This Week in Startups - Ben Narasin on raising a new VC fund in a down market, + Natalie Barbu of Rella | E1515

Episode Date: July 23, 2022

Today, Jason and Molly speak with Ben Narasin of Tenacity VC about raising a new venture capital fund in the down market (1:30). Then, for this week's segment of OK Boomer, Producer Rachel sits down with Natalie Barbu of Rella (1:00:33). (0:00) Jason intros today’s show! (1:30) Jason and Molly speak with Ben Narasin of Tenacity VC (11:45) Masterworks - Skip the waitlist to invest in art using promo code TWIST at https://Masterworks.io/twist (13:07) How do you make a decision to sell a percent of your position? (26:59) Bubbles - Get your point across with unlimited screen and video recordings for free at https://usebubbles.com/twist  (29:06) Valuations, 2022 (39:39) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (40:47) Crypto is a speculator’s game (45:25) Are these tokens securities? (59:19) Producer Rachel tees up this week’s OK Boomer (1:00:33) OKB: Natalie Barbu of Rella 1:25:16 Outro + Plugs

Okay, everybody, we have a big Friday energy on this week and startups. Really, you can't get away from it. It's Big Ben Energy. That's right. Tenacity VC founder and GP Ben Narison is joining us for a world win interview about raising his fund in a down market. You might want to listen to this one at 0.75 speed because I talk fast, Ben talks even faster. And then, of course, another great edition of OK Boomer from producer Rachel to take you into your weekend. It's going to be a great show.

So stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Masterworks. Masterworks is the first company allowing investors exposure into the blue-chip artwork asset class. Twist listeners can skip the 30,000 person waitlist by going to masterworks.io and using promo code twist. Bubbles. Guess what? You don't have to be in back-to-back calls all day or get continually pulled into quicksinks. By using Bubbles A-Sync collaboration tool, you can remove a minimum of two meetings a week from your schedule.

Get your point across with unlimited screen and video recordings for free at usebubbles.com slash twist. And lemon.com. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget. Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.com. to get 15% off for the first four weeks. Hey, everybody, it's Friday, and we have a great interview for you today. Ben Narerson is here, and he's going to talk to us about raising his latest $50 million venture firm,

but doing it inside of a down market. Ben's been on the show before. We're friendly. We do investments together, and he comes to our accelerator in terms of his background. He's been at NEA, Canvas, and Triple Point Ventures, some great investments. in Dropcan, divvy cards, which we use, branch, which we use, Soul Savvy. Just great investor. And we were just chatting because Ben heard Molly and Ben meet Molly Wood.

I don't know if you guys have met before. Great to meet you. I think Ben, if you don't know Molly Wood from the CNET, New York Times and Marketplace, where you've been. But Ben was like, hey, I really like this VC Sunday school you're doing. I'm raising a fine. I was like, oh, would you come on and talk about it? because we too, we've done three launch funds and we'll be doing our launch fund for,

and I'm actually going to do it as a 506C, like a public raise. Ben, did you do a 506B or a 506C for your current raise, and let's just get right into it? Okay, so we ended up being a 506B. Interesting. So here's one of the things that happen with me that is a little funky for those of you that want to raise a fund. So when you raise a fund, you can't really talk about it except to the people you're pitching. So you do one-on-one pitches. So just like when I was doing my IPO road show, you can pitch investors, but you can't go out and like talk to the media.

Well, I like to talk to the media, a down on to CNBC, stuff like that. So as I was spinning out of NEA, I granted an exclusive to the Wall Street Journal. And so they did like a half a page story, which was awesome. But, you know, the thing was several of my friends, I had talked to a bunch of people that had spun out of N.A. and other places, and I fully expected the fundraising process to take a year or more. And one of my friends said to me, it was actually Dana Grayson, who has a great fund, who I've co-invested with, who was at NIA for a long time. And I knew even before I joined, said, hey, you know what, it's going to take a long time. Just go ahead and start pitching.

I'm like, but I don't have anything built. I don't have a lawyer. I don't have an accountant. I don't mean that. So, just use a deck. It's like, okay. So I started pitching. And 25 days later, I had commitments for half the fund.

So I was like, uh-oh, I guess I better get this done. And so I had to find lawyers and I had to find back office. Anyway, the point of all this was, to your question explicitly, I went to the lawyers and I was like, so are you going to be able to give me a clean opinion? Because the lawyers have to state that you appropriately followed the rules to be, I think it's a 506A maybe, in which case you're protected by the SEC as a private fund. And I was like, and they were like, well, why wouldn't we be able to give you a clean opinion? And I said, well, I did this like half page story in the Wall Street Journal. Like, oh, absolutely not. No, no opinion for you.

They said we literally wouldn't give somebody an opinion once because they updated their LinkedIn profile with the name of their new fund. And I was like, uh-oh, so what do I do? And they said, you have two choices. You can either do a six-month cooling off period. And I was like, well, I can not talk to the press for six months. No big deal. And they're like, no, no, no, no. You can't talk to anybody.

And I was like, okay, that's not going to work. I have half the fund lined up. I want to close it ASAP. I don't want anybody getting cold feet. Like, let's get this money in the bank. I mean, not really because, you know, capital call system. But anyway, they said, well, the other choices, this 506, I think it was B, I can't remember, maybe it was even C. They said, and the difference for this funding model was normally when you raise a fund and you only talk to high net worse and institutional LPs and everything else, they can represent that they can represent that.

Yes, they can self-represent that. Exactly. When you screw up and get the media that I did, then they can no longer self-represent. have to get an outside party to say that they are fill in the blank. So I did two things, though, which is a little more specific to how it's not, it's not what you're doing, but I raised the main fund. That's a classic LP based, you know, it's all QP minimum. Qualified purchasers, they have millions of dollars in net worth. Yes. They know what they're doing. They're even more sophisticated than accredited investors. Right. Credited, you have to have a million bucks. QP. I think you have to

have five. Yeah. Or you can, there's some, you know, things like you can get a VC to say you're super sophisticated item. Anyway, so the main fund is all of QP. It also means I can raise from a larger number of people within that spectrum. Yes. But I also wanted to be able to take capital from my early founders, my late founders who didn't

have liquidity yet and young people in venture. I have 36 BCs in my fund. And it's everything from general partners to founders of funds to associates. And associates not going to write a check for a million bucks. So I did what I called an affiliate fund. I basically carved out 10% of the fund and I ran it on Angel List and there, you know, accredited was the sort of limit and you could put in smaller amounts. So that allowed me to bring in a lot of folks.

Fantastic. What was your pitch to people if you were raising this after the market exploded in Q4? Yeah, it was a blend of timing. So, you know, originally I set out to raise 50 and I was going to be a total solo act. It was literally going to be the Ben show. And they were like, oh, what's the team like? And I'm like, well, there's me, it's myself. And there's I.

So we got a phenomenal three-person team that live inside this brain. But then I found a young guy, Taylor Oliver, who I'd known for a couple of years who approached me as many people did. Over time, he convinced me that he'd be a good fit. And he has a good fit. He's a really great guy. And so we reopened the fund to take some of the oversubscribed and some new people he had. So we took it up to 60.

And so that meant that even though the whole fund got raised in about three months, I then reopened it and have literally closed all the way through like, call it end a Q2 or something. So here's the interesting thing for me. So I have, you know, I have this deck. It is basically track record, examples, mindset, structure of the fun, blah, blah, blah. And I had a lot of LPs, one particularly, just really bugged me, but I won't mention them by name. And that would be like, so what's your focus?

I'm like, seed and precede everything before the series. Yeah, but categorically. I'm like, you know, I'll tell you what my focus is. Because here's the number one reason I believed I was able to raise this fund as quickly as I was. I've been doing this for 15 years. And I took that 15 year track record. I broke it into three year periods, which is a normal fund deployment. And I showed them returns.

First one was about a 14x fund. Next one was like a six and a half X fund. And a buddy of mine's like, oh my God, your track record is like top 1% for Cambridge. And I was like, really? So I did a Zoom with Cambridge. And I'm like, somebody told me my track record is top 1%. Is that true? And he looked down and he's like, well, I'd have to check all the advantages.

But it seems right to me. So when someone's like, why aren't you doing a focus, like, I don't know, fill in the blank, I don't know, plant-based birds. My answer is, I have a focus. I want to stay in the top 1%. Would that be good enough for you? Yeah. Anyway, the bottom line is focus funds have sucked for all time with the exception of crypto and fintech. All the other focus funds have underperformed generalist funds.

And that was something I learned from a 40-year NLP. That's a great rabbit hole that we should come back to. But I want to ask about like, obviously your, that track record is key here, right? Like, not everybody is going to go out and start raising and have the same experience. But I do want to ask you while we have you about this question of sort of measurement. Like, do LPs and GPs want to measure those results differently? Like, do you find that there are metrics that matter more to LPs than they might to, like, do you want to be super focused on, I don't know, moik, right?

Or like. Well, yeah. So that's a very good point. So I'm all about multiples, right? And the reason for this, and they're like, are they all about IRR? You know, that's what I guess I'm sort of wondering. Nobody gave me a hard time. So as an example, my fund, I don't know if I can be super explicit, but I will say I have

two bump levels where I get paid a premium of carry. If I hit certain multiples, right? Not certain IRAs. Now, when I was at N.EA and I invested in Divi, the company's now exited. So I think I can say this, you know, we exited for $2.5 billion. put in $80 million, I made the LPs 92% IRR. Great. But you know what? The multiple is like, eh. And here's the thing. The reason I focus on multiple is when I started doing this 15 years ago, I carved out a certain amount of money I was willing to lose. And anybody that's investing,

by the way, and I know, Jason, you've got a phenomenal and enormous syndicate. Like, if you're investing in this category, it is risk capital, right? You need to be able to lose it. Yes. You cannot be like the, so this house that I'm sitting in right now, I bought for cash. Yeah. Why? Why would I not take the world's cheapest money over the last 10 years? Because I know as an entrepreneur for 25 years, there's always a risk.

I'll do it again and bet the farm. And if I do and I'm wrong, I don't want anybody able to take my house away. Now, California taxes are so bad they probably would take my house away anyway because every year that's my biggest bill. But, you know, net net, I set aside a certain amount. I was willing to lose it. And I cared about how big it was at the end. Interesting.

You know how I said it was 14x, 6 and a half X, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's not the real number. I had N.E.A. do my back office, N.A.'s back office as a favor did the analysis of my returns. I remember how I said I broke it into three-year chunks? But the reality is I ran an evergreen fund. My actual returns on my evergreen fund where I put a certain amount of money in a box and locked it and said, I'm investing that and I'm willing to lose it. He's over 40x, of which 12x is realized. But there is a key point. LPs care a lot about realized. So my first fund was the exact number of fund, by the way, the first three-year period, 13.8 total value, 13.6 realized.

So it's not like, ooh, look at my markups, right? Here's the cash. Not paper money. Here's the cash. Yeah. I saw a quote that was like some LP, I don't know, they were probably espousing on Twitter or something. It's like, if you ran a fund over the last 10 years, the best bull that's ever existed on

the planet and you didn't return capital to your LPs, don't come talking to us, right? Because, you know, like, I don't care if you marked it up forever. If you never got liquid, like, dude, what was wrong with that? Okay, it's been a tough year for a lot of investors. Inflation at a 40-year high. Lots of asset classes are down from their pandemic peaks. And it's really hard to predict the future with all this uncertainty. Don't I know it? But I'm not sweating. I'm diversifying. Last year, I invested in a really interesting alternative asset class, fine art. And as you may know or may have read, Fine art is historically uncorrelated with the stock market.

Now, I'm no expert about art, but I do know about performance. And according to Masterworks, in the first six months of 2022, their $500 million art portfolio is up 12.4%. Whereas the S&P and NASDAQ are down more than 20% during the same period, and that's why I'm deciding on my next Masterworks investment. Right now, it's between a Jonas Wood, a friend of mine, a Warhol and a Picasso. Masterworks, if you don't know, securitizes these multi-million dollar paintings. then they let any investor like me buy shares in this legendary art category.

And I'm going to build a little portfolio here of a couple of different art pieces. I don't want to have this art in my house. I don't want to be responsible for it. But I do think it's an interesting investment and it's part of my blended portfolio. I've met the Masterworks founders and the team. They're awesome. And you should go check it out. Masterworks.com.I.O.

twist to get priority access. That's masterworks. com slash twist. Cut the line today. See important disclosures at Nasswerks.io slash disclaimer. It's your job as the manager of the fund to take opportunities to return capital. And so if you got all these markups and you had a chance to sell in secondary and you didn't,

oh my lord, that was a strategic mistake. It is tricky and it is hard. I will tell you a quick story. How do you make a decision about that? Like, okay, you have a secondary offer to sell 20% of your position. Do you take it or not? I really try not to sell. I've only done it twice.

And I'll tell you both stories very quickly. the one that's most recent. So when I went out to raise this fund, I decided I wanted to make a 10% GP commit. Now, I've done well. I'm assuming everybody understands what that means or, you know, basically 10% of the money in the fund is mine. I'm putting that money in alongside of my LPs. Right. So $60 million fund you're going to put in $6 million. Correct. And here's the thing. If I do this three times in a row, here's the way I think about it. I'm giving this thing 20 years. Three funds, three years to invest each of them and 10 years to harvest. That's 19 years. Okay. That's what I'm in for. I'm not going to retire. I got other stuff to do, but that's what I'm committing to my

LPs. Very few people ask me, but you know, at a certain age, they want to, you know, I just tell them. Like, yeah, I'm in for 20 years. That's it. Then I'm Forrest Basket and I'm okay, or I'm Bill Davido and I go do something or I'm, you know, Bill Draper who's got a charitable fund. Awesome. But, you know, 20 years is my number. Okay. So if I do three funds in a row at 10% GP commit, that is more than 50, a significant amount more actually than 50% of my liquid network. I did say liquid. I've got lots of great stocks that are private and who knows. But I was really uncomfortable with that, and I really wanted to get the number down to 50%. So I sold shares in a phenomenal company I invested in.

The company's last round went had gone off at the time at $1.2 billion. I got paid $2 billion. In a secondary, I thought I was big . Now, I knew I would regret it because it's an awesome entrepreneur, and I knew he would get it marked up. That company is now worth $11 billion, and it has been less than a year. So you missed the 5X. You missed the 5X. On top of the, yeah.

But my game is 40 to 100 X and I wanted, I was like, oh, I'll reinvest it. Did you sell the whole position or half? No, well, more than half, unfortunately. But, you know, I kept some. I love this founder and I want to stay involved. What's the name of the company? No, I can't do that. Oh, come on.

But it's, I mean, how many companies are worth $11 billion right now and it was a pretty recent round? So now, having said that, when a lending club, and this one I will name, was going public, there was a tender for the shares. And I was talking to Renaud, who was the CEO and founder. And I said, I don't really want to say, I want to own this stock. And he encouraged me to sell some.

He said, you know, just be good. It would be financially smart of you, blah, blah, blah. Okay. And I was like, eh, I don't want to sell. But then I had an opportunity to invest in a company. Now, remember how I said I had a certain amount I put aside? So I'm sitting with this entrepreneur, third or fourth meeting. I'm like, I'm in.

And here's the way I work when I was a direct personal investor. I will commit to you as soon as the round is done. So if I'm putting in 100 grand, you have my 100. if you need a million. When you have 900, you have my hundred. When you have 200, you don't have my hundred. But I'm good for it. I don't care. I have twice given people money six months later because of that promise when I knew I would lose it all. It was like, you definitely want me? Are you sure? Because I can make, you know, if you want to give it to somebody else, no, no, I want you. Right. Writing a check, literally going, I'm never going to see this money again. In both cases,

I was right. But I told him I was good for it. And that's the way life should work. It doesn't always work that way, but it works that way for me. Anyway, I'm saying this entrepreneur, blah, blah, blah, I want to invest. Here's how much I'm going to put in. Comes back a month or two later. Okay, we're ready. We're going to close. We need your 50 or 100.

Great. I actually, when I was a direct investor, closed by check. I like to celebrate. I like to sit with them, hand them the check. Usually write it there. Buy them a glass of wine, toast it. Shake hands and say, you know, awesome. Let's celebrate.

I mean, it's more money than I've paid for a car. You know, like it's a transaction of substance, man. Like, air. You need little celebrations along the way. And people, you know, you get a wire. You don't know where it came. from. What do you care? You just wake up. Oh, there's a wire in there. So anyway, I go to my check. I'm like, hmm, which I have two check accounts, two checking accounts for business.

So I was like, which account should I write it out? I'll use this one. Oh, there's not enough money in there. Uh-oh. All right. Well, I'll use this other one. Oh, there's not enough money in that one either. And this is when I learned about liquidity. I had all these awesome companies, none of which I wanted to sell and I was out owe cash to invest. So I did sell like 25% of my shares in Lending Club to refresh the capital

because I'm a recycler. I did not want to go dip into the other pocket. I did dip into their pocket temporarily but net net. That was the correct thing to do not just because after they pushed Renaud which is a tragic and idiotic mistake to make and those board members

really did a disservice to that company and I have friends that were those board members. Wait, which part was the tragic part? When they fired Renault. Oh, I mean, just, one of the worst, ugh, I had two companies.

Yeah, I didn't. There were two companies in my portfolio that were both worth $5 billion at a moment in time, Lending Club and Zenefits. And both the founders got fired. Terrible in both cases. I mean, Zenefits was a little harder,

but still, I think the board was complicit. And that guy, there's one guy that was, anyway. But here's the thing. Okay, I'll tell this story openly.

because I don't really care about the guys that stuck around. I care about Parker who funded it and he's just as unhappy. So Parker gets his company to a point where it's worth $5.5.5 billion. Five billion. I think it was $500 million invested on $4.5. They fire the guy. And I got, that company got bought within the last year and I got a check in the mail for my investments, which are typically like $50 to $100,000.

You know how much I made on my 50? a company that at one point was probably worth a thousand dollars back you got a thousand dollars back you got two percent one thousand two hundred seventy one and it said i was going to get two point four shares of their stock and then when i followed up they're like oh sorry that was a mistake oh really so do i get more no you get zero here's your twelve hundred dollars i had this pocket change and lent in my pocket and i was thinking why don't i throw it at you that's what it's worth here you go take that i mean unbelievable now having said that you know like in a perfect world if i'd it's sold at the $5 billion.

It would have been sweet, but I want to support my entrepreneurs. In this one case where I sold recent, I said, I'm a note, like, I'm really sorry I'm selling. I don't want you to take anything out of it. I need to start this fund. I need to anchor it. I need a 10%. And he's like, I'm just happy I could help you get the fund started. So, you know, by the way, Renault, crushing it right now with his new company, Upstart,

upgrade, which I'm in, investor in. What does upgrade do? Upgrade is another, it's like all the lessons he learned at Lending Club. It also does lending. They're at a $6 billion market cap right now. And Parker, he's got Rippling, which is just absolutely crushing it. Sorry? I like personal loans and that kind of stuff.

Yeah, yeah. And they use these cards to do it. So they also get some interchange. It's a very, very good business. In fact, my friends at KDT, Coke Disruptive Technologies did the round before this. And then a guy, it's funny, I went to meet one of the partners at DST, who I don't really know those guys well. But he goes to her to me. Yeah.

And he was like, oh, we did a round with Renault too. I was like, really? I never, no, like, did you do another round? He's like, oh, I forgot to tell you. I was like, oh, thanks for, you know, you just marked me up to $6 billion. That would be nice to know. It's fine. I don't know.

Good news can come late. I don't care how long it takes my entrepreneurs to give me good news. I want to give the bad news fast. Tell me in the audience what an evergreen fund is and why that's important. Okay. So this fund that I've raised, tenacity is not an evergreen fund. Tenacity is a traditional, you know, lifetime. So basically for those, here's the thing.

Evergreen funds are great. And the only one I know of that works is Sutter Hill, one of the best in the world. They're phenomenal. But I think more than half the money in Sutter Hill is from the partners. An evergreen fund, you just keep recycling the cash. So remember, for every dollar I put into a box, I now have $12 of cash and another $28 coming to me if those companies were all to get liquid at the prices they're currently at.

And that was before Renault got marked up and the company that went to $11 billion. So even better, right? So there's an enormous amount of power. The challenge is I didn't have to care about when liquidity came, right? Like, as long as, and look, I mean, I could die and hand it off to my air. But that's not how LPs work, right? LPs give me money. I invest it and they would like to get it back in a multiple.

At this size fund, you're not going to institutions. Do you have high net worth individuals, ventures? Oh, do you have any of the big endowments? And then how do they look at a small $60 million? fund. My experience was they were like, this fund's too small. We want to get to know you, Jake, how, but we need to write a $50 million check. And I was like, well, it's a $40 million fund. That's not possible. How did you do and did you pitch any of them? And what's their vibe right now? Yeah. So because of spinning out at N.A, they had offered to be helpful with LPs. We realized

that probably wasn't going to be that useful because, as you pointed out, much bigger checks. I did talk to some. What's their vibe right now? What's their temperature? right now. How do they feel about the economy? How do they feel about venture? Well, what they basically do is ask a lot of questions. So I'll give you an example. One of my institutional LPs is London-based. And I was in London. I'm on one of the Nat West boards. And I go there once a quarter and we were having breakfast or lunch or something. It's like, how's the market? And I was like, well, you know, he said, actually, no, he said, are you slowing down? I was like, look, a bunch of my LPs are asking me this, by the way, everybody wants

know how we're reacting, are we slowing down? I said, we're in the business of finding phenomenal. Very good isn't good enough, great isn't good enough. I need phenomenal. When we find phenomenal, we need to fund it. I don't need to worry about what the market. These are seven to 10 to 12 year journeys, okay? The market we exit in is not the market we're in now.

So I have to fund phenomenal when I find. I don't get to say, oh, Mr. Zuckerberg, I love this new thing you're doing with this social network. But would you mind waiting three months until the market crushes your soul and brings your valuation down so I can get a better deal? No, you got to fund the guy. So he said interestingly that on most of the cases where he was an LP, people were pencils down until January. Right. Which I'm stunned by. I've been hearing people saying, I was just at a conference where people were saying, oh, I'm hearing that VCs are taking the summer off. Like, it sounds like your, your deployment schedule is not changing. Okay. So they're taking the summer off. A friend of

mine, you know, so I've built. Nobody told Jason that we got the summer off. I'm just saying, no, no, no, this is a big summer. This is a hardworking group. Here's the thing. When you're a general partner at a tier one firm, so here's a, I built about 300 relationships across the tier one ecosystem. That was sort of half my job when I was running the equity practice for triple point. I had a buddy that was a young partner at one of these tier one firms and you said to me once, you know, I best my ass worked all summer. You know what I got out of it? I got to lose a perfectly good vacation. Because there's always some. Think about, look, I'm a tan guy, but there's always some old white guy that's off in.

I mean, literally the places they go, you know, it's like they're on a boat, you know, they're in, Khan, they're in, oh, where is it? One of my friends goes all the time, Santropay. You know, like, yeah, whatever, dude. I was just going to reconnect with the GP of one of the funds that is an investor in mine. I was like, hey, we shook up. He's like, oh, I'm pretty much spent on the summer in Europe. I was like, okay. Now, at Zoom, they can still work.

The problem with that is when you need to make a partner meeting decision and some key people, are not a way it makes it harder. So historically, venture folks have been lighter on the summer. It is harder to do a deal in the summer. I don't think that way. I look at it as, it's funny, we were doing prep work for this. We were doing the mic test and the audio and video and all this. And, you know, they mentioned, oh, you know, Jason, Molly would like to do something

for Venture Sunday school. I was like, oh, great. No problem. I'm out of town for Comic-Con on Saturday. I'll be back on Sunday. Like, oh, no, no, don't be recorded. You were ready. Yeah, you were ready for a Sunday.

I like it. I mean, that's how you have to be if you want to win in our business. Yeah. I have no other life, right? I have my family and my founders and entrepreneurship. That's it. You're done. Now, I do like poker.

Well, you do like the wine. You do have a passion for some of those dessert ones. I just walk downstairs and get that. The thing is, I don't care about any sport. I don't care about music. I don't care about celebrity. Like, none of that stuff's interesting to me. I mean, I like to play a poker game, but not at your stakes, Jason.

You play too high for me. You know what? I'm starting a small stakes game. I want to start like a $500, $1,000, $1,000, buying game because I got so many friends who want to play like something reasonable. Yeah, we'll keep it at 500. Let's not bump it up to a thousand. Let's keep it at 500.

You know, I could play a thousand dollar buy in game once. It's not that I can't afford it. It's that it frustrates me so much. That's what we want to see. We want to tilt you at the game, Ben. We want to tilt you. Then you lose more money.

That's the whole strategy here. It's getting you to play a little bit above what you're comfortable for. Then it negatively impacts your game. Well, that's why I don't do it. I played once. And I think it was like, everybody was like, you know what I changed my mind? All the people who are emailing me, can you get me into J-Cal's poker game? We're just like, never mind.

Never mind. It's all. I know that it'll play that high. But the thing is, if I lose $1,000 I leave immediately and it will bug me. It's funny. One of the things that made me know Taylor was the right fit. You rage quit? No, I lost my money.

That's it. That was my stake. That's called a rage quit in the business. You got to come back and get that thousand bucks. You remember my box with the money in it for investing? Yeah. My box for poker is the same. This is how much I'm willing to pick suppose.

Got it. So one of the reasons I knew Taylor, was the right fit for me. We were playing pickleball with an LP down in Costa Rica. How like totally old school ventures that. So, oh, it's down in Costa Rica playing pickleball with my LP. Anyway, we lost. And he's like, man, I hate to

lose so much more than I like to win. That is me definitively. I lose a thousand bucks. It will bug me for a month. I've win a thousand dollars. Two days later, I don't remember it. Remote work promises more flexibility, more time back, and Max Freedom. We all know that, and we love

it. But in reality, We're more overwhelmed than ever. You know what I'm talking about, endless meetings, nonstop messaging, pack schedules. So let me introduce you to a tool that I am using with my team and a lot of founders are starting to use to pitch me. It's called Bubbles. It's an asynchronous collaboration tool

that allows you to do teamwork on your own time. Bubbles helps you get your point across. The product creates a 3D conversation, on-screen audio and video recording. So you can walk through a beautiful demo of your site and send it to me as an investor. Or, if you're a designer, you could show your latest designs to your founder.

And then everybody can reply to specific moments in time during your walkthrough. So maybe you show me 10 features of your product. I have questions about two moments. I pin a question. I kid you not, to that moment in your demo. Then you reply, and we have a little conversation thread there. It's a really slick product,

and I've taken multiple meetings now using bubbles. You know, when you have these like standing meetings, hey, we got to talk about the design of the website. Oh, we're going to talk about the SEO. Oh, we got to talk about ourselves progress. Why not record a bubble, send it to your team, and then people will respond if they need to, or they'll just be super informed.

And you know what's a really cool feature? You can put it at 2x speed. So people talk too slow for me. I'm like, talk faster. I'm getting this information. I want you to go 2X, just like in a podcast. Bubbles is free, and it offers unlimited recordings. The ability to record straight from your web browser.

No apps or downloads are required, and one-click sharing. was built for remote workers by remote workers, and that's why it works so well. And in a recent survey, 90% of their users said bubbles helps them make better decisions. I totally believe that, because it's helped me make better decisions. It's free. So all I want you to do is try it. And if you want to pitch me your startup or your product or service using Bubbles, just email your bubble to Jason at Callicannis.com.

The product is free to start using. Just head to use bubbles.com slash twist. And again, if you email me your pitch, I'll listen to it using Bubbles and I'll post a comment or two. Let me ask you a question. Valuations 2022. Summer 22. Coming down, man. Coming down finally for me. Keep going.

I mean, think of it as like a waterfall. Public markets came down and the late stage guys got crushed immediately. I mean, they're in the news all the time. They're probably fighting for their lives. I mean, you know who they are. And they've been pencils down since January of this year. And, you know, like they're just, you can't be the last person in before the IPO. And then go into this Malstrom and think, oh, it's okay.

Let's do business as usual. So late stage guys got crushed. And then it came down to the C's and then the B's and then the A's and finally these seeds. However, the spread between what investors believe is fair and what entrepreneurs believe is fair is not quite there yet. Even though I will not do this, I did turn to Taylor at one point after a particular difficult discussion with an entrepreneur and say, maybe we should just take three months off to your point.

I'm like, because why don't we let the market beat them up? They're going to get beat up. Why should we be the ones? Like, you know, this is an entrepreneur that had raised like a 60 cap on no revenue. She had a really interesting business, but literally nothing yet. And I was like, you know, it really feels like a 10 to 20. And I would pay 20. But she's like, well, you know, I just raised on 60, six months ago.

I'm like, yeah, you raised in the blazing heat of summer. And this is the worst winter we've ever seen. It's like tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and fires. So, you know, go crazy. Try to plant your crops now. But I don't need to be that guy because eventually she'll figure that out. And then I'm the nice guy when I offer 20 when the reality is her business. should be going off at 10. So, you know, I think it's starting to get there. A lot of, the number one thing,

the two things I will tell you, and you know some of this already, one, a lot of reopening of prior rounds. And in some cases, I'm encouraging my entrepreneurs to do that so they can shore up the balance sheet a little bit. One thing I do say to my interest is, look, it does not matter how much runway you extend if you don't get the plane off the ground. Nobody's funding you because you survived. I don't, you know, now there's a counter to that. But net, net, it is a. like, oh, we made it through the hard times and we still have a mediocre business, right? They're still going to need growth. But that Scott Sandell, who runs N-A and who is on my board of advisors said, nobody is funding

anything that needs another round after them. Nobody's funding anything that needs a round. Go back to that. So this next round, so get you to break even. I know. Like, okay, not seed, though, right? No, seed has no choice. I mean, we're in the experiment business.

We give you enough money to go into the old. have and run an experiment. If the rabbit dies, nobody cares about you. If the rabbit mutates into super rabbit, lots of people care about you. But for a series ABC investor, they, you know this, they used to be able to say, well, we'll put it in $10 million, and then they'll spend $18 months, then they'll raise $18, and then they'll raise $100. Now it's like, we'll put it in $10 million, but you better be profitable at the end of it. Now, they're not going to actually want them to be profitable. They're going to want them to have that option, because having to raise and wanting to raise are very different. As I said to my entrepreneur, one of my entrepreneurs is crushing. He's like,

well, we don't have to raise. I'm like, I know you don't have to. But you don't drink when you're thirsty. You drink when water is available. Think like a camel, not like a horse. Like, if it's there, drink it, get it, put it in the bank. Okay, let's not screw around. Let's put the money in the bank and keep going. So I believe that people want to see you have a path to a place where you don't have to raise, but you can raise opportunistically if you would like to. interesting. I wonder how do you think about there's been this long, long, long, long bowl market, funds have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. You raised a nice size fund here. Like, there's been this kind of increasing conversation about how these mega funds maybe just can't,

right, you're seeing them start to go a little more public in their portfolios because getting the returns that they need to is harder and harder. Like, do you think that this, whatever it is, crash, recession, slow down, winter, pick your, pick your, pick your, word here is going to nuclear winter. Yeah, that. Is that going to continue to argue for smaller funds? Well, personally, I think smaller funds have

always been the right way to go. Who are the two best funds in the world? Who are the two best funds in the world? Sequoia has done pretty well and then Fred Wilson has done really well and benchmark, yeah. Okay, fine. You can I wouldn't want to throw Fred in there, but I will.

What do they all share? They're all basically sort of 400 million or less funds. Yeah, the venture funds. Now, obviously, Sequo's got China and India, whatever, whatever, you know, they've got a public, you got a we manage your money for you. The funds themselves are tight and small, 400 million. On 400 million, so interestingly,

we went through this math a lot. When Taylor joined, you know, took him a lot of requests and we spent a lot of time. My answer was no quite a few times, but he is tenacious, name of the firm, tenacity venture capital, right? He really wanted me to raise more money. And I'm like, you know, I don't know if I want to. I just want a 10x fund.

And it'd be harder to do that on a bigger fund. So why don't we just keep it where it is? And, you know, he convinced me because what he pointed out was, Ben, you realize we have invested, you know, in nine companies and, you know, seven months. And we're already deploying a third of the fund. Like, we're way ahead of pace. I'm like, oh, you're right. But before I agreed, I reached out to one of these white shoe LPs, one of these classic

famous LPs everybody wants based out of. Boston associated with a school in Boston, who is not in my fund yet. But I'm very positively inclined to see him come in for fund two, maybe fund three. It's an investment in the future. And we can talk about the realities because, you know, the opportunity fund and the, you know, SPVs, that's how we get to your question on, but they can't put enough money in. Anyway, I called him and said, look, you're not in my fund. So I want to, I know I'll get a straight answer here.

I got this new guy. He wants to raise more money. I was thinking about reopening the fund adding some more money. How would that feel? He said, oh, that makes total sense. You got more capacity, blah, blah, blah. I said, okay, now, let's say three years from now, I don't like the market. Let's say things change.

Let's say there are no more Zuckerberg. I don't know. All the entrepreneurs stink. And I've got a phenomenal portfolio of companies and I don't want to dilute it with a bunch of garbage. How would you feel if I gave you that money back? Would you be upset because you've allocated me money and now I'm not using it? He's like, no, it's only happened once or twice before, but I think your LPs would appreciate it because it shows you're being realistic and reaction to the market and blah, blah, blah.

I was like, great. And because he said that, I was willing to raise more. But I wanted the escape hatch of not having to deploy it. Now, realistically, it probably means I can run the fund longer. I can be opportunistic, et cetera, et cetera. We're a one and done fund. We don't reserve. So it's a totally different structure than most people.

Oh, interesting. You know, I'm in and I'm done. I will do SPVs, but I'm not re-uping. I don't have like, I think Jason, you were talking about something in one of your podcast where you know, you have like 20% reserve for your biggest movers. I have SPVs reserved for my biggest movers, but I're not putting more money in. So, you know, I think larger funds, I've always believed that for the most part, larger funds are a function of greed for fees. And I don't care about fees because they're a loan against future performance.

In essence, you're getting them back. You give me a million bucks today and whatever, 100,000, it gets burned up in fees. I still have to give you a million dollars back before I get carried, which means you are loaning me money against my future performance. The only time a VC gets to keep the fees is if they lose. money, right? So that's a double whammy of bad. Interesting, yeah. But it's like a draw against commission. I mean, yes, I need to run the fund. Yes, I want the money, but I'd do a zero and 50 fund in a heartbeat. I want the upside, baby. That's where the real money is. And it's also capital gains, not ordinary income. So I think bigger funds, bigger fees, it gets, eh. And then, you know,

it is just so hard to grow a venture fund. Yeah. Because it is not, you know, you can't just add head count. It takes forever. Getting a job and venture is the most Sisyphian experience in the world. And at the end of the day, you know, I was talking like half a dozen funds when I spent on a triple point. A lot of these funds came to call. And one of them, you know, I'd gotten an offer from somebody else, but I preferred this other fun. I went back to it. It's been a year. And he said, Ben, you're number one on our list. I'm like, it's been a year, dude. Like just, you know, fish or cut bait, man. But they know they're going to spend 10 years with you and they need to make sure it's right. So, you know, it's tough. I've seen funds push out a top performer. And I talked to

the guy that ran the fund. And I was like, how do you do that? Dude, he was like so much of your returns. He's like, you know, life's too short. You can't live with them. And I was like, oh, okay, now that guy got outed for some Me Too thing and it was really bad and his new fund sort of fell apart. So, you know, I guess they saw the writing on the wall. But it's, it's tricky. It's a tight-knit group that you spend a lot of time with, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, you can expand it by, I think Sequoia's mindset has always been, we will make the decision when the decision is right irrespective of stage. They're phenomenal and intelligent investors, highly logical.

And so if they want to buy stock in the public market, the reality of these funds converting to RIAs is a bucket of things. It's called bad bucket. Bad bucket is this concept that you as a private fund cannot deploy more than I think it's 20% of your capital into things that are qualified as bad bucket. Public stocks, common shares, secondaries, stuff like that. like that, crypto. So guess what? When you're Andresen and you're putting all this money into tokens, your bad bucket right off the bat is blown out. You have no choice but to be an IRAA. And if you want to

buy and support the public stocks and the companies you're still on the board up, although there's some tricks. You know, like that could be hard. Once again, same thing. So you've got to change your form and that's why these people flood into RIAs and become a whole new thing. And it's just structurally Annie A phenomenal shop. I love it, love it, love. It's the best firm in the world in my opinion. And, you know, yes, if I had to put LP money in, Sequoia and benchmark are the place for me to go if I got it. But, you know, in terms of the culture and the longevity and the trust and the support of the entrepreneurs, you just can't do better than the day. You know, but like the MedTech team, which I love because they're super smart and they make me money and I don't know anything about MedTech's, one of the two categories I don't invest in. You know, like, they do, right?

Yeah. That's part of what they do because med publics. Did you participate in any of these tokens? Did you buy any of these tokens? No, no, no. Well, you got offered these tokens. I made my first blockchain investment in 2016 in a company I thought was going to be AWS for blockchain. Now, in the end, it wasn't Ethereum and therefore I didn't get my result.

However, the entrepreneur raised almost all her money in Bitcoin, so the company's still worth like 20X what it was when I invested in even though it didn't work. Fascinating. We'll see if we ever get liquid. Let me tell you a quick story. Drew Fabricant is the launch portfolio founder. and he runs a company called Scout. It's a lead gen platform. He's super talented,

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and running within a week. And of course it's more affordable. So go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off your first four weeks. That's 15% off your first four weeks at lemon.io slash twist. I've always believed this entire category so far is a speculators game. Speculators game. Why? Yeah, I am not a speculator. I'm an investor. Speculation is a type of investing, I guess. Explain the difference to you. Well, okay. So whether you're a Warren Buffett style investor

or a momentum style investor in public stocks, you're buying equities, you're researching the companies, you're making a decision, you're going along, or short. Okay. When you're trading corn, or oil or gold, you are speculating on price movements in one direction or the other. That is not what I do. It's usually highly leveraged. And the same thing here. Like most of this stuff is, you know, obviously if I had started buying up everything that came out in 2016, I could have been wrong in an enormous amount of the time and

still made a butt ton of money. But it's not how I think or act. Like, you know, I've been told we do seed with the diligence of a series A. I would actually argue we do more diligence than some people do in their series 8. We had a company, we were on the 10th diligence call when we heard a disastrous piece of news. It was like nine great calls,

but the 10th one was just as bad as it gets. And so then we did a background check and we found it all this bad stuff and was like, geez, you know how few venture firms even do background checks? Yeah. It's rare. Why do they do that?

Why do they not do diligence anymore? Why are people suspending disbelief here and not doing diligence? Because they're lazy. They're doing it now. They're back to doing it now. Here's the thing. People didn't have a choice. If you found the deal you thought was the hot, sizzily next thing, the market was there alongside

of you. You either had to make a choice fast or you were out. So the market dictated there wasn't an opportunity to do diligence. It was like buying houses with no contingency. Well, Tiger, sorry, not Tiger. Yeah. No, Tiger's argument was always, we do our diligence in advance. They say they are Baines number one client and that they do the work by going to the customers

of the companies that are interested in before they ever meet the company. So in theory, their argument is we've done our diligence before we show up so we can act fast. Look, everybody wanted a correction as an investor as a buyer. Nobody wanted it as a seller. But as a buyer, you want more time to make a better, more logical decision because Because, first of all, nobody wants to look stupid. It's pretty rare for extremely bad things to show up later, but it's happened. There's been some bad fraud.

There's been some discovery of some very inappropriate behavior by entrepreneurs in their youth. There's stuff that's like headline making bad. And you don't look great when you didn't figure that out. Now, I would argue in some, there's one I'm thinking of, which I'm not going to mention because I was talking to the guy that did it. And I was telling him the story of the 10 and then the background check. And I said, I just don't want one of and I mentioned his company. He's like, Ben, you know that wasn't discoverable.

I'm like, I do know that, but I still want to try to avoid it. You know, it was like some tragic, horrible thing from the person's youth that would not even be disclosable if the law is, you know, like it's just can't juvenile activity. You can't find out about it. Anyway, so now people want to spend the more time. To me, diligence, yes, there's traditional diligence, but it's mainly about spending more time with the founder and their team and figuring stuff out. And so people used to ask me about this in the bubble days, in the, in the, in the, you know, know, then the big bowl. And I said, how do you get the time?

I said, look, the bottom line is you have to have the time. I cannot make a decision in a meeting. I don't care how exciting it is. It's going to take me at least three. And if that means that I meet you on Friday and you're going to go to see some fancy partnership, Raylock, Sequoia on Monday, I got to find a way to spend the weekend with you, right? Because that's how I'm going to get the time to make the decision, because if I let you go to those places on Monday, they're going to out bid me and overpay and they're not going to

as much value anyway. I'm talking about seed. Obviously, they're phenomenal. I love Greylock. I love Sequoia. But like we wanted, supposedly, I was told, we want to deal away from Excel benchmark and Sequoia. Now, someone might say, well, how would you do that? Those are great brands. But who's going to put in more time? Who's going to be there? Who's going to help? Who's going to show up? Right? You really think a partner of a traditional venture firm that does a seed deal

and then does a $40 million B is going to spend material time with you? No way in heck. Come on. That ain't happening. So, in fact, that's one of the reasons it just doesn't make sense to do seed in venture. Venture in seed just up and down and up and I've to watch this stuff for 15 years. We don't care. Oh, we got to get into it. Oh, it's not working. Oh, let's do it a different way. Oh, it's still not working. Oh, it's, you know, the number of times that venture firms of quality have gotten into and out of seed, it's just, it's ridiculous. Fascinating. Are these tokens that people are selling in your mind, securities? You know, I don't have a good point of view because I've sort of consciously decided I don't know enough.

And therefore, here's a, here's a, I will answer this in the following way. You remember when ICOs were hot? Yes. Well, I didn't believe what I said to every, so I'd hear a hundred pitches for ICOs. And they'd all start with, hey, man, you got to be really careful in this space, 60% of steps to scam. But we're not. Let me tell you about us.

And I'm like, I met a hundred of you. I'm not that brilliant advanced math, but I'm going to go with more than one of you as a scam on the whole 60% thing. So I had to call my PhD and math friends do the math for me, but he tells me if I met 100 of you and 60% of you are scammers, that at least 60 of you are scammers. So, why are you not? So first of all, I don't know if you are or not.

So I was at any age the time, I went to one of my friends there, Rick Yang, who's awesome, does FinTech. And I was like, you know, I think if we're going to seriously consider doing any investing in ICOs, which we did not, I should take a six-month leave of absence and do one myself. Because that is the only way I will really know where the bodies are buried. and who the whales are and how it all works. And without doing it all the way from zero to live, I'm never going to know.

And, you know, I decided not to do that. I didn't think it was a good use of my time because it wasn't a category I was going to focus on because what I said to every entrepreneur was, you know what? You're too young to know what the pink sheets are, but I'm not. There used to be the regular stock market and then the penny stocks. And the penny stocks were not listed in the newspaper where normal stocks were listed or on some digital thing, they were literally printed on pink paper in the morning and sent to brokerage firms.

Once a day, they traded by appointments. That's what your ICO is going to look like a year from now. Nobody's going to care. Nobody's going to remember. You're not going to have any coverage. I didn't come any public. All you can care about was who's going to cover you? How are you getting analyst coverage?

Who's going to remember your ICO? Nobody. If you don't have a product and you wrote a white paper, that's really not enough, I think, to get venture investors to buy equity in a company. But it might be enough to get. a global group of, you know, a couple of million speculators who have been pumping and dumping and dumping other coins to participate in this casino. But, you know, they all failed. And now we see insider trading today, some Coinbase employees got dating differently. So you just hit on the perfect analogy. I say speculator versus traditional investor. Yeah. But the reality is it's roulette versus poker.

Yeah. Right. You and I play poker both as a card game as an investors. As a CECD. As a CECD. Feed investor, when I walk up to the table, I want to see aces or kings, sometimes queens. Maybe Ace King suited. That's what I'm betting on. I am handicapping entrepreneurs without ever having seen them run a race. Like, I'm a handicapper. And I've said this to entrepreneurs before when it didn't work out, I'm like, dude, when I backed you, pocket queens, solid. I thought it was worth taking a shot.

But guess what the flop was, right? Ace, King, two, two spades, and both your cards are red. Okay, we're not winning. Okay, it doesn't, you know, like your queens are dead. Sorry, dude. Yeah. I mean, maybe he has a, you know, whatever, you know, whatever.

You know, that's the game we're in. You know, professional poker players exist because poker is a game of skill. It is a mix every hand of skill and luck. You cannot go against luck, you know, whatever. Moneymaker hitting a one outer and winning the, this. series because of it, but you will consistently do better by playing the right odds and playing the right player, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Rulette, there's no skill. And this is a roulette wheel with 10,000 numbers on it and 75 blacks, sorry, 75, whatever the color, what is it, black and red,

is it green? Whatever the one that you don't win no matter what. Two greens, yeah, there's two greens. Yeah. So this is like, but 75 greens. So it's just a bad, it's just, it's a different kind bet. It's like, okay, you know, my son likes to do some of it, but, you know, he's learning. It's like literally playing at the roulette wheel. There's no skill involved. You're just spending time watching a ball bounce around and hoping you hit your number. What do you think about this? Ooh, it was red last time. I better bet black. It doesn't work that way, man. Sorry, go ahead, no, I am hesitant to open this can of worms. But I have this theory that of course species. Let's go. Well, I have this theory that of course species want.

to be involved in crypto projects, that involve a token because in theory, if it works, you get paid twice. You get an early allocation of these tokens at a really low price. You have your investment, which isn't liquid for some period of time. You have your tokens that have a lockup period that's still probably shorter than the overall life of your investment. So you can reap liquidity, again, assuming success and get paid twice. So I sort of feel like I can kind of understand why you would go hard on that if you thought you could make it own work. I don't know anybody that is Tier 1 that's playing in the game. Right.

So I've just consciously, every once in a while we hear an interesting pitch, but here's one of my top rules. If I don't know what I don't know, I can't touch it. You know, it's like you tell me there's a dark room in there and there's a cat of some sort internet. If I go in, I could either make a million dollars or lose whatever I invest. But you won't tell me if it's a house cat or a leopard. Like, yeah, that's not okay. I'm not doing that.

And that's how I feel about the token economy and everything else. So I've just, we always say we'll do anything tech before the series A except MedTech and security. I'm tempted to just add, you know, the whole token ecosystem. Because, you know, I did say to Taylor, hey, if you want to make this happy your life and spend all your time on it and learn everything about it, I'm more than happy for you to do that. Mike Maples was telling us a story once like one of his young guys that came in and told him they owned something, some token or something. He's like, oh, that's great. And he's like, yeah, it's worth $252 million now. It's like, oh, I guess I should pay attention.

So, Mike has some smart guy that figured it out. Good for him. I have a smart guy who hasn't decided to care, and I've only got one smart guy, so it's not like I can go out to the team and say, who wants to raise their hand? So, you know, I think it's sort of like, remember the old days of the famous money manager who was like stick to your knitting being the number one thing for companies that succeed versus companies that fail and how too much diversification and blah, blah, blah. You know, so I mean, Jeff Imelt, ex-C-O-Gs on my board as well.

And, you know, he's told me some stories about, you know, GE, G Capital. It gets really weird when you get too far out over your skis in areas that maybe, you know, I have a friend that they ran a spirits business. Then they bought a movie theater company. It's like, anyway, in the end, it didn't work out. I was like, well, I had to be hard, you know, because you didn't know what you're doing. It's like, oh, we're really good at it. And I was like, but were you? Because your merger was one of the worst that's been ever recorded.

So, hmm, how did that go? Anyway, this is where it is. It's not something I'm going to attack if people are listening and are wanting to pitch. By the way, it's pitch dash bend.com. I'll take any pitch from anywhere in the world or any point. But, you know, probably don't bother to pitch me a token. Yeah, probably not a great idea. For me, you know, I assess startups and we'll end on this.

Just the assessment of startup ideas for me is really a lot about, hey, the founder, the product, and the customers. And when I met crypto people, I did find some very impressive founders and team. but they didn't have products and they didn't have customers. And so that made it a non-starter for me because I need to see all three of those things, or at least two, to kind of get an idea of the bet I'm placing.

It would be like making a bet on two cards without looking at either card. If this was a three-card game, there is a version of poker where you get three cards and you toss one and hold them. Yeah, that's a pineapple. Crazy pineapple. Right.

So, you know, like it's almost like a pineapple hand. Like I need to see all three cards. I need to know what I'm dealing with here. Okay, I'll take two hours. You know the analogy? It's like a live straddle. I've got no cards, but I'm going to double the bet. I've got no information at all, but I'm going to go ahead and throw in more money than anybody else.

I just want more action. So how do you assess startups? What is your model? What is your model for assessing a startup bet? How do you make your bets and you've made some great ones? So I'd say there's, you know, I have two pithy sayings. One is I need five things to make an investment. I'm sure I've said this to you before.

People, people, people, a great idea and a huge market if it works. Got it. are number one, but I need great ideas. I do not invest in super smart people hoping they will pivot. I've made that mistake three times. I invested in people I thought were phenomenal with mediocre ideas. In each case, I told them, you're awesome. I'm not a fan of this idea, but I think you're smart enough to figure out it's not the right

answer and you'll probably change. And then in one case, they changed and it grew to like 50 million of revenue and sold for the debt and I lost all my money. In another case, they came back to me and said, you were right. It's not a great idea. So we're going to give you back 50 cents on the dollar. I was like, wait, what? What? Do you know? Like, my whole conversation was, I don't like this idea. I like you, go figure something else out. And they said, okay, we'll try. And they came back and said, we couldn't find anything else. Here's your 50 cents. I was like, that's just a bad deal. So also the other pithy thing, you know, when people say, what's your, you know, what do you look for? What do you focus on? I focus on finding founders that make me say, wow. I have found that my best business investments in startup land are almost entirely visceral.

reactions. I'm not a thesis better. I'm not like, oh, let me think about what the world will look like. Now, in fairness, during COVID, since, you know, investors were quote unquote, whatever that term was that may you could go into the office. For the first year of COVID, I was in the NA office. This is pretty much just me. And I had three newspaper subscriptions. I was cutting out everything like, oh, that's predictive. Look, you know, they can't grow trees anymore. That's interesting. So, but having said that, I'm like, I'm a quantity leads to quality guy. I used to tell people we see 1,000 pitches a year and I fund 7 to 10.

Then with Zoom, I started to say, you know, we see more like 1,000 to 2,000 pitches a year and we'll probably fund 10 to 12. And then I was saying that to a potential LP a couple weeks ago and Taylor interrupted me and my partner and said, Ben, you know, you're wrong. I said, really? I've got to be right that we see at least 2,000 is like, no, no, no, it's not that. He said last week, I saw 274 pitches. of which we followed up with two and didn't fund either.

So the reality is the explosion of demo days, the explosion of Zoom and every other flipping product. I had a meeting with Amazon and it had to, what is there, internal product of like, chime or something? Yeah. Not good. That's terrible. Anyway, sorry, Amazon.

AWS is great. Amazon is great. Chime. Not so much. It's an internal tool. Don't ever use it outside. Anyway, my point is like, I'm, you know, so I was a professional food and wine writer and spirits writer.

and I would go to a wine tasting and they'd have like 100 wines lined up. In a perfect world, they're just lined up and the journalist gets to do it themselves. In an imperfect world, you have to stop at every table, listen to their story, have them pour for you really slowly. I'm like, you know, come on, man, I don't care about your story until I taste your wine. You can spend it out, oh, we drop a lot of fruit and it's deep volcanic soil and I taste and I don't like it. I'm out. You can say nothing and I like it. I want to hear your story.

So it's the same sort of thing. Taste, taste, taste, taste, taste. Ooh, this is interesting. thing, right? So I'm a constant taster until I find something I want to drink. And then I want to dig in really, really deep and learn as much as I can and make that decision. So, you know, and I don't care about category.

You know, one of the first companies I funded is a plant-based tuna called Current Foods. It's awesome. I saw so many alternative protein companies at any end. And then in every case, like one of my partners said, hey, will you help work on this deal? They know I'm a foodie and I have this background in food, wine, running, and all this stuff. it's plant-based bacon. I said, well, let's go taste it.

Because literally nothing matters until I taste it. Drive to San Francisco, go to this little place. They bring out their bacon. Bacon, they cook it in oil. I was like, wait, no. Well, people cook bacon. I'm like, I've been cooking bacon for a long time. I've probably got 40 pounds of bacon in my freezer.

I'm pretty sure I've never cooked in oil because it's the number one producer of oil on the planet. Anyway, we tasted it. I was like, eh, tastes like toast soaked in oil. We leave and the guy's like, I don't know, I thought it was pretty good. I'm like, that's because you're kosher and you've never had real bacon. A real bacon eater will think that's not interesting. You think it's good. How many of you are there in the world?

Are we focused on kosher non-bacon eaters? No. Right? Anyway, so I had this tuna and I was like, oh, my God, is that good? In fact, it was so good. It's in sushi preparations. They also do a smoked salmon now. It was so good.

I offered it. I did all my work, a meeting, meeting, dig, dig, dig. I offered him money. And I'd already made the offer and I realized, wait a minute, what if it's not plant-based? What if it's actually tuna? Right? Like, I'm trusting, but suspicious.

So I was like, oh, I mean, it's a third-nose moment. It's a third-nose moment. What if I made a hamburger for you, told you it was plant-based, but I bought the meat at Costco. How would you know? So the last thing I said to the entrepreneur was,

hey, man, this is great. I'm ready to go. I'm getting ready for the clothes and everything. I just, can we just do one more? I just really want to do a factory tour. I want to understand how this works. And we did. I was like, great, here's the money.

Because I was like, I just want to know. Trust but verify. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you've got to do your diligence. Listen, this has been a great hour with Ben. Everybody knows how to pitch Ben. It is pitch dash Ben. Is that right?

Yep, www. Pitch-h-bend.com. There you go. Go pitch, Ben. All right, Ben. Let's get a meal on the books. And let's get a deal going here. Congratulations on Newfound.

Thanks for sharing. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye bye. Bye, bye. Okay, Rachel, it is your turn to shine. Who do you got for OK Boomer on this Friday? So this week I had Natalie Barbou on. She is a lifestyle influencer turned founder with over 12 million views on YouTube.

Her startup is called RELA. And she would actually be a perfect use case for Rela because it's a digital workspace for creators and helps manage the entire pipeline of their businesses. in one place. So it's kind of like notion, but for creators. Got it. So she made her own SaaS software product that she needed herself to manage her business, which is as a digital creator on YouTube.

What videos does she make? What is she talking about in her videos? What is that like Martha Stewart? So it's kind of like a day in your life. Sometimes they're fashion videos. Lately, they've been a day in her life as a founder. She does live in Miami. So I've got to meet her IRL before, which is really cool,

because I haven't met that many OK Boomer guests, IRL. So I've been talking to her for quite a while about her startup, and it's been really interesting seeing where it's going. And I've actually found out about Natalie because I listened to her podcast. It's called The Real Real. She also interviews other founders. So it's really cool seeing that space as well. Fantastic.

Okay, well, here it is, everybody. Okay, Boomer with Rachel reporting. Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. Awesome. So thank you so much, Natalie, for joining us today on this segment of OK Boomer. So Natalie's actually my friend outside of the world of podcasting, but Jason has been mentioning a little bit lately that he wants more people with like a creator presence to come on

my segment of the podcast and talk. And you came to mine absolutely immediately. You're the founder of a creator platform, Rela, which I would love to hear about. And obviously you are a content creator yourself. I'm going to brag a little bit for you over 60,000 followers on Instagram, 300,000 subscribers and counting on YouTube with over 12 million views. You are doing a ton. But today I really want to focus on RELA. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

I'm really excited to be here and to chat more about my background and also RELA. Yeah, super excited. So I guess to start things off, what is RELA? Yeah, so RELA is a digital workspace for creators to manage their entire business. So think of it as like the OS for creators to manage their workflow from content planning to revenue analytics and sending invoices to comprehensive analytics across all of your platforms. We want to be like the notion for creators. So that's what we're building. And it came honestly out of a need that I desperately had as a creator doing it full time. So we're really excited because

there's, you know, so many project management tools out there. But we wanted to make this one specifically for the creator industry. That's awesome. And previously what were you using? Was it just like a bunch of fragmented different tools or is there anything else that's like, competing in the space. Yeah, I was using tools that were pretty much like duct tapes together. So I used the notes app on my phone. I used Excel to track my revenue, but it was really inefficient because I, you know, every payment term is different when you work with brands. And so I never really knew how much I was getting paid when I was getting paid, like when stuff was overdue, things were just being like left on the table. I would always have to follow up

with brands. Then I tried every project management tool. So I tried ClickUp, Asana, Trello, Notion, all of them. And because they weren't made for creators, I was still using other tools to kind of try to integrate with them, but they weren't integrating with any of them. So I just had a bunch of different tools that I always had pulled up and it was just really disorganized and inefficient. And so that's kind of when I was like, okay, why this needs to be better? There's millions of creators out there that are doing this as a job. Like, why is this still so inefficient? Totally. That makes sense. I'm a huge notion fan, but it's definitely one of those things that's really broad and encompassing. Our team is also a huge fan of Notion.

I'm pretty sure they even sponsor some of our, or at one period in time where like a partner for this week in startups was really cool. But Notion is definitely my favorite thing. But it's not focused. And I've seen people have like templates on Notion that you could use to integrate. What makes Rela a better option than just integrating like a Notion template? Yeah. So with Notion, like templates are great and you know, people can make their own templates and custom to your workflow. But it's still not integrated with any parts of your business.

So like, for example, RELA actually connects to the social media APIs. So we actually are integrated with your actual accounts. So you're not having to update your analytics on Notion. You're not having to update, you know, or your content calendar. We auto post for you. We connect with the apps. So it's actually integrated with your workflow. We're also doing something where you can, you know, from your email, if you get a brand deal,

you can automatically send it over to RELA and add it on there to kind of working as like a CRM tool. So it's just more integrative with your work and it's not as manual. So we have a lot more automations where you can actually send your invoices directly through RELA rather than just uploading your invoice to Notion after you've made it on a different software. Or your contracts can live on Rela rather and send contracts on Rela rather than again having to upload it onto Notion but then you have to use other tools before that. So it just integrates and it's not as it's not just a place where you can upload and store notes. and organize that. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And how many people right now are using RELA?

Is this something that people go and download it on the App Store? Yeah, so we have 8,500 users right now, and we launched in January. So 8,500 people have signed up. They're using RELA. And then you can download it on the App Store, but it's also a desktop version as well. So you can go on the browser. It's a browser-based site as well. That's awesome.

And for users, is this something that people are paying for right now, or is it a free option? So we just had like a private beta where people could actually test our paid features that we're releasing. So it's freemium where there's a free version, which is like the content planner. You can track brand deals

and manage all of your brand requirements, notes, goals, all of that. That's in the free version. And we're rolling out paid tiers where you can add multiple workspaces. You can have more earnings insights on there. And those are starting right now in our like testing period at $5 a month

because we just want to test it out. But we're going to start charging at the end of this year actually two different paid tiers with a lot more features behind it. Very cool. That's awesome. And I guess before we dive even further into Ruella, I'd like to back it up a little bit. And like you said, like this came out of the need.

Your content creator, I dropped some of your numbers in the beginning of the episode. What is like the Natalie Barboo story? Like I know you went to university. That's when I first saw some of your content, which was really cool. But how did you go from being like a college, student to influencing and doing creator things full time to becoming a founder.

Yeah. So I started on YouTube in 2011. So like way, way, way before it is what it is today. I started it as a hobby. I was filming on my computer. Like it was not what it is today at all. But started back then, did it throughout high school. I ended up going to college and I thought I would do something a bit more technical. So I ended up majoring in industrial engineering, getting my degree in industrial engineering and then going off to work for a consulting company. So I worked for Accenture for about a year in there as a technology analyst there. And then during that time, I was still doing social media. And I started making double my salary on social media than I was at my corporate job.

So I was like, okay, I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to do this full time. I'm going to try to make this into a scaling business, my social media content creation. So this was back in 2019. And so I quit, started doing it full time. And that's when I started a podcast. I started coaching other creators to really scale their businesses as creators, help them make more money, try to get them in contact with brands,

started kind of working with brands as a freelancer to, for influencer marketing campaigns, all while still doing it full time myself. And that's when I was like, oh my God, why is there not something out there that makes this so much easier for all of these creators I'm working with for myself, for,

I'm telling them to use like a million different tools. And I know that it's not the best way to do this. So that's really where the idea of relegation. came was I was so frustrated. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to do this. But I was doing it for, I mean, I've been doing social media for 11 years, which is crazy because I've definitely seen the evolution of the very early days when no one was making money to people started monetizing on it. And now it's, you know, people start social media with the hopes of it being a job. Like, it's not just a hobby anymore. Like, people know the amount of money going into it. So they're treating

it as a business from day one, which I think is really cool. It is super interesting to see that. And I guess. We're in one of the most interesting standpoints, our generation, where we weren't necessarily raised in the generation of content creators when we were kids. These were people like Disney stars, I feel like that that like filled that for us, like Hannah Montana, people that were like actually on TV. And now I even talk to my sister who's just six years younger and she has like her favorite TikToker. And that's really interesting to me to kind of just see that evolution. But yeah, it's basically like your own mini company being a, being an influencer, being a content creator. So I guess that would be your first business as being like your own self, like as a company.

And then didn't even mention your, I guess your first like official company, which was your consultate gig, right? And the real, real, how could I have forgotten? You host a really awesome podcast. Really a jack of all trades here. So industrial engineering degree, creator, founder, everything in between. That's awesome. How has your experience as being like your own entity as a creator,

basically being a solo founder of Natalie Barbu and your brand, impacted you as a co-founder as you do have a few other people on your team? Has it been a weird switch over to working with like a bigger group of people? Well, when I first started, I didn't think I wanted co-founders because I thought, you know, I've been doing everything on my own so far. I don't want co-founders. I can do this as a solo founder. and as I obviously got more into it

and started realizing everything that it would entail to really build this company, I realized I do want co-founders and I need co-founders. I didn't just want to outsource my development because I wasn't developing the app myself. So I knew that I needed someone technical on the team. And at first I was interviewing for just contractors.

I was like, I'm just going to outsource it. I'm, that's going to be easier. Like, I want to be the one in control. I want to be the one that's, you know, like with the, like finding the direction of the company. And so once I started interviewing other contractors, I was interviewing people overseas.

I was interviewing people in the U.S. I was just talking to a lot of developers, and I felt like everyone was treating it as just a project. It was like, oh, okay, this is going to take this amount of months. This is how much money it's going to be, which I knew going into it, that's what it would, that's how, like, what they would offer because I was like telling them the scope of work. But then I realized, like, I want this company to scale.

I don't want this to be a little project. I know this is going to be constantly evolving. I think I need someone on the team. And so that's when I was introduced to my co-founders. I had asked my own network and my mutual friends, and they introduced me to my co-founders. And we just worked really, really well together. They really believed in what I was doing.

And after six months, they joined and became my actual co-founders, which was really great. And it's been such a great adjustment because I know that I couldn't do it full-time on my own. And so having not only the people that, like, you actually need to develop this, like not only having technical founders, but also that support, like just the emotional side of it, just having actual co-founders that are supporting you and in this with you and going through

the startup and founder experience with you, I think is so important. So I actually, the adjustment wasn't that difficult, but it was something that I pushed back on for a little bit. And what advice do you have for people that are interested in shopping, I guess, would be a pretty good term shopping for somebody that would be a great co-founder. Yeah. So I actually was not friends with my co-founders beforehand. I met them in this business setting where I wanted you to help me with this, what my business that I'm doing.

And then eventually it led to co-founders and a partnership. I actually recommend that. I think that one, you need to spend a lot of time with them before you jump into business because it is like a marriage. So we had six months before actually being co-founders officially. So that is one thing. Definitely spend a lot of time with them to get to know how you guys work together, what your style is. Also find someone that has strengths that you don't have because if it's just another duplicate

of you, then I don't know how helpful that's going to be. And I think it could cause a lot of tension because if you have the same role, then that's, you know, just going to cause arguments in the future. And then setting really specific roles for everyone is really important because if you just say, oh, like, okay, we're just both founders and, you know, we're both doing. like, we're just both like helping find, find, found the company, whatever, like doing the founder role, but you don't have actually specific roles. It's going to cause a lot of fights. And I honestly don't recommend going into business with friends, but obviously that's just because I didn't do it. So I don't have the necessarily like the experience of going into

business with friends. But I think it caused a lot less drama because we came into this, knowing this was going to be a business, knowing what our goals were with this. And now we've formed a friendship afterwards. Now it's like they're literally my. family now, I feels like. But in the beginning, we, it wasn't like that. And I actually think that made a huge impact because I think with friends, it just causes fights and arguments and you can ruin friendships that way. Yeah, this is actually the first time I've ever lived. Like, my roommates right now are my friends and I've never lived with people that I was really close friends with beforehand. And I feel like founding is very similar. Like my roommate situation honestly is very good. But there are

conversations that I have now with my roommates that are totally different than when I lived with people that were just acquaintances or that became my friends, like through the process of being roommates. Obviously, that's not anywhere near to like founding a company, but these are people that I spend a lot of time with. And I think everybody knows it's a lot easier to start like bickering fights. And it's more impactful to have those bickering fights with your friends than it is with people you are as close with on that level emotionally. So that's really interesting. And you guys are a remote team. You just mentioned to me before we started recording that you had to go down and visit them.

How has it been navigating this landscape of having a remote team in the startup landscape? Yeah, I prefer being remote, and I know it's very, you know, Gen Z, Millennial, preferring to be remote. I've worked remote even prior to COVID, just from working for myself. I never had, like, an office when I was working for Accenture I did. But once I quit that and I was working for myself, then I was always working from home. and I'm very productive at home. So for me and the people that are on our team, we are used to it. It's all we know, honestly, and it's still very productive.

And I think when we're in person working together, it's honestly less productive because we're like talking and we're, you know, distracting each other a little bit more than when we're remote and we can actually just like, hey, I have a question about this. Okay, thanks. Bye. And then get back to work. So I personally really, I prefer it.

but I know that there's challenges as you grow because you have to have people that you can rely on. You have to have people that are very motivated and self-motivated and independent. So I think it's worked for us so far, but it's definitely going to be interesting to see as we grow how it's going to look. But my team's in North Carolina.

I'm always there because I am from North Carolina. So my family's all there. So I go there quite often. And we try to work in person at least once a month, so for like a week once a month. So it's kind of like a hybrid situation. Yeah, that makes, I get that. I think our team has, I think I've met everybody on the team only once.

And it was last month, which was really cool. And I'm hitting my one year mark. But that is something as a complete, at somebody who I completely support remote work because I'm somebody that feels, like I can allocate my time pretty well to work. Like I think you need really good time management skills. I think my team has really great communication, which I'm really lucky about.

And we are like constantly on this one feature called huddles in Slack, which is like basically being on a phone call without like showing your video. So it's not like we're getting Zoom fatigue, but like being on Zoom all the time. But if I ever have a question, I'm always able. So I'm really happy we have that. But there is something to be said about like creative process and the problem solving

that goes on when we're in person. And I always wonder like how different would my relationship with my team members, how different would like we execute certain projects? if we did meet a little bit more frequently. So maybe that's something that will integrate in the future. But I definitely think that's something that more young people in particular should take consideration before they think they want to work in their sweatpants all day because there are some bumps in the road and there are things that can be done.

So much more efficiently if you're just working in the same room as somebody else. Definitely. And going on to your switch here from becoming a creator to becoming a fator to becoming founder. We see people all the time wanting to become creators, which I think is awesome. I wish when I was younger that I had somebody that I looked up to enough that continued to make me want to make little YouTube videos because I remember when I was younger, I loved taking these classes that were actually video production classes and really cool that now I get to produce content here at the speaking startups because it's something I've always loved doing.

Always love producing. I started probably in middle school, started taking classes in high school, When I got to college, I never thought that that was going to be an option for me. And now that it is, I'm extremely grateful. But I wish when I was younger I had somebody that I could look up to, maybe in the production space, that, you know, really just influenced me to take the jump. So I think it's great that young people right now have such easy access with their phones and the tools to become content creators.

How do you think we can inspire more people on the flip side of what you do to become founders because they don't meet that many young people anymore that want to found companies? Yeah, I think it actually kind of goes hand in hand with being a creator as well, though, and being a forward-facing founder, front-facing founder, that showing the behind-the-scenes scenes of being a founder and showing, you know, why you're doing what you're doing can also inspire others to do the same. So I know whenever I listen to podcasts of other founders or entrepreneurs or whenever I would read memoirs or books about other founders, I would get inspired that that's something I want to do. You know, I want to have my own business one day. I would look at other people in my life that has their own business, which were not that many people. But whenever I would talk to them, I would get so inspired and want to do what they're doing. So I actually think building in public and being a little bit more of a forward-facing founder

can help inspire other people. So it kind of goes hand in hand with being a creator at the end of the day where you're showing the behind the scenes, you're going on podcasts, you're posting TikToks about what it's like to be a founder. Obviously not everyone needs to do that. But at least from my end, I know that that has inspired a lot of people that watch me. So a lot of people have commented, like, oh, like, I really want to start a business because of like the videos that you've posted because I've been posting videos for so long about wanting to be an entrepreneur.

Or when I was in school, for example, I was an engineering student and there's not that many female engineers out there. So I was always posting about, you know, the week in my life as an engineering student and showing the behind the scenes of that and answering questions like that. And to this day, I get so many messages. saying you're the reason I decide to go into industrial engineering. Wow. Or you're even the reason why I decided to go to the school that you went to.

Like there's so many people that message me because of that. And that makes me so happy because I'm like, wow, I, that's crazy that just me posting about my life and influenced other people. And so I think with the same thing goes with being a founder, if you're actually showing them behind the scenes of it, you're showing what it's like. I think more and more people will get inspired to do that too and not just be a creator because I never wanted, I love social media. I love being a creator and it's a great career, but I never wanted that to be the only thing I did. Like I always knew I'm going to start a business

one day and I'm going to start something else. Like that was never the end goal. It was always a stepping stone for me. Social media opens up so many doors. It's brought so many opportunities. I've learned so much. But at the end of the day, I knew that's not what I wanted to do full time. It's funny because I feel like being a founder and being a creator that have so many crossovers. So it makes so much sense why you're such a forward-facing founder. I feel like you were really good at taking the time that you have and using it to propel you forward because I feel like the biggest difference I see

in people that are really active founders versus people that just prefer to have a job. And this isn't a bad thing at all. But prefer to have a job where things are a little bit more structured day-to-day and corporate is the ability to have that like self-starting motivation, which again, that's so vital in content creation. Nobody's like breathing down your neck in the beginning of when you're doing it, we'll be accountable. And the same goes for founding a company,

especially founding a company with like a remote team that doesn't watch what you do every day in a space where you are really like the expert. Yeah, definitely. And I don't know, just sharing more of the details about it because I think a lot of people think, oh my God, I have no idea how to start a company that's so scary. And the fear of not knowing stops them from starting or even exploring it. And I think by showing them more of the details and more of the day-to-day, it makes it seem

more approachable or at least something that they can explore. And it's not just something that's reserved for the top 1% of people. Anyone can explore this idea being a founder. It's funny. Actually, I'm thinking about it now. And for a while, I really wanted to be a privacy engineer at Google. Like, I wanted to work at Google for a little bit when I was in college. To this day, I have no idea why I do not like working interning at a big company.

I don't know if I would do very well working at Google. But I would constantly watch this one girl named Bukula, B-U-K-O-L-A, I believe on YouTube, as her day in the life of the software engineer. And it was still like lifestyle content. Like, she still showed us like your skincare routine and things like that. her thoughts on minimalism and stuff. But she was also, like, this really big part of her was her job, because obviously that takes up, like, so much of your day.

And I think you're right. I think that is such a good way to approach inspiration, especially in young girls who maybe aren't given necessarily, like, any at all, actually I was going to say, not given the best examples, but given any examples of things like industrial engineering or becoming a founder. So really excited.

I hope more people in this space start documenting their journey I guess, like building in public in a way that feels more like lifestyle content would be really interesting. Yeah, it's kind of like when you were in school and you would have people come in the classroom and talk about their job. Like, it's the same thing as that, but on a weekly basis. You're always seeing it. It definitely is. You're totally right. And you get to watch it at two times speed, which I like.

Yeah, exactly. Awesome. So do you have any more advice you can give to people that are interested in starting companies, especially in the content creator space? Yeah, I always say to just start, and I know sometimes that might seem like bad advice, like, no, you need to plan, you need to have a business plan, you need to have all of this stuff first. But when I say just start, I mean, start talking to people, start exploring the ideas, get the notes app on your phone and start writing out what you want this business to look like,

and then start reaching out to people that you think could help you and inspire you or if you need someone technical, just start talking to people that maybe could do it just to get a feel of even what that process is like. And I think once you explore it more and once you explore the possibility of what you want to start more, you get excited and then the snowball gets moving. And then all of a sudden you're like, okay, I'm going to start this business. But I think, again, like that fear of starting is what stops people. So I always just say, just start exploring, start learning about how to do this, build your network, and then start actually taking action and actually starting. So I don't know if anything that's specific. It's not necessarily

specific for content creation, but just in general. And then in terms of content creation, if you're not a creator, start creating content. Because I think the creator economy right now has a lot of startups out there. And a lot of people, I do believe, start sometimes in these industries just out of, it's more of like an opportunistic view that they have where, oh my God, the creator economy is so huge. Let me dive into this. But I think you should learn how to be a creator yourself if you're trying to start, you know, building a tool for creators. I mean, it's not always the case for everyone.

You can obviously talk to people and, you know, do focus groups and and observe creators. But I definitely think right now everyone has the opportunity to be a creator because most people have phones that they can just record and start posting on. So if you can actually start being one yourself, I think that's going to give you really great insight. Awesome. I think that is phenomenal advice. Thank you so much, Natalie,

for coming on this segment of OK Boomer. last thing is where can people find you and where can people find Rela? Yeah, you can find me at Natalie Barbou across all social media platforms, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and then Rela, you can download on the app store or you can just go to getrella.com and you can use it on desktop. Amazing, great. I hope to see everybody over there and thank you so much again for coming on the segment. Yeah, thanks for having me. Okay, everybody, thanks for listening. We had a great week again here on this week in Startup. Up Sunday is going to be another awesome VC Sunday school. And we're going to talk about Molly's first board meeting and how that went and what should

happen at a board meeting, what, you know, makes for a great board meeting and what makes for a great investor contribution to a board meeting. And then she's got another great climate interview for you. You can follow us. I'm at Jason. She's at Molly Wood. And the show is at TWA startups on all your popular social networks. Make sure you subscribe to the pod and give us a five-star review if you're up for it.

And we'll see you on Sunday. everybody great week