This Week in Startups - Sunday VC School: how investors work together + Prime Movers Lab's Ramez Naam | E1367

Episode Date: January 23, 2022

First, Jason teaches Sunday VC School: how investors work together (01:54). In this segment you will learn.: How collaboration varies across investing stages. How lead investors are determined and what their responsibilities are. The strategies you can use to win deals (Jason explains the pitch he gives to founders with options). The warning signs to watch for when working with other investors. Tactics founders can use for lower-friction fundraising. Then, Molly chats with Ramez Naam from Prime Movers Lab in a This Week in Climate Startups segment (35:10). They discuss the declining costs of renewable energy, making the choice between advancing existing technologies and inventing new ones, how science fiction can make you a better investor and more.  (00:00) Jason and Molly introduce the show (01:54) Sunday VC School - how investors work together (06:53) How collaboration varies across investing stages (08:43) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (09:49) Why seeing other late stage investors be passive in a deal is a warning sign (11:20) How raising from more investors can be actually be easier than raising from a few (15:44) Lead investor responsibilities (20:09) Fellow - Sign up and get $1000 in credits at https://fellow.app/twist (21:38) How VCs can win over founders (26:44) Do VCs get offended by what order they get into a startup? (29:16) Will investors still invest if the founder picked another VCs term sheet? (31:33) Molly and Jason introduce the next segment (33:25) Revelo - Get 20% off the first 3 months by mentioning TWIST at https://revelo.io/twist (35:10) This Week in Climate Startups - Ramez Naam (37:55) Advancing existing technologies vs. inventing new ones (42:19) Early stage climate investing (46:43) The declining costs of renewable energy (52:52) Confronting climate tech skeptics (57:06) How writing science fiction impacts Ramez's investing Check out Prime Movers Lab: https://www.primemoverslab.com/  FOLLOW Ramez: https://twitter.com/ramez FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

All right, everybody, welcome to our Sunday show. As we do, it's time for our VC Sunday school. And Molly has a lot of questions for me about who's the lead investor and competitive deal flow and sharp elbows when there's not enough equity on the cap table. How do VCs work together, how to seed funds and angels work together? It's a very dynamic conversation. You're going to get a lot out of it, whether you're on the investing side of the table or you're probably candidly get more out of it and understanding your target to get money from

if you're a founder. I think that's true. There's something for everyone at Sunday, V.C. school. Also, today in our climate segment, I talked with Rames Nam, who is a climate investor and a futurist. He's at Prime Movers Lab. And also, we talk about our shared love for sci-fi and how that helps us to imagine climate solutions and businesses that might not exist yet. Plus, he's just so smart. You're really going to enjoy it.

Stick with us. Stick with us. It's going to be a great episode. This weekend startups is brought to you. buy. Odu is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever, and right now Odo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odu.com slash twist. That's ODO.O.com slash twist. Revello. Looking to affordably scale your product development with

global tech talent in US time zones, hire vetted remote developers in Latin America with Ravello. Get 20% off for the first three months at Revello.io slash twist. And fellow. Dot app is a game changer for all your one-on-ones and team meetings. Eliminate time wasting meetings today. Go to fellow.app slash twist to get $1,000 in credits. Welcome, welcome, everyone.

I am excited because it is the time of the week when I get Jason's undivided attention to pass on his wisdom. It's Yoda time. It's Sunday BC school where I take my list of 10,000 questions, which just keeps getting longer and try to break it down to like one that we're ready to talk about. And today, actually, I want to talk about because this is already coming up, because I'm noticing a small possibility that there are more climate tech investors than there are climate tech startups. That's absolutely true, actually.

Good observation. An interesting stage to be in. But it means that there's also like a lot of collaboration. So I'm starting to have all these conversations with other VCs and realizing a thing that I hadn't actually been that aware of, which is the opportunity for co-investment. And the sort of like amount of teamwork that seems to be on the table. And I want to know how it works and if it's real. So it is a intrinsic part of what we do here in Silicon Valley because we have what's called,

or what I've called a milestone-based funding system. You have an idea. Congratulations. So did, you know, seven billion people in the last 10 seconds. They had some idea. I'm going to have a bagel for breakfast or I'm going to create a marketplace of, you know, a bed and breakfast, right? Everybody has a million ideas a day probably, and some of them stick and some of them are great ideas.

The question is, you know, of course, who's got the ability to execute? So since there are so many ideas out there and we like to have people prove it over time. So you may see sometimes a headline like Clubhouse gets $100 million or $10 million in their first round, some giant number. And you're like, well, that's interesting. Why did that happen? And those are very rare, weird edge cases. So edge cases happen. Like people will throw the ball, basketball over their shoulder, and they hit a three-point shot.

It was completely accidental. So you don't practice that, right? That's not the standard. The standard is somebody comes up with an idea. They get some friends and family, or they bootstrap it, then they go to an accelerator, then they get a seed fund, or five seed funds and 10 angels to pass the hat and give them enough money to, you know, see if the product actually gets traction. That milestone-based system allows us to filter. And it allows us not just to filter founders, but it also allows

us to filter ideas and timing. So, if you cannot get through the next set of investors, you have failed in some way as a founder. Now, it doesn't mean that you fail to execute. You could have executed perfectly. But nobody wants a wireless fax machine in 2022 that's portable and that you can wear on your wrist. Like, it was just a bad idea, but you executed perfectly, or it's a great idea, it's too early, or it's a great idea, it's the perfect timing, and you executed poorly, or there was competition. So what we're trying to figure out is which idea is going to win, and each time you hit a milestone, the chances of failure go down. because you have made it to the next hurdle.

And it could be the hurdle is your default alive because you're profitable. If you're profitable, business is not going to end unless you shut down a profitable business, which has happened, but very rarely. So usually those get sold to somebody who wants to take a shot at it. So because of this milestone-based financing,

you as good hygiene wants somebody else to validate the next round. So built into the system is collaboration. There are instances where, some funds get so big, you know, the elbows come up and they want to hit a certain ownership percentage because, as you've heard, when you do have a winner, kind of sucks to own less than one percent of a winner. Listen, I've had some big winners like Robin Hood at Uber, which I own less than one percent of. Now, those were extraordinary outcomes, but still imagine how they would have been if I own five, 10, or 15 percent. You know, it would have been, you know, a whole different

ballgame. And so as time went on, we as a firm started owning 10 to 20 percent of companies. We fixed that leak in our game or we actually earn the ability to do that. And we heard that with David Rosasol, didn't we, on the last podcast? So built into the system is collaboration. And then there's this tension that occurs, which is if something's really good, people want to own as much as possible. Right. When it's unproven, people want to own enough to, you know, kind of be in the game,

but not so much that they're the bag holder. And they're the only person helping the company. When it's known to be a winner, man, you just want to knock everybody else out and get as much as you can. So those are the two pieces of tension that you got to keep in your mind at the same time. And how do the various stages affect that? It seems like maybe co-investing makes sense or at least is more encouraged or more likely at the early stages. And then later is when it might get a little sharper? Correct.

100%. In the early stages, people are like, hey, this is an idea on a piece of paper. They need 500,000 to figure it. it out. Instead of me putting $500,000 into this one, let me find 20 of these, put $25K into each, knowing that the attrition rate's going to be so bad. So this would be the equivalent of if you were going to have very long odds with a very high payout, you probably want to put down multiple bets. If you look at the roulette table and you have, I think, 38 numbers or whatever it is, like, you ever see people put it in the middle and they get like access to four numbers?

They split the bet between four numbers. It's kind of what people are doing there. they're doing that diversification at the roulette table. When it gets later on, you're kind of like, well, this is like, you know, a black and red situation. Like, this company's got a 50-50 chance of returning a lot of money at this valuation. I just want to put all my chips on black or whatever, or red. So there's betting strategies at each. It's a bad betting strategy at the early stage to be that concentrated with very rare

exceptions. And it's usually in hindsight that people look at it and go, oh, my God, Peter Thiel, put 500K into Facebook. what a genius. There was no other angel investor, really. And it's like, there were other angels, but, you know, he had a lot of money at that time. So it was an easier bet for him to make. And for him, his bet size might have been $500,000, you know, just like there's some maniacs who come up to the roulette table. I saw somebody once just, you know, literally put, you know, $1,000 chips on each number. So they were just paying with a bigger sack. That was a little crazy.

Oh, my God, amazing. They hit once, you know, it's like 40 grand or something. It's pretty, pretty wild to watch. If you listen to this week in startups often, you've heard me talk about Odo suite of business apps a lot. Well, they are going to give you your first app free forever and $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odu.com slash twist. Here is why Odo is great for startups.

Their suite of business apps helps run your entire company on one platform, and they'll streamline workflows by bringing all your information together. This eliminates annoying, repetitive tasks, like entering data across multiple platforms. Plus, if you only need two or three apps, to optimize your workflow, that's all you're going to pay for. Odu won't charge you for apps you don't use. Odu offers over 30 main apps and over 16,000 apps from their open source community.

Her apps include bookkeeping sales, CRM, website builders, and more. So again, your first app is free forever. But Odo is also offering you $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack, which you can get at Odo. do.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-com slash twist to get that thousand dollars right now. But yeah, that's pretty much what happens. And if a company doesn't have at a later stage, here's a, here's another corollary. If a company doesn't have people fighting for the equity in a later round like a series B and somebody's not being sharp elbowed, it's kind of a warning

sign that like this company's doing good but not great. It's basically, you know, people don't feel as much conviction about it. people see the conviction, it's like, hey, this Uber thing's going to be big. People are like, I need to, and they put the term sheet in, I need to take the whole round. And I want, not only do I want the whole round, I want the previous investors to waive their pro rata. In other words, they can't keep their percentage up. So I, or I want to, you know, I'll let them, I'm not going to get rid of their pro rata because they have the right to it. I don't want to get into a big fight with them.

But I want to buy any secondary. So any previous employees or original angels who want to get out, I want the right to buy $4 million. worth of secondary, old shares on the cap table for people who want liquidity. So they'll fight for that right as well. So it's a bit of a tell. But at the early stage, thinking of it this way. If you're the founder, you got a crazy idea. It's going to take a lot of work.

You're going to need to meet a lot of downstream investors to fund it. It's kind of cool to have 25 investors in that round or 20 investors putting in 25K as opposed to one putting in 500K because then when you email and say, hey, I need some help, you're emailing 20 people, not one. Right. Is it more work, though, as a founder, to have all those? I mean, do you, at the early stages, you talk about this a little bit in the book, but the idea that even in an in a syndicate, for example, there needs to be somebody who's acting as the lead.

Like, does that happen if there's a bunch of co-investing at the early stage that you just have to sort of constantly be managing all of those? Yeah. So, again, conflicting forces here, right? So there'll be conflicting ideas and tension, right? And tension is good in these kind of situations, whether it's gambling or, you know, a, sports game or betting. Attention means something's at stake. So let's talk about that tension.

For a founder, getting somebody to give a 25K check is easier than a 500k check because it's less money. Right. So if you ask somebody for a donation for your school of $10, they're like, yeah, sure, here's $10, I'll buy a cookie. You ask them for $10,000. So like, $10,000, what? It's a bigger check.

Or even $100 or $1,000 or $1,000. Like, what am I getting out of this? I got to think about it. Are there other charities that matter more to me? So although the number of transactions go up, passing the hat is actually easier because it's a lower benchmark for everybody. So now there's another thing that happens,

which is if things go wrong, if people only put in 25K, how vested are then? So for an affluent person to put in 25K, I typically have to educate people. I had to get re-educated myself of the value of money. Having grown up poor, when the idea that somebody put 25K into me was mind-boggling. That's like, you know, at the time was like almost somebody

salary in journalism, like $30,000 salary. So I was like, whoa, that's a lot of money. And then I realized, wait a second, for some people, you can just drop the zero or two to get the relative impact. And so I had to, you know, reconcile this in my mind. And so I would say to somebody who, you know, just drop a zero off, that's the actual impact. So it's $2,500 or drop $2.0 if that's the actual impact on that person. worth $50 million, like 25K is like you spending $250 on a DVD player or, you know, dinner or

something. So anyway, it's really not that big of a deal. So when it's not a big deal, they forget they even made the investment, things go wrong, they don't feel they need to follow on. Now, if somebody puts it 500K, and now the business needs another $100,000 to get to the next level, they need a bridge, right? Hey, we're short. 9-11 happened. The pandemic happened. The stock market crash out. Some crazy things happen. Hey, listen, I need a bridge round. So the 500's in there, 25K each. Now you go to all 20 people. Say, hey, I need 100K just to get through the next six months during this extraordinary time after 9-11 when a lot of companies went under. People are scared. Stock markets crashed. If you were the person who put 500 in, you're like, I don't

want to lose this investment. It's only 20% more for me to keep this investment alive and I've already got 500 running, riding on it. So you're going to basically, in poker, that would be called floating the bet, right? You're going to float it so you can see another card, see if your hand improves, it's a small bet. If it's, you put it in 25K asking it for 100, you're like, well, that's four times as much. And the situation's changed. And this company's weak and the stock market's weak. No, I'm not putting 100K on top of 25. So that's another dynamic that happens, which is diffusion of responsibility, which we talked about. When there's many people responsible for something, the ball will fall right between all three outfielders

or two outfielders in the second basement. They're just like, yeah, oh, you got it? You got it? No. If it goes out into left field, left field's got the ball because if they don't get it, nobody does. And it's a triple. You know, they kind of know what's going to happen there. Side note, $30,000 a year, by the way, is $15 an hour.

Rachel did that math for us during the show yesterday, and I missed it, 31,000. So basically, that is basically when you're just either hitting or above or below the poverty line, depending on what city you're in. If you're in New York City in San Francisco, go. Yeah, poverty level. But remember, the people have those jobs, those are usually the latter up jobs, the first rung of the latter jobs, second rung of the latter. And sometimes that person works with, sometimes that person is in a multi-income household. So they have two roommates or they have, you know, two parents and sometimes, yeah. Yes, I was just happy that Rachel had done that

math and I was like, oh yeah, okay, it's not a living wage all by itself. Anyway, and that's if you work 40 hours a week, you know, you could also work 60. True. All right. So at the At the early stage, it seems like, everybody's talking, you can co-invest, it doesn't get that awkward, there aren't that many hierarchies necessarily. But later on, when you get into who's the lead investor, how does that start to change, if at all? And how do you decide who's the lead? Because it's not always the most money, right?

The lead is the person. This is a great question. People have a lot of questions about this. The lead is the person who originates the term sheet and makes the offer. So they set the terms. They say this company's worth $10 million. The founder may have asked, like, yeah, we want to raise $2 million at a $10 million valuation versus, okay, I'd like to lead that. I'll put in $1.2 million.

You can go collect the $800 from other people. When you hit $1.5, that's when we close. So they set a goal for what the total round would be, and they send you the terms. We get a board seat. We want prorata. We want information rights. We want these other rights. And that's how the negotiation happens.

So the lead is the person driving the deal. They're putting in the most money. and they're basically taking most responsibility for the company, typically joining the board. In an early round, if it's competitive, can the, does the founder get to choose who their lead is?

Of course. Yeah. I mean, if you have five term sheets, yeah. That's the function of valuation is really demand for the share. So I think we might have talked about this already, but,

you know, people wonder, why does one company get $8 million, another gets $15, another gets $50? And they're all coming out of the same accelerator, and they all have the same traction. Let's just in this hypothetical situation, say there's an eight, a 15, and a 50.

Well, why is there this edge case of 50 and why are the eight and the 15? If all companies have exactly the same thing, three developers, you know, one salesperson and a designer on the team, and they all have the same experience, and they all are SaaS companies, and they all have equally good ideas. Why is there a range? One of them met with 200 VCs and got five term sheets. One of them met with 10 VCs, got one term sheet, one of them met with 30 VCs, and have two term sheets or one and a half, you know, like a silly term sheet that really was incredible.

The one who got the five, then we're able to say to the investors, listen, we have five term sheets. We're deciding between them. We are going to decide next Friday and I'm working with my team. Would you like to submit a term sheet at a higher valuation because you were not the highest valuation and we think we deserve a little bit of a higher valuation. And here's what we think we deserve a command to higher valuation. So we'd like everybody to resubmit another round of turn sheets, or you can stick with your existing one, and we're going to make a decision next Friday. I just wanted to be honest with you and tell you, you know, where we're at. So I work on this language because our job as early stage investors is to give the language to founders and really

implore them, please get multiple term sheets. Right. It's in your best interest. Now founders get one term sheet and they're like, I'm in love. This is the greatest person. ever met. Again, back to like, they get me. They get me. They understand me. We went to the greatest restaurant ever. It was magical. We walked through Central Park. This is the one. Yep. The first one. So again, not using dating or courtship as an analogy here, but there is a dynamic of courtship here. So when they get that first one, they're just like, this is it. This is the one. And they should actually think about it in the same terms as a marriage, because it is a 10-year journey. And you're basically cohabitating this startup and you rise and fall together.

You either succeed or fell together. Even if you hate each other and you fight constantly, you literally succeed and fell together. I've had, you know, maybe out of 350 investments, less than five times the founder and I, you know, like I'd say like one percent of the time, something happens where it's just irreconcilable. Like I think it's one percent is a pretty good number of when this happens. And then how you deal with it, which I've been dealing with less this year, three, two times this year. maybe one or two times before that. And that tension is like, you know what?

I just tell all of them. You don't need to have me on the cap table. Obviously, we don't see eye to eye. If you find a buyer for my shares, that's great. Yeah. You know, semi-quarterly updates or monthly updates. And I wish you luck. But, you know, I'm not going to be spending time on it because we don't see eye to eye

for some, you know, really significant reason. Right. Like ethics, morals, criminal behavior, you know, things I consider risk of ruin, behavior. You know, Theranos level behavior. It's where I would, you know,

well, then again, I want to hear these stories later up. Yeah, off camera. I would give you plenty of them. If you're looking for really qualified international developers without the crazy time difference, or if you just want to scale product

velocity without sacrifice and quality, Revelo is the answer. Revelo is a talent platform that matches you with vetted full-time remote developers in Latin America, who work in the U.S. time zones. This way you don't have to stay up late or not communicate with your developers.

These developers are more cost-effective compared to hiring in the U.S. and your engineers are going to collaborate with you in real time. You'll get matched with vetted candidates within three days. Compare that to the three to six months it takes to hire a developer if you're lucky. And after they find the talent for you, they handle everything else, payroll, taxes, benefits, etc.

So you can hire internationally without the logistical overhead. And trust me, there's a lot of overhead when you hire international folks. You want to make sure that you're paying them correctly and taxes, all that stuff. So, Revelto's engineers are full-time and embedded in your team, like normal employees. And they're proficient in AWS, Rust, Ruby, React, Python, Node.js. And more. They've got great customers, including GitHub, Foursquare, car to Indiegogo and Kickstarter.

So just go to revelo.io slash twist and mention Twist to get 20% off your first three months. Plus, they offer 100% risk-free 14-day trial period. If you're not satisfied, pay nothing. So head over to R-E-V-E-E-L-O-O-S-T-E-O-S-T-E-O-S-T-T-E-L-O-S-T-E-E-L-O-S-T-E-W. One more from me, and then there are such good questions from the Nodig-G about this. How should you play it as a VC when you know you're walking into a competitive situation? Like when the founders clearly feel in their oats, they've got lots of options. They're like, we might be able to find room for you.

I mean, I assume there's a little bit of divorcing from like, I don't care for your attitude. But also, you can actually appreciate it. Like if the I look at and go, okay, founders got options. Right. That's actually attractive. That's a signal. Again, you're always looking for that signal in this, you know, milestone-based venture system, this milestone-based funding system.

If you see signal that somebody's strong, what does it tell you if they have five term sheets? Right. It means the smartest people who are capital allocators appreciate this company enough to write a chair machine and compete for it. And this person was able to create a marketplace. If they can create a marketplace among VCs, that should translate it to be able to create a marketplace with customers or employees. Is there a tension, though, between FOMO? I mean, then it's like, because I also had the, like, feeling that you have when you're at an auction and the bidding is really hot, right? And you've got this person who's just like, oh, I've got all this stuff on the table, but I might be able to find room for you.

And I'm like, oh, crap, like, you better find room for me. You know, like, how do you sort of, you want to respect the game. Yeah. And respect the fact that there's a lot of interest, but you also don't want to get tricked by it. I suppose that is just the dance. Yeah. The first thing I think you have to come to the table with is, okay, this is not the only company I'm ever going to invest in. Even if I do think this could got Uber or Google or Facebook like potential, yeah, I'm going to fight to get my allocation.

But I need not hit Airbnb. I could just hit Uber or if I didn't hit Uber, I could hit Lyft and still have a great outcome. So that's one of the nice things on all sides. If you don't get Sequoia to back your company and you get, you know, sacks from Kraft, you still got a great investor. And you may have not gotten the top one, but that's okay. You got another investor and you're in the game. Yeah. So, you know, it's, oh, you didn't draft LeBron, but you got staff or you didn't get staff, but, you know, you got whoever great player. So you do have to keep that in mind when you come to this, in terms of fighting for it and getting it, you have to then tell what your value

proposition is. In our case, hey, we've got a major platform. We can help you get your first 10,000 customers. Might that be interesting to you? And yeah, I know a lot of people. And when I invest in a company, more people will invest, but you have enough investors. And I think this would be fun to work together. That's what I say to folks.

I can help you get customers. I can help you think about your business marketing, getting it to market. Obviously, I know about that. And they would be fun to work together and get to know each other. you know, to win together. So I take the approach of, listen, I'm already successful. You know that. You are either a serial entrepreneur, so you're successful.

So then in that case, it's like, wouldn't it be fun to work on this together? Totally. I feel passion for your idea. I'd like to see you succeed. I'd like to win with you. Then if it's somebody who's new, it's like, well, you know, listen, you got five people here. And on that list, like, I'm as successful as any of them or I'm in the top two or three of most successful people.

you probably want me on your team. So yeah, you should take the number one person's money. If it was like Sequoia and us, I'd be like, you should totally take Sequoia's money. They're great. And yeah, you should leave 500K for us because we can be helpful too. So you kind of have that discussion. And I like to be super candid about it.

You have choices. I have choices. I would love to be involved. It would be exciting to work together. And it would be great to get to know you. That's my value proposition. Now, if you're a new VC, they're like, okay, Randow, like, great to know you.

But you had no. No, you're Molly Wood. They've been listening to you for 20 years. Yeah. So it's been like, you know, Molly's smart. She's fun. She's got a great network. She's got great insights.

You actually have something to offer. It's true. Yes. And so that's what I would lean into you. Now, some people also are like, I got a team of analysts that no SaaS better than anybody. We can model this for you or somebody might say, hey, we have a recruiting team. We can help you get your CTO. Other firms are not going to help with that.

So a lot of firms who are like unknowns, maybe they don't have a cult of personality or a track record, they'll build a great recruiting team. And they're like, because that's a major issue for founders, right? They're like, I need a developer tomorrow. And they're like, we got 300 developers in our database. What do you want to offer them? We can help you craft the offer. We can just go down our list and help you recruit.

So a lot of people will build recruiting into their domain expertise as a way to attract folks. Like, oh, yeah, now, when we did Webvan, we had a great CF. It looks like a bill girl here. Oh, we did web van, we did this company, we did that company. Yeah, I think we know a good CFO for when you go public. We've got a couple of them, you know, here I am ringing the bell with these three public companies. And we can help you with getting the CFO to go public, no problem. Yep, totally.

All right, a couple of questions from the NOTES because everybody is riveted by Sunday VC school. It's a great, it's a great segment. It's actually so great and so much fun. And you're so generous to give all this knowledge away. Walter Dornish asks, do VCs get offended by what order they get into a startup or are they just content to get in? Um, there can be a little, uh, we pitched you on the seed round and now it's a series A and you're now at a disadvantage as a VC firm because you said no to them or you said no to them twice. You said no at the seed, no at the A. So this is why PVCs are so, um, uh, full of BS, uh, in some people's minds because they're like, oh my God, your company's amazing. We couldn't get our partners around it. Oh, but you're amazing. You're so that we really want to stay in touch and let us know how we can be helpful. We can't invest now, but we think you're extraordinary, and we know you're going to be successful.

If you think I'm extraordinary, you're not going to be successful, and you love the business, we'll give me the money. Yeah. And they're like, no, you're, we're lying. We're lying to keep our option open. So people lie. So when you tell somebody, no, this is why VCs are really, like, it's not a fit for us right now.

I tell people not yet. Listen, I can't get my head around it yet. I would like to see, you know, maybe 10 customers here, and I'd like to see if they can get to maybe five or ten seats that's when it would be perfect for us as a firm. So, you know, it's not you, but it is, and I try to be honest about that.

It's true. That's always true. Well, I guess you've seen some conversations. I was having a conversation with that I was like, this business, although it's doing okay, I wonder if it could go 10x from here, maybe, and then could it 10x again, I don't think so. So I think the total addressable market is very small,

and then if they were to go outside of their market, I know all the competitors there and that's going to be a dogfight. So it feels like a niche business to me. It's a very hard thing to say to a founder. We've built our reputation at our firm by being candid about why we're not investing. And then other firms have really clever ways of saying it.

Sequoia's got, we have other investments to prioritize right now, which is a way of saying we have so, it's sort of like a... It's a flex. It's a little bit of a flex. It's like a no and a flex, kind of. And it's honest. It's like, listen, we've got so many

companies right now, and some of them are just a little far ahead of you, and we need to focus on those deals. Because there are so many companies, so many investors, like, you know, you have to have that founder market fit. So there can be bad feelings, but you can also have great feelings, which is the founder then gets to be like, okay, you know, I offered it to you at a dollar share. There's a $10 million valuation. Then you had the chance of the Series A at $4 to share, and you said no.

And here we are at Series B. It's $8 to share. So you're buying the same number of shares you're paying eight times as much. Great. Give me your money. And then I wonder, what about that scenario where the founder has chosen, where there were like multiple term sheets, you were one of them. The founder chose someone else to be the lead. But, you know, you can still be in.

Do you just sort of have to set aside feelings about that at some point and be like congratulations, you got a better deal? You know? If you're the investor and you liked the company enough to submit a term sheet and you didn't get it, you probably love it even more when he gets to series B because remember I said each funding round, you're eliminating risk. Or she. did I say he? Oh, sorry. They, I'm usually very good about that. They normally would say, I was thinking about a rule off in this position, they would normally say, you know, you have now eliminated more risks. You have, right, totally. So even though I'm paying twice as much of the shares or four times as much or eight times as much for the shares, it's actually a

better deal because the chance of this going under or down. So I may have paid a better higher price, but removed a lot of risk. And a savvy investor understands that. Like, you know, if you're buying Netflix before they launched a streaming service or they've got 100,000 people in the streaming service, that's risky. When they get to 10 million, is it risky? It's like, no, they got a foundation of users. Professor J-Cal, thanks for the lesson. I have a million other questions, but we got to keep this.

We're going every Sunday, right? Every Sunday, exactly. Do it for the rest of the year. And the questions will get increasingly more pragmatic as you meet with more companies. Yeah. I think you had the company you were meeting with and we were like, hey, this is high risk. maybe, and it's early, maybe they should come to the accelerator. What you'll see is when they get, if they do choose to go to the accelerator, then you start

building this group of, hey, maybe now you know 30 really good sustainability organizations. You could go to the 30 and say, I believe in this company. They're in our accelerator. They want to raise, I don't know, $3 million. We're going to put in a million. I'm looking for another firm to co-lead with us and put a million in and help us grow it. Right. And then, because we really could use your expertise.

So then you're writing these emails on behalf of the founder to another firm to try to help get somebody really smart around the table. And that's another piece of this is like the attention of smart people is valuable. And now they want to win. So the more people who buy, you know, tickets to your game, you know, and they're in their vested, they have season tickets to, you know, the Warriors, the more they're going to root for the Warriors. Yep. Love it. You're selling season tickets. Today we're selling season tickets and we want them to be sexy. Well, this is a perfect segue actually to this week's, this week in climate startups segment, the time of the week where we talk about climate, because my guest is Rames Nam, who I actually came to know because I read

his sci-fi books, which we talked a little bit about. But he's the chief futurist and partner at Prime Movers Lab, which is a deep tech fund. They're focused on global grand challenges. We did actually talk about sharing potentially deal flow on a pitch that he just received, because I said, God, why isn't there like an Angie's list for decarbonizing your house? And he was like, I have that pitch in my inbox. And I was like, oh, my God, can we co-endiping? invest in that, which led to these exact questions. So now that I know how it works. That's a great idea. Yeah. I mean, marketplaces where you can help people make better decisions in their day-to-day life, we've talked about over and over again. You see it. People are willing to pay 15 bucks for an

impossible burger or they're willing to pay extra money for an electric vehicle because they want to do the right thing. And that's one of the, or they've been putting solar on your house is expensive. People will literally pay the 50 to 100K and take the inconvenience of ripping apart their roof because they want to do the right thing. This is one of the right thing. This is one of the the great things that's happened as a tipping point is that consumers are driving doing the right thing. Exactly. And the more you can have one stop shopping for that, the more you can just make it easy. Just make it easy and fun and sexy. Take friction out. So we talked a little bit about that. We also just talked about kind of this, you know, tension in climate tech investing between deep tech

and maybe software and figuring out metrics. It's a super good conversation. I want to hear about his books. He's into the nanodrugs, a lot of brain connections and stuff like that. Yeah. That's a little trippy. They're so, and they're from like 15 years ago or something like that. I mean, I read them a lot. They're really, really good and very ahead of their time. He's a super smart guy. It's a good conversation. Awesome. I can't wait to hear it from as now. Coming up now. Listen, time wasting meetings are brutal. You know the ones. There's no agenda. There's no takeaways.

And there's no accountability. Waste the time for everybody, right? And that is infuriating when you're the boss and you're paying everybody's salary. Three, four, five people. They spend two hours in a meeting. Nothing gets accomplished. You know what that is? Five people times two hours is ten hours of your money. Ten hours wasted, cumulently. Well, after selling his last company, Aidan Mirzai, swore he would never attend another meeting without a clear agenda. He adopted a motto that I used as well. No agenda, no attenda. That's right. I don't see an agenda in there. I'm not going. So Aiden and his co-founder's built a tool to make meetings productive and delightful for everybody involved. Call fellow.app. And it's simple, beautiful, and it helps

stay organized. It's a meeting productivity platform where teams can collaborate on agendas, track key decisions, and hold each other accountable for action items. Somebody's got to be responsible, right? Who's a single thread leader here? It's a game changer for all of your one-on-ones and team meetings. You'll never have to attend another meeting without knowing exactly what the purpose is, who is doing what, and what the outcome is. What is success? Are we defining success in this meeting? Is anybody in charge? Is there an adjustment? Is there an adjustment? agenda, my God, don't get me started. You can solve all these problems by just going to fellow.app slash twist. Fellow.app slash twist, f-E-L-L-O-W dot app slash twist, and you'll get $1,000

in credits. Yeah, they know you're going to love the product, so they'll put $1,000 in credits in your account, join companies like Shopify, Laminet, Warby Parker, and thousands of others who are already using fellow to make their meetings delightful. That's fellow.app slash twist. Get a thousand dollars off. Rames Nam, thank you so much. You're my second guest on what we're now calling this week in climate startups. That's such a pleasure.

Great to see you again. I know. I'm so excited. For those of you who don't know, listeners, you should know that I first came to Remez through his sci-fi, Nexus, Crux, the trilogy. Nexus, Apex and Crux. Did I get that right?

That's right. And Apex, yes. So everybody, if you have not read those, you should go and read them. And then come to discover all of these years later, I think I've talked to you on Marketplace, that you have become a big clean energy advocate and researcher and analyst. It's part of your work at Singularity.

You, I understand. Tell me what you're working on. Yes, I've been speaking about how clean energy is getting exponentially cheaper, how we've got a plunge in price of solar, batteries, wind power, electric vehicles, literally dropping in price. This decade, the cost of the solar panels is dropped by Vachrosix, the cost of batteries, the power EVs, a drop by a factor of 10.

And so now I'm a venture capitalist. I'm at Prime Movers Lab, where we invest in breakthrough science to improve the lives of billions and worship climate tech, clean energy, and lots of other stuff. So tell me about the fund. What's your stage? What's your investing thesis?

Who are you finding? How long you've been at it? Thanks. The fund was formed in 2018. We've got a seed stage fund and a growth stage fund. So we write checks from, seed through Series B. It's a large fund with a lot of money under management. We've made a lot of investments, companies like Kiliogen, energy vault, companies in indoor agriculture, companies in energy storage and batteries for EVs. So we write checks from small to millions to tens of millions. It sounds to me like you are not shying away from some of the parts of the climate tech space

that investors find a little bit difficult. There's some hard science in what you're doing? We think in general that the world's biggest challenges are also its greatest investment opportunities. Climate tech is definitely having this moment. We have to address climate change. The world realizes that we're spending more than a half a trillion dollars a year on clean energy already, and that's going to double by the middle of this decade. And we think our secret sauce is we have a team of scientists and engineers who,

can go deep, deep, deep on the tech, as well as great business people who can evaluate founders and look at the business models and so on in these areas. What is the mix do you think? You know, in some ways, renewable energy, for example, electrification, those are like silver bullet technologies that already exist and may need some iteration. Tell me if I'm wrong about in that supposition, but it sort of seems like there are two buckets here, right? One is actually advancing these existing technologies in the best possible way and the other

maybe is invention? Yeah, there's some of the both. Deployment has a huge role to play. If you create incentives to deploy solar and wind or electric vehicles, that also drives innovation. That drives through learning rates. Technologies get cheaper and better. And that's a big part of what we've seen.

Those are a role for early stage R&D and productization of technologies to do better in things like electric vehicle batteries, EV charging, new ways to mount use or new. materials for solar. Sectors we've barely begun to decarbonize yet, like heavy industries, making steel, making cement, shipping, aviation, more efficient buildings, and true wildcards like nuclear fusion. So all of this is up our alley and things we're looking at quite closely. How are you, can you give me some standouts? What are some of the really exciting things you're invested in now? Yeah. So one of our company's Energy Vault is an energy storage company for the

grid that uses gravity to store energy. Pumped hydro is one of our biggest ways to store electricity today, but water back up by end a dam. Just think of this as pumped concrete. It actually uses cranes to lift cement blocks up into the air with this electricity and lowers them down when you need power back. Helogen, another one of our companies, uses AI-controlled mirrors to precisely focus the sun's rays.

So the next generation of concentrating solar power can make super cheap electricity, 24-7 and super-cheap hydrogen. We'll soon announce a big investment in the battery space. We've done some things in indoor agriculture, the company called Upward Farms, and there's more like those. So your thesis, it sounds like is, I mean, like you said, it's very science-focused,

but it's also like what I've heard referred to as meat space. I think there's a tendency now with a lot of money rushing into climate to be like, how can I sass this? That's right. And we're not... completely opposed to doing software investments, but if you look at our portfolio, it's basically all hard tech. It's basically all tech that touches the physical world.

And we think that actually gives us a critical advantage because investors are so scared of that sector that as a fund, both because not enough other investors are going into it and because we combine great venture capital experience with great scientific and engineering experience, we think we have a better chance of picking the winners and losers in this space. And we think companies are actually underpriced relative to risk in this sector. Yeah. I wonder how do you think about, like we the world need investments in hard science. You've put together a big team of scientists and a big fund.

Is that replicatable in the venture space? Or rather, how can it be templatized? Because there is that fear. There is that reticence. It is difficult to put together the kind of team and expertise you put together. And yet, it seems like we need like 10x what you're doing, 100x what you're doing. It's a space that needs more investment. And we definitely have this other deep tech firms out there.

Mostly not entirely climate focused. But there are deep tech firms that do a lot of climate investment. There's climate firms to do a lot of deep tech investment. So we love working together with companies, other investors like Breakthrough Energy, congruent at the early stage, energy impact partners, the IP, Shale Khan. I think you bring up his podcast and a pure deep tech. tech investors like Data Collective, KOSLA, Steve Jervison's future ventures who do some portion of their investment as climate.

About half of our portfolio is climate energy. The other half is mostly stuff that there's a global problem. We also look at space, aerospace, food, brain tech, as I heard about my sci-fi, addressing longevity and aging, things like that. Yeah. I totally want to ask you about this new, what is it, Altos labs that, long. lunch today, but I will, I'll come right back to that. What do you think is the role? I mean, now there is, of course, like you said, climate tech is having a moment. There are all these,

like, baby VCs such as myself, trying to like jump on this and have some impact. What is the role that I can play, right? What is the role of that kind of early stage, super risky capital in crazy ideas related to climate? I think there's a lot of different pieces of the funding story. And I think there's a role before venture capital. of government funding of companies, entities like ARPA-E, other parts of the DOE, the NSF, and so on, to help get these things going in the lab. We like to take stuff with-R-A-E, we should say,

is the very electrification-focused part of ARPA, right? Yeah, ARPA-E. The organization that originally created the Internet? It's a replica of ARPA that created the Internet, which is now DARPA and the military, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Department of Energy has their own that operates in a DARPA-like way,

basically for energy. And there's other great DOE projects like Sunshot. There's later stage DOE projects like the LPO, the loan programs office, the Jigger Shaw runs, that provides scaling capital for projects. We exist between those worlds. We let's take stuff that has been the science has been demonstrated and de-risk, but there's still potentially technology risk,

productization risk and scaling risk. And we're going to take it from out of the lab to get into the point where they've got a product and a real revenue. And then they have to scale and get that to millions of people or more. One other big maybe self-imposed barrier to U.S. venture as an industry is investing internationally. Do you do a lot of global investing or is it stuff that has U.S. customers? We do look internationally. If you look at our portfolio, you'll find that it's really, US-focused, the companies we invest in are predominantly headquartered in the US, but they

create technology and sell it that can be used globally around the world. We're not averse to investing in a company domiciled outside the U.S. It was going to have it easiest to invest in U.S.-based startups and the U.S. remains the startup hub for most of these companies. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it seems like that's the case. And also there is this huge international opportunity. I just wonder how you think about that landscape and evolving into it. The laws and regulations are different, different locations. There's certain things we can take advantage of like QSBS for if we've done C-Sage for the qualified small business company investment tax benefit for very early stage companies

if they're domiciled in the U.S. and not internationally. So it still is the case that from a startup perspective, I think domiciling in the U.S. is the best way to get your startup funded. We will certainly look at companies headquartered in Europe, in Singapore, in other parts of the world, where there's a great case being made, that there's a great venture-like opportunity

to make a huge impact on the world. Clearly, the energy transition is, it seems like, the primary focus of your fund. Is that fair? And is that just because that's the most impactful place to start? It's about half of our funds. We look at sectors like energy, transport, agriculture, and food, all of those impacted heavily

by climate, infrastructure, human augmentation, longevity, healthcare, neurotech, and so on. And so maybe half of our portfolio ends up being very directly climate and energy related. And half is somewhat not, but still quite fascinating. and we think addressing their human basic needs or great human aspirations. Now, is human longevity potentially at odds with solving the climate crisis? I don't think so. A lot of people talk about this, we talk about not having kids in the case of climate change. But really, the bulk of consumption and growth of consumption is about people rising in wealth

and having only dirty ways to do so. It's not about population. Population is growing in the least developed countries where people, knew people, will add it to the population and really have minimal impact on global carbon emissions. So for us, the real key is let's take everything that humans desire and consume today and find a way to make a clean alternative to a clean version of it that is cheaper and better than the polluting version. Well, then now let's talk about those economics, because that seems to be a thing you've

particularly been digging up on or digging in on your slides have popped up all over. the declining cost of renewable energy. At what point do we reach an economic tipping point where it's just not worth having the conversation anymore about why you're not on renewable? It's just cheaper. I think today, if you're building new energy production, new electricity production, you find that solar and wind are the cheapest around the world. And so 85% of new

electricity generation capacity built out in 2021 was renewables. That wasn't true. Ten years ago, renewals were always more expensive than fossil fuels. Those are the first phase. They were heavy subsidized. Five years ago, they started to get cost competitive. Now there's a place where almost always the cheapest option for a new build.

It's supposed to keep going for renewables to be cheaper to build new renewables than to keep operating, existing, already built coal and gas plants. We're seeing that start to happen. That's the world. And then we've got to replicate that in ground transportation. That's happening now with EVs getting cheaper and cheaper. In industry, making steel and making cement, those are massive areas in building heat, in shipping and aviation, and making chemicals and plastic.

So we've got to take the playbook that has worked, the electricity is starting to work, still early stage, and apply it in each of those separate sectors. Yep. Where do you think consumers fit in? I know that, you know, the idea of the carbon footprint was in, and foisted on us as a way to like avoid corporate responsibility. And yet my friend group, and I actually think this is a very promising investment direction for somebody

who's as consumer focused as I historically have been, is starting to talk about decarbonizing their lives. You know, decarbonize your house, decarbonize your vehicle, decarbonize your, like go zero waste. And I feel like there are 10 to 100 businesses a year in that stack. The number one thing that any consumer can do actually is to act as a citizen and vote. It really, I don't want to get too political, but the number one power that we have as individuals is to help press for policies that scale clean energy.

That's not actually that one-sided an issue. There's bipartisan love for solar and wind and EVs in the United States. The number two thing, I think, is to push the companies that you buy from to go more green. And so we see that there's an organization called the RE100. These are large companies, mostly tech and consumer brands, that have committed to having 100% of their electricity come from clean sources by 2030. And they've done so because they know that consumers value clean products. There's a brand halo that you get from that,

something that customers want. And the third thing I'd add is many of your listeners are going to be in tech, is as employees, we can pressure our employer years to deploy clean tech and to clean up our messes. You saw two years ago the thousands of Amazon employees sending a letter to Jeff Bezos talking about the need to go clean. And you saw Amazon respond in various ways with the $2 billion climate pledge fund, with investments and making a massive order of vehicles from Merivian and so on. So I think we all have ways to apply pressure as citizens, as buyers, and as employees.

Yeah, absolutely. How did you end up here? I mean, 2018 makes you a downright veteran of Green 2.0. You know, there was, of course, like, the one around the early 2000s. Well, I really got into climate around 2010. I was in computer science. I was a person at Microsoft. I've run a startup, had written some books.

But I had a very cliche environmental awakening on a beautiful beach in Mexico, just fell in love with the ocean, and there was some litter on the beach. And I just decided to look into what is the state of the environment? Why does pollution happen? What's my responsibility as a human being? So then I got to Singularity University. I wrote a book, The Infinite Resource, about addressing these global challenges. And I started as a public speaker about that.

And I started meeting startups and writing checks to them around 2014. And that has scaled and scaled and scaled. and I just joined this fund just last year. The fund was formed in 2018, Crime Movers Lab, but I just joined in 2021. And how has it been? I mean, now do you feel like you have successfully evangelized people into this space? Like, it really does feel like a moment.

It's a moment. I have the best job in the world. I feel like over the last 10 years, I was telling a story on stage and in my writings that clean energy is going to be cheaper than dirty energy. because of these exponential cost reductions. We could see that every time you double the scale of solar, you drop the price by 30%.

But telling that story in 2011 and saying solar would be cheaper than coal in 2015, was much harder than it was in 2015 and 2016 when that happened. And that was still harder than it is now when it's just obvious. So many people, it's happening. And then as an investor, I just am so fortunate. I feel blessed that startups come and educate me all the time on the audacious things that they're doing, and it lifts my spirits constantly.

Climate is still a very, very hard problem. We have bent the curve. We've gone from thinking we're headed to four, five, six degrees Celsius warming to now thinking maybe it's two and a half degrees that we're on track for by a 200 with some air bars. That's not enough. We've got to keep bending it further. Every 10th of a degree matters. We're probably having to say below 1.5 degrees Celsius,

but we might be able to keep it down below two. And every day I meet startups that are addressing that or addressing food issues or water issues or helping us get into space. They just make me more optimistic and more hopeful about the future. Yeah. I know that there is some skepticism about technology as a solution. Maybe even, you know, there's this accusation that like we're being technocrats. We're looking for some sort of Silicon Valley solution that is for profit. that will be sold to people, air and a can, that kind of thing.

But at the same time, you know, you talk about we're on track for two or two and a half degrees of warming. And that's after the governments of the world just came together at COP 26, assuming they keep every single promise they made, we're still not on track to keep warming below 1.5 degrees. So I just wonder how you think about that tension between, you know, for profit investors saying like, look, it feels like it's up to us now. I think these things don't exist in isolation to one other. Policy and government decisions and technology exist in a feedback loop. They're symbiotic. The reason that solar started to get cheap was that in the early 2000s, people in Germany started this thing called the Energy Venda, where they started saying we're going to subsidize solar and wind. In Denmark, they started subsidizing wind. In Norway, started subsidizing electric cars. And that was when these technologies were all really, we're going to subsidize solar and wind. In Denmark, they started subsidizing electric cars. And that was when these technologies were all really early. They were like digital cameras were in the 1970s. They were really crappy, very

expensive, low-quality product. But these countries that took a strong policy stance and said, we're going to do it, we're going to go green. They scaled the technology, created a larger market. That allowed corporations to reinvest R&D dollars. A dream that best revenue is R&D, and that's the reason that the prices started to fall so rapidly. And then the positive feedback loop is, as the costs, of solar and wind electric fields have gotten cheaper, they've become more popular with citizens, consumers, businesses, and it's easier to enact new policy. And so the reason that countries were able to sign up for the Paris pledges that put us on track for, let's say, two and a half, three degrees from Paris, the reason we even got there is because countries looked up and said, wow, the cost

of solar and wind and batteries has dropped so fast that our aspirations, what we can do economically have lifted. So we have to keep pressing on both levers, on all three, on policy, on policy, tech, and what we do as consumers and businesses. Yeah. How to what I don't want to put you on the spot here, but to what extent are you walking the walk and or what EV are you driving? I drive a Tesla. I've got an electric car. Yeah.

I live in Seattle, but I've got solar panels on my roof. I still use some natural gas and heating, but I've got a heat pump that augments my heating here. And I try to eat low mammal. I wish I could say that I was a complete vegetarian and pescatarian, but quantity matters. We go from five meals of red meat a week to one. That's a big, big jump. Yeah, absolutely. But wouldn't I'm just saying, wouldn't you be happy if there was like a one stop,

like an Angie's list for decarbonizing so you can buy the heat pump and you could get the solar installed and you get the battery? I'm just waiting for that company to pitch me, by the way. Like if you're out there. I've got a pitch like that in my inbox right now, actually. So there's a company. Can we co-invest? Is that a thing?

I'll drop you a line. Oh, my God, I'm so excited because I want that. I sort of feel like if I want it as a consumer, then I want to fund it. I literally got that pitch in my email this morning. So I'll drop you on the front door. I'm so happy that we're talking right now. That's amazing. Well, I love this ecosystem.

I love all the potential for it. And then just I also got a Tesla, but I have been, I'm on a, I'm testing them all. I'm doing little EV reviews because I'm I'm looking for the Tesla killer. Awesome. I'll keep you posted on what else is out there. Great. Is there anything I have missed?

Anything you were so excited to talk about? No, I mean, there's so much stuff that's happening. We're really excited. Primemoverslap.com, if you're a startup or you're an investor looking for a fund to put into, we'd love to talk to you at Seed Stage to, you know, series B and beyond, and especially if you're solving really hard tech, deep physical problems. On that note, actually, I know that sounded like a goodbye, and it almost was, but thank you for the producers who reminded me

that the reason I was so partly excited about this is because the thing that actually got me interested, two things happened that got me interested in climate as an area that I felt like I could dive into. One was talking to a climate scientist from Berkeley who has co-authored a million of those IPCC reports, accepted the Nobel Prize with Al Gore for Inconvenient Truth, and who basically was like, you know,

at this point, this is an engineering problem, problem because we are on track for so much warming. We have, you know, maybe bent but not flatten this curve. And I thought, well, thank God. I'm a tech reporter. Now it's my story because it's so hard to sit on the sidelines of this conversation. But the other thing was sci-fi was this world that imagined these possibilities. You know, Kim Stanley Robinson in New York 2140 where there's like diamond coating on the bottom

of buildings to keep the water out when it's, they've had 50 foot level C level rise twice. How does sci-fi, like, researching it, writing it, read it, how does that influence how you think about tackling this problem? It has an amazing impact. In science fiction, you're given license to think big picture about technology. You often go to first principles. You don't look at what the system is today. You say, what's possible theoretically to the science?

And as central capitalists, we get to do that too. And then in sci-fi, the other thing is you've got to think about the motivations of the actors. Why does somebody want A to happen? Why does somebody else want B to happen? why do they both believe they're right and how do they come into conflict? And I think as business people, too, we have to think about that in terms of what's going to meet consumer acceptance, what's going to motivate people who want things. So I feel like there's a kind of synergistic feedback loop.

I was looking at some pitches today for novel energy production and other things that look like science fiction to me and blow my mind. And I'm sure when I get a chance to write in a novel, some of those ideas will find their way into what I write. And it'll inspire us entrepreneurs to go do some new things as well. Remeznam, investor, author, analyst, researcher. You should read all his books, fiction and nonfiction, and definitely follow him on Twitter. Thank you so much for the time today. Molly, such a pleasure to see you.