Acquired - Special- Ho Nam from Altos Ventures — A Different Approach to VC

0:00I feel like I know you guys because I listen to you guys on your podcast and it's really fascinating because I think the three part series on Berkshire is kind of like is your signature piece because I think you guys said it's like oh geez you know you never thought you could go beyond two hours and I know you guys have to cut a whole bunch of stuff out just to fit it into six hours right now but there's nobody who goes into the depth like you guys and so it's great to talk to you guys here welcome to this special episode of acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund PSL Ventures. And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts. On today's show, we have a guest that both David and I have looked up to for years. Ho, Nam from Alto's Ventures.

1:08without giving too much away in this early intro, I will say that this episode could be summed up as what if you tried to be a value investor with Berkshire Hathaway's principles but for early stage technology companies. This episode is the perfect cousin to everything that we talked about on the Berkshire trilogy. Now, before we dive in, I want to say, first, if you are new here, join us in the acquired Slack.

1:34We'll be talking about this episode and everything going on in the tech and investing news of the day. That's acquired.fm slash slack. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on acquired LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

1:56Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Legora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm.

2:22for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts, and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lagores Bed here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

2:52And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially.

3:19speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1,200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months. Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test.

3:44Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right. Now, as you know, this is not investment advice. We May hold interest in some of the companies that we discuss on the show, and this is for informational and entertainment purposes only. We also have one more exciting announcement today. As the world opens up, we are marking the occasion by having an acquired party as we wrap season eight. Yes, that is an in-person event. It is going to be here in Seattle at Gas Works Park on Thursday, June 24th at 5 p.m.

4:36It'll have picnic vibes, so bring anything you want to eat or drink. Rumors are circulating that David Rosenthal is even going to fly up for it. We cannot wait to see you there. Now on to our conversation with Honom from Alto's Ventures. Oh, we are so excited to have you here. This is an episode we've been wanting to do for a long time and just speaking personally, the last...

5:03VCs we had here on the main show were Alfred Glenn and Doug Leoni from Sequoia. And of course, I have so much respect for them. But even though Althoses isn't as well known, I have learned just as much from following you over the years. And I am so excited to share that now with everyone. So I thought maybe a good way to start is Althoses made so many incredible investments. But I thought we could start off with probably your best known one, which is Roblox. And I think it'll tell your whole story in a really nice way, including the most amazing part, which is how Althos ended up investing multiple hundreds of millions of dollars into one company, Roblox, out of what was originally just an $85 million fund. It was $86.5 million fund. And you became the largest shareholder at the time of IPO. Is that right? That's right. Well, we were also the largest shareholder from the beginning.

6:02but we increased our ownership percentage over time. We increased it, and then it went down, and then it went back up. So I'll tell you the whole story. So we met the Bazooki late 2007 in the fall of 2007, and the deal was referred to us by Mark Weinstein, who actually works for Roblox now full-time as the general counsel, but at the time he was a partner at Wilson, and he was a general counsel for one of our other portfolio companies.

6:29Number of years ago is a enterprise software storage company and he said hey, I think you're gonna really like these guys And we said why because he actually you know Wilson since he works with everybody of course, and so we knew benchmark was looking at it We knew a number of other firms were looking at it Craig Sherman actually who was an EIR at benchmark at the time that David you know very well So I think Benchmark asked him to look at it. We asked him to look at it because at the time he was CEO of Gaia and he knew something about social networks. And anyway, he's a really smart guy. We ended up doing the deal and we let Craig invest with us. So he was actually like right there from the beginning before he even joined Meritech. And he came in much later, of course. So anyway, going back, Mark said, oh, you're going to really like these guys and say why? He said, well, they're really scrappy, very capital-efficient.

7:21You know, it's just like the altos. You know, we like these really bootstrapped kind of scrappy, capital-efficient kind of entrepreneurs. We don't like burning a lot of money. And they said, well, and they really, you know, I don't think they really like VCs. I said, really? Okay. Great. They're going to love you guys. Yeah, exactly. Our kind of entrepreneur. And literally though, I mean, when we met and we got excited, we decided to give a term sheet. I mean, they would not take our money until we had to be interviewed by the founder's father and brother.

7:50who were both on the board. So somehow we passed a test. I was not even at that meeting. It was my partner Anthony and Han who were there at the meeting and luckily they passed and they gave the blessing. Like passed the test. Yeah, they passed the test and our term sheet was for $2 million for a series C financing. A and B were all friends and family and they said, well, $2 million. Wow, that's a lot of money. That's just too much. What, what year is this? This is in 2007.

8:19The deal closed in February of 2008, but when we were negotiating was going to the holidays in 2007 to 2008. Right before Bear Stearns blew up. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So they said, yeah, two millions too much, but we'll take one and a half million from you guys. Okay. We'll start with one and a half. So that's how they got started. Anyway, but backtracked before that, you know, why we decided to do the deal. It's really interesting because my partner Anthony really had a thesis.

8:47And specifically, he was looking for the next club penguin. I remember club penguin. Yeah. Yeah. And my other partner, Han, his two daughters were totally hooked on club penguin. So they loved club penguin. And then Anthony got all excited about club penguin because it was another one of those great bootstrapped success stories. They never raised any venture funding during British Columbia, right? Yeah. Yeah. So a Canadian startup, which in Anthony's Canadian. So Canadian startup.

9:16I think four or five different dads got together and created this company and then sold to Disney for like four hundred million bucks. So back in those days, I was like, wow, that's a huge exit, you know, and you're investing out of an eighty five million dollar fund. You're like, yeah, four hundred million dollar exit. Great. Fantastic. Right. That's a fund returner. So so he had a thesis, which is really interesting. And then for me.

9:37I did not have a thesis around it and if somebody had told me was like, well, you know, you should fund this company. That's like a Lego 3D virtual online playground. I would have told you that's kind of a dumb idea, right? I would have said, like, why would I fund that? I don't get that. So, you know, this is kind of an interesting dynamic because in a partnership, you have different partners with different passions, different ideas. And you have this intermixing of different ideas, right? And so we debate it. We talk about it. But I might think it's something that really dumb idea. Somebody else might have a thesis. Now, you have this entrepreneur who walks in the door. And why did I get converted from, well, this is the dumbest idea I ever heard to, wow, this is really interesting. Well, when you show up at my door and then you have this little graph that shows 7% compounded growth on a weekly basis for 52 weeks in a row of engagement hours, well, that's kind of interesting.

10:33If you graph that out in Excel, that is a classic exponential curve that just grew 33x in a year. Okay, something's going on. And they're not burning much money. They're just early in the monetization phase. They copied exactly copied Club Penguin. They had this Club Penguin, right? Well, we had a club too. We called it Builders Club. That's what it was. Same exact pricing as Club Penguin, 599 a month. And when we first started talking to them, it was tiny. And by the time we closed the deal, I think maybe they were doing $50,000.

11:03a month, so $5,600,000 annualized run rate. This is Roblox. Yeah, this is Roblox. Yeah. So that was kind of like, okay, something's going on. You have exponential growth and engagement. You got early monetization. And then the thing that was really interesting, two other things that kind of sealed the deal for us. One is you did a YouTube search for Roblox. It's a unique name. And back in those days, this was several years before Minecraft ever launched. That was 2011.

11:31And we found like 200 something hits on role blocks. It's like okay. So what are these videos, right? We start going through all these different videos and some of these were really shaky videos.

11:43camcorder recordings of the computer screen and kids were so proud of their creations right back in those days it was really difficult they're so think about all the fiction points you're recording off of an analog camcorder your computer screen and then you have to get that off the tape digitize it and then upload it on a slower bandwidth connections back in those days into YouTube which was very early days of YouTube and then They were so proud of their creations, right? They wanted to show it off to their friends. So something is going on. There's so much engagement, so much passion around this community. You top it all off, you know, you meet the bazooki. I mean, this guy had this vision and this inspiration going back so many years. And he had four kids, and he really wanted to do something good for the kids.

12:32for his kids that he would be proud of and his prior company had done something to educate kids teach 3d physics that is a little simulator yeah and that was a successful company but again bootstrap no venture funding had a nice exit but even though they were it was designed to sell to elementary schools to teach kids physics it was purchased by a CAD company mechanical CAD company so that Boeing engineers could use the physics simulator Right? So he was working for that CAD company, and it's like, okay, I think now I want to go back to my original passion, do something for good for the kids again. So you meet a guy like that in our original investment memo, we talked about, hey, I think this guy is like a hedgehog. And the hedgehog concept was kind of new to us still. You know, we published this blog post in 2006 about the Fox and the hedgehog in Silicon Valley.

13:24And we wrote that blog post. It's fired by Jim Collins, right? Yeah, Jim Collins. Exactly. And wrote that blog post long before we made Dave Bazooki, but it's like, this guy is a total hedgehog. But of course, it was very, very early in the journey. And you only know when you're five, 10 years into it, whether or not that person truly is a hedgehog. That's what we talked about in that blog post is, hey, these people have hedgehog potential, but you won't know until you're 10 years into it. And hope for folks who don't know, what is the fox in the hedgehog concept?

13:52Yeah, well Jim Collins wrote about this in good to great and his conclusion was hey, these great CEOs great companies are run by by these hedgehogs that really have one big idea and they have one big mission in life versus the Fox who is very smart very clever There may be polymaths. They're the great serial entrepreneurs and they're very popular, you know, with VCs. They could hang out at these cocktail parties and they're very smooth and they're really, really good at fundraising. And the hedgehog is really this boring creature, not very good at fundraising, does not networking. He doesn't even like VCs, doesn't want to meet anybody. They're just too busy doing their own thing, nose to the ground, right? That's kind of the hedgehog personality. So Collins just kind of perfectly nailed it. And when I wrote that blog post, I was thinking,

14:44Oh yeah, I mean, this is just like Sam Walton. I had Sam Walton in my mind. He is one of the all-time great headshots. His book made in America is like, oh my god, that...

14:54told me what the mind of an amazing entrepreneur looks like. And we're very, very fortunate that he got sick at the end of his life because he never would have written that book. But because he would have been out duck hunting and visiting his stores and doing all those things he loved, right? But he was kind of bound at home. Everybody wanted him to write something. He finally wrote it. So we're very lucky that we got to get a glimpse into his mind.

15:18and then and then Buffett of course is another amazing hedgehog right you have the sky who at the time he I don't know how old he was in his 80s or 70s you know he hasn't needed to work for money for decades right but he's still working he's now 90 or 91 you need to work for money when he left Graham Newman that's right like at age 25 you're right at age 25 he had enough to retire but but they keep going they keep going on and on and it's like the energizer bunny they never run out of energy why is that What is it about certain guys that become billionaires and they're still showing up to work and not only showing up to work, but they say they tap dance to work, right? Basil's copied Buffett's lines like, oh, I tap dance to work every day. Buffett's still there, right? And Sam Walton's still there to the end, to the very end, you have to carry him out with the stretcher, right? So there's some of the people who are just like that. Like we're like trying to study who are these people and then we're trying to incorporate some of that for ourselves as well.

16:17How do we structure the work and surround ourselves with the types of people that give us joy, that motivate us to come back, to keep coming back, to keep doing it, rather than to say, oh, I'm done. I'm punching out. So we're always thinking about that because our role model is the Buffett kind of guy. We didn't set out to start the venture firm for ourselves.

16:43so that we punch out at the age of 50 or 60, it's like, well, why did I start something so I could give it to the next generation? It's like, I think I'm going to just kind of be around for a while, right? And the next generation could join us and they're fantastic people. And these are people I want to invest in. And we kind of think of the next generation as we are both LPs and GPs. We want to invest in that next generation. And I think that's one of the things that I think we observed with some really enduring franchises, where they are no longer thinking about the business as a GP, they're really thinking about it as an LP, and they become both LP and GP. And there are certain folks like IGSP, right, that David knows about. There is very distinction. Yeah, they are the LP. They've never had LPs in 52 years. And so those guys are fantastic. They'll be mad at us for bringing up their name in public. But for folks who don't know the investment group of Santa Barbara, which also came out of

17:40GSB business school, which Alto's did as well, which we'll get to and specifically Jack McDonald's investments class. It's all their own money. There's no outside capital, but I believe they manage now probably approaching 10 billion plus out of out of Santa Barbara, and they have beaten their own path over 50 plus years. It's amazing. Before we move on from Roblox, because I think this is relevant to how Alto's has evolved, how did you end up making the untraditional moves of putting so much capital in?

18:09Yeah, that's always a kind of a mystery for folks. So this is what happened. So we only got it one and a half million dollar piece. And then about a year later, first round actually came in because they actually passed on the original round that we invested in, but you know, kudos to Chris Freilich for tracking it. And they said, hey, look, can I really get in?

18:28throw in an extra half million dollars and say, hey, yeah, you know, we could use a little extra capital. And so we got them to come in and we actually invested more in that round. So every chance we got, we kept investing more. And a lot of times before we started doing these big SPVs, we actually bought secondary shares, I think, on six separate occasions. So every time we had a chance to pick up some shares, whether from it was from employees or founders or whoever, people need a little bit of liquidity. It's like, hey, We're happy to buy some more. And every time, of course, the price changes. The price keeps going up. We value it based on what we thought were the right comparables. And we price it at a certain level. And we kind of had a similar kind of comparable. Maybe we're valuing it at five times revenue or something like that. So the price kept going up. We kept buying more. But at some point, we had this interesting turning point. We were very lucky in some ways. We thought about selling the company.

19:27And by that time, you know, we had had a pretty good game. We had a tiny fund. Of course, it would be a very meaningful exit for that tiny fund. And luckily, the offers came in at significantly below the price at which we were all willing to sell.

19:45And even at that higher price, it's like, oh, we were really reluctant, but it's like, okay, I guess we gotta do this thing. It's the right thing to do for the fund management business. And we'll talk on this topic later because I think a lot of fund managers make decisions to serve the fund, but they may not be making the proper investment decision. And you gotta learn how to separate that.

20:05or perhaps serve the management company like the institution that you are building with your investment firm that is not necessarily perfectly aligned with the actual investors in that particular fund exactly and we've again we felt those conflicting interests right we've made those mistakes or we've made certain kinds of decisions and then we just sort of finally said hey look let's just be very clear about why we're making such in such a decision and it's okay to make a good business decision it's okay to make a decision that's very rational that serves the fund or serves your business whatever it is and it's also okay to make an investment decision but just don't get those confused just understand why you're making certain decisions so anyway we had these these bids right and we said well jeez at that price we're not gonna sell actually we said at that price we should be buyers

20:56Right. And so some people did want to sell at that price and other people wanted to buy. And so we said, hey, look, why don't we just buy some more shares? So that was a time that we kind of stepped up and did significantly more than the little nibbles secondary. So that was another secondary, but it was only like a 2.2 million secondary and nowhere near the levels later. So by this point, you've put five plus million into this company. So it's becoming a five meaningful percentage of the whole fund. Yes. So anyway, we bought more. And then what ended up happening right after that round was about a year later, again, the company continued to really perform. That's when Craig, our friend from Maritek, comes back in the picture. And he's been, he's known about this company like from day one.

21:46And it says, well, this is starting to look quite interesting. Maybe we'll lead the next round. And that next round was led at a significantly higher price than the price that we were talking about, which everybody was thinking about selling. So it's like, OK, we'll look at 500 million pre. Maybe it's time to sell a little bit.

22:09right, make our health LPs happy, increase the DPI. Now, so this DPI thing is very interesting, right? This is the fun management business. Yeah, we're Chris Dubos, right? Who's a like a friend of all of ours, right? I mean, he, what, what does he say? He says, it's all about the mula in the kula. Yeah. I love that. Like, like, like, like, until the cash is in the bank, it's not for real. And DPI just for folks is Distributed capital to paid in capital. So it's actually dollars. Don't give me more mark of like give me dollars in my bank account. Yeah, exactly. Well, and look, we all live through the bubble, the dot com bubble and, and you know, we thought we were going to be so successful. We had all this huge gains and it just disintegrated on us, right? And so we were all kind of burned by that and LPs are burned by that. And the thing is, you know, look, LPs really don't know

23:01if something is a fraud, or if something is for real, right? They're trusting us. They're trusting the fund managers. And so they see all this gain after gain after gain, but it's all paper. At some point, they have to convert that to cash, right? Otherwise, they never know. And if you've been around for a long time, you know, it could go to zero. So anyway, we had these pressures. And so maybe we should increase the DPI. It'll help us raise our next fund, right? That's kind of how a lot of fund managers think.

23:31And so we decided to sell 15% of our role blocks position. And so we were still the largest shareholder at that point after that. And it makes our LPs pleased. And anyway, we said, whereas we were selling that little piece, Oh, it was such a tough decision. We were saying, I think that's going to end up being a $200 million mistake, which, you know, $200 million mistake in the context of a 86 and a half million dollar fund is a pretty big mistake, right? But we still did it anyway. We still did it even though we thought it might be a $200 million mistake. Well, it turned out to be more than a billion dollar mistake, right? So anyway, but just just remember that because it was the pain of that mistake that really led us down this whole different path.

24:18where we became an RIA, right? So we sold a little bit at that point. And then fast forward a year or two later, a much bigger round happens, two and a half billion dollar pre. And before that two and a half billion dollar pre-around, led by Tiger and Greylock also came in in that round. We had a number of other people start to get really interested in this company, right? People were just begging to, like, can we have a chance to look at the company? And we weren't really looking to raise money because the company, you know, again, after the first 10 and a half million dollars of equity, we got to a point where we were a cash flow positive. And we just didn't need to raise any more money, period, right? So people could be knocking on our doors and we just kept saying no, no, no. But look, at two billion dollars, we thought, well, she said two billion, maybe we should sell a little bit again. Like we thought, hey, that worked. Okay, last time at two billion, we could sell maybe only 10% of the

25:14of our position and still return a big chunk of the fund, right? So why not? So we actually talked to some folks at two billion and they came in at slightly below. Like they just are asking price was two and they for some reason couldn't quite get there. They're offering like one seven one eight and we just said, eh, we're just going to pass. This is like when Buffett bought Berkshire Hathaway, and he wanted to sell. And it was the Chase family, right? It came in, they, they came in at, uh, I think an eighth of a dollar below the price that they'd agreed shook hands on a tender offer. Yeah. And that's when Buffett said, all right, you, I'm not going to sell them, but to buy. Yeah. Well, I have another one of those great stories for you later. Remind me, who are others? Like, you know, you're just off by a little bit, and it's just so dumb to be off by a little bit. Just go for it. Right. So anyway, those guys were off by a little bit, and it's

26:07Lucky thing for us because we waited a little bit longer and we got to the two and a half billion dollar valuation If we were going to sell at two we should be going to sell at two and a half right but that but it's all relative to how much progress is the company making and then thing is the other key difference was by the time we got to two and a half we had registered become an RIA And so that was the key difference. And once we registered to be an RIA, we could do these SPVs and we could purchase secondary. And RIA being registered investment advisor or advisory. That's right. Registered investment advisor. And so VCs are exempt from SEC registration because we help create jobs and all of that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of truth to that. VCs are really small and they can't.

26:52You know, it's really for the public investors, right? But from my SEC perspective, if you do too much secondary, well, they look at it and say, well, hey, look, you're not creating any jobs here. You're putting dollars into somebody else's pocket. It's not going into the company. It's coffers. It's going to another shareholders pocket. Well, to me, that looks like a public trade, right?

27:10share of order to shareholder transaction. So so we got to too much secondary that that's kind of what happens. By the way, before Ho continues, we should just anchor a price in people's mind. So you know, when he's talking about we invested a million and a half and then you mentioned something around a $500 million valuation round. Now you mentioned a two and a half billion dollar valuation round. It's like, man, how big can this company get? Well, the public markets currently believe it's worth about $60 billion. So it does indeed keep running.

27:39Yes, it definitely keeps running. So that 2.5 billion, because they didn't need money, they only took a little bit of money into the company. And then the rest of it was a tender offer to purchase secondary shares. So there was a whole process going on. Everybody got a chance to sell a little bit. And remember, we sold a little bit in the last round at 500 and 2.5. We told the company, you know something? Thanks, but no thanks. We're not going to be part of this tender process.

28:07But what we did was we ran our own little tender process. We said, you know something? We will do this SPV and we'll participate in the round. And then we will run a tender process amongst our LPs and say, hey, look, if anybody really wants a chance at liquidity, here it is. And if they want to roll over, you could also roll over. So we don't want to force anybody out. We wanted to give them a chance to roll over on a no fee, no carry basis.

28:33Because the reason we were going to provide no fee, no carry is well first of all no fee because we're gonna work with this company regardless because we still had a big position Right, so why should we charge any fees and then no carry because we're crystallizing the carry as we did that distribution so they already paid us a fee carry From that fund so if they rolled over into this new vehicle we shouldn't charge them anymore So it was a free rollover if they want to roll but a lot of people decide to cash out So it was interesting. And we cashed out some too, right? As, you know, GPs, we, you know, we've been toiling away for a long time. We didn't have a, you know, a whole lot of fund returners at that point. And so we cashed out half of our carry and rolled over the other half, right? So it was a good thing for everybody. So we did that. And then fast forward later, there was another round after when we did the two and a half billion, it was a hundred twenty five million dollar SPV, right? After we did that, we didn't think we would do, never do another SPB on top of that.

29:27But yet again, at 4 billion, when that deal happened, we did another 125. So that's how it starts to get big, right? 125 plus 125. Now you got 250 plus we had another round after that, the pre-IPO round at $45 a share. Now when you think about all of these rounds, though, it's kind of crazy to think even at the $45 a share, which people thought was crazy, right? That was $30 billion market cap.

29:51and all the rumors about World Box One public was at 8 billion. And I have no idea where they pulled that out, but I think they just, it was reporter saying, well, if the last round was 4 billion, then the IPO must be at two times that. And so it must be at 8 billion. So everybody said it's going to go public at 8 billion, maybe 10. And this is famously the IPO that got pulled because people were like, oh, actually, the company presumably thought, wow, looking around at where tech companies are being valued going out today, you know, this wouldn't make sense. Like we actually should raise more in the private market and then decide if we want to go out next year. Yeah, that's that's right. Yeah, these those pops were just kind of insane. And we kind of felt helpless to control it because if you do a traditional IPO, you have such a limited supply. And you just can't and a lot of people want an access to this deal. They didn't get a chance to invest. And so they were going to buy, but as soon as they did, the price would

30:49spike up and then we knew that it would come back down and we just didn't want people to get burned. It just didn't seem right. Also, also for the sellers, right? All these employees and early shareholders, they wanted some liquidity and why should they sell at this artificial little price just because that's kind of what the bankers want it doesn't make sense. We wanted to try to explore and find the right price and we thought the right price was going to be much higher than the IPO price. And we did find some investors to validate that, hey, look, it should be at least $45 to share, which is $30 billion market gap way higher than the 10, 15 billion. Maybe people thought it should be priced at. And we bought more at that point. And so that's, again, a key lesson to in terms of how we think about the business and holding on to our winners longer.

31:40I think that kind of tells the whole role box story. So I skipped a whole bunch of other things that happened in between because this whole role blocks journey would not have happened at all in terms of making these big investments without this other little company called Booba Brothers in Korea. And that was one of our early winners. And we always said that we didn't think Booba Brothers was going to be our biggest winner, but we always said for a number of years that this is our most important company. And if we screw that up, we screw up all of all this, right? And the reason is we use that company to test out so many different theories about the business and about what we wanted to do, what kind of VC we wanted to be. And Wooba Brothers was the main reason that we registered to be an RIA to do the first SPV. So Wooba is this little food tech company in Korea that did, I think, a billion in net revenue last year in GMV, I'm not sure what it is, seven, eight billion.

32:39you know, surprisingly big for a little country of South Korea. But we had been involved with that company again from very early stages as well. And that company is so fascinating because the founder is one of these non-consensus founders. He did not go to one of the top colleges in Korea and in Korea, you know, going to a topologist like a really big deal, right? Education is everything there. And so he was a designer, went to design school and started this little company that failed. And so he was in debt. And he had to go back and try to pay off his debts. And he started this company after he paid off the debts or most of it. And the company was growing pretty fast. We decided to bet on it. And we thought, hey, this could be... It was like the grub hub of Korea at the time before the whole physical delivery. And we thought, hey, we thought this company could be maybe $30, $40 million in revenue.

33:38and maybe we can exit. In Korea, you could take a tiny company like that, public. We didn't think it would be that big, right? But it got to 10 million run rate, and we thought, hey, this is really starting to work, and this is maybe a bigger market than we thought. And the CEO comes to us and says, well, look, I took it this far, and I think it's time to get a CEO. Like, do you see? This is such a great story. And it's like, what do you mean? It's like, well, because I don't know how to take it from 10 million to 100 million.

34:08And some of the other board members were saying, oh, we got to take this company public. Like in Korea, you could take a tiny company like that public, but you have to be profitable. So from 10 million to 20 million, they wanted to get the company profitable and then take it public around the time it was 20 million.

34:24And we said, no, no, I don't think that's the right approach. I think this is really starting to work. It's time to step on the gas. And we told the founders, like, you know, I think we could take it a little bit further. Let's see what happens, but let's raise a little more money and just kind of go for it. You do have to back into service.

34:39Yeah, it's sort of interesting because we are seen in Silicon Valley as these very stodgy, conservative, pragmatic guys, capital efficient, we don't like burning a lot of money. In Korea, when we say this tiny little 10 million dollar company should step on the gas, right? They think, oh, these guys are really aggressive, right? And this is really very interesting. It's the same exact approach because by the time we got to 100 million, of course, we were profitable or a casual break even. We like companies to get to a self-sustaining phase, but around the time you get to triple-digit millions. And so while we're on the time, they got to 100 million. The CEO came back to us again and he said, wow, this is amazing. Now we're at 100 million in revenues. And I think you have the wrong man for the job. Is that really?

35:26because I got it to a hundred million, but I don't think I'm the right guy to take it to a billion. It's like, well, okay, let's see what happens. Now, here's the fascinating thing. He came to my partner at Han recently and said, you know, look, I think we're going to take this thing to ten billion. Like, he's like, just watch me. Like, now he's got the confidence. He took it from a hundred to a billion, and now he knows. And then, of course, he's just become a fabulous, fabulous CEO. Amazing.

35:55Korean to sign the gifting pledge, right? Yeah, he recently signed the Buffett Gates gifting pledge first person ever to do that from Korea. Now another founder from Korea recently signed. So now they have two out of Korea all in the last few months, which is fantastic. And, you know, he's such a special guy. He actually started selling some of his shares even very early before he became a billionaire.

36:19because he just felt like it was the right thing to give back and he made some promises. And we told him, he's like, you're crazy for selling the stock. You know, because we were buying, right, when as we were buying, he's like, we told him, I don't think he should be selling that much, but he's like, no, no, I got to sell it because I got to give 10 million to these guys, whatever he had made promises. And so he sold the stock. So he's such a such an amazing guy. So anyway, along this, we were brother's journey, right, talking about the missing out on price. We had again, pressures, all the feeling the pressures to return some capital, right, to our our founders. And we were brothers was was on a much faster growth trajectory in the early days that compared to a role blocks. And maybe we thought we would sell 20% of our shares, right? That returns a nice little percentage of the fund. And we actually had shaken hands on a deal with a great, we found this great long term investor that they would be like a altos. They we would leave the shares and really good hands because they would be

37:15really with the company for a super long time, not looking to flip out of it. And we shook hands. And then when we got the paperwork, the price was different. It's like, oh, it's like, and it wasn't off by a lot, but it's like, but this is not what we agreed to. So we just said, no, we call off the deal, right? And it's a lucky thing because what happened was we called off the deal, but we were still interested in many of the other early investors were all interested in cashing out a little bit.

37:43So by the time we found the next investor, which turned out to be neighbor, and we wanted a strategic as well, because we thought neighbor could become a competitor and why not make them our friends rather than our enemies. By the time we got to that deal, we actually got the price that we had wanted from the beginning. But again, six months passes in a fast growing company. Six months makes you pause. It's like, wait a minute, at this price, We should be buyers rather than sellers, right? The good, same position we made with broblocks a little earlier. It's like, yeah, we were thinking about selling it this price, but I think maybe we should be buyers. Very similar to what Nolan Bushnell had told us about the Atari deal with Don Valentine, where it took so long to close the deal. Months and months and months went by that when Don showed up with the final paperwork to sign. Nolan was like,

38:35Hey, I think we're actually worth twice as much now. And they were. I mean, you just objectively look at their growth. And like, all we do, but still could have that conversation with Don Valin. It's always a moving target, right? And you try your best, you know, valuing a company is just, it's an art and not a science. You can't just like apply simple formulas. And it's a moving target. It keeps, it keeps changing on you. So anyway, so we decided, okay, you know, we had been talking about potentially becoming an RIA, like, for years, like two, three years before this World War Brothers decision, we thought about doing an SPV for Coupon, which was growing even faster than some of these other companies was early rocket ship. And we just could not get comfortable with the notion of becoming an RIA at the time. It was just, you know, for a small fund like ours, it was just a big huge undertaking. A lot more overhead. You had to have a chief compliance officer, a lot more legal costs. I'm looking back to this, but at that time,

39:34How many people are at Alta's? What did the firm look like? We were tiny. This is before any of our next generation partners had joined us. So it was still the three of us, just three partners. Our receptionist was our office manager, our admin. She's still with us. We just had tiny little office.

39:53So we decided not to do the SPB for a coupon, but we had been thinking about this for a number of years and we talked to a whole bunch of people who were registered and they told us it's like, well, you know, my advice to you is just don't do it. It's like, really? But you're registered. It's like, but yeah, it's a cost of doing business for us. But for you guys, I don't think it's worth it. So I mean, literally, we got that good, well-meaning advice from a lot of people. So we just didn't do it for coupon, which probably turned out to be a billion dollar mistake, right? But that's fine. That's one one billion dollar mistake. The role boxing was another billion dollar mistake. We keep making all these huge billion dollar mistakes. And it's like, you know, at some point, we should stop making these big mistakes. So, so, so for who are we fighting again, we went back to the same exact people that we had talked to before who said, you shouldn't do it. We talked to some of those guys and we got some advice. And we said, you know, something despite all these cons, we were kind of doing the math on it. And for this little 30 million dollar SPV.

40:49I think we will make enough money on this to justify all the added expenses and overhead, kind of forever, at least for the 10 years. I think it will pay for all the 10 years of expenses if this turns out to be correct. And then we thought, it's like, you know, there could be some other deals. Like, like three years ago, we had coupons, now we have war of others. There could be some other deals you just never know, right? So we thought, okay, why not?

41:15So we registered and we got it just in the nick of time. We had to register very, very quickly to be able to close. And the $30 million SPV was 100% for secondary. It was not a penny of it went to the company. We bought shares from other early investors like us that needed that liquidity. And is that one of the things that you can't do if you're not an RAA is?

41:40Lead a whole round that's just secondary. Yeah. The technical technicality is that it's 25% of any fund. And so you could have a billion under management. But if you have a one fund, that's a $30 million fund. And if 25% of that one fund happens to be secondary, then that triggers the registration requirement for the entire platform. So that's kind of the math. And so 30 million 100% of it secondary. So that triggered the registration.

42:09And so because we had done that for woo-wa brothers, that's what allowed us to do all those other Rolex SPVs. Now, before this woo-wa SPV, that was the sixth fund that had invested in the woo-wa brothers. So I didn't tell that part of the story. So we were investing fund after fund after fund into woo-wa brothers. And canonical VC, you know, dogma.

42:34From LPs, but I think VCs also believe this is cross-funded investing is a no-no. It's a no-no. People really don't like it. And so when we first started doing this, LPs were, well, first of all, when we first started doing it, that's because we were just not very good fund managers. Like, like a lot of times you do it because you're just not doing a good job of reserving. And if you run out of money, we ran out of money.

43:00It's like, well, geez, we can't support our companies anymore. So we had to beg our LPs like, can we really like use our new fund to help support some of our older companies? So we did that and LPs didn't like it, but you know, like they gave us a little rope, right? They said, okay, you could do a little bit, but we're watching you. Our eyes are on you, right? We're going to start reading those quarterly statements that you send us now. And we're going to make sure that you don't put good money after bad.

43:27Right, to support your crappy companies that run out of money. But look, we made some mistakes, but we also made some good deals. And our LP started to get more and more comfortable with us doing these crossovers. And what others, when we raised our first Korea fund, we raised that fund.

43:47primarily because of some of the lessons on war, but we were starting to run out of money in our US funds for Korea. So when we first started raising US funds from institutional LPs in 2005, they let us invest up to 10% of our fund anywhere outside of the US. And the reason is we asked for permission to do that because we started to see some interesting things in Korea. It was worded in the legal documents that we could invest anywhere outside the US, but we were just only focused on Korea.

44:16And in that first fund, we never reached that 10% limit. But in the next one, we increased that limit to 15% because we continue to see more interesting deals. And so it was in that second fund, where we absolutely hit the 15% limit. And then we wanted to go beyond that 15% and why did we want to go beyond 15% limit to put more money into woo-woo brothers, right? That was the company that we really wanted to start to lean in on. And so our LPs kind of relented and they said, well, We won't let you go up to 20%, but we'll let you go up to 17%. It's like, okay, we'll, you know, beggars, capy choosers, we'll take whatever we can get. So the 17% that incremental 2% all went into will well, but we want it more, right? And so now we were stuck in that US fund limited at 17. So that's what we went out and said, hey, we're going to raise a career fund.

45:07Korea only fund because some LPs actually like that idea and want it more exposure their other LPs did not want more exposure to Korea you know there's all kinds of North Korea risk and you know they didn't even know like how to categorize Korea it's like well that's not really an image it doesn't go into an emerging market bucket and like you know so they don't know how to how to categorize it so some of our core LPs actually passed on that first career fund. But luckily, we were able to get enough, convince enough LPs to come along with us on that first $60 million career fund. And when we raised that fund, we told our LPs the first investment we're going to make out of this fund is a crossover. So LPs, I mean, you're literally doing everything that is going to make LPs nervous here. You're investing in a market they don't know and understand. While you're based out of the US and

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47:53Oh, let me ask you a question. This will take us a little bit into sort of firm history. So we've thrown around Roblox, we've thrown around Coupang, we've thrown around Woowa Brothers. At this point, you know, these multi-billion dollar investments, these things keep happening to you. So you sort of like, you know what excellent feels like now in terms of the results and then sort of back testing that against what are those.

48:19entrepreneurs look like when we invested very early in them. Can you take us back emotionally to what it was like the first time you started to see your first 3X, 5X, 8X where you knew you had something in the portfolio where you were looking at each other like, hey, we actually might be good at this. One of these companies might go and what your psychology was around that point in time. Yeah, yeah, it's such a...

48:45interesting question is kind of complicated. There's the people equation and then there's also the business equation. So I'll talk about the people a little bit and we'll talk about the business fundamentals. So the people we already talked about a little bit, we just have a bias towards certain kinds of entrepreneurs, what we call the hedgehog versus the fox. And you know, there's nothing wrong with foxes and nothing wrong with amazing serial entrepreneurs. They're incredibly competent people. They will make money over and over again. But I call the great serial entrepreneurs just amazing people who just have not yet found their true life's calling, right? So you could be a serial entrepreneur, have a bunch of fantastic hits, but then you will find something. Let's say, oh my God, this is it. I found what my life's purpose is. I'm here for the rest of my life. Like we're looking for that match between a company founder fit. And you know, Sam Walton was like that. Sam Walton was a very successful

49:43serial entrepreneur, very successful, even as a teenager. He was making all kinds of money. He was making thousands of dollars, which is big money back in those days. Just like Buffett was a very successful teenage entrepreneur. Right. And so he's always been fairly wealthy, fairly successful, but he did not start Walmart until age 46. He was already a wealthy, successful guy. But at 4065 Walmart, and that was it, that was it for the rest of his life, the one thing. So we're looking for the people the one thing, right? And it's their true life's mission at this point in our lives. You know, we're not looking for yet another deal to make money. Like, why would we do that? Like, don't show me another deal that just makes money. Show me an opportunity to build something really special with a special group of people that have a mission, their life's mission, hopefully, and how can we support them on that? And guess what? If you actually do that, the money will be there, right? So don't worry about making money.

50:39That cannot be the reason to do any deal. It's got to be because you want to work with these people and it's got to be because we have a chance to build something, right? So it's about the people, that's such a critical component. You've said a bunch to me and you know, I love sort of adapting a buffet analogy, but you want to find people and I think you all think of yourselves this way, Adautos, where you're painting a masterpiece versus you're painting by numbers.

51:09When you're painting a master piece, there is no formula. And it's never done. Yeah. Every time it's just different. Right. And yeah, but Buffett calls Berkshire his painting. That's my painting. And when he buys a business, you know, from one of these great founders who become a billionaire, you know, says, he tells him like, you have this master piece. I want to hang it in my museum. Right. I'm not going to touch it. I'm not going to rip it apart. Right. Sell it off in pieces.

51:34And I'm gonna hold on to it forever. It's a beautiful masterpiece. And sometimes you do the painting and it turns out to be not so good. Sometimes it's a masterpiece, but it's just unique. It's just different every time. We're looking for those artists. And there's a lot of people out there who want volume. They want scale. And paint by numbers will do it. And you could build a much, much bigger business that way. Certainly, much more predictable.

52:00and much more repeatable. And there's a lot of people who want that, right? Or maybe a bigger business faster. Yeah. GPs was LPs. I think it's LPs that are driving it. LPs really want predictability, repeatability. You know, they don't want to take too much risk, right?

52:16And I kind of joke that like look I think everybody wants pretty made off without the fraud like nobody wants fraud of course But I think everybody wants pretty made off. They want nice steady. They're not they don't want to be too greedy They just want that steady returns and there's a lot of big big funds that they're just geared there's setup for that You know company after company deal after deal. It's like a cookie cutter right? Crank them out out of a factory and it's a deal factory. The deal machine and the LPs want it. It's okay, good for you. That's fine. We're just going to do something different over here and if you want that, you know, and it's a small piece of your portfolio because we're not going to be able to crank it out in volume like that. We just have our own little thing going. So that's the people side of the equation. And then you said there's the business side of the equation. Yeah, so there's a business side.

53:05You know, around the time a company gets to about a 10 to 20 million dollar scale, that's what we call first space. That's kind of when we start to get a lot more curious about the business. Around the time, like, let's say, Woolworth brothers got to 10 million. It's like, okay, I think we might have something here, right? And we start to dig in. And like sometimes, like, you know, I might not even be paying attention. If it's a company, of course, that I'm working with, I'm very, you know, involved with what's going on, but as a partnership, Like, we might not know about every single company, but if somebody else's deal, whatever, you know, if you get to first base, now you got my attention. So what do they do again? Like, what is it that they're doing? Like, I want to learn a little bit more about this little business. So around 10 to 20 million, you get our attention. We start to get curious. Like, we learned so much more about the people, the business, the market, because now we're a few years into it, right?

54:02And what we've learned is that, you know, so many companies, venture-back companies, especially, are in a hurry to grow, grow, grow. And the faster you grow, the higher your valuation at the next round. And everybody's really happy, right? But I tell you, when you really step on the gas, and we've done it before, we've had companies go to 100 million in revenues, and then the wheels start falling apart. And it takes so much time, so much work to get a company to 100. It's like the most heartbreaking thing in the world to have this thing that you worked so hard on, start to fall apart on you. And it's really hard to turn it around. It's much harder to do a turnaround than to build it right from the beginning. And, you know, I think almost every single company startup has a great culture in the beginning. People say, well, you know, the culture gets set when it's like the first five people or whatever. And you got to do it right. It's like, hey, don't tell me about that. Every little company has a great culture. You know why? Because just to survive that little infant

55:00mortality phase, if everybody's not pulling their weight, there's no place to hide. Everybody is contributing, everybody knows what the heck is going on. You have a great culture, every little company. But not every great culture at every little company turns out to be great as they grow. And so you have to pay a serious amount of attention. So around the time you get to first space, that's when you get to your first 100 people and you really have to do it right.

55:26And basically, in our best companies, they're accelerating in growth in the multiple hundreds of millions at a faster rate, a lot of times in percentage terms than when they were in the tens of millions.

55:39That's what we're looking for, right? We want this acceleration starting at 100 million rather than a deceleration and the wheels falling off at 100 million. And so when we see something special, and again, not every company that gets to 10 to 20 million is going to get to that hundreds of millions, right? So, but that's what we were paying attention to it to see which of these have the opportunity to really scale up. And if we see the big potential, we get more careful and more patient with those.

56:09because we want to do it right. And we want to build the right kind of pieces because by the time you get to 100 again, if you don't have the fundamentals down, it's just almost too late. It's just really hard. I mean, you could do it, but it just takes a lot of effort. But if you keep doing it right, like you're making the right kind of decisions at 10, 20, 30 million.

56:27rather than at a hundred million then by the time you get to a hundred million you got some momentum building and you got you got some practice and you got you got the right fundamentals going and so at a hundred you have this ability to start to accelerate and so that's what we're trying to do what are some examples of some of those key decisions in the you know ten to thirty million dollar revenue range that you got to take the time to get right in your experience yeah well a big thing is people people and culture you know it's so easy to just get get people with fancy resumes and they'll take you there super, super fast. And you just have to be careful. I mean, I have no problems hiring talent. And as companies grow, we have access to better and better talent. You know, when you're at a startup, you just can't get the kind of people you could get at 20 million. And when you're at 20 million, you cannot get the kind of people you could recruit at 200 million. And at 200 million, I will tell you, you cannot get the kind of people you can get at 2 billion.

57:27I mean, you start to get tap into better and better talent. So all along the way, we are trying to upgrade the talent, but also all along the way we're trying to develop the talent. And we're really looking for signs of that, of which are the people that we hired early days that are able to keep coming along with us. And you have to be patient with some of those folks. But if you could, like, it always makes me feel a little bit more comfortable with the company. If I see certain people coming along, And we have some history with them. Because if it's, uh, if I wake up one day and we're 100 million in revenues, but I look at the management team and I don't know anybody on the team, makes me very nervous, actually. I might know the business. It might have a long 10 year history with the business, but I just don't know these people.

58:08Now I got to start the cycle all over again. It makes me feel more comfortable when I've known these people for a while and some of them might start as individual contributors and they become managers and then the directors and DPs and usually we get to know because we work with these companies for such a long time we get to know people at multiple layers right we might know people at four or five different layers within the company at all different stages of their career development and Again, those are the companies where we tend to get much more conviction around. It reminds me of, I remember talking about Zoom, and I remember talking about this with Santi in our episode with him that it's a very altos like company. I remember in the IPO prospectus, going through the management team, and they all were developed internally.

58:58and they're all incredible but it looks very different than you know often you'd see in sort of a typical venture path just like you're saying you see you bring in the gold-plated resumes at each stage and they're you know they've done this they've done that they've done xyz but they've been with the company six months before the IPO yeah yeah and we certainly had some of that at role blocks too i mean you can look at the IPO perspectives there's some people we brought in and there's other people like behind the scenes that have been there for really long time. Some amazing people, right? And there's some people at the IPO perspectives that might not be like in the documents yet, but we know they're in the background and they're getting better and better. And maybe five, 10 years from now, they're going to take over who knows, right? But we see that kind of a machinery being developed. That's really interesting. But that's again, going back to people. I mean, so much of this is really about people at the end of the day, right? That's what certainly makes it more fun for us.

59:55I mean, you know, I mean, it's interesting because in Korea, right, we go to a lot of funerals. It's like, it's so fascinating. It's like, really? Well, in Korea, like, you don't have to go to all the weddings, but you do have to go to all the funerals. It's like a really big deal. So I think every month, these are not funerals of employees of companies. These are up there like older family members. Yes, yes, usually we have so many employees at our companies now. But I think we go to at least I don't know, four or five generals a month. I mean, a lot. It's a, it's a big deal. And we take time to do that. But, you know, we developed these relationships, right? I've seen people who are single, they get married.

1:00:34They have kids and then at the other end, people who become empty nesters or people who unfortunately, who do pass away. So we've seen the entire life cycle having been in this for 25 plus years. And it's kind of seeing the journey, the lifelong journeys of these people and seeing these families grow up. I mean, that's also one of the things that keeps us coming back. But anyway, I keep going back to people, going back to the business though, the metrics.

1:00:58I think we do like to see this capital efficiency, but we have no problems stepping on the gas. It just depends on the business, right? Kupong is a good example where, you know, they got to profitability, actually, or cash flow break even, but then really made a courageous decision to really step on the gas and build out the entire infrastructure. And that really cannot be done without serious amount of money. And so that was a billion dollar, first billion dollar check from South Bank and then they did another two billion.

1:01:24We have another company called Aviva Republic, another Korean company, FinTech Unicorn. They're, I think, approaching a billion or so in revenues. And, you know, that took some amount of capital. That took a pretty good amount of capital because in the early days, we were kind of losing money with every transaction, right? It was a Venmo of Korea. And every single time you did a transaction, it cost us 50 cents.

1:01:51Not great, gross margins. Yeah, as our volumes went up, we negotiated those rates down much, much, much lower. And then also then as we got bigger because the network affects some of the transactions, we had zero costs because you could just leave it in your toss account. That tosses the Venmo of Korea. So if you leave it in the account and you do money transfer within the network, it's zero cost. But if you transfer it back to a bank, then it costs us whatever we negotiate with the bank. But that is an example.

1:02:20of a deal that really did cost us a lot of money. But we were, again, this is a good example. In places like US and China, you would just raise a ton of money and say, hey, this is a great product market fit. Like, go for it. But they're like, we were trying to slow down the growth because we were going to drive ourselves out of business, right? We're this little venture fund. We can't keep funding this burn rate. So we actually did things like, oh, you know, why don't we charge you a transaction fee? After the first three, five or 10 transactions, we were charging.

1:02:49So it's like by charging people, we will slow down the growth. And so we did that, of course, and that helps subsidize the burn. It didn't slow down the growth that much, actually, but at least we got some money. So you have to do clever things. If there's a saying, creativity loves constraints.

1:03:12We try to constraint our companies in a way that forces them to think creatively about the product and about the business model so that you don't burn crazy amounts of money. Again, I have no problem stepping on the gas when I see something obviously good. But again, we try to do it within the bounds of some reasonable constraints. The number one rule for us is we have to be able to control our own destiny. And it's not just to protect the altos ROI. We're trying to protect the founders.

1:03:40Because these founders, they start their companies. And this is their life's mission, let's say we pick the right founder. This is a life's mission. The last thing I want to see happen is their life's mission blow up. And it will blow up if you keep running out of money. I want to see founders in control, not the investors. If the founder keeps running out of money, guess what? The founders no longer control. Some big investor comes in, they're calling all the shots.

1:04:06And before you know it, the founder could be gone. And then again, now I'm staring at a bunch of execs that I don't know, I don't have a relationship with and I'm not sure what to do with that. I like having relationships with the company. And I want to know who I'm working with. And so we're trying to protect the founders. We want them to be under control. And if they're burning too much money, they're going to lose control over their own companies. So we want to protect them and we want to protect our capital efficiency. We care about price per share appreciation.

1:04:35You could have this valuation keep going up, but you have so much dilution, your price per share is not going up at the same rate, right? Price per share, appreciation matters. Ironically, yes, valuation is actually not the thing to watch. It's, of course, you're never going to see price per share in a tech crunch article, but it is funny how people just anchored directly on that valuation. On this note, how I want to take us in a little bit of a investment fundamentals direction. So I think it's too easy to say, well, there's two types of investing, value investing and growth investing. It's obviously some spectrum. And I think you have, at least from the outside, mastered the art of identifying where and when to be on which places in that spectrum. And so earlier, you mentioned something like, well, with Roblox with our early investments, we paid something like 5X revenues on a valuation basis.

1:05:27I assume and I haven't looked at the numbers that it's much higher than that now. And so I also assume that at some point when you were investing in those multi-billion dollar valuation rounds that it was higher than 5x then, too. So when are you comfortable and how do you make decisions in fast growing tech companies around what investment multiples make sense? Yeah, that's a great question.

1:05:53We use these kind of rough metrics, whether it's 5X or 10X, when we don't know the business. But once we know the business and we know what the potential is, then we kind of know, hey, we could be monetizing more, but we chose not to for a whole variety of reasons. And so we have to factor that into the valuation equation. And so until you really get to know the business, you really don't know how to value it. So we have to use these dumb metrics.

1:06:22But then once we really get to know the business, right, then we feel like we are in a better position to value it than anybody else. And so, you know, I like to say like we're different than every other early stage VC because we never run out of money and we never run out of time. Thanks to our LPs, we could just keep investing out of across multiple funds. But we're also very different than any other later stage investor because that's where most of our dollars go these days, right, to later stage. But we're different because we don't chase somebody else's unicorn.

1:06:51We are going very deep into these companies, and I like to say I'm a very slow learner. So give me many years to get to know you and your business before I could even qualify myself to make that kind of a judgment call. You know, we kind of, you know, Buffett likes to talk about a circle of competence. We, our circle of competence is quite narrow. It's our own companies. Like, you know, we look at other people's companies try to learn, of course.

1:07:20But we're going to town going studying our own businesses and trying to figure out which of those businesses have potential and trying to understand how does it work. You know, when a company starts to work, that's a rare thing as you know, you know, we're all in the venture business. It's hard to find something that actually works. So when it gets, when something is working, that should just tell you, maybe you should be paying more attention. Like something is going on.

1:07:46Try to understand what the heck is going on. There are many, many explanations behind something that's working. It could be the market, it could be a competitive dynamic. The people are really special. It could be you have some secret sauce. Maybe you got lucky. Whatever it is, try to unpack it and try to understand the components of it and then try to understand how this machinery works. And as you understand the machinery, you start to understand what the potential is and how to evaluate.

1:08:12So, there's no easy formula, but that's kind of one way to think about it. Now, the interesting comment about value versus growth, right? Like, I give a lot of credit to Jack McDonald, who, you know, taught investing for 50 years, and he's no longer with us, but that's the same class that the IGSB guys teach at. We go back every year to teach that class, Buffett used to come every year. He always told us, hey, value and growth is the same thing as far as he was concerned.

1:08:42two sides of the same coin. That's what Buffett says. Two sides of the same coin. The way McDonald talked about it is, well, isn't growth just a component of value? Like, of course it is, right? Growth, if higher the growth, the higher the valuation, potentially, right? So it's just one of the many elements that we have to factor in to try to put a proper value valuation on the business.

1:09:05So that's kind of the way we've been thinking about it always for a long time. And of course, in these early stage venture deals, there are no metrics. It's too early, so early. So I just no longer even think about the venture deals as investments. I think about the venture portfolio as just the world's greatest discovery mechanism.

1:09:31try to learn about businesses, try to learn about people. And once in a while, we discover a very interesting opportunity. And then we'll develop that opportunity. And it's not about you discovered it, and you cut this lightning in a bottle, and then now you're rich. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It doesn't happen that way. You discovered the opportunity. Now you got the next 10 to 20 years to figure out what to do with it. And if you don't show up for the next 20 years, you're not going to get paid big.

1:09:56You know, maybe you'll get lucky and you can flip it to somebody because they're going to pay you a big forward valuation. But, you know, if you're not lucky and somebody is not going to pay you for all the future cash flows today, you have no choice but to just build it. You've got to do it yourself. Do it the old-fashioned way. Do it the hard way. Just build a damn company instead of trying to flip it to somebody else and get paid. That's what happened with Roblox. Right. Get paid for not doing it. Like, let's just do it.

1:10:20I remember when you told me this viewpoint, it was such a, like, I'd never thought of things this way before. But for me, so many light bulbs went off and really helped me evolve the way I think about investing over the past year. It's tied to what we were talking about earlier that the out years of compounding are where the huge lion's share, the value is. And so if you take the sort of, shall we say?

1:10:50traditional and normal VC approach of, you know, I'm looking for the markup, so I'm looking to get paid, et cetera. You know, I want growth, and I want to offload it. You know, that that's a pejorative way of saying it, but that's how a lot of these things, traditional venture companies go. You're missing out on the potential to go from roadblocks going from two and a half billion dollars to 68 billion dollars, and that's 90% of the value.

1:11:19Yeah. And, you know, the company like that again, we're not thinking about what's going to happen to the price in the next one or two years. We're thinking about what can we do with this company in the next five to 10 years, or 20 years? The best ones will keep going longer. You know, we always talk to, like to talk about Geico. I love the Geico story because that's a 70 year relationship between an investor and a company. It's like, well, that would be amazing to have a 70 year relationship. You know, I don't know. Some of these tech companies, they might have a shorter life, right? But, you know, you could have...

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1:13:31So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. The Geico story is the perfect transition to another topic I want to have you educate us on is you also said to me once, passing, missing, that's all in your head. That's just a construct. You can always invest in the buffet Geico story. Yep.

1:13:59It illustrates that so beautifully. Like, he bought, he sold, he bought part, then he bought the rest of it. You can always invest. Tell us more about that. Yeah. Well, this is the thing. If you've been around for as long as I have, right? You get to know these companies. Now, of course, we defined our circle of competence for all. So it's just our own portfolio.

1:14:20But just as an investor, we've all been doing public investing now for decades. And I've encouraged people to just do that. We have our 401K's structured in a way that we could individually manage it. And we want everybody to do that so that they get to practice, practice, practice, practice with this tiny little 401K, which is no longer that tiny by the way. Right. And now we have the benefit of decades of experience when we have serious money to manage on the public side. And so it's a fascinating fascinating journey, and this concept of you get to know these companies over the period of many years and many decades, right? And you get to see these teams. And once in a while, like whether it's a 2008 crisis or the .com crash, you have these kind of strange things happen in the external environment that gave you this amazing gift. And if you have a database, mental database of various companies that you know about, different models, different

1:15:17you know, teams that you could really get to know some of these public companies quite intimately. I've been quite impressed by meeting some folks on Twitter who really know their businesses and their public investors and they have no special access to those management teams like we do. And yet they really know their stuff.

1:15:39And like, wow, I've been very impressed. And some of the CEOs, we didn't invest in some of these companies, but I know these people. And I realized these people have never met the guy, but they know him. And it's like, they really do. They study him. I mean, because you could study these CEOs. They're on videos on YouTube. They're on podcasts. You could read to the quarterly earnings calls. And they're going really deep.

1:16:08And if you start to go really that deep and then you follow them for 10, 20 years, hey, you really do know. There's a guy Tom Russo who's a class and other GSB guys speaks at that same class. I think he's been investing for like 30 some years ever since he saw Buffett speak at the class in the 80s. And he follows some of these companies like Nestle for like decades. And I think I remember him talking about you know, meeting some factory manager in China like more than 20 years ago. And he does a factory tour. He's just always looking into those companies. It's the same company. He's still invested in it. But now that factory manager has become some bigwig executive in Switzerland, right? This is the Phil Fisher scuttle butt. Yeah, the scuttle butt just taken to an extreme. So you just get to know a bunch of companies, you know, and again, stick to the stuff that you know.

1:17:00Why speculate on stuff you have no business speculating on? Get to know a bunch of businesses and just realize, take some comfort in the fact that only a very small number of companies are truly special, so you don't have to get to know everybody. Maybe you do have to kiss some frogs to find a few princes, so you have to know a bunch of businesses good and bad so that you could recognize a great one when it's staring at you in the face.

1:17:27And again, if it's not so obviously great, then that's kind of easy. If it's not obviously great to you, then it's not great. What an easy thing, just pass. What does your flow chart look like in your brain on deciding if a business is truly special? Like, what is the mental walk? Is it first slice by sector and then look at a few key metrics? Is it...

1:17:52more people oriented. How do you even begin? If I were to tell you, hey, company A is really interesting. You should check it out. How do you validate if I'm right or not? Yeah, it's a good question. So sometimes it's really, really based on how special the company is, but it's also based on how does the market do the company? Because if I think that the market's misunderstanding of the company, then there's an opportunity for alpha, right? And so again, we talked about people that has to be a critical equation, you got to look at the financials, you got to look at the balance sheet. If it has too much debt, if some unforeseen event could kind of put the company over the edge, you know, I tend to be shy of it. But I'm not totally afraid of debt. If I think they have, you know, because sometimes you have the best opportunities in public markets with companies that have a pretty good amount of debt.

1:18:44because they could go to bankruptcy, right? But you have to use your judgment and say, okay, they have a good amount of debt. Everybody thinks it's going to go be K, but I think this company is not going to go bankrupt for the following reasons. And if you have a thesis that everybody thinks it's going to go bankrupt and you don't think it will, then that's a pretty, you have an opportunity to make an interesting bet, right? That has asymmetric upside. The classic example this I think I'll always think of now is, Buffett's Coca-Cola investment where the market then there was the new Coke disaster and the market thought oh my gosh I don't know the Coca-Cola bankrupt but like this is they've killed the Golden Goose and I don't know if this is how Buffett looked at it but you could go back and look at that in time and be like okay let's say Coca-Cola classic you know before it was classic is done

1:19:34They still have Diet Coke, which is the biggest soda in the world. So there's a huge margin of safety there that people were not appreciating. Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of my favorite examples was during the 2008 crisis, there's a little company called Select Comfort. Now it's called a sleep number. And I remember the Motley Fool was kind of touting the stock as this great stock, and it was growing like crazy, and then it completely cratered in the crisis. And a lot of people were saying that, well, they're going to go bankrupt, or maybe not bankrupt, but they were saying things like, well, no one's going to buy a $3,000-$4,000 mattress in the middle of a crisis. People say these kinds of things, which is just ludicrous.

1:20:29Really, seriously, nobody is going to buy this. Is it revenue is going to go from 600 million to zero overnight? Well, let's see what happens. You could look at the financial statements. You could talk to listen to the quarterly earnings. Well, yeah, of course, they're going to struggle. Of course, revenues are going to go down, but they sold quite a lot of mattresses actually during the crisis. Nobody goes to the shopping malls and traffic is a lot lighter.

1:20:58lo and behold they I think sold like 650 million dollars worth of mattresses during the right in the middle of the crisis. So like the world just doesn't end. You know, when bad things happened, very few things just go to zero overnight. So you just have to look at it and then the management team made a bunch of mistakes. They were doing a right in the middle of the SAP implementation, switch over in the ERP which is always...

1:21:24really painful. And it's in a fairly small company trying to do SAP. They probably overreached. I knew Intel was doing SAP implementation back a number of years ago. And oh, my God, that was such a nightmare implementation. And they spent like hundreds of millions of dollars. And it was just like one of those black holes. So you could imagine a little company like Silicon for trying to do it. And yeah, they kind of wasted up.

1:21:52few tens of millions of dollars and they got in over their heads and things were getting a little bit tight around them. They had all these lease obligations and they did have some debt again but this is what we had to like apply the judgment of like well they have debt but what are the chances that the lenders are going to come in and seize control?

1:22:13Right I had to think about that now you could imagine in the 2008 crisis now I have my you know that's so this is a little you know fun Detour on the public investing, right, but like look at the altos portfolio during the 2008 2009 crisis You know we had some companies struggling of course, and there was no prospects of raising more equity, so we had to rely on some debt and the bankers were getting awfully nervous, right? And I remember literally sitting across the conference room table with one of the bankers, and they were giving us a really hard time about one of our companies, you know, and we stopped making payments, and we wanted to kind of renegotiate a few things like, you gotta give us a little more time. You know, of course, you know, the bankers hold all the cards, they could like, you know, seize control. And I literally, I think I pulled out the keys. It's like a mythical keys out of my pocket. It's like, here it is. Take the keys.

1:23:04Like, good luck. And as soon as it's like, just take over. It's like, look, if you don't want to work with us, just take the keys. It's yours. And it's like, nobody's actually pulled out keys. It's like, you're the keys. Nor do I want to operate this business. Exactly, exactly. I really don't want those keys. It's like, what can you do with this? It's like, well, if you want us to involve, I think we might be able to do.

1:23:31XYZ, but they have to work with us. We knew that companies, of course, a lot of companies are going through trouble, but there are a lot of debt guys who don't necessarily want to take over the keys. There are some guys who do, by the way. We've had the unfortunate experience dealing with some folks who are the lone-to-own guys.

1:23:53That's the whole strategy. They're on the keys. That's the strategy. They take the debt position, but they're really control guys. They're more like private equity guys, but they happen to be on the debt side. They're looking for the first opportunities to take over. That's a different kind of a debt provider that you have to be careful with, because they will take snatch those keys. They will pry those keys out of your little clenched fingers. You have to know who you're dealing with. For most part, most debt guys you can work with.

1:24:23you know, good folks and they, you know, as long as you pay them back, they're fine. Eventually, we'll pay them back. We've, I think we've defaulted on very, very few loans in our entire history. I'm trying to think, like, when's the last time we ever defaulted? I can't, I really, to be honest, can't.

1:24:41tell you when we default that there's going to be some debt guy who's listening to this podcast going to say, oh, you stuck me with this thing once. And I have no idea what it was. Maybe it was 20 some years ago who knows. But we try, we try not to. We honor all our commitments.

1:24:55I do want to ask that question a little bit of a different way and I think I asked you on a relative basis who we talked a lot about like when could there be attractive investing or windows like buying opportunities but what about like on an absolute basis? I mean what makes a company one of this incredibly rare 1% or less that are truly special businesses? So I voted an interesting blog post last year kind of answering this question because people ask me this kind of a thing a lot, like what gives you conviction in a business at the end of the day? To do these kind of crazy things where you're buying more, instead of cashing out a little bit, you're buying more shares when you're up. So like what gives you that crazy conviction? And so I wrote that blog post called How Do You Know? And they're just like some really basic rules of thumb. First rule is like, this is like kindergarten, right? This is business 101. First rule is, well, does the business make money?

1:25:52Because if the company, again, we talked about the founders, trying to protect the founders, make sure that they stay in control. If the company keeps running out of money and they have to keep raising more and more, and again, maybe in a faulty environment, they could keep raising more and more at higher prices, and they're going to be fine. But what if the music stops? What happens? And so we want to make sure that we are within shouting distance of break even, even if we're not generating lots of cash, let's say, that we know the path to survival.

1:26:21Right, we know what belts we could tighten to make sure that we don't just go off the cliff. So we want to make sure there's a business generate cash or we see the path to profitability or cash roll break even. So that's one. Now, second rule, because obviously that's such a basic thing. It's like, well, no duh, right? That's the whole purpose of starting a company so you could make some money. Now, second rule is, of course, it's not good enough to just make a lot of money.

1:26:49If you make a lot of money, as Bezos says, your margin is my opportunity, right? So you have to have something more. So the second thing is what Buffet calls a moat. You have to have something that is protectable. And again, the deeper you get into a business, the more you realize whether or not there's a moat and whether or not there's not a moat, right? And again, sometimes it's not totally obvious. And the mode can come in many different ways. Obviously, network effects is one of those things. You could have patents, you could have know how. And I think of all the things that I think about, I mean, network effects certainly are very powerful, but I think it's really the know how there's so much discovery that happens, right? And as we figure things out along the way, if we think that we have figured out some things that are not obvious to the outside world, those are the companies that are very interesting to me.

1:27:42It's like, I think we uncovered some secrets that other people don't know about. And this is the thing that always puzzles me when people say, oh, we're killing it. We're doing so well, you know, pounding the chest. It's like, you know, something, that's not the way I've seen it. I think people who kind of uncovered some really interesting secrets, they want to keep it a secret. They're not blasting to the rest of the world, the thing that they figured out. They're keeping it nice and hush, and they're kind of working at it.

1:28:10and working at it and working at it. But it's really the mode, and it comes in again, many, many different ways. But if we feel like we've figured something is out that is protectable, that is not replicable, maybe in some ways the best mode is maybe not a secret. You could tell your competitor exactly what you're doing. You guys talk about counter positioning, things like that, right? That's a classic example. You could tell the competitor exactly what you're doing, and they're still not going to replicate, right?

1:28:38Because they can't or they don't want to that's just not their model Maybe that's even better. I remember one of our companies meeting Amazon and they got very curious and they want to come in and and you know with most companies you have to be super super careful because they're gonna come in and maybe act like they're going to buy you. And then they come back and say, you know, we've set the change our mind. And then they release their own product. This, this, this used to happen with Microsoft. Amazon has done this now a number of times. I think some other larger companies may do it. And who knows? It may not be with really bad intent. Maybe they had already a project underway. Anyway, and they were curious about it. And they really wanted

1:29:22thought you would be a part of it, but they decided that you don't have anything special. They just decided to go down their own path. But with big players, sometimes you have to be careful about what you disclose. But there are other companies I will tell you that have met those kinds of companies like a big scary Amazon or whatever. And we said, oh yeah, I have no problems. You could tell them exactly what we're doing. We could tell them everything about what we're doing. We would have no worries whatsoever.

1:29:48So it depends on the secret. It depends on what you're doing. Some things you could tell people, we tell people exactly what we do in terms of the crossover investing and the SPVs, the RIA, the structure of our deals. I've been very open with it, and then people want to do it.

1:30:06I think that's a good thing, because I think it supports more entrepreneurs. We don't worry about them competing against us, because how many people are going to manage, though, whatever, the multiple billions of dollars under management with zero management fees. We have a lot of our... All of our SPVs are zero management fees. If you want to charge zero management fees, I think that's good for the world. Go for it.

1:30:24No one seems to want to copy me. I've had so many conversations with good friends of mine who are in the hedge fund business. And then they go off and they want to do their own hedge fund. And I've had so many of these conversations over the years. And it's just like...

1:30:40I cannot believe people do not copy the BPL partnership structure. I think, because I don't manage a public fund, right? But it's like, hey, I think I think that's a fantastic structure. You should do that. You know, Moniche provides doing it and Guy Spears doing it. You know, a couple of guys are doing it, but not that many. It's like, I don't know why you don't do it. It's such a great thing. It's a win-win. You charge 25% Kerry after a 6% hurdle. Like you should do that. And no management fees. Yeah. And they all know about Buffet and they know about that. And then they look at me like I'm like in some idiot.

1:31:09Like, like, what the heck are you talking about? Like, why would I give up the fees? Right. If I have a $5 billion fund and I have a guaranteed 2% fee every year, you know, yeah, yeah. It takes a certain amount of ideological conviction, not even faith in your own abilities because I think a lot of people say I know I'm an outperforming the market and many do, but it is, you truly have to be ideological about it in order to turn down the easy, standard default path to those fees.

1:31:39Yeah. So going back to your original question, Ben, first two. So make money, have a moat number three. Now this is where it starts to get into very idiosyncratic portfolio construction because the first two you want in every special top one percent kind of a business, right? But the third one is more narrowing your circle of competence and more nearing what you choose to do with your life as an investor, just do something that personally fits you.

1:32:08And that's the third is really about the relationship. The relationship is all about people. And again, we like to go big on companies where we feel like we have a great relationship. And if we don't have a relationship with the company in a very deep way, then we're like any other investor. We're like an outsider looking in. Now, I did say that some of these public investors are very impressive in that they are not like outsiders that I've ever known. They really go deep into those companies.

1:32:38But again, we like to have a special relationship. If we don't, then we get very nervous holding on to a massive concentrated position in a company where we're just like any other investor and outsider looking in. We have no proprietary knowledge. At some point, of course, we had some proprietary knowledge in helping build some of these companies, but that knowledge decays over time.

1:33:02and then we become like any other investor. And so maybe we should just start to distribute our shares or sell our shares or whatever we should get out at some point. And we all part ways as friends, you know, if the founder or the company found their new best friends, because now it's fidelity or T-road price or somebody else, we're no longer getting the updates. And again, it's tricky. Like, we're kind of new into this whole public investing realm. The relationship is very important to me personally.

1:33:30And I think it does give us some advantages of insight. And after a while, it just becomes a personal decision. I think of some of these businesses as really like a family business. You know, if you had a family business and it takes care of your family and generations potentially, some of these family businesses go on for literally generations. If your family business happens to do well, you and generations of your family will do quite well. And if it fails, than your family fails. And so you better make it work. And there's nothing wrong with writing on the co-tails of a great family business. And there's nothing to say that you deserve something you don't deserve, right? If the business doesn't do well, you don't deserve to do well. And so I kind of start to have an maybe irrational attachment to certain businesses, well, say, you know something.

1:34:26It's special to me and I'm not going to part with it, sort of like what Buffett says. No matter what, he's kind of irrational. He just won't sell any business. He might ride certain businesses down to zero, like with the Berkshire textile mills and so on. So I'm okay doing that. So I'm kind of perfectly happy holding on to the shares if I ever need capital. So here's another thing that I used to have kind of a more difficult time selling certain shares just because I kind of don't see the dollar value coming in. I see dollar value times 10. It's like, you have the word of a curse. Right. Like I have a curse. Right. So and I just give my wife a hard time. It's like, do you realize that this house that we're building is actually costing us its money instead of just other money? Because I see the real value. And it's like, and I used to hate parting with it. But now I've come to a realization that, you know, something that's what it's there for.

1:35:19The capital we work hard to build this capital and then we want to return this capital to our LPs that are funding educational institutions hospitals, you know homeless shelters all kinds of great causes and then we use it for our personal needs to build a house to take care of somebody's medical needs educational needs when you need the money It doesn't matter if it's the stocks gonna go up another 10X or a hundred X or whatever who cares you need the money That's what it's there for. You sell the stock, you pay all your taxes, and you should use that money, and you should be very grateful that you have access to this capital. But if you don't need it, why are you dancing in and out of a stock and paying all these taxes? Just why don't you just leave it alone? Because that's one of the things that we've learned in investing these public stocks for over all these decades, and we've tried different strategies.

1:36:08And, you know, I think we, again, we wanted to practice before we got better. As we practice, I tended to be the bigger trader. I think my partners tend to be just, eh, just leave it alone. The leave it alone strategy works pretty well. You know, I've seen, you know, we all kind of go up and down kind of together. And there's, of course, a lot of beta driving all the portfolios and then there's some alpha. And we have different strategies. And so we're all kind of within dancing.

1:36:36shadowing the sense of each other, but I've seen the numbers kind of go up and down over the years and it's very fascinating to see the different personalities and different strategies manifest itself. Some are more concentrated, some are more intact, some are more in value, and I think that kind of the thing that works fairly well is kind of stick to what you know, stick to good people, good businesses, and it's not that hard, and it does not take up much of our mental bandwidth. We kind of do it in our sleep. Our primary job is to you know, invest in the auto's funds, but I'm glad we did that sidewalk so that we kind of have the experience and the conviction now that we have some serious amount of stocks to deal with. I feel perfectly comfortable leaving a bunch of things alone and when I need the money, I might sell it or we start to transfer it to various charitable causes and it's great because we get to put all of the pre-tax money to work rather than having to put it after taxes.

1:37:33It always surprises me that more VCs aren't active public market investors on the side, like you say. It feels like if you're not doing it, you're just missing out on opportunities to practice. Well, that's the thing. And I realized that more than 20 years ago. I mean, many, many years, because I got my first venture job back in 90. So this is 30 years ago. And I knew a lot of VCs and over the years following them. And so many...

1:37:58you know, VCs have made a lot of money. And a lot of them, it was very interesting. They would turn their money over to some wealth manager, to some other professional investors. And this is again, 30 some years ago, I was very young. I didn't know anything, right? But I always thought it's like, well, that seems kind of strange. Like I thought, I thought you were the professional. Aren't you a money manager? So if you're the money manager, why are you turning it over to some other money manager? Like that, I didn't quite understand.

1:38:27And of course, they would have the barbell strategy and say, well, the venture is my risk part of the portfolio. And I'll have this other thing, then tax-free municipal bonds or whatever. And there's some truth to that. Of course, you should always have some amount of liquidity and amount of cash that again, you are protected on the downside and make sure that you never risk your family capital. There's a certain amount that you have to set aside. But after that, The idea that you should turn it over to some other professional when you are the professional and you should try to be the best professional possible. And whether you're public or private, it doesn't matter. It's just fundamentals investing. And you should try to be the best investor possible. That's kind of what we want it to be, right? From almost from day one, that's why the public part of it, even though it was tiny dollars. And so I'm glad we had a chance to practice doing that for all those years because I, you know, what I wanted to test out.

1:39:25was, okay, after like 27 years, if I really suck as a public investor, then I'll be like every other VC. Hopefully, I'll make some money and I'll turn it over to the real professionals to manage my public portfolio. And if I got a chance to practice for 20 years and I decided that, you know, actually, I'm actually okay with this, then it's like, okay, now I've had a lot of practice. I'll just kind of do it, continue to do it on my own, right? And it kind of worked out that way. It's like, oh, yeah, we feel perfectly comfortable doing it all on our own.

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1:40:46So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. Okay, so we promised at the beginning of the episode that we would get into the whole Alta story. I don't know that we have enough time. I think we're going to have to do another episode. So maybe rather than, and it is amazing coming out of GSB and the Jack McDonald investments class, but maybe rather than that, We can't let you go without talking Twitter. Yeah, so I pulled some stats here how as of February you had tweeted 1,400 times ever and I don't think that's because you were like late to Twitter I think you just like didn't didn't tweet a lot But in the last three months you've tweeted 3,000 times and you've 7x to your following So what's going on? What was there intentional strategic shift? Did you just wake up and go oh this is fun? What's going on?

1:41:44Yeah, it's a good question. So Twitter, you know, I actually uninstalled the app from all my devices for a number of years. And I did that with Facebook too. And then I got back into Facebook and I think I never really quite understood Twitter. I never quite got into it. And I think I'm understanding it better now. I'm still kind of a novice because I got back into it recently. The reason I started to lurking on Twitter more recently was purely because we had some of these IPOs coming up.

1:42:14And I wanted to see what the sentiment was, and there were some analysis that was happening. People were posting interesting, interesting analysis and thoughts on these IPOs. And so that's why I started to re-engage on Twitter just at least to follow. And then of course, as I was starting to read, I got into some conversations with folks, right?

1:42:37And I thought the analysis on Twitter was way better than, you know, a lot of these reporters, you know, like those articles could be written by a machine, right? The AI might have done a better job. In many cases, even then equity research analysts. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's true. So, yeah, they just misunderstood the business, right? But there's some people who did understand the business and I was kind of impressed. I was like, wow, these guys kind of did their homework and they're quite insightful. And like, how did they even get these insights? I, you know, I want to just kind of engage is like, hey, like, how did you figure this out or that out? So anyway, I got into these conversations and then once you get into these conversations, I realize, well, the way I'm using it, I don't know if I'm still using Twitter properly or not, but the way I'm using it now is it's just that it's a conversational platform. It's not a PR broadcast platform. I think I was kind of using it as broadcast, but some use out there. If I put something on Facebook and LinkedIn, I also put

1:43:33used to post it on Twitter. And then I just completely got off of it for a while. But now I just don't post very much on Twitter. That's kind of anything related to news or altos or whatever. I just kind of engage in conversation and, you know, when I have a chance to look at the feed, if there's some interesting comments, I'll just kind of chime in and then people respond. And when they respond, and I kind of feel like I should respond, you get those notifications. And so that's kind of what happened. And as I get, again, as I started to engage in Twitter, then I think some various things triggered in my mind and I started to write something and I realized, oh, you know, this thread concept wasn't a big thing. I think early days of Twitter, but I saw all these people doing threads. It's like, oh, how does that work? And I remember like Saturday morning, I posted something about Arthur Rock. Something triggered my memory. It's like, you know, Arthur Rock is so amazing. And people, these young VCs, they don't even know who the heck he is. And I remember this old Mike Mord's quote saying,

1:44:30And I think I put that in the thread. It was some amazing more. Moritz is so eloquent with his wording. And he said like VCs, you know, when you got a call from Arthur Bock, it was like the white smoke coming from the Vatican chimney. I think that's what it was. He'll say stuff that you're so eloquent. I could never imagine. So anyways, I remember like Moritz saying like it was like that. It was like he was so legendary. And so I just had one little tweet about Arthur Rock saying that yeah, you should remember Arthur Rock and then you know that one tweet then leads to another thought and then another thought and another thought and then I then had this little tweet stream going so I did a whole bunch of tweets

1:45:13Like, replying to myself and I thought some people who are like lurking following me on Twitter make sure I don't say anything dumb. They're saying it's like, wow, you know, Ho is really funny because he just tweets and he just replying to himself. He's like a conversation with himself because that's what it is, right? It's like so I just kept. So then that became a tweet storm.

1:45:34which then I think got a whole bunch of impressions, like over 700,000 impressions or whatever. It's like, okay, well, and then that do a whole bunch of followers. So now I kind of, I've done it where I have this stream of consciousness, tweet storms, and then I have these conversations. And that's kind of what I've been using Twitter for. And I think some of the most valuable things though on Twitter is just meeting certain people for the first time that are quite interesting or impressive and having these offline conversations.

1:46:02through either DMs or Zoom calls. In one particular case, I actually met the person in person as we are coming out of COVID. And so there are some very thoughtful people out there. And many of them are individual. They're not institutional guys. They're just individual investors. And they're quite impressive actually. And I think as an individual investor, you have a lot of advantages over institutional investors.

1:46:30You could be extremely concentrated. You could be extremely long-term oriented. You could stomach a lot of volatility. If you could handle your own emotions, you cannot handle that kind of volatility because I could put you out of business if you're an institutional manager. There are a lot of individuals who approach it the way I would approach it, the way that I have been approaching it. It's been interesting to exchange some ideas and learnings. I would learn more from those guys than I would learn from any VC or any institutional fund manager. Because if I talk to an institutional fund manager, again, their institutional imperative is to protect the fund management business, not to get the best returns. And if you're an individual just investing for yourself, China, provide for your family, all you care about is the returns. I'd like to talk to those people who care about only generating great returns. Well, that's probably a great

1:47:28great place to leave it. Looking forward to following you a lot more on Twitter and hopefully more great stuff for years to come, but it's been, I think a gift to us all to get your wisdom over the last several months. Yeah. Well, hey, great to have you beyond this podcast with you guys. I've been looking forward to it. I know we talked about it last year and finally got around to doing it. So it's been fun. Such a blast. We'll link in the show notes for everybody. Literally everybody go follow ho on Twitter.

1:47:56He's a gift to the internet. Any carveouts, anything else you want to shout out before we wrap here? Yeah, well, you know, we didn't really talk about the whole history of altos, but Larry Morse, I should give him a shout out because I think he's such a special guy. And he, I don't know if he would be in business without him. I mean, he made a commitment to our fund in, I think, 2003. And we did not close that fund until 2005.

1:48:25So he waited. He honored his commitment for two years. It took us that long. We actually started fundraising in 2001. So it took us two years to convince him. And then he had to wait another two years to raise our first institutional fund in 2005. And that was exceedingly difficult because, again, this is coming out of the fallout of the.com crash. You know, when we thought we were going to make all this money and just all blew up. And so you had to have some people who just really bet on us as people.

1:48:55And this is the thing that I've learned over time is that, you know, whatever people decide, they kind of decide for their own personal reasons. It's not a purely irrational decision. There are a lot of people who backed us before we had a track record for whatever reason. Why we're always grateful to them. They backed us when we had no track record or elected joke. Maybe they backed us when we had a bad track record. And then there are other people who We'll look at our track record and might say, well, you got lucky with this or that, you know? And so they might still not invest in us. And so there are people who will pass on us when we have a great track record. And they will people, there are people who will back us when we have no track record or maybe a bad track record. So you just have to find your people, find the people who believe in you, who will back you no matter what.

1:49:46And people will take the data and make whatever the heck decision they want to make. And no longer bothers me at all if people are doubting our approach or rejecting us for whatever reason. Because there are plenty of people who think Warren Buffett can't cut it or is a fraud or is lucky or whatever. And it doesn't matter if you have a 55-year track record.

1:50:12there are going to be always doubters. So the doubters just don't bother me at all anymore. I love it. Thank you, Ho. Thanks, Ho. All right. Thanks, guys. Well, with that listeners, thanks so much for listening. You should join us in the Slack. We're going to probably be discussing this episode, acquire.fm slash Slack. And with that listeners, we will see you next time. Let's see you next time.