Uncapped #36 | Pat Grady & Alfred Lin from Sequoia

We've been recording the number that everybody votes on every investment for more than a decade now Our internal data shows That consensus versus non-consensus does not matter at all. It's just not a factor presence of conviction is what matters Huh, and so if everybody is a six we vote zero to ten no five so six and above this positive form was negative If everybody's a six probably shouldn't make the investment. It's consensus, but nobody has conviction Strong yes, strong no is much better if three people are our nines and three people are one. We should probably make the investment All right guys, thank you very much for doing this. This is my first attempt at a three-person podcast This is our first Showing together. So yeah, so I apologize if this is the disaster It's not gonna be a disaster. I'm we're gonna ask you questions to that's what I want and then we can edit everything out This could be a five minute pod with whatever's good. Love it. And that'll be fine. I'm in this might be generous Yeah, sorry. We'll take what we can get. I guess to start like how are you guys how are you feeling and like where's your mindset? Are you like do you feel the way you expected to when you first do this was happening like your couple weeks settled in like what's what's going on psychologically? I mean, we just came out of a meeting where we both said we're more excited than ever before and so we're excited and It's part of it is because we're we get to help lead co leads Sequoia into the next generation with a great team And the team that we have is probably one of the best that we've ever had in the history of Sequoia Does it feel like heavy or light like is it feel more like you just got to pick up the most fun video game? Or are you like whoa? I have the weight of something very serious on my shoulders. I think it's a little bit of both You know, I think we're both Alfred and I The idea of being steward someday was sort of a dream, but not an objective I mean, it wasn't something that we sought necessarily, but it's it's an honor to get to continue the legacy that Ruloth and Doug and Jim and everybody else sort of started for us So I think it's heavy in the sense that we feel a responsibility to mix Sequoia great I think it's also a light in a sense that one of the kind of main things that we want to try to do for Sequoia is to kind of get it back to what it's been for most of our 53-year-old history where Alfred and I are doing minimal amounts of administrative work and mostly in the field making investments Alongside a team of people like Andrew Reed and Luciana Luxandrew and you know David Khan and Constantine Bueller who are amazing at what they do And our job is really just to enable them as opposed to to really manage people if you think about like You know aspirationally like how good could it get do you like having your mind like good things that have to be like could it get better than it could It get more dominant than it's been or as the goal just to like stay where you are so I actually I'm obviously biased but I think that if you took you I took I think you took the partners at Sequoia and you stacked ranked them Against all of the other partners in our business. I Think that our 7th or 8th person is still in the top 10 like I think we truly have I know that I know that's a really I'm not like I don't know if all the other people okay, but I think we truly have like an unbelievably talented set of partners You do and and I think for that reason Like you could even take me and Alfred out of the picture and I think Sequoia be an amazing shape Well, it's an interesting thing because these are individuals who could be incredibly successful in their own obviously And then you put them on the Sequoia platform and get all the advantages that you have on top of that And our our basic job is to get out of their way yeah, like our basic job is to let them run and enable it Yeah, that's why we published our Sequoia It's about the team-based approach and it's about the principles that we Have laid out that we're laid out before us like we've always thought that it's founders first and LPs Then Sequoia then the team then yourself. We've always thought that we're only as good as our next investments and we added a few things It's just we'll always do the right thing and do it the right way. We're always gonna do that And if we fail at that because we're human we're gonna apologize fix it and move on and That's place because we have such talented people as Pat was talking about We just want to make sure that influences awarded to people with expertise Not not necessarily tenure or form hierarchy You guys are really explicit about your language here when you talk about like It's you know stewardship and like getting out of people's way. It's very much not CEO language Like I don't think you guys think of yourselves as like co CEOs, right? Let's talk about that. Yeah, so so great point If you are the CEO of an operating business, okay Chances are you are aiming for something like consistency Right, you want to produce the same widget the same way over and over and over again Or you want to provide the same service in the same way at the same level of quality over and over and over again And so I think if you the CEO of an operating business one of your objectives is like quality at scale and quality To some degree is defined as the consistency of the experience when you say an operating business Do you mean like something that makes a widget or are you talking about like a technology startup? I mean almost any other company technology startup. It could be a restaurant. It could be a manufacturing business I think for most of those businesses It actually makes sense to have a CEO who is making decisions and pushing them down into the organization Because you want to ensure that consistency across whatever product or service you're offering I think our business is dramatically different because in our but we're in the outlier business Our objective is not consistency, right? Our objective is to find the two or three or four outliers in any given year Who are going to produce the most important companies up tomorrow? Yep, get into business with them and help them realize the maximum version of their dream and and the key word here The operative word is outlier, okay? And so in order to partner with outliers we need to field a team of outliers You can't feel the team of outliers if you're telling them what to do you can't feel the team of outliers if you're managing them And so our our job is to like find these outliers who are crazy competitive Spiky in some direction or another but also have a heart of gold so that they can actually operate in a team oriented environment And just like set them free and let them go do what they do How do you then manage like inputs because like I would think I would think that you do need consistency of inputs at least in some sense or maybe you don't But like you know there's this thing where it's like the outcomes that you're looking for are these like crazy Spiky founders that you partner with but the inputs like the day-to-day work does that have a consistent rhythm? Does that get managed or do you not even think about that? I think it so again like to pass point Inputs for each partner at Sequoia is going to be different because they're different and their outliers in different ways So you can have someone who's very very thematic and their input is going to the whiteboard with Founders and thinking about the future and whiteboarding this the landscape and figuring out where the white spaces and building a company from that Well, you can have someone who is going to like just be out there meeting as many founders as possible trying to Be opportunistic. Who is it going to be very different inputs? Totally, and you know that's you know that's Jim who loves going to the whiteboard and Landscaping things and that's Doug who loves just dialing people up Intermediors or founders the best the smartest people he he knows and like okay. What's going on? How what can I learn from this person? Those are very very different inputs and if you saw a blank calendar on Doug's Like day you would be worried. Yeah, but not for Jim and if Jim's like Counter is full and full of meetings like this bad. We got a map. That's probably a bad day for him Mm-hmm, and so he's like okay I'm like meeting all these companies, but I'm not actually having time to think so think about like one way of frame It is freedom within frameworks. Okay, so we do have frameworks that people can use as guidelines So that they're not so it's not pure chaos Yeah, and so there's a framework that is what are the capabilities that you need and there are five basic steps in the value chains sourcing picking winning building and harvesting and then there's a framework Which is what are the values that we expect you to have and different teams have different values inside as a Sequoia Sequoia itself has the two primary values of performance and teamwork, but there are certain values that we expect people to adhere to Assuming you're developing the capabilities and assuming that your values are aligned with the values of your team and of our organization You can operate the business however you want and and so for example You know offered mentioned Jim and Doug. We have a partner in Israel named Dean Meyer You know Dean has been very explicit about mapping out the talent nodes in Israel and getting to know the most brilliant former operators Of the most brilliant you know academics researchers, whatever the case might be and just kind of like mapping those nodes and using that as a leading indicator where the world is going Or for example our partner Charlie, you know, Charlie is much more high volume, you know, he's out there in the market meeting a ton of people He's going through a bunch of lists. You know, he's doing a bunch of cold out down the company is like much more of a high volume You know build the funnel and then work your way through a sort of approach And so different people have different approaches that are kind of authentic to who they are and when you put it all together If we have the right people and if we have the right sort of incentives in place it tends to work out pretty well in the end I feel like in like you know, like a startup or an operating company a lot of times founders CEOs think about managing Senior people to outputs and junior people to inputs which I think you know Maybe that makes sense in startup context Do you think about that all in like a venture context where you're like you know the way that you're going to think about You know somebody who's fresh out of school been in venture for a couple years or whatever that's a different thing Then you know a senior partner on the team. Yeah. Yeah, but I think you have to realize adventure the outputs are like 10 years into the into the future. So you have Outputs that look like their outputs, but those can be mirages to like markups can be mirages. Yeah, so we don't really measure that as much as the inputs And what people do so like sourcing there's inputs like how many how many quality companies have you met or how many quality companies do you like want to bring to a Monday it for for Picking it's like the quality of your memo make a what did you get to the first order questions? Yeah, did you answer them? Did you call the right people it's not about having a long memo? It's about having getting to the right points And for the go ahead was it and so so for the grit team to make it a little bit tangible um Every June We review people based on values So we have four core values for the team aggressive but humble strong under scrutiny high-give a shit zero bullshit and demanding and supportive So every June that's exactly exactly. Yeah, demanding support came from rubber and so every June We all get reviewed on those values and literally rated with color commentary I'm like to what degree does your behavior adhere to these values, right? Every December we get reviewed on capabilities sourcing picking winning harvesting and building you know to what degree does your you know capability in those different areas you know reflect the level that we want it to be at and so those are Values or behaviors or one kind of input you know capabilities or another kind of input Over time we expect those inputs to translate into outputs And if they're not translating into outputs then we get to go back and inspect and say okay Well, what's the broken link in the chain like what's going wrong here? Can we talk just like pretty brass tax about each of these because like Yeah, I think from you know, I I'm starting to think about this, you know, we're obviously tiny But I'm starting to think about like how do you measure and care about each of these you know aspects of the job I would just be curious because you guys have done this a lot know how to do it So like can we just start with like how do you decide what it looks like on the like seeing stuff? So like as an example, you know, do you do you say we want to see every company Ever do you say we've got these are our zones that we care about Do you have a discussion? Yeah, so like I'd be curious like what is good like forget the individual level for a second But as Sequoia, I'm like you guys and I'm like reviewing my year. What do I expect to see? You know if I'm like of all the deals in 2026. How many do you expect to see? so Because of the Sequoia platform the partners at Sequoia can see almost any company they want to see So if you try to see everything and you pass on everything Because most companies will not be successful because that's the world we work in Entrepreneurship you have a very high accuracy rate So is that the point to make to classify a bunch of right 99% of the time because you passed on the whole world You pass on the whole world. So that's not really input. That's not a good input good sourcing is finding the great companies And figuring out whether they're worth the time to put in more effort to do the due diligence to them make a investment recommendation So can you only know that historically like in other words can I only judge how my seat how my sourcing in 2025 was like by 2026 or can I know in real time? We look at true positives false positives true negatives false negatives. So we bucket it into the four quadrants We keep a Running list of what we think is what you know? We updated as new data emerges so that you can get higher confidence in your X-Post assessment of like did we make this decision correctly? And so we have we have that as a running thing that we do and then we look at it about once a quarter when we go on offsites Yep, but it's hard because by the time the decision by the time it is obvious what the right decision is You've long since forgotten why you made the decision that you made yep So in the moment we also try to really crystallize like why are we making the decision that we're making which could be somebody does a cycle on a company and recommends to be passed doesn't bring it into a partner meeting But they actually send out a memo that's just a page and a half. Hey, here's what we learned in like here is the rationale for passing This is interesting enough to do a bunch of work Let's do the last 5% and just codify that so that when we look back on it six months from now. We remember exactly why we decided to pass and then the sort of The sort of process by which we do that is is rolling like we get more information. It's like updating your priors You get some information You make a decision you have to you get new information you have to update your priors and we're constantly doing that The other part about you know, how do you know that the company is worth looking at we you know each Business line has specs and so for the early team the spec starts with an ally team Are these people truly outliers like you can probably put it some Judgment around that that is That you can make like early on even before you work with them now. Of course once you start working with them Truly find out whether they're an ally or not totally So basically you're you're you're kind of observing this time goes on you're updating it is there like a sense of Depth versus breath on this because you're not a huge investment team So it's like you know if you're look would you rather look at you know 3000 companies deeply or is it better to actually have covered 8,000 companies You know, so we a little more shallowly. Yeah, we track we we track coverage and you know we track all sorts of different metrics Um our coverage for the growth business tends to be about 70% and 70% is defined There's a list of you know 30 or 40 other investors that we say okay if they make the investment You know, they look at things similar enough to what we look at that if they make the investment we probably should have at least seen it And we tend to we tend to see about 70% of the things that other people end up doing 70% is probably about right I don't think we want to be 100% because that incremental meeting probably gets into CYA territory as opposed to net multiple money territory 20% is probably too low, you know, they're probably missing a lot of stuff and so kind of that 70% neighborhood seems about right We don't track individual metrics for what it's worth And this isn't part because you know, I'd say incentivize this bad behavior Exactly. So now you know 19 years ago before as it's acquired as a summer partner as some partners amazing investment organization and like I'm It does seem like a crazy number of great people have come out of there right some some it is I would recommend for anybody coming out of undergrad who wants to join investing go to some of partners like amazing training ground Pay the advertisement come to CYA first. Yeah, exactly Go to summit crush it then come to see but but summit summit has this like really kind of elegant and brilliant system where everything is Incented you know for outputs and so the funnel is very granular and individualized And the problem that you would run into is if you're a crazy competitive 21-year-old as I was And you were not number one in the call metrics You'd pull out of your back pocket, you know The three founders who you knew would pick up the phone that you were never gonna invest in And call them to pad the metrics right and so it's just like weird behavior that ends up occurring And so we've never had individualized metrics because we don't want people to We don't want to think about hitting the metric We want them to think about the ultimate goal which is partnering with the most important founders of tomorrow Yeah, which includes seeing many companies and the and the judgment that you have to use The judgment that you have to use the first The first leading indicator of good investment judgment for a new investor is how they invest their time Yeah, like if you can figure out how to invest your time to get to that angle of partnering with the best founders Yes, is are you gonna end up being a pretty good investor? Well actually maybe so one more question on seeing them we can kind of move sort of down the chain but um On some level this 70% number whatever it is Well, it's an input to returns. It's itself kind of an output of like activities Like I can't just wake up and say okay, I'm gonna see companies say like that's not the thing I do So what are you like encouraging people to do to be good at seeing the right companies at the right time And maybe like on the early stage business in particular. I feel like this is harder like it growth in some ways It's like you know most by the time it's a beer see like you know You kind of could put the whole universe on a spreadsheet. It's all notable seed. It's not like that But I think the you know every business is difficult for a different reason for growth Yes, someone else is invested so you get to pick off what Pick those off and early it's hard because the waterfront is wide to your point like yeah for us to cover For seed we probably cover 50 to 60% of what is done By a competitor that we yeah, believe we should be tracking and adventure We probably do see 60 to 70% because we have the information from seed funds that a Seed fund invested in them so to see that many companies though The question then is not okay, you saw them. It's like there's a notion that Luciana came up, which is false coverage So to pass point about like calling your friend and you saw yeah, you had a call We can like just go and see a bunch of companies because we want to demo day for a variety of places and saw a lot of company That doesn't actually get to the point of finding substantive engagement and substantive engagement So like okay to pass point about like investing your time You saw the demo day presentations. They were one minute each very efficient use of time Okay, what are the five companies out of that demo day that you're going to spend time with yeah And so you can the decision quality there is actually fairly important And so you that is measurable so there's a relative list of of companies that you want and looked yeah And so out of that 30 to 100 companies were the top five that you thought were worth pursuing did you go pursue them? And so those inputs are actually very very measurable for quality And we may be wrong, but we then we update our priors on like okay Why do we miss something that was that you didn't take a meeting with? And so then you know the the thing about each of these businesses and Okay, tell the early team we have basically three shots Because we want to see companies before company formation if possible So for that it's like okay, are you in the right network? So are you in You know open AI or anthropic or these people who are about to leave these companies? And are you able to start getting touched with them before they leave? Okay, maybe you don't get that shot or you passed for the wrong reason You can then once they've left and they've gotten momentum invest at the seed Only because you poured some heart and soul into meeting those people in the first place if you didn't make the seed investment We can make a series A investments and so That those are all trackable and it is a funnel that you can track and quality Sort of end up rising to the top totally part of what's different About the growth business also you mentioned you can put the whole universe on a spreadsheet You also know a lot about the companies on that spreadsheet And so in 2007 when I joined Sequoia the primary way that you learned about a company Was you cold called them and you talked to the founder Now the amount of information that our CRM system yeah produces when you just put the name of a company into it Is more than the amount of information that we had when we were making a final investment decision 15 years ago, right? So there's an enormous amount of information that you can get And so one of the failure modes for young investors is to think of their job as my job is to meet founders No, your job is to generate net multiple money returns Meeting founders is one of the things that you can do to do that But reading about their company online is another way Go spend 15 minutes in our like our homegrown CRM system with all the data science signals and everything is Fabulous at this point Go spend some time in that system Beat it up a little bit You know, don't just meet you know, whatever company somebody told you are inflecting Like go figure out what we know about them before you decide whether it's worth spending 30 minutes of your time What you know about them that has nothing to do with a meeting some other partner had. It's truly just information from the internet It's information from the internet, but it's also information from a bunch of other sources some of which are paid some of which are proprietary Like there's data that we create to feed into the system so that we have the most holistic possible view of these company You want to talk about the proprietary data sources that you have gone? I'll give you an example Imagine imagine you found some great VP of engineering And you did a favor for that VP of engineering and now that VP of engineering says I love jack jacks the best I don't have anything for jack all the time right honestly. Yeah, well It wouldn't be crazy if you went back to that VP of engineering and you're like hey VP of engineering you owe me Any chance you could tell me like who your five smartest and most respected VP of engineering I never do that and I think that might be but like I truly never do that and I just like can't make myself and I think I should But imagine if you did that. Yeah, and imagine if you started doing that more than 10 years ago Yeah, and imagine if you tracked all the responses for more than a decade Yeah, and imagine if that all lived inside of a CRM system. Yeah, that has a talent map of Silicon Valley Yeah Not just the founders who are about to pop out of a lab. Yeah, but also like engineer number 37 in some growth stage company So imagine the you asking you're saying like who are your five smartest people? You know something it's pay drink for people. Yeah, it's the same basic thing and you have the whole the whole firm is doing this We have a whole talent in doing this. We have all the investors doing this. Yeah, it's and we've been doing it We had a we had a former partner named Brett record who came up with this idea More than 10 years ago. So we've been doing it for a long time. Yeah, and it's not that route I mean, it's it's not like something that you could just think oh, that's a good idea I'll just do it because it also requires actually helping people and that's it. You can't be transactional Yeah, you have to like yeah, you have to make sure that people you know that they're actually Kind of feel good about helping us do this. Yes, in fact if you make a transactional they'll just Give whatever a response to like get you off the phone. Yeah, so we we very much pride ourselves on making sure that we give Before we can and so for example if I hear about some growth stage company that's inflecting I can go into our system and very quickly get a sense for like what percentile is this engineering team because I can't think of a lot of great companies that you know became billion dollar plus revenue businesses without having a great Engineering team at some point. Yeah, and so that's a pretty helpful signal. Yeah Actually, this is a little bit of a side tangent I want to stick with this sort of like the intricacy adventure, but just as like a quick Eddie Do you find that there are examples where you can invest in something where the engineering team is not great And you go in and you're like we can help make it great and there's so many other things to like that this can become great Or do you think if it's not great from the beginning it never turns great? It's very very hard to change the DNA of a company so Generally, it starts being great at some aspects and then you can Sort of augment things so but in in in early stage investing like the problem is like if they can't build the product Yeah, and it doesn't work That's you're not going to get off the ground now I think there are quality engineers at different levels and so You can get off the ground because Nate builds all of a Airbnb systems and it's a one person show for a period of time and eventually you have to recruit the next generation of people the next Generation leaders. Yeah, those people may actually be good for a period of time And they will no longer be good and you have to recruit the next leader and the next leader. I'll give you a couple examples So, you know, we got a business of service now in 2009. Yep service now is founded in 2005 Okay, in 2009 all of the code was written by one person. Fred Lutty When service now in public Most of the code was was written by one person. Wow Fred Lutty So did they have a great engineering team? No They have a great engineer that one guy who was like not a 10x engineer. He's like a thousand x engineer Okay, so that's one example. That's crazy. I've never heard a story quite like that I don't think actually. Well in Palo Alto Networks in a different way like Palo Alto Networks ended up with an amazing engineering organization But for a very long time near Zook the founder was kind of like the guy who would just fix everything. Yeah, right? And so I think I think there are a bunch of these examples where there's one person who's actually a crazy Disproportionation, or the productivity amount. Yeah, another example would be HubSpot So we got a business with HubSpot in 2011 and at the time amazing story Awful product and Brad and Dormesh would say the same thing. So I'm not speaking out of turn Um, maybe they'd say mediocre product, but it wasn't great And this is before the CRM. This is before the CRM. So that point was only a marketing product. Yeah And they found this company called Performable run by these two guys David Cancel and Elias Torres And they acquired it. Yep. And most of the time that doesn't really work in this case They acquired these two founders with 15 or 20 engineers and product managers and whatever They ended up rebuilding the entire HubSpot platform within a couple of years And then the HubSpot went from being good story mediocre product to good story great product. That was in the built the CRM Christopher O'Donnell who came in with that acquisition was the one who built the CRM There were obviously a bunch of people involved, but he was kind of points on it Yeah, and then Whitney Sorenson who also came in with that acquisition is still CTO of HubSpot today And Andrew Bylecki who is the founder of Clavio had also been part of that team I guess there are probably some types of companies where you figure The product has to be good, but the engineering doesn't have to be unbelievable And we can make it better and then there are some types of companies where like the founding You know, engineer has to be just a genius. Yes. Yes. So that's like part of the magical HubSpot was Like Airbnb and Open AI can start differently. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's exactly our point HubSpot managed to get really good engineers to care about marketing software Which most really good engineers do not and I think another example would be like open evidence Open evidence is a you know vertically integrated Foundation model for medicine Right like all of their own training all the way up to the application that is in doctor's hands You can't do that with mediocre engineers like that is the absolute all-star team That was able to build that product because they're you know they end up competing with Open AI and the other broad foundation models You can't do that if you don't start with amazing engineering. Yep. The more technical the product the more Technical the founders have to be the more technical the engineering team has to be the less technical the product Then you can you can rely on one person. Yeah, literally. Yeah, and you know Airbnb started out that way door dash started out that way where the founders were just exceptional They built everything and over time they complement that with with people So that all securities you you really want you know, they're executing a micro nanosecond Execution. Yeah, it's a really good engineering team. Yeah Okay, can we talk about like um picking in some amount of detail like I think There's so many like I think it's like a very hard to discuss Part of the job, but it's obviously very important I would argue For you all I imagine in some ways it's like the most important maybe because You know, you're seeing and winning is going to be very very good Obviously you need to keep those very good, but then there's like this picking thing which like there's just like You know every year you got to pick well again Um, and so I imagine you spend a ton of time thinking about it and it can't just be Vibes it can't just be this market's big Vibes don't hurt fives don't hurt, but like so like can you talk about like In some depth like what goes into good picking and maybe just to like pick a stage in the middle like a series A or a series B or something like that Um, because like you know growth says on things seeds it's on thing, but like you know, maybe we can start and like How do you talk about what goes into good picking in the series A series B range? So I can do this in two different ways one of which is like Back to like making money on money high multiple returns That's not that important is it no, but that that's what we're aiming for yeah, so in a fund We you know venture fund. Yeah, and that'll probably a growth fund too, but this we have about 45 to 55 shots Of which we need six To like basically be a 10x or more yeah of which of those three Three of them of out of the six we need them to be a hundred million dollar gain or a billion dollar gain That's what makes for a good fund. Yeah, and we look historically at all the sequest funds and You know, there's a high write-off rate so When you say like picking or we actually that good at it now our best fund is venture 12 which includes Airbnb unity and And drop box All three of them were a billion dollar gains, but there were also 10 companies That were a hundred million dollar gains. That's crazy So That is a good fund The right off right there was like 50% So when you when you think about picking you have to be Half right, but your point is that good picking isn't Not losing money good picking is you have to take a high enough inclusion rate of asymmetry So the point here is we're in the business of risk-taking and you have to be able to take risk on things that will run Yes, so and then the other thing that we've learned about picking is you can't just have things run that you put a small amount of dollars in And have low ownership like he's put a million dollars into this Yeah, so that's been in a venture fund of 400 500 600 million dollars. It's just not enough You own if you don't own enough. It's just not enough. You have to actually have conviction And so when you have conviction and you focus on the right companies, you're gonna you're gonna be wrong half the time When you just when you look at your basket of across many funds of the things that truly ran like the billion dollar gains Let's say or the 500 million dollar gains and say Did those at the time feel like a lot of people wanted them and like can you draw any correlation between how hot consensus those rounds were not really or because like when you're describing like You know this this sort of like asymmetry where you're seeing something that's not obvious or something has a shape like Or and then you have these rounds where nine venture firms all agree this looks good like is there Do those correlate? I can give you lots of examples where they don't both there's both right so one of the sort of In door-dash the situation the series the seed round was really really hard for door-dash Almost everybody in pass including us and that's kind of my fault for not having enough conviction When the series a came together I think everybody knew that it was working So there were they probably got like six term sheets in the same week that we offered the term sheet So in that case winability was super important So winability was super important and you know, I had passed and we were coming a little bit from behind even though we just we tried to say um With Try staying um with the company and learning about the company and trying to add value in the series b it was red hot It went from a 50 million dollar evaluation to a 600 million dollar evaluation And when ability was really really important, but you know the series c Which nobody wanted to do was basically at the same valuation slightly less Um given and that turned out to be one of the best that uh not venture investments growth investments And series d was you know very difficult E f g those were super consensus. They all made money. Yeah, but the best the best rounds were the series a and the series c And those were not consensus at all If I go further back We led four rounds in a row with octa the series c d e and f because nobody else Want to invest. Yeah, um when we got into business with HubSpot we were the only term sheet Um, I remember was zoom zoom Zoom was like a reasonably hot company because there were a lot of people using the product But it wasn't a consensus investment and they weren't raising money and I remember a couple weeks after we made the investment Um, I was a dinner with some other investors and one of them was making fun of us for having for having made the investment You know, oh my gosh, you paid a billion dollars for zoom out how crazy, right? Snowflake, you know, we passed on snowflake And then six months later beg them to give us another chance Because in that six month period it felt like things had inflicted and that that was also not a consensus investment and so I think Our our internal data at least for our own decision making we've been tracking We've been recording the number that everybody votes on every investment for more than a decade now um our internal data shows That consensus versus non-consensus consensus does not matter at all. It's just not a factor presence of conviction is what matters And so if everybody is a six we vote zero to ten no five so six and above as positive form was negative If everybody's a six probably shouldn't make the investment. It's consensus, but nobody has conviction Strong yes strong no as much better if three people are our nines and three people are one We should probably make the investment Because the presence of the nines is a much more powerful signal than the presence of the ones But if you wanted to describe that mathematically. We're in the risk-taking business We need we need that volatility because the truth is not somewhere in the middle where everybody agrees. Yes. Yeah We're trying to build the future the future does not look like the past And so if everything looks consensus it's usually because it's we have something that is measurable to the past comparable to the past. It's all like it's everybody's thinking about it and when it's consensus It's all gets price to consensus too. Let's say you have an investor who is good. You're happy with them But you notice over a period of six seven years that like they're They're they're portfolio includes a lot of good stuff, but it doesn't have that outlier tail What would your coaching be like what would you what advice would you give that person to get more asymmetry into their Like if you're like, I'm gonna help you be a better picker. Yeah, this is not hypothetical The way I'm gonna help you be a picture is by helping you get more of the asymmetry There are at least three different names in my mind right now. This is not hypothetical at all. So now I say X to you. Yeah. No, so we're you know Jim gets had this expression front-stabbing Which is you want to tell people whatever concerns you have or whatever bad news to their front Instead of like saying it behind the back. So we have this conversation all the time with people who you know seem to be too risk averse or don't you know have enough of that kind of upside potential in their portfolio and so When that situation happens we start having the conversation, you know, hey You seem to be more in the base hits kind of business. We're more in the grand slams kind of business You know, let's let's work on taking some more risk, you know Like let's work on this together. Yep, and if years go by and their risk appetite remains kind of modest risk appetite Which is very different yet in what we tend to seek At some point the conversation becomes hey You're actually very good at what you do. You should do something. That's a little bit different than what we do Okay, but so how do you you say the like we should let's get you more risk appetite? How I'll give it so concrete example. There's somebody on our team now who we've been working with over the last few years and It literally starts with This thing that you are talking about right now We're going to invest in that company. Oh, no, no, no, but we still need to figure out this And we still need to figure out this and I have these five more call oh, no, no Yeah, we're going to invest in that company. Let's go invest in that company now And so you start with a little bit of a two by four Because you can see you know in this example. I'm not gonna name names, but in this example Like this person is so good at what they do and they come across so many interesting opportunities And they come up with a reason to pass on all of them And so at some point you just have to say look This is the good one. Okay, let's go do this one together And you do that a few times and you show you basically teach by showing and you go from it goes from like you know Alfred or me or whoever is the last 30% to to now we're the last 20% to now we're the last 10% to now we're the last 5% To now this person doing it on their own. Yeah, because once you've done it a few times you actually get comfortable to take him the risk In those in this situation is the person like are they like they kind of know it's good And you're just encouraging them to trust their instincts like is it about like cutting off the process a little bit earlier? Is that the learning that's giving them a little bit of courage What paths referring to is like everybody here at Sequoia came with a lot of Quote and quote success. They went to good schools. They had great careers beforehand And they were the A students are the A+ students and in this business It's not about not making mistakes as I shared with you our best performing fun had a 50% right off rate You're gonna make a mistake half the time. Yeah, and so you just have to like readjust And think about it from that perspective. Yeah I was I was gonna say the exact same thing. It goes back to the people we hire the people we hire these Competitive overachievers. Dylan. Most of them got straight A's their whole lives Yep, and so one of the interview questions that is most uncomfortable for them, but most important for us is What's your biggest mistake like what's the biggest failure you've had in your entire life? And usually get some you know BS one and you kind of have to keep pushing until you get to a real one But a lot of these a lot of the people that join our team haven't had much failure And so we kind of have to help them get comfortable with it. Yeah, because otherwise we're not going to get the outlier wins To do this business while you really do need courage. Yeah, you do need to be able to Hey, you know in both extremes if you're gonna pay a ridiculous amount for a company that you saw in past a month ago or two months ago or a year ago Like pat did with snowflake you have to have real courage He could have invested a year ago in snowflake when he decides to pass and he's like it's a swallow has pride And actually say okay, I made a mistake. I'm gonna pay up for this round Even though it sounds ridiculous. I'm gonna do it or the other extreme where you're like nobody likes this company Yeah, anywhere in the world except you. Yes, but it's a really good company and by the way this this courage thing is like It's the type of thing that always strikes me is very Tidy and nice sounding in a historical story, you know You tell a story of we did this door dash round the snowflake round everybody thought we were stupid and then look what happened But in the moment when you do something where everybody thinks you're stupid It's like I'd have to be like hey guys. Let me tell you about this deal And you guys walk away and like jacks actually stupid like you know, it's like Like in the moment it doesn't feel good when everybody around like your partners disagree with you your you know Peers and other firms are like you're not like stupid and the cute like this turned into snowflake way Like we actually just think you're bad at the job and like you have to stay with that. Yeah, yeah, I think it's really hard for people I think it is I think you're right that it's really hard But it's also like the two fears fear of missing out and fear of looking stupid or the two fears that prevent people from making the right decisions And you kind of kind of to block out those fears. We do it on this note. We do a lot of Introspection post mortems Post parades on decisions that we got right or wrong Just kind of looking at the outlier decisions one way or the other and saying okay Like we've got this one really wrong why we got this one really right why What's interesting about the ones that we get really wrong Every single one of them if you play the the five wise game like why why why why why why every single one of them comes down to some Psychological bias or emotional trap totally none of them come down to an error in calculations Yeah, all of them come down to these background effects that we're clouding your judgment. Yeah, and You know we cataloged them, you know, we have a list of 40 of these things so that we can kind of like Use the common vernacular and and be able to Yeah, be able to kind of get in front of them so that we can have a conversation before we make that mistake like hey Do you have separation of church and state here what separation of church and state well Letting the thrill of the chase bleed over into your clinical decision-making yeah, right? The thrill of the chase is a very passionate emotional thing where you're falling in love with the founder But then you have to come back and put your emotions aside and clinically assess all the merits and risks and make a good decision And so it's pretty natural the co mingle those two things, but that can lead you down the long path How do you guys as Senior partner stewards or like partners partners equal partners. How do you How do you with younger partners who are newer? How do you react when you see them doing something where they're doing something that is courageous But you think is genuinely a bad idea love it You're like let them let them be learn the lesson maybe no be curious not judgmental the conversation Uh the conversation that we have with our partners all the time is I observed you doing this thing I am curious why When you start a conversation that way they the immediately are like uh-oh, did I do something wrong? Yeah, but if you genuinely come from a place of curiosity This is what makes us all better like when when somebody joins our team We don't want David con to become another Alfred or another Pat We want David con to become the best possible David Conny can become And so if David goes off and does something that's not obvious to me or Alfred I'm going to be pretty curious We know this guy is incredibly talented What does he see that we don't see like what method has he come up with that's not in our toolkit today And so we we would much rather let people just run Make some mistakes now they're doing something that we don't understand they do it four times in a row and they're over four Okay, now we're going to say hey, maybe we don't want to do that anymore, right? We're going to start with curiosity. Yeah What else besides courage would you sort of that like that was very resonant besides courage is there anything else that you would In view as lessons to help people be better at picking as defined by including this asymmetric upside I think the The other the other thing that comes with courage is to play your game like figure out what you're like uniquely good at Like for me when I got into this To this business. I knew nothing. I knew a little bit about investing but not really Guy made some seed investments here. They're a yes sure, but this business is about Making sure you partner with the best companies of tomorrow. How do you break that down? Like do you are you market led or you founder led? I just thought thought of it as like well, that's interesting How about founder market fit? And so I didn't encourage everybody just like It is sort of your lens on things. It's my lens on things like you can't really for Uber Travis is like a perfect fit for Uber for Airbnb Brian's a perfect fit for Airbnb for DoorDash Tony's like a perfect fit You can't you they can't go actually run someone else's business So when you go into meeting a company the top thing you're trying to figure out is was this person made for this company This person made for this company and the problems of this market. How do you do it? We're just like by asking them questions and riffing with them and they all come prepared with a pitch And I try to like say okay, be on this pitch. What do you know about this industry? What why why is this industry interesting to you Okay, you started with a problem that you're solving for yourself What other problems do you want to solve along the way if that's the only problem you want to solve that's not a lot That would be some runway, but that's not gonna be that's not gonna get you to act to and act three and four and the companies that are You know, just mega legendary companies. They have multiple acts That one can lead you a long long way. It can be a decade or 50 or two decades But most companies that are around for a long period of time and I consider a legendary They're around for a few few decades when you meet the company. Have you already like visualized this is kind of what Shape I think this company is and I'm therefore trying to figure out if the founder sort of like fits that shape No, because that that would imply that I know something That would be bad because in that situation we often talk about this as like for the former operators at Sequoia You're likely to do that because you're you see a problem you think about a situation I know what it should become and then you're trying to force fit your vision onto the founder yeah And that's usually a mistake because if the founder if you're if it's your vision And your force finishing that and the the founder isn't aligned with that vision. That's a mistake And the other mistake is like oh, you know so much about this industry. It doesn't matter of the quality of the founders like well You don't actually run this company. Yeah, you actually have to let the founder run yeah, and so I always approach these conversations with as we kept talking about curiosity You have in this business you you just have to be very very curious and you have to ask questions Five levels deep of why five levels deep of what five level deep deep of how and Through that process you riff with the founder and hopefully the vision gets More clear to you and to the founder at the same time and look this is a 10-year journey at the minimum Okay, I think in in some of these situations with seed companies Because of how seed funds are becoming larger and larger It's at least the five year journey even if it doesn't work totally and if it works, you know I'm still on the board of Airbnb It's that that's been a it's almost two decades. No, and so and then Jensen still doing it's been like 30 years Yeah, so if you want to shoot for a legendary status company You want to find a founder and a team that want to go for it for many decades. Yeah, and And then you yourself Maybe on that board for a decade or two Yeah, do you have an equivalent lens to this founder market fit sort of idea Well, can I zoom out and kind of give like an overall framework on wherever you want taking. Yeah, perfect And my my lens fits within the framework, but there's kind of the like what the why and the how? Okay, so What are we trying to find we're trying to find the most important companies that tomorrow And one way that you can think about that is the market determines how big the company can get And the founder determines how big the company will get And so the market and the founder by far the most important variables and the thing we care about on the market is not how big it is today It's how big is it going to be in 10 or 20 years So it's more of a why now question than a what existed a question So the what we're looking for the most important companies that tomorrow Why we're in the outlier business, you know, we got to take risk if we can Actually get into business with the most important companies that tomorrow That's where all the outsides returns are going to come from, you know, we don't We don't serve our mission for our limited partners if we're just getting doubles and triples all the time like We actually have to find the most important companies in tomorrow. It's also way more fun Like have you ever tried company building with a company that is not working Versus have you ever tried company building with a company that is working Company building with a company that is working is the easiest thing in the world, right? And so it's way more fun um And then the how There's a lot that goes into the picking that we do, right? So part of it is a shared language And Alfred mentioned earlier that we have we have a spec we have a spec for seed investing venture investing growth investing expansion investing The spec is just a shared language and the shared language for growth specifically is emerging market leader Uniquing compelling value prop sustainable competitive advantage And if you map those onto a set of financials the emerging market leader piece basically says This will be the most important company in a market that is important tomorrow, which implies high revenue scale The unique and compelling value prop piece Unique suggest that you're going to have good gross margins because you're not having to compete on price compelling suggests that you're going to have good operating margins because you don't have to spend a lot of money on sales marketing to get people to adopt your product And then sustainable competitive advantage says that the free cash flow produced by those nice margins on that nice revenue scale is going to be around for a while Those are the characteristics we're looking for in a business Back to what I said earlier about the founder in the market be the most important thing By the time a company reaches the growth stage if the founder is as good as you think they are Chances are these characteristics have materialized So the thing we care about most even at the growth stage is actually the founder But the sanity check on is this founder as good as we think they are is whether or not these characteristics have started to show up in the business Yeah And then in terms of mechanizing that You know we have a funnel like anybody does and we realized a long time ago that the most important decision is actually not the final decision that happens on a Monday The most important decision is the mid funnel decision that determines what gets to a Monday By the time it gets to a Monday, we're pretty good at making the decision Our biggest misses are the things that don't even make it to a Monday is you look but you didn't spend real time on something that deserves exactly And so having better hygiene around those mid funnel decisions, you know We used to just go back to back meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting now You can't have a meeting if you don't save time afterwards for a debrief So that we can have a concrete conversation about what did everybody think about this meeting what are the pros and cons? You know, what's the thesis where do we go from here and similarly back to our, you know, CRM system that we have Every single meeting you take you put a rating in the system, you know, you're rating it on like Quality of the opportunity zero to ten no fives and so we we just have this Kind of by the way, none of that is perfect none of that guarantees that we're gonna make good decisions Is just trying to get a little bit better every day so that over time, you know, hopefully we end up with more wins and losses We believe in consistent compounding. Yeah, so just like doing this over and over and over again adjust Adjust adjust adjust because the debrief thing we didn't have probably like five five years ago. Yeah, yeah, it's a really good deal Yeah, I mean it makes sense. I mean, it was like wait a minute. Why didn't we have this before? So I just run between these the MD you can't remember what happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and then if you don't write down exactly what you thought Maybe you want to still sleep on it, but yeah at that moment what were your impressions like we want to be able to marry thinking fast and thinking slow We can spend the least amount of time on this, but I'm just curious about winning Let's like when you want when you want to partner with an entrepreneur and you've decided we would like to do this deal I know strike this long-term business partnership. Yeah, exactly. That's the nice way to say it. What do you um You know, like what do you do? Like I realized like you know a lot of what you're trying to do is show them that you're a good partner But like actually know no so And we might have like everybody has their own style so yeah offer and I may have different responses to this, but my Basic mental model in this has always been if you genuinely love A founder and the company that they are building They'll be able to feel it And so what I found is that if you actually do your homework to really understand this person and to really understand this company And then you just tell them why you want to be a business with them Like the authenticity and the passion and the you know the depth of the thinking like all that stuff should just come out To ask that pointed question on that does that work for you because this is Sequoia or is that a good strategy in general That works for me when I was 24 years old and nobody had any idea who I was And honestly half the companies I was talking with didn't know who Sequoia was So what does it look like to show that much like love for what they're doing because you know You can just say it, but I'm sure you're not just saying it. I'm sure that it was expressed through Some work you were doing on their company or reflecting some thought you put into something It's kind of like when you know when people say that your brand is the sum of the experiences that people have with you you can't just like Be lazy and sloppy throughout the process and then pop out of a cake and tell somebody you love them Yeah, right. That's not consistent with what they've experienced so be thus far And so every moment as you're engaging with the founder Forms their ultimate impression of you and if you are consistently engaged and thoughtful and responsive And just kind of behaving the way that you would expect or want somebody to behave throughout that process By the time you get to the end Having now done your homework if if you are also now saying like hey here's why I'm really excited about this opportunity Usually that resonates pretty well. Usually that's Consistent with their experience of you so far. I don't know if you remember this but And this was like a this was like a positive thing But you you passed on one of the early lattice rounds. I know and it was the most gracious High-quality pass that I got in my life And I got hundreds of passes and I still remember that you called me and explained exact details of like What you were thinking and what the risk were and limitations and whatever and it was just like Clear that you would thought about it more than anybody else and I was like that's like that is like the gold dinder pass So I guess it can't be faked because you have to do the work along the way to do that. Yeah. Yeah Passing I guess well is really important for you all because Like you know if you're you know if you're me. It's like if I miss the a I don't have been like I'm not gonna do it You always want to be in business with a great company And so I'm guessing on this you know picking thing the way that you pass has to be Like excellent in general. Yeah, like you need to pass in ways that keep the relationship Healthy. Yeah, I think the the way we talk about it is it's maybe not now. It's not that we're passing We're not we're just not investing at this point in time And look I I experienced this when I was on your side Even though um, we made money for Sequoia ad link exchange When we were running Zappos Sequoia pass on Zappos like two or three times before they invested But it was always very gracious. There was always a good reason. This was Mike Moritz doing it And then we we learned from previous partners on how to pass and You know one way is to show a lot of love one way is to show a lot of work and and being diligence and Telling you why as a founder like maybe you should work on these things. This is what we found near diligence And hopefully we make your company better even when we're passing And that shows it to to past point real love and real love for the problem real love for your business and real love for you Yeah, it also shows love for your own craft which I think founders respect to like I always respect When I'm like these people are working really hard and they care about what they're doing and all of that like that matters a lot Yeah, and it's intense just to add on the winning side It really helps that we're on the Sequoia platform But we have like really strong competitors. We don't take it for granted That we're going to win totally I think you if you start with that That's a good that's a good position to start. Yeah, and we we do it from a level of humanity The founder is going to run the company. We're there to help. We're supposed to be the shock absorbers We're supposed to be that the sparring partners. We're not cheerleaders We tell the founders that what we want to strive for is at the end of the day because we love the company We love the business. We love the founders that we're always the first call Once you've won and now you're working with the company How do you start the relationship like obviously it's like the beginning of this long thing But like what do you you know you start working with the founder you're in business with them now like what do you what do you say? How do you start things? I think different partners will do it differently But maybe from a the same level of humility that we have which is we don't know anything about business Let me like learn as much as I can And we start there and there have been times when I go to the first few board meetings and I don't say very much I'm just observing. I'm listening. I'm reading the materials. I'm asking follow-up questions um You can't help unless you understand and as a board member your job is not to like Operate your job is we're not management or board members and where they're for you to Be a sounding board But our the thing that we can help with is Powder recognition of things that have worked in the past and have not worked in the past and asking a question Hey, I've seen this not work nine out of ten times explain to me why you're going to be the one company that is different We don't we don't ask it like oh 90% of the time this is not going to work. So don't do it Just we just we're trying to be very very open-minded I think in your first year If you if the founder actually trusts you by the time you're a year in You're good like that. That's a good place to be because I think I think it's hard to actually get somebody's trust and And so with that as the objective for your number one You know the two components of trust are confidence and intention I think the confidence piece People mistake as let me show them how valuable I am That's nice, but it's actually probably better to make sure that you have all of the relevant context on the company It's better to be like let me show you how much I understand and so I go through employee onboarding So that I have the same experience that a new employee to the company has and kind of understand things the way that they would understand it on their first day of the company Usually we do one-on-ones with all the sort of key VPs or director reports as part of diligence But if we haven't done that as part of diligence, we do that You know as part of onboarding Usually we get access to the last couple years of board decks as part of diligence if we haven't done that as diligence We do that as part of onboarding if there's any sort of employee like culture manual or whatever we get access to that And so we try to get as much context as we can after the investment has been made To make sure that when we go into those first-hand full-of-board meetings We're not just Saying random things off the cuff like to the extent we have an opinion to share It's at least grounded in the reality of the business as it exists today So that's that's on the competent side on the intention side um I think because every founder has the horror stories of the venture capitalists that you know did them wrong You know, I think because our competitors like to say nasty things about us from time to time Like I think we really have to show that our intentions are pure And one of the ways that I describe it to founders is look I have two objective functions Okay, I have the objective function that I owe to our limited partners Which is to maximize the share price of your company because our objective function is very explicitly net multiple money returns right Um, but then my second objective function is my personal one Which is like the reason I do this is because I really enjoy watching founders become Amazing CEOs right and like build these world-changing companies And so my personal objective function is to help you become the absolute best possible version of yourself and You can't just say that and then do whatever you want like you have to say that and then behave accordingly, right? Um, but I think starting off by saying that and just kind of explaining that to them At least kind of lodges that You know idea in their head like okay, maybe this person really is here to help me get better And then if you behave accordingly by the end of the first year Hopefully you're in a position where the founder thinks that you have both the competence and the intention To kind of like be in the trenches with them and then from there you can actually start to make an impact But to me the first year is all about like Actually become trusted by the founders when you think about the board seats where you are the proudest of That you'll like look back at the end of your you know career and say that's where I Shined like what is that? What do those look like you know and like are you Um, are you like part? Are you like an extended part of the executive team? Are you a conceitley area is it different situation the situation like there's a what are the ones you're proud of stuff? There is a accompany that I was involved with that when public and you know, when you go public you go to the NASDAQ or the nice zero whatever and you know Ring the bell and then take a bunch of photos and And this is a trivial thing, but this meant a lot to me Um, there was a photo that was board of management team There's a photo that was Management team. There's a photo of those board as a photo of those founders And then there's a photo that was founders and me And they didn't do it with the other board members and I felt so special, you know like I felt like that was uh You know like they were treating me as an extension of the founding team, which I wasn't I was just an investor No, it was a great center, but they like meant the world to me. Yeah, so It's always the it's always the founding the founders and how much do you engage with them that sort of matters and It's not a you know for me. It's never it's about Helping them get it right and helping them reach their full potential and helping their companies reach their full potential and In those situations I'm pretty proud that we Got to the right Sort of outcome and conclusion. I think there are a lot of boards that you know you've been involved with a lot of boards Where there are people who always have to rewrite they have to leave them they have to prove how smart they are Those don't tend to be the great board meetings sort of board discussions. No, those are particularly tough when that board member is like You know a real accomplished personality and like everybody you know, I think those can be very difficult You know sometimes those are situations are um there's a lot of value You know obviously from those people it's just it's um it changes things Yeah, but I think the being bright you can in business things change so much and in technology they change even faster So you you know your paradigm what makes you right can change and if you're not curious if you don't update your priors That previous notion could be wrong And we've seen that time and time again for most of our careers Software is the way to make a lot of money and he was on-prem software. It was It was SaaS software and then something changed like hardware became this interesting place to invest Defense tech became an interesting place to to invest. They're just gonna be more more things in the world And the world is gonna expand and you have to be open to new ideas and whatever work for a software company may not work for a hardware company and vice versa So if you've been a successful like chip company going into a software company You do have to sort of Check some of your paradigms and just be cautious that maybe those things may not work the same way in a software company and vice versa from a software company So to a hardware company All right, my last question you guys are going into first holidays, you know, I'm sure you're gonna have some downtime You're gonna think about 2026. What are you what what are you thinking about like what's up? What are your bullets on your little note to yourself of like this is this is what we got a you know Doing 2026 in our new new rules Well, you know, we're gonna have an off-site in January 2026 and we'll put those down that yeah But it's not you know, we've delegated that to Luciana and Adriana and they're gonna run that off site. So that's gonna be fun for them to run that That's our new role is our new roles are 95% our old roles like first and foremost our job is to help the daring build legendary companies from Idea to IPO and beyond you know in 2025 Alfred and I spent the vast majority of our time Investing working with founders in 2026 Alfred and I are gonna spend the vast majority of our time investing working with founders and so I think Hard of the reason this is a good time for generational transition is because our business isn't really good shape The teams are in really good shape the funds are in really good shape the strategy isn't really good shape The operating teams sort of the platform that we have isn't really good shape and I think 2026 like The punchline is it's gonna be more of the same like our our partners are doing an amazing job Winning in the market with the very best founders and becoming great business partners to them and we want to do more of the same Business as usual see it's funny because I would just be and this is why I would be terrible at your job I would be so tempted to be like you know what's next like what what do we add? What's the new thing? And it seems like There's a commitment to just improve this you know and perfect the core of all you know And like Alfred mentioned it earlier, you know We try to get a little bit better across multiple dimensions every single day We will always try to get a little bit better across multiple dimensions every single day from time to time We'll take a big swing and a big swing could be adding something big to our business a big swing could be removing something big from our business right And so we're we're always Hypothesis testing and evaluating and experimenting and trying to figure out how to get better But as we sit here today the business is in great shape and we're in the I don't know third ending Of the tectonic shift that's going to define our lifetimes And so yeah, we don't see a lot of need for big structural changes. We just need to go execute You know just building on that. I mean one of the things that Investors share in this business in the venture business is that we have a novel teaching Like we like the the next new thing But what you have to build is something that is stable over time So the things that we're building on are things that we've like built on Again and again urine and you're out improving those things And so yeah every now and then we'll take a big swing But the core business is a good business and so why not keep that core business and To your point like perfecting that craft getting better every single day and just build that core business And the stability at the partnership level is what allows for volatility at the partner level Yes, so when we talk about all these crazy outliers that we get to be in business with the high trust small partnership What's people do high, you know, volatility exactly? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right guys. This is amazingly fun. Thanks for doing it Thank you. Thank you Jack