Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Mitchell Green - Lessons from Cold Calling 10,000 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.464]

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

My guest today is Mitchell Green. Mitchell Green is the co-founder and managing partner of Lead Edge Capital, a growth equity firm that has spent 15 years building one of the most disciplined investment machines in the business.  Unlike most firms chasing power law outcomes, Lead Edge is designed to deliver consistent returns by talking to thousands of companies a year, applying a rigorous eight-point criteria to filter down to a handful of investments, and leveraging a uniquely constructed LP base of world-class executives and entrepreneurs.  In this conversation, Mitchell walks through every component of the machine, from how they source and evaluate companies to how they think about selling, building culture, and staying competitive in a world being reshaped by AI. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.  ----- Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at ⁠colossus.com/subscribe⁠. ----- ⁠Ramp’s⁠ mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ramp.com/invest⁠⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. ----- Trusted by thousands of businesses, ⁠Vanta⁠ continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Visit ⁠vanta.com/invest⁠.  ----- ⁠WorkOS⁠ is a developer platform that enables SaaS companies to quickly add enterprise features to their applications. Visit⁠⁠ ⁠WorkOS.com⁠⁠⁠ to transform your application into an enterprise-ready solution in minutes, not months. ----- Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest. ----- ⁠Ridgeline⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgelineapps.com⁠. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠). Timestamps: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best (00:00:53) Episode Intro: Mitchell Green (00:02:01) Cold Calling 10,000 Companies (00:03:54) Building the Lead Edge Machine (00:06:15) Lead Edge’s LP Profile (00:09:22) Hitting Doubles and Triples (00:11:39) Knowing When to Sell (00:15:08) Lead Edge’s Eight Buying Criteria (00:18:12) The Opportunity in Enterprise Software (00:24:54) Using Criteria for Filtering, Not Prediction (00:27:11) Building Relationships with Entrepreneurs (00:29:16) Improving the Investment Machine at Scale (00:31:59) Lead Edge’s Culture (00:35:08) Mitchell’s Schedule (00:36:37) The Mount Rushmore of Investment Machines (00:38:40) The AI Readiness Score (00:40:50) Overhyped, Frothy Markets (00:42:16 When AI Will be a Good Opportunity (00:44:29) Lessons from Competitive Skiing (00:47:33) Starting a Fund & Keeping Score (00:49:15) The Kindest Thing

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Visit workOS.com to get started. Felix by Rogo is a personal finance agent that turns a single prompt into finished client-ready work using your firm's own templates, context, and standards. Send Felix an email like, take these comments and turn them for me, or update my tracker with the context of these emails. Or run the ability to pay math on this buyer,

and Felix sends back finished PowerPoint decks, Excel models, and sourced research. Felix works the way your team already does, delivering work quickly and accurately around the clock. Learn more at rogo.a.ai slash Felix. Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at Colossus.com.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of positive sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Some may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My guest today is Mitchell Greene, the founder of Lead Edge Capital. When I think about Lead Edge, I sort of think about this giant money machine that Mitchell and his two partners have designed over the last 15 plus years to make remarkably consistent investment returns for their clients. They have all sorts of unique aspects to the machine that they've built, whether that's their collection of LPs, their eight-point criteria for how they select companies, the way they do cold calls, the way they construct their portfolio.

This is just a totally different way of approaching markets. They're trying to hit singles and doubles and deliver very consistent returns. Mitchell says it's really important in life to be memorable. That's just a great simple thing that you can do. I think you'll find listening to Mitchell today and him talk about his entire machine and the firm that he's built that he himself is extremely memorable. I hope you enjoy learning about his business. So the first time that I heard about Lead Edge Capital was the very famous list of what

companies report, starting with cash profits. And then if they don't have cash profits and you go down this very funny list. Hierarchy of bullshit. And the bottom one is the place that's the place that's, voted the best place to work in New York City or something? Absolutely. Where did that list come from? Why did you put that together?

We've always found that the best way to communicate with our audiences, which is entrepreneurs and also our LPs, our clients effectively, is to like write a quarter of the letter about a different topic. And I started my career cold coin companies, and that's the way we source deals. But when you start your career talking to, I think Brian and I probably spoke to like 10,000 companies. And if you want to know, it's a good company, just call 10,000.

Call 10,000 of them. You'll figure out really quick. It's a pretty good pattern recognition. Until our head of PR comms came in a few years ago, we had actually never posted any of these things online. We joke that we sent this letter to some people in the VC community, one of which is like our buddy and Entrice and Horowitz. And they posted something for us. We just thought, I think it's like a very simple way, like in a world where people spout off total bullshit all the time. and like you see everything in decks.

This is just a good way to just do it. Talk to me about the 10,000 calls. So what did you learn calling that many companies? You learn to be very disciplined, actually, and you learn that most things are actually just noise and to figure out what makes a lead-edge company and then try to ignore everything else. You learn a lot about like responsiveness of people

and more responsive CEOs tend to be better CEOs. I think another thing you learn that's really important for young people, if you tell an entrepreneur that you're going to actually do something, then actually do it. I think that's actually true. Like, in life, there are so many people that say they'll do things that just never do them. And so if you're known as a firm and a person that actually does what you say you're going to do,

it goes a long way. So if you tell an entrepreneur, hey, I know somebody at Adobe, do you want an intro? Because it looks like to be helpful for your business. And then he or she said, I'd love to. Well, then guess what? Follow up without do what you say you're going to do. Can you describe what seems to me like I would call it a machine that is lead edge, much more than most investment firms where a lot of great investors will tell you there's a lot of art,

everything's different. Lead edge feels to me like unbelievably well constructed as a machine to produce returns. Before we go into all the component aspects of the machine, describe the machine itself at a high level before I get off on a tangent. We run this place that gets a software company. My background was at Bessemer. I worked for somebody that was extremely disciplined. It was building a CodeClan program.

Partner Brian worked at Bessemer. We had the first two coal cars and my other partner, Nemei worked at Insight. And I think Insight, Jafarne was on recently, is one of the best software investment or technology investment machines on the planet. So we've modeled ourselves on that. To build a good investment firm that stands a test of time,

if you want to go build the next TA Associates or General Lannock or Bessemer, or Sequoia, you just have to be like extremely rigorous. And so our number one KPI that we run this place by is what is our gross dollar retention for LPs. We want 95% gross dollar retention because the only way you can get that is one, have good investment returns and great client services. So how do you, through long periods of time across people that will come and go, generate

world-class returns is you need to have a process. And the process for us starts with 18, 22, to 24-year that talk to about 9,000 companies a year. You get those 9,000 companies. How do you figure out which ones to work on? So then you need this framework to guide these 18 people to like, well, it's going to be an interesting company. Because in the investment business, we have one asset. It's time and it's precious. And so how do you guide people to say no quick? And so we built this framework that we really took from coming out of Vesamer. And so they helped build the Bessemer 5.

We took the Vesmer 5, turning the lead adage 8, and it's like drives everything we do. Now, when we find the company, we're then super creative. We'll buy 10%, 80%, LPs out of a 20-year-old fund by employees, secondary, fund somebody's CV. We don't care. We'll do anything. If I think about the two sides being the LPs and the company, that you invest in. I'll come back to the eight criteria. The LP story that you have is also quite distinct and different. Can you describe that in a lot of detail? Our LP base is all world-class

exacts and entrepreneurs. Now, we do have some big institutions, but 95% of our capital is all these world-class exacts and entrepreneurs. And we use these LPs throughout the entire investment lifecycle. It literally starts with sourced. If a company won't call us back, we'll email our All the P is. Two, let's say it's like an automotive software company. We'll have Rick Wagner, the former CEO, GM, we'll a long-term investor. We will send them the CEO a CEO in a note. If you're like an automotive software CEO and the former CEO at General Motors College,

they're way more likely to take an email than my knucklehead email in them, and I'm a 22-year-old email on them. Then for diligence, we'll say, hey, you're a healthcare software company, you're 25 million of revenue. Maybe you say like biotech and pharmaceutical software. It's like, oh, I see Pfizer's a customer. How big is it? A million. Could be bigger? Oh, it could be 10 million.

I'll meet the former CEO. And then I'll call up Ian Reed and be like, hey, Ian, can you talk to this company? They'd love to talk to you. But can you tell us what you think? And then if it's super interesting, could you call Pfizer and back channel it? And then you message an entrepreneur. Hey, I don't see biogen to the customer. Would you want to meet the former CEO? So then you call up George. Like, hey, George, I found this company. I mean, it's happening in a very criteria. Then post investment. We literally send emails to ROPs. They're like, hey, toast is looking for intros to these

restaurants. Do you know anybody? And it's, and it's, you know anybody. And it It turns out all these people invest in funds and never get asked for help. That's how we do it and how we leverage it. But it's not actually why we did it. It would be a lot easier to go have 20 giant institutions, right? You have 50 to $300 million checks versus me spending a huge amount of my time running around the world all the time, spending time with these people. Because if you want 95% retention, that's what you need to do because they're your clients. The reason we did it is because I knew that the returns in this sector and the tech investment sector,

flow to the top 10% of funds. They just do. It probably is the same in real estate. It probably is the same in the industrial buyouts, but I knew in the venture world that it definitely flowed to that. And I had the pleasure of working from one of these farms,

best for venture partners. So when I was starting lead edge, I was like, why in God's name is anybody going to take my money? I could teach him on a ski, but that doesn't get to be very helpful. But I said, you know what? Had I been the global head of HR

at Procter & Gamble and my partner been the global head of HR at Microsoft and the other one been the head of HR at Nike. When I called a workday 80 times at Bessemer and Dave's upfield, but by the end was like, I'll hire you as a salesperson. I'm not taking your guy's money. If I had been like a world-class HR exec,

he would have engaged with me. Because he would have known that I could have introduced to do those companies. Like, I have tons of other HR execs. I know these people. In a world that's super crowded and undifferentiated, and I think it's exponentially the case more today, even than what it was 15 years ago,

It just differentiates us. And we do what we say we're going to do. How many LPs do you have? Probably like 800. 95% by number are these executives. If you think about the level of returns versus the consistency of returns, how much does one matter versus the other

for this 95% gross retention? I think consistency is more important. On a per deal basis, we're trying to make a 2 to 5x in three to seven years. That's like a 25 net hour. if you just actually map it on a curve. Put it into a fund,

we want to generate you two to two and a quarter X nets with 20 net IRAs. Some of those deals aren't having five axes. Some of them might be 0.7 X's. Our downsides have been very low. I think we've only left all of our money in one deal ever. And that's because of the kind of criteria we look for in a company and what our average company looks like

and the fact that very few of our companies have any debt on them. Now, I'm trying to make a 2 to 2.2.2.2x net, which is more like a 2.5x gross. However, if something is a really big investment in the fund, and we do not run funds with like 100, 150 companies in them, we run funds with 20 investments in them. So if we've made something in a 7, 10, 12, 15% position, and that goes 8, 10, 12, that's how you can throw out of fund. Yeah.

And so because you really lose money, does that mean you also almost never hit some, like, giant grand slam? Correct. We're like Cal Ripkin, doubles and triples. We're not Sammy Sosa or like Mark McGuire. It's all about hitting doubles and troubles. And if you do that with very little leverage in the portfolio, 90% of our companies or 85% of our companies are like recurring revenue.

So if you invest today and know what revenues are in July, that's a pretty good way to invest. 56% of our companies are like profitable businesses. You may get it wrong. You may back the wrong team. You may overestimate the size of the market. But I think 70% of the time we own the preff, You're downside to 1X.

Now, sometimes you need to be cut the deal with the entrepreneur or the managing team so you're making slightly less than that. But if you can avoid zeros, and turn to zeros into like 0.8Xs or 1.1-1-Xs, it massively helps return. We'll sell. Probably a third of our exits have been secondaries.

We will buy secondaries. We will also sell. We constantly underwrite. We've been referred to as traders for hedge fund guys. And we're like, no, no, we're just trying to actually make money because this company's about to be a living dead

and you're going to be in this thing for the next decade. Maybe spend a minute before you go through the buy criteria. talking about selling more. What is the process that you run to be able to sell well? We have a divestment committee. There's three of us, myself. Brian Nehmer, been here all since fun one.

We have a disposition committee. Same thing. We think a lot of firms do a really, really good job on the buy. Very, very few firms do a very good job on the sell. Like knowing when to sell, pressure into sell. And we would tell you that the private equity funds

tend to do a much better job on the sell than most venture growth guys. hedge funds, if you do a mess public accuracy or long only funds, you constantly can buy and sell. The three of us meet once, twice a month and just walk through the portfolio and just talk about it. Like, hey, there's a round going down in this company. Should we sell? How can we try to position this company for a sale over the next 12 months? The fastest way to get fired at Lead Edge is have a company and not tell us when there's a liquidity opportunity or just something's about to happen before it happens.

What does the holding period end up being on average then? I bet our average holds are three and a half to four years probably. Everybody gets all excited by these 2015, 2016, 2017, 2017, 2018 returns. Like our 15 and 18 returns look very good. But it's just multiple expansion and we sold. That's it. If you think you're going to make a 2X in four years and you make a 4X in two years, it's amazing what it does to NetIRA.

People forget the reverse happened in 20 and 21. Nobody's 20 and 21 funds. I think the venture growth ecosystem gets a bad rap, but it's going to be every alternative asset. Their 20 and 21 funds are going to be awful relative to earlier funds because people thought they were going to make a 4x in two years and instead making a 1.6x in 8 years. And so that's going to drive. That's going to have huge impacts on the industry. What is the most interesting thing about the skill of selling and making the transaction happen?

And presumably it's easiest to sell in private markets when a lot of other people are really excited about buying. You can't just hit sell like in public markets. Correct. Maybe in like a bad, medium good, there's different kinds of outcomes that you'd be selling into. Are most of your sales into everyone else is excited and you're less excited? It can be everything in between. But if a company goes public, it's just hit a two to five X in three to seven years. And then sell.

So you're like, the company goes public. You're at like a 3.3X. In 18 months or 24 months, they're like annihilate a 12% or 20% in that IRR. It's a great company. But we constantly are underwriting like what's a forward net return from here. We made like a 3x in 18 months. That's like an IPO. In a secondary sale, it's about underwriting the forward IRA in toast, which is some of our biggest investments,

which we put like 12% of our fund three into. And we'd always get crabbed. Our fund three was like a $290 million dollar fund. and we put like 36 million bucks into it. And before the IPO, we had sold 180 million bucks. I mean, I think we'd make 350 to 400 in it total. Because like, why are you selling? You don't believe in us?

We're like, no, no, no, all these other knuckleheads that invested alongside us, none of them put 12% of their fund in it. And by the way, somebody is paying us a price in the secondary markets that we think is just lunacy. We sold, like, in the secondary markets, like, 40 or 50 bucks in toast. The stock today is 30 bucks. We think it's cheap. But it's just, by the way, we sold like six years ago.

And so it's constantly underwriting forward IRA. As your business scales up, everything gets more complex, especially your compliance and security needs. With so many tools offering Band-Aids and patches, it's unfortunately far too easy for something to slip through the cracks. Fortunately, Vanta is a powerful tool designed to simplify and automate your security work and deliver a single source of truth for compliance and risk.

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management helping ambitious firms scale faster, operate smarter, and stay ahead of the curve. See what Ridgeline can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgeline.a. Okay, now I get to talk about the eight buying criteria. I don't know if you want to tick tick them off or give us some highlights or... Let's get some highlights. So there's eight criteria. 10 million plus in revenue. Why? Do you have like product market fit? Are you growing? Because we don't invest in startups. Are you growing like 25% a year returns to gross? We don't use leverage. Do you have 70% plus gross margins?

Why? Because at the end of the day, you trade on multiples of earnings. Revenue multiples are just shorthand math for what it will be even double multiples or earnings multiples when you don't grow that fast. There's a reason that Facebook gives away electronics and the vending machines and Dell charges for coax. It's just like one has 80% gross margins and one has 15% gross margins. And we think that just drives at the end of the day earnings. Are you recurring? It's like a heck of a lot easier to invest knowing what revenues will be in July than they are today. Are you capital efficient? This metric is probably kept us out of the most trouble.

It's like our version of return on equity. I mean, I think it's more on Buffett with ingratients, but are your revenues today greater than your historical cash burn? So what I mean about that? There's 20 revenue. Have you burned to 80? Like every other tech company? Cumulatively, yeah.

Have you burned 80 since inception? Or have you burned 10 since inception? We're looking for like this one-to-one rate. In a world where capital is a commodity and capital is everywhere, if you can build a business that's growing nicely while burning less than your revenues, you've got a pretty good business. We don't have a start-ups. If investors startups are $2 million revenue companies, then obviously it's harder. Are you profitable at the bottom line?

Do you have any customer concentration? I just don't want to wake up and find out 40% of my revenues, like disappeared because some customer decided they don't want to work with you. I want to talk about the price you're willing to pay for companies and how you would plot yourself on the, so much of this sounds like a private equity strategy, but you mentioned toast and it's not like the high growth rate. Toast was $25 million of revenue growing 150% a year. And it was, we paid like $500 million. It was like 20 times revenue. People are like, that's crazy. Not when it went from 10 to 25.

So we just try to build a forward model. And you're like, look, you can pay as high as price as as you want. You just got to be right on your exit. You got to be right on your multi. how people got at a bunch of trouble in 2020 and 2021, I think how they're going to get in trouble today and all this AI stuff is they just assume the exit multiple is 20 to 25 times. That's insanity. Because when you're maxed multiple collapses.

Now, so you can pay 20 or 25 times revenues, and if you're right, like some of our companies have been, then it's fantastic. But you can also be wrong, like some of our companies have been and you look like an idiot. I think you invest in an open AI, and her billions is a little insane personally, but like, I don't know, if it goes on to do a trillion dollars of earnings, yeah, I was going to be

very wrong. I should have invested. It's almost like shorthander. If you're like, if this company grows and doesn't desal much for 18 months, am I in the money? And can I make a decent return for what I'm paying? And if the answer is, oh, am I even in the money in 18 months or 24 months? Yeah, you're paying way to our price. So right now there's this seismic thing. You can look at the constellation. And the constellation software is stock price or something as the perfect visual indicator of what's been going on, which is this intense skepticism of the market that boring traditional high gross margin software businesses are worth like much at all. But I'm curious how you process this moment where I'm sure a lot of the companies you're looking at are software companies

that have a lot of the components that make people fearful of the similar kinds of companies in public markets. Our belief for right or wrong is that the competitive advantage of software company has never been about R&D. We're not building semiconductor chips. We're not building biotech and pharma companies. This isn't that. To build like Chamber of Commerce software, you two could build this.

My mother couldn't, but my brother could. No problem. He was an engineer. So who could Microsoft. Any of our companies in our portfolio. If Microsoft took 500 people and gave them a month, each one of our companies could be out of business. But they just don't care a lot of the Chamber of Commerce market.

They don't care about the price optimization market for manufacturing companies. They don't care about the tax, the tax software market for a very, specific niche product. So the software companies are really about like distribution, sales and marketing, customer success, client services. We believe that it is the incumbents game to lose in software today. I'll give you a couple examples. Workday has like 98 or 99% gross dollar attention. It grows 10, 15% of year. Oh, it only goes 10% of year. I'm sorry, it's like 10 billion

of revenue. It only took like 20 years to get there and it does like $3 billion of free cash flow. Exxon or your hospital system or Warbro-Pinkus or KKR or Procter & Gamble probably spent three to five years implementing the software. If you think they're going to start building their own HR software, you're on your mind. Now, the GUI and how you access it is going to be far different, but actually they already have the customer relationships. And the only reason they built it is because Dave Delfield-Nanil realized 20 years ago that Oracle and SAP had really crappy products.

They have thousands of engineers that are trying to build the product much better and are going to use Workday versus Mitchell Green's cousin vibe coding his way to build workday. The flip side, why did Kupa get built? And the reason that it was able to be built is SAP Baudariba. They just left it for debt. So they built this big business. They took up all work, and now it's been sold to Tomorabo.

So what I actually worry about, Tomarabo or any of these big private coupons, if they're putting a bunch of debt on it, it's not growing that fast anymore. If they're putting a bunch of debt on it, and then what they do is they brag. They're like, oh, yeah, we drive all our company. It's like rule of 50 businesses. Now, do they end up cutting a bunch of people in R&E and sales and marketing and product that if you were being run by an entrepreneur

with no leverage, you would have capped. And now I worry that a bunch of these private equity-owned assets that are over levered are right for disruption versus independent software companies that are focused on growth that are trying to innovate. And I like to remind people that if you look at e-commerce in 99 and 2000, everybody thought every big boxer, is going out of business.

But if you look at the top 50 largest e-commerce companies in the United States, Amazon is number one. 2-10R? Walmart, Home Depot, blows, Macy's, Target. I mean, Sacks is a crappy company. Their online business is actually pretty good. Even Marcus, same thing. A lot of the incumbents will win.

Now again, Montgomery Award, Kmart, Sears, what boss for either like over-levered, didn't innovate? So for us, that's what we're constantly thinking about. Does that mean that right now feels like an especially especially opportune time for your style because entry multiples are lower? I think the best risk-adgested returns right now are in public software names. By the way, Warren Buff is at a spy when everybody is fearful and sell when everybody's super excited.

People hate software. When we bought a bunch of Robit Dan's stock, two years ago, when everybody hated China, when Alibaba's doubled off its lows and doesn't grow and trades it 15 times earnings. If you think about the CV, very specialist-type buys that you'll do, can you explain an example of one of those. We like to use the house analogy. You walked down the street, going to a apartment building.

My apartment needs to have these six things. You can go in the front door, and you can lead the primary round and put money in the balance sheet or you can buy the whole business. You can go in the side door and buy an early investor, our early employee out.

But maybe that's not available. So we'll go through the basement window with a pickax and buy like a derivative. Because if you run a business and there's a can of Pepsi on 30% of your business, and I go to the glass that is an investor in the can of Pepsi's fund, and that is the other half the LPs,

and I literally buy that out and you own 30% and I buy half the fund, I just bought 15% of your company. It's the same thing I'm saying. It's just the derivative. Do you have as much control? No.

Do you have as much insight? No, but you trade off price for access. We made a big investment in Zoom. So we couldn't go into the front door. The company didn't money. We sure as heck weren't buying the entire business. You couldn't buy secondary. They were secondary to buy.

You couldn't buy it because Sequoia would roll for you. They're smart. They're not dumb. They're like, why we let these knuckleheads in? and we'll take the stock and make two or three times our money. And the company was one that took a long time to get funded and wasn't backed by Sequoia Day 1. It was a bunch of random Chinese people on Chinese funds.

It was actually a second year by, but you couldn't because they're over. So we're like, huh, why don't we go to this fund that, like, has stock? Their LPs have been in this thing for 10 years. Maybe their LPs want to sell, and we can do it one of two ways. We'll just buy your position on the fund and we'll know exactly how much, we'll know exactly how much zoom we have through it. Or why don't you create like a new vehicle. Any LP that wants to sell,

we'll step into their shoes. Well, if you own 2% of Zoom, and half the LPs want to sell, and I then step in those shoes, I now own 1% of Zoom. And if I say to you, listen, we get to vote them like we own them, they used to hold it.

The company gets an M&A offer and you get to vote. You have to call us. Day 181 of the IPO after lockup, you got to give us the stock. We just bought the position. In a world where LPs and GPs are desperate for liquidity, that part of our business is absolutely booming,

and that part of our business is headed by Tim Beamer with one of my partners, who was actually a Notre Dame alum as well. If I think about the dollars deployed last year over the next year, how much of it is direct capital on a balance sheet, secondaries, something creative, like what you just described? 70% is creative on the balance sheet. 70% is special sets or like sector.

We will evaluate in an I see a public position, a control buyout, a minority deal, or a special sit. You could get four different things in one week and literally we underwrites the same return, but today the opportunity is in, we are a market drawdown away from an exploding in value, or like exploding and stuff to do. The hard part, it seems like, is finding a company that has six of the eight criteria that you can also buy a multiple that you're excited about for the forward return. What percent of companies of the 9,000 or whatever meet all eight criteria?

By the way, no correlation, how it informs either. If we do like an eight criteria deal versus like a five criteria deal, there's like actually no correlation to like it was a better deal. What about like four or three? We've never looked at because what we try to do is if you say it must meet eight criteria, 9,000 companies becomes 90. Okay. To do five to seven deals a year, it just doesn't work.

And so for us, what we say is it just like must meet five. That's about a 10% yield. We're trying to get to a set of companies that we can then actually do work on. So you have 900 companies that meet five. have a more criteria. Are you diligent on about 150 to 175 to do five to 70s a year? You're like, well, not more. I'd love to, but like, we're cold calling entrepreneurs.

They're like, oh, I'm sorry, I want to sell my business tomorrow. You just happen to call me on this day. No, the sales cycles can be a decade. And it's about staying in touch as an entrepreneur because we're not the only ones calling them. There's great firms like Summit or TA or Insight or, you know, Bessemer or Battery and the great firms. And so it's like, well, ask the entrepreneur, how do they need help? So I don't tease information out of them. Oh, you sell into.

like the consumer space. You want to meet the former CEO, Colgate Pamoliffe? And you're doing that to try to build a relationship with somebody. If five criteria companies don't outperform eight criteria companies, but doesn't that imply the criteria aren't predictive? So then why have their criteria? Because you need to set a framework for what to focus on and what not to focus on. So they're not predictive necessarily.

It's not predictive, but it's getting us to a small enough pool. It's like knowing your strike zone. My partner is a big baseball fan. He's the baseball analogy. like Ted Williams knew in the hitting zone exactly where a swing and what is probabilities for it swinging the ball. Like, yes, you can hit a ball two inches above home plate and it could be a grand slam and have hit the ball the far as you've ever hit it. But if you do that over an entire career, your entire career won't be very long. And so it just enables us to know like what pitches this swing at.

Our biggest mistakes have honestly been not swinging at the pitches when they were in our strike zone. And I think that's what we've learned over the last 15 years to get more comfortable. And like when it's in our strike zone, swing at it. How do you train these young people to be able to get all this information to know whether or not it's an eight point score or whatever out of an entrepreneur? What is the art of getting someone on the phone and then actually getting them to tell you the information that you need? It is incredible what people will tell you on the phone.

People are like, listen, you just like call people and they talk. People love to talk. It's investigative journalism with sales. we tend to hire people that are former athletes. But getting a C or a D on a test is not your biggest failure. Dropping the ball and the Rose Bowl or not making the Olympic team, that's failure. And so you're looking for people that are insanely persistent.

People are really inquisitive. And then it's just, hey, Patrick, pretend you're toast. We're doing work on the restaurant point of sales system space. read a bunch of articles. Sounds like you kick him butt. Oh, by the way, I just talked to like Square and Clover and set our company that. We'd love to talk to you on the phone. And oh, by the way, I'm sure you're getting bombarded by other people, but we're different than a lot of firms. A lot of our capital comes from world-class execs. Oh, by the way, one of our LPs, the former CEO Wendy's. We'd be happy to let's talk to them if you don't want to make these people.

Huh. Sure, love to chat. By the way, we used to get the cold call people when Brian and I and email were doing this, literally cold call people and you'd do like, you feel like the person you calls you at 6 p.m. 20 years ago that you're like slam the phone down on. Today it's like, look, come like, you guys get to send emails to people. We actually try to now encourage some of the analysts to start calling people. The biggest issue is it's hard to get people's cell phone numbers versus four phones. And it's just once you get the person on the phone, you just have to show knowledge. That's where, by the way, AI is incredible.

It's like you give every analyst and associate, you give them the power of knowledge and you can sound super smart. And you won't get everything. It's like, hey, just on the game, you have like 80 employees. So what do you like, 10 million revenue? 15 million revenue? Oh, I see like your employee trust growing like 80% a year. What are you growing like 150%? Eh, not that fast.

Oh, what, like 100%? Yeah, around there. So it's trying to get numbers. If you think about this machine, so we've got this very unique LP base. We do 9,000 calls, 5 to 7 investments per year. We just raised our 7th fund. It was 3.5 billion. Okay.

So the $3.5 billion fund, 2 to 2.5% net MOICs to your investors. So that's the machine. Where do you feel the most tempted to go tinker on the machine for the next decade? How do you hope the machine improves? As the firm gets bigger, how do you build a culture of teaching people to still be creative, the scrappy hustlers? That's the most important thing. How do we get creative and do CVs? We were doing CVs and nobody wanted to do CVs.

We didn't know they were called CVs. We just thought it was paying somebody a profit share. It's continuing to innovate on that. What's really interesting is the secondary markets now for some of these names are so liquid. So actually you almost don't even have to underwrite to this thing going public. It's like, can it just get big enough with enough escape velocity where I can then sell out? If you think about all the investments you've made the last five years or something, how often are you personally excited about the company and its product?

Frankly, this is what drives me nuts about a lot of people in the venture capital ecosystem is they think they're actually changing the world, which they are, but they should tell everybody about it and they're like doing God's greatest gift to mankind. Like we don't think that. We love helping entrepreneurs. Like that is actually what gets me excited and gets us up in the morning.

Helping an entrepreneur try to bend the curve and make that customer intro and help find that great CFO, the audit chair or whatever. We love making customer intros. That's what gets us the most excited. And I think we are still actually just scratching the surface

on how we can leverage our office. How often do you control the business? We are in a control position about a third of the time. When that's the case, how different is that? It hopefully should be no different at all, but there's less knuckle that throughout the table. There's less people around the table.

And what's really interesting is when you have a lot of different people around the table, you can have a lot of different competing interests. And so it's about building consensus. And people that are in at one cost. That's what there's all these 20 and 2021 companies haven't sold. There's these late stage guys that are like, oh, just get me out. I own the craft.

I'll make a one X today or I'll make a one X in a decade. But we don't go into companies and say, we're replacing the interim management. This is not what we do. When we invest in a business and when we exit, it's something like 75% of the time, the person who was running the business when we invest is still involved in the company.

It may not be running it, but it's like back people who just want to build awesome businesses and great companies. And it's like, listen, if I'm not the right CEO, well, then make me the chairman of the board or make me the chief customer officer or make me the chief product officer or whatever, That's what's really important.

I want to go back to the culture thing, the lead-edge culture, I mean. What have you learned about culture in the many years now that you've been doing this, especially given this is the thing that you want to keep nurturing? I didn't think I appreciated how much culture comes from the top. Follow-ups. Send hand-written thank you notes. I've sent hand-written thankness everywhere I meet. Almost everybody, every entrepreneur, every company, Gus who also does now, the 22-year-old analyst.

I know how we track it and report on it. If you just treat people the way you want to be treated, that just flows. We've built a culture of treat LPs, like you yourself want to be treated. People appreciate that, and it comes from the top. The intellectual honesty comes from my partner, Neme, a lot of the creativity comes from my partner, Brian. Now, of course, as you get to be 85, 90 people at a firm, we've built like a real training program, which is a result of a lot of work, Neh May and Brian and our CEO, Susie's done, and that team and the recruiting team. We didn't have weekly IC meetings before three or four years ago.

Why? Because the IC was every of us. We talk every day. And so it's just like building processes in place. Can you talk about this crazy one-on-one thing you do with every employee? I got the idea from Tom Barnes at Excel Kikair. He's built a true machine at Excel Kikair. I asked him, what do you think something you do that really helps the firm?

He's like, interview everybody once a year. So we start with like a survey, and then you sit down with every employee. You personally do. I personally do. Sit down with every other partner, every BP, every associate, the accounting person on the back end, every receptionist. and be like, what do you like about your job? First, give me everything you do, green, red, yellow. Green you love, red you hate.

Let's figure out what you hate and why. And if there's things you hate, well, then let's figure out other people that may be able to do it. Or how can we make your job easier? Okay, that's the first bucket. Second bucket. If you were me running lead edge, what would you change? Three, what's something we can do to make your job easier?

What you learn is incredible. You get a bunch of really good ideas every year. It actually drives my two partners nuts because sometimes I'm like, that's amazing. Do it. And then they're like, come on, we need to have build consensus. I'm like, no, we don't need to build consensus on some of these things. Is there anything else that you do in the culture that you feel carries that much freight? Being the good person is not that hard, frankly, in a world that's insanely competitive.

If being the nice guy gets you the callback and being the helpful person, then do it all day long. And then it's another really important thing about running this place is I can't be the bottle. I can't know every LP. And so, like, if you're a 25-year-old or 23-year-old associate here and you have to go to Seattle next weekend for a wedding, I'll pay your trip if you stay on Monday and go meet a bunch of LPs. But you're 23 years old. 99% of firms in this planet wouldn't put 23-year-olds in front of LPs.

I'm like, if you're smart enough to work here, you're smart enough to meet this LP. I don't care. And people love that. The 23-year-olds associates love it, which helps us get great people, but then also the L.P. loves it, too.

because no, it's like, oh, my son is your age. You mind talking to him or, hey, you went to Notre Dame? Oh, my son plays the cross. It's like thinking of going there. Would you talk to him and be like, oh, well, actually, I know, talk to my partner, Tim because he played Notre Dame lacrosse. You just build real relationships with people. If you think about the average month for you and the major slices of the pie

are time with LPs, time with companies. I'm so curious. It's actually kind of hard to guess maybe there's different buckets than those three LPs, companies, investments, internal. What does yours look like? And mine's, by way, very different than Brian and you miss. This is by design. It's imposed a little bit with fundraising, obviously.

I probably spend 60% of my time with LPs. Wow. Now, again, that could be getting somebody to help a company, though, too, or coordinating with the team of people with us like, hey, let's figure out a way to get into Exxon. And then I would say 25, 30% of my time is investing-related. which could be reading memos, helping people win deals.

That's frankly all I want to help. I'm like, if we lose a deal because I didn't meet the company, I might say I can help us win, but we got at least put our best stretch forward. And then probably 15, 20% of the operational. The operation stuff's coming down because one of our partners, Susie,

who lives in Greenwich, used to be an investment partner. A few years ago, she became RCOO. So that's like my time. Nime probably spends 90% of his time investing, 10% of his time on everything else, which is what you should do. I think Ronnie in the IC.

our partner Brian probably spends 60% of his time investing and probably 2020 on LPs and operations. It's very clear to people that spend time with Brian Niam and I that we like play to our strengths and weaknesses. You mentioned Tom Barnes as someone that you've learned from. If you had to like create a rush more of other investment machines that you most respect, who is the rushmore? Insight, TA and probably Excel KKKAT.

I think Devin, and Jeff, Triplett, the guys, Lieberman, at Insight, have just built like a factory. You know how you know what a good software company? First off a company is, first off the 30,000 companies a year. It's an absolute factory. It's a process. And so I think they're like amazing at it.

TA's on the pioneered cold calling. Insights obviously saved to do itself. I would guess Insights growth rate in their portfolio between 2001 and today is actually pretty similar. TAs has definitely come down. They're more private equity-like, discipline and process. I get the sense that TA is very good at selling, too. And then Excelpixir has built like an incredible value creation here that I think actually has a lot of it.

I think there's a lot of talk about value creation. I don't do much, but I get the sense that these guys are like very good at actually helping companies and trying to bend the needle. What have we missed about what makes the machine tick that you think is really important? I would have said that the three of us who run the machine are all very, very different. and we play to our strengths. And I don't think that should be underestimated. And I think that's what makes the mission. Like, we literally negotiate carry economics for the three of us in 10 minutes.

There's firms you hear about that get into a month-long fight to over carry. We all highly respect each other and know what we're each really good at. Just a focus on intellectual honesty that I think a lot of firms just don't have. Like, if you go to our investment committee means, our investment committee is the three of us. everybody that's basically VP and out gets to come. But if you sit in the room and listen to Brian and EMA, I talk about a deal, you would think the three of us

hate each other. Or you might think we're Israeli. Because it's just like a joke in Silicon Valley. If you listen to like an Israeli board meeting from the outside, you're like, these people all hate each other. Like how they're like, no, that's how they talk. So it's like, no, it's just like, let's debate the merits of this deal. Your finance team isn't losing money on big mistakes. It's leaking through a thousand tiny decisions

nobody's watching. Ramp puts guardrails on spending before it happens, real-time limits, automatic rules, zero firefighting. Try it at ramp.com slash invest. As your business grows, Vanta scales with you, automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk. Learn more at vanta.com slash invest.

Every investment firm is unique and generic AI doesn't understand your process. Rogo does. It's an AI platform built specifically for Wall Street connected to your data, understanding your process, and producing real outputs. Check them out at rogo.a.ai slash invest. The best AI and software companies from OpenAI to cursor to perplexity, use WorkOS to become enterprise ready overnight, not in months.

Visit WorkOS.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. Ridgeline is redefining asset management technology as a true partner, not just a software vendor. They've helped firms 5X in scale, enabling faster growth, smarter operations, and a competitive edge. Visit Ridgeline apps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm. Maybe riff a little bit more on just all the ways that you're excited and fearful about AI, both in the investment process at Lead Edge, for running Lead Edge the business and for the companies that you invest in. I'm the most fearful for what I don't know.

AI is going to change the world and it's going to do it in ways that nobody can think about, just like the Internet did. And in 2009-99, 2000, we would have mentioned social media. Today, it's $3 trillion of value. Now, I'm the most fearful, whether it comes to companies and prize. processes for that. It's like, what don't we know? What are we missing? What am I the most excited about for us? AI in the long term will create the biggest productivity game of the last 7,500 years. I don't know if it'll be like electricity, but like it'll be pretty damn close.

That's really excited. People get too excited about, oh, we're going to go, like, build the next piece of workday, or we're going to go build better call center software. If you're going to see industries that we're not even thinking about, if they're thinking about what's going to be possible is going to happen. That's really exciting. It's going to be the age of entrepreneurship, people are going to build and build awesome businesses. What I worry about whether it's internally at Lead Edge or at our portfolio companies is do we have the right people in place so that we don't get disrupted? Because you constantly want to be, I joke, you want to hire a bunch of young people. The people worry about young people, but young people

aren't able to find jobs. It's like, you know, the young people are the ones going to figure out AI more than the 60-year-old or 55-year-old. And so it's, we actually rank. We take all over portfolio companies and we're saying, what's your AI readiness score? And then it's, okay, this company's like really high, this company's pretty low, huh? We should connect those entrepreneurs together to figure out what they're doing. What goes into that score? What's your data look like? Is it structured in a way that you're going to build leverage AI?

Are you iterating? How many of you AI products have you come out with? What's your AI revenues on new products? How much more product releases are you able to release? It's not, did your engineering comp stay flat or go down? I, for one, strongly believe that if you think in 2020, If your budget in 2024 for 2026, which have 150 software engineers, you should still have 150 software engineers because those software engineers can be exponentially more productive and they can then create more products that your sales team can then go sell. Who do you compete with?

We would be against Insight, FTV, JMI, battery, decimers where they do like bootstrap dish type stuff. Sometimes we compete against Meritech and IVP and Rockinship companies in Silicon Valley are freaking awesome. I was not going to pay 100 times reference for him. That's the problem right now. There's like too much money. Matt Kohler said it best. It's like they back these giant internet companies. When distribution was loose and capital was tight, it's like the first happened.

So capital is everywhere, but like four companies controlled distribution. So good luck going to build a giant internet company. And right now there's just too much money chasing, at least in solid and so I'm about it, do food very things. So decompose and expand on that a little bit. So I guess the question is your view on the state of markets and technology markets. in general. Overhyped, overfrothed, and I believe this AI CapEx bubble will end badly. It's like the telecom bubble all over again.

It will be very interesting if Apple may look like the really smart one at all this at the end of the day. We've seen them, but I think people are just going to overspend. I'm convinced that people invest in all these AI companies, all these D.Cs have to portray the view that software is going to be dead because they have to justify how much money they're going to spend. If you start to run these assumptions on like how much money is going into these companies, and what that means for how much earnings you have to drive

and what that means for like how much power you need to generate. It just doesn't work. Where are the nuclear power plants coming up and it just doesn't work? That presents the opportunity. That's when you're going to buy it. That's when you're going to buy these companies. The counter argument would be in telecom,

there was all dark fiber in AI. It's all burning GPUs. And yes, the capus is crazy, but everything still feels mega undersupplied. I'm just curious how you think about when the opportunities will present itself for an investor. Yeah, my fundamental belief.

is that the models will commoditize. And that companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon and Apple have a competitive cost advantage. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Google have more data to train a model than these new model companies will ever have. And then, oh, by the way, if you are all these Chinese models or European models, a bunch of these things cost a fraction of the cost to run, and you can run them locally, especially companies outside the U.S.,

like why would you pay that amount for OpenAI? tokens or Fantopic Dolvens, when you can just run Deepseek are one of these 10 models. I think we worried the most about modelization. I have no clue when this will stop. It will probably go longer than people think. In 99 and 2000, people also thought we were in a bubble. People think we're in a bubble now, and it will just stop. Is it one of these monster IPO is happening?

And it just doesn't go like people think it does. I think this anthropic round was kind of like an IPO. We're trying to hit doubles and triples. A lot of these companies we struggle with, they're either going to be 200 Xs or 100 or zeros. That's the struggle for us. What kind of company in the AI center of the heat map? I know you're probably not investing in any of them because of multiples or whatever. What kinds of companies are the most interesting to you just as an enthusiast?

I think it's fascinating some of the stuff that's being done in infrastructure software. And actually agents appear to consume more resources and actually people. Some of these consumption-based models, the growth of companies. By dumb luck, we were very early investors in Clickhouse, which is a database company. We were early investors in Grafana Labs, infrastructure company that competes with like data. I think dataducts went like high 20s, 30% a year at scale.

It's those types of companies I think we find super interesting. I find him fascinating. I really struggle with the violations, but the growth rates are like we've never seen it with very good economics. You see how much money a company like Click House has raised. What they've burned is very little compared to what you might otherwise think. What do you think is the most surprising thing about you? you have a good sense of you, how you operate persistence, enthusiasm, energy, process.

What do you think if I've spent 10 hours with you, I would be most surprised about? Probably how driven I am and how much I truly love what I do. And I just put my heart and soul into everything I do, whether it's like racing cars, which I race cars competitive, which I race cars competitive, of the national rank ski racer or all I will need. I probably sleep five hours a night, four hours, night. It's because I love what I do. I'm insanely competitive. If you spent 10 hours, it would be like, oh, my God, this guy is a lot.

the most persistent, competitive person I've ever met. Were you born that way? Yeah, I think it was born that way. Was it enhanced through formative early experience? Ski racing. Skiing growing up as a kid, went 100%. Can you make that tangible for us? Like, what was it like?

Process. Do these things and you'll get better. Do these things on video in a GS course and constantly analyze video and do these things the next run and change this. And you fell, get up and go do it 10 more times. I grew up on a ski hill with 500 feet. I mean, Lindsay Vaughn,

the best skiers in the world. She grew up skiing on 500 feet, Buck Hill in Minnesota. and doing laps from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. at night, just repetitive. Michaela Schifrin, who's one of the best female skiers in the world, views it as her time on snow is, like, limited. When you get off the chairlift, everything is a drill, constantly be trying to improve. I think that's it.

At lead edge, what you would find in me is constantly trying to improve. It would surprise me the most, actually, if you had to say, like, huh, you started the firm 15, 20 years ago. I think I've been able to recruit and maintain motivate and build a really good team. I mean, very good to pick really good partners that treat other people really well and that feed on itself.

Is there anything else from skiing? I'm not a skier, that you find visceral and helpful as an analogy for how to do things elsewhere other than reps and practice. Scott Booth, who ran Eastern, asked him why he hired me, and this was early 08.

You said to me, because when things get scary, you're going to want to buy. And I didn't know, what he meant, because he's like, you go to the hell at 80 miles an hour. This isn't scary. This is like nothing. You're like, you can make a decision that going down the hill at 80 miles an hour and what

to do and what not to do and not at the fall. In the fall of the way it happened, I was like, this isn't scary. Let's buy. It's eventually going to go up. Ski racing helped me really understand a very fine line and risk adjusted and risk return behavior. I just think being an athlete, whether you play basketball, whether you play hockey, whether you play golf, I think athletes just have a work athlete.

if you're trying to find it in young people and have a drive, there are athletes that have incredible athleticism, but also have incredible work ethic like Michael Jordan. Those are the best or the best. Then you have people like Steve Kerr, who are not very good athletically, but had a work ethic of Michael Jordan, they could be good.

But then you have wasted talent, which is like Zanis Robbins to the world where they were amazing athletes, but they like didn't have a drive. And I think the same can apply. to invest in. Why did you choose to start the firm? Because you were quite young when you did it.

How would you translate that experience into advice for someone listening that is thinking about starting a fund to decide whether or not they should do it? Do you want to be an entrepreneur? My board of Brian's like, you started a firm is because nobody was going to like hire your ass. And because you know what you couldn't work for anybody, I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to make a lot of money and be like really, really successful. It's always tripping me.

I always wanted to be solely focused on it. And if you wanted generate generational wealth or build something, you need to be an entrepreneur. Yes, if we build Blackstone, everybody who's here will make an insane amount of money because it was 90 people. One of my partners, Zach is very young. I mean, he's 30 years old, and he's a partner.

Because he joined here, and he took a bet when the farm was tiny. I just encourage people, if you want to do it your own way, there's no better time than now. What are you waiting for? I actually think it's easier to leave when you're 27, 25, Then when you're 45 and have three kids, I had nothing to lose.

If it failed, I was going to just go work against. I guess it works for the money. Once you made lots of money, do you still care? 100%. Why? Keep score every day. Because it's a score? Because it's a score?

Because I want to win. People like Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen are like mentors to LPs of ours. It's incredible how hard those people work. Now, again, maybe these are NF2 people, or if you look at some of these tech entrepreneurs, like in Elon Musk or Alex Carp from Pellantier or Matt Prince from Clubflare or like George Kurtz from CrowdStrike. These people are incredibly driven. hardworking people that live and breathe what they do.

And so, yeah, I mean, people keep score. It's not work for me. This is fun. I travel constantly to meet companies, to meet LPs, to meet entrepreneurs, to like meet bankers. And it's not work. It's fun. Until people I schedule and they like cry. I'm like, oh, it's not work.

It's fun. It's pretty amazing what you built. A very unique model, incredibly fun, willing your art to just walk us through it all. That's so much fun doing this. I know, do these interviews ask everyone the same closing question. What's the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? Pete Wilmot, he's passed away, was the former CEO of FedEx, and he was a Williams alum. I started a company in college, and he was the first person that ever believed me.

I was like 19 years old, and he became an investor with us, and the company completely failed. When I was trying to get my first jobs, and when he got my job at Bassamer, he was my reference, and he basically told the person they were insane if they didn't hire me, because I was the most persistent person he never met. So that's probably the kind of thing I was ever done. I learned so much today about building something unique. Thanks so much, your time. Cool. Thanks so much. I'm young. If you enjoyed this episode, visit colossus.com.

You'll find every episode of this podcast complete with hand-edited transcripts. You can also subscribe to Colossus, our quarterly print, digital, and private audio publication featuring in-depth profiles of the founders, investors, and companies that we admire most. Learn more at colossus.com slash subscribe. Your finance team isn't losing money on big mistakes. It's leaking through a thousand tiny decision. nobody's watching. Ramp puts guardrails on spending before it happens, real-time limits, automatic rules, zero firefighting. Try it at ramp.com slash invest. As your business grows, Vanta scales with you,

automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk. Learn more at vanta.com slash invest. Ridgeline is redefining asset management technology as a true partner, not just a software vendor. They've helped firms 5X in scale, enabling faster growth, smarter operations, competitive edge. Visit ridgelineapps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm. Every investment firm is unique and generic AI doesn't understand your process. Rogo does. It's an AI platform built specifically for Wall Street connected to your data,

understanding your process, and producing real outputs. Check them out at rogo.a.i slash invest. The best AI and software companies from open AI to cursor to perplexity, use WorkOS to become enterprise-ready overnight, not in months. Visit WorkOS.com to skip the unglom infrastructure work and focus on your product.