00:00:01 [Music] moving the needle on founder failure one conversation at a time I'm your host Lukas polls and welcome to startup to point out by spark XYZ join us as we give you access investors and I think there's no better place in the country to be investing than Los Angeles what is the problem that you're solving and for who like what is that specific pain point sometimes when a company is not listening to its customers and just thinks it knows better than it customers has a really really hard time finding

00:00:36 product market fit I want to see somebody that that isn't gonna stop you know this person you just feel like they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna make it work a big heartfelt thank you to Breck's who without their support this show would not be possible we've seen firsthand the difficulties accessing basic corporate credit without providing a security deposit or personal guarantee early on as companies grow managing expenses has become more difficult and time-consuming which is why we've partnered with Breck's to

00:01:10 offer a corporate credit card that is not personally guaranteed offers higher credit limits provides Auto reconciliation and integrates with ERPs using receipt capture Breck's is the credit card of a start ecosystem and we highly encourage you to check them in thanks for jumping on the show appreciate it great to be here Lucas nice to see you awesome well so my truculent where we like to start out is want to hear more about you more about fun just kind of want the whole rundown who how he is no

00:01:41 man far back you want to go pretty I thought this is a no this is a therapy session I like it though I'll just expose myself to the world through being through your show yes so I run a venture fund called alpha bridge ventures along with two partners and sort of the culmination of 10 years of being in venture capital and and sort of had two big epiphanies of the first you know eight or nine years of being adventure which were effectively there's this really unique untapped opportunity between seed and series a in terms of

00:02:24 this disproportionate relationship between valuation and risk as well as series a goal posts getting moved back and companies wanting to you know be in the best position to raise a large a with like less diluted a with the right partners and so they wanted just a time extension to get there so like historically bridge rounds or post seed rounds or these rounds between series a would indicate that the company was distressed or like looking for a resuscitative capital like keep their head above water which may be during

00:03:01 this KO bid period it's kind of happening but freak Ovid it was there's this there's this behavior that was happening where founders were raising a small round between seed and a they had a clear line of sight to series a they probably could even raise a small away but they needed a small and Jenna wanted to raise a small injection of capital a million million five to bring on some strategic hires to put them in a better position to raise a larger more non-dilutive a and to have time to build relationships with the with the right

00:03:35 series a leads so I thought that was really interesting no one was really playing in that space and we were paying like two x from seed so like these were valuations that range from the twelve to twenty million dollars but I I believed my partners believe that there's like this like the risk was mitigated by an order of magnitude because most of these companies had something built and most of the times had something in market so we could Anna we could assess you know the founder team we could assess how

00:04:06 they you know their their previous use of proceeds we could assess you know their unit economics we could assess their traction we you know we could assess their you know their margins and customer acquisition costs and LTV I mean we just had the luxury of having so many more data points to look at which made me feel way more comfortable from an investor and which mitigate the risk so stage focus is between Sivan series a and then we had a second big epiphany which was you know there's a lot of VC firms that are out there that

00:04:37 have platforms to help the companies grow and one was really focused on the people behind the company's grow and so we took a pretty heavy interest on founder mental health and wellness we're all prior entrepreneurs and so low fund managers and have deep empathy for the founder journey we know what they struggle through we know what they give up because we've gone through it ourself and we wanted to build a platform to support those founders to help them be in the best position to win in their series and beyond nice super exciting

00:05:08 yeah so you you invest from one of the I think kind of one of the better spaces because the the jump to see from seed to series is one of the most difficult in the startup world though when I talk to people at Ceres beings here he sees they say the same thing but so very interesting space like what what is it deal that that gets you excited like what what would be something that you're like okay like this like is it just the metrics that look good the team looking solid to be able to take them to the

00:05:45 next level like one gets you excited but actually making that investment it's a very different answer today than it was probably five years ago today I mean not even not even like because of what we're in but but it's really people and you know I think a lot of investors to talk about you know investing in the people I you know pre-series day because you just don't I have in post seek you have more you know more metrics than its eaten at precede but you don't have the kind of numbers that you have in like Series B

00:06:19 or Series C where you know really the later stages becomes very like transactional like numbers on a page and how's the company for you know how's the company performing you can make assessments extrapolate from that but before pre-series a it's it's all about the people and when you have enough interactions with founders and you take enough pitch meetings and you have enough conversations with them and you have a nut enough you know portfolio companies under your belt you know you kind of you kind of

00:06:54 get you know I don't want to say it's pattern-matching or I don't want to say it's like confirmation bias or a success bias but you start to start getting a sense for because you can sort of extrapolate from the winners of your previous portfolio companies you can start to see like the characteristic traits the way they talk about things how they answer questions are they you know how they proved out all their assumptions and suppositions are they problem solvers are they first principle thinkers are they critical thinkers you

00:07:22 know are and there's ways to get this out of founders by asking the right questions but you just start getting a sense of like kinda who knows a what they're talking about and have done like extensive research in the space and then be are they executors and are they leaders you know not just executors but are they gonna be able to lead and sell and you know create a culture that's gonna attract and retain top level talent and you just kind of like you kind of get a sense about people on you know of course we look at the

00:07:52 idea and we look at the market and we gotta get excited about that but 80% of it is people that's what like makes me run towards a companies if I get a sense about a person where it's like wow this person feels like someone I want to put my money behind and partner with not just put my money behind but also partner with and help them you know build their build whatever they're building get them to the next level awesome so you touched on a little bit we are in post coded world so as you were as your investment strategy changed

00:08:21 it all call it January versus now or even my q4 of last year versus now we had a luxury of closing our fund on January 31st of this year I say I was like you know an Oracle that could have predicted all this was gonna happen but we just got lucky so yeah I think our investment we definitely took we slowed our cadence down significantly since when this happened because it was just like let's let's see where like so much was unknown and so much is still unknown but in those first few months it was just like wow yeah this

00:09:01 feels irresponsible to invest money right now because we just like there's so much of uncertainty and there's so much panic and there's so much hysteria like we don't know where all of a where the dust is gonna settle and particularly with like all the PPP loans and all that whole debacle it's crazy so we kind of just pushed pause for a minute and wanted to focus on because we're halfway to ploy time on this fund we want to focus on attending to the needs of all of our current portfolio companies and not necessarily looking

00:09:30 for new deals there there were some follow-on deals within our portfolio that we participated in so it was mostly internal deals but now I think moving forward you know we have dry powder and we're excited to put that money to work and you know historically speaking down markets are some of the best times to invest in companies and I think that you know top talent rises to the the top or her you know like the cream rises to the top and or a better analogies like when the tide comes out you know like a bunch

00:10:02 of people that are naked some people are wearing like really awesome bathing suits so I want to you know find the people who are wearing awesome bathing suits and and so we're proactively looking and I invest primarily in consumer so it's actually kind of a great time you know when we talk about essential services essential products you know that's that's that's where I typically was investing before essential that word essential became so in vogue with kovat I like to invest in things that people you know use on a daily

00:10:40 basis and when a pandemic comes it sort of exemplifies which products and services people really need and are essential and so you know I think well I'm excited to continue putting money to work in that consumer CPG direct to consumer ecommerce subscription model sector as we sort of see behavioral shifts happen through Co vid and I'm looking at handful of deals right now that in that space and my partner Jake is doing more on the frontier tech side so moral a I kind of biotech arrow states deeper tech kind of

00:11:19 stuff and a lot of those companies are mostly doing where we invest are mostly still doing product development and or you know they have a high bar of scientific or technological you know they're they're they're basically working on you know figuring out how to science it technological and scientific complexity that they're trying to figure out before they go to market and so what's happening with kovat is kind of those companies are also kind of insulated from what's happening in the world right now so so i think like we're

00:11:55 keeping we're not really differentiating from our original plan the cadence slowed down for a couple months but now over the past three weeks we have a I would say 10 or 15 deals in our pipeline that we're taking a serious look at between consumer and frontier tech awesome no super exciting so you just closed on your funds in January I don't think that a lot of entrepreneurs truly understand the challenges that venture capitalists go through to actually raise a fund and close it and go through the entire

00:12:26 process so walk us through a bit of like kind of how that went and how long it took and for meetings maybe you had have just kind of run through some of it to give them a better understanding that they're not the only ones that are having to go out under hey yeah we are not at that point where money is growing on trees for us or that people are throwing money our way I'm very excited to get to that point that inflection point of you know changing help ease fear it's a fear of missing out that have a goal that is the goal everyone

00:13:03 and so we're on our way but you know for this fund it was you know it's it's not the most fun part of the job but it's a necessary part of the job and you know you really have to believe in what you're doing and you have to have thick skin and you know a no wait like the rejection rate that you get is not an indication of like you know what you're doing is in can't isn't gonna be beneficial for the world or what you're doing is stupid or what you're doing does it make sense it's just you know not the right fit for some

00:13:39 people and there's a plethora of reasons why it's not the right fit for a particular investor that you can't take personally sometimes it's hard not to take it personally but so you know with that mentality it's it's just a numbers game and it's it's you know you want to find value a Dell Keys you know who can be helpful with the portfolio so you try to be selective at the same time you want to meet your goal and be done with the fundraising process as quickly as possible so there's a balance but it's

00:14:09 mostly taking I mean we took or not have to look at my CRM but I don't know probably a thousand inch froze over a thousand intros for sure I would say it's over five to seven hundred meetings and you know that got us yeah and that got us probably 70 LPS 60 or 70 L piece something like that Wow yeah yeah it's even funny like even even in what you just said like is exactly what we tell founders right like it was the exact same thing it's like look don't take it personally just because this specific

00:14:59 investor doesn't actually but maybe it's not the right fit for them like it just it doesn't mean that it's personal towards you it's just you're not in their investment criteria like right it's what like I don't think entrepreneurs understand or there's a lot of reasons yeah yeah like they may have woke up on the wrong side of the bed that day yeah or you know their wife may have left them that day or their husband or like who knows what the reason is you know but you just got a key movie you just

00:15:30 got to really have your sights set on your goal and I also think it's important that you can learn from every single meeting I mean we must have revised our deck and we we had over 50 iterations on our deck just by virtue Spy having meetings and like you know looking at it it's hard to sort of elicit negative feedback from people but sometimes I'll just on a pass if I have a you know a relationship with investor even if I don't I'll just ask like what like what didn't resonate for you like with

00:16:04 something unclear just kind of you know if you have any constructive credit you know feedback let me know and some of them would respond some of them wouldn't but you're sort of learning as you go what narratives are hitting like what what are like what makes sense to people and what are converting and then what's just fluff and so you have a deck and you have a story and I think through the entire fundraising process you're just chipping away at that deck or that story you know at that iceberg and then it

00:16:33 began it's just like this you know it's it's like you know you know it's like it's like a it's like a it's like a ice Carver do you have a block of ice like so you start with and you're like trying to sell people a block of ice and like I don't really want it but then you keep carving and carving and after a year you have like a beautiful like ice Swan like yeah I would I would buy get into that ice Swan okay let's switch gears a little bit let's get away from maybe a little bit of the BC stuff and let's

00:17:10 talk more about platform stuff that you do because like I've personally been to one of your retreats that I loved I've never had a such an incredible just paused from life to be able to be like oh okay like about things and let's think about wellness and now gonna translate this to my portfolio company so let's talk a little bit more about kind of your objectives with a platform what you guys end up actually doing with kind of dive into some of the details sure as I mentioned we we deeply we deeply care about and we understand and

00:17:46 we acknowledge what founders give up and in their personal lives to run their companies and to achieve the impossible and we we wanted to do something about it we wanted to acknowledge it and then actually do something about it and then put our money where our mouth is and pay for services so what that looks like you know is you know founders it's very nice it's a very lonely isolating life for founders and and they take there's a lot of sacrifices that are made across their emotional mental and physical health and

00:18:23 so you know we thought and we've experienced it ourself and it's you know we're very shameful prideful creatures and so we don't want to go out and talk about all the things that aren't working for us personally we have to you know come off like everything's great and we're crushing it mentality and like all this stuff which is just you know a false reality and so everyone's kind of living in this false reality is a very taboo subject to talk about your feelings as a founder and to talk about like what you're actually going through

00:18:51 but like everyone was going through the same thing to varying degrees so we wanted to kind of expose that number one and give permission to founders so we thought as a VC like we we have deep empathy for what the founders are going and the going through and the founder journey so first of all let's just acknowledge that we know what you're going through let's bring this stuff up to the surface how are you what do you need personally to be you know like what are you struggling with and so we built a

00:19:19 program called Atlas which is effectively our service platform and our operating model and our core value proposition of the fund to you know create a safe environment and a confidential environment to four founders to address all of these issues to talk about it with a with a coach or a therapist we have a network of over 75 coaches that range from executive coaches therapy nutritionist sleep coach you know you name it to kind of address the specific needs the specific challenges that founders are going

00:19:58 through and and yeah we just we just you know we really believe that once founders to simplify it if founders are happy and healthy they there's really a much larger chance for them to build a long-lasting sustainable successful company and you know we need to meet the unique needs of each specific founders so there's not a one-size-fits-all model so we learned very quickly that outside of creating like a safe and trusted environment for founders to work on these work on their problems we also have to custom tailor the program to

00:20:35 each of the founders needs so they can get you know what what they would eat you know so so so they can you know get the resources that are applicable to their specific company in to their specific life until their specific body and mind and so forth so so yeah we actually brought on a woman who has a PhD in clinical psychology concentration organizational behavior and development who built this program from the ground up and runs it for us she's our head of platform and she's also a partner in the

00:21:06 fund now and it's been going incredibly well the response has been overwhelming so much so that there was external demand from other VC funds and other accelerator programs and other founders outside of our you know portfolio that wanted access to these services because the truth is these services are not accessible they're not affordable and they're not custom tailored to the founders needs if we wanted to you know really address all three of those things underneath this this one platform called

00:21:34 Atlas and yeah it's been going great so far and founders have really experienced a ton of benefit from it and we're kind of we've definitely proved it out the model that's exciting and and all honestly I'm sure that it is hyper relevant right now for the founders being stuck in quarantine possibly like a I'm sure it can shift your mindset a lot not being able to interact the same way possibly with your team if you weren't already working before so I feel like that's a very important tool to have in your tool belt

00:22:12 for helping the founders going forward oh for sure and outside of just like one-on-one coaching with the founders oh and by the way we subsidize the cost for the first year so we're like literally putting our money where our mouth is this isn't just lip service like we want the founders to get sort of like really under you know reap the benefits of we just think it's so important and we're starting to see you know there's like data that supports this as well studies that have been done that like people

00:22:38 problems or like most of the problems that kill companies post like Series A yeah let's get out let's get out ahead of that as possible but yes so we're doing a lot of groups now we have like this group offering that we'd launched for Co vid that's kind of more of like a one-to-many solution sensitive one-on-one coaching like we'll get a group of founders together we've actually extended this thank you you came to our event we did this with VCS and now we're offering it to executive employee executive executives as well as

00:23:13 employees that company will put you in a group with you know similar people that are in your that identify with you identify with whether it's a founder of VC or an employee or an executive whatever and you it's an online group and it's facilitated by a coach and you know you you meet once a week for for three to six months or something like that and and it's been incredibly powerful to just be in that space with other people who are going through the same thing you are again to feel safe and trusted and confidential to talk

00:23:49 about what you're feeling and then to know that there's a group of there's six or seven other people in the room who are you know agreeing like nodding their heads while you talk because they're feeling the same things you are experience the same thing as you are to varying degrees and it's super powerful and it builds trust and it builds just an incredible camaraderie and it's you're sort of sharing your misery together in a really constructive way so we've been launching we launched that a beginning of Kovan and it's been it's

00:24:15 been going pretty well nurse yeah I think one of my favorite things when we went up to the beta do that was was actually the peer group we all sent around with everyone very similar spaces and I'll share anything because the point of pure birth but I found it very enlightening and very comforting to be able to talk very freely in that space whereas typically founders Andy sees like we're very guarded with a lot of the stuff that we end up talking about and so being able to have that conversation I think I think it helped a

00:24:51 lot especially for a lot of people in the room so definitely kudos for kudos for that yeah yeah totally yeah that's that's what we're doing period we're calling them inner growth groups but they're essentially the same thing as it occurs cool so you touched on a little bit let's dive into a little bit deeper so you talked about people problems is definitely one of the large reasons why startups end up failing let's dive into then let's dive into like some of the other reasons that the startup said your

00:25:22 particular stage and failing or not executing properly sure so on the people problem front I mean Noam Wasserman conducted a study I could send you the link or go across 10,000 founders and leader types and he concluded that like 60% of companies that fail in their growth stages attribute some kind of people related problem or co-founder conflict to the primary reason of failure so I think it's yeah I think it's more and it's important at every stage and again it's important to kind of get out get out

00:26:06 ahead of this stuff early but we're talking about stuff like personal burnout anxiety stress you know co-founder conflict are you communicating with your co-founder and your team properly you know and then I'll and then like culture building so like are you you understand sort of the tenants of how to build a culture that's going to attract and retain top level talent and you know because they you know have like talent is what I think is probably the most important thing talent acquisition as you at any stage of the company but

00:26:40 particularly in both Series A and then like oh and then you can just you know that all of that can be sort of distilled down to like again feeling good every day just like waking up and feeling good and being in a good mood are you sleeping right are you eating properly you know are you meditating do you feel centered you know like do you come to work and do you show up every day and like in a way that's gonna be helpful for the company and helpful for your team and it's surprising like how many

00:27:14 of us don't and we just kind of like you know we oscillate between good days and bad days and you know and so what we say it's like well there's things that you can do like functionally that can like put you in a good headspace and a good a good mind in space a good body space a good emotional space like should work on these things because there's a leader of your company like you want to people look up to you and so on the people front that's like super important I think at any stage and you know some

00:27:46 other challenges that I see for our where we invest in this post seed round outside of people I think I think it's really important to make sure that you're building something that you know I guess there's some like first principle stuff here but it's it's it's surprising to me how many how many companies are built without like proving like out the assumptions that a this is meeting the unique needs of your customer and this is something that guy customers want and like Paul Graham used to talk about like having one one

00:28:34 customer that's not your friend your family love your product that's like creating a 10x you know amount of value in their life is better than having a product that creates like incremental value for like hundred people like true product market fit its trying to get that one person you like with like wow how did I live without your product yeah and so I think it's really important for founders to take to build that and to achieve that level of product market fit and then also to have a viable business model

00:29:08 behind it so you know that's another I think things are changing in the world and well obviously and then like but before Cova David in the public sector you know with we work and all these tech companies that were just you know optimizing for growth and top-line revenue and like we've heard it all before you know that that doesn't indicate success that doesn't indicate a long-term sustainable success and sort of the cats out of the bag like you really have to have foundational business model tenants in place so it

00:29:38 gets a profitability be sustainable be a healthy company of course once you get there then you can apply and like you show the market that you can get there then you can use those profits for R&D you don't necessarily need to you know use them to maximize you know profit layer shareholder wealth and profit and you know shares in the profit profit to the shares but I think it's important to at least show that you're thinking along those lines of you know you can you can turn on and off certain things but you

00:30:09 have a robust and like you have a robust business model in place that you won't you aren't dependent on raising like subsidized capital for the rest of your life just to like keep up like you actually could you'd be fine without raising any more capital and just you know work work within the margins that you have so I think that's like really important now for investors at least particularly in a consumer space which is where I play to make sure that the founders understand you know that understand what a what a viable

00:30:42 profitable business model looks like and understand how to get cost of acquisitions down and how to increase LTVs and how to you know really play around with margin to make sure that they have something that that can sustain the test of time without being so reliant on like always having to raise the next round to justify you know market valuation to their former you know to the out to the the the GP suggests invested in their last round so that like you know they can justify those markups to their LPS you

00:31:12 know it's like let's get out of that sort of snowball of just like you know the flywheel of VC investing in markups and like justifying it by top-line revenue and kind of like maybe slow down a little bit which feels like things are happening just organically with kovat and like build something that's gonna be really organically good and self-sustaining that's honestly I mean I started to notice even last year like the people were once we work when IPO or trying to and they saw was a gonna end up happening like there was definitely a

00:31:50 shift that started getting back to like oh like we need to actually look at metrics because if it doesn't work now it's not gonna work at scale even if you grow a lot it's just it doesn't we're just gonna continue to burn cash but I think you're absolutely right like Cove age really sped that up because there isn't as much funding available to the founders now so the ones that had solid fundamentals in their actual venture early okay like cool like let's just cut our burn and we'll still be okay because

00:32:26 we can kind of we have enough runway to be able to run through it because we actually have a functioning company rather than just one that is purely built on growth that the number Ginetta yeah and and and and by the way for those companies there's there's more optionality in the within the funding landscape like non-dilutive options for them you know lenders won't touch companies that don't you know that don't have these healthy business models underneath them like they just you know that like yes they're looking at growth

00:32:59 but they're also looking at you know a bunch of other metrics that really matter and so when you look at when the VC you know when VC dollars dry up or are apprehensive to invest because you're in a global pandemic you know you have to look other places again I'm probably just speaking in the consumer space because that's what I'm most familiar with you can look at you have optionality you can look at other places for inventory financing for revenue based fight based financing you know debt if you have a healthy business

00:33:34 model in place you're much more likely to be able to attract those types of non-dilutive financing channels yeah I understand I agree awesome so let's let's talk a little bit more about specifically for you like just to give a bird's-eye view for the founders like what is your due diligence process kind of look like I know it's gonna be probably a lot different than some when I proceed or something that's a series B right yeah what what is it what does it kind of consist of what are some of the

00:34:07 things that you look for like let's kind of dive into and then we'll start diving into right after that more of some of the red flags that you instantly see I mean obviously my tricks not working would be one of them right well dive into red flags right after sure so I have an initial call with a founder for 30 minutes and that's really just yeah that's like for lack of a better term like does this founder pass the sniff test no this does you know the meter or is the meter going off so it's just like an initial initial

00:34:45 call just let's just have a conversation like am howey this is what my fund does who are you what is your company do and if you know I'll look at a duck sorry stuff before that is on to all of our deals are 95% of our deals I referred and to us so I'll look at a deck before I get on a call if the duck is interesting if it's a space I'm excited about yeah the deck actually does matter even though most people don't read decks and I have data to support that from my own personal data but also talking about

00:35:15 ders but we skim decks and you can learn a lot just by skimming a deck so make sure your deck looks good and make sure it's like 10 to 15 slides no more and make sure it tells like a clear and concise story and there's no flow and again it's gonna be iterative but like you know make sure it's designed properly make sure there's no typos or grammar I'm like a grammar nazi so like just it's just the first impression you know so like if you're on one of these dating sites your pictures are your first impression you're gonna put our

00:35:44 best pictures up right which you should although don't put pictures up from 10 years ago because like that's all over-promised under-deliver thing never works sodac Jack ven leads to a 30 minute conversation which then leads to me bringing up the deal up in our deal flow scrum that we do with the full team every week and so we have to we have three partners and we have two associates and you know we kind of believe in conviction over consensus through a lot of degree to to some degree because you

00:36:18 know I'm doing consumer my partner's doing frontier tech it's two worlds we don't really know about and then like the associates and our third partner kind of you know dabble between the two but you kind of have to pitch you know why this deal is in the pending category of our CRM it was different like different sections of our CRM because we want to track all deals even the deals we don't even get to a first call with we want to track everything so for our pending deals it's like all right why is

00:36:46 what do you what are you excited about for this deal you know and you have to kind of pitch it to the team and then the team you know will ask you some questions just based you know and anecdotally what you know you can talk about the market you can talk about whatever you know remember you only had a 30 minute call with this founder but then if you know the team sees that you know you have to have some conviction to bring it up to the team and then the team like starts to understand why you're at least marginally excited about

00:37:15 it and then the next step is we send questions to the founder over email so anywhere from 10 to 15 questions and we say you know digest these questions these are all the questions that we have for you know your company and things that are unclear in the back and so forth and then let's you can either respond to those questions in line like through an email or you can respond to them when we jump on a call like let's set up a call for next week and you'll get on the call with the full team and we'll go through the questions and you

00:37:44 can give us a little presentation if you want so so then we have that full team called and by after that call we get a fairly good sense on you know sort of you know probably like a rounding second at that point like we get a pretty good sense on if this is something we want to continue with or or if it's clear that it's just not a fit for us if we want to continue with it we then you know it's there's probably one more round of questions like five to seven questions that are aimed to clarify what you know

00:38:16 from the last call and in addition to that we have one of our partners Carrie who runs the atlas program we have her set up a separate call for 30 minutes to understand Team Dynamics which is really important for us you know to understand you know how the people are know are there any you know issues with the team that we need to be worried about so yeah and then if we pass we send we typically send like a pretty we really pride ourselves I'm not just saying hey it's not a fit thanks good luck it's more

00:38:53 like hey here are the reasons why we passed this is meant to be constructive we think what you guys are doing are great we'd love to Cheerilee from the sidelines but it's not a fit for us and here's why and it's typically you know a page page and a half of constructive feedback I'm like why you know some of the problems that we saw some of the things that you know and and why it just wasn't a fit so we've gotten really great feedback from founders on that being like a really helpful document for

00:39:19 them to look at because I guess a lot of VC funds don't again it's really hard to elicit negative feedback from anyone it's really if you can get negative and constructive feedback on anything that you're doing like I wish I could do that continuously in my life every day it's know how to just be better or how I come off socially professionally whatever so that that's been something that we've implemented that has resonated really well with the founders and and yeah then that's basically a process the whole

00:39:46 thing takes two weeks we typically come back with a yes or no definitive yes or no and then we get them on boarded shortly thereafter that's awesome I really like and I'm torn on there a lot of the time I really like that you give the actual feedback to the founders because you want to jump into this industry like I started for the people that requested a obviously like hey like give me like everything I want to hear it like I would run through the things that I saw and give them a specific feedback on it

00:40:19 and I feel like maybe like a year ago I feel like I slowed down on being able to actually communicate those items to some of the founders because the amount of times that people like the founders love this isn't just a fan of people challenges that it's it can be challenging to take bad feedback without getting defensive and right you just open to it and it's you have to be it's very you have to be very disciplined to be able to actually hear and be like okay is that relevant for me or is it not and either accept the feedback or

00:41:02 not which is both are fine but a lot of time we would end up happening is that people would be defensive like I heard someone yell at me I'm like why it's it like walk like why like this is like just because I'm saying it does not mean it's the actual truth like that over Airbnb you know which is you know there's probably like a normal just normal distribution curve between like the major you know funds on Sand Hill Road that you know like got Google right but missed on Facebook and missed on uber or got Facebook right but missed on

00:41:44 uber or missed on Google or not Airbnb right and missed so it's like if there's not one firm that has hit on all of them so you know but you learn from it and [Music] but yeah but we really we really care about that like continuous feedback loop and continuous improvement kind of thing is really important just like as a general principle the fund a value of the fun they're also like that you touched on the the piece about the deck the short concise like easy to read understandable and that it is important it's not the

00:42:23 deck number closes a deal but the point of the deck is to get you the appointment right no I don't think a lot of founders understand it's like look like your goal is to is to get in and have a conversation with me and if you can do that that's a totally different aspect and we're gonna talk like humans a good conversation and we're going to talk to we're actually working on but I feel like they think that they can perfect the perfect deck and send it that then that that specific deck will lead specifically to the actual funding

00:42:53 no it piques my interest and it's a means to an end to a phone call which is not which is what you want you want to get to as many phone calls as possible and again me being in the consumer space and I care about you know I design and I care about packaging and I care about you know can they do they have an ability to sell their product you know that's like core to the business it's like building something people want that meet the unique needs of your customer and like can you tell a story and can

00:43:22 you get people excited about it well the deck can inform me right off the bat and if they have like if they can achieve that if they have a selling mentality if they have a design I if it's something that's compelling like the deck is my first foray into that into their world and its first impressions or everything you know like that really matters it does I don't even think that I talking about a founder I don't even realize like so I usually read X it like 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning or like super late

00:43:55 at night like there's just kind of when I generally have time to build actually into breeding decks and I remember someone sent me a deck that was neon red and like having my phone open like one of the first things I'm looking at in the morning like my eyes aren't barely open but I'm going through a ring the deck and you just have that mean like neon red just blast me in the face I'm just I don't even know what you do but I'm unhappy with you like me like offended me in my bed and I want to kick you

00:44:37 wanna do whatever you can to like not yeah to not make investors feel that way you want to grab their attention but that's a very nuanced yeah cool well some final thoughts where where do people how do people typically reach you how do they find you online website all that kind of fun stuff yeah we're we're alpha bridge although alpha bridge ventures so alpha bridge BC and then our our integrative leadership program it's called Atlas atlas Q calm although I will give a disclaimer here and caveat that we are

00:45:20 going through a rebrand and so we're converging alpha bridge atlas under the same name alright I don't want to I don't want to reveal it yet but we're going through that process and so in about three or four months all those sites are gonna be inactive and obsolete but we're gonna come out with a press release and hopefully it all makes sense but like right now it's just it's - people aren't like we're it's too confusing for people to connect alpha bridge and Atlas so we just thought let's keep them yeah so

00:45:51 we're excited about that so stay tuned awesome I'm looking forward to the to the developments and again thank you for coming on the show and sharing your knowledge yeah great chatting with you Lucas thanks for having me of course [Music]