This Week in Startups - E32: “Angel” podcast: Season 4 Premiere! Sarah Cannon, Partner at Index Ventures, shares insights on investing in the future of work, underrated emerging startup markets, going from the Obama Administration to Venture Capital, increasing upward mobility in America, fixing the gig economy & more!

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

0:01 Jason intros Season 4 of Angel & Index Ventures' Sarah Cannon 3:22 How did working for the Obama administration lead Sarah into Venture Capital? 4:56 Picking a fight with Larry Summers as an intern 15:42 Choosing Harvard's MBA program over Stanford's 18:26 Getting into VC 20:27 Working at CapitalG 24:09 How was the foundation of Index built by Danny Rimer and what is Sarah's role? 31:42 What does Index focus on during a Series A and what is a partner meeting like at Index? 36:31 Thoughts on gig economy work and is there a better way to categorize freelancers and full-time workers in the gig economy? 44:54 Sarah's proposed solution for categorizing gig economy workers 46:36 Jason's thoughts on politicians evolving their views over time 50:15 Ideas to increase upward mobility in America 1:00:35 What was Sarah's first investment? How did it work out? 1:08:42 Founders getting distracted after raising large rounds of funding 1:11:05 Thoughts on emerging international startup markets like India & Australia 1:13:19 Is France an underrated startup market? 1:17:42 What is Sarah most passionate about investing in?

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Angel, the podcast. We are in season four. And it's our first episode. We have an incredible guest. Sarah Cannon is with us. And she talks about her investments in the future of work, productivity tools, business intelligence. And she works at index ventures. We also get into a lot of politics, a lot about gig economy, remote work. And it's an incredible, incredible episode. She previously worked with the Obama administration at Google. doing investments. It is now at Index Venture. Stick with us. It's an amazing episode. Season 4 of Angel is brought to you by LinkedIn. You already know LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network. It's also a better way to find great talent. Go to LinkedIn.com slash Angel and get a $50 credit towards your first job post. Asure is the leading provider of special purpose vehicles and fund administration with over 5,000 completed transactions. and $2.5 billion under management. Angel listeners can get 20% off their first SPV at ashore.com slash angel.

And Zeus Living gives you a place to come home to. For trips of 30 days or more, stay with Zeus for beautiful, thoughtfully furnished housing. Go to zeusliving.com slash angel for $200 off your first booking. Hey, everybody, welcome to the first episode of Season 4 of Angel. This is the podcast. That's the sister podcast to this week in startups. It's also the podcast that complements my book, Angel, which you can go to angelthebook.com, search on Amazon.

Now in Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, English, obviously, and a bunch of other languages. Thank you so much for reading the book. For those of you who are angel investors, or early stage investors, syndicate investors, this is a great podcast for you because you can see what downstream investors think about. And it's very important in the role that I play as an early stage investor to really play nice with

and understand what drives a later stage investor. So for this season, season four of Angel, we're actually not interviewing Angel investors. We're interviewing people with over one billion dollars in assets under management, A-U-M. And one of the great firms here in Silicon Valley, and of the last cycle, is Index Ventures. I know Danny Reimer and a bunch of the team over there, and we were lucky enough to get Sarah Kana. Sarah Cannon, not Connor. You did it. Are you Sarah Kana?

I am Sarah Connor. The Terminator. Yeah, exactly. It's a common error. Yeah, you get it a lot? Yeah, I do. And Sarah is... I think it's...

Is it? I feel it. I'm feeling like you could at any moment just take a rocket launch of out. Remember that. Yeah. I just saw the new one, and I actually enjoyed it. It was a little too... tropical.

Well, too close to home? Well, no, they like literally... I haven't seen it. Nobody did. But unfortunately, because it's just great to see literally Linda Hamilton is just so amazing in that role. I could just watch her in that role without Terminators. But they literally have a huge part of it have to do with like the border and people being jailed at the border. And you're like, okay, we get it.

Terminator, oppression, Trump, the border. But it's actually an interesting segue. Anyway, you worked as an economic advisor to Obama. I did. And so how does working for Obama lead to becoming a venture capitalist? And welcome to the pod. Well, thank you very much for having me on the pod. And I'm glad we got to get right into The Terminator.

You know, a personal dream is actually to be the first Jane Bond. So I was hoping, yeah, yeah. So not Terminator, but Bond. I hope soon. Yeah. I'm waiting. And maybe they've called while we've been in here. I'm trying to figure out what is the proper age to watch James Bond

with my daughters. Because if you watch some of the old ones... Yeah, no, they are a little racy. They're pretty racy. It was a family tradition on Thanksgiving to watch the TBS Bond Marathon. Yeah. So I would say like never too young,

but maybe there's just some scenes you want to take them for a snack or something. Exactly. Quick fast forward. Yes, exactly. That's not going to work with my 10-year-olds. So tell me, how did you go... How did you get into the Obama? How did you work with Obama

and then how did you get into Metro... Yeah, not an obvious path. Not one you hear often? No, never. actually. Good, good. Nice to be a contrarian. So the way that I got into the Obama administration originally was sheer passion. So I was working another job, but really wanted him to be elected president. So I was moonlighting. So between like 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., I was helping to waive people into the transition building in Washington, D.C. And then they said, oh, Sarah, wait, you know how to do math.

And there's a crisis going on. What's going on with housing prices? And so I thought, well, surely I have no idea. And Nobody did at that period in time, but you do enough math for enough people and then ended up getting an internship. And then eventually picked a fight with Larry Summers. Oh, wow. I know, Larry. You do. Yeah. Lucky you.

Yeah. Can't wait to bring up your name. What's he going to say? He's going to say, hopefully, he'll say she's like a goddaughter to me. That is now the case. At the time, that was not the case. What was the fight over? What were the difference?

Poverty. Okay. Let's all pack it. So we were, I managed to get this internship where I had to. I didn't have to pass Larry's test yet. And then he had a lunch with the interns, which I'm sure was his favorite activity. But actually, Larry spends a lot of time meeting with students. So he met with the interns, and the thing closes, and he says, any other questions.

And I said, you know, I, yeah. And he said, yes, in the back. And I was like, well, I don't think we're doing enough for poor people. Like, I just don't think, and this is Barack Obama. He stands for this. Like, we're doing all these macroeconomic policies, but we're not doing anything for poor people. And so he said, and he was like, all right, well, what do you think? think we should be doing? And I was like these place-based policies. And he goes, no, no, no,

these are bad ideas. Sarah, have you studied the research? Like the research tells you, like, a lot of these don't work. I mean, Larry's- Well, what was your number of an idea that he thought was bad? Place-based policies. Place-based policies. What does it mean? So it means that in a city like Detroit, for example, when you have a geographic area where there's been a lot of economic activity that's left, let's have a policy to incentivize people to stay in Detroit, right? To have tax incentives and job credits and all these things to strengthen the local economy. And And Larry's argument was, historically, these haven't worked very well because you want economic activity to move around, right? And so if there are better opportunities in Cleveland, you don't

want to be tying them to Detroit if they're opportunities in Cleveland, which as an economist is a very rational argument. Yeah, you want to let the marketplace decide where is the best place for work to be. And traditionally work was in places where resources were, I guess, or ports were. And today, it's where young people who are highly educated and skilled want to live. Right. And industries change. And what was needed for the manufacturing industry is different than what is needed for the next generation. So why do you have this like position that people should stay in places where their businesses are not naturally inclined to be? So the economic rationale for that is that place has some value.

That like we're not, people probably aren't going to leave Detroit en masse. And it's actually not a fair thing to abandon a whole population. And maybe it's a good idea to try to incent some economic activity in places where people live because you don't want them to deteriorate. Massively. Got it. So it's compassion. And in a way, maybe even a little bit of tradition or... But I also think economics, because the people, I mean, Larry's argument would require

people to move efficiently. But people make decisions about where they live, not only because of their job. Maybe you love Detroit. Maybe your family's there. Got it. So I think there's a little bit of, like, the realism of people aren't all going to move to the jobs. They will in some amount, but not everybody.

And it's actually become, this is another issue that I've been reading about because I like to read about what people like you and and Larry Summers were talking about, is people don't have the ability to move anymore because they don't have savings in one part. So people who are on the lower or up-incomeers don't have the money to move to that job. And if they did, that would be a big unlock.

But the places where the jobs are are so expensive that you have a compounding factor. There's jobs in L.A. There's jobs in San Francisco. There's jobs in New York or Seattle. But they can't afford to move, and they certainly can't afford to move to a place where the real estate and the cost of the world,

living is so expensive. So that is one of the big unlocks. I actually heard people say, we should be giving people relocation money. The government should if they can get a qualified job or a tax break based on relocation because of that argument. And I don't know if it came out of your argument with Larry, but you've read the... Jason, I wish we were friends then, so I could have phoned a friend into my argument with Larry Summers to make some of its arguments. And it's true, like the average American doesn't even have $400 in savings. Like, how are you going to... engineer a move. So that was Larry's, so that was the thing that I was trying to argue for.

But I was really just, it was a more compassion. We need to do more for the poor. And he kind of said, Sarah, the best thing you can do is grow the economy. Right. And if that happens, the system will work and it will benefit everyone. So has he turned out to be right, given the fact that we're in the lowest unemployment and wages have raised the most under Trump in our lifetime? So he was right, because I did do all my research on this because I felt embarrassed that I was wrong about the research showing growth. That is true. But I would also argue, and this is Sarah's view personally, that, yes, the S&P is performing really well, but wages aren't doing as well. And there has been, I think, a decoupling between them how the markets are performing and how the average person is doing.

And you're seeing that show up in politics in all kinds of ways. So I think, yes, Larry was right. That's what history has shown us. But I also think there are consequences which you would agree with, too, to not doing something to make sure everybody's life is actually getting better. Yeah. I mean, the rising, the minimum wage going up has certainly helped. I'm not sure closing the borders has helped, but there is a perception that closing the borders leads to people hiring more Americans, more scarcity than the market then rises. Do you believe we should be closing the borders in order to drive up wages here or that we should have open borders or somewhere in between? Well, I love that you walked into high-scale immigration. This was actually when I was at the White House, one of the things that Larry tasked me to look at. was what should we be doing for our high-scale immigration programs? High-scale immigration.

High-scale. Oh, high-skill. High-skill. So people who had, well, Ph.D. Exactly. So we had a, you should staple a green card to a Ph.D. If you're educated in a U.S. school, we had a whole bunch of great proposals, which unfortunately did not get passed because immigration is a very polarizing topic.

Even Obama had a hard time with the concept of bringing in high-skilled foreigners because of the perception in middle America that they're taking American jobs? Well, a lot of the challenge, too, is that Obama was very, because it's actually the time that I met Obama. So we, well, I worked for him, but we actually, one of the most kind of the time,

most time I spent with him was discussing immigration. And he was giving a very impassioned speech about the DREAM Act. And his team was saying, you know, I'm not sure, like polling wise, this is going to help you. And he was like, but this is why I'm president. And I can convince the American people

and then gave an impromptu speech in the Roosevelt room. And I was one of these moments where I'd worked for him for years at this point. And I was like, it's real. Everything that I thought is true. And he asked me my opinion. And I had done this research, which you asked about, which is what is the economic impact of immigration? So I looked at all the studies that have been done over this over many decades.

And the research does say that immigrants are actually a boon to the economy, right? Obviously. They pay a lot in taxes. They do a lot of work and new jobs. It's definitely beneficial to GDP. And, like, that's been documented. There is a negative impact for certain. population that they, when they come in, will compete directly for those jobs, then that will have

a negative input on that population. So then you think about, okay, from a policy perspective, what could we do for that group of people? So you do need to be mindful, but net net, like immigration, yes, I'm absolutely important. All right, when we get back from this quick break, I want to know how you jumped from Obama to venture capital. We get back on Angel. Hiring the right people is one of the best ways to help grow your business. You know this. But it shouldn't take your time away from all the other priorities of running your business. With LinkedIn jobs, it doesn't have to. They know what they're doing. Their system is amazing. LinkedIn jobs screens candidates with the hard and the soft skills that you're looking for so you can find that right person quickly. LinkedIn looks beyond the

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all of the 200 companies that I've invested in. All of them use LinkedIn to find great candidates. If you're a startup, I beg of you, go to LinkedIn.com slash Angel and get that 50. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, welcome to Angel Season 4. We're back. Thanks to the partners who made Angel Season 4 possible. I really appreciate it on behalf of the fans of the pod and people coming up. This podcast is seen. by hundreds of thousands of people, each episode, millions a year. We couldn't do it without the partners. And for those of you listening, if a partner gives a code, please use it. If a partner, and you're on Twitter, you use their product, go ahead and say something nice and say you learned

about it from at Jason on at TWA startups. The partners see that, and it makes them come back year after year and support the pod and allow us to have great guests like Sarah Cannon on the podcast. She's Sarah R. Cannon on the Twitter. Are you active on Twitter? I'm not. It's just... I need to be. Do you? I'm an active consumer.

Well, one of my... I invested in this great company and he was like, Sarah, you have to get on Twitter. You're nowhere. This is an embarrassing story. I knew that my Twitter was hacked. A childhood friend was like,

someone's posting cat photos on Twitter and I happen to know that you hate cats. A likely story. Are you a cat lady? No, I hate cats. Oh, really? I hate cats. Thank God.

I don't. My sister's a veterinarian. I love humans. She loves animals. We think it was divided 100% in either case. So, no, it definitely wasn't me. So, no. But I will be more.

have on Twitter in the future. Be careful what you wish for because it is an addiction, especially for smart people who like to engage on topics that are like topical. Like literally my Twitter now is outpacing my email usage. And so I spoke at actually Stanford GSB recently, like this week in fact. And they were like,

I emailed you, how to get, and I was like, just DMs are open on Twitter. And like if you reply to me with an intelligent comment 10 times, I'm going to follow you back and know who you are. I don't know why more people don't do this. All right, there's a gulk. It's a easy goal. Now, I know you were accepted to both Harvard's MBA program and Stanford's. So where did you wind up going and why? Very lucky. Yes, that's true. I ended up going to Harvard. But I actually had first accepted Stanford. Because, yes. So I was very lucky. Really like

Stanford. It was very enthusiastic about coming back out to the Bay Area where I'm from. But you wanted to be with the smarter kids? So no. I'm scurring with you. They're both smart kids. I worked for, as we discussed, Larry Summers at the White House. And so I actually had packed my bags to move to Stanford, and then I got the offer after picking this fight with him, which I was wrong about. He was like, well, I guess I argued, you know, laudably. And so he said, well, we actually have an open. Would you like to come?

Wow. And so, of course, I said absolutely. That's a BFD. I was very... Big freaking you. Very lucky. So took that job, didn't go to Stanford, and then he ended up leaving the White House to go back to Harvard. And I ended up going back with him to continue to work with him.

Got it. Were your teachers associate? What are they called teacher? TA? No, not officially, but we wrote a number of things together. You know my standard joke. No. Well, whenever anybody tells me they went to Harvard or to Stanford, when the Stanford kids say, you know, went to Stanford, I said, oh, you couldn't get into Harvard.

And then when the Harvard folks say they went to Harvard, I say, oh, you couldn't get into Stanford. And the Stanford kids are just like, yeah, you know, I wanted to be in California. I'm an entrepreneur. I just wanted to be closer to venture capital and innovation. And the Harvard program's amazing, obviously. And I did think about that. But, you know, Stanford felt like a better fit for me. And then you say to a Harvard kid. And they're like, well, actually, you know, Harvard is ranked number one in 17 of the 22 studies. And actually, if you look at the average salaries coming out, it's 14% more. And there's more people at Goldman and more people in CEOO positions and more people in CEO ofO positions from Harvard than actually Stanford. And it's actually, and you're like, okay, pump the brakes. Your insecurity is overwhelming. You're being trolled. My other favorite is, if somebody went to Harvard, you're like, oh, would you go to college? You know, like Boston? You went to Boston College?

Like, no, no, no, no. Boston University? No, no. I went in Boston. You're like, oh, where? Cambridge. Oh, you went to MIT? Like, no.

Where did you go? I went to Harvard. And they're so used to people hating them. for going to Harvard that they will not say it. Well, I went to Yale, and I made the mistake once of saying, oh, I went to school in New Haven. And that one is really, that one's really bad. So I learned that lesson very quickly.

Oh, you're in the community college? I don't know what the community college there is. No. Tell me about how you got into venture capital. Because actually, Larry knows every venture capital. The way I know Larry is he knows every venture capitalist. And I think he's on some, I mean, I won't speak out of school here, but he's evolved in some venture funds.

Yes, he is. Absolutely. He works with, yeah, he worked with Andreessen. Okay. I wasn't sure. Yeah, he was an advisor to time at least years ago when I was learning about this world. So I actually got into vendor. So when I was in business schools, I did a degree in economics and a degree in business when I was at Harvard and I couldn't decide. And I spent a summer at the IMF working on the Greek debt bailout, my first summer, decided I was not going to be a career economist, although I still flirt with it, and went to business school. And Warburg-Pinkist reached out to me when I was in business school and said, hey, Sarah, would you? think about doing a summer internship with us. And this is embarrassing that I'd never heard of the firm.

And I was in India reading the Economic Times, which I love their newspaper. And they had done a deal in India. And I have loved India. I was very excited about emerging market investing, having spent a bunch of time abroad. And they said, and so I was like, well, this firm made do deals in India. I emailed Larry. And I said, Larry, this Warburg-Pinkus. And he said, Sarah, take the blank expletive interview.

So I have great respect for him. and I did take the interview. So I learned how to do leverage buyouts on paper over a weekend and went into Warburg. It was Valentine's Day and met with seven partners in a room, very similar to this, and somehow survived. And with some dignity and tax, spent the summer there, really loved investing what I was beginning to know of it.

And heard Google was starting a growth equity fund. And so blind emailed, who then became my boss, Gene France, and said, I spent a summer, I really want to do this. and are you looking for people, and they didn't even have a website, and we're just building their team, and so it was very fortunate to join what is now called capital G. You'll love this. We had to buy the Twitter handle name from a replica.

Capital G. Capital G. Yeah, yeah. He's pretty great. He's pretty great. Capital G, we got it. Now, Capital G is the corporate investing arm that did, I believe, Uber. So Alphabet makes this very confusing.

And then they have Google. Ventures, which then became GV, which operates outside of Google with Google's money, but has independence. And Google, theoretically, Google's employees, business units don't know or get the information that's firewalled with the GV investments. So you know more about this probably than most people at Alphabet. So that's right. We were balanced sheet capital, and so we were independent.

So we were not investing for strategic reasons. It was for financial return, just like. a Warburg-Pinkus or a KKR or TPG would do. Do people believe you when you say that? Most. Or did you have to explain that over and over again to the founders? Oh, I definitely explain that over and over and over again to the founders. But then you would say, but the reason you would take the capital from us is because

we can get Google to help you. And that was very compelling. So it's almost like having your cake and eating it too. It's like, I'm going to get money at probably a competitive price. And then if I want to talk to somebody at Google, I can, but you're promising me that my information, my data, whatever you glean at the board meetings, is not. not going to Sundar or Larry or Sergey or some other business unit to compete with us. Exactly. And we couldn't do that. I mean, the reputation of Google would be damaged and our

group would disappear. So that never happened. But we did, yes, it's confusing. But GV is GV invested in Uber. And they're the earlier stage arm and capital G was later stage. And then subsequently sued them for the Waymo trial. Yes. I'm staying out of that. Were you there at that time? I was not there at that time. That was an interesting moment. I'm sure it was. Yeah, well, I mean, the person who was at the center of that, I mean, apparently committed serious crimes and took every document with him. And I don't think that's a dispute.

And when he showed the documents to Travis, Travis said, by all means, do not ever bring those anywhere within a mile of our building or servers. Are you absolutely out of your mind and broke up with them? It was a crazy moment in time. Taking anything from Google doesn't, I didn't even like, I went forward an email. I mean, it's just like, you're going to. It is so, isn't it amazing how people are dumb? Like, I had somebody at one point, I'll just leave it at that,

email themselves every document after like 15 minutes and download every database before they were signed. And it's like, you emailed yourself everything? How dumb are you? Of course we're going to know you downloaded every database and forwarded it yourself. We had a lot of discussions about the White House. like no forwarding things to your Gmail, you know. They told you, like, don't be stupid.

Yes, of course. But I mean, why does people have to even say that to people? Like, do people not understand the nature of, like, corporate communications? Everything is tracked. Everything is backed up. Like, you're going to get caught. Yeah, we don't have secrets anymore. We're post secrets.

I write every single email, every single SMS exchange, every Slack exchange, with one thing in mind. This will eventually be public. and other people are reading it in all likelihood right now. So I just assume that this message, whether it's on an encrypted messaging platform or on a Slack channel or anywhere, email, is going to be the lead on a CNBC story or whatever.

It's all going to be out there. I hope my emails are that interesting, you know? I mean, they'll be living a pretty good life. You have to tell your founders, like, this should not be in an email. This should not be on any electronic communications. It's just like you can talk about it on the phone and actually not have a problem. So after GV, you wound up at Index.

I get how you got there. What is your job today? And describe the footprint of Index and what Danny built here. Yes. What's his Danny Reimer's partner in? He had a partner in founding the firm, I think. Oh, Mike Volpe, who opened the San Francisco.

Yeah, got it. Danny was in London. That's where I'm, or Paris even. I went to his apartment one time. I don't know if it was London or Paris. Probably in London. I'll be very jealous of it. was Paris. That's where I aspire to live someday. It might have been. I don't know if I'm just

out of having a Paris apartment. Well, now I'm going to demand an invitation next. All I know is he had the Lauderey macaroons. Oh, there you go. So you were transported to Paris. It could be. That's what I'm mixing up in my mind. But yeah, give me the history here. How much is under management and then what your role is and all of this. Absolutely. So Index was founded 25 years ago in Geneva, which is very unique for venture capital fund by Neil Reimer, Danny's brother. And We were, so we were originally in Geneva, then moved to London where Danny opened that office. Danny's been kind of a geographic pioneer for index and really helped create the venture ecosystem in Europe. At a time where now everybody is talking about Europe as being an exciting place to invest in technology companies.

But back then, a lot of people, and this is what I heard, was like, it's not, there's nothing large coming out of Europe. Well, that is obviously not the case now. Scandinavian companies seem to be doing pretty good. Exactly. Spotify. Spotify, Supertile. So that was a lot of, Clarnet, exactly. So a lot of index was early days investing in gaming and fintech, which was very helpful.

And so Danny helped set up that operation, the team in Europe. And then our value proposition was helping those companies expand into the United States. Because when you got to a certain stage in Europe, you wanted to expand to an even larger market, you come to the U.S. And then when Danny and Mike came out and opened this office about eight years ago, they also realized that there were a lot of great companies here that we could help expand into Europe. as like Slack being one of them. They have unbelievable traction. They have a lot of users, but they don't have a business stand in Europe.

So we started doing that. So that is where Transatlantic, venture capital fund, wonderful for me being one of the eight partners that I get to travel to Europe to go see Danny. Often, he's back in London. Oh, is it? I didn't know that.

He moved back. Heartbreaking for me because I really would, I mean, we talk daily, but nicer to see him in person. And your role at the fund now? What do you do? Early, mid, late? Yeah.

Tell me about how the fund in, invests. Absolutely. So you asked me funds size too. So we have a billion dollar growth fund and a $650 million venture fund. And it's actually the same partners that invest out of both funds. So we have four partners based in San Francisco and then four in London, all three in London and one in Geneva. And we're all doing all series. So I have invested in seed deals and series H. So the last round we did in Slack was a series H before the company listed. So I will do all of those things. And for people who are founders, which fund do they go to at what time? Because growth funds and venture funds, even those are subsections within them.

So what's the smallest check you write out of the venture fund? What's the typical check? And then the same for the growth fund. Yeah. So for index, companies should come to us at any time. And then we'll figure out which fund to invest from. That's actually the nice thing is that. You know, when I was at capital G, it was, oh, wait, are we GV?

Are we capital G? And that would take some figuring out here, like the entrepreneur doesn't have to worry about it. But how we think about it. So, you know, seed we would do anywhere from, you know, I don't know, 50,000. We would do that. That's rare. To a million to five million these days, seed rounds. To, and for Series A, you know, anywhere from 5 to 10 to 15 to 20.

Who knows, you know, this market is crazy these days. Rules are made to be broken. And I think the way that we think about a series A companies, we're really looking for a founder and an extremely compelling idea in an attractive market at Series B and above, which is traditionally in our growth fund. We're looking for, you know, real traction and evidence of product market. So those are the two ways that I would distinguish kind of the funds. But the nice thing is that's on us to figure out not the founder. All right. We'll get back for this quick break.

I want to talk to you about the Series A and what it takes to clear market in 2020 for a series A. specifically because it seems to be extremely hard to do right now. And there seems to be a glut of companies trying to get a venture capitalist to write that $510 million series A check. And they're not having success when we get back on Inj. If you're an accredited investor or if you're a founder, you need to understand what a special purpose vehicle is. You've probably heard people in the investment community say SPV.

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Thanks to our friends, that is sure. We love the company, and they've done a great job for us. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the first episode of Angels Season 4. Thanks to all the partners for making this possible. It really needs a lot to me into the viewers. I know that.

Sarah Cannon is with us, not Sarah Connor. And she's a partner at Index Ventures. Yep, billions under management, obviously, a very successful firm, known, of course, for the Slack investment. And what are the other big ones, Spotify? Spotify. Dropbox, Audien, Robin Hood, Elastic, Roblox. Yeah, lots of winners in there.

When I left for the quick break, I wanted you to get your take on the Series A. What does it take to clear market right now? And what happens in a partner meeting? Perhaps this is the best way to frame it. When you're in a partner meeting and you're fighting for a Series A investment or one of your partners are, what is the dynamic and what clears market with the other partners? you need to have consensus here or some percentage of consensus? Is it a consensus-based firm, or is it majority, or is it free for all?

Yeah. So I will talk about the partner meeting. So, you know, so much at the Series A is two important things. One, if I had to boil it down, one is the founder, and the other is, you know, the value proposition they have and the size of the opportunity, right? So for the founder, we meet as a partnership. So both my European partners and my San Francisco partners were one team, we will meet every founder. So at, you know, other firms, it will be one partner will meet the company and then

represent them to the rest of the investment committee. For us, the relationship with the founder is so important that we want them to be able to meet all of us. Eight people. Yep. And actually nine, because we have a wonderful operating partner, Bernard. Just on a scheduling basis, does that mean they come to the partner meeting or do they have to meet two or three at a time and do three meetings? So we know, we meet all at once. Got it. So we have a partner meeting every Monday morning and then we'll meet company. So we'll be meeting a company in Berlin. We'll meet a company in, you know, Helsinki, and then one in San Francisco, one in New York, and the partner will be with them wherever, or hopefully they're in this room.

How many do you do every Monday? Oh, man. So I personally have wanted to institute a cap because at five, you're not making good decisions, right? And your context switching. It's a series A on this market, and then it's a series C in another market. So I, you know, typically, on an average Monday, two or three companies. Half an hour hour each, or there's an hour allotted for each?

It's 45 minutes presentation by the company. And then we will have a debrief as a partnership for 15 or however many minutes. It's a full day. We need. Oh, it's a very full day. But so much of it is that founder. And so to be able to have eight people's perspectives on is this person the kind of person that's going to build a multi-billion dollar business?

And also get them a chance to get to know us. Because I think you really get a sense of a firm by meeting eight people. Like who are the people they've chosen to be partners? How do they interact? What questions do they ask? They give me time to ask them questions. So that's a huge part for us of the series A. And then I'd say the second is this kind of what I called,

what is a value proposition, how big is the opportunity? You know, I was trained kind of doing later stage investing. And the key question there is, like, is this a good business? One of the things I learned is, is this a good business to be in? So we'll say, like, is this fundamentally, if this works as this entrepreneur has laid out in this visionary way, is this a great business to be? What's a bad business to be in?

What's a good business to be in? What's something in the middle? If you could give an example, you can scrub the name and give the category or, you know, it doesn't have to be in your portfolio, but what are bad businesses to be in? I don't know, like airlines, for example, like things that have been historically very low margin, right? Like, or highly, low margin, high-regulation, but then, so I'll say that, but then there's Amazon, right? Where there is an investor you learn, too, there are exceptions to this rule, where there are things that are scaled with very low margins that are attractive. Now, that's rare, right?

Right. And so I think, exactly. And so you also want to design, and we'll jump to your other question about institutional design and how you make decisions as an investor. committee, you want to have flexibility to make sure that you're not just doing the median deal that everyone likes, that you are taking risk on maybe there is a low margin business that's very attractive, for example. But I'd say that second series of things that we debate as a partnership is, is this a good business to be in fundamentally? A great business to be in would be enterprise software. Take a slack, for example. Right? Large market, growing, bottoms up adoption by developers, right? And structurally it will have good margins. Subscription base now. Subscription base. So every year.

you start with 120% of the revenue of last year. I like that. By default. I do high quality revenue. Yeah, high quality reoccurring revenue. Exactly. How much are we going to make this year? Well, at least 120% of what we made last year, unless this product stinks.

Exactly. And then what are the ones in the middle? Like marketplaces? Where do you put them? Great businesses. So I'd say in the middle, I would put a category I've thought a lot about, because I'm very interested in this trend towards freelancing and gig workers, but a lot of labor marketplaces.

So as you can tell, my background's in economics. I'm curious about how people find work. So there are a lot of labor marketplaces that exist, which I think is an interesting idea, connecting you to work that needs to be done in the universe. But I think when the ticket sizes are low, like you're earning relatively, let's say it's a category where wages aren't that high,

and it's really... There we go. And it's really expensive to acquire them. Those unit economics are not going to be probably great. So I'd say that's a business where there's a need for it, but it may just not be as good of a business or as large of a business down there. on. We have millions of people driving for Uber, Lyft, Postmates, DoorDash. We have a government here in

California and in other places that are fighting to make those full-time workers. Those people have unlimited job opportunities at that low end. We'll call it $12 to $20 an hour jobs today with massively low unemployment, they're opting in to being freelancers. Why is the government trying to fight for a group of people who want to be freelancers to be full-time, when if they wanted to be full-time, they could take the gig at Target, Walmart, and drive their asses into an office, into a location, and be there for an 8, 10, 12-hour shift if they wanted to, but they're opting to not do that. Yeah. I think the reason you're seeing, do you remember the protests outside of Mary that were happening in San Francisco.

Let me guess. There was a giant rat. There was a giant rat. But something really stuck with me walking by them was like one job should be enough. And the reason that I think a lot of people are taking these jobs at Uber and Lyft and DoorDash is because they're not earning enough to our very earlier. Supplemental income. So in and that because they're not earning enough to pay for the expenses and living in these

cities, as you mentioned. So because I think, and I forget the numbers. exactly, but when I looked at it, it was like 70% of people were doing it part-time. Oh, yeah. It's absolutely the majority are part-time, and they swing massively. Now, this is information from, you know, when my guy was running Uber, but back in the day, it was a 50% or greater swing in number of hours week over week. Right.

So people would work 20, 30, 10, you know, and they would also work two or three hours, pick up their kids, have lunch with them, work, have dinner, put them to bed, then work three or four hours, and it was massive flexible. So should they be allowed, in your mind, to have this flexibility? Or is, and is the government here right or wrong, to not allow 1099 work? Your personal opinion, I have one. So I think income on demand is great. And I think that we need a new labor contract. So I don't think it should be full-time or 1099. I mean, there's obviously rules in San Francisco or, sorry, in California that have been proposed. My view on this is that personally and this is not an index view, is that there should be partial contribution.

So if I'm working for lift 20% of the time, they can contribute 20% to my health care benefits. And if I'm working 60% for DoorDash, they can contribute 60%. So kind of a pro rata allocation based on the amount of hours that I work. Because I do fundamentally think if you're working, you should be getting benefits. But I think the nature of work has changed. Like you said, it's flexible, it's income on demand. It's different. And so we need government policy to evolve.

So in your world, when you're governor, and you have to make these decisions. Do you lump a freelance attorney, designer, truck driver, freelance journalist, writer, freelance, real estate brokers are freelance. Do they get to be 1099 and only the poor people don't get to be 1099 in your world? No, it's a great one. Because that seems very unfair to me on its face. Yeah.

No, I think there are different types of work, right? So I think it, but I mean, my model would be proportional to the salary that you earn. So you would still be getting, it would be tiered based on what you're earning. Got it. That's an interesting punch up. So where do you put that line? It's a great. It's a great question.

What's the distinguishing feature between a real 1099 worker and, I don't have to figure that out yet. Good thing. I'm not governor yet. More than minimum wage? Then you can become a 1099 by the level of income. I never thought about it. But this is a very, I've always thought what's going on right now is a negotiation to come up with the third tier.

Yeah. And actually, based on the inside information, I know, that's actually what's occurring. Yep. That there is full-time employment, 1099, and can there be something in between where there's a contribution, et cetera. So how does that get triggered? I never thought about it based on the salary. That actually seems to me to make sense.

If you're making minimum wage or less, yeah, there's not a lot of room there. So maybe when you hit a thousand hours a year, you get a contribution towards health care. off, whatever. But if you're above it, if you're double the minimum wage, do we need to be dictating to a $30, $40 an hour person how they, if they decide to be a freelancer, that they can't do it, a writer, a designer, a PR rep, a real estate broker? This is interesting. We need to get you to Washington. I think this is a good, which doesn't seem like something you'd be jazzed at doing. But they have... But they have... Governorjason.com.

Yeah, President Jason. I mean, why... But he's wearing a mic button, so... I wonder where all those domain names resolve to. All right, let's answer this question about how to solve this debate in 90 seconds after this break. We have 90 seconds to solve it. I've got it. I've got it. I'm ready. Okay.

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Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. We're cooking with oil now. We're talking about politics. We're talking about employment. We're touching all of the third rail issues here. And in the fourth segment, we're going to bring up atheism. We haven't even talked about the things I invest in.

I love it. We're going to get there. Trust me. Okay. This is the way to do an interview is that if you have a super compelling, discussion that's not like marketing or PR or that kind of stuff, then when we do drop your portfolio, people are going to be like, you earned it, right? Like you earned the plug, right? It's sort of like Robin Williams would go on David Letterman or any of these shows. It would be so

amazingly funny that when they mentioned the movie that they were promoting, you'd be like, got to see Bicentennial Man. He was so good on just talking about his life. We have to go see it. Bicentanylman, I just watched it with my daughters because I'm doing all the Android movies. So we did Blade Runner, Bicentenno Man, AI, and actually underrated. Have you seen Bicentenelman? No. It's worth watching. It's actually a really great film.

It has flaws, but really just talks about if you could live forever if you wanted to and how we treat androids. Not totally dissimilar to the human rights issue of work and benefits that we're talking about right now. All right, you said you had the solution. We're brainstorming. We're workshopping here. No, it's thanks to you that I got it. Because you said an income-based, it should have been separated based on lower-income

workers or higher income, basically. And I think that this is you got to it, but it is, it costs a certain amount to buy your own health care, right? So if we can figure out at what income level you could afford your own health care, then maybe that's the cutoff where we say your company then doesn't have to provide you benefits. So whatever that costs is. $6 to $12,000 in room for health care, you get to be $1099.

So if, you know, in the United States, most places, you know, dual income, 50, 60, 70,000 a year, taking San Francisco and New York out, $60,000 a year plus for the family income, plus, I think it's $9,000 for a family, $12,000 a year. So somebody's about $10. You'd have to be 10 over a household income of 60 or 70, which would then equate to $40,000 a year to divide it by $2,000. It'd be over $20,000 an hour. It's about 50% more than minimum wage. So your first guess wasn't that.

Well, it would be triple minimum wage, the federal, right? because federal is $750 or something. So it would be triple federal. Oh, right. California is 50. Yeah. Yeah. Which actually I think is smart

that they localize the minimum wage because. Posterling is different. Radically, yeah. But there is a little, but so I think this is, you know, to our solution from brainstorm, a creative one.

Yeah. But. God forbid, anybody had a creative idea in the political sphere. They'd be like, I'm sorry, did you have an innovative idea that you wanted to test? Okay, we have to cancel you now.

No, I'm sure someone's thought of this. Well, I don't know. I hope we made a real contribution. But I also think part of me is like, well, why don't we let people choose? Why don't they decide if I'm a real estate agent or I'm a door-dash driver and I want them to contribute or I'm going to pay on my own? Why don't we just let them? Why don't we let them choose? Because politicians are so afraid of actually having an open conversation about something because they'll record it and then play it back for the next 30 years

that, oh my God, you considered stop and frisk as Mike Blomberg did. In context at that time, I think it was close to 70 percent of New Yorkers were in favor of stop and frisk. in doing anything. Now, it was obviously different by different demographics. And it was a mistake. He apologized for it, Mike Bloomberg, with Stopp and Frisk. But in context, people were very scared in New York at that time because it was so lawless. Just like after 9-11, we made a mistake with waterboarding. It was obviously terrible idea for us to break the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After we, Eleanor Roosevelt, you know, taking credit for it, we, the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt, created it. We broke it. I mean, just, really.

really spit in the face of everything that's right in the world. So mistakes can be made, but in this case, that would be actually wonderful. I think it would be a massive advantage for Uber to offer minimum wage. You have to work these shifts. Unlimited, uncapped, you can pick your own hours. But it would be great for them to be able to say, you know what? We know the Super Bowl or this event is occurring or New Year's Eve is happening. You, as a full-time person, have to work New Year's Eve.

you don't get search pricing, but you just have to, we have, you'll have a defined shift, and you get benefits. So you get the benefits, you get the job security, but you got to work the hours we want. And you can't work for Lyft, or vice versa, or postmates. So this is what people don't realize. That is great for the business. Right, I love this idea for the business side. But if you were thinking about it from a worker perspective.

Wait, but didn't you just take the side that you want everybody to have benefits? I do. And not want them to be freelancers. So which is it, so? But they, in my world, they could choose what they wanted. You're not allowed to do that because you get sued. The companies have to pick one. But this is because the regulatory infrastructure doesn't exist yet.

It's broken. This is actually what I wrote my master's thesis on with Larry was what are the new laws that we need for the sharing economy. And if there were rules that said this, then the companies wouldn't have to be. This is actually like writ large something I think in technology, right? Like Mark Zuckerberg is saying, I don't want to be choosing what content goes on Facebook, but the rules don't exist yet. So I think there's a whole opportunity, hopefully, for people who know technology. to help think about what are the good rules. Maybe we just could keep talking about them and come up with a whole slew.

In this case, I think it would be really amazing if people could make a decision for themselves. Like this patriarchal, like the government is the best person to decide if you want to be a freelancer or you want to be full-time. Why not let UberLift and Postmates say, here's the full-time job. Here's the part-time job. 1099, unlimited upside, search pricing, make your own hours, no benefits. Full-time benefits. We pick your hours. You don't.

Which, by the way, is what Starbucks does. Or if you want to work at Target, you have to come in at 6 a.m. And you have to work this 6 a.m. to whatever shift. And it sucks. And you've got to drive an hour to be there. And you've got to be in this location. You don't pick your location. You don't pick your hours.

The challenge is, I think, the economists would say, that the individual doesn't know the full economic cost and benefits of the choices, right? Which sounds patronizing. No, but there are things like consumer, like information, right? Like, okay, the interest rate on this loan is this much higher than the market standard. Or this thing that you're about to eat has this many. any calories in it. So I think there's a little bit of, like, trust the individual to make the decision, but arm them with information. Like, if you get this graduate degree, you're never going to get a job. Like, I want someone to know that because it is very hard to know that,

go in before. So I think I'm much for like, let's get an individual's the data. Like, at this rate, you will earn this much this year. Healthcare costs this much. You decide. Okay. Now we go back and forth. If we could change one thing, that would increase upward mobility. Yep. Let's just pick three things. That would change. change upward mobility. And we can do this dueling banjo style. They'll put in a do-da-dun-dun-d-dun-d-d-da. You pick one, I pick one, you pick one, if we're duplicating, that's good for the show. What three things? Changes we can make here in America. We're talking about America. We're talking about the American system. What could we change here? That would increase upward

mobility. I'll go first or you can go first. You pick. Okay. I'll go first. Great. I knew you would. The quality. I mean, you've got accepted to Harvard and Stanford. There's no chance you're going to be like, no, of course you're the host. You go first. Oh, no, no, I'm rude. Your hand goes right up.

No, I'm rude. You're the first person, like one third of your classes were class participation. When I was at GSB, literally I've never seen 100% of people raise their hand when the professor said, does anybody have any feedback? No, and then there's the poor one guy who doesn't raise his hand, and he definitely gets cold gone. There was a T.A. who had a picture of every single person in a spreadsheet, and when they asked a question, she typed in if they asked it. And there's a problem with Sarah. It's a really easy name to say. So you really get called on a lot.

Okay, yeah, so maybe I raise my hand. Go ahead. This is great. Reforming the quality of our K-12 education system. Fantastic. Education two was on mine, but I will not pick that as my first. What's your first? My first is to change the accreditation laws to be sophisticated laws so that any person in the United States who's able to play roulette in Vegas. is also able to invest in private companies. So if you were an Uber driver or an Airbnb host,

you would be able to freely buy shares in the company and not be stopped. Because then the debate that we're talking about of the millions of people driving for trucking companies, Uber and Lyft and Postmates could say, for every $100,000 you bill through the system, we are going to give you $500 in shares at the current valuation.

which they cannot do because of the oppressive patriarchal rules that make capital gains and private company investment something for the rich, not the poor. What's your second? I... And you feel free to react to my... No, no, no. Actually, the Germans have a lot to teach us about this. So they actually will have a lot of workers represented on the boards of companies to deal with this. So I don't think it's, so that's more representation than it is financial. But it's the same principle. Same principle. So I think we have a lot to learn. So my second one actually also learning from the Germans, and the South Africans do this well, too. But it is having technical schools where you actually are learning skills that can be applied at work,

but over the course of your life. So we have community colleges, and we have a lot of great four-year institutions. I think there's still a room. I'm hoping someone will start this business. It's one that I've thought about starting, where you're getting kind of technical skills that then you go into work, but you do this every five years. So I think education needs to change. Exactly. But why is it that in our lives we're born? we have a chapter of education and then a chapter of work. Why don't I have some education, work, then maybe all of a sudden venture capital can be done by robots. And Sarah, you're out of luck,

and I can go learn to be a philosopher, which I've always wanted to do. And then I can hopefully do that. Did a great job today, by the way. Thank you, thank you. This week and philosophy. This week and philosophy. I'm sure we're talking about this on all of your shows.

No, no. Literally, you put this on the table, and people, I watch them curl up, like, the tension, like, oh, my God, you're going to, Jesus, is going to make me talk about poverty or jobs. And they're just like, my PR person did not prepare me a stump answer for this. You're delightful in that you'll just talk about it. Oh, dear, all the trouble.

I mean, you do give the, like, this is my opinion, not index, which, by the way, this is what America used to be like. People forgot the 80s and 90s where people could sit down and have a vibrant discussion and debated. You try that now. People are like, I don't like that opinion. We've got to cancel this person. Probably the most horrible thing about what we do to politicians is that they are not

allowed to evolve their views. So I'm going with Mike Bloomberg because I want to have the most qualified president who's got the most experience and knows how to manage people. And he wasn't on your top three, which I find super revealing. Disturbing also. Well, I know Mike Bloomberg. Mostly to provoke you because you're wearing a button. Was that you just straight up trolling me? You're doing it for the good of the pod? It wouldn't be any fun. Okay, great. I love it. You know how podcasts work. But we're... I'm learning. How do you, you know how entertainment works or just inherently entertaining? How do you look at it, Mike Bloomberg?

As a extremely talented business person. And I just think that these people have been, I like him. We mentioned I also went to his event. I'm open-minded. To be honest, I would just really like one of these people to win. Yeah. Yeah. Normalcy, loyalty, something.

All those things. All those things. Honesty, empathy, reasonability, listen to experts. But I have to say I'm an optimist and harder. You wouldn't be a vendor capital. but I'm happy we're talking about climate. We're talking about a whole new set of economic proposals, the basic income to Andrew Hing.

So I like that there's new ideas out there. It's fantastic. I just want them to be implemented. Okay, so my second is unlimited trade school education sponsored by the government two-year clips, etc., but at any age. And so we do what

similar to income sharing agreements, I guess, if you want to go for free to college, we will tie that in some way to your taxes compensation increasing, and it'll be free. But if you do get a job in that space, you will pay back yours over some period of time. It could be 50 years because the United States can play the long game. So if we train you as a developer or as a nurse or whatever job is really in demand right now, we don't have enough of plumbers. actually also the average age is like 55 or 60 years old for plumbers right now in the United States nobody wants to take that job even though it's high paying. If we train you in that,

you agree to pay it off tax-free in some very de minimis way. So if there was $20,000 in education over 50 years, or let's even make it 60, it would be nothing with no interest, but pays for the next person coming up the ladder. And those are available to anybody at any time, but only for jobs that we need. So you can't do it for philosophy or art appreciation or things that are not We don't need artists? I think that that's something you can teach yourself on the internet, but the government shouldn't pay for it. I was going to actually give you a high five.

I don't know if I'm allowed to do that on the proposal because I could not agree with you more. I think there's a financial structure and you're making income from this. You're getting the training. But we need some, I can't be like enough for artist, philosopher. Maybe not for this model. I understand. You need to bound it or it would be very expensive.

I'm trying to figure out also something because you talked about ideas becoming execution. This is a great first step. If this works, then maybe there's a place. where we can say, hey, this model worked of a 60-year free loan from the government, not from predatory, you know, horrible loans that, you know, people are paying interest for 10 or 15 years like you talked about earlier and they don't know what they signed because they did it when they signed it when they're 19 years old and their frontal lobes were not even developed for long-term thinking, hey, maybe we could.

It's true. Like literally the only loan you can't get out of is your student loans and they make you sign when you're 17 and 18 years old and you have literally no frontal lobes yet. very de minimis. Then you could actually say, okay, we're going to do some other ones, but it's capped at $10,000. Because going to Yale or going to, you know, Columbia to get a $200,000 degree in philosophy that there is literally no job that pays anywhere near that would pay that back. In fact, there is no job for a philosopher other than I think.

Professor. But you know what? We're going to need a lot of philosophers to help us understand AI. So, you know, like maybe we need that. Exactly. Read books and do it. it remote or do it in like mastermind groups, but do not pay $50,000 a year for four years and then live in an apartment in the Upper West Side for another $30,000 and go $400,000 in

debt. Exactly. We just need to tell people what they're getting themselves into. Okay. So I got my second. Do you have a third? As we fix society? As we fix society.

I mean, there's so many. We're talking specifically here about upward mobility. You went K through 12. I went accredited investor rules. You went community colleges. Community colleges. And you went the financing for that. financing for that piece. Was there anything left? I have so many. If I had to pick one,

you know what it would be? Early childhood. I'm just going to pick child. I'm going to pick education all the way because all the research tells you that like so much of people's capabilities are determined in the first two years of life. So like have someone reading and taking care of them, I would fund Head Start or another great early childhood. Literally it was the same for me, which was in the early years, allowing seven day a week education slash child care, for, let's call it, 10 hours a day, or maybe even 12, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. We have all of our schools open seven days a week, maybe even 360 days a year, take out the five or six major holidays, available 12 hours a day.

Anybody can bring their child for any reason to be taking care of and educated in an open curriculum, including the summer, because it's such a small amount of money to do that. It would create jobs because you could double or you probably triple the number of teachers in the world, which is a great way to deal with unemployment or jobs going away because of automation. Teacher jobs are not going to go away. And then you unlock, for one of the reasons people can't start companies, is they had a child early in their life, perhaps even. And they can't take risk because they can't work because they've got to pick up the child of school

so they don't qualify for certain jobs, like working at a startup, where they might need to come in on the weekend. See, you love the European socialist model. That's what they do. They have universal daycare. Yeah, I mean, and socialism isn't a bit of a, you know, a spectrum, right? And so I think society's slowly ticking up things. I am for compassionate capitalism. All the suggestions I have drive capitalism. There are decided not to be handouts, which I don't believe in. I believe in opportunities that then drive the capitalist system and create more billionaires. Couldn't agree more. And we just need to do more

on the opportunity side. Tell me about your first investment, as a an investor, why you picked it and how it worked out and what you learned. And then what's tell me then about the last two or three and how you pick them. So the first and the last two or three. The first deal that I really led was Looker. So a business intelligence company, do you know them? I am on Looker every day. You are on Looker every day. Well, one of my company is CafeX, which is a coffee machine. I drive past it every morning. Yeah. So we closed the ones in San Francisco because Well, not every morning I used to. We just moved them to the airports because literally the vandalism in San Francisco,

when you have to hire a security guard to secure the robot, the business model breaks. But when you put them in airport and people don't rip them apart, you're good. And they're crushing it. But, yeah, they have a looker dashboard that I check on every day. Without speaking out of school, literally, when they put these things in the airports, I was like, oh, my God, this four-year journey, we figured it out. just took four years. So how did you find Looker? What round did you invest in and why? Yes. So we invested, I was at Capital D at the time, we invested in the series D. And I found it

because I, you know, business intelligence, there's a lot of companies. So as an investor, it's always what's challenging. It's like, okay, everyone knows it's an attractive category, but there's so many. Like, how do you know which is different? And I surveyed our portfolio companies. So we had invested in, say, 20 companies at the time. And I sent them a survey and I was like, what tools do you, you know, a bunch of categories, what tools do you love? And Slack was number one, which I tried to invest in for a very long time from capital G, and number two was looker. And I said, huh, this one stands out. And then I talked to, which is ironic now, because the company has recently been acquired by Google. But at the time, it had not,

obviously, because I invested independently. And I asked the Google team, well, what do you think of the technology? And they said, wow, I mean, the team there is really unique. And what's differentiated about them is they've created this language called LookML, which you didn't have to know SQL. Look ML. Look ML. Don't you love it? Yeah, that's genius. It's like the power of naming. It really is the thing. I was literally doing a workshop on naming this morning.

Well, yeah. Just for a company. They did it. Well, it matters. Totally matters. It's inception. It puts it in your brain. When you say Looker ML, you're like, oh, so you have your own coding language that makes

it simple to convey complex things. Got it. Nailed it. So you know the business. But they came up with, but it was really that like, BI used to be done only by there. It would be the poor guy Bob. Business intelligence. In the corner.

Exactly. Business intelligence. to be poor Bob running all of the analysis for the company. And poor Bob had a long line and Bob was miserable. So the idea with Look-M-L was to create a language that a Sarah could learn in marketing or HR finance, and then I could do my own queries. And so that kind of democratized access to BI across the organization. And so really I loved the product.

I loved that it was cloud first and that our companies loved it. And they were going to raise. This was, I preempted, which now is like the oldest news in the history of time, But then it was interesting. This was 2017. Preempted. So the company was not actively looking for capital. They had raised around already.

And they said, we're not looking. Sarah, we're not going to raise until next year. And I said, okay, well, why don't we pull it forward? Why don't you, here's a term sheet. Like, at this valuation, we'd invest this much. So you jumped the fence. I jumped the fence. And that's how, that's conviction.

I'm a high conviction gal. So you gave them a valuation that might be next year or two years valuation. Year and a half. Year, year and a half because the forecast, you don't know. Oh, exactly. Right. So you take the year and a half valuation and you say, hey, here it is on a term sheet. And for the founder, what is the decision making for them?

Because there's no such thing as a free lunch. There's some pro and there's some con to taking the preemptive funding. So give me the pro and con and how a founder should think about that. Absolutely. And this has become market. I mean, this is almost everything. Everybody's always raising is what is now, as I'm sure you know, is now the table stakes. So as a founder, when a founder thinks about this, it's a couple of things.

One is, is this valuation too aggressive? And, you know, founders think, oh, this person values my company at a billion, but that's on paper, right? And there's a lot of risk that if you don't grow in the next two years as you expect to grow. And it's not just to grow into the valuation that the investor's given you, but you need to keep growing after that because you want your next valuation to be higher. So you're putting a lot of pressure on yourself and your team that you don't necessarily need to do. So one is like, is the valuation too aggressive that you're going to put yourself actually in a tough spot for no reason? The second thing I would say you really need to think about is do you want to work with this investor, right? Because the alternative is to run a process and to meet more people.

And a lot of times people who preempt will do it because if it were a real auction, they wouldn't win. So they're using their checkbook and jumping the fence to close the deal because they don't feel they would beat Sequoia or whoever, Index or Bill Gurley or whatever. That's a fascinating way to look at it. And then for the founder... And I always say just as advice, because I get this a lot, like to people is meaning. the three people, at least meet three people. I actually did this, and the company called Linear, which I really like. And the founder said, so Sarah, should I just talk to you? And honest, Sarah was like, well, I think you should talk to three firms.

I like you with a sword, more than like a bowl of fruit or something. Or a cannon, you know, given my name. Like I get better with a gun. No, I'm not done, not pro-gun. No, no, we didn't get to that. Oh, okay. We'll get to that in the fifth section on this two-part, Grand Slam, opening, season four. Yeah. So I think, yeah, that you should always talk to a couple people. You know how to shoot a gun? Have you ever held a gun? I have done. I have done skeet shooting. I think all women, specifically, should know how to use a firearm and they should own one. I can change a tire. That's great. My dad was insistent that his daughter changed tire. I think specifically because of the violence towards women in society

and the disproportionate nature of it from men and the fact that just on a physical basis, men are bigger in almost all cases and more aggressive and targeting women specifically. All women not only should know how to use a gun, they should own one. I think we should just get rid of all of them. I would be fine with that. But since that will never happen in our lifetime

or any of our children's children's children's children's children's lifetime in America because of the Second Amendment, that will never happen. Then women are obligated to know how to use a firearm and own one. Are you going to see your daughter? 100%. Not only I'm giving her a gun. I hope to meet her. I'm giving her 50 caliber on the top of her Tesla.

Try not to upset her. Wow. That's a quote. Somebody hops the fence. You're on your own, you know, and cops are not going to be there for 10 to 20 minutes. How is a persuasion? You think that's not going to work? Not going to work if somebody is looking.

to attack you? No. And I think all women should take self-defense classes, number one, because when I taught self-defense classes in New York, 30 years, 20 years ago. You taught them? Yeah. And people, women, I would say four and five women didn't know how to throw a punch or make a fist. So 80, show me your, you ever throw a punch? I mean, I've done it, yes. In a boxing class. Perfect. We were looking at investing in a company. Perfect. Like, boxing class, great. Because when I would do this with people, It would be all kids didn't know how to throw a punch, and then women still didn't know how to throw a bunch. Boys would learn because they would get in fights, and they were encouraged to get in fights.

They put their thumb inside their fist. No. And then they would punch with the front of their... This way, right? That's it. And you're hitting those two knuckles right here. And if you punch the way I just showed you, you're breaking your thumb and or another finger, and it's having no power. But the way you did it is actually where the power is, those first two knuckles.

Perfect. All right. Anyway, where were we? We were talking about preempting deals. Preempting deals. Yeah, it's kind of like if you're preempting deals. If you're the founder, it's like you're getting on the, I just thought, I was trying to think of the right analogy. I was like, it's kind of like when you get on the ski lift and it's like, yeah, those are double diamonds up there.

And you're like, well, I did a diamond. And you're like, okay, but just you know when you get off this lift, it's a double. It's a double. And it might be slightly different than the diamond you did. So when you take that preemptive funding now, like you've just, you've committed. And it turns out, I mean, it's extremely hard to get to one million an error, but like getting to 20. I mean, you're really, it's harder to grow at the same percentage. when the base gets larger.

Math is tough that way. The other thing is, I don't know if you find this, there are very few founders, I think, who can handle the distraction having a large amount of money in their bank account. It almost university screws with founders' heads. We spent a lot of time in our morning meetings talking about that.

How do you address it? How do you mitigate against it? I think the two ways we've done it are, one, to try to understand the psychology of the person, what motivates this person, why are they building this business? And then two is to how to do it. have an honest conversation. So we have had a lot of our portfolio companies, have inbound interest from other firms, evaluations were like, holy smokes. And you say, like, okay, if you take

this money, I mean, I'm on a board of a company, and we had this discussion with the founder and said, okay, like, this is, if you want to work with this company, like, you don't need the money, let's be very clear about that. But if you do and you want to take it because you want their help and here's how are we going to spend. Like, let's commit to a plan of how much cash we need to execute our plan. If the plan changes, tell me that and how much cash. But you just need to have a plan that they commit to. So you have to be very thoughtful. And explicit.

Because every founder is, I mean, most are very well-intentioned, and they're not trying. But it's easy to say, like, oh, I just raised $40 million. So, like, oh, we'll get the bigger office. That's how it shows up often first. Yeah. Oh, I always say it's the reception desk. When the founder is in a meeting,

looking at the designs of the reception area, that's when you know the company's fucked. All right, noted. And I'm just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This reception desk, like, literally, you're figuring out, like how to have the swooping desk and what the emotional feeling is in the lobby, this means nothing. Like, what is on the roadmap, you know, landing a span?

Let's talk about the customer. This is very efficient. I should just go in and be like, have you been discussing your entry? Oh, my Lord. When they're, when, I've had founders in, like, I can't meet it because I'm in meetings with the architects all day. It's like, you're in meetings with the architects? Like, is there a COO or a culture person who can do this and just tell you this is what we're

doing? Like, it's just the moment of. Interesting. Yeah. But I'm very prone to design focused founders, but I like it when it's on their product, maybe less more so than their office. I mean, or if, you know, it's reasonable to spend a couple of hours,

but when I see them getting obsessed about it, and that's what happens, or they're talking about the chairs or they're talking about the off-site, and it's just, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, like they get too obsessed with those things. Keep the core things, the four things. Yeah. The main things, the main things.

The main things. You mentioned India earlier. what are your thoughts on the opportunity internationally, India and China specifically, are places where venture firms are opening office? How does index look at those two markets? Are you opportunistic? Are you active? I am very bullish from a macro perspective, obviously, about China,

where I think there is more venture actually being invested this year than in the U.S. And firms have obviously done very well, and similarly about India. I think the question with India, where, I actually opened Capital G's office there or worked on it, is a question of timing. Like, you're certainly saying you've seen FlipCart, like you've seen large companies being built, but how are there enough people to sustain, as a market large enough of people who can buy things online to create the businesses that venture capitalists are the size returns we're looking for.

So I think India is very much a timing question. I think for Index, we, you know, we're originally in Europe, we're now in the U.S. There's so much opportunity right now in those two geographies. I were all very adamant about serving those founders. so we're very focused on those GOs. But we're open-minded, right? Like I do, I have, you know, company, we have some in Australia, we have some...

Australia is amazing. We have five investments in Australia now, yeah. Well, I mean... It's Atlassian. Atlassian and Canva leading the charge there. And when you think about what having two big unicorns like that does to the psyche of the other entrepreneurs there, I mean, listen, it's a form of penal colony.

Like, people are coming to it with a... I think the spirit of them is, like, pretty rebellious and they're very self-possessed, which if you're a founder, those are two of the qualities I look for. Like a little rebellious, I'm self-possessed, and like you're going to change the world, good. And they want to build companies

that are bigger than the... They can't build an Australian company. What's the 30, 40 million people? Like, you're not building a big business just on Australian companies, so you're automatically looking outside of your country, as opposed to Japan and Germany where a lot of the founders I mean from those countries

are like, got enough 100 million people speaking our language. We're good. We're just going to work with that. And that's a big enough to am for us. When you look at Europe, how do you break down the different regions in countries? Because obviously some countries are not producing unicords per million people at the rate of Sweden. Right. You know what we're excited about is there's a lot more geographies in Europe that are interesting.

Right? I mean, we talked about the Nordics historically. France has been interesting, and I think it's increasingly interesting. They have a lot of great AI. France is interesting. France is interesting. You're kidding. The place where you have to go.

This is the place where you have to go to the government to fire one of your employees. So, and those laws may change. Macomb is talking about it. Really? Yes. And they've actually just, we've been working, index in Europe has been working on changing stock option grants to employees. And Macon just mentioned that they were going to do that in France to be able to give,

you're very much in line with your proposal. So I do think, and but not only France. They got rid of the wealth tax, too. I mean, they lost your Rod de Perdue, and I think that was like that, that was the, yeah. But they, but not only. So France, I think, we think, has been interesting for a long time. But Romania, you know, like you have UiPath, a great business that's come out of Romania. So it's even more countries we're seeing founders from broader and broader GEOs.

Portugal, I saw all over. So open mind about Europe. But I think we'll probably stay out of India and China for the near term. Is it the reg? I'm a little obsessed with the regulatory environments and how they sort of slow down founders in Europe. But you do see this like incredible Nordic, you know, dominance, like, what is it, 11 unicorns now or something, and, you know, in a very short period of time, like in a decade. Why do you think it is that they've broken out and other people

haven't? The Nordics? Yeah. I think they, I mean, I think a lot of it is the great companies that you mentioned. Well, Nokia, I mean, you have some really large businesses that have spun out a lot of great companies. And I think success forget success in this ecosystem, right? So, you know, it was semiconductors in Silicon Valley originally. So I think you had those great companies, they spun out, there's a lot of great talent. And I do think a lot of the social benefits that they have in these countries, like help people make the decision to found a company. So it's always a confluence of effects, but they've had the benefits for a long time. So it's not fair to say that in the last decade, all of a sudden, that change.

But I do think it's a lot of having a Spotify or, you know, King or SuperSelt, some of these great companies signal to people there's a path. I think that's exactly what it is. I think you nailed it because if you can see it, you can be it. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, everything from seeing more female VCs or people of color, when people see it, then they can be it. It's like, oh, I know somebody who worked at Spotify. I know somebody who worked at Clarnia.

I know somebody worked at Spotify and Clarnia. Just like we all know people who worked at, you know, Microsoft, then Google, then Facebook. You know, like Cheryl Sandberg. I was like, yeah, you're at Google, she's at Facebook, what next. Like, when you can see that repeating pattern. Can I share my favorite story on this signaling at Obama's inauguration? I was standing next to this gentleman, African American, and he had his kids on his son on his shoulder. and Obama started speaking,

and now he said, now you have no excuse. Yeah. And it was just this like, now it's possible for you. And that was like a pretty powerful moment. This is why I really was so hard-cressful and just completely heartbroken about Hillary not winning. I mean, I went with my daughter and she filled out the form for me.

And then we get this. Right, it's just, and I was talking to my daughter about writing for my Bloomberg, and she said, I thought we're voting for a woman. I was like... The right woman. No, I love her question. You shouldn't vote for someone.

I wouldn't vote for someone because she was a woman. Right. But for her perspective, like she was so upset about Hillary not getting in. And she's like, I thought we're voting for a woman, dad. And I was like, you know, I'm voting for the person I think is most qualified in this cohort, which I believe is this person. But let's talk about it. Let's go through each of their positions.

Because I could be wrong. And I'm going to let her vote with me. Good, dad. Well, I'm trying. That sounds pretty great. I think we're getting there. All right, listen, I've kept you for far, far longer than you agree to. So just in wrapping up here, atheism, religion, rank your top three religions in terms of how those some they are.

And then let's get right to abortion and family planning. We haven't covered. What did we miss? The things that I want to invest in. Yeah. Can I at least? Can I mention? We're going to make this the clip that we share, and I'll make it part of my intro of what you're interested in.

And we're going to blow this clip out. literally in my cold open, I will put what you invest in. So it made it worthwhile here. You get some deal for that. Oh, I'm having the best time. No, I'm having the best time. Okay. Me too, actually. So the things that I am most passionate about as is obvious, is the future of work. And specifically, so there are three parts of that that I'm spending time on right now. One is the next generation productivity tools. So we have Slack and Zoom. And I think there's a whole generation of tools that are being, that are designed first, that are inherently collaborative. and I think you're seeing Microsoft Office, Adobe, and Alassian Suite become unbundled. So I'm very excited about investing.

Isn't that interesting how everybody thought, oh, just here one log in, get a collection of things? And they're like, yeah, you know, that's really easy, but I'd rather do it the hard way and have the best. So I want to do Slack, AirTable. Notion. Notion. And it's like, but Google Docs has all of this. And it's like, yeah, nah, nah, rather log in three different times. And you're like, really?

fascinating. I think it's because the developers, like, individuals are choosing. It's not being purchased centrally. So, like, the bottom of buying has been a big part of that. And also because you can now integrate between the products. Zapier makes you have your. There you go. So great.

Zappar's a sponsor of the pod. Oh, thank you, Wade. Oh, you in Zapier? No, but I'd love to be. Oh, wait, are you an investor in Zapper? No, but I love the company. Wait, he's been on the pod. I forgot what episode. We've got to get back on the pod.

He's going to come back on two weeks? He is? He is? Well, tell him I say hi. Yeah. But he's, and he built a remote team. But I think that genuinely has made it possible for people to use these and then share data between them. It's amazing. When he started that company, and also, in fairness, if this than that, people were like, well, that's a goof.

That's not a business. That's like middleware. It's like, nobody's going to pay for that. And now it's like literally people in their job descriptions are like, Zapier, if this than that, understand integration, no code, et cetera. So you love this space, remote work because why is remote work so important? Why do you think that's such a big trend? Is it generational?

So I fear it's been a little bit overplayed at the moment. I think about it overhyped, yeah. I think for me it's much more about so much about how we work is changing. Like we're doing flexible jobs to our discussion on gigs. We're working remotely. So I think there's many things that contribute to a Slack or a Zoom being even more valuable. They're still valuable in the traditional enterprise. They're valuable in a distributed team.

So that market is enormous and I'm interested in tools for all of them, not just for the remote segment. But I think it's because talent is from everywhere. everywhere. And technology is enabling us to have people, great people who work for us in Helsinki and Bogota. Yeah. And you just think about how broken, when things break in society, it creates these opportunities. If real estate and transportation were really robust, and we had solved those problems in America and major cities, we probably wouldn't even be talking about remote because they'd be like, well, no, you need to come to the office and just get a house as close to the office as

possible and reduce your commute. And it's like not possible anymore in a lot of cities. And the commute distance is correlated with depression, domestic violence, suicide, happiness. It's actually really dark. I looked it up online because I actually had this thesis about it years ago. And it's really scary how long commutes equal worse life. Oh, well, having done it for a year at Google, I can understand. Well, it's so bizarre. We have people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. living in San Francisco, it's not a great city to live in, put that aside, and then commuting down to a wonderful, beautiful, Buccolle, you know, Cupertino Mountain View, where it's gorgeous, but they can't afford to live or they choose not to, for 75 minutes at each way?

What was your commute? It was on good day. It was at least an hour and a half each way. So you were an elite white-collar executive in the top 2% of society spending three hours commuting? I spent three hours to do. What was wrong with your decision making that you just didn't live? live near Google. I really love cities. And I love the diversity and the like all the positive

externalities about being around a diverse set of people. And I was willing to pay for that, you know, three hours every day of my life. How long did you do it for them? A little over a year and thank God, capital G moved to the city. You lasted a year. Well, they moved. I don't know how long I would have lasted. They wouldn't have, yeah. I think it's become this incredible limiting factor for Facebook and other place, but I think Facebook now is getting an office in the city. They took one of these tall skyrised or half of it or something, but I don't know what people were forcing people onto these buses. I know.

Well, they thought they didn't have to move. And now I think because all the startups are here, and they can recruit the engineers away from the big companies, and big companies have also come. It's so dystopian, like three hours a day on a bus. I know. Well, a lot of people in the world do it. But you're right.

It's irrational when you have the choice. They usually don't have the choice. Yeah, and that's my point. It's like, but it does. Okay, so what are the categories? So my other, but that one, the new thing I'm thinking about in that world is intelligent productivity. So how do we leverage AI to actually help us focus in our tools? Example. It within Slack. So Sarah, you're spending a lot of time on this particular content.

Why don't I prioritize that for you? So I actually invested in a company called Quill. I live the series A. Oh yeah, I know about this one. Do you know Ludwig? So Ludwig was a creative director at Stripe. And to my whole thesis on there being kind of these design first, best product wins in this category. He's a very talented designer with an interesting vision. And his point of view was to build a product that actually is designed how we authentically communicate, and it will leverage AI to help us prioritize the things that matter. So I think we've all learned kind of this complex communication in Google, like grocery store open hours.

Like I've learned to query. And Quill will actually meet us where we are and how we authentically communicate to get the highest ROI on our communication within an enterprise. So very excited about that. So intelligent productivity is one area. And then another, I was, this call it liberate the data. So a lot of people are interested in AI. Every enterprise wants to be adopting it like it used to be said about the cloud.

But so much of it is the data is not in a place where it can actually be liberated to do anything helpful. So the constraint is really on the data side. There's a whole series of companies that I'm looking at investing in that basically make that possible. So new ETL tools, a whole series of new... What's ETL? extract transform load. So to basically to make data pipelines available. So I think you're going to be looking for like a whole,

there'll be a whole new set of those businesses. Yeah, that makes total sense. Because now if you need to get data, you've got to talk to some data scientists or some developer. And then by the time you ask for it, they've got a long list of people who are asking for stuff. And then it's not in the format you need. You can't use it.

You forget you ask for it. And people just need to be able to go direct to your looker experience. Exactly. I think the next, we talked about this with BI people. I think the business intelligence folks, now there's going to be data scientists. And what tools exist for them to share their analysis and make it more interesting to others? Everybody at some point is going to be able to do BI. Everybody is going to be able to do this data analysis.

Citizen, citizen, VI person. No, it's democratizing access to all these things that used to be a specialist. And now it's tools to kind of put it in the hands of everybody. And that kind of relates to the last one, which is automation. So a company I invested in called Instabase is actually doing business process automation. So there used to be a lot of people in the loop doing things that now algorithms can do for us, like underwriting alone, for example. So I think there's like deep business process automation,

and there's also the lighter workflow automations that kind of low, what is called, low code, no code. I love this no code movement because it's just the ability for founders to, you know, why comedy was famous for saying you can't have a tech, if you don't have a technical co-founder, you failed the first test. She can't come. Where if you're not a technical co-founder who can successfully apply and conceive of a business, you failed the first test. And now it's like, well, if you and I were not coders, but we were hustlers and we had some insight into a market,

we can actually make our one point of ourselves with some bubble, webflow, zapier, Slack combination, square space, just whip it all together and be there and done and get to our first 100 customers before we hire a developer. Which is beautiful in that the barriers to starting a business are much lower, but I also think it makes it much harder to be defensible. because if you and I can do that and it's easy for us to do, then, you know, Tom and, you know, Arvind, Jane can also do that. And so I think there's a little bit of, yes. Please be careful with the names of, we have to be gender.

Gender, gender parity? Yeah, we have to be gender parity. Okay, Nickia and Joe. But, you know, that really is, it's easy for us. It could also be easy for them. So I think as an investor you're saying it's way harder to find something defensible. I love that, though, because if you give more, kids of basketball around the world, like the chances of finding a Michael Jordan go up.

And now you just look at the NBA and how many international players they are that are doing so well. It's because in the 80s and 90s, they just said, David Stern said, let's make this an international game. Let's play some games overseas. Let's send our players overseas. Let's sign autographs overseas. And now they just have such an amazing product on the floor because so many more people picked up a basketball. So many more people pick up, you know, Squarespace and Shopify and Zapier and build stuff. you know, we'll find more, you know,

Travis's or, you know, Elon's or whoever. And from Kenya. Yeah, I mean, literally the, the pitches I'm getting from Africa now are becoming so, like, just in, I'm talking about like a two-year period. You know, the businesses were very like service-based

businesses, consulting firms. And now they're like, oh, you know, we're starting an enterprise company. And it's, you know, like, they actually know how to speak the entire language because they're watching videos on YouTube of two investors talking. talking about what they invest in, and then two founders in a growth podcast and a design podcast and this, you know, stuff.

And they just can build their own version of what should exist in the world. Like notion, those guys move to Kyoto. Well, Ivan spent some time in Kyoto rethinking the product. That's right. That's right. And now they're back here. They're back here. They're back here. The founder wanted me to have like his VP or something on the podcast. It's like, yeah, no, that's like a sales thing. I want the founder to come on. You want Ivan to come on? I can ask. Can you ask him because I think he's a little podcast. Rakesha. I just let him know that. It went great. And we talked about all the number of... It's just his political views that are going to need to have views on guns. And I'm just using.

All right, listen, we can talk for hours. And we have. We're off to a great start. If people want to contact you, I'm assuming first name on index ventures or something like that works. That is my name. There you go. And you invest series A typically or seed series A or series A, series B? Series A, series C, seed to series H, any of them. Got it. And we didn't get to the type of Founder's, like to work with on a personality basis, but just what, do you believe there's a personality type that works well, or do you believe there's a personality type that works well with you? For me, yes, independent thinking. So I love very contrarian, independent thinking, curious,

and thoughtful. Yeah, clearly based on this conversation also quick. Well, this is one for the ages. This is going to be one of the top podcasts of the year for sure, and we're already in just January Oh, wow. I've got a lot of work to retain it for that long. Well, I mean, most people... I should have done this December 30th. I would have, if I had known. Well, you know, one of the things is, like, if you are in the position we're in where we're checked for a living, sometimes being honest and talking about stuff, people feel like, maybe I shouldn't talk about all these issues.

And it's actually the wrong approach to life in general. Because as you learned from Larry Summers, when you have a position, even if you're wrong or it needs to evolve, at least you stayed at a position well, and Larry Summers could appreciate it. That's what being a great investor is, is being able to debate these things. It's clear to me. I'm wrong all the time. One of the best things about being wrong is you can very quickly figure out,

yeah, you can learn so quick when you're wrong and you get corrected by somebody. And you're like, oh, thank you. Actually, I think it's kind of the best part of our job as investors is to sit in a room with people smarter and more driven than us who want to change the world, who tell us what our blind spots and how we're wrong. And you're like, please keep talking by all means. All right. Sarah Cannon.

You've been great on the program. The Obama impersonation's coming. I'm waiting for it. I don't have an Obama. But next time. I've got Clinton and I got Trump. I just got to fill in there. All right.

Thanks to Master Nick and Sir Charles, M.K., ringing the register. Jackie, Ashley, and Cush, holding it down from the Ventricide and all our LPs and sponsor the podcast. We couldn't do it without you. And we'll see you all. next time on Angel Podcast.