This Week in Startups - E36: “Angel” Podcast: Ajay Agarwal, Partner at Bain Capital shares insights on culture evolving from sales-driven to product-driven, why enterprise software is the ideal business, best investments & anti-portfolio

Episode Date: March 4, 2020

0:51 Jason intros Bain Capital's Ajay Agarwal 3:17 Are we experiencing late-stage capitalism? Is capitalism broken? 8:22 Why is upward mobility stalling? 15:29 What is it about founders & startups that made him dedicate his life's work to? 18:46 What piece of knowledge got him in startups? Ajay describes gross margin & incremental costs 23:03 Two insights on why enterprise software is the best business 30:11 Mitt Romney at Bain Capital & issues with cultural appropriation 36:44 Ajay's early days at Trilogy Software, how software sales were different in the 1990s 42:23 Companies going from sales-driven culture to product-driven 46:52 Ajay describes one of his best investments: FourKites 49:13 Ajay describes the biggest miss of his anti-portfolio: Pinterest, and why some firms care about stage and some are stage-agnostic 54:57 Has Bain ever participated in every round of a companies life-cycle? 58:15 Effects of the SoftBank Vision Fund on venture capital as a whole

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With over 5,000 completed transactions and $2.5 billion under administration, Angel listeners can get 20% off their first SPV at Assure.com slash Angel. Hey everybody, welcome to episode five of Angel, the podcast. This is our third season, thanks to the partners who made it possible. We couldn't do this podcast without the support of the partners. And so when you hear me read the partner ads, I know you may have heard them many times. Don't skip them. Listen to them. And then if you really want to help out the podcast and be a friend of the pod, which we have been doing for over a decade and we do it for free, go ahead and try those products or at least tweet.

Hey, thanks to at name of the company on Twitter for supporting the podcast. Really appreciate it. When they see that, the marketing people and the growth people and the CEOs of those companies are like, oh, wow, people are listening. That's cool. And they appreciate the support. And this season, we wanted to talk to downstream investors from Angels and from Series A, seed people. The people have billions of dollars under management. Now, many times they have a SCAL program or SEED program, so they're doing that as well.

But we wanted to talk about venture at SCAL, the big firms, the ones that make the big checks and then work backwards to how they interface with the early stage investors. Today on the program, Ajay Agarwal. Got it. Yeah, you hit it. You hit it. Perfect. Agarwal, we're talking before the show about pronouncing names of Indian people. Or people just general Greeks too who have typical names.

Exactly. And pretty universal. People are now making an effort to do it. They are. Which must feel nice. It's great. It's good intent. It's very good intent.

Definitely. But when you were coming up. Not the case in elementary school, but. Yeah, they were just like, AJ, Ajah, Ajar. What the hell is your name? Something, yeah. Teachers too probably made fun. Yeah, they didn't make fun of it, but, you know, in that era, some tried, some didn't, you know.

Yeah, no, with Calacanus, they were like, we just should call you Cali. Yeah, there you go. And that's like, no, my parents might not be super. They wouldn't be psyched. It was really funny on Prit Bahara's podcast. He's got two of them. One is called Stay Tuned, and then he has a paid one on Mondays with Ang Milgram called Cafe Insider. Okay.

Cafe.com. It's really good because he goes even wonkier. Yeah, he goes super deep. Yeah. That's my thesis on podcast. The wanter or the better. Do not assume that you have to explain everything to the audience. Exactly.

Let the audience jump into a conversation with experts. Definitely. And, yeah, maybe they're a little overwhelmed. Sometimes I'm listening to his podcast. I'm typing in the words into Google and trying to understand what they're saying. Yeah. And it's great to get that background. I agree.

I love that. It's like immersion. Yeah. But he had Anand, Gehri Dahadhas. The Hadadas. The Hadadas. Right. Giri the Hardadas, who wrote winner takes all or the winners take all. Do you read the book? I've not read the book. I've been married the book. It's a pretty good book. He makes some good

points about late stage capitalism, which is the term people used to say capitalism is ending. It's late stage capitalism. That's right. Do you think capitalism is broken and as a venture capitalist and as somebody who believes, obviously, and is dedicated his life's work to funding companies, how does it feel And I think we're probably in the similar age category, Gen Xers, how does it feel having spent our lives looking at capitalism, entrepreneurship, founders, startups, the creation of jobs, the creation of products and services that drive the human species forward to now be hated, held in contempt by a significant minority of the population in America? Well, I think. Do you think about it? I do. Because I do. I definitely think about it. I think about it as a venture capital. I think about it as a citizen of the country, as a citizen of the world.

Well, and your parents immigrated. My parents immigrated here in the early 70s. I really curious what they think about it. Yeah. I think they, look, they came here for the reason that so many immigrants come here, which is, you know, America for them and for me is a place of opportunity. It's the reason why immigrants from all over the world come to America because it's a place where anyone, theoretically, with hard work, can accomplish something. Now, I think that notion of the American dream in many ways has eroded in this current era. And, you know, as a citizen of the country, I believe we need to invest more heavily in making that dream still be the case. You know, I think the level of, you know, social mobility in this country is, you know, from what I've read at the lowest level it's been in, you know, 50, 60 years, you know, the education systems have eroded.

The public education system is not good. It's not good, right? It's not good. It's eroded. I think we're in like the high teens in terms of globally. Oh, it's horrible. We should be in the top three. Absolutely.

No, for sure. It's not even close. And so when you think about, you know, My childhood, I grew up in Pittsburgh. I went to a public school. The schools were great. Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Yeah, yeah, great town. Indian immigrant parents in Pittsburgh. Steeltown. Steel town. Yeah, absolutely. I'm a huge stealer fan to this day. But that's what's all about, that you can come to this country, you can get an education, you have freedom, you have the ability to go pursue your dreams.

And I think for a huge swath of the population, that is not the case anymore. in this country. And I think that truly is something that needs to be addressed. Now, what is the culprit of that? Is it, is it capitalism? Is it the way the government, the government are policies and how those policies have evolved? And so I think it's a conference, school unions, the quality of schools. I mean, there's so many factors at play. And so I think it's, you know, capitalism technology are, you know, easy targets. And certainly, I would say folks in our industry, you know, have, you know, not made it easy for themselves in terms of how they've, you know, gone about addressing this dialogue.

And I think the level of, you know, folks who are just tone deaf to this issue. But the reality is innovation is the engine of our economy. It has been, if you look at the pace of change from an innovation standpoint for hundreds of years, it's been a steady march. I think at every technology innovation and dislocation, there are going to be, there is going to be change. And some of that change is going to be painful. But the reality is, you know, globally wages, poverty levels, infant mortality, I mean,

everything is the best it's ever been. And Stephen Pinker wrote this great book where he just shows you chart after chart after chart, how much better the world is today than it's been at any other time in history. Now, again, that doesn't mean people in this country and around the world aren't, you know, hurting. It doesn't mean suffering doesn't exist. Exactly. It means suffering is being reduced at a level that is inspiring. That's right. And should make us incredibly optimistic. Absolutely. If you open up Twitter, it's not good enough for some people. Some people would like to focus only on that which is wrong in the world, which in a way is noble in their minds, I believe,

but I don't think they're actually doing a service. And I think one of the core things that you said about this upward mobility and why is it not happening, it's confounding to me. And it's a very hard discussion for people to have, I think, because while we're not seeing upward mobility, the information and the educational system, as broken as it is, a new one is emerging or has emerged where the answer to every question, a lesson on every subject, is now available for free, everywhere online. Yet people either don't know or more likely, they do know it's there, but do not have the inspiration, motivation, energy, I mean, some word, and it's very difficult for people to say this,

but if you really wanted to learn how to be a developer or a product manager, you can go or a designer, all of that content is available. And when we were growing up, I think we're similar age as, how old are you? Just turn 50. You just turn 50. I'm 49. Oh, there you go. Why do you look like you're 40 and I look like from 60?

Jesus Christ, RJ. What are you drinking? What is it? A lot of coffee. A lot of coffee. That's it. They say four to five cups a day is now considered healthy. That's great.

This is great. What I have to do is take out three cups. Get a couple more. Yeah, exactly. And I'm going to move on. This is the thing. You grew up with immigrant parents. I'm assuming that they pushed you hard on education.

Did they? They did. They did. Absolutely. And at that time, for you to get an education required that you went to the library. and got books. There was no online at the time. We lived through 300, 1,200, 2,400, 4,400, 4,000 board modems, which, by the way,

is painful. That's right. You can watch the text draw on the screen, sentence by sentence. You remember it. I remember it. I remember it. You had to go fight to find that knowledge. You had to fight to find those books.

You had to, like, actually acquiring a book. I agree with all that, but I think in fairness, it was hard, but in fairness, I had a huge advantage, right and my advantage was I had two parents who were very focused on their kids who invested the time my dad had the benefit of a high quality job what he do he was a physician and wow and so he did he get his education here or in india he got trained originally in india and then we moved to they moved to the united kingdom uh to get further trained that's where i was born i was born in wales uh cardiff wales um little known fact and then they my dad got a job in Pittsburgh. So he had a great job. He was highly educated. And so as a result,

you know, my dad and my mom were not thinking about their next paycheck. They were not thinking about how to put, you know, a meal on the table. And so instead, they could focus on making sure their kids had access to education, making sure they spent the time pushing us and so forth. And so you compare that to I think many families, you know, in this country today. Single parent work at three jobs, single parent, you know, multiple shifts or exhausted when they get home. Exactly. You know, and so I think that's the real tragedy here because I do think a lot of this does start in the home and we can provide technology. We can provide resources. We can invest in our schools. But a lot of this starts at the home and when you have either single parents

who are overwork or a parent who's out of a job and doesn't feel a sense of fulfillment and a sense of purpose because they lost their job. I think that's really at the root of it. And I think it has a cascading effect then on the kids and this next generation and their upward mobility as a result of it. There is a theory in psychology learned helplessness. People give up on trying. So the situation could have changed dramatically.

but if they've been beaten down and they've been feel that there's no route out, then they give up trying. This is, I think, one of the hard discussions we have to think about is that the situation could have changed materially over the last 20, 30 years with information being available. But there is a group of people, and I see it amongst elite, white folks who will argue with me that poor people cannot come up. They cannot actually rise. And I'm like, is that a bit racist that you believe that a group of a population cannot go online and learn a new skill? It feels to me a little racist. Like, it might be that they don't know that the information is available, but it might also be that you're underestimating people because in the line of work we have, we see people all the time who've come from very difficult circumstances.

So when we can get back from this quick break, I want to talk to you about what it is. that is magical about entrepreneurship and capitalism and founders to you. That has led to you dedicating your life to supporting them when we get back on Angel, the podcast. Hey, everybody. Instead of me reading you copy in an ad about LinkedIn Talent Solutions, I thought, you know what would be a great idea? Who made LinkedIn Talent Solutions? Who's the product manager? Give me the head of product.

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Happy to be here and, of course, anytime. Welcome back to Angel, the podcast, episode five of a great season. If you didn't hear the Dan Rose or Sauer from Index, got some great, great guests this season. and Ajay Agarwal is really bringing the heat already. We're talking about entrepreneurship, late stage capitalism, a derogatory turn, meaning capitalism is going away. I don't believe it is. I think it's going to come back even stronger.

I think some people maybe don't appreciate what capitalism and entrepreneurs and founders bring to the world. We're talking a little bit about education. Obviously, there's work to be done. But I'm optimistic. You're optimistic. I'm optimistic. For sure. What is it about founders and capitalism and creating companies that you find so appealing that you've dedicated your life to it?

Well, you know, I think there's nothing quite like, you know, starting something from scratch, from seeing something that's purely an idea, particularly when resources are constrained by definition, and that turns into something real. And, you know, for me, it manifests itself in the work that I do. But also, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, upward mobility in this country. You know, I've had the benefit of, you know, being on this board called build.org. And the whole concept of build is it goes into organizations in East Palo Alto in Oakland and D.C. in Boston. And the kids in these high schools learn entrepreneurship. And the whole idea is start a company. You know, and they start T-shirt companies, they start cookie companies, they start companies to, you know, come with all kinds of creative problems that they're having.

You know, one team started a company where you could tie something to your shoe. So if you had to stick, you know, a credit card or a dollar bill and you want to go running and, you know, pick up something on the way, you don't have to carry it. And so all kinds of creative things. And what, you know, the amazing thing about the program is, is just the sense of fulfillment that our students have. standing up on stage, presenting their business plan, running their business, you know, where in so many other aspects of their life, you know, it's a struggle. And here they learn what it's like to take limited resources and create something out of scratch. And so to me, that really is what's so magical about entrepreneurship. It's the manifestation of something from nothing.

Limited resources with limited resources. And pressure creating that diamond. Totally. Totally. And sand in the oyster creation. in the pearl. Exactly. And so I had the benefit, you know, very early on in college, you know, when I got to college, my advisor, first week of college said to me, he was a CS professor, and he said to me, look, you've got this next four years. My advice is don't worry about your grades. Don't take the minimum classes you need to take to get your major and then use the rest of the time to go start a company, go overseas, you know, try things you've never tried before. Life, you know, and so beginning of sophomore year, I show up back on campus and he calls me up. And he said,

remember I mentioned starting a company? He said, there's someone you should meet. Which college is? This is at Stanford. And so he introduces me to a classmate, you know, who's a year ahead of me. I was a sophomore and this student, Joe LeMont, was a year ahead of me. And I sat down with him. And we grabbed a coffee on campus. And, you know, I was, I was major in electroengineering. I, you know, my parents weren't in business. I didn't know anything about business. And the first thing Joe says to me, he said, you know what the two greatest businesses are in the world?

And I said, I have no idea. I have no clue what you're talking about. He said, the two greatest businesses in the world. You know, remember, he's 19 years old. He said, our biotech and enterprise software. and I said, what are you talking about? First of all, I sort of know what biotech is. I really don't know what enterprise software is.

And he goes on to say that the only two businesses in the world that have 99% gross margins. And here was this 19-year-old who had that insight. To find gross margins for people who are listening and have never heard that term, because it is one of those terms that are confusing to people. That's right. Explain what that means and why it's so powerful

and investors are obsessed with it. So gross margin is essentially, the amount of money that you get to keep when you deliver a product or service and you subtract out the cost of delivering that service. So if I'm selling groceries for a bag of groceries for $30, but it cost me $25 as the grocery store to buy those groceries from Procter & Gamble,

five divided by 30 is my gross margin, which is, what is that, less than 20%. and the beauty of software is that it's purely digital. I can sell the same piece of software over and over and over again to hundreds, millions of people without any incremental costs. Now, there are some costs such as Amazon Web Hosting and so on and so forth. And when you say incremental cost for somebody who is 19 years old listening to this and is, you know, Aj and whatever it was, 1988, 1989, I guess, what,

does that mean, the incremental cost? What that means is once you've spent the money to actually get back in those days, you had to install the software, this was not pre-clouds, package software, you had to get it on a server. So you would spend money to send someone to a company's office, implement the software, get it up and running. So that first year gross margin would be lower because you've now invested all this costs. You had the cost of putting it on a server. That's right. Cost of putting on the server, but from that point forward, it's basically a hundred percent profit. And especially in those days, because you didn't have hosting costs, it was on premise, sitting on site at the customer. And yes, you had to provide some basic bug fixes and maintenance and all of that,

but it was essentially pure profit. And that money you would actually charge for. So a way for a young person listening to the pod right now, a lot of young people are listening to this in their, you know, freshman, sophomore, junior year of high school. That's right. A lot of high school people listening podcast because I meet them when they graduate college or they're in college. And literally was at Stanford talking to some MBA students. And they were like, yeah, I've been listening to the podcast when I was like, yeah, I was like, oh, that's great. He's like, yeah, we listened to undergrad.

And I was like, oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. This is for like, oh, yeah, for like six years. He's like, well, we also listened to it when I was a senior in high school. The entrepreneur club would listen to things. That's great. The magic of this is if you were just thinking about Fortnite, a video game, the millionth customer of Fortnite who's paying, you know, spending $100 a year on

something, they don't call. cost Fortnite any more money. Exactly. And the 10 millionth cost no money. That's right. Absolutely. And the hundredth millionth cost no money. So that's why something like Minecraft or Instagram or any of these or com.com, the meditation app, the millionth user or the five millionth user, there's likely no cost of them. There might be a cost to acquire them. But that's not gross margin. Gross margin is about what it costs to provide the product. That's right. And what the incremental cost is to provide it again. And providing it again used to be putting it in a box. So there was $10 to make a CD-ROM to sell a $300

a license to Photoshop. Totally. But it was still de minimis. It was 3% in that case. Exactly. But now it's because of people delivering it as a subscription in the web. That's right. It's gotten even more.

Exactly. Then you look at a service like Uber or Airbnb. There is a cost involved in the margin is much lower. It's much lower. That's right. So they have to be bigger. They're not bad businesses. They're great businesses.

But it's a lower gross margin business. And so Joe's insight back then was, and he said, of the two, I like enterprise software better. And I said, well, you know, biotech, it's a little bit of a crapshoot. You have no idea if your drugs are going to actually work or get through FDA. But enterprise software, it's all in your control. And he said the other beauty of enterprise software was once a company starts using it, they don't rip it out. It's ingrained in their workflow. And so that was the other thing that he knew at age 19 that I didn't know.

I love a subscription business. You know, that you're in there and people are using it and they're relying on your software to get their work done on a day-to-day basis. You're integrated into the guts of the company. And that is the beauty of enterprise software, which is it's hard to rip out. The company, you know, their basic business processes are relying on it. And it's effectively 99% incremental. Even if you just say 90. Let's just call it 90%.

Whatever you want. It's absurd. Some crazy number. Compared to, yeah. It's like it's as in the food business. Like, people used to always just laugh at a slice of pizza. That's right. It's like the greatest business ever.

You have a tiny little hole in the wall. And you're selling them flour, cheese and water and cheese. It's like not much, right? And the margin is incredible. Nothing compared to software. Other amazing part of this is there is so little friction today compared to when you were having that discussion. I was a Novell Network engineer at that time. Oh, yeah.

It's like Novel Networks. Oh, yeah, definitely. For Mike Savino. It's a blast from the past. Putting in like literally putting in. in document management software, which would allow people using WordPerfect, our law firm, to actually have revisioning and to organize their documents and be able to look up a document in a database because there was no Dropbox of cloud storage. There was no cloud. So you had to put the

cloud into it. That's right. Putting all that aside, it used to be a tremendously, a tremendous struggle to get people to make the decision to put in enterprise software. We had to take the CTO, the VP of this, the top lawyer out to golf to this. Nick's game. Oh, yeah. It's crazy. Wherever. And then they would put a million dollars up.

Now you turn on Slack or Notion or Salesforce or whatever, and they're like, Zendesk. It's just like, oh, yeah, it's free. It's free for the first month or a year. And now we have people who sponsor the show who are doing SaaS products. And by the way, if you're a startup and you've raised under 10 million and before your Series B, you can use whatever it is, HubSpot, Zendes, for free for the first year. That's right. We don't care.

Yeah. Because it's that high margin because it's that high margin. They realize it. And some of those companies will become big. Yeah, it's great. To try it. Totally. I mean, I think that's as important as the margin.

Well, it's, I mean, it's, you know, been fun to watch just how this industry has changed. And so, you know, back in the 80s, the startup that Joe and I did, we were selling, you know, what you'd call today, CRM to startups up and down El Camino. We'd go to a startup and say, wouldn't it be great if you had one database to manage your quotes and your proposals and all the customers you're trying to work up. on, you know, all your prospects, wouldn't that be awesome? And by the way, for people who are wondering what El Camino is, it's not a car, it's El Camino Real. El Camino Real.

Which is, used to be the highway that connected San Francisco to the peninsula here. Exactly. Now it's just a four lane. It's just a four lane. It's a road. It's a road. Between the 280 and the 101. And, you know, back then the startups were down in the peninsula.

They weren't up in San Francisco. And, you know, that era was all about exactly. exactly what you said. You know, in the 90s, you go out. Knock on doors. You knock on doors. Hey, we can make your life easier. You get in front of, you know, the boardroom. You pitch this grand vision of enterprise software. The positive of that era was you got all the money up front. You know, so we would, you know, instead of getting it over 10 years or on an annualized basis, you get a million dollars right now. We got the check up front, our contracts. And so anyway, long story short, after that startup, this guy, Joe dropped out. He started a second company called trilogy software. Oh, wow, Trilogy was big. Yeah, Trilogy was big. I joined a few years later. I decided to graduate, and I joined his employee 18, and I ran product and go to market

there. And Trilogy is a classic big deal business. And we would go to these large corporations, and we'd sell the dream and sell the vision. And our goal is to walk out with a $10 million check. And the day they signed the contract, they literally, within a week, had to wire us the full amount of money. It's hilarious. Of the money.

And then on top of that. friction. I mean, this made it a six to 12 months sales cycle? It was, you know, 12 months, 18 months. And I mean, you know, some of the stories from that era are crazy. I mean, I remember we were trying to sell this paper and packaging company down in the south. And, you know, we were working with our champion. He said, okay, I'm going to get you in front of the senior executives. And, you know, our goal ultimately is part of these sales cycles is eventually get to the C-suite, sell the dream. What's the value of this deal? Our typical deal size is $5 million. Okay. So when we get back from this quick break, I want you to tell the audience what happened with that paper meal deal when we get back on Angelabuckus. Zeus living makes it easy for you to live wherever opportunity takes you. Yes, whether you're connecting with investors on the other side of the country or opening

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Our venture group has about $6 billion under management. Bain Capital overall, which includes a set of other funds, about $100 billion. That's private equity. We have a hedge fund. We have a real estate fund. We have a life sciences fund. Was it Mitt Romney at Bain? Mitt Romney is one of the founders of Bain.

One of the founders of Bain. Did you see his speech? I did. How moving was that? It was incredible. It was truly incredible. I mean, did debt reverberate through Bain? Do people even know he work there?

these days? People do. For sure. No, people do. I mean, he wasn't there when I got there. So, but certainly I think that speech, you know, I think all across, you know, various communities were in, that speech, you know, had an impact. And a friend of mine who's in Utah recently said, you know, he got landed at the airport and saw a giant billboard. And it said, thank you, Mitt, for being, you know, just a hero to us, you know. And so. Just a good American. Yeah, exactly.

It's like we live in times when people think that ethics and morals don't matter and, you know, cheating or getting an edge is allowable. That's right. It's not why your parents came to this country. Exactly. It's not why they took that risk. That's right. It's not why our parents, all of them, worked so hard to try to make a better future for us. And it's just great for somebody to say, you know what?

I know this is my team, but I got to put my foot down and say, you know, my team can make a mistake too. That's right. It's not about whose team you're on. It's just a matter about the behavior, objectively bad behavior. on the same team, right? I mean, that's... Well, that's the problem with America now is we used to be, if we were conservatives, yeah, or fantastically liberal, you could at least be like, you know what, we're Americans. That's right. Right? And, oh, maybe San Francisco's a little weird and I'm from Nashville or

Texas, but, you know, we're Americans at the end of the day. We both salute the same flags. And now people are like, yeah, the flag doesn't mean much to me. That's heartbreaking. It is. It's too bad. It's also weird, too. Like, when you think about when we grew up, we were told that assimilation, the melting pot was what made the country strong. And now for me to just say that, I don't care about getting canceled, screw it. To be honest, if I got canceled and I could retire right now, that would be my dream. So I am free, I'm uncansable right now. You know what cancel means to me?

Cancel means I go skiing with my brother 100 days a year. For the love of God, please figure out a way to cancel me. I know everybody here needs the job. Open invitation. Yeah, there you go. But here, I'm going to say it right now. America was based upon, they taught us this in school. Whatever culture you have is valid. But it's not as important as the culture you're about to enter because this is the superculture where you contribute what you learned in India, what you bring to the table, your religion, your cuisine, your way of dressing, your movies.

And I bring my Greek and Irish heritage. That's right. And we mix them together. And I can say, you got that chicken Magni? Yeah. That's incredible. That butter chicken. So good.

Way do you try my Spanicoeitas and Sauganaki to fried cheese? Yes, totally. And we could sit there and that was a good thing. Now, it's cultural appropriation and it's a bad thing. This generation thinks that blending our cultures together and making a monoculture, a uniculture that we all get to contribute to is a negative. They think that that's. By the way, that's why this country kicks ass. It's because Indians can come to Pittsburgh and assimilate and fit in.

It might have been a little edgy at times. Well, look, I mean, I think that... Could have been. Yeah, no, look, you know, the reality, I think, is that certainly it's, there's always a healthy tension, right? You want to be able to respect and allow people to pursue the way they want to live. live, you know, and you're free to do it. And you're free to do it and your traditions. And, you know, as an immigrant, you can choose to, you know, speak the language. You can choose not to speak the language. That's, you know, that truly is what makes America great. You have the freedom to do it.

But I agree. I think what's always been so powerful about America is that it is this melting pot and you come and you're part of it. And, you know, as an immigrant, it's fun to see a lot of the Indian culture and tradition now become more mainstream. It was amazing. The dancing. The dancing, the food. Just to watch memes, yeah. Like young people are doing memes of Bollywood dancing saying, I'm going into Monday.

Totally. Doing that dance. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the bungra. Yeah, exactly. The bungra. The bungra. Yeah.

I love the bunger. Oh, yeah. Totally. It's incredible. Yeah, it's great. And like, I had an obsession with chicken mokny. Yeah. Am I pronouning into correct?

Chicken muckney. Mokney. Mokney. Mokney. Mokny. I mean, this is the greatest dish. ever. So good. You've had it. Of course. That's Northern Indian, Northern Indian? It's Northern Indian. Yeah. Yeah. So all of that food like chicken Makni, Tandori chicken, all comes from

Persia. And so it's all Persian originally. Yeah. So when the Mughal Empire got built in the, I think 15, 1600s, they brought all that. Goatrain? They brought all that. Not for me. Cooprain's not for me either. I'm not a goat person now. Guy, my guy at the Pakistani tea house on Church Street, Dwayne in Manhattan, I used to go to the three or four in the morning and get the chicken mock me with the non-bread. Oh, there you go. Well, he tried to sell me on the goat brain. It's like, this is the best goat brand.

I'm just like, you know. I've had goat before, not goat brain, but. Goat is delicious. Yeah, goat's delicious. Yeah. Goat's delicious. Yeah. Goat brain? It's too far for me.

Chicken feet, no. So we can assimilate. I agree. But there might be some things that are not. That's right. Definitely. You do have some choice. That's right.

I thought the most incredible one was a woman went to her prom. Okay. and wore a traditional Chinese, like, one-piece dress that fits all the way up to the whole. I don't know the name of it. And she, you know, whatever, just tweeted and Instagrammed it. And, like, somebody was just like on Twitter, like, my culture is not your, you know, punchline for your prom dress. Yeah. And it was like, and she gets like, they're trying to cancel this poor, like, 17-year-old girl going to her prom.

That's terrible. Just because she thought this was a beautiful dress and she wanted to wear a Chinese dress. The New York Times, God bless them. Yeah. Because they're totally, like, hysterical now. since they picked aside. They went to China. It was a really good idea.

And in the Chinese Bureau, somebody went to Chinese people and said, this woman in America wore this to her like graduation party, you know, thing. They explained what the problem was. What do you think? And they were like, oh.

They loved it. They were so touched. Yeah, they loved it. I'm sure. Oh my God. Yeah. Thank you for that beautiful, you know, respect you gave to our culture.

And this is where intent kind of really matters. All right, let's go back to Elchemy Real. You're selling trilogy. selling software. I mean, but this is how the world's changed. You know, like, thankfully, in many ways, soft, you know, I think the fact that software's not sold this way is a good thing. Yeah. And I prefer investing companies that don't rely on this. But, you know, back in those years, we're, you know, we're in the sales cycle. We put in a year, our champion says, okay, I finally got the meeting. I got the meeting. I got the CEO, the CFO. Everyone's going to meet a room

together. We said, perfect, you know, and he said, you just do your pitch. And, you know, this is pretty typical for us. You finally get to that boardroom. You make the pitch. And I would say two out of three times, you know, after a year of work, we'd get the deal. And you get the five or ten million dollars. He said, there's one catch. He said, you know, the mantra team's going to be an offsite. And so you guys have to go to the offsite instead of coming to our office. I said, sure, no problem, wherever it is. So it turned out they were at this hunting cabin, you know, in the middle of South Carolina. I'm sorry, hunting. Hunting. Had you ever killed anything? A pick up a gun? I never hunted. Better pick up a gun in Pittsburgh?

No. No. No. You know, Indian parents. You know, it's not something culturally, you know, my parents had ever. Yeah, I don't know how many guns are on the streets of New Delhi. Yeah, exactly. And so.

Not allowed. You know, myself and a very good friend of mine, another trilogy colleague named Severe Kandula, we show up with this hunting lodge. And literally the executive team is all wearing camo, you know, with the orange, you know, hunting vests around a table. And there's some big spread of game and stuff that. that they're chowing into. And, you know, our champions is, you know, time for you to guys,

for you guys to give the presentation. I'm thinking, okay, this, there's zero chance. We're not in Palo Alto anymore. There's zero chance. Two Indian dudes, you know, in the middle of the woods in South Carolina, you know, are going to pull out this deal. And I have to say it was, you know, we gave the pitch, we gave it our best shot. I don't think any of those guys were paying any attention to what we were talking about.

And that sadly was one where we did not get the deal. But that's what it took. It took these crazy situations where you're just working it, working it, working it, trying to get there, you know, spend two years of your life, you know, wandering the halls. You finally get the pitch. And, you know, when you got it, it was the greatest thing, you know, in the world, you know, to get five or ten million dollars. And so that was how we built the company.

Now, the beauty of it was because we got it all up front. We got to $300 million in revenue over the course of six years from a million. when we started, and it was profitable. I mean, the business was generating $100 million a year of profit because, again, we got all the money. And so we didn't have to wait 10 years. And so what's changed about SaaS is, you know, the good news is the companies are far more durable, number one, because you start each year, not at zero. We would start each year at zero.

Right. You're starting at either 90% of last year if your product is low NPS score. Exactly. or 115% if it's high MPS score. Exactly. And you have the score, net promoter score, to know how well you're doing. Exactly. So you can even predict it.

You can even predict it. And so, you know, I was on the board of this company, SendGrid, which ultimately got sold to when public got sold to Twilio, our net dollar retention was 117%. So you literally. Explain net dollar retention to the audience who's listening, all the high schoolers who are building their companies now. They're about five years ahead of what we started. At least.

They're starting at 14%. Is that a 19? No, if not younger. So net dollar retention is if you take all of the customers that you had last year and you add up the total dollars that that cohort of customers spent with you last year, and then you look at how much that same cohort without adding or subtracting any of those companies or customers, how much are they spending this year? That's called net dollar retention.

What that will mean typically. So it's the same group of people. Same group of people. But how much are they spending? because that's right if you were using 10 seats of Salesforce and your company doubled or you're that's right you only were doing a trial of five seats of Zendes or hub spot or whatever it is now you might increase the number and Sendgrid was sending emails that's right so if you did your job well and their companies were growing they would be sending more emails exactly and spend more

that's right so in sendgrid's model you know startups every startup they get started decides at some point, okay, I have to instrument my app or my website with email. SendGrid is a market leader. I'm going to sign up for SendGrid. For transactional email. For transactional email, it's super easy to get set up, easy to get started. You don't need to talk to a salesperson and just get going. Now, in a given year, some percentage of those startups would not exist.

It'd go out of business. And so if we started with 100 customers, maybe at the end of the year, we'd have 80 customers. But those 80 customers throughout that time period would increase their usage of email. And so those 80 customers would now spend, let's say, you know, 30, 40 percent more. And so on a net basis, when you account for the fact that some percent have gone away, you have a net dollar retention of 117 percent. And so the beauty of that business is we literally could tell the entire staff of the company to go home for a year.

And the business would grow 17 percent. You know, so if we did 100 million one year, the next year without any, you know, work, without any new customers. Just the momentum. Just the momentum. and we'd be $117 million. In contrast, at Trilogy, we were $300 million in revenue. Starting at zero. And you'd effectively start at zero.

Now, we had some, you know, 20% maintenance, you know, and some services. It was small. You'd start from scratch. And so the beauty of today's world is these companies are far more durable. They're more predictable. Wall Street loves it because you don't have this lumpiness. Our business is very lumpy at Trilogy. You get a big deal.

Yeah, I have a great quarter. Then you lose your VP of sales. Yeah, exactly. And the whole culture was sales driven. That's right. Which that, I think, is a profound difference. Exactly. Because when the culture is sales driven, things get weird.

They do. Now, you don't really need a sales team as much. They're more customer support, right? They're working on making sure you don't churn, making sure you don't leave. And that changes the whole nature of the company. Then who becomes the true north of the company? Who becomes the heroes in this company scenario today? Definitely.

Well, today it's product for sure, right? So product leads, not sales. It's product led. And, you know, I think the transition that's occurred was, you know, in the 90s, it was, you know, sales-led, big deals, you know, classic, your classic sort of caricature of, you know, an account executive, you know, master of the planet, going out there, you know, and slaying these giant deals. And then, you know, I think what that led to, which was, you know, a way that got started, you know, about 10 years ago. And we're part of, you know, fortunate to be part of a company called Gainsight, which was actually customer success in a world where you now. have to re-earn your living every month, every quarter, every year because the customer can cancel, unlike the software before where you paid it all up front. Now you're not. And so customer

success matters. And that's led to a giant wave that Gainsight has helped propel. And now, I think a world where, you know, so many companies now are bottoms up companies where instead of thinking about a functional loaner, you know, in the 90s in that era, you thought about, I got to sell to the CFO or the CMO or CIO or CIO, yeah, head of sales, you know. But now, and that, you know, certainly it created a lot of large enterprise software companies. But it also perverted the sell and how you made the software. Exactly. Because you were selling them on some buzzwords that they thought were important.

Exactly. As opposed to now you're selling to. Well, now you're selling to individual users. And I think what that's done is, number one, it's changed the nature of software. and companies are more product-led. And I think what that's created, actually, is not only an explosion of bottoms-up companies, but it's also created a supply chain

of new software companies that are supporting the new way software's built and distributed. So if you think about how many companies have been started to help the product function. You think about Figma. We have a company in this space called Parlor, product board. We don't have Figma.

I wish we were in Figma, but Figma. Is that the design kind of? That's a design. So now you have a whole cohort of apps that let you design better products. So everybody in the industry is just focused on actually providing a service that gets the job done, as opposed to trying to convince a CIO that you have the latest stuff. If you're an accredited investor, you need to understand what an SPV is.

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discount to angel listeners. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Let's do the lightning round here. Yeah. Which company in your portfolio that you invested in, objectively, has the highest revenue growth, the greatest success based on just that business metric, just incredible growth in revenue and not your favorite, not the most recent, but the one that you've invested in in the last decade that's got the highest revenue growth. That's become the great, you know, high growth company. Yeah, well, you know, I think a company that we've had good fortune be part of that had just spectacular growth from the series A, which we led is a company called Four Kites.

Four Kites. Four Kites. Yeah, they're in the supply chain, transportation space. So less sexy space, but huge amount of value creation. What they do is they go to large shippers, craft or ConAgra or British Petroleum. And they say to the executives there, you know how executive, you know, when you order something from Amazon, you know exactly where your stuff is, you know, where it is, has it left the distribution center, when it's showing up.

And they said, the problem is, you know, Kraft, when your truck leaves your warehouse and is heading to Walmart, you can't tell Walmart when it's going to get there, where it is, what's in that truck, when did it leave? Is it on time? Do you get in a traffic jam? Did it have an accident? You have no idea. And so what they built was a system that integrated to the back end, you know, enterprise software systems like SAP. So that knew, okay, this order has to get from this distribution center to that distribution center. And then they integrated into all the telematic systems of all these trucking companies. And there are thousands of trucking companies in the United States. It's a very fragmented. So you know where they are. You know, and so you now know where they are. Now, what's cool about Falkites is that's the initial hook. That's the wedge.

You get in the door. We provide visibility. You can now tell Walmart, hey, the truck's running late. Here's why. It should be there in an hour. And optimizing supply chain is super important. And it's super important. And so, but the beauty of Fokites is we know.

in real time, how much inventory you have in your distribution center? Why do we know that? We know what truck came in. We know what truck left. We know what was on the truck that came in. We know what was on the truck that left. So our ability now to actually provide a real-time view into supply chain, incredibly power. So the business has grown like weed.

It's been crazy. Here's a painful question. Tell me about the company that came in to pitch you that you couldn't get your partners to agree on. and you couldn't get there in terms of writing the check, but that is the biggest loss, the anti-portfolio, the missed investment. I would say, yeah, it's painful to talk about it, but I would say that the example that jumps to mind is Pinterest.

Wow. And the backstroy- Another great Indian founder, Ben, Ben Soldman. I thought he was Indian. No, no, at least as... Well, maybe he's co-founder. Yeah, no, Ben is, as far as I can tell, not Indian. And so we, so the challenge for us is we had just open up our West Coast office. Actually, we hadn't quite opened it up. We were, we originally, if you go back 20 years ago, Bank Capital Ventures was primarily in Boston.

It was an East Coast firm. East Coast. East Coast thinking is slightly different. Very different. And, and, and so. Don't tell me you got okay, boomered. Yeah, I did not. But I, I moved out here, you know, got the office up and running. And at the time, we were not writing seed checks. and Ben Silverman was raising a million dollars. A million? A million dollars. First, I know. Is it five million post? You know, I can't even remember the pie. I erased it from my brain. No, at that time period, it would be a five million would be average.

This was like 2010. Yeah. $5 million. And Seed was not something we did as a firm. We were very focused Series A. You cared about the stage. We cared about the stage. Why do VCs care about the stage?

There's a good jump off point. Why have they so obsessed some of them with stage? Yeah. as opposed to how great, because the way I look at it is, is it a great founder, and do the customers love this product and is the product exceptional? That's what I look at. That's right. But why are some of them stage? Well, I think there are good reasons for it from the standpoint that what an entrepreneur expects and the level of service and commitment and value ad that you have to deliver at Series A, you know, that involves a certain amount of time.

that level of service commitment value ad is very different at series C or series D. And so if you've built your practice and services and value add and everything else around series A, and then you try and apply it against these other stages, it's hard to make that work. And frankly, part of the reason we do seeds today is the seeds today are very much like the A's of 10 years ago. Right. We used to, our typical Series A, a decade ago, was $3 to $5 million. Right. On a PowerPoint.

For 20% of the company. Sometimes 30. Behind a, you know, one founder, two founders. Yep. But it was typically at the idea stage and almost always it was pre-product market fit. Now today the Series A's are happening at a million dollars of ARR. There's product market fit. Sometimes two or three.

You know, sometimes two or three. I mean, I get a lot of nose on our portfolio companies that have two million, three million. It's crazy. And they're like, yeah, not enough for a series A. That's crazy. What? Yeah. That's crazy.

And then, you know what they do? They skip rounds. They're like, okay, we'll just be profitable and be a Pegasus. Yeah, just go straight. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, why do it. Fly over. And so that's why we're doing seats today because, you know, it truly is.

Smallest check size, you're right? You know, well, right. 250K. Wow. Yeah. But that means you have to give that company the same amount of attention as somebody you gave $5 million to. You cannot as the VCBLA.

It's hard. It's hard. If you call me, I'm going to cut the, I'm going to make the phone call one 20th the length. You can't do it. Because it's 120th at the check size. expectation is if I'm taking money from Bayne Capital Ventures, there's a level of value add and services and the brand and access to the Bain network and our companies. That has to be all of that, you know. And so that that's why historically firms have been staged focused. Now, I think number one, the world changed. The lines are blurry now. You know, what is a Series A or C or Series B anymore? Who knows? Each company, it's very different. It's very bespoke. And I think our mode, has been that, look, we want to invest in the best companies.

And we have areas of expertise across our partnership. And if we can find that company at Ced in Series A, great. We'd prefer to do that. We'd prefer to get involved early. But you're not going to see every company at Ced in Series A. And sometimes we make mistakes. You know, where we see a company. It's nice to get into a company after you made a mistake.

Yeah. Have you done that with a company where you've passed on an early round and we're able to get in on the series B or C and make up for the sin of omission, as we say. Sins in our business are the misses. It's omission, not commission. It's not like you did something bad. It's that you didn't do something good. Definitely. Well, you know, my partner Jameson Hill invested in a killer company that is a marketplace for on-demand, you know, gig workers. And, particularly in the industrial space and warehouses supply chain, which we were talking about earlier, there's constant fluctuation in demand and need for folks. And so this company Winolo, which we saw,

God, we've used them. Yeah, no, it's great. And we saw it in the Cid and Ceres A round and did not do it. And so my partner Jameson led around, you know, about a year and a half ago. And that Uber's doing a work kind of thing. That's right. Yeah, no, exactly. You know what we used it for when we would have events?

Yeah. The registration desk on the first day would be 20 people. Totally. You know what the registration desk on the second day is? Two. Two. Exactly. So how do we staff that?

We don't have that. We would put all 10 of our team members on the front desk and nobody would be. inside the conference. We put the price at $20 an hour, sometimes $25. That's right. And then we get more than enough applicants. They want the four hours and work, five hours of work. They want a quick $125.

Exactly. Sequoia famously did like every round of WhatsApp. Preemptively funded them. You guys have this giant bank roll. Do you talk about that internally and have you ever done it? We have done it. How do you make that decision to do it? Because it seems unhygienic to many people.

people for you to just keep putting money in. And it feels like as an investor, if this thing blows up, you made five bets, you covered your own tracks, it could look really bad. Yeah, the cases we've done it have been a combination of, you know, clearly we have huge conviction in the company, but the founder also wants us to do it. So we've never been in a situation where we are, you know, shoving the term sheet down the founder's throat. There are cases where the founder wants to do. And a good, you know, A good example company I was involved with, you know, we led the series A to a robotics company called Kiva Systems. You know, they were the original China. Wait, did Amazon buy them?

Amazon bought them. Amazon bought them. They did the little baby robots that drive boxes around. Yeah, exactly. So they're what, you know, mixed innovation, he was a web van way back when. And yeah, he was a web van. And he was in the distribution center. He was like, all right, the math doesn't work. It costs $30 to pick and pack the groceries. It should cost $10. I can't figure out how to get from 30 down to 10. And his insight, when he was thinking about it, he left Webvan, he was at another startup. And one day on a napkin, he figures out this insight that, you know, 70 to 80 percent of the fulfillment workers' time is spent walking. And then only 20 to 30 percent is actually picking and packing. So if all the stuff came to a desk, they could just pack it.

Exactly. If the shelves came to the worker, you had mobile shelves with robots bringing the shelf to the worker. Then all of a sudden, you do a couple things. Number one, you're essentially virtualizing the physical story. because you don't really care which items on what shelf and where that shelf is in the warehouse, because the robots is going to bring it to you. And so you can be very intelligent now of saying, you know what, the Easter candy, no one wants the Easter candy the day after Easter.

So we're going to put that shelf all the way in the far back of the warehouse. But the week before- We can figure out the shelves in real-time. Yeah, you can figure out. So you just kept plowing money into that. And so what happened was- What did you own at the end, 30, 40 percent? We own almost 40 percent. And each round, Mick would, you know, the company is a Boston-based company.

Mick would come out to Silicon Valley. People would be like, it's hardware, it's robots. It's hard. It's hard. We're not interested. Amazon's going to kill you. And so he'd come back with, you know, term sheets that he was kind of like, okay, you know what, Bain, we love you guys. Just, why don't you guys just match this term sheet I got. I started doing it. I started doing it. I did. I offered five or six of our companies. We just watched their revenue. And the revenue doubles in six months or less. Let me know. Hit the button. My team hits the button. And we have a discussion about it. Let's offer the founder, $500,000, and see if they want extra capital. But to be honest, we don't, it's not a stand. It's not a statement. standard practice. For all the reasons you mentioned, which is, you know, number one, part of the reason we like investing in Series A is we want to get to that 20% ownership then, and then just be aligned with the founder, which is, okay, we're on the same side as you now. We have 20, we have our threshold ownership, you have your threshold ownership. Now we're on the same side of future capital. Let's figure out, let's minimize dilution, let's get the right

partner. We're all on the same side. The moment, I think, is a firm, and certainly we have access to a lot of capital. We have this incentive to start shoving money down the throw the founder, that puts us at misalignment with the founder. And so that's the beauty of getting involved early. We're on the same side, etc. Right. Masayoshi-san coming in with a checkbook that nobody's ever seen at that scale, even Bain, which has $100 billion, but in all different pockets, you have deep pockets, but you yourselves

never took the audacity that Masa Yoshi-San did with Vision Fund 1. Is Vision Fund a net positive for founders and our industry in the venture capital citizens like you and I? Or is it a net negative? Would you like to see two more Vision funds participate if they were created by crazy maniacs who could pull off raising $100 billion? What do you think? That's what the public market should do. What do you personally think, Ajah? I think the concept of the – let's separate the concept from the execution.

The concept of the Vision Fund, I think it's a really good concept because there are – Because there are businesses, and Amazon's a good example of this, there are businesses that require a huge amount of capital investment in order to get to either the scale or the network that finally allows you to see the kind of profitability that you want to see. And in the era that Amazon went public, you could go public in that era before you had, before you prove that, before it was proven out. In this year, you cannot. You cannot go public without having proved that out. And in some cases, an Uber is a good example and others, where it just takes a sheer amount of time, effort, and money to get to a scale where all of a sudden the magic of the business

model finally comes through. And so this idea of really filling in this space in the market, which historically, you know, companies like Apple and Microsoft went public at 30 million of revenue. And now company, the average company that went public the last two years is 300 million. So you think about that period from 30 to 300 million where, you know, these companies need capital. And particularly when you think about SaaS as one example where the average SaaS community is $200 million of capital because you're not getting paid up front. And so I think the concept of late stage capital that can fill the gap and particularly for some of these transformational businesses that it's going to take a decade before you finally realize, oh, wow, that's a great business. I mean, think about Amazon and what a great business. it is today. It's been a 20, 25-year journey. People hated it. Yeah, people hated it.

Yeah, people hate it. Netflix, when they said we're going to make our own content, people are like, oh, that's the end of Netflix. That's the end of Netflix. By the way, that was the starting line. That was the starting line. And so I think the concept of it makes a ton of sense. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about execution on the margins. They make this Uber bet. Yeah. Uber goes public. The public markets are like, you guys are growing 30%, whatever. No, we want profits. It can never be profitable. The press is going crazy. Never be profitable. You and I are sitting here. We do this for a living. We look at the numbers and we go, 1.7 billion rides, losing money, but growing like a week.

And we're in the first inning, second inning of transportation. What would you, don't you want high growth? Who cares if it loses a little bit of money? But the press creates this narrative. It can never make money. And they force the CEO to say, you know what? We're going to start cutting our investment. And we're going to start cutting offices.

We're going to start selling units away. And we'll get to profitability. Stock goes crazy. which would you rather have seen them do? Continue the growth march, burning capital for another five years, ten years. Would you rather see them doing what they're doing now, which is react to the press and the public markets and get to profitability? What do you think with Uber specifically was the right move? You must talk about this internally.

Sure. Were you guys in Uber at all? We were not in Uber. Left. No, we were not in ride sharing. I wish we were. We were not in ride sharing. So do you think that this is a good outcome, or maybe should Uber have to stay private?

for another five years and just kept trading shares because I was able to liquidate some shares, Yum, Yum. Definitely. I don't need to be looking at my phone every day watching the press go crazy. The press is so dumb. I mean, it's just, I'll say it not you, but they have 10% of the information. And this is why I'm a little bit, and I'm going to talk about it with Harris-Wisher on her podcast, that the press needs to do a better job.

Because if a company has 1.7 billion rides in a quarter and they lose a billion dollars or whatever it is. And if you take out some of the stuff that's like one-time charge or whatever, maybe it's less. But let's just call it if they were losing a billion. Do you think behavior is going to change if an Uber on average is 50 cents more or a dollar more per ride? Maybe for 5%, the bottom 5% is it's not going to change for everybody else. They're not changing their behavior. If Amazon race price is 10% right now, 5% right now, let's just put it at 5% or 10%. Do you think people would change your behavior?

I mean, do you know what Amazon Prime is now? It's insane. It's $150 a year, I think. Yeah. When we all bought Amazon Prime, the initial price, it was 49 and then 59 with the introductory prices. They've tripled it in a decade. Totally.

Nobody, I ask people what they pay for Prime. You know what they say? I don't know. They don't know. And they don't care. If Amazon Prime was $300 right now, I don't think it changes. I don't think it changes. Well, I think this is the, I think this is exactly the point.

I think Amazon is the most instructive where, you know, Bezos and Amazon run the company and they make decisions not based on what the unit economics look today. They base it on where they think the unit economics will get to once they get to scale. And Prime is a great example where they basically said, where do we think the unit economics will be of delivering something in two days a decade from now? A decade. A decade from now. You know, with the investment, with scale, with density, with Kiva robots, with all the things that they put in place. Should we stop?

Yeah. No, no, that's great. For those people who are listening, I'll bring you into it. We're in the studio. Our neighbors are doing some construction. They told them they give us 15 minutes more and 15 minutes is up. We hit 15 minutes. All right.

Ajay, we got to get next story and we got to help them put in the new, we've got to put in the new chandelier. So we told them we'd help and put the chandelier up after. Ajay Agarwal is a partner at Bank Capital for almost 20 years. Thank you, Jason. It's fun. Thanks for coming on the bottom. I appreciate it. You're pretty podcast shy.

You don't do a lot. I don't do a lot. You just put your head down and work. You know, spend time with founders. You must be so proud of you. Your parents must be so proud. I'm proud of them. My mom's still alive.

Mom's still alive. Yeah. She must be. Wow. What does she think of all this? You know, she's great. She must be blown away. She's great.

No, look, you know, I mean, I think she's great. I think we're myself and my sisters. Your son is a venture capitalist, being capital. I mean, this is like you went from in one generation, India, London, and then here to Silicon Valley. And in the top, the best seat you could have. in terms of careers, like one of the five or six best seats you could have in the world. You did it. Ajah, you did it.

I get to do what I love. I think that's the most important thing. I think that's, you know, myself, my sisters, were healthy. Yeah, that's good families. I think that's really what matters. Of course. But it's also nice for mom to look at this and dad from up above, rest and peace, to see what you did, Ajay. You did it.

Thanks, buddy. Appreciate it. Good to see you all next time. My name's the podcast. Bye, bye, bye, everyone.