Fundraising Mastery: The Tao of Kimmer – John Kim

The structure of the meeting is very important, but the persona can be even more potent. First of all, we talk about the structure. Every meeting must start with four things. You must establish rapport. You must establish credibility. You have to gain their attention. You have to generate interest. And you better do it fast. It's a conceit that when somebody walks into a meeting, they say, "Oh, well, you are meeting with me and so I have all of your attention." No, you're doing something right before you met me and you're going to be doing something right after you meet me because by definition, if you're not busy, you probably don't have any money. Of course, you're busy because everybody wants your money. So, it is completely arrogant to believe that you're not thinking of something before you come in the meeting and you're not stressed about something else in your life. You've got your own life. And that's the whole idea that the cappurrican theory of selling. When I walk in the room, the whole world is you. I literally only exist in your mind. My existence, and this is actually very meditative. The whole idea that we make up our own rallies and our mind, the whole idea is, therefore, I need to establish rapport. I need to say, "Hey, let's change the setting." Hopefully, it makes it a little bit charming. Sometimes, you just talk about the weather. I know it sounds silly, but today happens to be a beautiful day. Well, talk about it if you want. Hey, if you've got something else you can talk about. It's particularly worthwhile if you walk into somebody's office and just pick out something and they often talk about it. But that happens all the time. Very few times. We say, "Okay, great. Thanks for meeting me. Let's just jump to business." That is a terrible way to start because they're not paying attention. If that happens, just run with it, but then later, make sure you charm them. Make sure it happens. Because they've got to have some likability. So they clear your mind. Then, establish credibility. Say something about yourself. Say something about what's going on. Say something that you go, "Oh, there's a reason for me to be here." "Ah, you're credible. That's the authority piece of it." Then you want to gain their attention. "Okay, well, you're credible. You've done stuff before." "What's so interesting about you?" "You better say something interesting." Then you want to make sure you gain their attention. Getting attention can happen in any different way. Getting attention can simply be the way you sound, the way you look, the way you smell. It could be the way your pitch books look. It just happens to look different. You have to all four of those sides. You can do them in any order, but you make sure you all those four things. And then you start to ask yourself. I'm Ted Cyties, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is John Kim, or Kimmer, who's raised more than $70 billion across his career for Leading Venture Capital and Private Equity firms. Kimmer recently distilled three decades of lessons into the "Dow of Fundraising," the best book I've ever read on fundraising for investment managers. Since then, Kimmer joined a general catalyst portfolio company, iLess Sciences, as Chairman and President of Corporate Development. Our conversation covers Kimmer's philosophy about raising capital, the sales process, art of persuasion, best practices in a meeting, frameworks determining fundraising success, taxonomy of institutional investors, ideal sales team structure and compensation, and the features he's carried over from capital formation for funds to a new operating role. Before we get going, some are in the air, and with that comes summer vacations and out of the office email responses. At the beginning of the year, I pledged to my team that I'd respond less rapidly to emails while traveling, so I started writing, entertaining, out of the office emails every time I'd be away from my computer. There was one about ditching my cell phone for a day at the Masters with no chance I'd respond, just like it ought to be. There was another about not responding because I was attending Wilgadero's unreasonable hospitality summit, which created some cognitive dissonance for me, knowing that I wouldn't respond while allegedly learning how to see others better. And there was yet another about attending Wilkann with the recognition that anyone getting the response would probably see me before I responded anyway. Now many of these out of the offices increased my email count when I got back with a positive response about my reply. That caused me some confusion about whether I should reply to their reply to my reply to their email. One thing I learned from the exercise is we really don't have to reply to email when it comes in. Knowing that others know I won't respond reduces my people pleasing angst. That's especially true when I get interrupted, like while listening to an episode of Capital Allocators. So if you're listening, ignore your email for a while. And if you do grab your phone to send an email, you may just want to reply that you're engrossed in the latest episode and need some time to thoughtfully reply. Yeah, that works for me. Thanks so much for spreading the word. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction. But today, investors are asked to cover more companies and move faster with leaner teams. With AlphaSense's AI-led expert calls, their TIGUS call service teams sources experts based on your research criteria and lets the AI interviewer get to work. Then they take it one step further. 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Want to make sure your M&A processes aren't stuck in the past? Partner with a company that's been defining the future of dealmaking for nearly two decades instead. When it comes to M&A innovation, SRS Aquium has reshaped the way that deals get done, streamlining processes for maximum efficiency and minimum headaches. Professional shareholder representation, online M&A payments, digital stockholder solicitation, SRS Aquium pioneered each and continues to set the bar for game changing innovation. So leave the days of disjointed deal management behind and define your future with SRS Aquium, the smartest way to run a deal. Learn more at SRS Aquium.com that's srsacuyom.com. Please enjoy my conversation with Kimmer, John Kimmer. Kimmer, so excited to do this with you. I'm excited to be here too. Thanks so much for inviting me to that. Why don't you take me back to your background that led you into this path of fundraising? I started my career as a cash register salesperson at IBM. If you want to learn how to sell, there's an area where you actually figure out how to sell because the cash register that IBM were selling back in the late 80s were way more expensive than the NCR or the Casio cash register. You had to go door to door and try to figure out who's going to buy them and why. Fortunately, IBM had an exquisite training program. The training does some training does some training does. And eventually I got pretty good at selling cash registers. I did well enough to make it to business school. And then when I got to business school, everybody was going into banking and consulting. I guess somewhere in my life I'd said, I just want to be different than this. Instead of following that path, I just said, why don't I just stick to a career in sales? Then I went into sales and trading at Merrill Lynch. Then I a couple of the Wall Street firms. Then one day I had an opportunity to move into fundraising, well friend of mine from business school had told me about this job of going around to talk to pensions and endowments to invest in venture capital and private equity. In the late 90s, I'd made the jump. There were very few of us in the industry at the time. From there, I quickly said rather than being a placement agent, I actually joined the industry as a placement agent at Bank of America than Chase. I moved into being investor relations because I realized that the investor relations piece had more agency to it. They had more representation and felt like it had more identity. In 2000, I was an investor relations professional. There are very few investor relations professionals in the entire industry. Then of course, there's a grue, grue, grue to a place where it is now where investor relations for many firms is a core function. You do this throughout your career. There's this great aphorism if you can't do teach. So you end up writing a book. That's probably met with the other after that. If you want to know how little you know about something, start writing about it. That's what happened to me. One of the things that I should get out in the open is I wrote the book as my farewell gift to the industry. I now run a artificial intelligence company, a lot of sciences, which has fundraising as a component to it. But I was finishing of big fundraiser my last from general catalyst. I was feeling there urge to try some the different the last chapter of my life. The essence of the book or where it was started was is that I wasn't going to teach a class. I was going to teach. class on fundraising at a school that I was affiliated with. This was basically the syllabus. Then I thought I don't have time to teach the class. So while I put it out in a blog post, then a friend of mine wrote my blog post before I sent them out and said, "You should turn this into a book." So I wrote the book. The first half was lessons on fundraising. How do you fundraise? One of the techniques, one of the things you have to think about. Then as I started writing the book and I started realizing I'm moving out of the industry as my core profession, I started realizing some of the more emotional lessons that I learned and more the more value lessons that I learned about how persuasion writ large actually is very powerful everywhere from your personal life to your professional life. I started writing about how the art of persuasion and the way you can use it to change people's minds can be used for good or for things that are not as productive. Those things have a real cost on your well-being and who you are and your character. So I wrote about that. That's why I decided to call it the "dow fundraising." I'm not a dowist and I'm not somebody who is trying to be more realistic about it. Hopefully I try to be balanced about the idea that if you're going to learn something that has real skill and effectiveness, then you've got to be careful on how you use it. That frame of the dow, how do you think about applying that to the process of raising capital? My interpretation of the dow, and so anybody who's listening to this, you're going to look that's not dowism and I'm really guessing probably isn't. The whole idea of the dow is it was all about opposites, balance about dualities. There's so much about fundraising and persuasion that is about dualities. Things that are completely not true yet people believe them. The things that people hate, yet they're addicted to, the things that people don't want to do, yet they are compelled to do it all the time. What's the most amazing thing that you would see in so many professions and you have to watch out for in sales is something called the Nash equilibrium, which is when in order for some positive outcome to happen, both people have to cooperate. But if you know the other person not going to cooperate, then you don't cooperate and then both people lose. That's a duality. That's the, well, now on the one hand, I've got this energy that says, hey, look, I want to go be positive, be first. And if I don't think you are going to reciprocate, then I shouldn't go positive and be first. At the same time, you will never know if the person is going to react possibly. So you have no choice but to be positive and go first. That sounds confusing. But in some ways, it really is very elegant in what is a Taoist view of the world, which is filled with contradictions. You have to be able to hold those contradictions in place in order to be effective, particularly when you're talking to other people and trying to forget what they're thinking, how they're going to react, how they're going to answer questions, how they're going to change their minds. How did you think about the positive application of persuasion in the process or is in capital? There's so many positive ways to think about persuasion. I believe that persuasion is desire minus fear. So what people want minus how scared they are. So many books on persuasion talk about how to stoke desire, how to get people interested. I think that that's very credible, very real. But I find that most of successful communication table stakes are actually to get past people's fears, their insecurities, their doubts, their cynicism. The positive way you can use persuasion is that when you're in a meeting, this is a simple rule that I use. You meet someone who's very cynical. There are some people who just believe that the glasses have empty. That's their mode of operation. But then there are some people who are cynical and you can hear charge in their voice. You can feel it. When that happens, it means they've been burned. It means they're scared of something. I use this service and it never works. I go to the airport and I know I'm going to have a difficult time with whatever service it is. I'm very sorry because you've had a bad experience. Or even worse, you've had experience that's been harmful to you. When you're trying to sell something to somebody, try to persuade them and also they meet you with cynicism. I'd say 99% of people try to talk about the positive side of life and talk about all the great things and try to convince you and try to balance the energy. When the right answer is to sit down and say, I see your pissed. Can you just give me a second to tell me what you're pissed about? And it's unbelievable. They'll say, you know what? I'll say what I'm pissed about. Blah blah blah. The last time somebody gave me a demonstration, it didn't work and I ended up paying for it. I lost all my money and I had answered my boss. Now you know, Jack, what the key is to sell. You don't have to convince them of the features, functions, and benefits or the wonderful opportunities they have in front of them. You need to convince them that they don't need to be scared and you can give them an opportunity. What if I could give you a trial run? What if I can give you an opportunity to do this on a less risky basis? There's always a way to create that in somebody. When you do that, what happens is you've reduced somebody's fear and you've seen them. And I promise that that person goes home a little happier. That person goes home a little bit more seen. So in the process of trying to get somebody to do something using persuasion, you have met them where they are and have helped them understand. Sometimes they don't understand their own citizen. That's a pleasing feeling to them and it ends up being reflected back on yourself. It ties to the idea that when somebody is persuading somebody, too many people try to get them to believe what they're saying is true. The fundamental truth is that's usually not where the sale falls down. Most people will believe that people are good investors. Most people will believe that the opportunity makes sense. They just don't trust the person. There's a big difference between belief and trust. The idea that I believe that the Uber that I took here is not going to get into an accident that there's a professional driver, but I still buckle up because I don't trust that the system works. However, I don't buckle up in certain situations. I just trust it completely and implicitly. I don't strap myself into a boss when I get into a bus, even though they're office seat belts there. If you can get somebody into a world where you cash, you get them to trust you. You've gotten through a lot of insecurities. That feels pretty good. How do you think about it in the context of asset management building that trust to get people comfortable? This is the part where I caution people because they're simple techniques to do that. There's a beautiful book by Robert Childini in 1986, Ethical Persuasion, a power of persuasion. I've never met him, but he has been guiding life for most people in persuasion for generations. I believe the book is written to protect people from people who are trying to sell you things. He articulates six different ways that people do that. These six different things when you look at them, what they are are ways for people to get past and securities or to learn to trust you. So no particular order. The first one is authority. But authority, if I happen to have a PhD in science, and I'd say something about science, or I'm a medical doctor, I have authority. And so I say something to people, okay, I trust you. Next is consistency. If I'm always behaving a certain way, then I know that the next time I say, I'll behave that way again. Oh, I trust you. Then another one is liking. I like you. You like me. I am like you. And you trust what you like. You trust when you're attracted to you. And that's part of the human condition. Another rule was reciprocity. I do something for you. Then you'll tend to do something for me. Reciprocity tends to be at the core of all ethics. If people didn't do things back for people, then we wouldn't be able to have community. And if you think about how many times people feel like they've been wronged, then usually there's some reciprocal experience where they have not done to others as they wish they would done to themselves. Then there's scarcity. You sometimes say, look, everybody's buying it. It's off the shelf. Or it's about to get off the shelf, or I can't get it. And if I can't get it something, then I say, well, I just trust it must work. And finally, it's consensus. Consensus is what everybody's doing it. It's some levels, these hardwired into the human condition. Like consensus. If you're walking through the forest and also a bunch of people running the other way, and that's the consensus, you don't run the other way, you're the one that got eaten by the bear. Consensus also can be insidious in terms of fear of missing it. Well, fear of missing out to the scarcity issue, but consensus can be really powerful. It's one of the most powerful tools at macro. If everybody's doing it, then you start to do it. I'll stop with this one statement about consensus. It also reflects the idea of moving through the adoption cycle of innovator to early adopter to early majority to late majority to laggard that everybody's trying to make that early adopter to early majority leap. And that leap is usually defined as trust. In other words, there's enough evidence now that people can trust that it works. And then the consensus is it works. And now early majority comes in. So take that lens of persuasion reducing fear and bring it into the process of raising capital for a fund. Walk me through how you break down that whole process. There's a process of raising money, and then there's a process of actually being in the sales meeting. And those are two separate things. The reason why it's called selling, selling is generally persuasion with a process. I can be persuasive, but I have no process. Nothing's going to happen. The macro process is your pipeline times your conversion ratio times the size of the contract or the bite size of the investment equals the amount of money you're going to receive as a sale or how much money you're going to raise. If you know that pipeline is the first piece, then you have to have a pipeline process. It's that simple. There are six different steps around it. Basically, you have to be able to identify who are the potential buyers. You have to then go contact them, then you have to go qualify them and say, "Hey." Are you in the market to invest in mid-market buyout funds? You have to then persuade them. You have to pitch them and then you have to close them and closing is handling objections. It's all part of the selling process because the better you identify the marketplace, the better you qualify the marketplace, the quicker you contact the marketplace, the better your pitch sounds to the marketplace, the better you handle objections and close, the better your conversion ratio. The better you identify the largest investors and how they work versus the smallest investors, you then affect your bite size. The big sovereign wealth and pension plans act very differently than family offices or consultants. So that's the macro process. You can dial in the whole idea that pipeline times conversion ratio times bite size is how much money you're going to raise. Then there's a specific way of saying, okay, how do I affect each one of these variables? Well, let's dive into being in the room as you walk through it would say there's a target. It starts with how are you going to reach out to them? Let's assume it's not someone you ever want to intro to. When you reach out to somebody, if you don't have a brand, if you happen to be one of the big major firms, you have a brand which helps a lot. By the way, the brand in our industry can be personal brand or an institutional brand. There are plenty of fundraisers, there are plenty of individuals or plenty of investors that have an exquisite personal brand. If you don't, then you are always better off getting referenced into somebody. One of the challenges is this is a pro tip that I should never talk about anywhere. If I want somebody to help me get into an account, that individual's relationship with the person they need to contact, I don't need an intimacy between them. They don't have to be close friends. It does help, obviously. That person just has to be respected. If that person is respected, the second thing that has to happen is that person has to be credible. Let's say I want to have somebody introduce my firm, let's say, lilasciences to some potential investor. If that person is credible either because that person happens to be a successful artificial intelligence investor, or that person is somebody who is recognized as credible and smart, but knows lilasciences really well. For instance, if I leave a firm and I say, I would like you to meet former colleagues for my firm. Everybody knows I know those people really well. What will happen is they'll say this person has credibility with me. That helps. What never works is when you send a note out to somebody who said, hey, would you like to meet these people and they say, well, Kimmer, how much do you know about these guys? Oh, nothing. A friend of mine like, well, why would you waste my time? The only way I will meet them is a favor to you. No, I'm doing a favor for somebody I don't even know. But Ted, you say, Kimmer, I've got these guys, your friends with so and so at such a state page and we just introduce them. Sure. But if they take the meeting, if they don't like the meeting even, now I owe that person a favor. And this person does not owe me anything. Maybe they do owe me something, but people are sending that reciprocity. So now, wow, I just mortgage a favor when I can be using that favor as something more special for myself. That's the start of getting the meeting. Then once you're in the room, that's a totally different thing. I can talk about that if you'd like. Sure. There are two things about being in the room that are super important. One is the structure of the meeting. The other is the persona that you're bringing in. And you have better do it fast. It's a conceit that when somebody walks into a meeting, they say, "Oh, well, you are meeting with me, and so I have all of your attention." No, you're doing something right before you met me, and you're going to be doing something right after you meet me because by definition, if you're not busy, you probably don't have any money. So it is completely arrogant to believe that you're not thinking of something before you come in the meeting, and you're not stressed about something else in your life. My existence, and this is actually very meditative, the whole idea that we make up our own rallies in our mind, the whole idea is, therefore, I need to establish rapport. Sometimes, I just talk about the weather. If you've got something else you can talk about, it's particularly worthwhile if you walk into somebody's office and just pick out something they often talk about. That happens all the time. Very few times. We said, "Okay, great. Let's just jump to business." That is a terrible way to start, because they're not paying attention. Make sure it happens, because they've got to have some likability. Say something that you go, "Oh, there's a reason for me to be here." "Ah, you're credible." That's the authority piece of it. Then you want to gain their attention. You've done stuff before. What's so interesting about you?" "You better say something interesting." Then, you want to make sure you gain their attention. You have to do all four of those things. Then, you start to actually sell. Sometimes you don't get to do that, but then I'll always come back and then say, "Okay, let me establish some credibility here." I see or feel in the meeting, "Oh, I can see you with some doubt here. What do I need to do? I probably need to come back with credibility." So I'll tell the job partner, "Why did you tell them about that deal that did really well, that actually sounds like this, that you're actually pitching?" Something that's credible. Then you have to have a closing. One of the things that I would recommend, whenever I walk into a meeting, 100% of the time, I have two things that I will do. This is Christ's birth. I will know what my first thing I'm going to say is. Then I know what my closing objective is. Now you have to be quick to give that up if something else, but I know where I'm going with the conversation. That is important because then you can shape the conversation. I've got a friend of mine who was talking about cocktail parties. He hates cocktail parties. He's brilliant guy. He lives in Connecticut and the cocktail party scene is not his scene. So I say, "Look, what you want to do is pre-program or discussion." That's it. Have something on your phone that you could show people like, "Oh, I saw this video. Have you seen this video? Something that you can actually have a prop and have something to talk about, but nowhere you can talk about before you go." Then you have to have just have the mentality. This is a social tax. To live in Connecticut, you want to be accepted by your community. It's totally fine. Then stop thinking about it. It's a tax. I don't think about my taxes. And if I don't like it, I move. It works like a charm. Here's the net benefit. If I know generally what I'm going to talk about when I go into a party, I'd remember everybody's name I met. The reason why you don't remember somebody's name is saying, "Hey, my name's Ted." And I think one of my guys say, "Next." "Oh, shoot. I don't know what your name is." It's almost always what happens. If I know, "Oh, gosh, you know what Ted, I'm going to talk about," or "I knew you were going to meet the party," or something, I'm going to talk about your podcast. I'm going to talk about the last guest if I know you're going to meet the party. If I don't know you're going to the party, I'll probably have a question that will be relevant. That'll be somewhat interesting. And hopefully I stick to landing. I'm going on because there's so much to be said about the process of having a conversation. A sales pitch is a process. If you go through these processes, establish a pause, establish credibility, get attention, generate interest, discuss needs. Like your solution and then close, you'll find that even social interactions work this way. You go to a party, establish a poor, "Hey, how you doing?" "You know what? You look great tonight." Get attention. Did you see the mix? You're just killing it now? And then you say, "I was just at the game. You're just at the game now. I'm really interested." And so you'll move into, "What do you do in this weekend?" That wasn't a super great example, but it is the same process. It's just different words around it. So when you come in knowing there are these four things that you have to engage with to get the conversation going. You also mentioned in this Copernicus way of looking in the world, it's not about you, it's about them. How do you think about addressing what the needs are of the prospect? When you're in the meeting, there are two things that you're always looking for. First, you're looking for what is the way I'm going to persuade you and then what are your insecurities? Those are about you. First, let's talk about the persuasion piece. It's one of these things where Aristotle writes about this 300 BC that in order to convince somebody or something, you must use logos, ethos, pathos, logic, logos, pathos, emotion, empathy, sympathy, compassion, pathos, and then ethos, ethics, or your values. But here's the trick. Every argument, if you can win two of the three, you're in pretty good shape. These were almost everybody gets it wrong. Everybody focuses on the logos, the logic that is almost never where you want to start. You have to be logical, but you want to address the person's emotional desires for what they want and then their ethical or intuitive desires, what they believe they should be doing. That is the key. There are lots of different ways to argue why that is the right thing. Simon Sinek talks about this. We're very beautifully saying, well actually, the hind brain governs the emotions and values and the frontal lobe governs the logic. Therefore, we know that the hind brain does not have language. The frontal lobe was created as interpret feelings from the hind brain. Lots of rationalization is rationalization is you take something that is emotional and you create basically an artificial construct that allows you to hold what was once not rational. And we call it rationalization. So rationalization ties to every single discussion of sales, yet it is the thing that is the output of the ethics and emotions. When you're talking to somebody, you hope that you're able to sit down and say, "Hey, you want to know the why I'm doing something? I'm doing this because I believe in. " And by the way, it does not be super high-falutin. I just believe that the same in market biofirm said, "There is such an important role for increasing efficiencies in the economy because if we don't do that, then we're just going to be hollowed out as a nation. Standing for something is always difficult because differentiation is key to selling something, but with great differentiation comes a great sacrifice. If you're why, as famously said by Simon Sinek, it doesn't cost you anything, then it's just branding or just a slogan. This is the essence of the equation I call the law of differentiation. Your track record plus your differentiation divided by the complexity of your story is generally how much money you can raise. Your track record plus your differentiation divided by the complications of your story. Your track record is logic. This just happened. And that's the belief versus trust. If you've got a great track record, I trust that you've done something in the past, therefore you can do in the future. That's logic. Differentiation. That's a little bit more intuitive. That's more like, do I believe you're really different? First, I have to believe it. Second, do I believe it's important to be different, so what you're doing with operating partners or technology. And then do I want it? In other words, almost everybody investing money has a portfolio. They want that portfolio to have a diversification of different things. And at some level, they just want to be interested. You're going to make money by doing something different than everybody else does. That's intuition. That's not a logic, actually. But it's very powerful. It can also be emotional. For a lot of people, they like to be special. And that's a huge thing. Specialness. I find this to be true with endowments. Endowments love to feel special. They are very special. And it makes sense because if you're in endowment, you sit in a school. Usually if it's got a lot of money, it has got very talented people. And when you show up into those communities, everybody says, well, look, you belong to a talented community and you want to look special. Everybody else is special. They head to the physics department. They have the English department. They're all very special people. They head of the endowment and needs to be special. That's almost always the case. So specialness, that can also be tied to differentiation. Now let's talk about complications. Complications of the story, they divide the potential. Why? Well, first, complications are what gut trust just guts it. You're like, okay, first I have to do this and I do that or this person left the firm or no, I don't have a successor. Yeah, there's a lawsuit against us like, oh gosh, I don't trust you. The second is there's a real piece of fear that says, I trust and believe that the track record is good. It's good enough for me. The differentiation makes sense to me. I like it. But the complications make it hard for me to explain this to somebody. And I don't have agency or the decision. I must explain to a group of people. Often, these group of people use the investment process to create a power dynamic within the firm. That's where you get to debate things. That's where you're allowed to have a safe space to criticize things. It can get personal. Anybody's been an investment committee. It can be condescending. It can be righteous. I need to be able to have a phrase to tell people that allows them to justify what I've done. The most famous phrase ever is if the glove does not fit, you must acquit. I explain why I made the decision that I did because I'm not trying to find the person guilty or innocent. I'm trying to adjudicate the law. The law says beyond a reasonable doubt. The glove didn't fit. That's actually the golden real effect. Anybody one single thing in a fundraise that you want is to be able to give them one phrase that they can repeat to other people why they want to do this and allows the complications to be very simple. Track record in the performance characteristics. That's generally facts. That's the logos, you know, pathos of dynamics in formula form. If you're in a debate when people get righteous, you know that the debate's over. The righteous, that means your ego is committed to the emotion and usually you're bringing in the value system. I need to be right. The more you fight against that, the more you're going to feel like you've done them wrong. You see this with issues of wokeness. You see the issues of conservatism. The more you fight it, the more they are offended that you are actually going after their belief system. In the context of this logo, see those pathos. You mentioned at the onset that allocators might be cynical coming in. There's a lot of knows that they're going to say before they say yes. Also that it's a endowments. They want to feel special. Everyone who's across from you has a different bias or a different way of approaching this. How do you take that framework in the meeting and then try to figure out how to best present what you're doing? I'll give a taxonomy of the general investors. The problem with all frameworks is that they're all wrong but sometimes they're useful. Obviously there's only a certain percentage of the time this is right but the percentage is higher than zero. I found that pension plan investors, people who don't have a lot of upside. If I make ten times money for you, you don't get paid anymore. Your job is hard because you work in an environment that can be bureaucratic, political, disrespectful. It can be. Not all pension plans are this way. Generally respect is what they're looking for. Respect who they are. Respect their opinion. Respect their needs. Respect their requirements. When somebody says, "Here's the forms you have to fill out for reporting. Don't roll your eyes." Smile and say, "I respect you. Need this. I got it and I'll take care of it." I'm sorry. Our investment committee can't meet this week after all. Just respect it. At the core of their culture, if you don't respect it, you're not respecting what they do. When they're doing, pension plans are there to serve their constituents, which tend to be people who serve the public. This correction's officers and policemen and firemen and garbage men. That's respect. If you're talking to sovereigns, you better have something strategic. You better have some reason why it benefits the country. Better look through it and say, "Hey, this is why your nation benefits sovereign by definition sovereign wealth money is money that they did not need. It's surplus money. They want to make money out of course, but if they don't need it, they can put it in treasuries. That's what the Japanese do. If you've got a surplus, use it and the government says that they want to use it for productive reasons, so that productive reasons is what? The national interest." So you better say something strategic. If you're talking to a fund of funds, the asset manager, you better say something really differentiated because they're selling differentiation. They're differentiated oftentimes as performance, but they want to be able to say, "Hey, we're differentiated." So give them a reason to say we're differentiated. Sometimes scarcity is a great differentiator. You can't get into this fund. We did. But family offices, you have to be careful because you have to find out whether or not you are talking to the decision maker. I always say, if you talk to five family offices, you're talking to seven different types of decision makers, but they tend to be more aligned. If they make money, then you make money. Insurance companies tend to be very risk-averse. So you better talk about risk mitigation. Be intelligent about it. And endowments, as I mentioned before, feel special. So that's the taxonomy. When you're walking through your presentation inevitably, you get the objections. How do you best go about getting past objections? Objection handling. That's selling. Everybody can sit around a room and talk about what's interesting and how you want sales, let me put something together. It's when somebody's saying, "No." And you have to get them to say, "Yes, that's the good stuff. That's the selling. The traditional way it works all the time." Repeat back what they said. You want to make sure they say an objection. I think your fees are too high. Okay, that's an objection. Then you literally just have to repeat back, "Okay, so hey, you just said our fees are too high. Can you give me some more color on that? Why you have that perspective?" So you answer it with a question. Make sure you repeat back what they said. A lot of times I say, "Well, not the fees are too high. Well, say if your track record doesn't justify the fees you have, ah, I see. It's not that the fees are too high. I'm not good enough." That's a very big thing to find out in an objection. You can easily turn it off. Fee's are too high and then you start talking, "Well, I have to maintain a firm," etc. This is market. I've got 50% of my funder age is standing up to it. There's nothing you've done. If you said, so ask the question and clarify. Now, sometimes they just say, "No, look, yeah, you've got great performance. We just don't invest with funds for those fees." Sometimes you look and go, "All right, is that really true?" So then you have to actually get to truth. Thank you. You'd think the fees are generally too high. But I see you're investing a lot of funds. Are all the funds then at a discount to what I perceive as market? I get to know that. If that's the case, that's good signal value to me. And you could just say it that way. So I'm going to say, "All right, you'll almost always find that's not the case." No, not every single one. Now, if they say every single one, then you smile and go, "Great. I know how to solve the objection." Then if you really want to sell it, it's like, "Okay, we're done here on the subjection. Do you like my fund enough that I actually drop my terms to that?" Will you invest if you are willing to do that? Then you just close them right there. But if they're not, they say, well, I've got other. Okay. What else is there then? Now it's discovery. This is the part that's really fun. A lot of times you're going to find that there are certain rules and regulations that they have to stand up to. There are certain things that the institution is putting on top of them that they have to abide by. I didn't find those rules. The trick of that is you want to be able to make sure that whatever you're selling can fit within those rules. Sometimes they can't. This sometimes they can't is the important part. I talked about conversion ratio. Ted Williams, 400 batter, one of the best hitters, maybe the best hitter in the history baseball. One so many awards, despite the fact that he actually went then served in the military, he had five years off. He would have broken every single record. Famously, this guy was the first guy to deal with statistics and say, I know that these are the five pitches that I can hit. Every time I hit them, I get on base. But within the strike zone, there are plenty of balls that, if I swing at them, there's a high probability that I'm going to get thrown out. But it's in the strike zone. So he would sit there and a ball come in strike and he would just let it go. People are like, "Whoa, why don't you swing at the strike?" Because it's a guaranteed out. Then when the ball came exactly where he wanted, he crushed it. That, to a certain degree, is in the room of fundraising. When you get the objection, you know you can handle. Maybe it's fees or maybe it's performance or maybe it's the complication. Maybe it's differentiation. And you know, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not differentiated enough. Knuckles go on the table, you lean over and you just rip it. Because you know that's your strength. A track record is not good enough. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me just get into that. If somebody hits something that you've got to get to this, I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to try." But if I know that this is something you're gutting after, I know I've got to reduce my expectations. We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about Dipsync. One pattern I hear consistently in conversations with allocators and managers is that research and diligence workflows tend to outgrow general-purpose productivity tools. Share drives, spreadsheets, even traditional CRMs work for a while. But they weren't built for the nuances of an institutional investment process. Trinity Church in New York is a good example of a firm that addressed that head on. They've been stewarding capital for over 300 years, and like many longstanding institutions, they're deliberate about the partners they choose. Trinity Church sought a platform that could keep pace with their investment process and found that in Bipsync. What Trinity Church and a growing number of their peers have found is that capturing and using a team's collective intelligence at scale requires a system designed for that purpose. Bipsync is a system of action for investment intelligence, structured, searchable, and secure. Every insight gets captured, and every decision is traceable. It's built for institutional investment teams and trusted by asset owners and managers overseeing $4 trillion in assets. The workflows, integrations, and support are all shaped by the specific demands of institutional investing, not adapted from tools built for a different industry. Learn how organizations like Trinity Church in New York are modernizing their investment research process at bipsync.com/capitalallicators. And now back to the show. A lot of what you're describing gets to this dynamic that inevitably you're trying to put yourself on the same side of the table to form a partnership, but there's always this different tribe, GP, LP, dynamic. How have you gone about it trying to broach that and meet people where they are? Now we're talking about persona play. There are two basic ideas that I talk about developing relationship. And this is any relationship. How do you get past a guarded relationship? One is you put on a persona that you think that they want. For somebody's intellectual, we put on an intellectual persona. They trust you more. That's what they're looking for. Remember, I like you, I am like you. That doesn't necessarily mean that's true. There are other people who are boisterous, but they're looking for a patent fund and they want the person to be intellectual, even though they're boisterous. You need to know what you're auditioning for because it's not a sales pitch. It's not an interview. It's an audition. The idea that you're walking in, they know what they think they're looking for. So try to beat it. That's the persona. Some personas, they just all sharks midwestern kind of thing. There are plenty of hedge funds. You walk in all sharks, you're like, look at this guy just out of the tiger. They're a vassal. Some people go, you're the one I trust. Everybody else is really slick. You have to gauge your audience of what kind of persona do you think? Now that's tough. But if you know somebody in advance or you had one meeting with them before, and that's what I always ask somebody, say, I'm about to meet this person, what kind of person do they really like? I think they like this kind of person. All right, let me try it out. But I promise you, if you get it wrong, sometimes you blow it. I've had plenty of big meetings. When I come in, somebody's giving me advice, something I come in this person, like, hey, I'm here to deal. Oh my God. You're sure. Well, I'm going to try to back off this persona. And I back off. It's too late. It's too late. I just came in the wrong way. I come in all goofy. Like, oh, you're not serious. That's one. The other is their insecurities. There are a lot of people. It's called the Sedona method. Do they care about control? Do they care about approval? Do they care about feel special? Do they care about being safe? I think that AI is a really dangerous thing. And I think that AI has an equal potential of destroying the world and then saving it. Okay, there are two ways to answer that. Wow. And come in aggressively. Like, look, let me just tell you, either we get it in front of AI and we win the race or we get behind it and just capitulate and it doesn't matter every rules over us. Okay, that's one way to look at it. That's very persuasive, argument. Or there's another argument that goes, you're right. Yeah, there's a lot scary about it. We're doing our part. That's a really good question. I'm glad you feel that way. I feel that way too. Completely different answer. So that one person wants approval and wants to feel safe. The other person wants control. I want to say, hey, look, I don't like this. I don't like right. You don't. We're going to control this. It's this way. And oneness is another one. There are a lot of people who actually care about go along to get along. So you'll see this a lot of beings too. That what people will agree with people a lot. Not because they're afraid of being criticized, but they really want everybody to be a one group. It's more common than you think. This idea of oneness. People just really love groups and love culture. The two things I described first is the idea of persona play. The second is, if you see somebody want to actually get close to them, figure out how they manage their insecurities. I can't accept what's going to happen. So I want to control it. I want to feel safe. I don't want to engage in it. I am afraid that myself forth in self-esteem isn't up to bars. I need your approval. Those are the powerful things to use. When you have the potential to play these different personas, how do you maintain your authenticity and stay being true to what you're trying to present and not acting something to persuade somebody? It is probably the most important lesson I had to learn. It's completely okay if you make them the center of your attention. The idea that I can meet you where you are, see you, and I have tools and ways to actually make you feel okay. And it's not an authentic. We do it all the time. When you're the boss, you're joked her a little bit funnier. People laugh a little harder. When you're the LP, the GP tends to be a little less aggressive with you. That's approval. That's also a submission of control. You can be authentic about it. Authenticity starts with, I'm here to serve you and your needs. I'm meeting you where you are. Parenting is a little bit this way too. One of the best things I've ever heard about parenting is that we parent our children the way we wish we were parented. Nine times the attest the wrong way to parent. Fortunately, sometimes it is. One of the things you say about selling and persuading is that people tend to talk to people the way they want to be talked to. That's pretty self-centered. If I'm talking, I should talk to you the way you want to be talked to. I don't think that there's anything you're not thinking about that. If I'm just being utilitarian about it, it is if I'm just saying, "All I care about is the end. I don't care about you." People will see through that, not always. That's what a fraudster is. These tools, the Dow fund region, the idea of presenting these ideas to people, to use them to hopefully acquire resources that allow them to do what they can do can be used very authentically and it can be used very manipulately. There's a duality of this. That's the always the contradiction. Persuasion is not bad. It's not inauthentic. It can be an authentic. It can be authentic. If you take a step back from the one-on-one meeting where you're trying to persuade a single prospect to invest in a fund and broaden that out to the process of raising capital for a fund, you mentioned a couple of these laws. I know there are a few others you put in the book and would love to walk through some of what goes into a successful fund. Maybe I'll take the conversation into a few more laws that actually are useful. The law of differentiation, I mentioned track or close differentiation, divided by complexity of the story. The law of pipeline, which is pipeline times conversion ratio times bite size, is how much money you're going to raise. Then the law of trade-offs. It's one of the easiest and best laws to understand that you're always trading off size. terms and speed. It's size times terms times speed. I'm in a situation right now where a customer is giving me terms that are not so great for me. I can either choose to tighten those up and then slow down the process of getting to yes. We're gonna get to yes, but I can tighten up those terms and make them more beneficial to me. And I'm gonna have to assume I'm gonna slow down the process. And I have to look and I say, "Do I want to slow down the process?" If I tighten up the terms, it'll make it harder to get a larger commitment. And there's probably more money on the table for me. And part of it says, "Well, look, I want to get better terms. All right. Well, how you willing to take less money?" Well, no. All right? Then I'll note to do for you because that's in contradiction with each other. Well, that's what you think. Well, no, it's always what happens. It is F equals M A. That's just the nature of trade-offs. Now, you can maximize these things. There are ways to maximize them. And that's the whole arch of negotiation. How can I get better terms? And how can I do this? That works. And I love people who will challenge it. Because then you want to be able to challenge it. Am I getting the best terms for the right size and et cetera? That one is a really beautiful one. Because so many people in isolation say, "I want this." And it literally is the same way. Like, "I want to lose weight." All right. Great. Well, I'm just gonna have one cookie. Well, yeah, but I had that same cookie every day. Well, that can't be the reason why I'm getting weight. Well, that plus the beer plus effect, you're not exercising. There's always a combination of these things. The law of leverage is something that's important too. That great fundraisers do not just create great demand. It is true. You have to start with something that actually has great potential energy. You can't just make something up. If the product is not worth raising money for, no matter how good you are, you can't raise money. In other words, if you have no differentiation, your track records, bands, really complicated story, you're out of business. The general partners in that situation, there's no fundraisers. You can hire. That's going to change that outcome. What will happen is is that when you get a really good fundraising team or really good fundraising capability, then you'll greatly amplify your potential energy. What is your potential energy? Your track record plus your differentiation divided by your complexity of story. That will allow you to raise a certain amount of money. If you get a fundraiser, they will use logos, ethos, and pathos to affect and improve each category. Now the whole circle completes. The idea of persuasion comes into the idea of your potential, which adds on top of it, the ability to actually leverage your potential. The big firms have figured this out. It's not distribution. It is about saying, hey, here's my almost entitlement. How much money I should be able to raise. Let me get some excellent fundraising on top of it. I'll be able to raise a lot more money. How do you think about the potential outside of the organization? Trends and styles that go in and out of favor? One of the things that is frustrating is that so many people fight the tape. They fight the wave. When the wave comes in and what you're hoping for is to catch a good wave in and get balanced and serve it in. So you have to know when to turn the support into the wave. If you're strategy's out of favor, if it's not invoked, then what do you do? You raise less money. That's a little bit of a serenity prayer. God give me the serenity to do, except I cannot change and give me the courage to change what I can. The fundraiser needs to have the courage to change what they can to maximize what the outcome is. The cosmic joke of it is is that that's when firms usually make the best investments because it's the hardest to get money. But if they get good fundraising, they'll raise materially more money than someone who doesn't have a good fundraiser. So when the market moves and the tide comes out, those who are the strongest swimmers end up making the most advancement. When the tide comes back in, they just then catapult forward. Who are those groups? Those are the megafonds. When 2009 came around, there was a set of very large funds. The market went into a nuclear winter, but those megafonds already had great fundraisers and they were going out in service and clients and making sure they knew what was going on and the global financial crisis and doing this. The other folks are just adding the ground like okay, I don't know what to do. The big megafonds had people holding people's hands every week that have some updated what the crisis was. What happened? What little money they had? They put to work. Did it probably well? And that's when they actually went mega. That's when six billion funds became 20 billion dollar funds. If you do have the product that the law tells you you have potential to raise a lot of money, what does a good fundraiser or investor relations team look like to get there? The way to think about it is you have a two by two graph. GP information is on the x-axis and LP information is on the y-axis. So you want to cover all four boxes. You have low GP information and low LP information. You're a data service. You're prequitted or your sales force. That's important to have. You got to have those tools. If you've got high GP information and low LP information, in other words, you know a lot about what's going on the firm. You know everybody in the firm. You know capital accounts and valuations, but you don't really know the LP that well. You don't know the decision making. You don't have a relationship with them. That's investor relations. Somebody calls in your service provider. I don't really know you very well, but I can get to service. If you know the LP really well, but you don't know that much about the GP. You're not sitting in all the meetings. You know it's a song, but you're not running the firm. You don't speak for the firm. That's a relationship manager or a territory coverage person. A lot of the mega funds have some exquisite relationship managers. Placing nations have wonderful relationship managers. These are sales people. And that's what you call distribution or whatever you call it. Those are really helpful because they have the people who actually build trust with the LP and the firm is monetizing that trust. So it's a very important job. Then there are the occasional few making it to the upper right hand corner. Most investor relations professional want this and most general partners want to find this person, which is the secretary of state. You have high GP information and high LP information. You know a lot about the LP. You know a lot about the GP, but you're not the CEO of the firm. That looks like a secretary of state, secretary of state, the state's third most powerful position. The secretary of state, when they go to another country generally understands politics, understands diplomacy, understands different cultures. The other amazing thing is that that secretary of state can speak for the president. That's an ambassador. The salesman said, okay, I heard you said I can't make policy. I can't tell you, but I'll tell the secretary of state secretary of state walks is that you need what done. But then I need you to get your president to say X. My president will say this. They shake on it. Secretary of state goes back and the secretary of state says, I agreed to this. And generally a good secretary of state knows what can get away with. People ask me if you're a general partner or if you're something that I are, they all want that job. I don't think it's the best job necessarily, but they want that job. How do you get that job? Or if you're GP, what are you looking for? It's the most incredible thing. One of the reasons I wrote my book is because I really wanted to show people that this is a skill that you can learn. Yet people hire people who have never done this before. It's incredible. Cracks me up. You would never go to a doctor and say, have you ever performed surgery before? No. Put on a veterinarian. Close enough. Go ahead. Operate on me. So if you've flown a jet before, no, I've just won't propel a pleasure for it. Good enough. You know, people say, you're been an investment banker before. Oh, well, you know how to sell. Why would you put you in this job? Never fund it before. Oh, you're a deal guy before. I've met LPs. Never done it before. It's a skill you have to learn. Yet people put it in. Why do they do that? Because GPs tend to put in that position. The person they want other people to think they are before they meet them. So an investment bank like, oh, smart, good looking, went to good business school, wealthy. That's what I want. That's a powerful person. Somebody's very attractive, very nice. That's what I want. I want to know that I'm a very friendly firm. Somebody who is aggressive, somebody who is charming, somebody who is Midwest, somebody who's very New York. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the presidents of the United States. Bill Clinton chooses Madeline Lovbright. Madeline Lovbright. Super nerdy policy walk. That was Bill Clinton. That's what he wanted the outside world to see. He'd take a look at George W. Bush, first secretary of state Colin Powell, War hero. That's what he wanted. The war didn't work out so well. People criticized intelligence, then replaces him with one of the most intelligent people to ever sit in that job, Condoleezza Rice. Okay. Then you get to Obama. He wants to be that person who is a peacemaker. He recruits his semisist, his opponent, who is actually one who's experienced international politicians ever, Hillary Clinton. Then you get Donald Trump. First term, he gets Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon. He wants to be the corporate. That doesn't work. He gets Mike Pompeo. That has to spy agencies. It's always that way. If you want the job, then what you want to do is say, what is the persona that they're looking for and pretend to be that persona, you'll get the job. If you're a GP, be careful. You're not hiring the persona. You actually want to hire the skill. That's the dichotomy of the industry. The whole industry is upside down. People aren't looking for skills. They're looking for personas. If you have a great persona that actually fits, you'll get the job even though you have no experience. Those different boxes, and you're building out a team to serve in this role. How do you think about aligning those people with the objectives? It's true that a service provider is going to be motivated differently than somebody who is a salesperson. A salesperson is going to say, "Hey, I have attribution for bringing this money in a service room. has looked, I'm actually here to make sure everybody is happy. Therefore, you need to create an alignment. The investor relations proposal is fairly easy. You just pay them the same way you pay everybody else. With the salesperson in that job, you should vary their compensation. That will make them feel better. Most people, then this is not terrible. In fact, it's awesome, in some cases, give that person carried interest. So here's what happens, Ted. You literally will not find a sales organization that's a high-performance sales organization that doesn't have some sort of volume in set. You never find a service organization that does anything but pay people on a group. But somehow, some way the alternative industry doesn't actually figure that out. What they do is they break up the investor relations job into three different buckets. There's the service providing analyst job. They have to do the DDQs, do the reports, do the presentations. It's a real, analyst job. Then there's the vice president or director's job, which is the trans actor. They're the person who has to help the GP find the deals or get in front of the LP, sometimes represent the GP without them, but the sales component, the actual selling, they're getting on the road and doing this with the GP. But they're still a service provider. They're trans acting. What does an investor bank just do? Then there's the strategic piece for the partner's job, is how do we position the firm? What's our differentiation? How do we want to go to the market? How much money do we want to raise? What kind of terms do we want? Very strategic. What happens is they look at the professional and they say, what percent of your job is in the associate's bucket? What percentage of jobs in the vice president's bucket? What percentage of jobs in the senior bucket? And multiply by those percentages, what does a associate get paid? What does a vice president get paid? What is a partner get paid? What is the care and interest? Multiply by those ratios, it almost always perfectly describes the person's compensation. Anybody who can do that calculation, how much time do they spend doing pitch books? I'm 59 years old this year. I still write pitch books. That's just the way it is. That's not every head of IR, every salesman, but a lot still do. You're always doing the selling piece and then you get to do the partner piece. So what's kind of interesting is that the younger you are and the career, actually the more money you make relative to your peers, because the younger professional gets to do some of the selling. The case actually gets to advise the GP because you're traveling with them all the time. So that's generally get paid a little more. Then they move into the vice president's role and then you get paid the same. Then they move to the partners role and actually get paid less than other partners because you're doing this other thing. I've described 90% if not 99% of the investor relations industry. People find that objectionable because it devalues the partner when you make partner and it actually makes the analyst more expensive when they're analyst. But it tends to be what happens. Back to your incentive structures. The incentive structures are awesome. No one ever uses them. There's also reason why you can't actually make a person a pure commission salesperson because there's a broker dealer issue. You can still vary the compensation. That's perfectly kosher. How do you do it? There's a way to do it. What do people do? They don't do that. They do the buckets. What's a better way to go about it? The better way to go about it is to match the level with the class of investor. If you're an associate and you get to do other things great, but you should be paid like an associate. If you're a vice president, you should be paid like a vice president. When I'm looking at the vice president, we're equal. If I'm in the Navy and you're in the Army and we're the same rank, we should be paid the same. You're doing something very different when I'm doing. I'm on the water, you're on the land, but we're equally important. Same thing with the partner. If the partner is doing all this stuff, that's great. But you're a partner, pay them like a partner, pay them like a deal partner. The whole idea is that even though the incentive structures are that you can actually vary them some, anybody who opts into an alternative's business knows what exactly the compensation structures look like. You're just opting into these classes. There are people who do that very well. And the reason why it's important is basically retention. Here's the problem, and this happens a lot. The person who sits at the top, when they get really good, if you're not paying them as much as the other partner, other people can pick them off. Happens all the time. When that happens, for that person who's good, it's a very expensive mistake. It also creates more of a harmony culturally. The whole idea of ego deprivation of walk around being a second-class citizen in a job that creates a dystopia, that creates a victimhood for a lot of people in the industry. If I actually think about the thing that people complain about most in the job of nest relations is that they don't feel like they are equal to-- and by the way, the general partner often says that's true until they can't raise money. So it's stepped away from the alternatives industry into this AI health care company of all of these things you've learned. Which ones have you found most applicable? And which ones were you able to leave behind? The leaving behind part is probably the easiest. I left behind the notion that my job was different than everybody else's. When I was working at a venture capital firm, I'm working at a leverage by effort. My job was different than everybody else's. Now that I work at Laosites, I am responsible for the fundraising for our series A, series B. But my job's not different than everybody else's. I am the chairman and co-president, and that's my role. But my job is to make a Laos successful. It's not different than anybody else's. I happen to be doing something different. And that's really different. There are other scientists that are doing things that are amazing. There are software AI programmers. There are financial people. There are laboratory people. There are development people. Their jobs aren't different. We're all trying to make a Laos successful. They do different things. That's a real difference. I got to leave that behind. And I really enjoyed that. The thing that I got to keep first is the relationships. That's been great. I've really enjoyed the ability to keep many of the relationships who still are investing directly into technology companies. That's very satisfying. The second thing you get to keep is the outward centrality. When I'm talking to clients or customers, I use the same techniques of I see your cynical. What's going on? Well, last AI, I got it. I got it. Or I get your sales pitch, but it's not differentiated enough. I get it. Or it's just too complicated. One of the things about Laos science is it's very complicated we're doing. We're using artificial intelligence to combine with laboratories to create a better scientific system. Well, that explanation takes forever. Instead, there are lots of different quick phrases I use. I say, hey, look, realistically, the entire world is trying to use AI to not need laboratories. You do realize that the Lael paradox is that in order to actually not need laboratories, you need to train on laboratories. Everybody really nods their head, but yeah, that's right. We're the largest firm in the world that actually trains the laboratories. And we've got a head start. And everybody goes, well, that makes sense. That is repeatable to somebody else's investment pity. Well, why lie? Well, to get rid of laboratories, you need to train on them. There's a whole discussion of why training on laboratories creates a better system that can move 37-- Oh, that's true. It's quite complicated. I need to tell that story, but in the end, I give them that little thing. So that's something I bring into the experience. If you circle all the way back to your early training at IBM, what were some of those seminal lessons you learned in that fantastic sales training program that have carried all the way through? The two things that I learned, the custom tailored sales calls for any IBMer in the late '80s, they would know the custom tailored sales call. This brings us back to not a surprise, the custom tailored sales call is establish rapport, establish credibility, generate interest gain attention, discuss needs and qualify, present solution and qualify, handle objections and close for 30 plus years. Almost every conversation I have fits that structure. It's a habit. Anybody I ever meet, that is how I will structure a conversation. It's habit for me now. The other thing that I took with me is that sales can be a trained skill. I sat next to very introverted people who were exquisite sales people. I sat next to people who I considered to be pretty average horse power, very strong sales people. I sat next to a very good looking, very charming people who couldn't cut it as sales people. And that is a really important lesson. It's a learned skill. It can be a learned skill. There are a lot of people who are naturally good at it. Usually they're doing the same things naturally, but they learn it because a lot of these things are about life. I do people get along with it, the people. You can learn it very quickly. That was a lesson that I've taken with me in my entire life that it's a trained skill. Anybody's ever worked with me? Well, smile and go, yep, I've heard of all these things from Kimmer before. Every single thing. Kimmer, I want to make sure I get a chance to ask you a couple of closing questions. What is the best advice you've ever received? The best advice I've ever received is knowing when to release the tension. My personality type is I hate tension, which is why I have to be empathetic. To learn to sit in tension was one of the most important lessons of my life because it's the tension that the real truth will emerge. But you have to know when to release it. How's your life turned out differently from how you expected it to? Ted, I never expected I'd be an entrepreneur. I had such an identity of being a salesperson. I never thought I'd be an entrepreneur. I knew how hard it was. I knew how risky it was. But I'm really lucky. My life allowed me to find my way into the need-odd-printer-experience, where no matter how it works out, it was one of the best decisions of my life. What light-lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life? The way empathetic people move through the world in their most beautiful form tends to be due unto others as they would do unto you, because they put the other person first. By the way, it's a wonderful way to live. The golden rule, as a matter of fact, is the one rule that exists in all religions. That's because it's reciprocity. A reciprocity tends to underpin all ethics. Turns out that's not right. Turns out you want to do unto others as they want to be done unto them. The way I want to be treated. It's not the way you want to be treated. We want our freedom, we want our respect, but how we deliver freedom, how we deliver respect. There's plenty of freedoms I do not need. There's plenty of gifts that I do not care for. You could gift me with so many wonderful things psychologically, emotionally, intellectually, that I don't care for. Then there are things that you could give me that I really do care for. Last night, my wife did a wonderful thing. She had this surprise book signing party for me, and she rented out a pizza place, which I happened to love pizza. She brought in all this Budweiser beer, because the restaurant didn't sell Budweiser. She knew that's what I liked to drink. She's doing unto me how I want to be received. If it was up to her, we would have something different. I wish I'd learned that lesson a lot earlier. I thought I was doing good by treating other people the way I want to be treated. I thought I was a good parent, but I actually parented the way I wanted to be parented. Turns out it's the Copernican rule. You really want to be empathetic. Treat them the way they want to be treated. And that will get you really far. I can't remember the last one. It's the next five years or a chapter in your life. What's that chapter about? The next chapter in my life is trying to fulfill my potential. I somehow think I've underperformed my true potential. I got so attached to the sales persona and being this super fund-raiser. I raised a lot of money in my career. I'm proud of it, but I got really attached to that persona, that identity. When there are a lot of other things I discovered that I can do pretty well, and I might have done exceptionally well had I practiced it much earlier in my life. Leadership, strategic thinking. I've got a lot of catching up to do, but there are some areas of leadership and strategic thinking that I think I've got some potential. So the next five years, I'm going to see if I can't hit that and grow those areas of my being, my soul, my ethos, my pathos. I can grow those in a much more beautiful way. Okay, Merit. Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom. Oh, thanks so much for having me. I've really enjoyed this. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time. [MUSIC] All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.