Earnest Sweat 00:13
On today’s episode. We’re blessed to have Michael Downing. He’s a serial entrepreneur turned venture investor who brings nearly three decades of Silicon Valley experience to the conversation. He’s the founder of MDS v capital and co-creator of the Promontory platform. Today, he’s going to share with us what he believes the most authentic form of venture capital today is, and why the emerging managers live. He’s going to talk about how the promontory platform is pioneering a community plus capital model to serve both GPS and LPs, and just to share a ton of wisdom with us. So with that, we welcome Michael.

Earnest Sweat 00:59
As I mentioned, and I got to learn in our prep conversation, you have worn a lot of hats. The definition of worn a lot of hats. So I want to start off first with you, just sharing before getting to this point of MDS, V, how did you get here?

Michael Downing 01:20
I feel like the backstory gets longer all the time, though. So just to give you a little bit of my background, I’m sitting here in Palo Alto in our office right now, but I probably have the most unconventional and slightly unusual path to Silicon Valley as just about anybody but I’m originally from Texas. Grew up in Texas, as I like to say, and people think I’m joking, but it’s real. I spent more time on the back of a horse growing up than in front of a computer, but I came to California to go to university many years ago, and while I was at university, I started a little software company my sophomore year, really out of desperation to try to make money and pay my bills. And I was terrible at programming. I took some CS courses, but I had a couple of buddies who were really good at it, and we came up with a crazy idea for a service that helped graduating seniors actually find jobs more effectively. And it worked, and that ended up paying my way through college. And so that totally convinced me and showed me just how magical software could be. And granted, this is 1992 so even the term, like startups and, you know, that sort of thing, there was no hustle culture back then. If anything, it was just kind of like crazy ideas and people who, you know, couldn’t go get jobs, would do this. After that, I, you know, I graduated from university, came to San Francisco, like many people did. In 1994 I started another company, again, with my buddies who were better programmers than I was, that built early e-commerce sites. And, you know, this is very early in the whole e-commerce function. Most of those meetings and pitches that I would do, people were saying things like, no one’s ever going to put their credit card down on the internet, you know, and so that went really well over, you know, a three year period that that company grew pretty quickly and got rolled up and acquired by a group of investors that were acquiring those companies at that time. 1997 after that was the COO of a startup and joined a little team called Sonique that created one of the first applications that let people listen to mp three files on their computers. That free application grew to 9 million users in 1999 which was about half the internet at that time and was acquired by a much larger one of the big search engine companies that, unless you’re as old as I am, you probably don’t remember, but it was a company called Lycos, one of the big search engines that was awesome. We were all still in our 20s, you know, like 2425 years old, sold a company in the early 2000s started another software company that was focused on video technology, leveraging a lot of those same lessons we learned with Sonic at the beginning of that digital music kind of revolution, and that online video company called Go Fish grew very quickly. We took it public in 2006 and it was a great experience, super exciting. Stayed on as the CEO of a publicly traded company for a couple of years, and then decided that was really not nearly as interesting as starting new companies, and created another company after that in 2009 that was also one of the early social video companies called tout. You may remember. Shaquille O’Neal announced his retirement on tout. We had this novel idea at the time that was Mobile Video, Short Form, 15 second videos with a scrollable screen, that when you scroll the video into view, it would automatically play the video, which people thought was kludgy and weird back then, but obviously caught on.

Michael Downing 05:23
have a kind of track record of being insanely early on some of these technologies. But, you know, over a 28 year period, six companies were super fortunate. Three of those companies were acquired. One we took public. Had a couple of those companies that just never made it off the tarmac. But in the process of doing that, you know, as you said, you know, I wore every hat you could imagine. Did a ton of venture rounds, worked with a great, you know, set of investors, angels, VCs, etc, who backed those companies, and I also invested in a ton of early stage companies who were former employees, partners, friends, who broke off to create new companies, and so played the part of angel investor and supporter and advisor to a huge number of companies. And in 2008 after I said, you know, running a public company is really not fun, in 2008 I actually started an accelerator co working space called kick labs, right down by the Embarcadero in San Francisco. At the time, people were like, it’s 2008 the world is falling apart. It’s the global financial crisis. You’re insane. You know, this is terrible timing. Thankfully, we went ahead and did that, and it turned out it was not terrible timing, even though people were terrified and there wasn’t a lot of money flowing. Some of the most generational companies of the next 15 or 20 years were born during that period, and so that was kind of my entrepreneurial journey. Still advise and help out a lot of entrepreneurs who are starting new companies. One thing that I did, and a couple of my business partners who built these companies with me did is starting in 2009 2010 that time frame, you started to see this new phenomenon of what they used to call micro VCs or micro funds. And literally, it was friends of ours who, I mean, in some cases, they created a $1 million fund, and they were cutting 25k checks, and, you know, 20 different checks a year into other people they knew and friends, and we personally got involved in a number of those early micro funds. We invested in those funds, we saw firsthand just how awesome they performed, how close to the action they could get, and how great the insights were, because they knew these entrepreneurs and founders who were creating the next new thing. And then we also personally experienced firsthand the kind of second order benefit of some of those companies that were going to grow and do incredibly well. And they were going to do a series A or Series B and subsequent financings. And because we were in those micro funds, we got the opportunity to co invest and double down on the winners, and, you know, get more involved in those companies. And so fast forward, four years ago, my wife told me I was too old to be starting companies. So I focused on getting together with, you know, the same investors, partners who had built companies with me over the years, and we decided to take all these learnings about small managers, small funds, what they used to call micro funds. It’s become much more elegant and cool now, and they call it emerging manager funds, and we decided to take all those learnings and really structure it into an actual strategy that focuses on emerging managers, supporting those emerging managers. We like to think of small emerging manager funds as really the inception point of value creation and venture and in many ways, it’s one of the only remaining purest forms of venture as that whole market has evolved. And so that’s what we’re doing now. And you know, we have a pretty interesting and specific strategy as to what we do. Part of that is supporting emerging managers investing in as an LP, what we like to think of as the top 1% of super innovative, strong, confident managers, and then also reserving capital to act as the bank and support those managers as they have winners and outliers that are doing subsequent rounds and providing capital for those subsequent rounds and making sure that those managers get to participate in that as well, and that that strategy is really, you know what, we’re pursuing, full bore and as a part of that.
Alexa Binns 12:31
What do you love about the emerging manager landscape? What’s, what’s the argument

Michael Downing 12:53
I think most importantly, from the LP perspective, you know, you you’ve got to kind of level set on the data like, what have we learned over the last 1518, years in venture what we like to do is we go back to 2008 because that was a really critical kind of year. And we look at all the data from 2008 2024 or so, and there’s some really important statistics that we zero in on since 2008. If you look at all the companies that drove returns in venture capital, there’s only about 1800 companies that drove all returns. Some of those companies went public. Some of those companies got acquired. Fair amount of those companies. About half are still out there. They’re not public. So 1800 companies, if you drill down on those 1800 companies, and you look at the cap tables, what you’ll find is that about 65 to 70% of those companies, the very first investor in those companies was a small, emerging manager. And so the ability for these smaller funds, under the radar funds, we like to look at as sub $100 million funds, their ability to filter for the best founders and the best companies is undeniable. Now, if you look at that same data set and you say, okay, gosh, that’s really interesting, they did a great job of filtering towards the best companies. But how often did they invest beyond that pre seed or seed round, right? And the answer is less than 5% of the time. And as such as you would expect, you know, they gave up, you know, over $150 billion of returns based on not taking advantage of that pro rata, or that ability to continue to invest. And this is a really critical point, because a lot of people talk about power law and venture capital, and they usually talk about one part of power law. And the one part of power law everybody likes to look at is, well, it’s a really small number of companies that drive all returns. And that’s totally accurate, totally true, but there’s a second part of power law that people forget. Once you find one of those outliers, you have to continue to invest in it at every possible juncture in order to maximize return. And it’s that second part that people tend to forget about, and it is that second part that really encapsulates the broader, bigger opportunity around emerging managers. So from an LP perspective, you know, what we have seen is emerging managers. To this day, 90% of the capital that’s going into those funds, as you guys well know, are small checks from individual, high net worth investors, right? It’s your buddy who is a product manager at Google who is going to give you a 250k check. You know, it’s, it’s the guy that owns a construction company in Tampa who’s writing a 500k check. And thank goodness those LPs are there. We think the composition of LPs coming into this part of the market is going to change. We have some proof points there. One of the things that’s driving that is, you know, you have your institutional set of LPs in venture capital, we’re all familiar with who those usual suspects are. They’re now facing an interesting set of realities, where, if they’ve been investing in the larger funds, who, by the way, got larger and larger and larger, you know, they’ve also watched the return profile, and just, you know, overall experience as an LP evolve pretty substantially, I would say, since about 2016 or 17. And so if you’re actually looking for alpha, and not just high beta, with a little more risk than most people are accustomed to, you’re starting to look at how you change up where you invest, and that goes for everybody.

Alexa Binns 17:30
and for those winners that are coming up through the system, do the LPS participate in some kind of fund that’s the capital extension program. Or are you picking? Are you able to sort of select, I can see benefits to both as an LP, but you are getting a basket of follow on investments like an opportunity fund or individual SPV,

Michael Downing 17:57
we have a philosophical point of view on the right kind of structure to support a more efficient capital flow into this part of the market. Here’s what our philosophy is. The way we’ve structured it is we have a single fund. 30% of the capital in that fund goes to LP commitments to emerging managers, we like to say we’re investing in the top 1% of managers. When we make those LP commitments to managers, we do not charge any management fee or carry on that 30% so we’re not believers in the layering of fees, and we don’t expect our LPs to be believers in that, and so we charge no fees on that. The 70% of capital in our fund is reserved for the capital extension program or this, this movement of basically doubling down and putting more capital behind the outliers. But when we do that we invest in an outlier. What happens naturally in each of these situations is the manager comes to us and says, Look, I wrote the first 250k check into this company at pre-seed when it was two people and a white board. Now they’re doing a series B, and Sequoia is leading the round, etc. What we do is we put forward the capital and put it into that company, and we split the carry with that manager, and that creates what we believe to be a perfect alignment of incentives and a way to create compounding value in the market, but importantly, it also creates a way so that institutional investors can Begin to deal with the natural kind of physics issues of how you invest in the small part of the market. You cannot write a $60 million check if you’re a large endowment or a pension or $100 million check, and practically just be kind of, you know, single threaded on, I’m going to make a lot. Commitments to small, emerging managers. You have to look at the emerging manager Alpha opportunity as a whole, and that includes fund investments and these follow on or CO investments in the very best companies that come out of it, if you’re successful, prosecuting that strategy and making it scale inevitably. What happens is, you create a healthier ecosystem for emerging managers. You have some predictability and consistency around how they actually get LP commitments, which is sorely lacking today.

Earnest Sweat 22:05
Could you speak to, you know, once an allocator has decided, yes, we do believe that this is the part of the market where there is an opportunity for, you know, per se arbitrage, but it’s still more competition. There’s still a lot of noise. How do you direct them, or filter out who are going to be those best managers in an age of AI, Age of adaptability, hotter climate, all those things,

Michael Downing 22:33
It’s a very dynamic environment, right? I mean, lots of things happening at the same time. I mean, number one, the universe of emerging managers. It’s hard to navigate. It’s hard to even know. Well, who are they? Where do I go to see who these managers are? How do I, and we hear this all the time, by the way, how do I assess them? A famous quote that we like wrote down on a whiteboard and just kept it there. It is based on many conversations from, you know, endowments, multifamily offices, as they say, Oh, I met with 10 managers. They all sound great, which basically means I have no idea how to assess and evaluate and determine, like, who is the better choice for me? Or, you know, which manager should I allocate to? And so part of this exercise, earnest is just creating clarity and demystifying the data and helping the allocators, helping the LPS understand what is the right choice for you. What is the right manager for you? There could be different kinds of mandates. It could be different types of managers, different verticals, areas of focus, but there is no structured, logical, rational way to even start that process, which is part of the reason why we created the promontory, taking all the data, taking all the information, having the network connectivity to the managers, and then giving these LPS a simple and easy way to see here’s who’s in market. Here’s how I can evaluate them. Here are some rubrics or constructs to think about how you might want to analyze them, sourcing, capability, continuity of strategy, outlier, velocity, just kind of basic constructs that we’ve learned over the years are methodologies to think about, or filters to apply, as you look at these managers, I mean, it’s kind of crazy that nobody’s really created this to clean up this part of the market.

Alexa Binns 25:31
Are there any other sort of common misunderstandings that you hear from LPS that would be a great place to correct if you’ve thought so deeply about the best strategy to invest in this space?

Michael Downing 25:54
the one thing we continue to see, you know, it’s starting to change, but it’s just a reality in the category, is the amount of, you know, inertia around institutional investors who just default to, well, we’re just going to Keep going into this 600 million, 800 million, 2 billion, $4 billion fund because it’s familiar, and we just don’t, we don’t want to get fired. Yeah, right. And you know, you can’t overstate that meaning there is so much, there’s so much allocation that’s occurring that is kind of cruise control, so to speak, that, you know, it’s, it’s a challenge now that that fixes itself over time, because what we’re seeing is the funds that are getting bigger and bigger and kind of the default just re upping to the same guy eight times in a row. You know, likely it’s going to show up in the returns, or, you know, in other areas. So this is, this is a shift. We think, you know, it’s going to take time, but we do think that there’s going to be a gradual shift in terms of how people think about allocating in this, in this category, but other misconceptions that we see out there, I mean, it kind of spans from the basic misunderstanding, or maybe not clarity around how venture capital works, all the way to, you know, some allocators who Believe or feel like venture should operate like buy out, and then they’re confused as to why it doesn’t. And so we’ve seen glimmers of those things. And, you know, it requires education, it requires data. You know, here’s what’s happened over the last 20 years. We think that the general movement is going in the right direction. There’s a greater awareness of, you know, hopefully, what we feel like is the core concept that needs to be understood, which is, you invest in venture capital because you want to support the architects of the future. It’s the only reason. And there are great rewards, and there’s great returns that come out of supporting the architects of the future. But if that’s not your goal, that’s not your objective, if you know, if you’re not looking to invest in the future and the architects of the future, then it’s not a good place for you to be investing. And so you know that general mindset of trying to over institutionalize venture or pretend like it’s buy out and we can run the numbers on everything.

Earnest Sweat 29:44
Now we’re going to take a quick break to speak with our sponsor

Alexa Binns 29:47
on the show. Today, we have our stellar partner and industry expert, Shane Gowdy. He’s the leader of Sidley venture funds practice, and if you get value from this podcast, we have Shane and the Sidd team to thank for it. The. Make these recordings possible. We are looking forward to hearing from you. Shane, are there categories of LPs that you’d say are becoming more active? I’m curious about high net worths or endowments, where is the money coming from?

Shane Goudey 30:17
Yeah, some of the answers. It depends what funds you are, you know, you if you look at kind of what fundraising numbers were, and the constitution of who raised and the percentage of capital over the last couple years, I mean, it was the biggest firms in the world that took the lion’s share, and really only the largest institutional LPS dive into those waters meaningfully, because, you know, their and reasons of the world are taking LPS for 234, 100 million at a time. And so that is, you know, those, and it was a flight to quality, right? It was, you know, they’re only investing in kind of brand name funds. And now it’s very different. I think the emerging managerial world is very exciting. I think there’s a lot of allocators who are getting interested, again, in the diversity that is venture capital and what the up size returns can be. So to not take seven minutes to answer a 32nd question, funds are a huge component of who we’re seeing. I think asset managers, frankly, private equity asset managers, are starting to get into some of the venture game. A lot of foreign investment is coming into us venture capital, particularly kind of, either in Europe or in the Asian market. A lot of foreign money coming into us, funds these days, and just some very interesting strategic high net worths, I think people are being very mindful, in particular, those funds that have an AI component to them. You know, a lot of people, just purely from a strategic, not even a balance sheet investment standpoint, are getting excited to have access to the best AI companies or companies that are, you know, the intersection of AI in something like AI and defense tech, AI and biotechnology, AI and medical devices. The firms that are focusing in these ways, it’s really just steel access and so and really other LPs who just want co investment. CO investment is a huge topic these days. Investing directly in a fund is great, but really, what all big LPs are after is the direct access to the companies and, you know, having those kind of relationships, so being nimble on one’s feet to be able to manage those kind of demands is what’s required of anybody thinking about raising a fund these days.

Alexa Binns 32:37
No, we had a common occurrence that our LPS would write a single check the same size into an individual portfolio of companies, series A that they wrote into our entire fund.

Shane Goudey 32:49
Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. They want to get rid of your economics, you know, they like to have that direct access. And, you know, it’s good and bad that’s, you know, you got to build a business. So I understand it. But for my sisters and brothers that are fund managers. It’s not always necessarily the best economic answer, but be that as it

Alexa Binns 33:06
may, glad that your founders are getting funded. It’s okay.

Shane Goudey 33:08
Yes, true enough. Yes, the ecosystem is all doing well. God bless them.

Alexa Binns 33:13
And now back to our LP interview,

Earnest Sweat 33:17
Are there any trends that you’re seeing now that you’re surprised managers aren’t trying to leverage or take advantage of

Michael Downing 33:39
Here’s one pattern, or maybe it’s not a pattern, but it’s an evolution that we think is important, and this is our perspective. This is our point of view. So some people may not agree with this, but there’s just a fundamental data concept that you have to pay attention to. And because we’re old guys like me, if you go back to the 1990s when I was starting and building companies, generally speaking, 95 to 99 or about maybe 250 companies a year that were getting seed financing. There was no pre seed back then, right? So, seed financing. Fast forward to the next big cycle, 2008 to 2012 2014 about 650 700 companies getting seed financing. And at the time, by the way, everybody’s saying this is unsustainable, way too many. It’s never going to work, you know. And now here we are in 2025 and by most accounts, we’ll see 4000 companies this year that get seed financing. Wow. Now that’s just a statistical reality, right? Like it is what it is, and why is it happening? Well, we know why it’s happening. The tools are getting cheaper, faster, better. I can start a company in 20 minutes. Companies, you know, are up and running and testing with potential customers faster and better than ever in history, which is awesome, and that’s great for humanity and everybody else, but it also means there’s a ton of startups. And so the idea of how you filter and how you discover and how you, you know, lean into great founders or great companies, it is becoming harder and harder. And one thing we’ve noticed, and we think it’s important, and this is the difference between, you know, 2009 2010 when some of these folks who had, like, a micro fund, I mean literally, it was just your social circle, the people you knew in San Francisco that you know could, you could build an amazing portfolio of just those relationships. Now it’s getting a lot harder, and even if you are super experienced, you know, serial entrepreneur, whatever, in Silicon Valley, what we’re seeing is that emerging managers that have a structural sourcing methodology or a platform approach, seem to have an advantage.

Alexa Binns 42:05
there will be plenty of emerging managers listening who are going to be jumping at the chance to speak to you. What would you who should be filtering themselves in and out. Who is a good fit? When should people come speak to you, and what’s, what’s the right avenue?

Michael Downing 42:27
obviously we are an LP, and we’re committing to emerging managers. We’re making about eight to 10 commitments a year, so a little bit more than most we prioritize highly just based on our own experience. We prioritize highly sourcing methodology per the earlier conversation. Value add. We think these two things work in concert in really magical ways. And then, you know, like any LP, of course, we look at track record and what companies you’ve been in, we have seen a pattern that managers who have been in a true outlier, call it a 50x multiple of where you entered that company. They see what that looks like. You know, they experience those teams, they experience that journey. And it helps to have proximity to at least one of those and understand what it looks like. And so we prioritize sourcing value and add just past investments and what they’ve done. But there’s other things that are maybe counter intuitive or non obvious that we value as well. And so non consensus decision making or non consensus commitments that they’ve made and investments they’ve done. And so we try to gravitate, you know, away from, let’s say, the far too obvious kind of party round-ish, early managers that are, you know, part of the herd. And we try to find folks where, and I’ll give you a great example, if that’s okay, hopefully they don’t mind me mentioning them, but, but I’ll give you examples of, you know, like managers, where you look at an investment they’ve made and you’re like, Whoa. That’s different. Like, explain, and by the way, there’s nobody else you know in it, like, it’s not the usual suspects of eight of the same folks crowding in. And what we found is that, you know, it’s just a certain kind of psychology and confidence and also level of rigor and diligence. I think for these like non consensus decisions and investors that we have seen, leads to really interesting outcomes. To put this slightly differently, in this. May be helpful. There’s a bunch of people out there who talk about when an emerging manager gets to a certain level. So Steve Kim from Virtus published a paper on this. That was awesome. Michael Kim from Send Donna talks about it quite a bit, and he and I, have, you know, had conversations on this, but there’s a certain dollar amount, call it 60 or 75 million, that when an emerging manager raises that amount, for some reason, behavior starts to change. And Steve, Steve Kim would say that what was the word he uses this really like a very non-invasive phrase, like willingness to take risk or something like that. But basically, I’ll put it in a much more crude way, but it’s just like, you know, they’re not making ballsy decisions right around companies, and they’re and so at a certain at a certain level, managers start to act in a way that they think they should be acting as a capital allocator, as opposed to that independent, you know, confident investor who’s trying to seek out and find those unique deals. And that is a long winded way of explaining why we try to look for these non consensus deals in the portfolio, you know, and which is tough because, you know, obviously big validation for a lot of managers is like, look at all these great investors who are in my companies, and that is awesome, and that absolutely, you know, is validation. We’ve just learned over time that the non consensus concept can be a really important indicator.

Alexa Binns 46:45
I can imagine if, if your carry is all you’re working for, you need that stuff to hit the moon, right? If, if you’ve got the management fee and and your carry combined, it’s like, this is a much safer road. You may have two mortgages you’re paying off at that point,

Michael Downing 47:06
those are important concepts that we look at, and obviously, as an LP, we’re looking at clusters of managers in specific areas that we believe are important to us and may not be important to everybody. Deep Tech is really important. We feel like, you know, we’re kind of going through a real revolution or explosion around deep tech, much the same way that in 2008 to 2012 cloud and mobile and open source kind of created this perfect storm of innovation, and like, you know, Cambrian explosion of new companies. We think the same thing is happening in deep tech right now, and obviously you’re seeing some of this happen in AI. And all the you know, breakthroughs that are occurring there, it’s like every week there’s new structural breakthroughs in AI. But you’re also seeing it in interesting places like defense tech. And, you know, some people think defense tech is just army stuff and military and so on. But, you know, if you really drill down on defense tech, it’s robotics, AI, material science, jet propulsion. I mean, you know, it’s like the most deep deck stuff you could imagine putting it all together. And so there’s different areas, different clusters, you know, FinTech and digital assets, an important area that we also look at as well. And then, of course, just generalists, folks that just have their methodology seek out the awesome founders. I mean, if you look at historically, the returns of emerging managers, generalists have outperformed the market. So there’s a lot of debate on this. People say, Oh no, it’s really specific ones, the people doing just this or just that, but actually, the best performing funds were generalists. So it’s an important concept.

Earnest Sweat 49:02
It’s fascinating. And I’m curious for you, what are the best ways for emerging managers to develop the relationship with you, and are there any examples of ways people have really tried to develop that friendship relationship with you guys,

Michael Downing 49:24
this is, you know, again, one of the reasons why we created the promontory. Think of the promontory as just a community. We’ve got a group of GPS and we also have a group of LPs. Our first goal with the promontory is like, how do we create more interaction between these two groups. How do we cultivate a group of LPs who are actively allocating, you know, to emerging managers? And how do we facilitate relationship building, which is, you know, precisely what you’re asking about. And so what we do through the promontories, we do a number of events. Yes, some of those events are here in Silicon Valley. We actually have a building downtown Palo Alto, and we have an event space as part of our building. So we have happy hours. We have demo days. Just two weeks before last, we did a demo day where, once again, managers brought some of their coolest founders to come and do demos, and we had some really interesting LPS there. And so for any manager you know who wants to be a part of it, we would welcome them to just, you know, connect directly with us, the promontory community and some other functionality we’ve built into this digital platform we’ve been testing with a group of GPS over the last several months, and we’ll be opening that up to a broader set of GPS. But it’s not only events, it’s not only engagement, it’s also some interesting functionality. One is, I mentioned the group of LPs and the group of GPS. We’ve tried to create a more predictable way to facilitate warm introductions between those two groups. LPS tells us all the time, the only way that I meet a new manager is if another LP suggests them to me, or if a GP suggests them to me. And so we took that to heart, you know, we understood that loud and clear, and we built some mechanics to facilitate that in a more programmatic way. So that, you know, every introduction is a warm introduction, and hopefully that can make things move in a more smooth and fluid way. And so, you know, GPS managers can reach out to us directly. We’ll be onboarding a larger group to the promontory, you know shortly, where events, engagement, some of this kind of introduction work can help them, and hopefully a lot more in the coming months, in terms of support for these managers will be available to them there.

Earnest Sweat 51:59
Michael, I think, just wanted to end the podcast by saying, Where do you think you know your firm and the community will go in the next five years? Where do you want to take it?

Michael Downing 52:12
Well, it’s our belief that this evolution of venture, what’s happening right now in the market, you know, both the bifurcation of what venture is large platform, multi stage, kind of buy out private equity groups, but also some other kind of external inputs that are happening, like the growth of the private wealth channel, the, let’s say, reallocation of institutional dollars and how they’re going into venture we believe that this early stage, part of the market that we refer to as emerging managers is going to become a much more important access point for capital, but that structurally, there’s some plumbing and other things that need to occur to facilitate that. So our role, our goal in this is we are going to be part of that plumbing. And so it’s not only us running a fund and you know, facilitating dollars going in, some of the things that you’re going to see come from the promontory are more programmatic ways that institutional LPS can allocate dollars to emerging managers, not in a fund structure. So imagine, you know emerging manager alpha as software. You’re not paying management fees, you’re not paying carry but you’re building a blended basket of emerging managers and allocating institutional capital into that under a software concept. And that’s something we’re working on and hopefully deploying our first partner in the coming weeks to months in that. But we think structurally, that’s going to really change the market pretty meaningfully.