How I Invest with David Weisburd - E19: Raja Doddala, Head of VC at Churchill ($47 Billion AUM) on How LP’s Should Diligence GP’s
Episode Date: November 9, 2023Raja Doddala, Head of VC at Churchill Asset Management, sits down with David Weisburd to discuss how Churchill diligences managers, and the importance of integrity in a GP. We’re proudly sponsored b...y Bidav Insurance Group, visit lux-str.com if you’re ready to level up your insurance plans.
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Ideal GP for me, I'll give you a name here. It's a small manager named Sean Marani. He's the solo GP at Parade Ventures. We're literally texting most days, either discussing how the portfolios are doing, discussing potential co-investment opportunities, you know, diligencing, you know, new funds, whether he's introducing us to new funds or we're, you know know we're looking at funds that we'd like to get his opinion another one i you know the couple that i that i mentioned um you know eric
chin at crosslink um mark souster um at upfront in la you know we're literally texting uh weekly
and discussing and sometimes i'm helping their portfolio companies close deals um you know
recently i helped close, you know,
a pretty substantial contract with our parent company
just by understanding where they're stuck
and giving them advice.
Raja, you have a truly remarkable and power-like story of coming to the U.S. at the age of 23
with $400 to your name and transforming that into a storied and humble career as a venture LP,
including being the head of VC at TIA Cref, which currently has over $1 trillion with a T,
to now running the venture and growth equity book at churchill asset
management today with hundreds of millions of dollars and growing aum welcome to the limited
partner podcast thank you david thanks for having me i'm super excited to be here and a little
nervous uh to follow some of the really impressive guests that you had so far thank you well like i
said uh you're very humble and i think by the end of this interview,
uh, the, the audience will agree with me.
Uh, so, so tell me a little bit about Churchill.
What is Churchill?
Churchill is the private capital asset management, uh, subsidiary of TIAA.
Um, TIAA is a nonprofit, uh, founded by Andrew Carnegie about 100 years ago with the mission of making sure that people that work in nonprofits, specifically higher education and healthcare, have a retirement that is secure.
And that mission still continues today. And all the asset management for TIAA is done at a few subsidiaries and one of them is Churchill. Churchill's business is private debt and private equity and private debt for middle market
companies and now venture capital and growth equity. Going a little bit off that, TIA Cref
has a mission-driven background. Does that help you get into the top funds?
I think it's certainly helpful. As I started to sort of take this business on and
somewhat in a rebuilding phase, I didn't know what to expect. But as I started having conversations,
that mission story certainly resonates with at least some, if not most.
So in terms of your governance, you have a very flat organization. Tell me about how you come to decisions at Churchill and to what GPs to invest into.
We try to be somewhat nimble and predictable and professional in terms of underwriting and setting expectations.
We have a monthly IC process with three folks, some of them are peers and are managers. And once we start, in terms of underwriting,
it's a fairly small team. It's just me and one other person. And we have wonderful in-house
legal and fund administration team that helps us. And when we start underwriting a fund or a
company that we happen to directly invest
in the company, once we start working on it, we try to wrap it up in a four-week sprint.
And we set very clear expectations before we start with our managers.
And that monthly IC is where the approval happens.
And we typically run the other stuff like legal due diligence in parallel.
Let's talk about that monthly.
I see a lot of emerging managers, a lot of GPs don't know what goes on behind the curtain of LPICs.
How does that function?
Tell me about a typical IC meeting.
When I speak to emerging managers, especially, they ask me how institutions make decisions.
And I could see how that could be sort of come across as a
black box. And what we try to do is I tell them it's an open book test. It's not a mystery.
It shouldn't be. There's very specific things that we look at. And we could go into that in
more detail. And we actually turned that into a couple of pages of very detailed sort of questions
that we try to get answers to.
And we actually share that with our managers.
Answering those questions really shapes the drafting
of the memo, which is pretty detailed in our case,
usually 40 to 50 pages.
And that's a memo that's pretty standard
across asset classes at Churchill.
And obviously, we had to repurpose it a little bit for Venture because Venture is slightly different.
But our IC has come to expect a pretty standard way of presenting funds and how we underwrite.
You mentioned specific things that you look for in general partners at VC firms.
What are those specific things?
Venture is a bit of an idiosyncratic asset class.
And it's part qualitative, part quantitative.
Obviously, if it's an emerging fund, a lot of it is qualitative.
But if it's an established fund, there's track record.
We like to look for managers that are people of high integrity and show good judgment and
that could take in on multiple different formats good judgment could be that they
understand who the stakeholders are and they are able to judge the technology
cycles in a mature way that they're price sensitive and then also that
they're in quality networks that that they see good opportunities.
And then once they invest in the companies, they're able to help.
Well, at the minimum, they won't hurt.
And then the other things that we look for is that when we underwrite a fund, we're looking for a long, multi know, multi vintage, you know, potentially multi-decade
relationship. So we like to make sure that the folks that we're working with are people that
we like to work with and their values match our values, including our parent company's values,
and just generally prudent investors. I mean, it's a, you know, I know it's a super simple answer,
but it's just generally how we look at underwriting.
And your parent company being TIA Craft, correct?
Correct.
So let's unpack that. You said a lot of nuggets there. High integrity.
A lot of people say it means different things with high integrity. What does that mean to you?
People that are essentially at the basic, if you strip it down um they're doing what they
said they'll do either that's in terms of you know portfolio strategy or in terms of um making
truthful statements in general to us and to founders and just generally good actors
you know we both came from immigrant backgrounds. You came with $400.
I came with $600. So I was essentially, by the way, the $400 thing, I want to downplay that a little bit. There's immigrants that come here with, you know, $400. They don't know anybody.
They haven't, you know, they don't speak English. They start at the very bottom. That's not,
that wasn't my case. I had, you know, a graduate degree in computer science. I had a job and friends.
Sure, I only had $400.
I had to build my life.
But I came in pretty privileged compared to some other immigrants.
Well, I have to push back on that because although you may have come with a background,
you also came at 22, unlike individuals such as me who came at four.
And that 18 years is is very important as
well so let's call it net net how do you suss out high integrity versus doing what needs to be done
in order to succeed in business i don't know that those two things are mutually exclusive
uh when we say high integrity i think you know one of the ways that we diligence people is that
every every manager gives you sort of a list of,
you know, references. We certainly check those. But fortunately, we have a pretty wide network,
and it's a small world. And we're able to really get, you know, from other sources that they don't
provide us kind of generally their reputation on both personal integrity, but also their judgment
in picking the right, you know, right companies. Yeah, I would also their judgment in picking the right you know right
companies yeah i would also add to that the nuance i believe is why sometimes you do have to break
rules sometimes you have to do things like that and the question is why what is the intent behind
that is it selfish intent is it for the good of the company when you look at some of my top
founders in my portfolio at some point somebody like a Travis Kalanick, who I did not invest in, had to break those boundaries.
So I think there's a nuance there that applies not only to startups, but also to VCs.
But let's talk about the next bullet point, good judgment.
What does that mean to you?
This is probably going to be offensive to some people, so I apologize in advance. A perfect example of not having good judgment in our
mind anyway is if you're writing, I don't know, a $50 million check at a $300 million
valuation for something that doesn't, there's no product, it's just maybe a page for pictures
of tulips or monkeys. To us, that's bad judgment on the market and technology and product.
A simple question for me is, maybe not today, two, three, four, five years down the road,
can I potentially see this technology or product help people that live around me? Or is it just
simply selling to other startups and other sort of enthusiasts?
That's a good example of sort of the market and technology judgment.
And the other is price.
Especially in the last few years, some people have gotten into this notion that it doesn't matter what the entry price is as long as we get into the right companies.
So let's talk
on that you you've invested in many many managers and many of the top managers that you can imagine
if you imagine a basket of the very top managers yeah is there ever a time have you ever found
managers that are not price sensitive that have uh delivered significant dpi
very few exceptions no and what are those exceptions?
We're in a fund that invested a significant amount of money into the seed round of OpenAI.
Clearly, that was a rare exception for a product that didn't really exist,
but in an area that this person has has been thinking about writing about for more
than a decade and they had super high conviction that would be a good technology and and in that
case that manager you know asked the alpac hey this is off our strategy this is generally not
how we do things but we feel strongly about it.
Would you be okay with us writing this large check?
And they said, yes, and that worked out.
And that's the part that I say is the integrity part
is that being transparent.
And if you're gonna go off strategy,
at least be open about it.
It's a combination of good judgment
and high integrity as well.
You mentioned OpenAI, I didn't mention it.
There's a rumored 86 billion or 80 to 90 billion dollar valuation secondary.
I saw that.
How do you advise your GPs when it comes to secondary?
What's your ideal strategy for how a GP should access the secondary market?
The honest answer is I don't know that I'm qualified to answer that from a GP perspective.
The reason that we have managers and we trust them, we do really hard work in picking these
managers so that we have to trust them in terms of how they construct their portfolio and how
they deliver returns. But having said that, if you have a position that you're sitting on, I don't know, I'm just going to make up a number, 8 to 10x, and there's more upside, there's nothing wrong with taking some chips off the table and providing liquidity.
At the end of the day, liquidity is part of the flywheel that makes all of this happen.
So I don't fault managers and I get calls all the time. Hey, we're sitting
on this position. There's a way to provide some liquidity to you guys and some employees, um,
and, you know, make up a number three, four, five, 10 X. Would you be okay with that? And then more
times than not, I say yes. yes when they ask your lack of desire in
order to be activists in your approach to vc i think has led to some of your positive selection
you mentioned uh you want people in good networks what does that mean does that mean other vcs does
that mean startup founders does that mean early stage how do you really look at networks uh
holistically i think it's all of the above i I think this business is about, at the simplest level, getting into the right companies, the right time, the right price, and then helping them to get to an exit.
So some notion of proprietary access is important, And that could come in multiple different ways.
We have managers that started out as operators
in some very successful tech companies,
and that's their network.
And some of them started as angel investors,
and that's their network.
Some of them worked at large firms
where they were part of underwriting
hundreds of investments, and that's their network.
We just like to see some proof of whether they'll see potentially outlier opportunities
and some notion of whether they're in the flow or not.
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Thank you.
You mentioned your timeline is multi-vintage, multi-decades.
Are there not situation where there's managers
that could create alpha for two funds?
Why is that so unattractive to institutional LP?
The way we think about our portfolio construction is,
there's other asset classes in our portfolio,
or our parent company's portfolio,
they're more liquid,
they have a different risk profile.
So we understand that this asset class
is sort of a buy and hold.
This is not a trading asset class,
this is investment, not trading.
So I think it's important that we have a portfolio
that over time has a pretty, you know, I think I've listened to other guests on your podcast and some of them want to smooth out the risk and some of them want a concentrated portfolio.
We sort of err on the side of, you know, this asset class is risky enough and it's idiosyncratic enough.
You know, let's take a three year sort of investing period. We like to sample the mean and that's kind ofyncratic enough. Let's take a three-year investing period. We like to sample
the mean, and that's how our approach is. In order to do that, I think you have to have
vintage diversification, and you have to have sector diversification, and you have to have
geographic diversification. Obviously, weights for each different geographies can vary. It also takes a lot of work to underwrite a manager.
And as long as we have reasonable confidence that the strategy is working
and the team is still working and we know there's going to be persistence,
we like to take advantage of these multi-vintage, multi-generational funds.
Part of what LPs tell me, especially the very top LPs,
is that part of this desire to smooth out time diversification
and sometimes stage diversification
is actually in the best interest of the GPs.
They're trying to keep the GP from shooting themselves in the foot
because the last thing you want to do is pick a good GP
that has one bad or two bad vintages
just because the future is unfortunately not predictable, is probabilistic in nature.
I agree with that.
We have great managers in our book and most, if not all of them, had one bad vintage.
I mean, it could be macro, it could be, you know, technology, you know, timing of technologies, et cetera. But I think more LPs valuing time diversification
will hopefully avoid some of the bad behavior
that we've all seen circa 2019 to 2022,
where people are deploying, I don't know, every 12 months.
So speaking of bad behavior and deploying every 12 months,
one of the bad behaviors has been fund AUM. And you said off camera, we believe in our data, which says that's easier to get higher returns and smaller funds. How do you think the role of data um you know i think everybody has the same
data set and and the data shows so far that um it's more likely it's you know sort of a
probabilistic statement not a definitive one that you know smaller funds have historically
had better returns and that could be a function of, usually they go earlier, so entry prices are
lower. And usually they have to make better decisions, price sensitivity, and also strategy
discipline. But I want to caution, just like we talked about persistence is a problem in this asset class. You have to be
conscious of the data, but I don't know that you want to make all of your decision-making on the
data, just like the returns are not persistent. I think it's a guide that we use, but in this
climate, I'll tell you how we're underwriting in this vintage and probably the next and next is we're probably over indexing on the smaller
sort of fund size than larger we have about 35 managers in our book and they range from
uh you know smaller funds you know 25 million dollar funds to up to 2 billion some of them
are even larger um and you know going forward, we will probably index more
towards, obviously it depends on the stage, but if you're a seed fund, pre-seed fund, I think less
than 100 is ideal in our book. If you're a multi-stage firm that started series A, you go
larger, like 300, 400 to some that we have in our book that have done
quite well that are a billion and a half and two billion.
You mentioned a strategy discipline.
The opposite of that is strategy creep.
Is there ever a place for strategy creep?
Very rare.
And I'll refer you back to that OpenAI example.
So we're a long time LP in Coastal Ventures. We know, you know, wrote a $50 million
check into their seed round. They were, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, they were the only venture
capital firm that was allowed to do that. And that was off strategy for their 2018 fund
to invest in a seed stage startup and such a large check. And, but we know they had conviction.
He's been thinking about that
you know uh technology for a decade or more been writing about it um and he he went back to to the
key investors and was transparent and that worked out so there's exceptions um definitely scope for
exceptions but i think they only work um if it's uh they're transparent about it. Jason Calacanis on episode 14 mentioned that Vinod had a 2,500x return.
What makes Vinod Khosla such a great VC?
What we like about Vinod is that he's very, very transparent.
He's just very blunt.
And that might not be for everybody that we
happen to like the transparency. And we also happen to like the fact that
he built a great team and they have a great training program that, you know, take you as
an associate and sort of, you know, grow you within the firm and even send you to portfolio companies.
And also they just have great judgment in terms of technology cycles.
They take pretty hard swings.
They're not shy about taking technology at risk,
but they're pretty smart about not taking too much market risk.
And that's why we like them.
You mentioned being very transparent, being blunt.
We also have somebody that I look up to, Keith Raboy. He's an excellent investor. Tell me about
Keith and what makes him special. Yeah, Keith, we know Keith, he's probably one of the best,
you know, if not the best that I've seen that came from an operating background is pretty
successful firms. And this is I'm just quoting Keith now.
I think I've asked him, what makes you a great investor?
And he said, his ability to meet with an entrepreneur
and know very quickly whether that entrepreneur
is a top decile entrepreneur or not.
He says that can't be learned.
Somehow he was gifted with it
and he's had a pretty in pretty good success
doing that and he would tell you that he's not the best in terms of knowing which technologies
and and the timing of um of those technologies but he's very good at you know uh assessing people and
entrepreneurs one of the oldest i think uh discussions discussions or arguments in VC is about the operator versus
a non-operator VC.
I'm going to ask you to over index on your own portfolio managers in favor of shining
a light here.
What are your views on operator versus non-operator VCs?
In our portfolio, we probably have more people with operating background being successful,
especially in the sourcing, early stage sourcing.
What about specialists versus generalists?
One of the things I'm really, you know,
if you look at business from a first principles basis,
in theory, the specialist should have
the highest returning funds,
but it seems like some of the top early stage investors
of all time have all been generalists.
What do you think accounts for this?
In our book, generalists have done better than specialists. So we generally favor generalists,
but generalists in terms of like, take Coastal, for example, they would tell you they're generalists,
but inside of the firm, there are people that are sort of experts in sort of certain areas,
and that's what they focus on. So at the think you know i think generalists probably do better
um you know especially you know if you look at early stage you're you're underwriting um founders you're underwriting people more than the technology so uh being open about you know uh
not being in you know too narrow a box i think is helpful one of the potential discrepancies there is that a lot of the data
is biased 10 years from before, if you look at the DPI. And in that point, the early stage was
such a nascent market that you didn't have enough specialists. So I think that's one of the things
that describes that. The other things is if you look at a first principles basis, the best
returning funds are the ones that the top entrepreneurs pick.
Yeah, I'm in the camp that believes that a great entrepreneurs, maybe Keith could pick the hundred X entrepreneurs early on.
But at some stage, everybody could choose them.
And it's a matter of who the entrepreneur picks.
I think the entrepreneur picks the VC versus the VC picking the entrepreneur and all things being equals.
Entrepreneurs would rather have a specialist within a firm that's more of a generalist that could give them more more branding especially now
that we're back to sort of quote normal classic venture model where um capital is uh is not
abundant um and you have to you have to like build real. So I think expertise probably matters a lot more now.
And founders are probably choosing the VCs versus the other way around.
One interesting guest that we had, David Clark from Vencap, and he's had data going back to 1986
to 2017. I enjoyed that episode. That was a pretty impressive data set that they have. Yeah, it's very impressive data set. He has DPI, which is undebatable and hard to contradict. And
one of the things that he told me in private is that there's no evidence to show that opportunity
funds do do worse than kind of the vintage, the medallion funds. And the reason for that is
there's some kind of canceling of the later stage with the insider
advantage.
The joke that I like to say is that the best way to diligence a company is to be an existing
investor.
How do you feel about opportunity funds?
Are you negative on them?
Do you see them as a necessary evil in order to get into the top funds?
I don't think we've thought about those too much.
We don't do too many of them.
We like a single fund more because it's just easier decision making on our part.
If you have multiple funds, some people staple them, which I think is pointless.
If you're going to staple them, why do you need the extra burden of putting LPs through,
picking the allocation, and then fund administration?
If you're not stapling them, then you're giving the LPs the choice. through picking the allocation and then fund administration.
If you're not stapling them, then you're giving the LPs the choice.
Then the other issue with that is now we have to do
extra work in portfolio construction.
So I prefer, in general, I prefer strategies
that are super simple, easy to understand,
and easy to execute, and that
don't scale. That's, to me, the strategies that we like.
How about co-invest? If a fund decides not to do an opportunity fund, do you guys do
co-invest, first of all?
We do. We do do co-invest, and we're learning how to do them quicker. At the end of the day, the point of venture is you want to make sure
that either an LP or GP, most of your money is in the outlier sort of set of companies,
either within a fund or across the asset class. And one way to do that is if you have the resources
and the interest, and this is where I think some of my background is helpful.
My background is I started as a software engineer.
I have a graduate degree in computer science, and I built software for a living.
And I was an enterprise buyer of software, and then I did a fair bit of venture investing myself in companies.
And then my team member, Pat, comes from a similar background.
So we're able to actually go into these companies and understand the businesses once we're in a fund.
And once the companies have passed some of the market risk and product risk for giving the opportunity.
We like to do a bit of co-investing.
We think that's one way for us to maybe tip the scales a little bit into getting at least most or majority of our money into outliers.
How do you diligence co-invest?
Yeah.
Ideally, these are companies that are not new to us.
These are companies that we know in the portfolios that we've even met the founders and spent time.
And we, you know, there's no getting around the fact that we're relying on our partners.
And this is why I think it's important to pick partners that sort of match our investment philosophy.
And so we're relying on their judgment.
But in terms of our own diligence, we try to make sure
that these businesses are real. We talk to their customers, you know, just like we do as a fund.
We talk to people in the industry about, you know, the founding team. And we'd like to make sure that
the entry points are reasonable. And sort of the uh the classic buy low sell high
i believe is the adage but we try to be quick about it you mentioned uh ideally these are
company that we know um i'm guessing that you know them through your gps tell me about your
relationship with gps how do you gain alpha from from from being a good partner to GPs? And what does that look like? Most, if not all GPs that we have, um, this is, you know, some of this, this
is the reason why we, we prefer smaller managers where we, we matter, um, that
we have pretty close relationships with our GPs, ideal GP for me, I'll give you a
name here, it's a small manager named Sean,ani. He's the solo GP at Parade Ventures.
We're literally texting most days,
either discussing how the portfolios are doing,
discussing potential co-investment opportunities,
diligencing new funds,
whether he's introducing us to new funds
or we're looking at funds that we'd like to get his opinion. Another one I, you know, the couple that I mentioned,
you know, Eric Chin at Crosslink, Mark Suster at Upfront in LA, you know, we're literally texting
weekly and discussing, and sometimes I'm helping their portfolio companies close deals.
You know, recently I helped close, you know, a pretty substantial contract with our parent
company just by understanding where they're stuck and giving them advice. So that's the
kind of relationship that we like to have with our GPs. I've interviewed over 50 people,
not everybody recorded and live. I've never heard of an LP closing a deal for a portfolio company.
Yeah, we do that routinely. That's incredible. You mentioned your parent company, TIA Craft.
You were head of VC there. What lessons were learned as head of VC at TIA Craft? And how did
that guide what you do today with Churchill?
The lessons that I learned from there is, you know, being close to the technology organization
at TIA just really helped me understand how enterprise buyers at large, you know, Fortune
500, you know, TIA's case, fortune 50 organization works and what,
what their challenges are and what they look for in partners and the
process enterprise sales process. So that really, so we're,
we're enterprise heavy in our book with, with our managers.
And that's really gives me a, I mean, then I have a, I live in Dallas.
So Dallas is home to probably 25 or 30 fortune you know 500 organizations and i am friendly with a lot of cios
to me that helps me a lot in not only underwriting funds but especially co-investments
and by cios you mean chief information officers, correct? Correct.
So a different world from chief investment officers.
But speaking of the community and how do you interact with other LPs?
You're obviously very collaborative.
You help your GPs.
How do you work with other LPs?
Do you see it as a zero sum?
Are there certain LPs that you interact with?
Absolutely not as a zero sum. I think this is a collaborative business.
I think I've learned from a lot of LPs. One of the movements on Twitter, for example, that I've really come to respect and learn from is the open LP movement. I think bees are at sapphire i think david you know they're very generous with
you know they've been doing they've been doing this a lot longer than i have um and i'm incredibly
grateful for all the information that they openly share and and we have um lps here in dallas um
and that i am close with that we're in some of the same funds and sometimes we're not
um we both share managers um as well as do diligently help you know diligence managers
that we're uh respectively looking at i i think both um at a gp level an lp level i i think you
know collaboration is is the name of the game for this asset class absolutely chris duvas we were
lucky enough me and eric to have him as the first guest ever
on the Limited Partner Podcast.
And Beezer, of course, we interviewed as well.
In terms of the other LPs, let's shine a light.
We also had another big member of the community, Michael Kim.
He's famous for not only investing and leading, but also bringing in a lot of other LPs.
Let's shine a light for other LPs that you think bring a lot to the community outside of the obvious ones.
Who are some LPs that maybe don't go on camera, but are really helpful to GPs and portfolio companies?
Yeah, I think it's a great question.
I think, you know, I meant to say this at the beginning, you know, people that I'm, you know, I think we all should be grateful for is sort of the early endowments like Yale and Harvard's of the world that to me deserve as
much credit for the sort of flourishment of technology sector in the US, which I think is
truly a competitive edge for our country. And their sort of leap of faith and funding early you know
technology companies going back to you know 60s and 70s i think is really vital and you know and
i stand on their shoulders quite a bit and i read about them and i you know i learned about how how
they've done it in terms of sort sort of the current, you mentioned Michael Kim
and we respect what Michael has done a lot.
There's other fund of funds like Michael
that we know that are super helpful.
There's one that we know called Vintage Investment Partners
out of Tel Aviv, Allen and Abe.
We're not in the fund of funds, but we're in their other funds.
And they've been super helpful in helping us discover new managers.
There's other GPs that we're in that have their own sort of emerging managers
program that helps us discover managers.
And like I've already mentioned, the Open LP movement. And there's some that are here
in Dallas. And I don't think I should mention their names, but I think they've been super
helpful and vice versa. I believe it or not, have read David Swenson's book. And I would love to
have Matt Mendelsohn on the pod. I know that's a big reach, but maybe if he is feeling boring and
wants to talk about portfolio construction, he could hit me up
at any time. I have the book and it's pretty tough read. In terms of the book, do you think those
principles still apply? Do you think you have to be contrarian? Do you think you have to be
the same private? And what would you update from David Swenson's book? I caution being dogmatic about various sort of methodologies and even data sets. I think we firmly believe
in being humble and deserve the right to get smarter. I think those are all data points that
we consider. But at the end of the day, you can't go away from the fact that you're underwriting
people and their judgment and their relevance. So with all the
data and all the wisdom that's available to us, we try not to forget that you're underwriting people
and we try to remember, are they in the flow? Do they have strategy discipline? Do they have
price discipline? Can they help these companies grow and to exit?
At the end of the day, it's a judgment call.
That was, I guess, a trick question to see if you stayed disciplined on your own strategy.
So Raja, you've been an incredible guest.
You've been a personal friend since we were first connected.
And despite you not taking credit for it, you come to the us with 400 at 23 years old and
to see where you where you've made it this far is just emblematic and just inspiring for any
immigrant including myself and just anybody in the united states so really appreciate you coming on
the podcast what would you like people to know about yourself about churchill about anything
that you'd like to shine a light on first of all thank you for having me on you know know, I feel like an imposter. I looked at the list of people that you interviewed and
I don't, you know, why am I on this list? And so I really, really appreciate you for having me on
and for Heather, for introducing us. And in terms of, you know, what people should know about us, we're actively building our portfolio and we like to
see hundreds of managers a year and we're open for business. Thank you. And of course, a big,
big thank you to Heather at Human VC for making the introduction. And thank you, Raja, for jumping
on the call and look forward to meeting in Dallas or in New York.
Come on down to Dallas.
Thank you for listening to today's episode.
We hope you enjoyed it.
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