This Week in Startups - Strategies for investing in an overheated market, understanding warrants + Nat Bullard | E1599

Episode Date: October 30, 2022

First up, J+M cover how to approach a market that's heating up during a downturn (1:42), before covering warrants. (25:07) Then, Voyager's Nat Bullard joins to discuss his journalist to VC path and Voyager's climate focus. (32:09) (0:00) J+M tee up today's segments! (1:42) How to approach a market that's heating up during a downturn (11:26) Blueground - Get up to $1000 off your booking at https://promos.theblueground.com/twist  (12:58) Strategies around patience in VC, entering markets at the wrong time (25:07) Understanding warrants (30:49) Paperclip - Go to getpaperclip.com/twist to get the app free for life (32:09) Nat Bullard joins Molly and breaks down his path from journalist to climate VC (39:15) LinkedIn Marketing -  Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (40:38) Voyager's thesis, most exciting investment opportunities in climate FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood FOLLOW Nat: https://twitter.com/natbullard Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

All right, everybody, it's Sunday. So first up, Molly asks me two. You get a bonus here. Two VC Sunday school questions. The first one is about what's the rational way to deal with an overheated market, whether it was crypto last year or climate, the category that Molly has dedicated yourself to today. Great question, Maher. Thank you.

And then I got a spring one on him because I just still don't totally understand Warrens. But after this conversation, I do. Which is great. And then we have former journalist Nat Bullard. on the podcast to talk about moving to Voyager Ventures as a venture partner investing in early state climate startup. Wow, sounds familiar from journalist to investor. Huh, I see a trend emerging.

Thank you, Michael Moritz. And O'Malley Wood. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Blueground is revolutionizing the rental game with its global network of designer furnished apartments that can be seamlessly booked for a month. year or longer. Get up to $1,000 off your booking with Blueground. Visit promos.com

slash twist for more info. Feel at home free to roam with blueground. Paperclip. In a downturn, every dollar counts. See where your firm's cash is going and stay on top of your runway with paperclip. Go to getpaperclip.com slash twist to get the app free for life. and LinkedIn marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com

slash this week in startups. Hey, everybody. It's Sunday. I hope you had a restful weekend. Thinking about your career, maybe blocking out some of the bad news in the world, and thinking about something great, Molly,

which is building companies. It's virtuous to build a great company that solves a problem in the world, creates jobs. You are now a free market capitalist monster, correct? How has the transition been for you? Definitely. Capitalist vulture up in here. I actually was at an event last week, this past week, and one of the, I did a million panels at this event. But one of the things I did, it was a verge 22 by this outfit called Green Biz. And they put on, it's very, very business and finance focused conferences about climate. This is specifically a climate tech event. So. I'm very excited to say I already have four startups in my inbox as a result of this one day on the ground. And I got to spend the whole day with like my number one favorite sci-fi author, Kim Stanley Robinson. Oh, wow.

It was a great day. But I did a lunchtime event called Will Capitalism, this was my title, Will Capitalism Kill Us or Save Us or Both? And ended up with a table full of investors and startup founders in the climate tech space. So first of all, good job me. It was really good bait. but it was a very interesting I think we kind of landed on both because we're all like,

well, we feel really great about this. You're good at naming things. You have a talent for packaging of media there. It's why we have to, we're going to have to see where you can take that, pull that string and see where it leads us. Because you're good at making a,

yeah, a splash. I'm pretty good at branding, yeah, branding and titles. Never trained in it, but you just have that ability. I think of myself as a translator in general, right? I'm like, take your complicated topic and I'll boil it down to a few words for you.

How we survive. Okay. Translation. So, so anyway, that was a long way of saying, yes, I'm all in. Great. Awesome. Capitalism. I love the motivations. It's just clean. It works. You know where you're going. Yeah, I mean, if you look geopolitically, I, you know, I've made this argument a ton of times, including on All In, when, you know, last year, people were like, I guess, I mean, it was Freedberg. It was like, oh, my God, China's going to, you know, wall up the U.S. and I said, I have to pull this clip so I can do one of my pulling of the clips like Chumot does. But I have this great clip where I said, listen, I think dictatorships always wind up imploding and they have their own problems and they overreach. And capitalism always wins. I'm not worried about America, basically. And sure enough, here we have it.

China is becoming super insular. Ain't nobody in China want to start a company after they saw what happened to Jack Ma and all those companies losing their value. Like, what's the point of being an entrepreneur if it's going to get you in hot water? it's hard enough. Like imagine if entrepreneurship was a quick road to being, you know, put in jail or whatever happens to people in China when they get too powerful. Absolutely. I should probably say that I'm still enough of a public radio hippie that I do not

believe in unregulated capitalism. I think unregulated cap. And that's where the kind of climate tension comes in because unregulated capitalism is just complete consumption until we all die, right? And so this kind of idea of rules, rules matter. public-private partnerships really matter in the climate space, but also talk about rampant capitalism. We're in this moment, and I've made this joke a couple times that, like,

about timing in life. For once in my life, I have timed this particular career move perfectly. Yes. Maybe because climate tech investing, specifically right now in this weird moment of downturn, this gets to the VC Sunday school thing, is out of control. Like the slowdown in funding. does not seem to have hit climate tech investing. There are so many new funds.

There's so much money. It's still like totally competitive. You know, we had a company that was destined for the accelerator all of a sudden get this huge term sheet. What do we do? What is, is this normal for like one part of a venture ecosystem to be like wildly out of whack with out of step with the rest? Sure.

It really does happen from time to time where you have irrational exuberance from the capital allocator side and perhaps even overfunding and not enough entrepreneurs. So if the balance, if there's only a small number of entrepreneurs pursuing a vertical, let's say it's like the stable diffusions and the open AIs of the world, you know, AI kind of creating images and words, there are a small number of opportunities to place a bet there. People are enamored with it because the technology, when you see somebody use Dolly or stable diffusion or GPT3, you're like, oh my God, that's incredible, right? So you want to place a bet. You're sitting on a bunch of chips and everybody wants to place a bet in the same space, there's more

supply of money. There's a lower supply of companies. So therefore, demand for those companies is really high, would be the best way to say it. And so since demands high, the price goes up because entrepreneurs are smart and they want to have a marketplace and they'll go for the highest price. So what are you doing that situation is you have to be disciplined because if people overpay for a company early, then the company has to do what's called build into the valuation. So to give an example, if companies pre-product, they don't have a product completed, they don't have a product in market. Those are typically valued $10 million and under. They could be an accelerator, they could be seed invested, so $10 million and under.

Then they have a product in market and they have some people using it. Okay, now you could see them getting 10 to 15 or 20 depending on what amount of traction, right? And you can put a multiple of cash on it, like how much revenue they're making. But just broad strokes, let's say under 10 if you don't have a product, over 10 if you do have a product. But what happens if there's so much demand that to win a deal, a VC says, you know what, I'll just give you credit for what would happen in the next round in this round. So what would that look like? Well, instead of investing a million at a $10 million valuation, I'll give you $2 million

at a $20. So I'm still buying 10%, but I'm paying twice as much for it. Why would a VC do that? Because there's competition and they want to get it on the deal. And what should you do if you're one of the people who doesn't get in the deal? Well, you just wait because they're going to need more money. and in order to justify the $20 million valuation, they're going to need at least a million dollars in revenue,

20 times revenue, maybe $500,000 if the market's really hot, 40 times revenue. So you can just wait it out, wait until I hit 30 or 40, K in revenue, build a relationship with the founder and say, hey, I see that, you know, you now hit a half million to a million in revenue. Probably a good time for us to talk about maybe doing your seed extension or your actual series A. Is that something you might be interested in?

And they're not going to be able to say, well, give me 100 because people are going to look and say, well, you have half million in revenue, that would be 200x, that doesn't make any sense. So gravity will eventually bring all of these companies and valuations back down to Earth. And you just be patient. It is kind of interesting how there is, even in a down market, always bubbling. Because, like, I brought up climate tech and you brought up AI.

That's a, that's a group, like a little bubbling bubble right now. It sort of feels like. And so one of the things that was discussed at this conference, a couple of times about the investing space and how much money there is, I was kind of gratified because I I've been hearing this, you know, these whispers about how like climate tech is still really competitive and valuations are still higher and there's like a lot of, I don't want to say tourist money, but there are a lot of new funds. Yeah. And new investors such as myself. Yeah.

What happens when kind of like crypto or SPACs, like a bunch of bad things may get funded here? Correct. And then what is that due to the category, you know? Do I have bad timing after all? No, no, I don't think if to. I think this requires patience. And it's very hard to have patience when you're sitting there with a bunch of chips. It's the equivalent of, hey, I want to go to this restaurant.

And it's been open for 30 days and it just got this incredible review. And now it's booked out, right, for 60 days or you have to wait online for three hours. And then you go in the afternoon for lunch and you arrive first and there's no line. And you're like, wait a second. This thing has a three hour line. It's like, yeah, not at 3 p.m. So in between lunch and dinner. So you basically have to look at the situation where this place is overbooked and say, well,

what is a place where I could enter? How could I enter this? Well, there's a couple of different things you can do. One, you can be patient with that company and wait for it to, you know, start executing because then they actually have to hit the numbers. If they don't hit it, well, now you're talking about maybe a down round or a flat round. If they do hit some level of numbers, you'd be looking at only a modest increase. So keep the relationship with the founder. Send them notes, give them a retweet, and just build relationship fabric. Because I've seen over and over again, VCs, pass on a seed stage deal, pass on a bridge, pass on the series A, and then do the series B. There's probably five or six chances to get on the train. And if you could get

on the train for Google, anywhere between the seed round and the series B, you'd be happy, right? You'd be happy to get on that train. So just keep that piece in mind. And then maybe go find other startups that are going to compete in the space that are more nascent, right? So you can just look at who's going to compete with that company and just get a full version of, you know, of the field. So in the case of stable diffusion, raising $100 million at a billion, you know there's going to be 10 more entrepreneurs who are going to see that valuation and have their own spin on it. Get into one of those companies early and now you're still in the category. So you missed Uber but you did Lyft. People who invested in Lyft got an incredible return or

you got DoorDash or you got Postmates. All three of those series A's or series Bs were unbelievable investments. So if you missed Uber and people did like in Drayson-Harwitz, They got into Lyft. Or famously Sequoia did DoorDash, right? And other people did postmates. So you don't have to hit the Uber in the category. You can hit the other three. Remote work is here to stay.

We all know that. And I'm sure a ton of you are listening right now and you've gone fully remote. And a lot of remote workers love living that digital nomad lifestyle. Don't I know it? You see me during ski season. I'm out there doing the executive CEO, a little 90 minutes of skiing in the afternoon, skip lunch, you at your desk. Well, if the nomad life is for you, and I know it is, you need to check out Blue Ground. Blue

Ground is a network of stunning, stunning, move-in-ready apartments that come with everything you need to work remotely. They manage over 10,000 apartments across 15 countries and 27 cities in the U.S., but also Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Here are some of the cities they're available in. Copenhagen, Barcelona, Madrid, London, Dubai, Paris, Vienna, waits for you, Berlin, New York City, L.A., Austin, Marse, Marysville. Miami and so many more. And they're super flexible. You want to stay for a month? No problem. A year,

no problem. A couple years, no problem. A quarter, you pick. You're in control. And you can browse all the available apartments in real time, book in a few clicks, and you move in as quickly as the next day. You can manage your entire stay and enjoy a nice concierge style service through their guest app. Yes, if you need something, they're there to help you. They make apartments available where you want, when you want and on the terms you want with Blue Ground. Feel at home and be free to roam. And here's the best part. Get up to $2,000 off your booking at promos.com slash twist. That's promos. Dot theblueground.com slash twist for up to $1,000 off. That's a really interesting point you brought up too about how you, I think that probably I have started to bias heavily toward getting as soon as

you can as cheaply as you can. And you seem to be saying like, sometimes, sometimes clearly, right? That's the what to do and it's the most ownership. But that there may be times where you're like, this is a really promising pre-seed round. I'm willing to pay a little more. I'm willing to be a little later and own a little bit less so that I can see this

prove itself out and get to seed. You nailed it. This is a good one. This is a good thing about it. Good class. Well, I mean, if you take the situation you're describing. So let's say you found this company they were going to go to the accelerator.

They got a seed deal. Great. Maybe they even used the accelerator offer to get the seed deal. Great. That's within a founder's right to go shop a deal. I mean, sometimes they have no shop clauses

on them for this reason. But anyway, I'm fine with it. You know, somebody gets a better deal. You're happy for them. I need to stay in touch with them. And you look at the companies that are in the category around them because it's usually if it's a good category,

again, there's not going to be one. There's going to be 10. And you'll find an opportunity. to place a bet in the space. And so you just need to be patient. You don't want to place a bad bet. And this company that then did the C-Round, they're taking all the risk, Molly.

Yeah. They paid a high price. They do all the risk. And then you can just jump on after the risk is proven out. So Bill Gurley probably made the most money from Uber. He didn't do the seed round and take the risk like Chris Saka and I did.

Now, in hindsight, sure, of course, it's a great bet. But he got to let us fund that million and a half take the risk. And then he got to do the Series A. And then Mendoo, did the Series B, they let benchmark and the seed investors do the seed in the series A and take the risk. The B was still a great deal at $300 million. So there's going to be opportunities,

be patient, don't overpay, have some discipline. You can overpay on the margins if it's a truly fantastic founder slash idea. But I think overall, discipline and meeting with more companies, understanding the whole space is how you combat this. That was your original question. How do you combat the rationality? Right. How do you combat? Patience. Exactly. Patience is one. and thoroughness is the other because you're going to, what are the chances if you met with 50 companies and this one out of 50 you got this like overpriced deal?

What are the chances they're the one? It's possible, but statistically not probable. So let's look at the other 49 and make sure we understand all of them and that we're checking in with them every three to six months. And that is the way you're going to find out of the space. Again, you missed Uber, but you understood on demand, you understood the power of mobile, you understood the power of delivery, you really had a prepared mind and understood those dynamics.

Great. Lift, postmates, DoorDash, all did wonderful. So you just place a bed in one of those. Or maybe you waited out, you skipped Webvan and waited for Uber. Yeah. I mean, actually, it's funny you mention that. Bill Gurley did Webvan and then did Uber. So the prepared mine and the losses of Webvan led to doing Uber.

And maybe doing Uber a little more cautiously, too. Fascinating. Bill Gurley did good eggs as well. So he made two bats on a space. where he got walloped. Wow. So. It is interesting too because it's also, I mean,

it is the way of venture, I think, to be riding early, we're, you know, riding early waves in general. So like climate tech is a really early space where, where you start like,

it's, oh, okay, there are 10 businesses in this category, right? There are lots of different measurement things. There are lots of different this type of thing. There's this and this and this. And they're all kind of like growing and you're looking for the signals

that suggests that one of them might be a winner. That's also happening in AI. right now. That was also happening in cryptocurrency. Like, it sort of sounds like really with any brand new category that everybody's running to, the so-called VC lemming effect, the advice is always the same. Like, play tight at the beginning of the poker game

until you know what the table looks like. That would be a great way of saying it. And then, just to put a pin in this, I just sent you a link. Why the Clean Tech boom went bust? There's a story from Wired, right? And you're like, okay, well, this looks like an interesting, story. Let's read it. Oh, yeah. Let me just check when it was written. Oh, 2012. Right. So, you know, there was John Doer, Kostla, Cylindra, all of these things that happened

in that first wave that you can learn lessons from. And of course they overpaid. Of course, it was too early. And if cryptocurrency is going to be a thing, probably now is the best time ever to invest in it after having bought Bitcoin or Ethereum when those projects were first launched. So that was probably one entry window buying those, you know, in the first couple of years, Bitcoin and Ethereum. And now the second window is emerging now. I don't know if you saw the story about Chris Dixon and the portfolio over this, there's a big story that just came out. It was in the time, near times, right? Was it? Yeah. And so Chris Dixon, really nice guy, by the way. I'm a fan of Chris Dixon. And he went all in and it looks like massive losses for Indrisen Horowitz,

who apparently talking about timing went in at the wrong time. It's a Wall Street Journal story. Oh yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah. Indreason Horowitz went all in at crypto at the worst possible time. So now what you could do is here's how to strategize this. You look at everything Chris Dixon, who is a smart individual and was a great founder and a good product person. Um, You just look at every bet he made. You look at all the collapse evaluations of those. And then you would look at that portfolio and say, well, he's smart. He probably picks some good projects in there.

Let's go through those projects and see if there's a winner and see if they're doing or down around or they're doing a round where they're giving 10 warrants for every share you buy, which means it's 10% of the price, right? And that's what will happen is out of this, you know, poorly timed portfolio in all likely case if that's what's happening here. This could be a poorly time portfolio, just like the other climate ones were. Like the John Doors, yeah.

You could almost like you could almost cut and paste chunks of that John Doar climate once I know into this one. And then listen to John Doer on our show saying that $1 billion worth of investments then is worth $3 billion now. Right. And so which one is worth it? Now, if you were to look at that same time period, you know who's in that cohort? That's one of the most successful companies of all time.

Tesla. And if you were studying that in 2012, when that story was written about the collapse, Tesla in 2012 was, I think, public by that time and was probably trading at one or two percent of what it is now. All right. And so, Molly, if you did invest at the time of that wired story in 2012 in Tesla, you would have had a $245. So they had about a $2.9 billion market cap in October of 2012.

and they got a $710 billion market cap today. So, oh my lord, you know, in sometimes the collapse of an industry, if somebody does survive, we saw this with Amazon, you see it with other companies, to the victor goes to spoils. I love it too, because it's not the, what I love about that is that at the time, all the fomo, all the froth, all the bubble was about solar. And Tesla came out of that, right? So it's like, it's just such a great lesson that it's so easy to follow the school of fish to green hydrogen and fusion and whatever it is.

And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Look where they're not. Yeah. And it goes back to what I always say. Nobody knows. So if you can find a reasonable bet on a great founder, you make as many reasonable, thoughtful bets on as many amazing founders as you can find.

And that's the name of the game. It's exactly analogous to this Indreason Hartwood story. It is. I bet you inside of crypto, there are three or four in this, huge pile of heaping fire and rubble, two or three mother of dragons are going to come out of there, right? Three dragons are going to come out of that.

Three dragons are going to come out. Oh, that's so fun. And famously, Dorr did Fisker instead, like passed on Tesla. So, you know, it's, you could lead, you could literally lead the category. So Christick's an either,

and we will only know in 10 or 15 years, probably, Christics and either picked Tesla or Fisker, right? Somewhere in this. portfolio. Maybe both. Maybe both. You know, this is the thing that's so crazy about our industry. You know, as an investor and a capital allocator, you need to place as many reasonable bets as you can, understanding that you don't know. And that's the, you know, what I'm teaching to our, you know, 22 person team twice a week for two hours during those investment meetings is let's find every reasonable opportunity we can and place a bet. And if it goes well, triple down on that bet.

That's the name of the game and just have the humility to know, okay, this is a reasonable bet at a reasonable price with a reasonable founder, with reasonable product market fit, all those things we look for. Okay, this is a reasonable bet. Now let's move on and study the results of those early bets to increase our position in them and you just have to have that humility. The humility I've come to in my second decade of this is make bets on any reasonable opportunity you can and triple down on the winners and just study your process and try to make your process 10% better a month. That's literally what I'm committed to. I'm just going to try to be a 10% better investor every month by being more thoughtful, doing more training, and then you place as many reasonable bets as you can because overall the category wins. The category of venture capital historically has won. just get in the game and be thoughtful and that's what you're doing.

You don't have to sweat any one. You don't need to hit everyone. You need to hit one. I mean, it's so funny because like your advice on this segment and elsewhere has been effectively exactly the same since the first day. And it has been be patient. Like put the fomo in the box. Yeah.

FOMO is how you get yourself in trouble. FOMOs. And now there's massive fomo in the specific vertical. that I'm in and it's going to be, in a way, it's amazing, right? Because it's like an extra crucible. Like here we are in a bit of a downturn, but then there's a bunch of FOMO here. And so it's like the discipline that I feel that I will learn in the next two to five years will be incredible because there's going to be so much push to go the other way.

Can I like ask a bonus VCSS question? Absolutely. And I think, by the way, I would even take your two to five year window. Yeah. And I'd look at it as this is a decade long journey for yourself. Two to five years of learning and then the next five years of learning and then five years of being on top of your game. And if you take a 10 year review of it, what's the rush here? You know, there's no rush.

Just get to know as many people as you can. Get to, you know, take as many meaning as you can and learn as fast as you can in those first couple years. And then, yeah, place as many bets as you can on any reasonable opportunity. Your follow-up question is? Bonus question. Here we go. About, yes, I want to be clear. I actually just told somebody yesterday.

I was like, I can't wait to just go insanely hard for 10 years, just like run as hard as I possibly can on this for 10 years because I'm so energized by it and into it and thrilled by everything that I'm like. It is the coolest job ever. Yeah. I feel like the two to five years are the years I will be just actually on fire. Yeah, for sure.

Just take as many first round meetings as you can get is what it's about. Just like shooting as much playing time as you can get. Those meetings are the playing time. be very liberal with meetings. Take as many first round meetings as you can. If it's not a fit, just get comfortable saying, hey, not a fit for us at this time. We make very few investments,

but it was great to meet you and love to stay in touch. And the more of those 30-minute meetings you can get under your belt, you know, just a couple of week, then to 10 a week, whatever the pace is. Just want to get to know you. You know, hey, maybe it's just like a quilt. You're just weaving it in together.

Yeah, exactly, for the show, like the whole thing. Okay, so my follow question, well, I don't understand. I'm still working on warrants. I keep reading about warrants. Sure. And I just don't get it. Okay, it's very simple.

A warrant is the right to buy a share at some time in the future at a predetermined price. So if I give you a warrant right now to buy Facebook shares, and it's a public company, but let's say Facebook was private and was trading at the $100 it's trading at today. I see, you have a warrant for the next 10 years to buy a share for $100. You'd say, or let's just say for 110 and it's trading at 100 right now. You'd be like, okay, so if I buy the share, I lose 10 bucks. It's like, yeah, that's right. but what value does that warrant have the right to buy a $110 share of Facebook when it's trading at $100?

Well, it's a free option because if the company grows 10% a year, it will go to 110 and then 121 and then 134, whatever it is, right? 10% compounding. All of a sudden, you know, that warrant has some value to it. And you can execute it at any time and you do not need to put any money down for it. So this is a magical thing. So it's kind of like stock options, right? It's like stock options in a private company. Why would a company issue, it's not a fund raising mechanism?

It is a pot sweetener? It's a pot sweetener, yeah. And it could be, or it could be for a partnership. So let's say, you know, you've got a company, let's say like a sale plan, right? We've got a company like sale plan that you invested and you're on the board of and they do this thing in shipping, right, where they're monitoring emissions from shipping. And let's say, I don't know, the number one maker of ships in the world says, hey, we'll build this into our ships. We'll build your sensors into the ships in some, you know, incredible way. You know, we'd like the right to invest a million dollars in your company at this valuation.

Let's say it was a $100 million valuation. But we're not going to give you the million dollars. We just want the right to do that in the next 10 years at the $100 million price. Let's say there were 100 million shares. So each share cost a dollar. They would have the right to buy a million shares for a dollar each anytime in the next 10 years. So it costs them nothing. And the company might say, well, this costs us nothing.

right now. It would be 1% dilution, and we get to be in every ship. So all we have to do is have the ship, the person who bought the ship, turn it on and sell them the software. It's already built into the ship. All these sensors are all over the ship already. Okay, great. You have this option to buy those shares. And in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a company like Sirius XM, or Sirius, which then merged with XM, either one of them said to Ford, you know, at some point, hey, if you put our satellite receiver and satellite into every single car, we'll give you the ability to buy a million shares for a dollar each. You have the warrants. It doesn't cost anything now. And if you have the option, if this works and a bunch of people buy serious XM

subscriptions, you're going to make tens of millions of dollars. So it's a free option. It's a way for the company to give other people skin in the game who maybe don't want to put cash in. How often does that come up in venture deals? Not too often. It's usually used in business deals. But in a down market, it is a way for people to change the valuation, the effective valuation of the company without changing the valuation of the company. So you invest at $100 million, you put a million dollars in, and then we give you nine extra warrants for doing it at $100 million. So essentially you paid, you know, you got the million in warrants. You got the nine million in warrants. You paid in a million dollars for 1%, but you actually have 10% of the

company. So, you know, it's the equivalent of paying a much lower valuation. I see. So that is why I'm starting to hear the word warrants come up more because we're in and down market and those scenarios are coming out. It's another way to do a liquidation preference without putting a liquidation preference on the books. And so when you invest in a company, you say, hey, are there any outstanding warrants? Let us know about them. And that's a good thing to know. Maybe the company is given 10% of their company away in the future.

So you just have to factor that in. Okay, if I'm paying the $100 million valuation, there's 10% of these out here. Maybe I should be paying a $90 million valuation or what impact would that have when the company goes to get public and this person executes those warrants. So it's just a financial device to let people buy equity in the future if they want to, but they're not obligated to do so. And they typically time out. So usually you have the warrant for 10 years. You have 10 years to execute the warrant. Gotcha. Thank you. Amazing. I get it. You get it. Simple. So blog posts are not as easy as talking to humans,

turns out. That's nice to, you know, when you're on the treadmill, if people are right now are on their Peloton treadmill. You know, you can be listening to this pod and then you learn a little bit. And, you know, so I'm not, by the way, I'm not perfect in all this regard. I'm in my second decade of investing. If I get something wrong here, you can email me anytime, Jason at calicannis.com. If you have a question that you want us to address,

producers at this week in startups.com. That's right. All right. And then next up, this week in climate startups, this is actually very well-timed because, again, while I was at this day-long death march of awesomeness,

I was interviewed by another podcast about the transition from journalists to BC. And as it happens, today's guest on this week in climate startups is a journalist who became a climate tech VC journalist Nat Bullard, came on the podcast to talk about his recent move to Voyager Ventures as a venture partner. Voyager invest in early stage climate tech. And Nat does this really good newsletter at Bloomberg Green,

focusing on energy, transport, technology, climate, and finance. So it's like a cool transition to BC, but also in terms of that translation layer, he's writing this really. It's what I have been discovered. a lot is that the storytelling aspect of this is still a really big deal. And this is a great mashup of that. All right, everybody, enjoy the interview. Not as good as I'm at it, but guys, pretty good. Enjoy the interview. Founders, when you know your numbers like the back of your hand, you're going to come across as super credible. And when you're super credible, you're going to

close investors and you're going to close customers, right? And credibility, I say this all the time, equals closing. And paperclip is going to make you more credible right now. It's a free instant financial dashboard that puts all of your most important numbers at your fingertips. You plug in your bank, you put your credit card in, your financial accounts, and paperclip gives you instant access to the most important metrics like your net cash, your burn weight, and your runway. These are the numbers that you need. It's like being a pilot. You got your altitude. You got your speed. You know your GPS coordinates. Well, when you know those coordinates, you can be a better pilot. I want you to stop wasting time crunching numbers and spreadsheets or waiting around for your accountant to close the books. All of this

information is at your fingertips if you use paperclip. So here's your call to action. See why thousands of startups trust paperclip to help manage their finances. Check out paperclip and get real-time visibility into your financials today. It takes less than five minutes to set up and twist listeners get the app for free for life by going to getpaperclip.com slash twist. That's right. It's typically 30 bucks a month, but at my link it is free for life. There is no downside, literally. So go to get paperclip.com slash twist today. Nat Bullard is Bloomberg NEF's chief content officer and somewhat recently I hear became a venture partner at Voyager Ventures investing in early stage climate tech companies.

Me too. Let's have the whole journalism to investor talk about. First of all, what's Bloomberg NEF? Sure. So let me begin with a little qualification of that, which is that I was the chief content officer. Now I just stepped back into a role that is. purely looking at the climate mostly from an externally facing perspective.

So Bloomberg and EF for Reference, did spend 15 years, was, sorry, is a research shop started as a startup itself in 2004, covering the very early stages of what then was emerging as Clean Tech. It was acquired by Bloomberg in 2009, made its way sort of through the stack of global emissions and markets related to climate. And I spent 15 years with them. I joined in 2007, one of the first hires here in the United States, took it a bit on the road once we got acquired, the minute that we got acquired by the shop in London, where our team was,

I realized I want to move to the West Coast. So I moved from D.C. to the West Coast, moved from there to Hong Kong, now back here on the East Coast. But we, at when we're going to have to cover the whole thing. So we, as I said, we started really quite contained on the things that say a German investment bank would be asking you about in 2004, 2005, how does solar work? And in a sense expanded to really cover all the kind of key questions that you might have for the deepest decarbonization that's out there. But after all that time, after 15 years, you know, I'd see in my title, I'd kind of reach the apogee of where I was going to go within that group.

And in an important way, from a product perspective where I'd spend a lot of time and from a strategy perspective on what we're going to cover, kind of had tapped out. Like we'd read, we'd done it. We were covering everything. We were at the point where the biggest companies in the world were asking us the most formative questions. and I kind of missed the game a little bit. So took a bit of a step back. So I joined the company in a new role, contributor role, so basically doing public writing, assisting with some of a high-level stuff,

taking it on the road with some key conferences here and there. And that gave me the freedom to be able to do what I was very much interested in, as you are, which is to work with these early-stage companies after so long. It's fantastic because I've got what I would hope to think are kind of a symbiotic set of processes and priorities here. The first one is, I still write every week about climate. And I started off writing a little newsletter of my own devising in 2014. I remember it was 179 people exactly that I signed up for the first one. It finished last year at 175,000. And now it's going to about 220,000 people in concert with some other friends at Moonwork, of course, it's not just me

at this point. But then the work with Voyager is a sort of fantastic add on to go with that. It's my sort of chance to get way back towards talking to the earliest stages of companies. I was listening to your interview with Greg Dalton last month, actually, and you said a couple of things that sort of made me realize that we move from this world of high production and intense focus across sometimes months and years to put things together. And now we kind of have to unwind that and take our insights and our abilities.

to recognize genius and brilliance back down at the level of like a person with a PowerPoint deck. And it's really, really fascinating. It's quite a bit of a learning curve for me. In many ways, it's kind of like an unlearning to an extent of the sort of skills that you put in place for working with big organization, dealing with other big organizations for such a long time. And now you're back to how do I judge two students coming out of a lab?

How do I also talk to somebody who might have spent 30 years doing this as a practitioner? but within the belly of a very big industrial beast for a long time. So it's really refreshing. I'm doing these things both in parallel. I do writing with Voyager. I do sit in on conversations where I might help troubleshoot something with a portfolio company or help a prospective investment to kind of see where the market opportunity might be.

And then I'm writing every week. I don't know if you miss writing, but I know I would miss writing. I find it incredibly satisfying as a way to sort of shape my thoughts over time. And also to, you know, keep me honest, it's, you know, you're doing your work in public. Yeah. I would love to miss writing, but we do a daily podcast and I'm trying to run this climate syndicate. So like, I'm not missing anything except sleep right now. But no, I do.

Actually, and it's funny because I've got to like, I'm like, I have a piece inside me that wants to come out and there's just not the five minutes or a place to put it. So the newsletter is just a great outlet. It's called Bloomberg Green, by the way. I don't think we said. How did you get hooked up with Voyager ventures? Like, how did that? We've all got our sort of origin story in terms of the arrival in B.C. How did that? Mine's good. I've known Sierra Peterson, one of the founding partners since New Year's Eve of 2005. We met just as she was on her way to beginning at the International Energy Agency. And when I was still in school, studying international economics and energy policy. And I wouldn't say we've exactly been on parallel tracks. I would say honestly, Sierra is much more distinguished than mine because she worked in the Obama White House

after the IA. She worked for some early stage companies. She's been an active investor for a long time. But we were at a moment when they really, to be honest, were very few people that were doing this worldwide. You know, when her work at the IA was looking at energy efficiency at a time when this was sort of, you know, barringy kind of on the radar, I was coming out of sort of. school and getting ready to go to work for a research firm when we received really the most elementally basic of kind of questions that you had to answer, like, how do things work? Not just how big might the market be, but how might they work. And so Sierra and I have kept in touch over all of that time corresponding, keeping up with

each other's work. And we just entered a series of conversations as Voyager Fund one was approaching the close. And it was a, it was a, it was all the, always with these things is sort of a feature of timing. It's about when you might have the time to have that meeting of minds and to get together and be able to talk. But also, unique to find people who are, not in my case, necessarily, but in the case of the other founding partners, still relatively young, but have spent the entirety of their careers doing this. And so there's not a lot of people that can put together a founding team of two people with 30 years of experience devoted purely to climate

attack at this point. So that was a special opportunity. I knew I would walk in with sort of a high degree of symbiosis between the three of us and also to be able to kind of hit the ground running. And that's definitely what's going on. Yeah. Full full sprint. Yes. That's what you're saying. Yeah. That's right. Hey, everybody. I'm here with my pal Tom Eschbacher. He is the senior sales manager at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. And today, we're going to talk about marketing for startups. And LinkedIn did a great new internal report called today in startup marketing. Welcome to the program. Tom. Thanks, Jason. We've been talking about ICP, ideal customer profile. This is a critical concept for all founders to understand how can LinkedIn help with the startup figuring out who is their ideal customer.

It's hard to know, especially for companies who are really getting started. And one of the great ways that LinkedIn is able to help is by providing you additional insight on who's visiting your website. from all channels, organic, paid, search, what have you. Our website demographics feature looks at the professional attributes, and I'm talking about the job function, job seniority, company industry, company size, even company name, to help you hone in on the audiences that are most engaged with your site. We can look at this down to the particular page,

so you can get product level insights. And what you're going to do is take that, share it back with your sales and product team, and add that to the anecdotes that they are bringing, to provide a really holistic view of what an ICP can and should look like. Fantastic. You can go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups and get the report for free, as well as a hundy, $100 from Tom.

Talk to me about the thesis of Voyager Fund. So the Voyager thesis is that there's money to be made in doing things that are going to drive the deepest decarbonizations that's possible. It's primarily, I would say, in economic thesis. Actually, I'm going to even back you up one more step. Can you define deep decarbonization for people who don't know what that means? Let's start with deep decarbonization. And I'll do that into kind of like a sort of three layers here.

The first is when I started working in 2007, was in this era of renewable energy was this thing. This is where you're going to do wind and solar. You're going to do bioenergy. And if you're in Europe, you do some carbon markets. Flash forward about seven, eight years. You can layer another thing onto that, which is sort of I would call energy transition. You know, you've got a group within the company that's like, hey, it turns out that we can get to zero emissions in one part of our business.

We should go do that and we'll call it our energy transition strategy. So these layer up. And the next layer up is, and the final one really is kind of a net zero. Like, we're going to get ourselves to net zero emissions in the global economy by 2050. And that's different. That's not just like create a special situations group in your bank to finance something. And it's not just like, well, we have a strategy team that's working on something that might happen at the corporate. level by 2040.

This is like everything has to happen all at once. And it also has to happen at every level of the business and in every part of the business. So it kind of leaves things, it leaves you no out. There's no area that's sort of untouched in thinking about that. That's my thesis. Okay. That I think is probably not terribly controversial.

You know, and I don't want to speak too, too much of the voyage of thesis. Is there a part that is controversial? No, I wouldn't say that's controversial, but I would say that, like, I think, you know, you should get the Voyager founding partners on to tell exactly their take on it. Tell them they're welcome anytime. And they will be fantastic guests when you guess. Yeah, so as a starting place, though. But the thesis there is that there are new levers to be pulled in things like

food and agriculture, industrial infrastructure, of course, still things within energy, but also within mobility, within materials where we need to go. first of all, they need to be invested in in order to achieve a decarbonization down to like almost zero net emissions in most processes, but also that there are business opportunities to be had there. That's kind of why I start with that, like there's three layers, is that each successive layer that has been an addressable market. And now the addressable market is essentially every big process that creates emissions within every company that does it everywhere. The trick, of course, is to hone that down into something that you can actually do.

Right. That sounds like a lot of meetings. Yeah. Yes. It has, like that's not an investment thesis. That's a principle essentially on which the thing is founded. I think, you know, the thesis is that there are, there are now new things that are addressable by virtue of technology and markets that weren't previously. There's a really rich landscape in which to be active. There are entrepreneurs that are, and this is me talking here, but I think this also wouldn't be controversial, or essentially, climate natives. Like, they have come up through this entirely. To be honest, different from you and I in that sense, that like this is not something that they, that they ever sort of had to view as either controversial or outside of the main. It's something that they went to school to study as undergraduates, as graduates, they've worked in it. And finally, that there's,

there's opportunity to make money in all of this. And I think that it exists, obviously, within a realm of climate as a thesis. And it exists in tandem with capital market and policy rotation towards that. But it is not dependent necessarily on an ESG lens or a particularly socially responsible frame in which to make that happen. So lots to unpack there. But I guess the shortest version, shortest responses, it sounds like what you're saying is that the investment opportunity is far beyond energy. The investment opportunity is, is definitely far beyond that. I mean, there's one, which is there's an investment opportunity

in energy as it were in decarbonizing power in order to then use that newly decarbonized power to do other things. So like we're going to have just an insane amount more electricity generated from renewable energy, but we're also going to have like four times more electricity generated full stop globally by the middle of the century. A lot of that is sort of just inherent demand growth, but a lot of it is also that, like, you now need electricity to go and do the decarbonization of steel and cement manufacturer. You're going to need that for processes where it didn't previously work. You're going to need it to make green hydrogen, all of that sort of stuff. So there's, that I think is probably the first, the first principle

why, I would say. Um, how early stage are you? What's the, what are the check size? C'd and A. Yeah, C to A. Okay. And then what is that? translate to generally in terms of check size do you lead like good question another another one another one for for the two founding partners i think rather than may not huge and a lot of them are still stealth so to be honest there's probably not a lot of a lot of cover out there on that i think they have led some definitely have co-led with with others great what are you like as you look at this sort of suddenly much bigger universe what's exciting to within it and then what do you think we're maybe wasting time on?

What's exciting to me is people who are sort of building their new business thesis around a notion that we will have much more abundant energy in the future as an input to other things. It's not quite a kind of like abundance narrative as such, but it's something like that. I'll give you a great example in California where I sort of did some of my formative years, where you still are, the grid is just not able to use an really significant amount of solar power at key months of the year. It's just the feature of the way solar has been built and the way that the grid operates. So this is a technical term.

It's called curtailed. Basically, it's being generated by the panels. It's not going anywhere. And that's done on an economic basis. It just, it's like magic. You just turn it off and never happens. That's going to go up so much. in the future, no matter how many batteries you put in place or how much transmission you do.

But a better way to think about it is like what businesses are going to emerge around that, around the notion that you can get either free or even negatively priced energy input that has no emissions. Like, there's this universe of things you can do and it's not just mining Bitcoin, which is, of course, what every guy with laser eyes on Twitter tells me that you're supposed to do with it. Like, there's going to be something else that can come up with that. And the really cool thing is that that unlock hasn't really been explored. That hasn't really been looked at yet because that hasn't really been a thing. Like, you didn't have in the 1990s a thesis that said, well, people are going to pay me money to get energy.

So what would I do with it? It didn't exist. And so therefore, a lot of sort of incumbent architectures are not really ready to think about that. So that's one. And then the other thing that's exciting is that people, we're now thinking way ahead in terms of solving really, really tough problems. Like the coolest thing from me is that my B&EF colleagues when we catch out when I talk to them are doing deep analysis at a market level on stuff that was like guy with ratty ponytail science experiment

stuff even 10 years ago, but is now like part of a corporate consortium that's designed to make this sort of thing happen. And you start to see capital commitments go with it. And of course, you can say that you flubbed it and we spent $2 billion of, you know, of capital investment on something that didn't work. That definitely happens. But that's not really the principle in which most of these companies are operating. They're saying we're putting together a complex governance structure, multi-party, multinational, but corporate to go do something that's complex and was outside of frame, you know, even 10 years ago.

So that's really cool. What am I less excited about? Aside from that. I'm not completely convinced of the full utility of a lot of Web3 solutions that are meant to address, in particular the early side of carbon markets. I'm quite fine with NFTs in a different way, and that's because I was an art history major, and art markets have an incredible way of collating and processing manufactured scarcity. So actually, I think the long run for that, completely independent of anything related to climate,

is probably fine. The challenge that I find with a lot of the Web 3 things is that they don't necessarily make it easier to solve a problem for normal people. And they don't necessarily create much greater scale. And I say this coming from like, you know, the experience of working for a giant financial services company that has clients that are giant financial institutions. You were asking an awful lot of them to go create a new market by going on chain to learn a new protocol and having to stand up in a entire division that does that for something that may or may not actually end up having a lot of effect. And you have to layer into that all kinds of other things, measurement and verification, and then if you want to get into sort of thinking about it from a real banking perspective,

custodianship, possibly building instruments like futures and forwards on top of it, all kinds of things that will need to be built are probably going to be built in ways that are interoperable highly with other systems that we have that aren't necessarily that exciting. but they don't necessarily go through a kind of a Web3 lens. I mean, my last thought of that is like, and I've listened to many, many of these things, and I always listen with an open mind. But are they using Web3 to solve a climate problem or climate to solve a Web3 problem? And to my mind, most of them are tending towards the latter.

The explanation from a climate perspective is just very baroque. And I think therefore kind of like rate limited in terms of how far I could go. Yes. the idea of using an alternative financialization mechanism. Yeah, don't even get me starting. Right. It's just like, look, we can already have a very spirited debate about the financialization of climate solutions, right? Whether it will drive adoption, whether it has to exist to drive adoption or whether it's distracting us from, you know, really hard tech and frontier tech.

That's one conversation already. And then when you layer in the Web 3 part of that and say, but it's going to be an alternate. structure of extreme financialization of products that who are of dubious value to start with. And not just that. Is it interoperable? That's too many beers. Exactly. Is it can you warehouse? Like, you, you come at this from the sort of financial lenses that I do. Where is that, you know, who's the, who's the financial custodian for that? Right. Where does it get warehoused in, in the time before it becomes a full on security? Who's the market maker behind it? Like, all of these sorts of things happen. And, you know, like over time, all market.

probably grow to the point that they become ideally boring in a constructive way, in a highly interoperable way. Which is great. Speaking of markets, I actually, the reason that I ended up pitching, the thing that caused me to send the message to the group saying, like, hey, can we book this guy? Was the piece you wrote about Salesforce's marketplace for carbon emission offsets? Yes.

I want to ask you specifically about the Salesforce project, just because I thought you had such a great digestible write-up on it, but also from the investment perspective, how you're looking at carbon offset markets. Because we're starting to see, like, that's such an interesting area where I'm seeing pitches, and it feels like there's a lot of potential there. And it's the combo of like Bloomberg Inventure here

that I think this makes you the guy to ask this question. That's very kind of you. Yeah, I had fun of that because it was a sort of an aha moment that I was looking for. And like, who's going to make this easier, not more complicated? And when I say that, it's not just easier in terms of like it's easy to engage with, but like that there's a sort of long chain of things behind it that have already been made easy. And by that I mean that like when I wrote it up, I said, okay, like if you are a Swiss-based trading firm, you are definitely going to be able to get into the carbon markets because it's another esoteric, opaque, over-the-counter kind of thing that you're like, great, this is how I make money. It could be cocoa beans or it could be oil, whatever it is. It's going to be something that has asymmetries to it, opacity, and where my own calculations and capabilities are going to give me some kind of an edge.

Also, it's not very big. That's fine. You can get in that market play. But if you are a small to medium enterprise and you've been given this new mandate that you want to do some kind of carbon offsetting, do you really want your purchasing manager to have to go learn again? like how to be on chain to go sit through all kinds of different ratings and verification standards and learn all of these different things to serve what at first is a very thin layer of a purpose. And so I was thinking like, this is actually great because I can picture this meeting already.

The boss's boss says we need to buy some carbon offsets. And you in purchasing is like, okay, what am I supposed to do with this? Am I going to take a month and figure this out? I don't have McKenzie and Bain money to have them tell me what to do. and I'm not a trading firm. And then the answer, I'm going to use Salesforce is sort of elegant because Salesforce is already a payable for all of these companies. It's already an approved vendor.

There are little elements in there that, especially for smaller companies, you will appreciate it. You don't have to go through all these new processes to do things. It's already there. I think that's actually great because it expands this addressable market beyond the specialists. It does have some sort of, it does create some natural cohorts of, like, if Salesforce says that these are the standards that we.

support, then those kind of attract some things around them with their own specific gravity. You can debate about whether or not that's good. I've sat through many methodological and verification discussions, and everybody says theirs is the best. Or they say that it's the best for X. Over time, we'll see if those don't sort of, you know, goes kind of perito optimal and collapse into, like, the thing that works, not perfectly for everything, but it works well enough for most things that it goes forward.

And so I think that things like this are great. Do they potentially close a venture window for the new carbon marketplace that everybody's going to operate in? Potentially. But they also create a much bigger addressable market for all of the other things that flow into it. If I'm a developer, my goal right now might be, I want to get my asset positioned so that it's visible in the Salesforce marketplace. That's a simple, like one sentence pitch that you can make to yourself. and that we'll have probably a handbook style set of steps that you need to do to get to that point. And I think that that's actually really good.

You kick the innovation layer somewhere else. And I think that that's actually very, very healthy. One of the big challenges for these markets right now is that everything is in play. The assets that you are going to develop are in play, the way that you measure them is in play, the way that you transact them, warehouse them, the way that you securitize them. All of these things are in play at once. And that's tough. Like that's actually very difficult to do.

Because if you're, you know, at any level of those things, you're dependent upon other people's own innovations that may not be running aligned with yours. So if you can marketplace these things, I think that that's actually great. You want it to become as normal as possible from a climate perspective so that it become as big, become as big as big as big as big as big as big. Now, these markets themselves, I mean, there's just so many potential things that can be done. I do think that we will have a lot of shaking out in the long term about what counts as good. You know, it's sort of a rank ordering of like one company that says I bought, you know, I bought offsets from an old clean development mechanism hydro dam in Southeast Asia that's been running for 20 years is different from I'm funding geologic storage of atmospherically removed carbon dioxide. So I think that we're starting to see this qualitative aspect of men and not just quantitative.

And you can also see this in the prices that companies use. The range of prices that people pay for offsets is anywhere between like a few dollars to many hundreds of dollars a ton. And that's not because the market is inefficient. It's because there are many, many markets within it right now. And I think they'll shake out in the same way that related to that is that company internal prices for carbon range from like a don't. which is essentially not really a price at all to, if I recall correctly, $677 per ton of carbon,

which is incredibly high price that's way beyond what most economic modeling would say, but definitely is a price that would help force some behavioral change. And then finally, I want to ask you back to the fund. And Voyager's Fund One announcement, this is sort of speaking of this idea of tracking and quantifying. The announcement said across its portfolio, Voyager has a target. of sequestering or averting the emissions of 500 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent during the lifetime of Fund 1. How trackable is that?

And how much is it a thing in the back of your mind? I mean, you're relatively new, but, you know, in every meeting. It's a question you ask every time. Well, the nice thing is that you can you can just straight up ask in any given, in any given pitch, okay, for, you know, for each unit of your own economic activity, whatever that is. like how much, you know, how much emissions are you abating versus what would otherwise be happening? If you're in the business of removing it, how much are you going to be able to remove? Like, it's a nice sort of step ladder to be able to work through on the portfolio basis, while also, of course, kind of preserving some diversity of companies that you look at and different

industries you look at. But it's, it's nicely clarifying. Like, it's another clear form of measuring what the fund needs to do while also, of course, returning money to limited partners. So I find that actually very helpful because it helps you target for scale and for relevance. So if something has a fantastic economics, but a tiny addressable market, it's maybe less of a proposition from that perspective.

Or if it's small at the moment, but you can see the path to it being three or five orders of magnitude bigger in the future, then you can get a sense for sort of the emissions, capable, the emissions reduction or removal capability that comes with it. Would you say it skews you toward hard tech? Like, are you, do you consider yourselves a hard tech firm? So there's a lot of stuff in there that I think would still qualify kind of on the edge.

So it's, it's software-based or it's transport-based. A lot of it, of course, is driven by ICT in its way. I don't think you would call it hard tech in the like breakthrough energy ventures sense, because the timelines are, you know, within a venture horizon. But it's definitely not exclusively huge things that are going to take 15 years to come to fruition. I mean, it has to have some things that happen kind of within fund lifetime to go. And so not that not that hard tech funds are necessarily requiring a 20-year window, but I think that there are activities within the fund that are happening with some fair immediacy.

So not just requiring, you know, another 70-year-old. eight years to get to lab bench phase. Right. I'm calling this medium tech. Medium, media, medium, media, blended tech. I'll have to check with, I mean, honestly, blended tech could 100% become, haven't helped us, like,

not leadership term. Let's do it. I can see the offering documents already. You're the guy with the newsletter. Let's make this happen. Nat Bullard is writing weekly for Bloomberg Green on energy, transport, technology, climate, and finance. and recently a venture partner at Voyager Ventures. Thanks so much for the time. Thank you, Molly.

All right, everybody, thank you for listening. Yes, thank you. We have a great week coming up, a great Halloween week. We got Adina Pfeffitz from Dibby coming on the show to talk about that fast company hit piece. Yes, that'll be great. And I'm interviewing my pal for the second time

the founder of AOL Steve Case on his new book, The Rise of the Rest. I smell a book club. coming and we have an awesome drone startup for next unicorns. All right, listen, tons of news as well are going to be, is going to be breaking next week, earnings, geopolitical,

who knows what's going on in the world. Twitter might be bought by the, you know, and yeah, if the Twitter transaction is closed, then I will be able to talk. And you know what I love to do, Molly? Talk. So maybe next week Monday could be the start of an exciting new this week in startups

where I can talk about certain companies that previously I was Beep boop. Not able to talk about. Mark your calendars, everybody. See you next week. See you next week. See you Monday.