How I Invest with David Weisburd - E290: How LPs Underwrite Venture in 2026

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

Why does today’s venture market feel increasingly untethered from historical precedent? David Weisburd speaks with Narayan Chowdhury about structural shifts in venture capital, the limits of data-...driven decision-making, and how founders and investors navigate an unusually noisy and fragmented market. Narayan shares how access, trust, and long-term relationships are becoming more important as traditional signals lose reliability.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Ryan, you're a co-founder and a partner at Franklin Park. Tell me where Franklin Park sits at an AUA basis today. We are about a 21 billion AUA, AUM firm based out of Philadelphia. And you said last time we chatted, you said it's the most confusing, untethered sentiment today investing in nature that you've seen. That's quite the statement, given that you've been in the industry for a while. Why did you say that? every week there seems to be some event, some pricing, some scaling thing that, you know, I can't, there's no basis for, no precedent for. So, you know, things like a single person getting a $1.5 billion comp package to leave a company that he just co-founded months before, these things have never happened. You know, trying to figure out trillion-dollar spends on data center buildouts, the sort of growth and death and retention metrics of some of these companies that are just, you know, a few engineers are creating incredible products for enterprise and consumers.
Starting point is 00:01:21 It's just unprecedented. I'm in awe. The amount of options founders have seemingly many, but when it gets down to the nitty gritty of those financings and those fundraisers, the has and have not stories seem so insane to me. It's just a very bipolar market. All these, all these, all these, little niches. I can't imagine how confusing it is for all the market participants when you have all these really, really spiky events. Our ground truth has always got to be why do founders want to give up part of their precious life's work to somebody else? That's kind of at the heart of the venture equation, right? Adding to this complexity, there's companies like mid-journey, some report that at 500 million, half a billion ARR with no outside capital raised.
Starting point is 00:02:25 So they've scaled without outside capital. So VCs aren't even getting to those opportunities. Then there's people, I had the founder of HF0, which is a 12-week AI accelerator in San Francisco. It's one of the most interesting podcasts I've ever had. And they put people in these monk mode modes for 12 weeks. And these companies go from 500,000 to 10 million ARR just and just focused work and development for 12 weeks. They take away all the distractions from their lives. So there's the, and now they've actually evolved.
Starting point is 00:02:50 They used to give a million dollars for a 20 million and take 5%. Now they've evolved. Some people don't even want the million dollars. They'll just take 3% for just the services. So they're basically being paid in services. There's so many different models emerging. There are. And so it's in that backdrop that, you know, we're trying to think about what's going to endure.
Starting point is 00:03:09 How should we build our portfolio? What's the value of legacy brand? So I'd say the other confusing thing is, There's a temptation. I think a lot of investors have quant data analyst sort of mindsets. You want to dig into the data. You want to be, have some grounding for your beliefs in data. And I think the scary part for as I look at it is the data is very often plagued with holes, non-reporting, self-biased reporting. It's lagged. And so, you know, the slice of data we get to look at is either just not relevant for this current market, or the thing that it tells you
Starting point is 00:03:57 might be, was relevant for a prior regime. And so there's been a regime shift or there's been a underlying firm shift such that the conclusion you draw from the data is not helpful. So what I, look, let me mention some examples of this. Like you might, you might look at a data set of say, This isn't analysis I've done, but you look at, say, first-time funds out of some data set that you paid for, maybe your own data, you know, after 23 years for us, for example, we have a lot of, we have a rich data set of our own to mine from. But you draw some conclusion, well, what confidence do you have that it's representative of a population?
Starting point is 00:04:43 There are some data sets where, you know, I'm looking at these vintages and it doesn't include this fund and this fund and this fund, like 40 really compelling funds that are just not in the data set, right? And you might be led to believe that first-time funds underperform or have more risk or have less risk. But the paucity and or the end in a particular, the number of observations in a particular year are like four because you were looking at, say, Israeli infrastructure as your slice. And so very hard to do data analysis when the data, I'd say, is, problematic. There is some good news on that front. I interviewed Professor Steve Kaplan from University of Chicago and also Professor Gregory Brown from University of North Carolina, two of the
Starting point is 00:05:26 leading researchers in an entire world in the space. They both use the same data set, which is the MSCI Burgess, which is LP-driven data. So in order to get the ground truth, GPs, there's going to be, GPs are only going to report their best funds or some GPs are only going to report their best funds. So you have to go to LPs for ground truth. And most interestingly, when I interviewed Professor Steve Kaplan, he had just gotten a look at the Adipar data. So At-upar now is somewhere around $7 trillion in assets on their platform from a data standpoint. So they're actually getting very similar data to MSCI Burgess. So completely independent data set is getting to a similar ground truth.
Starting point is 00:05:58 That was very promising. I hope that's published soon. I'd love to see that. Yeah, things like that would be great. But obviously, it'll probably be anonymized, which has its own issues. And then there is that still there's a bias of, well, you have that. It's nice to hear that there's an independent correlation because you're still. going to then deal with the fundamental LP bias that is driving those portfolios.
Starting point is 00:06:22 So, for example, let's just say you got an LP submitted dataset, but the underlying LPs were very large FOIA-based investors, right? They would have different access than either the broader market or, say, best in class access. And access, of course, is a huge deal in venture. So there are still some problems. But then there's also the problem of, okay, you make a conclusion about, wow, this group or this segment is interesting.
Starting point is 00:06:54 Well, okay, it was interesting then, but this, perhaps this group that you've identified, they're 5x the size of when their peak performance happened, right? So they're essentially competing in a new market. So is the, you know, the dangers of being backwards looking on that data analysis within either, it could be that maybe the sector has completely gone away or it's overfished. And so the magic was you were on the front end and the valuations were two times revenue. And now they're 20 times revenue or whatever it might be. One of the hardest things of investing is seeing what's shifting before everyone else does.
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Starting point is 00:09:09 when they're going out and giving these billion-dollar signing bonuses, which they're probably not doing anymore, to start their team, they're acting from some pretty interesting first principles. Obviously, I'm not in the boardroom. I'm not talking to Mark Zuckerberg, but it seems like they've embraced a couple principles. One is that the best teams and the best, you know, 100x engineers, AI engineers want to work with the best people,
Starting point is 00:09:30 this whole concept of talent magnets. Some organizations just absorb this talent. And if you take that to be true, which is a pretty non-controversial truth, then paying $3 to $5 billion on these 3 to 500X engineers in order to bootstrap a company and a team for a market cap that could go from $1.6 trillion to $10 trillion if AI plays out. It becomes highly rational, but only when you tether it to the future, not when you tether it's the best. For me, untethered just means when I would think about, you know, I was very fortunate. I've said this before on some different podcasts, just being very fortunate to meet Josh Copleman in 05.
Starting point is 00:10:05 And, you know, the beautiful thing there was meeting somebody who had some insights that not a ton of other people had and getting into that that first mover community of microvices like in Aiden Sankhid or or Mike Maples or Manukumar or Steve Anderson. Like they were all kind of seeing it. And it didn't, it didn't really get overfished, become ultra obvious. I remember a lot of the larger Cap VCs at the time really dismissing that strategy. And so you could really, there was kind of a good first principles approach that wasn't being overfished. And so it felt like a very underwitable thesis that did in fact work out. Here, it's, it's, it feels like the consensus happens very quickly. And so even if you feel like, okay, that, that is the future perhaps, well, everybody has as has
Starting point is 00:11:01 coalesced into that feeling. And that's where it feels, you don't, you don't feel like you're always, always making a unique insight that has been, has been called from a massive primary research effort like, like we did back in 0506. It's just, it's just noisier. That's another way to say. It's just extremely, extremely noisy. Right. So we have to kind of go back to our, that, what I said earlier about we still have to answer that question at the at the at the at the crux of the problem. An entrepreneur has to give up some equity for capital and what's going to motivate that person to give up that that equity ownership. And I think what we're what we're feeling now is that it's going to be a couple things. So you assume a high degree of noise and uncertainty.
Starting point is 00:11:54 I think that's going to be our operating framework. Okay. It's very uncertain. It's very noisy. What's the response to that? We think that groups that have engendered a lot of founder love by virtue of being in the market, having poor seats, being in the trenches for decade, two decades, has a lot of merit. They've essentially created a federated network of founders for them that are helping them look around the corners, that are giving them some insight into interesting use cases, interesting go-to-market, interesting
Starting point is 00:12:29 spin-outs, whatever it might be. They're giving them a little bit more heft credibility, access into a next-generation company. But importantly, you have to marry that with, okay, they've been around for a very long time, but they're staying somewhat disciplined in terms of the stage, the type of founder request that has worked for them. What I mean by that is, okay, so let's say you've been around for 20 years, but that 20 years of history and that great trust and those halo deals and all the great things that happened are not as relevant because that all happened when you were first finding companies, helping to build culture, helping to make key hires, making those key initial business introductions.
Starting point is 00:13:15 But now your business is, we got to figure out how to get into the series D. What's the maximum we can pay? there's five other exploding term sheets. How do we, you know, it's a different, you're now in a different business than what the founders knew you for, how you competed. And so it's that, that question of regime change. And what you're really saying is top des all investors that have kept their AUM consistent and have knock room. And the team, and they've continued to build that alumni network. And the alumni networks feels very positive towards them.
Starting point is 00:13:48 Like, it's one thing to have just funded a hundred things. But, you know, and we all know groups that have been high-velocity investors, but totally forgettable on a cap table, right? That doesn't also mean much. It's those folks where, again, I'll use USV, you know, they had conviction. They, the founders feel a certain way about them. So all of those things kind of have to work in concert. The other thing that will undoubtedly work, I think, are more emerging. opinionated, thesis-driven, basically the non-consensus and right, but new things. And so we have to
Starting point is 00:14:28 also be thinking about those opportunities. So the next generation of Josh Copelman's Dima News, but today in 2025. Yeah, but those were, those were for the most part generalists. If we look at new managers and, again, crudely bucket them into specialists and generalists, I think the newer generalists are a challenge for us, because we're wondering why they might be a sustainable brand in this market where there's 3,000 options for, you know, first checks. There's a meme in the market that today more than ever, it's about product and distribution. Peter Thiel, this is his paradigm. He calls himself a distribution maximist, meaning the best example in the last couple of years has been in this company, Cooley,
Starting point is 00:15:11 that learned how to go viral without necessarily having a worked out product, which is quite impressive in today's world. To what extent is that what founders should be looking for which is can this VC help me with my product, which really is upstream of that in terms of recruiting. Some people will work on product, but that's not very scalable. Or two, can they help with distribution? And just add to that, so many of the top firms now are investing heavily in media, and Dresen Horowitz. Eric Torenberg, who co-founded this podcast with me, now has their media strategy. And talk to me about media. And is media becoming a core part of a value proposition for venture? Or is it just some headline-grabbing thing that VCs are doing?
Starting point is 00:15:48 when we think about success or what works is we tend to forget about all of the failures along the way that had the same strategy. You know, it's all anecdotes, right? So if you remember the summer of Turntable FM, right, that was the hottest company in the entire universe. I don't know if you remember this company. I was obsessed with it. You'd go into a room, you'd DJ some music, and people would, it was, it was joyful.
Starting point is 00:16:15 It was fun. And it grew like crazy. until it didn't. You know, the narratives there were doing everything right and this was the formula and here's how you build
Starting point is 00:16:26 until you didn't. When you're in this time period with so much froth, so much activity, so much noise, as you mentioned, and you're picking the top funds for institutional investors.
Starting point is 00:16:39 That's what Franklin Park does. One of the principal agent issues that I see is you may be reluctant to pick a very potentially high expected return fund that may end up going to zero. So you have this headline risk that a principal investor would not have. How do you make sure that you're staying cutting edge and choosing those funds that may be a 10x half the time might be a 1x, the other half? How do you make sure that you stay cutting edge? It's funny to think about the real disaster funds because there aren't that many. I think the interesting thing about power loss is
Starting point is 00:17:15 one investment can often save, save a firm. I'm actually thinking there's actually a buyout fund, or they started life as a buyout, pure buyout metal bending fund, had some luck in the venture space that really saved a fund of theirs. And then they pivoted to become a venture fund very successfully. And I always think about that as, you know,
Starting point is 00:17:41 risk saved that franchise. Interestingly, We worry more about the ultimate operations and behavior of firms. I think that's part of the reason we've been a little bit reluctant on the solo GP front. And that is not a return optimizing statement, right? Meaning going back again to K9 and Munukumar, there's been fantastic, Steve Anderson, been fantastic solo GP funds. And there will continue to be.
Starting point is 00:18:08 And absolutely, it works for certain, certain, VC profiles. What we have noticed is that they can endanger, excuse me, they can engender some operational friction, let's call it, whether it's subsequent fundraisers are a bit more challenging, and so they're out of the market for a while, or there's other reasons why they're out of the market for some period of time, the reporting, the portfolio management,
Starting point is 00:18:41 perhaps it's a little bit more loosey-goosey amendments. Just it tends to not be quite the institutional quality that we'd love to see. And then frankly, we're doing a ton of references on how they behave in tough times through our backchannel network, which we've been cultivating now over really 25 plus years going back to our prior employer. So, you know, knowing who those people are, how they behave, how much are they committed into the fund, that in our mind, some of these softer things are going to help mitigate disaster. If you've been considering futures tradings, now might be the time to take a closer look. The futures markets has seen increased activity recently and plus 500 futures offers a straightforward entry point. The platform provides access to major instruments, including the S&P 500, NASDAQ, Bitcoin, natural gas, and other key markets.
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Starting point is 00:20:09 Download the plus 500 app. Trading and futures involves the risk of loss is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. They're revealed preferences, not what they say they're going to do, but what they actually do when the shit hits a fan. Yeah, yeah. And I think that that is probably where we've avoided issues more so than fund one or fund two or small fund size, that sort of thing.
Starting point is 00:20:35 An odd question, perhaps taken to the other extreme, I'll reveal my bias. I think references are the greatest source of alpha and GPs. And I think what truly separates the top LPs, one of the things is that they just do more references. So that's my bias. But just as a thought experiment, taken to the other extreme, most people are so set on their gut. I've never met somebody that didn't say they're not good at assessing people. Never met in my entire life.
Starting point is 00:20:58 Is there ever, once you reference, you do your 20 references or whatever number of references you do, do you still have a feeling in the beginning or is that feeling a bias? And most specifically in this highly sophisticated world of VCs, you know, top 1% people in society, do the best people? Are they able to really fake their actual behaviors versus their revealed preferences? I have very few really bad meetings. To your point, these are all fairly accomplished, articulate, you know, for the most part, unlike I'd say other segments of finance, you usually get into venture because you want to make an impact. You love company building. You love that time of whiteboarding and thinking.
Starting point is 00:21:36 thinking through difficult personnel product, go-to-market problems with a small team. You know, there's a certain attraction that most of the folks I meet are pretty awesome. So the bar is very high. Still, you do have, I'll say two things about kind of referencing and funnel building. And that is that for us, it has to be continuous, meaning like we really, it happens, but we really hate to be in situations where we hear about a platform or a team or some, some opportunity really completely out of the blue.
Starting point is 00:22:17 Usually you would have liked, oh, yeah, you know, we knew they were spinning out or, yeah, we knew their deals. We knew that she led Pinterest when she was giving. You know, we knew some of that person's work here. One of the harder things in venture is you really can't be reactive. You kind of always have to be every day in the market talking to your founder friends and your VC friends about, you know, interesting product, interesting spaces, what events, what hackathon. Like, tell me, I want to soak in all of this, see these disparate pieces of information about how things are being built and how things are growing, attaching names to those stories. and you build this giant graph of, okay, I'm waiting for this thing to happen. There's actually a very recent concrete example of this with a group called Bright Mind in the
Starting point is 00:23:11 cybersecurity space where we knew that we've been feeling for a long time that cyber is a space that benefits specialists. The way those founder communities, the way they're sold, it's not as accessible to generalists. Sure, there are some. But even at the generalist firms, there tends to be partners who specialize in cyber. It's idiosyncratic. You can't just apply a generalist framework into cyber.
Starting point is 00:23:35 There are people preferences in cyber, kind of like how there is in drug discovery as well. What do you mean by that? Meaning I'm used to working with these sorts of people. I'll overweight somebody who's taking a drug through or somebody who sold a seam product. that I know has worked in production. You know, there's people lean on heuristics, I would say, which are self-reinforcing then for the type of people involved in those, in those spaces.
Starting point is 00:24:07 So another way, there's not many 18-year-old VCs in cyber. And so we had built a list of these companies that were just tracking at an incredible rate. And this is, you know, a while ago, you know, whiz and abnormal security and cripple and a bunch of others, Huntress and blah, blah, blah. And then it's easy enough, I mean, the access to data. now and through our network, you start having these conversations. Well, tell me more. Tell me about these other companies is how competitive is this space. Who's doing this? And we kept hearing this entity called Falcon Fund, either through data analysis or
Starting point is 00:24:41 people flow that was showing up in these companies, so I said, well, you know, what's Falcon Fund? So again, more, more back channel investigation. Falcon Fund is the captive fund inside Crowdstrike. Okay, that's interesting. I kind of loved immediately that it was. wasn't on offer, you know, but there's, there's people obviously behind that. And through some other relationships, we got to know who those people were and then sort of said, let's, let's just keep an eye on that, that, that, the progress of those people. And so much, I think, I think VCs do the same thing. They, they, they plan a flag on a person or an idea and like, all right, I'm going to track that. And this was, this is, that's so much of the business is you start with a germ and then you
Starting point is 00:25:27 track that over over a period of time and then it that opportunity meets. I've noticed this as well. And like, I think this originally is an avalism, but the people that are successful, they're hardworking and smart and high integrity that end up staying at it for a decade, almost all of them succeeds. So it's very hard to predict on specific venture or two ventures or maybe even on a third venture. If you could own equity in that person, they're going to be successful. And I've oftentimes thought about and I've noticed that in my own network now, you know, also going a couple decades, going back to 2008. So many people, either flame out, burnout, change careers, and so if you actually stick with it. And I'm
Starting point is 00:26:02 wondering whether that's like a bias, which is the people that stick with it end up being successful versus the people that are successful end up sticking with it. Wondering your thoughts on that. The people who flame out or the people that we tend to not or lose track of, they often presented a very transactional. They all they had the reverse appreciation saying it's, you know, we had a good conversation. It didn't work now. But I'm also opting in. to be tracked, to stay in touch and to to collaborate on what may not seem like an immediately fruitful idea now. So they tend to also, if you get what I'm saying, kind of opt into the long road. And so if I think about, you know, Franklin Park's broad universe of friends of the firm,
Starting point is 00:26:51 they also kind of have that, hey, it may not work out now, but I'm going to, I'm going to call you when our company has a fundraising need. And I trust you to help me think about, even if it's not for my immediate benefit or your immediate benefit, somebody who's thinking about blood brain barrier technology solutions. And okay, well, I happen to know somebody. So let's get them on the phone and talk about it. And these sorts of not immediately obvious transactional sorts of things. There is a kind of a mutual opt-in to that style. So I think there is something to the style be getting success, I think. I think that's one of the hidden luxuries in venture and private markets is that if you're a naturally long-term relationship building person, the model works.
Starting point is 00:27:44 If I was selling a product that's $1,000, I couldn't spend 15 years building a relationship with you, even if I loved you. It just doesn't work. The business model doesn't work. But it's such a luxury to be in an industry where you could spend 15 years, 15 years with somebody, and then they end up writing a $20 million check. Rahul McDahl, I don't know if you know him. He's one of my favorite episodes, episode 109. And he builds these decades-long relationships. And I've seen it with my own eyes. He sends me these handwritten cards, which is epic. I don't even get cards, period, let alone handwritten cards. But it is one of those hidden luxuries where the stakes are so high, at least the business model works. Then it's a question of whether you have the patience and the
Starting point is 00:28:21 stamina to stay in there. But the business model rewards the. those people that are long term. Which is interesting, right? Because, gosh, we're going to circle back to the sort of the regime question. When you look back to people who came into the industry, again, I'm hitting with a very broad brush here, but in that 1920, 21, and perhaps we're back into it. But the period when capital deployers really, really scaled like crazy in terms of their AUM and the velocity of how many deals they were doing, and they re-engineered their orgs to be high velocity. Like, hey, we can't, we can't be diligent seeing this opportunity for a month. We're going to be, that's now a competitive disadvantage, perhaps. And so we're going to
Starting point is 00:29:03 reorient our firm to be hypervelocity. You reorient to get money out the door. And then the people who come in, of course, they love this because it's just option value, right? It's just, if I can, if I can early in my career make 50 bets and they viewed them as, as best, bets. You know, if one of them hit, now I have a halo deal, now I have some credibility, and now I have something I can take to my, to my next position or that's my track record, right? So again, beauty of parallel is that you, you, some subset is going to have some, something
Starting point is 00:29:38 interesting to, that's going to come out of a not great process. To your point, if you do that 50 times today and one of those bets was 200 million at $5 billion, and you made 50 of these bets, you put out $10 billion, and now Open AI goes out at a trillion dollars. So let's say it's 15x on paper because a lot of these companies that end up scaling, they dilute less than the typical company. So you still, you might be out of 2x, even if everything else goes to zero. And it's so hard to internalize that idea because if, if you don't have an opening AI,
Starting point is 00:30:08 then you might have a zero without, with everything going to zero. But then you have a 2x, which is, you know, somewhere around top, top 33% for a venture fund on that basis. Is that talent? Is that great process? Like going back to the thinking about the process rather than the outcome. that person, that strategy feels really hard to underwrite for future success, unless you believe entrepreneurs value that as well.
Starting point is 00:30:36 It has to come back to that, right? If entrepreneurs are, we don't think they're that naive, ascribe a lot of value to that work, then, yes, it'll pay off. But if they don't, it won't mean anything. One other ground truth that both Professor Steve Kaplan and Gregory Brown, other researchers believe in venture is that it's idiosyncratic in the way that the founders are actually the ones picking the VCs. That seems to be ground truth as well.
Starting point is 00:31:03 It's not actually VCs that are going out and picking. The returns go from actually being picked in these kind of post-seat. That's an interesting question. I would love to have a chat with them. I feel like that's there's a correlate of time and company progress. when it is when it is say like you've heard stories of companies that start with one idea completely pivot from a consumer app to an enterprise you know the most common from elite C investor mistake that they make is that very mistake which is I was bullish on the person
Starting point is 00:31:44 thought the idea was bad didn't realize he would have iterated one sometimes two times into success that's the number one. it's not actually picking wrong. It's not picking the wrong company. It's the person was right. The business was wrong. I should have invested anyways knowing that I was wrong. And, you know, because the power laws are so great, because a great person can return 100x. If only 20% of times they end up iterating, it's still like a great investment, which is also a hard thing to put your head around. Right. And so I don't know. It's kind of the question of what is knowable at the idea or pre-idea, even at the wireframe stage. And so I wonder about the, um, the,
Starting point is 00:32:20 the VC, the VC founder Mutual Opt-in, I'll mention another story, kind of, again, going to our ground truth exercises. We, we like to, we love to interview founders just about what are their priorities. There was a, there was a time where we wondered, you know, would the whole industry move towards kind of platform service companies, meaning everyone would look like an Andreessen. And to some extent, the service offering at big scale, that has kind of played out a little bit, probably not at the Andreessen scale, but offering talent partners, media strategy, capital markets, professionals, that kind of has existed. But they're all playing at a different stage.
Starting point is 00:33:04 At the early stage, founders keep telling us, and hopefully, you know, we keep asking and we keep engaging and we keep refreshing this research, but they keep telling us that they care about sort of a minimal brand firm brand viability. So they're not optimized. There isn't a list of five companies or five VCs that they think about. But they do want to know that there's some stability that as I talk about my cap stacked with either of customers or hires, you know, it recedes. And it's not an issue. So there's some minimal threshold. And beyond that, it is, are you going to, are you going to run a sane and be respectful of my time process as we court each other. Am I going to, are you going to, is your money good? Are you going to, I got to pay these people. Are you going to fund me in a timely manner and you're good for
Starting point is 00:33:57 your, your capital? And then are you going to, can I stand to talk to you every day or every week for the next five, six years? You know, it doesn't get too much more complicated. And so I don't, I think part of that, that goes back to kind of that, that unicorn category of VCs with a established found, federated founder network that really cares about them, that they've demonstrated a lot of care and love for them at the very earliest, most difficult, unknowable parts of their, of their company. That's a really fascinating question of how much, how much is the VC picking and how much is the founder picking? And I'm sure it's very founder dependent as well. The founders that have had good success with a VC partner more than likely are going to go back unless here again, we go back
Starting point is 00:34:45 to an earlier statement about regime changes, we were talking to a few groups, I'm sure you've seen, they've really developed a thesis around backing repeat founders. And they'll have some nuance to it. It's not just, you know, you founded X, you had a above 100 million outcome or whatever, and therefore you're funded. They often have things about where were you in the org, what did you, what did you run? Do you still have a chip? You know, they have all these, these things. One of the questions we'll often ask is, well, these founders already took capital. By definition, they already have some venture relationships. Why aren't they just going back to them? And one of two things have happened. One is they didn't have a good experience with that VC. Or interestingly,
Starting point is 00:35:33 they did have a good experience. They would have loved to have continued the relationship, but they have moved to a different part of the market. They can't justify a one to two million dollar equity outlay anymore. And that's all that they're, you know, they're, they don't want to raise a 10 million out of the gate, a chunk of capital. And so it gives them the opportunity. And so it's the, they're offering a capital, there's a capital offering that has been abandoned. There's a, there's a vacuum for some of these groups that come into.
Starting point is 00:36:08 But otherwise, yeah, you would, you, yeah, the, the repeat founder is something that I'd say, most VCs, it feels fairly orthodox. There's so many unknowns in the market. What is one thing that is knowable in the market today that you believe with high conviction? Well, ooh, not on the venture side, but the thing that I'm pretty convinced about, and mostly because I've been, I've been building with building software with it, the two things are happening right now, the ability to build and the ability or the willingness for buyers to think about or think about swapping incumbents, I think are both at all times high,
Starting point is 00:36:54 which is a very exciting space for venture. I don't know if I've been clear about that, meaning like a small team, this is sort of dumb and obvious, a small team in less time is getting a lot done. Great. But complementary to that, buyers are saying, I think more than ever, I'm willing to consider swapping out big iron for something new because the offering is so different, right? The utility from these agentic, this class of software is so different. It's an order of magnitude better. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:37:36 So like willingness to change plus ability to change are, so I'm definitely convinced that amazing value is going to be turned over. On that note, Ryan, it's been absolute masterclass. Thanks so much for jumping on the podcast and looking forward to continuing the conversation live. Well, I look forward to having more questions and queries with you anytime. That's it for today's episode of how I invest.
Starting point is 00:38:01 If you're a GP with over $1 billion in AUM and thinking about long-term strategic partners to support your growth, we'd love to connect. Please email me at David at Weisperd Capital.com.

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