How I Invest with David Weisburd - E109: Top Tier Capital Partners ($7B+ AUM) - Lessons Learned from Investing in 450 Funds

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Ben Challgren, Principal at Top Tier Capital Partners sits down with David Weisburd to discuss what makes a top-performing fund, the surprising role of local managers in European venture success and the secrets to spotting a winning startup before it’s big.

We're Venture Capital Fundafonds. We manage about $8 billion. The firm's been around for years. How much risk is it that a couple of your funds don't perform? Venture's more risky, inherently. 450 funds, 100 managers. When you're looking at a new manager, are you just looking for pure alpha?

Who could make the best decisions? The dirty little secret of Venture Capital is that you want all the best talent to stay and help grow a growth stage company, but those make some of the best founders. So people aggressively target that talent. Every venture pitch you get is pretty exciting and interesting. No one boring really starts a venture fund. It's the top 5% of society. Ben, welcome to the 10X Capital Podcast. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming on. So what is Top Tier Capital? We're venture capital fund funds. We manage about $8 billion. The firm's been around for years. Offices, San Francisco, Boston. I just moved down outside of New York. And then we have an office in London as well. How critical are you guys to be on the ground next to your managers? It's a relationship thing.

So, I mean, back when the firm started, everybody wanted access to Silicon Valley tech. And for us to have a local presence, feed on the street, and be seen in the market was super important to our global LP base. Just to get the real truth of what's going on, I think we have a firm-wide belief that it's important to be local in the markets that matter. And what's your products look like? I know you have a primary fund of funds, but what other products do you have? The last investment cycle was about a billion five. So two thirds of that is primary capital. So investments into venture funds. We only do venture across all of that. So a five to $10 million checks into kind of new relationships, new managers, emerging managers, whatever you want to call them, uh, up to kind of

20 to 40 and, and more brand name stuff. and then the other third of our billion five this last cycle was set or is secondaries and direct investments and so we'll do all different sorts of secondaries whether that be lp stakes gp stakes direct company secondaries uh all over the math and then for for the equity checks and co-investments what we call it that's predominantly series b c ish tech companies a lot of enterprise tech some consumer over the years biotech's been tough for us to kind of wrap our heads around and leave that to the experts uh most days so the team is split really so you either uh predominantly focus on primaries or predominantly focus on secondaries and directs and so i spend my time on the primary side of the business. But the reality is, is we're co-investors and we only

invest in things from our own book on the secondary and direct side. And so when things come in through somebody's relationship on the primary side, it gets packed over the secondary side for underwriting, but you're still on that kind of deal team for relationship management, let's say. That's Q3 2024. What kind of secondary opportunities are in the market? I mean, I think there's a lot of people trying to figure out what value is and what people are willing to part with. I think everyone last year thought there was going to be a huge rush to sell secondaries and, oh, what a time to be buying and you can get things for 50 off.

Like, reality is not that much volume traded in the venture market. And it's because I'm in 2022, the venture market was down, like 35% from highs. And so if I'm a CIO sitting there looking at cleaning up my book, like, I'm gonna be down 35%, and then take another 50% haircut and sell it for some cash, like, I think was weight. And I think they were probably right to do that. And so today, I mean, when you see a portfolio is being traded, they're kind of in the 25 ish discount. I mean, you still see the occasional 50% where somebody just doesn't want to be

in a manager anymore, or maybe a CIO regime change and they just don't buy venture. They don't care. They want to rotate whatever cash they can. You see a bit of that, but for the most the most part uh the venture market on the secondary side and now i'm talking lp stakes uh you have all these discounts uh the lp stakes i mean really yeah call it 2025 up to 35 40 2025 up to 35 of the last valuation last yeah yeah so everything prices off a quarter end navs basically so we get our capital account balance uh for you know q2 here in a couple weeks and and so then i could take that

pricing and say like it's 35 discount off of that some people you'll hear people say like oh it traded at 85 cents on the dollar or something well that's a 15 discount like the lingo curious why are discounts so high, given that there are quite a few secondary buyers coming down? For sure. But a lot of the AUM for people who buy secondaries has gone into strategies focused on buyout and growth stage companies. I mean, these profitable businesses,

it is not uncommon to see those things trade at 5% discounts. So 95 cents on the dollar. I mean, I was just talking to a broker Tuesday. The competition you see in the big broker trades for the buyout stuff is 5% to 15% discount where venture are still 25% to 35%. And they're still, I mean, venture's more risky inherently. And the marks might not be as accurate, correct? So we're a fund of funds. We're invested in 100 managers. We have 450 active underlying funds on our platform. So we actually track this stat.

And it's one of the most asked for things from our managers of like, hey, like, can you blind my book and just say relative to all the other managers who have an investment in our underlying companies, like, where do I sit? And there's a couple outliers for sure. Every time you look at those and like, you know, one manager maybe has more confidence in the company than another, et cetera. But for the most part, people are pretty close these days. Or we know that some firms just inherently don't care and they won't mark their book up no matter what the operating metrics are from last round price. And they just leave it there until, I mean, company goes public. You're in 450 funds, 100 managers.

When you're looking at a new manager, are you thinking about how is this, has a diverse set of assets, or are you just looking for pure alpha? Who could make the best decisions? We only add two to three new managers in our probably core portfolio every two to three years. So there's not a lot of rotation in our probably core portfolio every two to three years. So there's not a lot of rotation in our book. And a lot of it's because people perform well and they stay. And so like

when I'm adding a new manager, I mean, I have to think about how is that different from what I already have? Because I'm kind of assuming luckily, fortunately for a young guy to join a fund fund platform that we have access to some of the best venture capitalists in the world already today. And so what's going to be different and new and how's that fit into my book? Are you somehow looking at their assets versus other assets, like whether they're doing SaaS and consumer and you have too much exposure to SaaS or consumer? How do you say we missed like a big winner in our portfolio. Like say we weren't in Uber indirectly

and we had some, but like say we weren't and there are a bunch of spin outs coming from those companies and some other VCs are just capitalized on that talent because let's face it, the dirty little secret of venture capital is that, yeah, you want all the best talent to stay and help grow a growth stage company,

but those make some of the best founders. And so people aggressively target that talent. We look periodically of like, hey, which companies are we missing in recent kind of vintages? And who are the VCs that are capitalizing on that? And then we'll go try to get in front of them. Sometimes it's an early product person who got into venture and is on their fund two or fund three and has examples of this sort of thing. Or it is the VC who did that deal, doubling down on the winners. Intuitively, it would appear you would think that serial entrepreneurs have a leg up to these kind of former employee number five at Uber, to an AI. But to your point, a lot of the big winners end up being from these ecosystems. Why do you think that is? It's just building an early team. Like if you can go start a company with

three of your buddies who you know are ex-WIT operators and are in the trenches and frankly hungry, like they're not already wealthy, but they want to go change the world and be a part of the next big thing. Like that makes that initial five person team all the more dangerous in our eyes it de-risks it and also sets the culture yeah there's a corollary where david sacks uh the first first like 30 angel investors were just friends he knew that people completely de-rested he has one of the best kind of angel track records because he has one of the best angel trackers in the world yeah you you You sound like you know more about it. Well, we did. We did craft Fund One. So him and Bill coming together and launching that.

I hope David and Bill are fine. That's good. My sources are good. Yeah. And a lot of fun to be a part of. You do invest in Fund Ones. So tell me about when would you back a Fund One? So Emerging Manager, I kind of like said in almost like air quotes earlier so we we

don't internally think of us backing emerging managers like it's just too hard for for our platform to really get excited about folks who don't really have a track record i mean you're being compared against index and excel and it's like well why you know why do you deserve to win and like what's your spot in the market and so when we talk about backing a fund one it's usually someone like a david sachs who has an amazing track record wants to institutionalize uh either as family office private activity and like hey he's all in on being a venture capitalist now or it's someone who has left one of the big brand firms who uh is going to you know generally they talk about just not wanting to deal with like the the scope of a platform and want to really focus on either one sector uh or you know

one stage not worry about the like later stage following on activity etc like we see that a lot and we'll back those sorts of managers so for example we backed tamas at erheri we were the fun one there we did west Wes Chan at FPB, folks like that when they spin out and they're just fantastic investors that we know we want to be a part of. Just to play devil's advocate, there's certainly persistence in venture capital returns and you're in a lot of great funds, but can you really just go to these funds and continuously upside? Aren't you basically capped in your top name? So our fund of funds, like 70% of our underlying dollars, if you look at our strategy basis,

go into seed or in series A focused strategies. And so as platforms have raised AUM and most of that AUM growth has been on later stage of fall on activity. Like if we scaled with a bunch of those groups, like our product mix would effectively change for our clients, our LPs. And so we worry about that a lot. At a certain point, our clients can go and buy those platforms directly and we're happy to make those introductions and maybe they should, but then maybe it's just not a fit for us anymore.

So our core fund of funds has actually stayed pretty consistent in size for the last 10 years sort of thing. And so you'd see $20 to $30 million commitments in there across the platform. And then excess capacity goes to one of our separately managed accounts that sits as an overflow vehicle on top of our stuff. Who would like more of that type of investment? You mentioned your clients. Who are clients that invest into venture fund of funds? What are some of those categories? A couple categories for us. I mean, we are almost exclusively large pension retirement systems globally. Half our money comes from US and then the other half internationally. So Germany, South Korea, Japan. So folks like that who think of us

as venture experts who will help them manage their venture allocation. And so those are the large checks. And so then they're just like, hey's our venture allocation we might hire two venture fund of funds and you guys go figure it out and get me into the best managers uh and then there's a cohort of lp that wants us to help with access and since our you know founding of our firm we always have inherent churn in our lp base because it's part of our business model so they'll give us a primary commitment and we'll help that for maybe like two funds in a row and then we'll help them with introductions to managers um and it's always up to the manager to let them in certainly but uh and we don't make a lot of promises there because it just it is what it is but you know the reality is is it's worked and people take their money and it's a way to get smart on the space and then eventually build up their program directly.

And we're totally happy to do that. Those family offices, endowments? Yeah, endowments, smaller endowments or maybe, you know, some international funds that know they don't have access in the U.S. and they want it. We're happy to help them get up to speed. Maybe come to the way we started up the feet on the street and know the market. Like they're willing to pay someone to help them figure it out. You mentioned when we last chatted that you don't chase sector funds. For us, and this is a house view, it's that we kind of view venture and innovation as

people finding opportunities at the fringes. Maybe it's where two sectors collide and then bam, you have a new business model or a new method of distribution, et cetera. And like, those are the big wins. And so as we think about like sectors, like it's really hard for us to not imagine that the generalist VCs wouldn't end up in some of like the most interesting collisions of sectors and finding the coolest opportunities because they're just good FEC and they know a lot of people have been successful.

I will caveat that with saying we do have really two sectors on our platform that we will invest in or are investing in today. One is biotech. And that's like 10, 15% of our book. And then the other is cybersecurity. The way we've kind of gotten there is that we think you kind of need some of the gray hair in the room when you're talking to like the customers of those two businesses. Like Big Pharma is not going to just like pick up the phone to any VC who invests in biotech companies. Like you need to have some gravitas to get in front of the decision makers there. It's just the truth. In cybersecurity, we knew for us that it's a sector of biotech goes back

to like 99 being about 15% of the book. But recently, we kind of came to the conclusion that cybersecurity, you need that same, I'm using the term gravitas to get in front of CISOs and the important decision makers who can really move the needle for early stage company. Hey, we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. Our sponsor for today's episode is Carta, the end-to-end accounting platform purposely built for fund CFOs. For the first time ever, private fund operators can leverage their very own bespoke software

that's designed from the ground up to bring their whole portfolio together. This enables formations, transactions, and distributions to flow seamlessly and accurately to limited partners. Thank you. the new standard in private fund management at z.carta.com forward slash 10xpod. That's z.carta.com forward slash 10xpod. So we chatted last time about the pros and cons. When you're in a situation where you have one more vintage, where you think that the fund could really deliver very well, would you invest knowing that it's a one and done? And we're already existing LPs? You're not existing. They're probably unlikely. unlikely reality is we have to monitor these funds for 15 18 years anyways and i mean if i can't hand over my heart say that i think i can get two to three commitment cycles with the manager like we're just not adding a new relationship so how often do you not commit to the second or third vintage i could count on one hand and like they

and a half ish years that the near how many times it's happened. And that's been due to something that specifically happened or what are those cases? Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just changing strategy to somebody. If you started a seed fund and you raised $150,000 and then like you come back

and had great success and you're raising like $450,000 and you want to go be multi-stage, like we might have a pause at that one. I would say the number two reason would be team. I mean, certainly if there's a bunch of team turnover and it's just not the same story and pitch,

that's hard to get behind because it's such a personal business. What are some other reasons that venture franchises decline over time? I mean, just senior partners who have made a lot of money and are really doing the deals. And it's just a bunch of junior folks who don't know how to make money in the business of venture capital that get the keys to the car. Do you believe venture could function out of office or do you think that

you have to be in office to be a good venture firm today? Now, I do think fundraising would be really tough. It just there's a trust element to it i mean so like yeah i do pitch your strategy totally great um i understand it it's in the meeting note i get it but there's just something about breaking bread with somebody and sitting down and having an in-person conversation that i just don't think changes um that quickly in in this business because there's such a opportunity cost for making the wrong decision here. Like if you, you know, are one of the big platforms and you invest in what you, you know, you invest in like the number five winner versus the number one or two winner in the category,

like that's just, and then you can't invest in the number one or two because you're conflicted, whatever. Like, I just don't think people are going to be so willing to to take it only on zoom just to play devil's advocate i i do think in person as well i think venture more than anything and like many asset management fields is an apprenticeship model sure and you just imagine you know you have a carpenter and they're doing it virtually it's very difficult obviously that's a very physical thing but i think some of the greatest venture managers the next generation tend to be from in-office cultures. There's a lot of truth to what you're saying. And I mean, top tier, as I'm saying, you can do it remote.

Like we still were two days in the office. And we actually, we hired kids out of college every couple of years. That's how I lucked into it. And for the first year, like you don't get to go to a lot of conferences. Like you don't, like your job is to learn the book, which I i mean we have a lot of active portfolio companies and a lot of active managers so that's it's all to ask i'd love to see if any of our analysts right now could could talk to our entire book but um until you're should be an lp and like till you know enough to be dangerous and probably this is true for a lot of bc is, like you probably really shouldn't be representing your firm.

Like you manage people's retirement money and like that reputation has built over years. And so until like our junior people can kind of talk the talk and we know we're going to have a good answer for like, hey, what's an LP look for? Like, what are the things with my venture funds I should be thinking about? Like until you can prove that, like, you know, we're not sure. You're in 450 funds. I'm assuming you don't know all 10,000. I should be thinking about. Until you can prove that, we're not sure.

You're in 450 funds. I'm assuming you don't know all 10,000. I know you're very smart, but probably there's limitations set too. Oh, totally. So how do you talk about your book and how do you talk about top tier when you talk to LPs or at conferences? We have a standing thing that we get together

as an investment team and we review quarterly new deal activity. And so it be like how many companies at what stages what was the average check size like the managers who do provide ownership percents like how does that tick up and down and this is kind of a scoreboard what are some of the things you're tracking there yeah average entry price ownership percent um size of rounds maybe people be curious uh q q123 versus q124 is actually about the same invested capital on like a look-through basis of our managers uh but if you look this year there was more of a shift to uh seed in series a stage uh so the number of investments was higher which like for us is a good early indicator that the venture industry is like really kind of

like at least with like you know premier venture managers which maybe i'm saying arrogantly but um you know those health care those top tier whatever you want to call it uh those managers are back that works writing early stage checks versus trying to follow on into some of their winners or um you know huge huge sums of capital into like a couple big AI deals last year. Whereas this year, we saw a lot more kind of back to basics. And I think it bodes well for the industry here over the next 18 months that there's such a, there was such an increase. Mentioned AI, do you have any early views on the ecosystem on what you see, you know, to your manager?

Well, real revenue pulling through these businesses but it's still tbd if that's just fickle revenue of people just trying to figure out which tools they want um it's totally unclear who's going to be category winners it's obvious that there's an enterprise budget for these these corporate tools solving like real pain points the problem is when you see like three companies show up that are solving the same thing in our fund of funds we're like you're just like all right like who's going to win? Like all three are going to be winners. It's just reality of business.

You said last time we chatted, our clients hire us because we have people that will tell us the truth. Maybe feet on the street. We'll go back to that. But it's references are such important. If you listen to any LP talk about investing in venture, I mean, they talk about how important references are. Well, like if I was starting a fund of funds today and was just like cold start, like I'm going to go get into the best venture managers, like every venture pitch you get is pretty exciting and like interesting. Like no, no one boring really starts a venture fund. It's the top 5% of society. The worst manager is the top five.

They're just really smart, interesting people. And i think you could get caught up and just like man this this is obvious this is going to be a winner and we talked to all our junior people about this like it totally and i have the same experience like the funds that i thought day one were like super interesting obviously great we're like yeah that's cool but like wait until you meet all of our managers who come through our office and i think you'll understand why our book looks the way it does. And like that then is the bar that you have to compare new relationships to. And then those are the people that I get to call to tell me the truth about the other managers and their ecosystem. And like, hey, is that seed manager really getting into all these deals? They're getting into your shittiest 20% of deals. Yeah. They're just scraping

the bottom of your phone. Those people tell us the truth. I mean, they're getting into your shittiest 20 of deals yeah they're just scraping the bottom of your phone those people tell us the truth i mean they're friends of the firm over time absolutely and and we we look to them uh to help us continue to make money in terms of your relationship with these top funds outside of being an lp what care do you have to give them to kind of maintain and strengthen their relationship i hope people view us as knowing what we're talking about. When you sit down with somebody at top tier, like with the access to the data that we have, like what I hope and what the firm spends a lot of time thinking about is like being a trusted partner for them. And you know, the money's next, right? Like everybody's nice to LPs totally. Yeah. I mean the ability to run l packs for like two-thirds of our managers and

stuff like that like we just can sit down and be like hey that's market or like yeah you guys actually are doing a great job or you're light on dpi i'm like we're just gonna tell you the truth and i think people respect that i hope people respect you find out the people that are most open to feedback your top managers somewhere in the middle or talk to me about the correlation between ac is super curious people. Like as soon as they know we have some benchmark thing that like will come up in a meeting, they always want to see, like they always want to figure out where they stack. So you lead with data, not with the ego essentially.

Most of the firms we invest in are not like, you know, again, first time managers, whatever. Like we're all, we're happy to help on operational stuff, all that. But like it's kind of got that figured out at this point. It's like, how do you tweak things at the fringes to win? And so like the scout programs, I don't know what, eight years ago when everybody was doing that, it was like, OK, like what's best in class? Like, how do I go keep up? Was that a failed experiment? Honestly, some of those like buckets have performed well, but I don don't know and i'd love to see the data on this we should

probably i should talk to some other fund of funds and like we should figure it out but like i would love to see the success rate of the vcs doubling down on the winners from their scout portfolio because they because there's i mean many portfolios of hundreds of companies sometimes and really hard to figure out which ones are working so early on and then how do you go from your 150k check that your operator that you gave money to to invest in this company uh is really the one that i should go and back up the truck and put four million dollar like superseding or whatever we want to call it are you not concerned that you guys are a market beta given you're in 10,000 companies?

And how do you assess that? Yeah, I mean, that's a worry. Sure. With the fund of funds. I mean, we try to benchmark ourselves against the Cambridge USBC benchmark. Fund of funds and secondary benchmarks are a little wacky because it's together.

So, yeah. But most fund of funds, actually, I mean, I've seen some of the numbers and a lot of them are public like they've done pretty well relative to the market why do you think that is i mean access to the best name persistence is certainly i mean statistically like does exist in our industry sure um willingness to probably take a little more risk uh than than other folks in the asset class as well i mean it's you know i have a 50 million dollar minimum check size like i'm limited uh on the new i can go for and that's probably a maybe a platform where i'm a little more later stage focus and it's like kind of an obvious buy

uh that that certainly i'm saying all this about platforms some of the platforms are our best performers so like i don't want to get that loss in the conversation david clark said the same thing he said that david clark from bencap said that his highest performing fund ever was a growth fund yeah why not what do you look at the future of a fund of funds in your industry any new products any new approaches for us we went to Europe, which was new. We spun our European allocation out in 2019, 2020, to sort of like we've been investing there since 2004, I think. And we just saw what was going on in Asia, probably China specifically. We just saw the quality of company and even, I mean, our US VC being like, yeah, we love investing in European companies where you can get it for a bit of a discount. And then they immediately come move

to New York or, or Silicon Valley. Like, yeah, why would we not? They're just really good technical teams. And then if you look at the underlying data on the European continent, I mean, the seed and series a round, I think it's something I'll probably misquote it our european team will correct me uh after this but it's like 85 of the dollars uh done is from a regional local manager at that uh at that round and so if you're thinking i'm just like dollar cost averaging into a strong tech ecosystem like that's where you want to be and the local guys are just commanding the market and the u.s folks are coming in at the Series B. So you don't have existing exposure into it. Yeah. And so we're like, we're getting in at the B.

Like, that's cool. But like, we might as well go buy it at the seed if we can as a fund of funds. And so we launched that strategy. And I mean, some of those firms absolutely compete on a relative performance basis, like with a historical track record with our U.S. relationships.

As a fund of fund, are you able to pursue pure alpha? In other words, are you penalized if one of your funds has a 0.5X, if overall you're doing really well? And how much risk is it that one of your funds or a couple of your funds don't perform? Just like looking at on maybe the other side, like it's really hard to pick which of our, we kind of have like 25 managers per 550 600 million dollar uh on the fund size like just if you go so like it's hard to pick

on any given fund which of those 25 is going to be the huge outperformer and so like the opportunity cost is really like okay which one is going to be the screaming home run and like what do you think about portfolio construction like i would be i have i would love to ask our partners and myself like if you only have one fund and like you it had to be over 3x net like could we hand over your heart this cycle would you put the money in like that's tough to do and so for us i mean taking that basket approach with with the upside opportunity is probably more how we think about it than worrying about the downside. Is there a power law to investing in funds? Otherwise, is it right tail skewed?

Or is it about, like, do you expect one of your funds to return a 10, 15x or does that not? No, I think it happens. Sure, some of the seed funds have like crazy, huge multiples, but no, we don't think about it like that. I mean, if you're a 5x net plus venture fund, like you're crushing it and you should be really happy about that um so the like just the number of company and we kind of got on this so like i think since our 2008 fund of funds we just did this over the

summer uh since our 2008 fund of funds like oh you could say on average like a thousand to twelve hundred companies and each of our fund of funds every couple of years at scale or at maturity, like 18 to 25 companies, they make up like two thirds of the value. And then the next tail to get you up to like 90% of value is only like another hundred companies. It's a 10%. It's like kind of a 10 and 90. 18 to 25 account for 75%.

And I think it's 18 to like 23, I think was to 25 account for 75 and i think it's 18 to like 23 i think was the stat uh account for like two-thirds of the value how does that inform your strategy if folks don't have and this is talking about maybe some of the venture math and like how do you make money in venture if a vc can't sit down with me and have a really clear like eyes wide open conversation of how much you need to own up front like what the sort of business can i'll just like pick a company and be like oh hey like you know this company seems cool like how walk me through how that like return your fund or like how that's a substantial driver and so uh as you're like talking about the finance side of life if if the dc can have a really clear

like oh we bought this much up front we think the market is huge, whatever, and we can scale it to this amount of revenue and sell it for this return. And at that exit price with some dilution, I'll return a huge portion of my fund. If not, it'd be a fund return. If they don't have a strategy and a clarity of thought of how to capture those winners and be really diligent about that, then I'm not convinced you know how to capture those winners and be really diligent about that, then I just, I'm not convinced, you know, how to make money at scale in this industry.

I think it's also, you know, if I was to advocate on behalf of those managers, I would say A, it's a learnable skill. And two, it's because they don't come from the finance side. They come from the entrepreneur side. Yeah, different strata. I agree. What would you like our audience to know about you, about Top Tier, and anything else you'd like to shine a light on?

I'm down here in New York now. It's people. Thank you. Yeah. If any local managers are around that want to meet, happy to get to know you over the coming months and all that. What's your criteria? Criteria? I mean, look, we're probably going to watch for a fund regardless.

We're just meeting you for the first time. Sorry, it's the reality of it and the business, the way the business works. But interesting people that, like on average, our entry point for a group

that isn't like a spin out like Tomas, it's fund number three. So we don't have the smallest fund we've ever done 50 million in size roughly so i mean that's probably the ballpark of like when you become investable for us but you should probably meet us when you're raising your fund too how could gps benefit from meeting you early and talk to me about kind of building a relationship with lps well i hope

people still think of us as as groups that knows what we're talking about and we're gonna shoot you straight and we're not gonna just like ask a bunch of questions and just like take some notes about, Hey, thanks for your time. We'll probably on the call be like, yeah, this is interesting. Like, you know, this sort of network that you're talking about, like, you know, a lot of people say it like that. What I think is unique and interesting about you is, and we'll try to give that feedback to people. Yeah. It's definitely not a waste of time. Up to them. You know, I think one of the underrated, people talk about pitching, but one of the underrated things about meeting with great LPs is actually evolving your strategy.

We just talked about it. Yeah. Portfolio construction, right? You're not born out of the womb knowing portfolio construction. It's a learnable skill. So by meeting with smart LPs, you could actually improve your strategy. You're not born out of the womb knowing portfolio construction. It's a learnable skill. So by meeting with smart LPs, you could actually improve your strategy. It's not just a matter of pitching or rephrasing and putting lipstick on a pig. I think that's an underrated part of fundraising.

Okay. I really appreciate you sitting down and chatting. Thanks for having me in person. Yeah. Great to see you. Okay. Thanks, Ben. Thank you.

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