Pitching security startups to VCs in the AI era

(upbeat music) - Hey everyone and welcome to this special edition of Risky Business Features, my name's Patrick Gray. And today we're doing something a little bit different. My colleague, James Wilson, will be joining me for this one. And we're both chatting with John Sakota, who is the, I believe, the managing partner over at Decibel Partners, which is a VC firm based in Bay Area in the United States. Now, of course, Decibel Partners actually owns a chunk of Risky Business media and we work pretty closely across Decibel's portfolio companies. Actually, the way that all came together is we were already working with a bunch of Decibel companies already and we thought we'd just formalize the arrangement more or less. And now these days, I scope out some investments for them and what not and I've done a couple of them with Decibel so far. And we thought it would be a good idea to bring John onto the show. And we could have really a conversation about how it is that you, dear listener, can pitch a venture capitalist on your wonderful cyber security startup idea. And not only that, but we can hear from John about how AI has changed that process because obviously the window for what's possible has really changed a lot. Thanks to the emergence of large language models. So first of all, James, John, thank you for joining me. - Thanks for that, great to be here. - Thank you so much, Pat. - Long time listener, so excited that we're finally doing our first show together. So I'm really grateful for the partnership and was excited that we were gonna tackle this topic together. - Yeah, so let's just jump right into it. And I guess, I mean, it's a big topic, right? Like how do you pitch your cyber security startup? But I think really what we're gonna be doing in this podcast is talking about how pitching a cyber security startup to a venture capitalist has changed. And it really has because everything in some ways has just got so much easier. It's a lot easier to build software, to build applications. So I guess in some ways, the bar has been really raised in terms of like how cool your idea needs to be to get up. I mean, do you agree with that statement? I suppose that's a good place to start. - Well, let's talk about what AI is and what it isn't first. Just to make sure that we're clear about how it's helping people and then maybe some of the myths around like how magical it can be. So obviously if you have a really interesting and unique idea and you are really great at directing AI to help accelerate the production and the development of that product, you can compress the timescale by which perhaps you can generate an idea, create a proof of concept, and maybe even create a product and put in people's hands. So that timescale may be a long time ago used to be months, maybe even quarters. Sometimes you had to raise the money in order to show people the proof of concept. The truth in the beginning is like, you have a PowerPoint, you have an idea. I'm trying to see what's in your eyes. The investor world is trying to imagine the world that you see. And it could be incredibly frustrating when you can't actually show people what that looks like until you actually build it. And then once you build it, sometimes people say, ah, like that starts to look more magical and starts to look more genuine. You can show off that genius a lot faster. So I do think the timescale by which you can create that is compressing, you don't need as much money. And so in sometimes days or weeks, you can show people a proof of concept and that is magical. Now, I don't think AI magically creates unique ideas. I think if you don't really know how to direct AI in a unique way, you can build very generic products and generic products I don't think necessarily stand out in markets. So in some ways, if you think about AI as being generalizable intelligence and you think about startups as being like the expression of really unique ideas, they don't always go hand in hand. And I think sometimes people get confused when they put them together because in some ways, like the more generic an idea comes across, the harder it is for a founder to stand out in the crowd. And it harder it is for a VC to believe that that idea will be durable. - I mean, we've seen also this SaaS apocalypse stuff, right? The idea that like SaaS is in all sorts of trouble thanks to people being able to vibe code SaaS replacements. I don't personally buy into that theory so much. However, I think if anything, there is something to that when it comes to startups, which is the barrier to entry now is a lot lower, right? Which makes, I guess, the barrier to getting funding probably a little bit higher because you must see some ideas that you look at and say, well, that's cool, but someone else can come along and just throw that together vibe code that and then off they go, you're just gonna be swamped with competitors. So is that something that you have to think about now as an investor that you didn't have to think about previously? - Well, to maybe take pieces of that point that you made and try and address them individually. First is this concept that the barrier to entry is low and that maybe AI made it even lower because now we can vibe code or use AI to kind of get into the game with a relatively small amount of money. That's been true in software and in Silicon Valley startups for decades. I mean, you think about the cloud evolution, right? I used to go out and actually buy servers. You have to buy servers. You have to buy Oracle licenses. You have to buy Microsoft licenses. If you didn't do that, you actually-- - I do, I'm old. - Yeah, I know, I'm sorry Pat. Sometimes I have to tell these stories just to remind everybody what it was once like. But yeah, you used to go out and buy hardware and you bought proprietary software and we used to say to people, if you didn't have tens of millions of dollars, it was even just hard to go into a customer like JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley and say, hey, I've run my software on your environment because you needed to own Oracle and Son even to do that. So that changed with cloud and open source and made, you know, so the democratized access for everyone to build in the 2000s and 2010s. And now I think in the air, in the air of AI, you're seeing the acceleration of that trend. So just even more people can get in the game. But maybe the analogy I would use is, it still is like the Olympics. So just because you have maybe 100,000 people that want to run a race instead of 1,000 people that want to race, there still are only eight lanes. And so everyone's got to qualify to get, you know, into the top eight lanes to even get to the semi-finals or to get to the finals. So I think- - Can we call the LLM's like performance enhancing drugs in this metaphor because that'd make it a lot funnier? - I guess what I would say is like the LLM's and AI, it will make the best people on the field even better. But it does not necessarily change the math for everybody. So if you were not really destined to be a founder, and this is not really the game that you were intended to win, AI is not going to solve that. And I think that that is where I would say, yes, it can be a distraction to have 10,000 more people running your race. But the truth is if you put everyone in the New York City marathon, the same seven or eight people are still going to win, even though you just opened up the qualifying to everybody. - Well, maybe try to delve into that a little bit more. Like I take the point that when it's so easy to create a startup, you've got to really excel. But we're still sort of talking about in aggregate. And I wonder if there's differences in how AI is used that might help to, I guess, separate people outright. I can think of sort of three broad categories of how AI is used. Either you're using AI to get your product to market faster, better, whatever the metric is that you're looking for. You might be using AI directly in your product, and that's a particular selling point that's a differentiator for it. And then there's even, I guess, entirely new classes or products that are required because of either companies that are developing frontier AI capabilities or that they're using it so heavily. So if we think about across those three different lenses, right, and feel free to add more if there's others that come to mind, are there certain aspects of those different use cases or, I guess, formulas for what might be behind a startup that are more interesting to you at the moment? Maybe James, to reflect on your question for a second, I think that there's this moment in time, or everyone feels like AI is changing everything. But if you, for a second, remind yourself that the entire world has been obsessing about this technology now for years, right? I mean, chat GPT is three and a half years from the magical chat GPT moment. And then I think almost every founder and everybody in software has been obsessing over foundation models and their capabilities and coding agents for years. So I think it is fair to say that the diffusion of this idea into the startup ecosystem is relatively pervasive at this point. So I would say it's maybe not so helpful to fixate anymore on AI being this massive differentiator or even a massive new investment opportunity or sector area because it is so diffuse. And so I guess that takes me back to this point of like, what was the unique problem that you were trying to solve with or without AI? And then if AI is an accelerant great or if AI makes you an even better founder great, or if AI is the new frontier area that somebody else is deploying and therefore you can help because you've got some bespoke expertise. Those are all obviously great investment theses. But as a catch all category, I think. it no longer has the same meaning that it once had years ago. - So there was no longer true that I simply slapped AI on my pitch and I get millions of dollars from a VC. - It's not clear. And it's not clear even when it was true that that was a good idea, right? So I think when you look at the-- - Well, I think plenty of us realized that was not a good idea. - Well, I think if you look at the haves and have nots, you know, there was a separation of those who really knew what they were doing with AI and maybe those who maybe were just trying to fast follow. And those that really knew what they were doing are starting to really stand out from the crowd. And those that are fast following are finding that their products are not as successful. Maybe the co-pilot era looks like everyone had a chat but on their product and that doesn't seem to stand out anymore. You know, I think people are now, you know, they're very aware that it's very expensive to have inefficiently run language models. So, you know, if it costs a ton of money and takes a ton of time for AI to do its job 'cause you weren't really great at AI engineering, these things are starting to show now. And I think that that is the lesson learned in all this which is, you know, to the extent you were doing something unique, it can stand out. But if you weren't really doing anything unique, the market can see it now. - It's funny, right? Like I was having this conversation the other day where I was saying maybe we can think of AI, or AI coding is just another level of abstraction, right? So, you know, no one's written in machine code for a long time, right? But we don't say those people are, you know, don't know how to, right, we compute a code, you know, 'cause they're not doing assembly. Whereas, you know, now we get into the point where I think James, you said it didn't you, where it's the people who understand the level they're working at and a couple of layers lower in abstraction who tend to be the real expert. So, I guess what we're all saying here is, AI is just me, now, it's just normal, it's me. - Well, I don't know that it's meh as much as it is magical to the extent that the person using it has a magic power. But if the person using it doesn't have a magic power, then I think it is a just generalizable intelligence or generalizable capability, which might be great in certain work environments where you're really just trying to create efficiency around work that might have been commoditized to begin with. But the startup world does not work that way. The startup world is the exact opposite. It is trying to express human ingenuity and uniqueness in packaging that the world can consume in a short period of time as possible, where people have a window to exploit being unique and new. And if you're not doing that, then you're likely going to run into a commonization and competition. - Right, so I guess the first lesson we're talking about today is just slapping now with added AI into your pitch deck is not going to get a lot of attention. - I mean, it may still work for some, but I think it's a false sense of security. - Yeah, so look, so let's move on to talking about how one, how does one come in successfully pitch you on an idea? Because decibel, I think one of the things that's really interesting about decibel and one of the reasons I was interested in working with decibel is because you do the really early stage stuff, right? So you're not turning up once the business is rolling, once they've got a million bucks in ARR. I mean, you do a little bit of that as well, right? But most of what decibel does is it's like a couple of people with an idea, with a slide deck on a resume and a bit of experience who say, we've seen a problem, we've got a solution for the problem. And then I guess, I mean, how would you describe the fundamentals of what your role is in the process of sort of deciding whether or not that progresses or not? Because it's an interesting idea because there's so many little different things that you have to consider before you decide to tip money into a slide deck with a team behind it, right? So why don't you share a bit of light for the listeners on what your thought process is when you're weighing up an investment? - Yeah, first just to demystify this, I think everyone thinks that there's this magical process where you create an amazing deck. You set up a meeting, there's this magical meeting, and if you do everything right in that meeting, then there's a romance we decide to invest and everything is great. - I mean, there's even grifters out there I bet who are offering like courses on how to prepare the perfect deck, right? Like it's, and it's nonsense. - There's something to be said for like, what I would call generic fundraising. So generic fundraising, and this is not bad advice, but generic fundraising is, you know, have a great deck that articulates, you know, who you are, the problem that you're trying to solve, the market opportunity and why someone should invest, and then get those investors and pitch that to a lot of people and hope that, you know, you find the right investor. So I think that if I was going to maybe demystify that for cybersecurity founders, and there's a reason why I think we decided to pick a decibel, a domain of investing as early as possible. So pre-seed, seed, series A minus. Like really everyone knows what early looks like, right? It's not quite a product market fit company. It doesn't have obviously repeatable metrics. There's something, there's something to be done still, and generally say money doesn't solve all your problems when you're still trying to create something. So that, that's the area that we work in. And in general, technical founders really need to find investors who enjoy that phase and deeply appreciate and understand what's going on in that phase because there's only so much you can pitch or sell your way into success when you have a technical product because technical buyers and practitioners, the listeners to your show as an example, they're very critical of products. And if it's going to say that it does a certain thing, it really better do it. And I like to joke, like no cybersecurity practitioner picks up the phone and says, you know, I'm just dying to talk to a salesperson. So there's just not, there's not this like traditional buying universe in this domain. And similarly, the investing universe is non-traditional. So my first piece of advice to people about pitching is before you pitch, do your research on who are the kinds of investors who like these kinds of products, likes these kinds of sectors, likes this particular stage. 'Cause if you take a universe of 3,000 funds, you can get that down to a very, very small group of maybe dozens. Then I think it's super important to try to talk to people who've been through that process. So I always feel that there's, it's not very difficult to find a founder who's had some experience pitching us or getting to know us in some way. So I would love to be able to publish to the world like a set of documentation and APIs or an MCP protocol, but it's also just sometimes best to consume that through a founder's lens. And then after you've gotten some reference ability, then I always say, you know, don't wait too long to set up a meeting and go to know us. I think sometimes people feel like everything needs to be perfect and oftentimes these relationships are built up over a long period of time. - And that's exactly what I was wondering as you were going through that excellent advice, there is the one question that I didn't hear answered is when. Like when do I know, I guess on a couple of angles, when do I know I'm ready to an approach and invest a bit also like, yeah, again, always bring it back to AI, but AI makes it easier than ever to get the idea at least in a prototype stage to even approach those sort of friendly partners, design partners, get you maybe a foot in the door somewhere, but then there's the balance of how much do I bootstrap this, how much do I just go for VCO the election help us understand the many different, I guess, angles of how time and when does someone actually book that call with you? - Well, I think sometimes people feel like this is such a formal process that you only get one shot to pitch a VC and if you don't do well in that one amazing opportunity, then somehow you don't ever have another chance. So I'll be the first to say that that's really not how it works at all. I mean, I think oftentimes will meet a founder maybe even years before they've even decided to leave, let's say the company that they're working at to go and ideate and think about their idea, or while they're at that company, they'll ideate and they'll ideate with us. So we actually even have a community of people we call them future founders that are ideating and thinking about building something and they often want to spend time with our active founders to learn from them, sometimes they wanna advise them, sometimes they wanna help them. The founder community is very strong, especially in cybersecurity. And so oftentimes maybe you're a CSO or you're a head of product or you're somebody that cares a lot about products that are being built by founders. And we often take meetings with these people all the time, develop relationships, ideate on new ideas, and oftentimes by the time someone has pitched us, maybe we've met for years in an informal way before we've actually gone and gotten to the point where they're asking for money or where we're offering it. - So okay, so we've talked about the timing and whatever. Now earlier you mentioned, hey, there's thousands of these funds out there, but you can whittle it down to like a few dozen and maybe approach them. That's a very daunting idea to most founders who don't live in their sort of investment world. They don't know a good VC from a bad VC, right? So I mean, we've been talking about how does a VC select founders, you know, how does a founder get their idea in front of them. But let's reverse that for a second. How does a founder select a VC? Because my, you know, impolite way to describe venture capitalists in this industry is I often say, they're the real estate agents of technology, right? And I've meant really very well. Variant quality people right in the sort of VC world you've got the people who are very much finger guns You know what I mean like trying to close their deals and like They're just I don't know just a bit like you And then you meet other people who are very sincere engaged interested in in the the fields in which they're working so how can you know a founder With no prior knowledge of this space actually identify who it is that they're gonna Want to talk to because I as I say daunting. Well, I totally sympathetic to how daunting it is I mean you can imagine there's three thousand firms maybe you know ten thousand people you could approach and You know oftentimes people don't really even know where to start so they might be go to Google and do an internet search and you know There's a small handful of names that'll pop up but then even figuring out how to get a connection to those those firms might be daunting So I completely understand where you're coming from an analogy I often use is like if you just use the internet to find A doctor or a specialist you might also bump into the same problem So in general, I think it's always great to find in the doctor world like a patient or somebody who's like been through a similar situation Or has exactly the kind of disease that you have and there are communities That that organized because wanting to found a cybersecurity startup disease. Yeah, so so there's there's As you might imagine a very active cybersecurity community that is very well-networked Because many of us grew up as cybersecurity researchers first You know, so I think that there is already a collaborative ecosystem. So it is it is one that likes to share ideas and share knowledge About not just threats, but also people and VC firms So I think it is relatively straightforward To just find a small handful of cybersecurity founders people that maybe you admire people that you know I found that the founders love to gossip about VCs founders love to share All the details about what VCs do or don't do or like or don't like it is there's probably no more joy that a founder has in Talking about their experience with VCs good or bad and oftentimes it hasn't always been perfect So there's maybe no shortage of people who if you email someone and say give me feedback on this VC It might you might be 60 seconds or less that they'll respond to you if you're looking for compliance You'll find them. Yeah, so I I think again like if you're if you have some sort of like unique Medical condition and you're looking for a specialist you obviously like wouldn't just rely on the internet and you know You would find patients that have succeeded And figure out what they did and who they talked to and I think the founder world is very similar like find Cybersecurity founders that maybe are like you or that you you admire and you want to be like them See what they've done ask them for advice and feedback and those tend to be the best gateways to our industry and it Time and time again happens to be some of the but the best ways that we get referrals like we get introduced to people all the time through the founder community And they're you know, they we might be one of the first VCs they've ever met But we might also be the perfect VC Because of the way in which they found us you know through cybersecurity founder Now now look just to bring this all home right to sort of wrap this up The one thing we haven't really talked about is like what are the fundamentals of what makes a good idea for Adventure funded start-up, right? I can think of a few things where they go wrong Where people have found a way to solve a Technical problem that just doesn't really seem to have much of a business idea around it I mean that's something you see quite a lot when someone comes log and says hey I built this really cool thing and you're like that is cool But I just can't sort of see a circumstance where someone would buy it right? So that's one But I guess you know, what's your what's your sort of do you have like a like a checklist? I guess and I know that the process is not Checklist driven right? I understand that because a lot of it is vibes right and that's something people have got to understand a lot of it is like Founder vibes When you meet when you meet someone and you say well, I think this person like you can give them money and Based on their track record based on the vibes I get off this person even if this idea fails They're gonna pivot it into something else They're just really highly highly capable high agency person give this person money that you go you can't go wrong You know, so that's a part of it as well So I understand that it's not a checklist driven thing But if you did have to come up with like five or six sort of criteria that you could that you could rattle off In a podcast with me right now Well, I'm glad we're going at this because let's just let's just call it like it is You know, there's lots of slides and there's lots of ways that you can articulate what is what you know You're trying to do but ultimately there's just one thing everyone wants to do and that is to be sent your Special in some way you're either a special founder or the technology that you built is really special or the traction that you have is really special You're trying to convey that you're special and on the opposite side The the founder just wants the VC and the VC just wants to feel like this is special and unique and not like Everything else and not the same idea just repackaged by by a new team in the same old way So I just keep going back to this uniqueness or this concept of being special so maybe just to hit on these points. I think oftentimes When it comes to describing your story as a founder as a team people gloss over this in just one slide And they just say hey, I was a senior executive at this place or I was a researcher at that place But they don't really tell their founder story and I always say I never really know where someone's going if I don't know where they've been And so I always say like spend more time telling your founder story because your story is kind of everything Where you came from why are choosing to do what you do why this is the magic moment for you? I think people gloss over that way too quickly. So take more time telling your story The uniqueness of a product is the second one. So I think there always has to be something really magical About something you're doing in the product that is super hard for everyone to do and very defensible Otherwise, it's just hard for people to imagine that this is a sustainable differentiation And especially in cybersecurity in the area of AI I think people want to see something that is fresh and unique And is very hard for people to replicate if I made I just have two examples because I know last week We announced our new investment in end and we also announced that Run zero was acquired by Accenture and I think these are two great examples of I mean I saw I saw that I saw the size of the round for aunt and it's it's a monster So yeah, and I think I think if you if you you know I know that you've been close to both of these companies, but you know I think when you get down to these are amazing people with amazing stories But also products that are incredibly unique in their technology and packaging So to put small models on endpoints is groundbreaking in end case Sorry, look just just in case the audience is lost here I'll just explain who and is and you know full disclosure I'm an advisor to Ant which I'm absolutely thrilled about but they are doing Intent aware security on the end point so they can put small language models stuff them into every corner of an endpoint You can even put them in the browser It can take telemetry from an endpoint kick it out to models that are off that endpoint as well But the idea but it can even use computer computer vision to see what users are doing but the idea being That it you know really can shoulder serve a user and stop them from doing dangerous things I mean there's endless use cases there You know you're worried about click fix or fishing or whatever it can it can deal with that you're worried about DLP use cases It can deal with that and honestly the use cases there are just gonna unfurl and be unlimited I think there's one other company having a crack at this but this is you know This is a big idea. It's unique the total addressable market is basically infinity, right? So they've just come out and what is it a series a seed round of a hundred million dollars Which is like yeah, okay? They're really going for it And I see why you picked this as an example next to Something like run zero right which was you know a very special founder with a cool idea who didn't really need that sort of level of Capital commitment to make this thing possible and you know just announced an exit last week very successful Exit also an advisor there. So that's great news for me as well But you know these are these are great examples. I know all of your listeners know that HD more is special Maybe not all of them know that HD is the founder of run zero. So you know, yes, yes, it's it's do more as an example You know when when he came to me and I said hey, how does this work instead of live this proprietary Protocol that I built which is basically you know decades learned on how to traverse networks to discover assets and software I knew in that moment that there was only a small handful of people in the world Who even had that level of proprietary knowledge to be able to discover Assets on networks without credentials. So you know, that was what inspired me and you know Gordon line from NMAP and others to to invest was We just knew how hard this was and so These are I think two great examples of like perfect people, you know doing the perfect product and I think Oftentimes people fix it on market or they fix it on you know they fix it on you know the tam or they you know They come up with other sides that they want to show me, but I'm usually fixated on those two things You know are you the perfect person for this moment? I really hope so I mean there's there's so many people that you know They walk the world obsessing about something and then the world allows them to come and really express themselves in this way. And then it really comes down to when you express yourself in this way, do I think you're doing it in a way that is truly unique? Because if it is truly unique, then I'm usually willing to give you a shot because I know just how hard it is to have the courage to get to this point. And if I think you're willing to bet your life on trying something in a really unique way, then I want to be there to support you. Well, I mean, Lou and Brandon, who are the founders of Ants, I mean, great example there, right? You don't throw a $100 million seed round at people who don't have a good track record, right? Like that's just not what happens. Yeah, and I think just to make sure that everyone, you know, gets all this in context, like the size of the bet often is commensurate with the risk reward of the opportunity. And so it sometimes is like just as genius to hand someone five or ten million dollars as it is to hand them $50 or $100 million. It really depends on, you know, how much R&D risks that take on, how big is the upside after they take that R&D risk? So I think when how fast they have to go and what the competitive landscape looks like as well, right? Yeah, so no one builds a small endpoint company, right? So I think it's been, you know, a good 15, 16 years since people have been decided to start brand new endpoint companies like CrowdStrike and Silence and Carbon Black and Sentinel. I mean, these companies were all started around 2010. And you know, that cohort has now run and it's 16 years later and now, you know, there's a new paradigm with small models. And so that probably requires a size of investment given the market and the competition ahead. And in other markets, you know, you may be able to get a lot farther with a lot less money. And it may make more sense for you to, you know, capitalize your company in a little different way to explore how you're going to find product market fit because maybe the competition is different or the market size is, you know, such that it's growing over time, but it's maybe not ready to take all of that money right now. So I don't think everyone should take, should in any way feel like they have to raise a hundred million dollars to be successful because sometimes five or 10 is exactly the right amount of money that you need for the kind of company that you're trying to build today. Sometimes it can be even less, right? Like if you're doing like a pre-seed, you know, it's just a couple people with a slide deck and a collection of scripts and a trench coat. I mean, sometimes you don't need that much. You just need that that salary for the founders. No, I'm so glad you're bringing this up because I think when you read the headlines or you're just on X and Twitter and, you know, you're sort of like seeing where all the action is, it looks like you have to raise hundreds of millions, if not billions, at, you know, just to even be noticed in this market. I think there are just so many great examples of people that are raising a lot less money and maybe their companies are just not as visible to the outside world, but for the founders and for the investors and for the customers, these companies will all be tremendous wins and all too often that is not being shared with founders because people are fixated on just the companies raising a ton of money and doing so at the highest possible prices. And John, just before we wrap up, I'm curious as to, you know, we've talked a lot about preparing a founder and, you know, how they need to be ready, what they need to bring to the table, what you're looking for, but having seen this process go on a few times, I think there's also sometimes some conditions that might get attached to a VC's decision that maybe the founders weren't aware of. Like, you know, I've met people that are great product idea, but you just think you're going to have to get a CEO in there or something else like that, or maybe there's some extra governance or a board that's got to be established that can catch people off guard. Like, help a founder get the full amount of, I guess, preparedness and mental model of what sort of things can become a condition of getting funding if they get to that point. Yeah, James, in Silicon Valley, everyone tries to do as simple and as straightforward of a deal as they possibly can. I think largely because the space is so competitive in our industry here is relatively mature. So maybe set it a little differently. Like, there's maybe not as much of a conditional based culture here, nor maybe as much of a nickel and dime culture because people are playing the long game. And so I think at least in our world, we don't see as much of that. I am sympathetic though that in other parts of the world, maybe where you have more traditional venture capital industries, these types of terms do exist. And generally speaking, what I say to people is if you can get away with it, execute a little bit longer to give yourself the opportunity to raise money in a clean deal that does not have maybe the same restrictions or requirements that you'd recommended. So, yeah, in general, my advice is just sort of progress and move yourself to a place where you'll either with that investor or with other investors get a clean deal for your company. All right. Well, I think that's a good place to wrap up this first appearance for Mr. John Sukkoda. Well, thank you guys. We've been planning this for like a year finally got around to doing it. John, thank you so much for coming along to share your yoder-like insights with the Risky Business Listening community. It's great to see you. Yeah, thanks, Pat. Thanks James. Thanks, Jordan.