Alexa Binns 00:11
Welcome to swimming with super clusters. This is a special crossover episode with David Joe. That’s Cup of Joe. You may be reading what he’s putting out online. He’s the founding voice behind super clusters, the emerging LP podcast, an active angel investor and LP investor advisor to family offices on all things venture. And we’re talking today about how new allocators can think like seasoned ones, and what makes a fund truly stand out. Thanks, David.

You’ve always had this approach of just an immense curiosity when it comes to the world of being an allocator, specifically in venture capital, where did that interest come from? And why did you like, you know, we can all get curious from a lot of different places, but what made you really dig deep on this?

David Zhou 03:49
AWS man, this is a therapy session. That’s a good question.

David Zhou 03:56
It’s born from a couple of things where I really enjoyed being the odd one out in grade school, and which was counter intuitive to most, because people usually want to hang out with the cool kids. They want to do what everyone else does, but, and this is something I’ve since used to describe my pursuits, but it’s been like five years or so in the making. That terminology, which is intellectual, promiscuosity, promiscuity, and I just, I like new things a lot. I like to learn things all the time. And for people who want to stay cool and like, you know trends as short as trends are. Trends last a pretty damn long time, at least in the grade school version. So when you know Pokemon came to be, when some of these other things can be, everyone was talking about those things like, it’s fun for the first week, but after the first week, I need to, I need to learn about something else, and so I’ve always pursued those things. The flip side of this is. I apologize, mom and dad, that with an Asian upbringing, my parents wanted me to be doctor, lawyer, engineer, which was the safe, traditional path that they would be proud of. But I was like, Oh, my God, everyone’s doing that, all my peers are doing that show. Goes to show that every all my peers are smarter than I am,

It’s really intimidating to be a venture capitalist, but then the next is like investing in and identifying new talent in venture capital. So how did you approach that?

David Zhou 08:20
Let’s see, we always say in venture capital, and it’s true for investing in emerging managers as well, which is, we invest in the people. And I strongly believe people matter more than anything else. I like when I’m investing in say whether it’s founders and or fund managers, I asked like I expect them that this is the, the last career they’re ever gonna have, which is there is no plan B. It is a bit kind of like as a human being, probably shouldn’t always have a plan B, but I’m kind of looking for people who spike in an area, and part of the areas they one of the areas in which they spike in is this is I’ve been put on this earth to do so, and I’m never going to give up and all that. And there are different ways to underwrite that, per se, right? And a lot of my thoughts are not original. They’re remixes of others. There I’ve learned from people smarter than me, one of my professors back in college, who was the kindest professor that I had, or one of the kindest, one of two of the kindest professors that I had, one of her favorite questions was, and she, at one point in her career, was the chief AR HR officer at Clorox. Steve Jobs really wanted to hire her and tried to poach her from Clorox. And she’s like, I don’t like Apple’s culture. I’m good. And so Steve actually spent a lot of time, like, being advised by her on how to hire people. And one of her favorite questions that she’s asked, which sometimes I realize, like as I’m saying, these questions, I guess I can’t ask them anymore, especially with such a large platform like swimming with allocators, which is, what did you do in your last job titles that no one else with that job title has ever done? And you kind of look for entrepreneurs. Ideal spirit before they’ve even started their business, be it a firm or a startup. And you kind of look at how people react. And one of the things that I really, really loved, that I learned from someone in the intelligence industry was you really look at micro expressions. And so I spend a lot of time looking at how people express themselves, proposing questions that they might disagree with, and seeing how they react to those things. And those are small things that give you tells on people that the traditional like, let me go through a checklist of questions of, what’s your strategy? What kind of founders do you invest in? They don’t really check off, like one thing I look at, and I’ve written about this a while back, but I look at people who have a really good sense of memory recall. I think some of the best founders or fund managers out there, they’re able to pull experiences, anecdotes and quotes from all walks of life, but specifically so outside of the world in which they live in because they borrow lessons and advice from other areas as well. Even better if those interests are in those but sometimes they just like, are fervent readers, and they read a lot of things, and they’re like, oh, on page 286, of the Lean Startup, there’s this line, and I love that line. I’m like, holy Frick. Like, okay, and part of that why that matters is, let’s just put it in the context of fund managers. We live in an industry where advice is really cheap, and everyone gives advice left and right, some less intentional than others. So let’s exclude the fact that whether a founder takes the piece of advice that a VC is giving or not, but sometimes the best advice is for folks outside of your industry. That’s some of the best lessons you can learn from outside of that. And if a fund manager has good memory recall, they can be like, hey, there’s an analogy here that you might be able to apply. It’s a tool in your tool kit. You don’t have to use it. Take it with a grain of salt, but take it as inspiration. And I feel like that often sets up founders with the best set of tools in their tool kit in order to go further. But that’s just like one example among many. Ernest, I don’t answer your

Alexa Binns 12:11
If you’re one of your biggest mentors, is a superstar HR guru where you fall on qualitative versus quantitative, like the Christo Vue versus the Jamie Rhodes. Like, are we indexing as allocators, or are we head hunting?

David Zhou 12:33
I had this thing that I’m forgetting who first taught me this. I apologize, it’s not original, but I’m forgetting the attribution here. But this is back in the days of like 2020, and 2021, where SPV is happening left and right, and every single week we saw an SPV on Angel List, or like at the time when it was still around, and all these other platforms now. So know one of your sponsors for your podcast, sidecar, love the team over there, so shout out to sidecar. I don’t know if they’re the sponsor for this episode. I have no freaking idea, but I want to give them a shout anyway. But there were like, tons of SPVs. This is what we do. We have to embed the commercials here anyway.

Earnest Sweat 13:16
Keep going. There are so

David Zhou 13:20
many SPV is being thrown left and right, and right. And a person told me it’s like there are two kinds of SPV syndicate leads. There are the taste makers, and then there are the marketers. The marketers are the folks who pitch things twice a week, three times a week, and like, every single deal is the hottest deal they got into right. And every year they do about anywhere between 100-150 deals. Who knows if they will close, but they do, like a lot of deals. And you ask yourself, Are there really 100 150 great companies per year? Probably not. And also, admittedly, in a time when everything looks very interesting, one of my good friends gave me this piece of advice, which I really like. I’m not going to call him out, because I think he’s out, because I think he likes to stay under the radar. But the most interesting time, or frankly, like, you know, the hardest time to be investing, is when you don’t know what the risk is. And in 2020, and 2021, we couldn’t measure the risk. Now it’s actually a really good time to be investing, because we know there’s geopolitical risk, there’s currency risk, there’s, you know, downstream capital risk, we can define the risks, but if you cannot define the risk, in that era, it’s actually a really dangerous time to be investing. So all that to say there are all these marketers, 100 150 companies, and also on ANGEL F and all these platforms, like these syndicates, are cannibalistic to each other. But on the flip side, there are taste makers, and these are folks who are gonna share a deal with you. I don’t have a schedule of how often I’m gonna share it with you, but when I do share it with you, I’m investing, and I’m investing a good proportion of my personal capital myself. But B, there’s something I really do believe in. And they send you a deal maybe once a quarter, once every half year, but they write a really good memo on them, so a lot. Like, going back to your earlier question, which is data versus like people and, you know, potentially diversification versus concentration, I’m a big believer that I’m forgetting the attribution to this quote, but if you torture data long enough, it’ll eventually lie to

Speaker 1 15:20
you.
So the question for everyone in any function, in any position of leadership, in anything is, can you identify real signals or and how can you display signals like, what, from an allocators perspective, like, how do you the job is much harder than you know. When folks were like, this job is hard, which it was, but there were only 100 seed funds.

David Zhou 19:44
I, I completely agree. I feel more comfortable saying this because initially, this person who’s also been on your podcast had told me this in confidence, and then he said it in a fairly recent episode. I won’t spoil it. The name, but this is going to be an Easter egg for someone to go dig down for both, you know, something with allocators as well as super clusters. But one of the guests that we’ve, we’ve both had on where he said he and he started investing the early 2000s in managers. And there was a world where he just took his 12 favorite funds and he had just invested in half of them, and they did very, very well for him. And that was like the world in the early 2000s even more so if you were investing in a venture in the 9990s right? We now live in a world I don’t know. There are a lot of platforms outside 4000. I’ve seen the number 6000. I’ve talked to another allocator who’s been doing this for 30 years, and he’s like, I have 60,000 venture firms in my database. I’m like, holy freak. I didn’t know there’s 60,000 venture firms in your database. All that to say is, there are a lot of venture firms out there. There’s a lot more noise. Going back to your question, earnest, and the question is, what does signal look like? The truth is, no one does, and we can all have our opinions, and we make decisions that make us feel good based on those opinions. But the truth is, what do you personally believe in? And I’m also a believer that venture is one of the few industries where you can change the outcome of your investments. There are many worlds where you can invest in like an above average founder, and the founder themselves can do everything right, and the company can still fail. But as an investor, if you can open enough doors, if you can increase the surface area for serendipity to stick for them, it’s still up to them to go build a company. But if you can do that, they have a much better chance of out performing. And when it comes to the world of Alexa, going back to your earlier question, I think you were trying to go in this direction of diversification versus concentration, because you can help the outcome of your investments. And Albert, from level ventures also had said, like, he looks for non redundant knowledge networks. He looks for a non redundant kind of network period. You really do have to have different kinds of networks. If you have everyone fighting over the same like they all have the number of the sweet C suite person at Salesforce, or snowflake, or whatever it is, like it’s all the same at some point. But if you really do have one, you can use it within your power to actually help influence the outcome of the company. And so in the world of signals, the truth is, if I were being completely honest here, I don’t know if I can identify signals half the time. I don’t know if investors can. Allocators can also identify signal half the time, but we can help create signal

Alexa Binns 22:32
from the GP perspective. How? How can they stand out? Like we’re sort of talking about what we can measure, yeah, but, but what should they be putting out there?

David Zhou 22:45
First of all, I will caveat. I’m Asian, and I’m too even like and what that means is I will look like this until I turn 70 and I turn 71 I will look like I’m 120 but that also does not discount that I’m young, and I haven’t been in this industry for that long. I’ve been lucky enough to learn from really, really smart people, and I’ve been able to form my own opinions from learning from these really smart people. But that does not discount the fact that I’m young, I’m inexperienced, and I have a long way ahead of me. So I just want to caveat with that before I even answer your question, Alexa, which is a really good question, how do managers stand out? I can speak for myself. I don’t want to put words in our peers’ mouths. But if you are curious about how managers can stand up, just listen to every single swimming with allocators episode, because there’s a good proportion of managers that I mean, sorry, of allocators that really just share. This is exactly what I’m looking for. I’ll give you an example, one of your episodes with Eric simple at simple farms, family office, he literally spells out word for word. These are the four things I’m looking for. And so all that to say, everyone has their own thing. So this is what I look for. I look for folks that I mentioned earlier. This is going to be the last career ever. And I need to really believe that there is no plan B. Eventually, you know, four years, five years down the road, 10 years down the road, shit might happen. I get it right. World changes, black swan events. I get it. But at the moment, I must really, really believe that this is the last career I will ever have, and that’s gonna take a couple of conversations. I am not smart enough to detect that in one conversation, but I will say, out of say, 10 funds I meet with, anywhere between six to seven funds are just like, I don’t feel like they’re in it to win it. And you just hear about how they’re talking about some things. Well, let’s take spin outs for example. Right? You have spin outs like, I’m doing this new fund. It’s going to be a $150 million fund. And great. And then you’re like, Well, why are you doing this? Why did, why did you leave your last firm and for the purpose of this conversation? And I hope, if we’re going to be in the same boat for a very long time, I hope we can stay honest. And I like anything you tell me, I will not tell anyone else. I. Yeah, but let’s, let’s shoot for radical transparency in this conversation. And more often than I say yeah, of course, like, no one’s gonna say no to that, per se, right?

Earnest Sweat 32:31
Now we’re going to take a quick break to speak with our

Alexa Binns 32:34
sponsor on the show today. We have our seller partner and industry expert Shane Gowdy. He’s the leader of Sid Lee’s venture funds practice. And if you get value from this podcast, we have Shane and the Sidley team to thank for it. They make these recordings possible. We are looking forward to hearing from you, Shane, for the GPS listening. When is a good time to lawyer up? You know, how many funds, what assets under management? Does it actually become necessary?

Shane Goudey 33:00
Yeah, it’s a great question. The answer is it differs, it differs, right? You know, if I think about the kind of the natural pushes and pulls of, say, an emerging manager, right? Because the question gets answered differently for where you are, if you’re a brand new firm that’s going to raise a small bit of capital, and really the backers are going to be probably five to 10 people that, you know, you’re not going to hire a firm like a Sidley to do that fund. The economies of scale just don’t work out for that. But the minute you start to bring on sophisticated family, even just family office money or a big, strategic, high net worth investor who’s going to put a lot of money on the table and wants to negotiate the deal and take a stake in your GPS and your management companies as part of their like the minute you start to get to the higher order types of let alone when you get to big institutions who have their own machinery and SWAT teams of lawyers Who are going to come after your fundraising. So I think it’s just where you are in space and time is a reflection of a lot of it. But I also think that for you to ease yourself along your own journey, you have to have people hand in hand with you. A, believe in you and what you’re doing, and B, know what in the hell they’re doing. And so, you know, fund in a box, you know, whether it’s, you know, sidecar or angel list or charter or you name other Juniper square or other really great service providers that have productization of a small, much smaller market. I think that’s fine for some. I, of course, I’m incredibly biased, so I would say, I think if you’re going to raise a fund that’s 10 million or more, and you’re approaching some high net worth individuals or in family offices and institutions, those are the times when you can really have to at least interview Some law firms and and see what makes sense, and not just law firms, but law firms who. Can really be price conscious for you, because not everybody is. For a lot of them, it’s just a transaction. It’s not a partnership or a relationship. And, you know, I’ve just seen too often it be the case. There’s just really gun shy emerging managers who are just super nervous about hiring a law firm because of the cost, and they see the billable rates and then, but you got to have a law firm is willing to work with you on, you know, rate reduction and delay and collection of fees, and wants to work with you, not just on the fund. We want to do your deals, and we want to do your employment, work and credit finance. And you know anything. You know, any diligence that you’re doing on your investment that involves IP work, or if you’ve got litigation, or whatever it is, I think you want to choose somebody who can do it all and be smart about it, but, but press on cost. And so I just think there’s an inflection point where it makes sense for an emerging manager. When you’re going from fund one to fund two, and don’t have a law firm like us, you have to start thinking about that, you know, because then LPS starts to measure how you’ve advanced up the scale in your Robin numerals. And what have you done to embed the brand if you don’t have a really good law firm representing you, you know, certainly Sidley, I believe, is the best. But if you don’t have really good counsel, kind of that’s a bad reputational signal to the market. And you know now, when you’re potentially getting into a better market, when there are more fund managers out there seeking the same capital that you are, you’re going to be behind the curve if you don’t have great service providers doing your work. So again, that’s a very long answer to a really short question. But it depends, and it depends greatly.

Alexa Binns 36:41
No, it makes a lot of sense that all the times that you want to be able to ask a lawyer, it’s not just your fund formation. Yeah, and so a technical solution or software may help you on the fund formation side, but yeah, only, only to a point

Shane Goudey 36:58
That’s right. That’s exactly right

Alexa Binns 37:00
In our episode with Paula Cruikshank, you talked about being a business counselor more than just sort of a transactional processor. And can you share maybe an interesting problem you’re helping a client with at the moment? Ooh, good one.

Shane Goudey 37:18
Yeah, I have a couple clients who, for the very first time in their lives, are fortunate enough now to have funds big enough where they’re looking at placement agents. And so our kind of counseling evolves a little bit in terms of one who we’ve seen be really good and not be really good, the types of, you know, the very large and these are two funds that are raising less than 100 million each, but northward of 50. So, you know, a placement agent can make sense. But who are the right agents that service that market, as opposed to the agents who are servicing the billion dollar funds. And those are the brand names, you know, but who is sort of out there in the wild west of the placement agent world, and who have we seen, and how have we been able to deal with them? What are they going to expect, and what are the compensation elements look like, and what can we negotiate, and what can’t we and who are their clients, and who have you seen from their LP world? Come in and be great LPs, right? And so it’s just tapping into that collective well of experience, regardless of the lawyering part of it, this is, you know, we’ll get to that, you know, got to be a broker dealer and don’t be an unregistered finder, and, you know, all the bells and whistles we got to worry about from your regulatory perspective. But this is just the business side of it, and that’s what, that’s what, hiring really, really experienced counsel who does it for a long time helps a client really maximize their fundraising potential. So like placement agents. And we weren’t really talking about that, because not many funds were being formed the last couple years, and the ones that were didn’t need placement agents. You know, you had, you had large institutions just flocking to them, and they were triple over subscribed, and they were beating away, you know, large LPS with a stick. You know, now are the days when, you know, there’s efficacy in having, you know, more professionalized access to the market. So that’s one star in a possible constellation. I could have thought about the business side of what we’re advising on in today’s market as recent examples.

Alexa Binns 39:24
One of the things I was excited to ask you about was, like, you’re such a good translator for GPS and LPs to, like, talk to us specifically about KPIs and, like, why allocators use different measurement and why, when we talk about 3x like, that scrambles their brain. Would that be interesting for you? Would you be down to talk about that? Because that’s something we haven’t really talked about on the show, and I think it’s helpful for GPT. I’d say more JPY listen to our show than allocators. And like, they’re not talking, they’re not using the same metrics. And so that can become complicated. So that was one thing I was curious if you’d be interested in talking about, and then, you know, I would throw it to you on, like, whatever last topic you’ve been really passionate about or have just learned lately that you could share with the audience. Does that work?

David Zhou 40:29
I’ll start with the story. I was at, I want to say winter has also been on this podcast, right? I was at Cool Waters Demo Day. This was like last year, maybe 2023 but I want to say it’s 2024 so four, where it was their cool water demo day in San Francisco. A bunch of us were sitting in the audience, trying to just listen to, I think, like 15 or so GPS pitches. And there was one person who got on stage, and they were telling all, I forget, I don’t remember what the thesis was. In full transparency, I was just talking about their thesis. They were talking about their strategy, and they’re like, this is why I really believe in it. Here’s my case studies. Here’s my track. Like, here they’re not even trackers. He’s like, here’s my case studies. And at the very end of the deck, it has, like, a fun strategy summary. And in the fun strategy summary, it talks about, in a very small text, his angel track record, which started, I want to say, 2017 2018 and he was sitting at a 10x Mike, and all of us in the audience are like you probably should have led with, why is it like size 14? And there was an audience member who, literally, as that GP was ending their pitch, called out, why didn’t they call this 10x and like it out much sooner. And the reason I share that story is I need a lot of GPS, and that’s totally fine if like how you present things changes over time, but they don’t always recognize that. There are certain metrics that really stand out to an LP, right? I think a lot about it, and I’ll get to your question in just a sec. I think a lot about what is the purpose of the pitch deck, the purpose of the pitch deck, and I think most GPT actually misunderstand the purpose of the pitch deck. There are two purposes of the pitch deck. There is a pitch deck and there’s a teaser deck, right? The teaser Deck, the only goal of that is to get that first meeting and there. It’s not to get you funding. It’s not to get you anything else. It literally. That’s the only purpose of the teaser deck, to get you the first meeting, which means you can put whatever you want on there to get the first meeting. And I see all these teaser decks, I go, like fun strategy. Here’s our track record. And let’s be honest, most track records aren’t nearly as interesting as GPT makes them out to be. Every single fund is top quartile. Every single fund is top DeSilva, and that means no one is right. And I think when they’re citing data on platforms like Carlton Angel, I love what Peter and the team is doing, but they only get, like, a fraction of the overall data. All that to say, I actually think the purpose of the teaser deck should actually include things that teach an LP something new they didn’t know before. A lot of LPs take that first conversation because they feel like they can learn something from you. Yeah, what do you know that no one else in the world knows? And I think that’s all you need to have on there. You can have your fund strategy, and it’s like, Hi. It’s like, we’re a $15 million fund investing in FinTech. Great. That’s all you need there. Other than that, teach them something new. So that’s one. The second thing is the pitch deck. The pitch deck. The pitch deck, most people just jump into a conversation. I don’t mean like Alexa, you’ve probably been in tons of these conversations where they have a 30 minute meeting on your calendar. You jump in the meeting and the first five minutes Smalltalk, cool. How’s your day? How’s your weekend, how’s your kids, all that kind of stuff. As soon as the small talk is over, they go like Alexa, do you mind if I tell you more about my fund? Do you mind if I screen share for a second? Share for a second? It’s like, always the line they use, like, do you mind if I script and they spend the next 20 minutes talking about

Alexa Binns 50:46
learned very early on working for Jim at Maven ventures, how often he would rely on the goodwill of some of his very best investments, and that Those are people, and once they become public company CEOs, you can’t ask many favors of them, but every time you’re fundraising like those are the people to speak to how you truly are a value add. And so I think you really are only as your career is really in the balance of how good of a relationship you have with your most standout founders, because they’re the ones who help you raise the next fund, and they’re the ones who help you close the next deal that you want to lead. Yeah, he is famously named Zoom.

David Zhou 51:38
Oh, that’s something. So I,

Alexa Binns 51:41
I think, you know, maybe that was one of those 10 inflection points you’re talking about. But it certainly helps that it’s not called whatever it used to be called, actually, final question for you, David, oh, sorry, go ahead.

David Zhou 51:55
No, just like a quick thought. And I know someone you mentioned earlier, Benedict, who will be out at some point, maybe soon, who’s a good friend of ours. He is this big and I’m a client like, I really do think this. There’s value in this, where the name of a company or the name of a firm matters so much that more people will say your name, the career company’s name more than they will say your one liner more than they like people don’t say, you know, video conferencing software like zoom, they say zoom, right? And all that to say, I think the naming of things really matter and the intentionality, but behind naming things and making sure the world knows about how you name things, I think really matters, obviously, if they don’t know and if they only have so much like mental real estate, picking a good name matters. And I think Zoom is damn good of a name,

Alexa Binns 52:53
it’s now in the lexicon, right? Yeah. Well, final question for you, you have been on this listening tour with your own podcast, super clusters. Is there anything that you’ve learned lately that you believe is worth sharing and was sort of eye opening for you?

David Zhou 53:12
So before I say what I learned, I’m gonna see this in your mind, Alexa, I’m gonna flip that question on you, and right after I answer, because you’ve also done. And I want to say you’ve done more episodes than I have. I think I did a count, and I was like, oh my god, you guys have done so much, and all good ones too. And so all that to say, prepare your answer as well. This is what we do in the multiverse traversal. One thing I’ve learned, and there’s a hypothesis I had when I started it, which is the job of an investor of any kind, like allocator, VC, PE, whatever it is, the job of an investor is to get to know a person as quickly as possible. And the process of doing a podcast helps you really understand, if you’re intentional about it, helps you really understand how quickly you can get a guest to loosen up. And this is especially true when you’re interviewing strangers, like there are some folks I’ve had on the podcast that I never chatted with live beforehand, and the first time we chat is on the podcast itself. And there’s a metric that internally, that my editor and I have, which is, and it’s kind of some somewhat subjective, but kind of objective, which is, how fast can I get a guest to showcase some kind of emotion, which is laughter, which is sadness, which is anger,
Alexa Binns 57:20
on LinkedIn it says you’re working on something new. It’s like den den.

David Zhou 57:25
It does. It probably will stay that way for quite a while, because frankly, I just don’t know how to describe the other things I’m doing. Bye everyone. No, I’m not, I promise I’m not, I promise I’m not, although I guess that’s what a spy would say. But the podcast has reinforced that doing a lot of homework really, really helps. That said, I’m glad I did the podcast instead of doing a coffee chat with Ben. And the reason for that is, if you’re in a one on one private conversation, you have very little context on each other, especially if you haven’t gotten introduced before. If you were to pour out like, Hey, Ben, I know you proposed to your wife on a 20 foot billboard in Orchard Road in Singapore, he’s like, What like? Who are you? Like? This is weird. This is really weird. But in through a podcast, you get a different emotion you because it is for the audience, like, I apologize, Ben, you were the guinea pig for this, but we’ve become friends, so I feel okay saying this, but you’ve now gotten to a point where it’s like they’re more surprised than otherwise. They’re not weirded out, per se. So I think the podcast has become a really good platform for that, but it also has reinforced how much diligence is required for someone to be candid with you if you don’t have the pre existing relationship beforehand. That probably was not the kind of answer you were looking for in terms of, what did I learn from doing the podcast? I’m sure you were trying to learn like, hey, how have you allocated? How have you thought about portfolio construction since? But let me know if you want to give me a you want me to give a different answer,

Alexa Binns 59:04
no, it’s what you’ve learned. That’s what it reminds me of, sort of the difference of meeting somebody for the first time at a house party or a bar, yeah, and at the house party, you’re sort of like, you’ve been vetted. We’re gonna find we’re gonna find we’re gonna find common ground at a bar. You’re kind of like, WTF, man, why are you talking to me? Please back away.

David Zhou 59:31
Same thing. Same thing. It’s the context you come to the conversation with, yeah, and being at a house party means you both know the host. You were both invited in a special exclusive group of folks, and there’s a pre-existing, like, trust that exists in the house party, where the first question is not, what do you do? It’s often like, how do you know the host? And then you have all these war stories to talk about, like, how. Do you know the host? And that starts the conversation somewhere. So I completely agree. Question for you. Flipping that question to you, Alexa, you’ve you and earnest, have done this for a long time. Well, I don’t like it, maybe not for a long time, but you’ve done a lot of episodes. You’ve learned, clearly, learned a lot.

Alexa Binns 1:00:15
Yeah, I think we started at the same time both, both our shows. I think one of the crazier things I’ve learned is, you know, I will sheepishly, sort of say, like, oh, I have a podcast. It’s very niche. And when people ask, Oh, what’s it about? I want to say, one in two times people say, Oh, I should start listening, because I want to start a VC fund. Maybe I need to, maybe I need to expand my social circles. But this is like random people on airplanes. So, right? We like, for those who have been tracking venture capital, the history of micro VC through the boom times of 2020, like we all have this sense that venture is harder now than ever. Why would you ever do this? But I do think speaking to like the plebes, they are as enthused as ever, of like playing Shark Tank one day and and I think that’s one of my main takeaways of doing this show has been how many people are still incredibly enthusiastic about the idea of of having this job, either as a VC or allocator, one day, and it’s, I don’t think it’s slowing down. I think it’s only becoming more sort of mainstream.

David Zhou 1:01:34
Frankly, I agree, yeah, it’s also, there’s so much people want to invest in different things. I think investing has always been a forethought, and a lot of people want to passively accumulate wealth like, you know, wealth and investing is, frankly, one of the best ways, and probably is the best way, to accumulate wealth passively and over time. Obviously, picking matters a lot, but traditionally, most of the world has not gotten access to private market assets. We’re seeing with a lot of regulatory changes, and I mean recently the big, beautiful bill and the Qs, Bs changes and all these kind of things, that there is a lot more attention on the private market space at a broader level, and naturally, like the startup and venture capital space, just because it exists in so much of the press these days that people naturally get curious. They naturally want to hear and how do they get exposure to these things? And so I think all three of us are very early on into the curve of, frankly, just personal finance about private market assets. That’s what it is. I don’t know if that’s the way to describe it. That said earlier, you said Shark Tank. And I was like, Well, you guys are swimming with the allocators. If there’s anyone to do a Shark Tank, like episode or like series of episodes, that’s you guys.