This Week in Startups - Packy McCormick’s Not Boring parlay: Angel S6 E3 + Producer Rachel visits Miami Hack Week | E1372

Episode Date: January 29, 2022

Today’s guest is Packy McCormick of Not Boring, for Episode 3 of Season 6 of Angel. Packy turned his massive newsletter into a Not Boring Fund I in 2021, and has since invested $10M into startups. In this episode you will learn: 1. How Packy raised his first fund from his readers. 2. What regulations he needed to navigate to comply with the SEC. 3. Which sectors he invested his first $10M into (in just 6 months) and some of his breakout startups. 4. Why IRR can be hilariously large in the early stages of a small fund. 5. How he manages a syndicate and a venture fund while still doing right by LPs. As Packy signs off we check in with Producer Rachel who went down to Miami Hack Week and spoke to one of the organizers of Tap House for an "OK Boomer" segment. (00:00) Molly introduces the show (01:43) Jason and Molly chat with Packy McCormick (04:40) Packy's editorial philosophy (08:06) How Packy used the 506c designation (10:38) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/angel (11:41) Using a parallel fund structure (15:33) How media-first investors can optimize their fund structure (20:50) LinkedIn Jobs - Go to https://linkedin.com/angel and post your first job for free. (21:57) Not Boring Fund II goals (24:42) How responsibilities change as check size increases (27:45) Managing Venture LPs and a Syndicate simultaneously (29:08) Embroker - Get an extra 10% off insurance for your business at https://Embroker.com/twist (30:25) Does it matter what time you enter the market as a VC? (37:04) IRR (internal rate of return) versus and multiple on cash (46:25) Packy's weekly cadence for investing and writing (51:39) OK Boomer - Rachel Reporting from Miami Hack Week Check out Not Boring: https://www.notboring.co FOLLOW Packy: https://twitter.com/packym FOLLOW Rachel: https://twitter.com/_@rachelbraun FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Welcome to Angel. This is episode three of our sixth season of Angel. And today's guest is Pachy McCormick of Not Boring. That's what it's called. He runs, and you already know this, by the way, because you probably subscribe to his newsletter. It is one of the largest newsletters in startups. Packy just invested his first $10 million fund over the last six months, and he is now raising fund too. So we're going to talk about his fund structure, the fact that it includes some of his most dedicated readers as LPs, how he uses his syndicates, and a lot more it's fascinating. And then after that we check in with producer Rachel, who went down to Miami, yes, in person for Hackweek, and spoke to one of the organizers of Tap House, yes, in person.

It's going to be an amazing episode. Stick with us. Season 6 of Angel is brought to you by Our Crowd. Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-R-O-WD.com slash Angel. LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Host your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Angel.

And the Embroker Startup Insurance Program helps start. Startup secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off traditional insurance today at mbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. All right, everybody, welcome to episode three of the sixth season of Angel. This is a podcast we started when I wrote my book, Angel. And it's kind of like a sister podcast of This Week in Star Wars. We candidly post it to two different feeds.

There's the Angel feed if you want to go look for that. just geek out to those pods and download them all on your player, or you just listen to this week in startups. And we started thinking of seasons and doing 10 episodes at a time to talk about, to talk about, you know, a theme. And so we did the three comma club, you know, people who had over a billion dollars in assets under management in a recent season. But for this season, we thought, so many people are starting venture funds, micro funds, SBV, syndicates, and they want to figure all that out. So why don't we start season six? with first-time funds.

And, you know, sometimes people will be on their second. Maybe they've got a little experience previously. But that's the general idea here is people are starting their own brands in the venture community. So first-time funds is our season six theme. We started with Molly two really great interviews. Maybe you could catch people off on episodes one and two. Yeah, Mac the VC with Rare Breed Ventures, which is just a must listen. Go back and check that out.

And then I got to sit in on the second one, David Rosenthal, with Kim. Kindergarten Ventures, great story about how he came up with that name. Those are both excellent listens and kind of come at a couple different directions, right? One is just like sheer brute force work and hustle. The other is hacking the system a little bit to build the fun that you want. And I sort of feel like you, Packy, are going to split the difference between both of those things. So super interested in this conversation today's guest, Pachie McCormick of Not Boring, one of the largest newsletters in startups.

So taking that media approach, which we are so familiar with. Yeah. Learn from the best. Well, it is a playbook, and it does work because you are pretty honest about the fact that, and I kind of think it's like one of your best editorial devices is like, hey, I don't necessarily

know anything. I'm trying to figure it out like y'all. And so let's figure it out together through the newsletter, podcasting, you know, and social media. And that, I think, is kind of refreshing because one of the things that I find incredibly obnoxious is VCs who think they know everything, especially when they've done nothing.

So somewhere along the lines, people are like, well, Fred Wilson is blogging and Mark Seusser's blogging, Bradfell's blogging. Therefore, I need a blog, but they might have been like associates or somebody very new, and they're definitively giving advice. And I'm always very careful, even 11 years in as an investor, to giving advice. to giving advice, I like to have a dialogue. So maybe you can talk a little bit about your editorial angle, your editorial philosophy of how you tackle new subjects.

So I think it's kind of interesting. For sure. Yeah. I mean, first of all, thanks for having me back here. And, you know, as I think we talked about last time, my last experience before writing this newsletter was working at a startup that raised $120 million and sold for $3 million. So if I came out of that experience and then came into this and told people that I knew what to do and what they should be doing in something that I, you know, that failed when I

was very involved in it and something that I wasn't involved in. Like, that would be fairly presumptuous of me to come in with that kind of previous experience and tell people that, you know, I know exactly what they should be doing. The other thing is, after being in one company, I breather for six years, I wanted to come out and explore. And the whole reason I started writing in the first place was just to explore different areas and learn new things and my memory is kind of terrible. And so actually just kind of writing after I read a bunch of stuff was really useful. But again, if I'm going to be writing about a bunch of industries where people who are reading the newsletter spend their whole

entire lives working in that industry and then I come in from the outside after having read a few things in a week and say, this is how you should be doing it. Of course, I'm going to get something wrong and often get a lot of things wrong. And then on top of all that, obviously, you know, on the venture side, people get things wrong all the time. You have to get a few right in a really big way, but people get things wrong all the time. My friend Lenny Richitsky, who's also, you know, an angel has a small fund, released his findings on his first 140 angel investments. And he said that the ones that he, that ended up doing best for him so far, are not the ones that he would have expected would have done the best when he made the investments.

And so I think even when you do well, it's, it's impossible to know how you do, how you do, how you're going to do well in a way that's that's kind of repeatable as far as I can tell so far. Maybe if you're much smarter, you can figure that out. Yeah, talk to us a little bit more about this sort of like learning in public and then also opening the curtain as you go into fund too, right? So your technical first time fund manager was the initial not boring fund. Tell us a little bit about how much you raised, what were some of your big wins and how it's going with fun too?

Sure. So fund one I raised back in April of 2021 after doing about 25 SPVs before that. And on the SPV side, I'd have a bunch of wins like Main Street, on deck composer, Ramp was an investment, Stitch, which just raised at a billion dollar valuation. So a bunch of really good ones kind of out of that cohort of 20 to 25 SPVs, raised a fund out of that have some really interesting ones. I mean, it's so early. The average life, when I wrote my kind of fund update, a couple of weeks ago, the average life of companies in that portfolio is five and a half months old. So it's very, very earlier.

But companies like Sound XYZ, which is doing music NFTs, brain trusts, which actually had its token launch, which is a Web3 talent network that's growing really, really fast and doing really interesting things. Companies like market to hire, rare circles, which just raised the kind of ramp again in Fund One. There's a bunch of companies that are doing really, really well out of the gate and then a bunch more that are in the middle of fundraising now or, you know, getting marked up as they should. I don't think this market's going to derail the good ones. Hopefully not, but so far so good on fund one. Well, that's a great place to pick up.

The first fund was 9.9 million, 79 companies. I believe, did you raise that fund in public? Did you use the 506C designation to be a public fundraise? I did. So for both funds, I kind of got the anchor check. in and then opened up the last little bit for not boring readers. In both cases, I did it again for Fund Two. Fun two, I wanted to raise $25 to $30 million.

I had 25 committed from first fund LPs and one or two other big checks, opened it up on Substack when I wrote about it. I think something like 1,470 people have come in and expressed $130 million worth of interest for that last five. So I'll raise that to probably 40 million for the fund. Now, it's important for people to understand that there are limits to how much you can raise from accredited investors. So when you go public like this in a really hot market, you'll have a lot of people who are interested. There'll be accredited investors, but maybe you could talk about the 250 LP $10 million cap on accredited investor limit. Sure. So if you, and this is what happened to me on fund one,

If you raise from accredited investors, and that's somebody who has, you know, a million dollars in assets or they've made, what, $300,000 as a household for the past couple of years or $200,000 personally, for the past couple of years, they're accredited, which is, I guess, in the eyes of the SEC, fairly sophisticated, but not obviously as sophisticated as someone with $5 million invested, which is a qualified purchaser. And so qualified purchasers, if you have people with $5 million or more invested in the market, you can kind of go to, I think. I think 2,000 people, unlimited amounts of money. Kind of uncapped, practical speed with 2,000 slots, yeah. And 2,000 slots and people can put in, you know, $100 million tracks each if they, if they want to do. On the accredited side, you can have, I think, 249 people up to $10 million. I think if you're under 99 people, you can actually go above $10 million.

It's very confusing and needlessly confusing and patronizing and all sorts of things. anything that ends in an ing, it's that. Hopefully, these rules change. Some Dow's will be pushing the envelopes, but they also are kind of restrained by the same rules unless they really want to push it and get in trouble and see where the SEC enforces. So hopefully something changes because I do think that as more people are investing, the fact that they don't have access to the private markets in, you know, through a good vehicle is a shame because I think it's a good piece to have in your portfolio.

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You want to read those deal memos at Our Crowd and pick your favorite companies and make an educated bet. Okay, so here's your call to action. You can truly diversify your portfolio right now by investing in innovative private market companies at Our Crowd. Join the fastest growing venture capital investment community at O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D.com slash angel. That's right, our crowd.com slash angel. Just one more technical question about that before we move on to the philosophy behind it, which is so, I think, compelling and revolutionary. But you did this thing where you created a parallel fund structure, right, for fund too, so that you could have those qualified purchasers in one fund and then maximize the room for the accredited investors who are your fans. Exactly right. So in Fund 2, all the kind of bigger checks get to be put in one pot. They don't count against that $10 million cap, which means that I can really go right up to the 249 people and $10 million cap just with the accredited checks. So I have $2,000 checks. Somebody, a founder that I backed VNSPV just wrote her first LP check into the fund and did a small check into the fund, people writing $5,000 checks, $10,000 check. into the fund. And that really gets as many people in as I can. Obviously, can't let, you know,

everybody in, which is a bummer. I would love to be able to do that. That is the real challenge, isn't it? It's like, we literally, we didn't do a public raise on our last fund, but we had at the time, maybe 5,000 people as members of the syndicate.com. And we said, if anybody has interest, again, and those are all accredited investors who have invested with us before. And we had to basically have a lottery. So we're like, tell us how much you want to. want to put in, the Mac too can put in is 50K. So we had to put a max on it. And then she think about capital formation, Molly, you know, in this country, if we want to really try to put more money into startups, we basically are saying rich, we're not even talking about the

94% of Americans who are not accredited. They are not allowed to participate. Like, forget it, people. You got to buy crypto. You're on your own. Yeah, go buy crypto or go to Vegas or go go play, you know, uh, go bet on the horses or scratch off lottery tickets. The 6% will have a lot of money. We're in the top 6% of the country. We're limited in how many of those we could have, which then takes people like Pachie or myself, or now you, Molly. And we can't do our best work. And so I think a very reasonable, I don't know what you think about this, Pachie,

but I think a reasonable concept here would be to just add a zero. So let's go from 10 million to 100 million cap. And let's go from 250 to 2,500. So, yeah, it's 10 times as much. But what's happening now is we're having 10 times as many funds, maybe more, which is good, I think, arguably. But there's no reason to not let more people participate in this part of the economy. And then maybe we could actually say to non-accredited investors, hey, you could be 10% of those slots. So you could have 250 non-accredited, and you could limit them to, I don't know, $5,000 each.

So we could just have like a little tiny onboarding for, I don't know, the next. five years. So for the next five years, non-accredited kids can put in $5,000, you can only have $2.50 in a fund. So the SEC can feel like, which I think is their goal, like, we just don't want to have to deal with people losing their money. And having complaints. Yeah. So maybe we just look at what is the potential risk and damage, Molly, and just say, well, let's, let's look at the potential damage. Because the damage right now that we're seeing in crypto of people buying ICOs or putting all their money into a Bitcoin and being the bagholder or NFTs is arguably massively greater. Well, and then we should say that with respect to something like your fund, part of the

reason that we're haggling over how we handle this going forward is because this is kind of this new model, right? It's like Patreon on steroids. You're in a situation where you're a media first fundraiser and you literally have, I mean, I got an email the other day from somebody being like, how can we get involved as an LP? And I'm like, I don't even know how to evaluate this. Sold out is the answer. Do I ask you how much money do you? Like, what happens now? But like, that's pretty new, I would think. I think it's fairly new. It's certainly not, you know, the first time that, as Jason pointed out,

VCs have written some, you know, very famous VCs, started out as writers and then became VCs, but I think this idea of kind of raising a fund on the back of a media entity is relatively new. And it wasn't, you know, something that was intentional by any stretch of the imagination when I did it. So you can see where the SEC is coming from, right? You could imagine someone like me who has a newsletter with a lot of people following it who has less qualms about just taking as much money as possible and taking high management fees. I have management fees only out four years instead of 10 years.

It's, I think, a very kind of generous structure. And obviously, I'm trying to generate the best returns that I possibly can. You can also imagine combining media and venture with just a wide open kind of general public fundraising and that going wrong. So I understand why the SEC wants to do something about it. A credit investor, I think probably that limit needs to change. I like Jason's idea. I like the fact that they introduced people who have taken their series 65 or 63 and 73. It was 63, right?

It was the one people were using. Or series 63 can become accredited, which shows, I think, shows, I think, a higher level of financial sophistication than a bunch of people with a million dollars have. I would like to see a more approachable test than the series 63. Wait, well, this is a higher level of financial sophistication than I have. What is it series 63?

All right. So it's, yeah, you have expended package. Yeah, so when you go into, into finance, you know,

in the beginning of your course, I started my career in investment banking, and I needed to get back then, I think it was the series seven for sure. And then I think also the series 63. I think now it's just maybe the 63 or they combine something. But it's a test that you take to, become essentially a licensed financial professional and let you do things like advise clients

or trade funds on behalf of clients and all of those types of things. And so it's this very long, in-depth tests on really boring arcane details. So if you can pass that, no matter how much money you have in the bank, you should be fine, you know, committing as an LP to invest. I would like to see a test a level kind of more approachable that people are able to pass. And the craziness about it is, you know, so the SEC was charged with, hey, let people become accredited based on, like, their knowledge as well, right? So that makes sense, right? If you were a economics professor at NYU who made 150K a year, you would not be accredited, but you would be teaching economics and, or an MBA professor. It was just weird, right? So then they, you know, said, okay, well, what if you

took these tests? So they already had the test set up. So it was kind of like a punt for the SEC, like, okay, just get a series 63, 37. You go read. the questions on that test, it has nothing to do with what Angel investing or private market investing has to do with. One of the reasons we created Angel.com University was, hey, let's train people who are already accredited on how to do it, just based on, like, pragmatic stuff of how to do diligence, how to interview a founder, how to think about, you know, diversification, whatever. And my hope was that at some point somebody would say, hey, can you make a 30 question test? That would be like a driver's license test or a gun test.

buy a gun in this country without a test in some states. That would make more sense. But yeah, the SEC hasn't gotten there. And I think one of the problems is the SEC is charged with not having, avoiding people losing their money. So they don't get rewarded for increasing participation. So their mandate is to protect people. But that mandate is like protect them from losing money. I would argue that the mandate should not be to protect people from losing money.

it should be to educate people on to be more financially literate and to make money. So just flip the lens at which the SEC gets judged from stopping people from participating to protect them to increasing participation. If their mission was increase the number of people participating in equities, private and public, that would be very freeing for them, wouldn't it? I just thought of that. Much better lens. This is something that I think is true even more broadly in society.

And I'm seeing it now as somebody who's writing about companies. companies that I invests in and all of that. And so on the, if you're saying anything good about a company that is tradable, you get labeled chill pretty quickly. If you're dunking on companies that end up doing really well, you look responsible and like you're doing people a favor by calling out, you know, the bad things that you see in a company, if you prevent people from investing, you know, over the past decade, over the past 100 years, over the past any timeline you look back at, if you prevented people from investing by scaring them away or making them believe that like, you know, this is something that is too complicated for them to understand or that these

companies are bad or whatever, you've lost people a hell of a lot more money than if you've told them to invest in, you know, the market kind of more broadly. So I think you're absolutely right on the SEC front and this is a bigger thing kind of societally is that we shouldn't make it seem like it's this very scary thing that, you know, only certain people have the ability to understand. And then I think that's particularly true when you're talking about LPing into a fund as opposed to making kind of individual investments. 100%. These days, it can be hard to find and hire the right candidates for your small business.

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It's pretty incredible, right? So post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Angel. Once again, that's LinkedIn.com slash Angel to post your first job free terms and conditions apply because they give me some for free. Tell us about your goals for fun too. So, you know, picking up on that theme, one of the things you specifically say in your blog post about raising fund too and sort of updating people is that you did want to increase that number of LPs, which we've now covered a little bit. You had your first liquidity event in Fund One. Like, what's the moonshot for Fund 2 here? Oh, that's a really interesting question.

So I think, you know, fun one, I was dipping my toes in Web3. There's a whole other, if we just want to make this whole podcast about the different rules that make investing a little bit annoying, we can go into the non-qualifying investment. I was hoping you would say, if we want to make this all about my blog post on, like responding to Prop D about Web3, we could do that too. I actually had a lovely conversation last night with somebody who works on his team who happened to be in an event that I was at. And I mean, I think that is a very good example of someone who looks like they're being responsible by dunking on things that could make people money if they approach it responsibly and don't write the whole thing off as a scam. So I do think that that is one of the things that I had in my mind when I said that. But back to back to fund two. So really, you know, I think if fund won, I invested about 15% in in Web3 startups.

This fund is about a third in Web3 startups and really trying to make bigger bets and back companies with more force and get more involved, you know, certainly will be kind of a similar size portfolio as Fund 1. So about 100 investments in Fund 1, about 100 investments in Fund 2. But the check sizes and hopefully the, you know, even the impact that I'm able to drive in this one are even bigger. Really, you know, spending a lot of time, hopefully this year telling the stories of the companies in my portfolio and helping to kind of translate and say, you know, I don't think that Web3 is all good or a panacea. And I also don't think it's a scam.

And like, let's look at each one of these businesses on a case-by-case basis and understand, are there things that tokens or DAs or NFTs let them do that are actually advantageous to the core product that they're trying to sell? And so that's kind of one of my big goals of this is for everything that I'm doing. Get a little bit weirder. I'm doing, you know, more kind of the intersection of Web3 and healthcare or Web3 and climate, get a little bit weirder with that and then explain why, and explain the thinking behind it and explain how these tools can be useful.

Well, and if you did 79 names in the first $10 million fund, on average, you're putting $100 and change into each company. Maybe you're putting $150 to $100 in the initial bet and then a little bit more on some of the winners, possibly as a strategy. If the next fund winds up being $40,50 million, you'll be doing $250 to $500,000,000, K-checked, which then put you into major investor rights and responsibilities, correct? Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you have to change as an investor when you become a major investor.

Yeah, absolutely. So I haven't really, I've done a few 500K investments so far. I think the average out of this fund now is climbing up towards 250. As a major investor, I get things like pirata in certain cases, which I've had to either negotiate a side letter for or give up before. So pro rata is just this idea that I'm able to invest the proportionate amount to what I invested in the last round the next time. And the idea there being obviously that if your winners keep raising money, the best way to make money is just to keep doubling down on your winners. And so you're contractually able to do that. You can fight back and forth

on that. And there's all sorts of things. This way I don't care super too much about the docs there because either I'm helpful and founders want me to come back in or I'm not. And I don't want to get in a legal battle over the fact that I do have pro rata rights. I think it's a little bit gross. But, yeah, writing 250 to 500 K checks, I just actually committed to my first million dollar check earlier today. And really, you know, like that means being the second, third, fourth, depending on the round, largest check on the cap table, which means that I need to be, I mean, ideally the most helpful person on the cap table. And I've had, you know, the nice thing here is I've had a lot of founders tweet over the past couple of months about just the impact that me writing about their

company has had on their launch or their client list or interest from investors for the next round or all of that kind of stuff. I can't write a full piece on everybody, but how can I be maximally helpful to the ones particularly that I'm writing checks that get me to the top three on their cap table? One more question on fund mechanics because one of the other things you do is when you get more allocation, you spin up than not boring syndicates, where you've done $4 million in investment, is that right? About $4 million out of the syndicate. And tell us more about that.

Are the syndicate, I would assume, at least some of them have also got to be Paki readers. So most of them are Packy readers. The idea behind the syndicate in the first place was I was writing, I wrote about a friend's company, they were raising money. And so I wrote a memo on them, sent the demand to somebody else's syndicate and realized that I could do that as well. I have a lot of smart readers in the audience who have money who want to invest in the things that I'm writing about.

And so spun up a syndicate that each time I had the opportunity to invest, they would come in. We were doing kind of $100 to $200,000 checks out of that. Now, you know, if I want to heap largely in the $250,000 to $500,000 range, unless I really want to make a big bet on something, anytime I go over $500K or the founders willing to give me more than $500K, I'll spin up an SPV for both LPs in the fund. And then the people who've just been in the syndicate, I think there's probably 15, hundred people in the syndicate, people in the syndicate to kind of come in and participate in the deals alongside the fund. But the fund always, I think, you know, contractually has to get

kind of first, first bite at the apple, and then anything above that goes to the SPVs. You know, when you do those, there's always this natural tension with your LPs and your fund. Why didn't we take more? So how do you manage that? Or how do you think about that? Yeah, I think I'm hopefully pretty clear about the kind of range of investment sizes that we're going to make. So that's the first thing that if it is just two times as big as I'd normally write, it would make sense if we do an SPV on top. The other is that I offer to fund LPs first and then open it up to the rest of the syndicate. Exactly our playbook. That's how we basically got through that issue.

I was like, listen, if there's more available than the fund betting size makes sense for, right, because you have a certain betting size for that initial bet and the follow on. We'll just offer it to LPs get priority. So we put that in our deal memos, launch LPs go first, and then everybody else gets put in a lottery and that's it. And it seems like nobody complains about that.

I mean, you're giving people choice, right? Either they love the investment, and then they're happy to actually just get the direct exposure, or they don't love the investment. And so they're probably actually happy that you have less of it in the fund, and then they don't have to participate there either.

So as long as I think you're giving people choice. And I mean, you know this. As long as you're being as honest and open as humanly possible with everybody involved about what you're doing and why people are fairly understanding. I'm going to quickly explain one crucial type of insurance that all startups need. E&O insurance. That covers errors and omissions. And it helps you scale your business because any major customer is going to ask you,

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While you're there, you can get an extra 10% off by using my promo code, which is T-W-I-S-T, Twist, Twist, Twist, broker.com slash twist. Molly and I had a conversation about did she start investing at the wrong time because it's the top of a market and then the market's correcting a little bit,

you would be the perfect example of starting at a market top. All of your investments are under two or three years old, right? Maybe the SPVs are a little older, I'm not sure. But they're all under three years old. And let's face it, a lot of markups, I'm sure,

because the market has been so ridiculous. let's be honest. It's been absurdly hot and it doesn't make a lot of logical sense, sometimes the jumps. And now, I'm guessing you haven't had a ton of exits because the companies are so nascent. I've had a couple, you know, a couple of coin offerings, which is the interesting thing about investing in Web3 projects. So you get liquidity. You're locked up still, but you kind of get a sense for what the actual market price is on those. So you haven't done distributions yet, and now you're going to find yourself in a very weird position, which is, hey, you send investor updates, you have markups, and now the market bottoms.

And so you get kind of get caught in this valuation trap. How are you thinking about just the communication to LPs of like, yeah, we invested at the top of the market and things might have pulled back a little bit. But here's our operating philosophy for investing in a volatile market, let's say. Yeah. I mean, I don't know when this happened because I'm also kind of like, you know, when I look at my portfolio or whatever, I'm an addict to look at it. the numbers all of the time.

And at the same time, I've been very calm about this pullback. I mean, one, I don't think has hit private market valuations yet. It will remain to be seen. I'm sure, particularly in the growth stage stuff, it will hit the private market valuations. But I'm really, and I know everybody says this, this is a 10-year fund life cycle. Do I think that these companies are going to be worth much, much more? And the top end of the range will be much, much higher in seven to 10 years than it is right now than it was two months ago, I 100% believe that.

And so certainly, you know, there's a communication issue in the middle where it's like, yeah, to your point, the last time I said that we were at, you know, 70% ROI and now, or IRR and now we're at actually 30% IRA. Sorry. So there is that communication challenge. But, you know, I think, again, if you're open and honest through the whole thing, I've said throughout the fund that, you know, that I'm going to be investing kind of through bull markets and through bear markets.

And so I think as long as you're kind of following through on the strategy that you set out, that's totally fine. And 10 years will be, I think, golden. We have some great companies in there. Yeah, I mean, you've even... You have questions about that, Molly? Well, I do. You've even published your risk appetite.

I wonder how you think that the risk appetite might change or wobble as market conditions change, but you're like, 75% is core with the potential to return the fund in the bulk case. 5% is explore and 20% is growth. So you, much like institutional investors, almost have a like a portfolio split in terms of risk. Totally. I mean, the goal.

They tell us about. I mean, by the way, that you tell people about. Like when I first started covering venture capital as an industry five, six years ago, being like, I want to try to untangle this black box. I certainly wish your newsletter had existed, right? Because it was like, invisible then. This is the same thing as the philosophy when I write about a company is I also don't know what I'm doing. here. And so LPs know this and I feel very good telling people up front before they invest

their money that I don't know what I'm doing. But part of it is I'm learning in public too, because when I worked at the last place that I worked, one, we had a board that wasn't particularly helpful and was probably actively destructive in some cases. And so like, that was one lesson. And the other lesson was like, I really thought that there was some like magic that these, the VCs knew that I like, as an employee of the company, like, couldn't possibly understand. And I'm like, it sounds overly self-deprecating. But like, legitimately, I remember our, you know, exec team before I was on it coming here with you.

I'm right here with you on this bag. Like, coming back from board meetings and I was like, oh, my God, like, okay, like, tell us. Like, what did the board say about the business? Like, how are we doing? And it's like, how the fuck do these guys come in for a day and know what we're doing better than we know? But it does, like, there's just a mystique around the whole thing.

And so a big part of this is like just demystifying this whole thing. Because like, an idiot like me can do it. Like, it is not rocket science to do this. It's not rocket science. You're an ATM. You're picking companies. You're placing bets and you're trying to be helpful. And the interesting thing is because I'm kind of between this new group of people who are raising and doing really innovative things like 506C, raising publicly, which I never did because I was part of that tail end of traditional VCs where they're like, don't do that. But I also had syndicates and was already used to kind of talking about what I was doing. So I was like one foot in both places. As an LP and some of the top firms, they don't send these like frequent quarterly updates. You get. get an email once a year with your audit, you get a distribution and they explain to you, your cost basis, your cash in, cash out, and you're done. I'm talking about the top most elite firms in the world.

Then I start LPing some of these new funds, Molly, and I'm getting emails, like every time one of their companies gets marked up, and then in real time, they're like, now that this got marked up, our IRR is this. And I'm like, just remember Bill Gurley in the back of my head. Do you know this? Bill Gurley in the back of my head saying you can't eat IRR. Like, IRR doesn't put food on the table.

And I was like, what does that mean? And I was like, you know, when I was starting investing, it's like, you know, internal rate of return, what percentage you make every year, you know, when you look at the total cash in, cash out. And then I realized, like, there is a maturation that occurs as a capital allocator. And the people who've been doing it for decades, they're just like, how much cash did my LP put in? And how much cash did I put in their pocket?

Now that I'm in year 11, and my first fund is over the original hurdle was a $10 million fund. And we've returned over that in amount, so I'm getting carry now. I'm just like, it's just about cash in, cash out. But for the youngens, they're sending these like colorful updates with icons and this is up. This one's up, you know, where it's 17x on this, 5x on this, 4x and I'm like on paper, you know? And I just thought to myself when I started getting these, like, what happens if the market corrects? and these things go down and you told people you were at 120% IRA. You were double more than doubling the money every year, like not sustainable.

I mean, the other fun thing about IRA is that it degrades over time. So if the valuation stays the same and you just sit there, it gets lower and lower and lower. So even if nothing bad happens, your IRA just naturally drops until something good happens. Explain what that means to people who don't understand the math here. It would be a good chance to educate folks. Yeah. So the internal rate of return essentially looks at like kind of the annualized rate of return on the money that you've invested.

And so if I put a million dollars into a company today and like tomorrow, you know, the old Instagram story where I think Thrive invested at 500 million and then it sold for a billion dollars in like a week, the IRA on that is absurd because you annualize that. And so it's essentially like, wow, if you play out that double over the course of the year and it just keeps doing it at that rate, like this is a trillion percent IRA. I just, in my last update, talked about an investment that I had that was a 15 billion percent IRA at the time.

It was a token, so it's both gone down since. And there's just been more time and particularly early on. It's very sensitive to every day. So now it's probably a million percent IRA or something, something low like that. But put that in there as a joke. Like, no one is expecting me to return. It is literally a joke. It's a joke.

Yeah. No one is expecting me to return 15 billion percent there. But IRR is just a good way to. to kind of measure on a fairly normalized basis how your fund is returning over time. And it then normalizes for how long you've been around. Obviously, you know, a fund that is less than a year old like my fund will not have the same return on invested capital that a fund that's been around for seven years might have. But our IRAs could be consistent and I could be kind of pacing towards that.

And the average, just so people know an IRA, a 20% IRA might be. average in venture, 25, 30%, if you're early stage because you have a larger acceleration. But in a market like this, Molly, where, you know, you'd have a company that was worth 10 million become worth 100 million in the same year, I mean, all of a sudden, the IRS get out of whack. When I had the Uber investment, at a certain point, when I went out to raise whatever, my second or third fund, my IRA of the Scouts fund, which was 600 invested 120, realized, or 110 million realized, was over 100%. and I just said to pretty jokingly, I can assure you of one thing,

my IR only goes down from here. Yeah. Right. This is not sustainable. It's like, you know, just getting lucky. But go ahead. You had a question about.

Well, I actually feel like this conversation, too, gets to sort of two, two things that you pointed out, Jason, that are really interesting. One is that it's a lot easier to be a media forward venture capitalist

when you're still super excited about the mechanics. Yeah. Because you're kind of, right? Like, I'm in the same boat where I'm just like, everything I'm doing is fucking fascinating. Yeah. But two, or B, if you are in a situation where you're wooing LPs in public on some level, right? Or you are engaging with a fan base that's excited about what you do. It is the tendency of maybe people who are old like me and Jason to be like transparency can be dangerous. And I just wonder, especially if we do enter a correction period, is there a point at which you could start to get worried? And I'm certainly not arguing for sharing less, but it's like, you know,

As we know, transparency can be a double-edged sword. 100%. Right. So I think a few different ways to think about this. One, I really don't share company details in the newsletter. So like, the last thing in the world, I would want to do is be like, you know what company just like got marked down and just doing really shi is like this company in my portfolio? So I think that's one is that I'm never good or bad disclosing particulars about a company

that aren't mine to disclose publicly. Which you're not allowed to, and it's considered bad. Oh, it would be awful. It would be terrible for him. So one, not doing that. And so it wouldn't just be like, oh, man, the market turned and like, look how bad these companies are doing. That would never be the case.

But if this market is turning, and I've said ahead of time that I have like almost a mini tiger strategy where, you know, I'm trying to get as many bites of the apple in like the top 10% of deals that I possibly can and then help those companies as much I possibly can, it essentially starts to look like an index. And so anybody who's reasonably smart as an LP will say like, he has an index on this market that is doing horribly. I wonder how he's doing. And so, you know, I think it's better to be transparent and open about the whole thing

and give more information than not. Otherwise, you know, I think people can come to the conclusion on their own and you might as well be honest. I guess the worst case scenario for this and where it will be tougher for me to be honest, but we'll, you know, hopefully it built up the muscle is in year three or four, if the market's doing well and I'm not. Like that is going to be a spot where it's very weird to disclose, you know, kind of returns and all of that. The trow of despair. Right. J-curf is, you know, a real thing. We, and I think a lot of the funds now, Molly, haven't had to experience what's called the J-curve, which is you deploy capital and your portfolio is valued at X.

Now, years three, four, and five, a bunch of your companies go out of business, right? Because you get the bad news first. So now, because they went out of business, there's zeros. The value of your portfolio goes down. You're below. And then you slowly, years five, six, seven, eight, nine, realize, oh, oh, you got a Robin Hood. You got an Uber. You got this.

You got that. They're going public. You're sending money out. And then you get out of that J curve, that trow of despair that happens for investors. And, you know, I think that's why the old. school folks are muted in their enthusiasm because they've seen this movie before. And there's something that- But in theory, you, Paki, will have been honest all along.

You will have been learning those mechanics. You will have been preparing even your newsletter readers who are accredited investors, who are LPs, or the fact that this reality exists. So hopefully it won't be so shocking. I mean, in the lesson, like, uh, no, they're going to be pissed. Yeah, nobody wants to, nobody wants to lose, to lose money, obviously. I think in the last update, I talked about one of the companies that I invested in in Fund One had a recap, which means essentially, you know, they can go to a lower valuation and can go all the way down to, you know, I think they went all the way down to something, $50,000 or something.

And I talked about the fact that I was really excited to re-up in the recap because I still believed in the founder. I still believed in the thesis. It was an opportunity to own more of the company. And it gave them kind of a renewed focus and energy. So again, that's a good actually opportunity to. explain a recap. I don't know if you, have you heard this term, Molly, before, are aware of it? I have heard it in Paki his newsletter, but yeah, let's do it. So here's what happens. Company I also am learning in public. Yeah, well, let's say company raises that 15 million. They come out of YC or something. They're really hot. They don't have the product market fit. They raise, you know, $3 million at $15 million cap. Then they, the product fails. But they learn something,

and then nobody wants to invest because they burn through the $3 million and $15,000. months and all it is is bad news. But then the founder says, you know what? There was one thing we were working on this like skunk work projects. It's like this audio podcasting software didn't work, but this Twitter thing did. And like it's kind of simple and stupid, but it just, you say you're what you're doing and what you're up to. And then it shows you what everybody else is up to. It's like literally what happened. And then Evan Williams recapped audio or what was obvious cooperation, I guess. And then Twitter came out of that. But a bunch of people were like, okay, I lost my money. I don't want to participate in next round, so I can't raise it 15.

I'm going to take all of the shares, put them into common, and then start a new fresh, basically refresh the cap table. Anybody who's in existing, investor is moving to common, and then we're raising a million dollars at a 10 million. So now you're left as the investor. Okay, my previous shares, I owned 1% of the company are worth five basis points. I've lost 95% of my value there and they're common. But I do have the ability to put 100K and own 1% again. So I own 1.05% of the company if I put 100. So that's called pay to play. So if you don't pay, you don't get yourself. That is like an extreme thing that happens in companies and it leaves a lot of bad feelings. Most people say if you're going to do that, you might as well shut the company down

and start a new company. But what happens sometimes is the IP was created in that previous cap table. So you have this conundrum and a recap occurs. But in your recap, you were like, I am going to put what you think is good money after bat. The first bet was a bad bet. It didn't work. But the second bet was a great bet in your mind. The first bet was a, you know, it was like went out and couldn't kind of raise the next round kind of thing.

With millions, you know, low single digit millions in ARR that stuck around after the recap. And, you know, there were a lot of good things. It just like kind of needed an organizational shift. from more kind of sales led to more product led. And so, you know, that's a, and I really like the founder and nothing changed, you know, the intervening months between when I invested and when, you know, they were unable to raise the round. And so if that is all still the same and I'm still betting on the founder kind of that

early in the game anyway, and I can get in at a lower valuation with a more focused product and a bunch of lessons learned relatively cheaply, you know, that seems like a bet kind worth taking to me in that case. Good money after Evolved. I just want to ask you briefly about the newsletter part of your business, which, you know, how is it manageable? Like, these are really in depth. This is good journalism you're doing here.

And I wonder how your time split works between these two. Like, is it sustainable to be a media personality and a VC at a high level? Yeah, it is. No reason for that question, by the way, Jason. It takes, you have to have a. certain fortitude to be able to do task switching. Task switching is hard. I think that is exactly, exactly right, that it's the task switching.

Like, I will start writing Monday's piece this afternoon. Right now, it's 2 o'clock Eastern. So in two and a half hours, I'll be done calls, and then I'll start writing Monday's piece. And then I'll spend most of the weekend writing Monday's piece. It's almost, you know, it has to be sustainable because, again, I'm not the smartest or best investor. And the newsletter is a, you know, a big help.

And the only reason a lot of people are willing to either give me money to invest or to take my money in their companies. And so, you know, they have to work together. I think probably where I need to do some work is just, yeah, I blocked out a whole day with no meetings the other day. And it was so lovely. So like figuring out how to just give myself those days to not just write, but also read and read more broadly and like think beyond the topic that I'm thinking about. That's the hardest part about writing. Isn't it, Molly Lake and Peggy? You need to have that white space and that dead time.

And then all of a sudden, you know, like if I go for a ride on my electric bike or I go for ski, all of a sudden I'm on the mountain and I'm skiing, I'm like, I'm stopping, turning on Siri and trying to use her to do dictation. She's terrible. I got to bring my Android phone with me because it's so much better. And I start dictating a couple of thoughts. And it's like literally a chapter of my next book or a deal memo or something. I just, something crystallizes. And that's the problem with writing is you really need to have a little bit of that downtime.

And then our job of meeting with companies is no downtime. and slacks and DMs and emails, it just never ends. And they are very, the task switching and the mind switching is very hard. I think the way you're doing it is exactly right. You have to block out time. So if your schedule doesn't say block for three hours, if you're a writer, you're doing something wrong. Yeah.

Any time for input. You know, like everybody thinks that content creation happens in some kind of vacuum. But it takes input to get output. And if you don't have the space to either take that in, like literally I have to be like, I haven't been to a conference or had a meeting. with somebody who I don't work with in three months. I don't have an original thought right now. Sorry.

Like, there's nothing to build on. There's no seeds. I think if you went back and looked at my post, you could tell when I've had periods of, you know, exploration and not, because the ideas are a lot more creative when I've had time to think about something other than what was right in front of me. This is the role of travel for me. I think it's one of the reasons why the pandemic was just screwed with,

candidly screwed with my mind and my ability to produce really well is because I would travel somewhere, I do a speaking gig, I get some culture, hit some restaurants, meet some new people, and then all of a sudden, like Molly's saying, all of a sudden the ideas start building and you're ready to go. But listen, Paki, great job on your second appearance. Fund two is closed, or you're raising a public is still open? It's still open, but only because I am literally so overwhelmed by trying to figure out how to pick among the people's of it. Who do you use to do your funds? Is it ashore? Is it Angelus? Is it private attorney? I use Angelus, and I always want to give a shout out to Jen, to Jen,

Ash on the team over there who's kind of my person there who is it's like having all another team like there's no sponsor relationship or anything with them but I mean it makes it it makes it possible frankly it makes it possible I think or you know carda angel is to shore there's like three or four of them now and they're all competing better prices better service and it's really one of the reasons Molly and Pagia I think that this revolution is happening is when I started you know the back office was like I'm calling my friend at Sequoia, like, can you explain this to me? He's like, yeah, come over. And, you know, it's literally four hours of me meeting with their team trying to get all this education. And then they put

it in all these, like, uh, platforms have put it in a box. And like, yeah, just fill out these forms, boom, press the button. We made it software. They made the capital formation software, right? Yeah. I mean, we talked about this with David Rosenthal, too, how it's basically AWS for raising a fund. I mean, kindergarten ventures at the size that they did fund one just wouldn't work if you were even just paying for legal fees outside of, you'd be at 250. $1,000 in legal fees to $500,000, it would be 2.5% of your fund would go to the legal fees and information. But when it's $100,000 or $50,000, it's palatable. You know, it's 1%. It's okay. All right. Let's do your plugs. Where, what are you doing? Where can people find you? They should

know by now, at least from the start of the show. But like just in P-A-C-Y-M on Twitter. At P-A-M on Twitter. What else? I know that. At Pac-E-M on Twitter. NotBoring.co. I should probably, there's not boring.com. has like a stick figure on it and that's it. I should probably just try to buy that, but not boring. com. And those are really the two. You can normally kind of find you.

You're in the world. You're in the world. That's it. All right, Packy, great job on the pod. Great second appearance. And let's have you on for like a news roundtable at some point. Great job. Great to be here.

Thanks for having me. See you on the internet. Cool, brother. All right, everybody. I told Rachel that if she had the audacity and the fearlessness to take out a Zoom recorder, not Z Zoom, at Zoom, the proper Zoom for NPR public radio folks. If she took

that out and she did some Vox Populi man on the street interviewed people, I would pay for her ticket to Miami. Did you understand the assignment? Definitely did. Last minute, yeah. I will say that this is a part where I should take

some credit for telling Rachel to go buy a Zoom recorder. I was like, yeah, no, if you're a woman on the street, you need some gear. I'm pretty sure we're going to pay for that. So hope that's cool with you. What does that Zoom recorder cost? That looks like 500 bucks. You hit the nail right on the head.

It was right around that with the insurance. You invested 500 bucks in your career, Rachel, to buy that? Don't fire me. You really bought that on your own? No. Oh. He bought it for her. I was in the bank, Heidi.

I'll pay for that. Yes. I will say, I went full boss on this one. I was like, Rachel, go buy a recorder. We were trying to find our credit card. Yeah. The renting, you need, you need, um, you need, already be in their system for like a few days or a few weeks in New York to rent one.

Don't worry about me breaking it. Now you're, if you use it 10 times, it pays for itself. So you started interviewing people live and in person. I watched it. It was good. It's a good start. Thank you. So tell us who you interviewed here at a HAC week in Miami.

So I got to interview a ton of people and the one with audio came out the best because this is my first time using a Zoom recorder. His name is Eric Button. He is the co-founder of TAP. If you want to check out their website, that is Try Tap. Tap builds low-code tools for businesses to offer crypto as a payment method. And I honestly, I met him because I mostly worked out of the Tapp. How is they had a really cool house.

And it was free to just go and co-work over there. And Eric will be on the show today. And we talked about why TAP actually sponsored a house for Miami Hack Week and the Gen Z tech people meeting each other in person after multiple years of just online Twitter interaction. Why do I get the sense, Molly, that we're going to be hosting a this week in Startups Hackhouse and Austin and Rachel's going to be running. Look out. If it can coincide with the F1. Yeah, right, right?

I don't see why not. I got the inside scoop for the next event. It's East Denver on February 11th. So maybe I'll catch me out the East Denver with a Zoom recording. Catch me, catch me outside with my instead of these hands. I got a Zoom recorder. Well, this is OK Boomers, certainly turning into a vibe. So good on you.

This one hit different. And you understood the assignment. How many of these TikTok memes do I have to drop in one sentence? Molly's like, what is you? Should we clap? No, that's good. Honestly, what could I add? That was so jockey.

I think I used all of those colloquialisms correctly. Okay, Boomer, here we go. Okay, Boomer. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the first in real life recording of Okay, Boomer. This is Rachel reporting straight from Miami Hack Week. Today, I am joined by TAP co-founder, Eric Button. I met Eric on Twitter like I met every single other person here. Let's go.

Eric, let's talk about Miami Hack Week. Where are we right now? Yeah, so I'll just give you a little bit of an introduction to what Miami Hackweek is. So it's a little bit different from a standard hackathon in that all the houses are spread across Miami. In each house has maybe 10 to 50 hackers working on different projects. It's a very low-key hackathon in that there's no rules. A lot of people are here to meet each other rather than win prizes.

So that's what Miami Hackweek is. And we are sitting right now in Tap House. Like I said, he's the co-founder of Tap. So this is their house. It is absolutely gorgeous. I'm going to try to get a tour of it after our recording. You explain to us how you were actually able to get a house this beautiful and how many people are here right now.

Yeah. So Miami Hack Week, the first Miami Hack Week was actually last office. August 2021. And that's actually where I met my co-founder. So needless to say, I appreciate the value that Miami Hackweek brings. So that's why we were like one of the first startups to go ahead and sponsor a house. We're definitely in an employee's market. So this is a way to send a message that we are a place that values having a good time.

And yeah, it's essentially courting employees, and it's part of our 18 to 24-month, you know, top of funnel game plan to attract great talent. Awesome. So what does TAP do exactly? I know you guys are looking for people to hire, but what do you actually do? Yeah, so we are actually a New York-based fintech. Very cool. I've met so many fintech founders here.

More fintech founders than I ever have before that are around our age, which I think is incredible. I think it's a really interesting field that not a ton of young people. generally gravitate to because it's not a consumer product as much as like creating, I don't know, like a new workout brand or an app that deals with communication, which we've met like a ton of people here that have had apps doing that. So very cool that you're doing fintech. Do you think in the next hack week that you could see people from more established startups or even maybe like corporate companies, like fang companies coming here and searching for talent or do you think that this is going to kind of stay within our little Twitter verse.

How low-key do you think this is going to get? Do you think this is going to blow up? Yes, so I think that's two different questions. One is whether Fang is going to look for talent here. And the other one is, will this blow up? I think Fang may not actually find the best talent here because it will often come to Miami Hack Week. There's a lot of Fang employees actually here this week.

and they're here to maybe find their next slightly higher risk, higher reward step. So that might not be the ideal fang employee. On the other hand, I am very bullish on Miami Hack Week. If this trend continues, it's going to be a massive event going forward. Whatever the next one is, it's going to be huge. Considering New York City feels like two degrees right now, I am also very bullish on Miami any weekend. At New York feels like two degrees. I would love to be here.

I think this would be an incredible opportunity. I personally would love to see startups that have disposable income that are looking to hire kids come here. Because one thing that I've noticed is there are a ton of kids that didn't have a college education, whether they dropped out of school, chose not to go to school. I think most kids actually don't have the traditional path going from like college to corporate to a maybe then a startup. I think most kids dove right in here, which is really awesome. But that also means I feel like they are stuck, like I mentioned before, and our little Twitter scape.

So we all know that tech Twitter is a really small community, especially within Gen Z's. We all know each other. It's kind of difficult sometimes going to this stuff because some people have JPEGs as their profile picture. But other than that, it has been a really cool meeting, everyone. How do you feel about the overlap between Gen Z Tech Twitter and Miami Hackweek? Yeah, first of all, Gen Z Tech Twitter is amazing.

I think there's some interesting dynamics at play. The same people that love to kind of have a good time on Twitter, maybe love to get together in real life and have a good time in Miami. So I think from also like a hiring play, what we're seeing here is interesting because everyone here, this event actually filters for young talent that appreciates human interaction. And also maybe is either good enough at their day job that they can kind of, make that work with a week in Miami, or they're at a transition in their career where they might be open to work, like they're fun employed or something.

I've been a ton of fun employed people here. They're all like, I'm doing consulting for startups, and they're absolutely killing it. There is one person that comes to mind. His name is Ami. I hope to have him on the show. I've never met somebody that has been so influential in our space that is, quote, unquote, fun employed right now, I believe. He was really, really cool.

And I definitely think you're right. I personally really missed going to in-person events. And I hope that we can continue going to these because not only is our community spread between SF, L.A., New York, even Canada. I've met a lot of people from there as well in Texas. But meeting people in real life, I feel like just has such a different connection because we're so plugged in all the time. Like just sitting around and having dinner with people and talking about something that's not tech is so refreshing. But then at the same time, like being able to like during my 9 to 5 ask somebody a question about our career. I feel like is really cool.

And that's really unique. I don't really meet a lot of people in the tech space. So hopefully I get to keep coming to these and making these kind of connections. Absolutely. Yeah. I have a friend who's actually thinking about building an electric motorcycle. Yeah. And he mentioned that to me this morning.

And I said, oh, you got to talk to Zach. He's built, you know, a hard tech startup. And he actually worked for a company building electric motorcycle. Now this evening, he's going to go see how to Zach. So this is the kind of connection that you can't really replicate online. Right. you really can't. As much as I love online connections, like being able to

meet everyone for the first time in real life, it just is so, it's even helping me with like my job because it's kind of difficult to dictate like, oh, well, I have a good conversation with this person off of their tweets versus like, do we vibe in real life? You know what I mean? So this is definitely something that I hope

continues. I know the pandemic is still here, but everybody here. So for Miami Hack Week, everybody had to get tested. There's a lot of tests hanging around this house. There's a lot of tests hanging around everybody's house. Hopefully when the pandemic gets a little bit lighter, everybody will be able to continue doing these, maybe even more frequently than just like once every blue moon.

You know what I mean? 100%. Yeah. And I'm in, there's still active group chats from the first Miami Hack week. Yeah. So these are long-lasting relationships for sure. Well, really looking forward to having a long-lasting relationship.

Hopefully we can grab a coffee in New York City. I'll also catch you in your Airbnb that you guys are working out of right now, right? Let's do it. Absolutely. Yeah. For sure. Awesome. Well, this is Rachel reporting.

And Eric Button, find me on Twitter. What's your Twitter at? It's Eric Jacob Button. Awesome. Well, I'm underscore Rachel Braun, but don't follow me. You should be following this weekend startups. That is TWI Startups. Yeah.

You should be following this weekend startups instead. I hope to see you guys over at the podcast.