 So warm welcome to everybody who's joining us here today for our Capital Insider series. We're looking forward to having a wonderful chat with Greg Sands who is the managing director and managing partner for Costa Nova Inches and is doing some great early stage investing in particularly in the tech space in tech startups and he's joined us from Bay Area. So thank you very much for that Greg. I know it's very late for you out there but thank you for being here and talking with us about what the scene looks like. You know for us here in India and Asia we've always looked at the Silicon Valley for a great amount of inspiration when it comes to doing the startup and really comes to understanding what the trends are like in terms of new startups. So we're going to discuss in the next 45 minutes about what you really feel is something that the world today needs to know in terms of understanding the business models, understandably out here in India and Asia. The whole digitization wave is very large and building a business for digital is really the way forward whether it's a consumer business or a manufacturing business. Everybody needs to be in some ways thinking digital and digitization of their platforms. So today particularly we would love for you to tell us as to what kind of trends do you see happening. Now if I look at the Costa Nova portfolio I see that there are a lot of companies you have in deep tech whether it's data whether it's fintech you know or even I would say all kind of related categories to deep tech AI. So we would love for you to say that tell us as to how do you see these trends changing today. What has changed post the pandemic for you in terms of how you're looking at startups. What kind of startups are you looking at. Is there something that has changed substantially for you in terms of how or what kind of startups you want to invest in or probably the you feel that in that scenario probably things continue to be the same. In India we have seen you know particularly when the whole business environment has been very subdued we've seen geo platforms in India which has raised huge amount of funding today and you know with everybody like from Facebook to Google everybody is investing over here in India on geo platform. So there is huge deep tech opportunity today for technologies to be developed in virginity and do you see therefore markets in India or Asia becoming more important to you for doing future investments. So I'm going to give it to you. Love to hear you. Yeah so there's a there's a lot to take on but I'd say the it is interesting to note the huge investments in geo and I think it is exciting to see the you know the sustained economic development in India creating not only a deep middle class but also technology platforms that are important distribution vehicles for global companies. The company of ours that has been most active in doing that is a company called Amplify you can think of it as a it is a business consumer engagement tool that helps companies make effectively chat bots that engage with consumers over Facebook Messenger text in a Google RCS and the like and it has it has been very active in India has both a sales effort and much of its product development in India as well. Sure and I mean particularly from a you know from a deep tech perspective what kind of startups are you looking at today what kind of new trends are you seeing happening today. I mean has healthcare been one sector in our health tech I would say one sector that you started looking at post or amidst the pandemic. No not not really I'd say you know the we do some things or call it you know software that supports the the healthcare ecosystem and even the edge of software and fintech that supports the billing around healthcare but we get given our expertise in what we do we're actually been more focused on things like the data science and machine learning infrastructure. Sure and so about half of our last six investments over the last nine months have been in data science and machine learning infrastructure because we think that trend I'll call it the camber and explosion of machine learning and its set of capabilities both creates needs to develop the tools and platforms to build and manage that set of capabilities right and then there are a set of really interesting opportunities that are what we think of as applied artificial intelligence in specific business sectors or for a specific business function. Sure and you said data science and machine learning and I mean you're making very early stage investments in them how do you see them growing in the coming years I mean do you see them becoming like faster unicorns then let's say an e-commerce company became back in 2010 so in terms of their growth and their scale up what what are you seeing differently versus what happened in 2010. Well I think the again we don't particularly do e-commerce and so every each of these businesses has their own characteristics I will say to me the thing that I'll note is that if you go back 100 years people were starting telephone businesses right but in 1970 it was ridiculous to call anything a telephone business right in 1990 when I was at Netscape and you know basically during the formative period and the initial launch of the you know of all these internet businesses you launch a business in 2010 let alone 2020 and it's silly to call it an internet business right because if you're in business it's an internet business and I think fundamentally that's going to be true for every substantial company every growth company every mid-market enterprise company is going to be an AI driven company it's going to be a data driven company it's going to be a machine learning or driven company so these technologies and these tools are three years ago they were very rudimentary sure and therefore the needs weren't that fully developed and what we're seeing is as people take these models and they push them into production and they need to manage their performance and optimize them and evolve them as the data involves and push them into production and retire them and keep a snapshot of a version of the model and a version of the data there's just infinite complexity and those are the kinds of problems that were that's one that's one of the big areas of emphasis sure and do you see globalization of companies in data science and machine learning happening much faster than companies in other you know as I mentioned maybe let's say other sectors or other kind of technologies I think the the wave of globalization is you know continues to to happen at an extraordinary pace and I don't know that this sector is going faster than others I do think that there's excellent work being done all over the world obviously the deep mind which Googlebot was based in London which and so that's certainly has been one of the centers but there's great academic research being done all over the world that is getting commercialized and it's often getting commercialized in the context of open source projects so one of those investments is called coiled computing it commercializes this product called Dask for it's just a tool for data scientists but when it's an open source project the people contributing to it are all over the world the people using the product are all over the world it's not like you say oh a higher sales representative in Chicago and she's going to sell in Chicago and to hire to sell in Europe or in India or in Southeast Asia I need to put a rep on the ground right no you just do thought leadership and make the code available yes so these businesses particularly open source ones are global from the start yeah that I agree and you know they're whole the premise of such businesses is more b2b than b2c is what I have also realized particularly for companies and data companies and machine learning ai so from that perspective do you feel that companies or startups that are actually getting built in deep tech they need to look at fundamentally going deep into the market or do you think there is more opportunity for them to grow via acquisitions or by actually partnering with a larger technology group and being able to provide their product over there so I mean you know as the number of companies in this area grows whether it's AI or machine learning or data science how do you see the opportunity paving out do you think there will be more acquisitions or there would be more individual startups who will go on and become much bigger my view on that has evolved I think three or four years ago I thought more of those capabilities were going to come from the giants and when I say the giants I mean Amazon web services Google cloud platform you know which are the major ones you know Microsoft and Azure as well those are logical places for it to happen and certainly companies like Facebook have been investing heavily in their machine learning infrastructure although they don't make it available to outsiders in quite the same way and I think what's happening is that the pace of development and the evolving requirements are moving so fast that that energy is coming from startups right and I think there will be I think there will be independent companies created there are opportunities for really substantial data management and machine learning management and data science management companies to be built that can be freestanding independent public companies yeah now some of them there won't be 20 of them that'll be the independent freestanding companies there may be three or four that end up being the aggregators and tie those pieces together sure and I mean yeah go on go on no I was also going to just add that I think outside of those categories and some of the things that we do there are there are trends that I think are globalizing even faster and so we talked about fintech the globalization of fintech is and the let the rate of innovation of financial technology and it's unbundling at least in the U.S. and in probably in Europe as well these services had all been built but they were they built in the context of the big banks and the big insurance companies and it's very painful to work with them and so what's happening is that in the developed markets there the profitable services and lines of business are being take you know basically created outside of the banks with better user experience and faster service and in emerging markets of course many of these services are being created for the first time and there is and that is a real enabler of the economy and so I do think that that's one of the exciting trends that we see with challenger banks and startup insurance companies and the like delivering capabilities to a broad audience all over the world sure so you know you're essentially an early stage investor Greg you know so I feel that from particularly from your lenses understanding the founder and what is his larger vision is very important so what are let me ask you this what are the four or five things that qualities that you see in the early stage founder that you really sort of say bang on you know this is the guy to put money behind and his idea and him together would be a great success what could be those four or five qualities that you look at I think the you know this is of course a subject of eternal debate but I can tell you what I have found and it has worked really well for me is first they have to have incredible knowledge of their domain and a curiosity about it and a desire to learn more and to dig deeper but they really have to come in you know for me I don't want somebody who comes in and paints a big vision I want someone who can drill down and tell me the nuances and the design choices and why they've made them so that's one the second is have to have incredible drive it often gets talked about as passion and I think that's a misnomer I think what people need is drive because it's going to be hard and you just got to be able to keep going and that that means literally just a source of energy that will keep you going day night weekend uh tenacity the uh there'll be moments that are dark there'll be moments where you ran an experiment and didn't work and it's not quite clear what the answer is for intellectual honesty I think people who try to convince themselves that things are true are really dangerous so I want someone who is who is actually looking at the facts and five judgment that's the thing that a CEO is going to make a hundred decisions in between board meetings right and so you know the reality is look I'm a support I'm a coach I'm a mentor but I'm not there and so that level of business and personal judgment is just incredibly important sure no I think those are some great points and and you know but let me also ask you this since you mentioned these areas today you have so many portfolio companies and all those founders in some way are I mean provide the pandemic has not hit the the the the digital companies in a big way probably you know the physical companies have been more hit by the pandemic but nevertheless I think you know in a business environment like this everybody is hit to a large or small extent so what is it that you're telling the founders I mean why did you brought all the founders on board with all these five qualities nevertheless what is it that you're telling them today you know to optimize their businesses what is it that they need to sort of do to stay afloat when they're probably not being able to find customers when they're not being able to maybe even deliver in markets you know which are outside their home markets so how is it that you guys I mean we uh so I spent all of March and April you know March April and the early part of May this is all we were doing right we just were focusing on the existing portfolio and dealing you know helping people deal with the challenges and I think the you know the um the the first thing is you can't run out of money right you know the the recent businesses dies because they run out of money right and that means um so that's that's thing number one you know you just got to look at expenses and unfortunate and that that includes personnel expenses and so almost everybody did some form of furloughs some you know some temporary salary reductions sometimes reductions in force or layoffs and any non-essential spending just stopped so that's one uh the second part of that is for many companies we you know this is the benefit of having a long-term institutional backer we let her catalyzed 13 financings in the first four months of the year well to try right so you basically both try to reduce expenses and you just lay a little bit more track right this the the second is take care of customers right I mean well I'll say I'll generalize it take care of your people but that's two fronts right one of which is take care of your customers because holding on to your existing customers is always the most efficient thing to do right you can't uh so and then but then you also have to take care of your people right the people that stay you got to figure out how to support them how to take care of their physical health how to take care of their mental health understanding that people are dealing with a very challenging environment and then the third is focus if people had three things that they were going to do this year cut it back to one yeah be really clear about a whole bunch of things that you're not going to do and uh and you know the consequence of that is that you know on march 7th which is when we went into lockdown here we didn't know all the answers and so but we said okay you're right don't run out of money plan and replan take care of your people focus and we went through about two or three rounds with every single company so that by about april 15th you could wake up and say okay okay i think we got our feet on the ground i think we know what we're doing we got a plan and um it's all working pretty well sure yeah and i mean you know um so let me ask you this way that uh i mean you know the plans of lots of companies who are there in your portfolio or otherwise you know out there at large might have stalled for some time you know whether it was plans for them to go global or to think or get into a new market or whatever and secondly i feel the talent is very important uh in technology companies and you said that you know people obviously you know the business climate was such very even uh the best of companies had to either ask some of their put you as you said furloughs or people were asked to uh take a reduced cuts or even leave maybe in some places so how is it that companies will manage when it comes to talent do you think uh this uh distant working or remote working culture is here to stay and how can we make the most of it i mean you know uh the best efficiencies the best optimization can be done within these cultures so that you know eventually maybe this just becomes the way things work or the way um uh like happens or companies grow do you do you see that happening the um you know yes i think it has been trying for everybody on the other hand i think it's also the case that all the employees who are recognized how much wreckage there is in the u.s economy and a global economy are also more thankful to have jobs and good employers than they've ever had that's been particularly true as we've been living in this you know again highly competitive labor market here the the war for talent and um but you know we we have a portfolio company called Beyond HQ which actually helps people manage uh remote locations and we invested in that about 18 months ago because we could see it coming it was already the case that you couldn't pack more people into the Bay Area you couldn't hire every single engineer that you wanted yes you know within 10 miles of your office you just can't do it anymore and so i think this i do think that this is going to be if you think about the changes let's just say go two or three years out at a time when we have a vaccine and a time when we're healing when we look back i think one of the biggest changes in the economy is going to be the acceptance of remote work for every white collar job yes and i think it is it takes different things to manage what to me the big insight was that people struggled when they're picking number 50 100 200 people and they're all coming to one office every day to set up a second location because it really changed the work practices to try to keep people connected and in touch and the like and it it didn't always work very well but when the flip that switched is that everybody's remote and when everybody's remote it changes the culture it doesn't happen at the proverbial water cooler it's written down and it happens in slack it happens in collaboration within the workflow otherwise it doesn't happen yes and so the business processes have just flipped yeah that's true but i also feel that you know the founder when you probably chose him to make an investment you never looked at him as a quality to be able to manage a remote team uh you know it was never there uh as a quality which might have been seen by an investor now how are you training the founders to be able to do that what what is it how do they upskill themselves today to you know manage a team which is pretty much spread everywhere and you know i was talking to the CEO of virgin hyperloop the other day and he made a very good point he says you know we are in i mean in some place some ways we are in some hardware business so unless we're all sitting together it becomes hard to put everything together so you know sometimes you have to be sitting in one place and the minds have to be together in order to maximize whatever output you are looking at so now the founder never the founder was never trained for that so how how does he change himself fast or hurt fast or or her exactly i think the um you know one of the things that i didn't include in the in the list of five things wrongly i got uh is this idea of a of a growth mindset and a desire to always be learning and building new skills because in part a founder of an early stage company is almost never ready to run the company when it's 10 million dollars or a hundred million dollars they've got to grow and stretch themselves to do it and so this is a moment of forced learning and people the actually i think a lot of people can come go through the transformation and come out the other side with this new set of skills but it takes work right and it takes struggle and it takes experimentation so we're fortunate to have a uh at our firm at coseno we've got an operating team right so we've got uh three full-time partners in marketing sales and talent who um you know amongst them they probably run 20 learning labs a year now those you all used to be physical we used to host them in our office and now of course they're principally virtual but over this last four months much of that has been around uh managing and crisis around transitioning to remote work around maintaining building and maintaining cultures in environments where nobody sees each other and so by the way i think it's the 55 companies that i know well i'm amazed at the transformation and it's mainly going very very well sure um Greg we're getting some questions also so i'm gonna probably ask um Raleigh Bardwas to maybe ask his question first he's in fact put about a couple of questions and then Anupriya Roy can we please have them on the screen yeah go ahead please uh very nice uh points that you have elucidated so uh my question number one is should the startup need to be revenue positive for a engine or a VC to invest what is your criteria should it already have revenue suppose we are product ready and concept ready very uh bullish about generating the revenue down the line um we are only product ready still uh is it a good time to go to the VC to showcase to uh based on the projections to raise the money or you want you think that people invest money only when we are revenue positive well so i can only speak to ourselves and i can and obviously the majority of our companies are in in the in the US and those that aren't have been Canada and Australia and Switzerland so far the in general so we do invest as early as company formation so sometimes in products that haven't been built now those are rare cases they're cases where often we know founders or it's a problem that we've studied and we know very well one of the things that we pride ourselves on is being willing to go sometimes do customer discovery with founders so that we learn together what the requirements are and we can figure out how big a problem is before customers are always using the product now that said there is no doubt that it is easier to raise money when you're already generating revenue when you've got referenceable customers who will say what they're using the product for and how good it is and how much money it saves them so i would say the you know the the most important thing is to have done that customer research right not built it for yourself sitting in a lab and uh and then it's possible to go share some of that research with investors and say this is why we built it this way and this is why we think there's lots of demand that'll help but i think having a handful of customers using it will be even better so there are some products for which it is difficult to build the revenue for example whatsapp like social networking products the traction revenue traction is difficult but the user traction can be achieved so does a vc equally respect a user traction synonymous as equally good as revenue traction so it depends on the vc and it depends on the market so there i think for the most part early stage consumer vcs don't have a choice right they have to be willing to invest in traction that they hope will be monetized someday uh on the other hand i we don't fundamentally invest in consumer businesses we principally invest in in uh business to business environments and you know exceptions have been in in education technology and fintech so for example we led the series a at springboard which is career transformation particularly for people in data science and in uiux design it has a significant india footprint again both on the go-to-market side and on the product development side but it in that case it did already have revenue so i think uh i think user traction is uh can be really impactful in our world the place where we see user traction but are still a question about what the path to monetization looks like is principally in and around these open source businesses and that is the way a ton of software infrastructure is being built these days is an open source and it has some of those very same dynamics thanks for your questions i appreciate it yeah thank you yeah can we have anu priya online please i have this question that in the initial uh steps how i think uh we've probably lost her signal so it says in the initial steps of the business how do you keep note of for reaching larger targeted audience anu can you unmute and ask your question please yeah yes go ahead yeah so i have this question that in the initial steps of the business what should we keep keep in mind to uh to reach a larger based audience our targeted customers well thanks for your question and it can be slightly different in different markets but i would say in reaching a um a large audience and a broader set of customers certainly one of the things to do is to begin and build thought leadership in your category and it certainly is the case that blogging and content marketing and social distribution of that can be very impactful in uh building a distribution channel and you may not yet have the product to roll out through that distribution channel but that certainly is a significant way to start in fact um this evening i i talked about these tools for data science and i was watching a uh and people uh quote computing is one of our uh companies and they have uh two of the you know the founder and their head of marketing and they decided that the best format for them was to do a youtube channel and for the two of them to lead people through capabilities of of product and to banter back and forth and it's a little bit like uh the way my son watches twitch so what part of what's interesting to me is you can innovate around the formats and the formats where you're likely to find your audience and where you can really showcase what you know and the capabilities of product sure you know uh let me ask you thank you thank you um you know now if you're investing in a newer market let's say in a market like india you've largely been investing in bay area and in us uh where you typically uh looked at but you know if you let's say find some something interesting happening in deep tech in india or in somewhere in asia pacific how is it that you will judge i mean and considering that right now we're all sitting so distantly and not even being able to meet each other only virtually perhaps how are you going to judge a founder how are you going to make your decision as an investor and i mean do you would you say that okay if it's come from a recommendation from an angel investment group and therefore it becomes a better choice for you to make investments and i mean so how do you and i mean in india you there might be a lot happening in this space at this point of time with geo having raised so much big investment there's going to be a whole big moment or a revolution that will take place in deep tech india and already see a lot of young startups working or doing a lot of work with geo as a customer base in mind so how as as a founder uh in early stage tech companies are you going to make a decision to invest in a startup based in india or asia well i think the yeah and it's very hard so uh we we have made uh investment decisions where uh that would have been done completely in the covet era we have made investment decisions in one founder that we have never met face to face in the covet era and i think that actually teaches a fair amount about how to do that in remote geographies so in prior cases in all of the cases that are international examples we've those are markets where we have co-investors and we you know we know people that we can triangulate with and we have met the founders often they've flown to us for the you know to do a silicon valley tour but at some point we've gone to them before investing but i think we we have learned to do a fair amount of that evaluation of uh person right in these zoom conversations and you know it is uh so we try to use sort of universal standards to do that i think the other thing that i'll note is that a great many businesses this isn't true at company formation but in businesses where you've gotten going i mean the honest answer is you know you push stuff to github and we can evaluate what's in github we can evaluate the traction in adoption of the of the product you start selling stuff to customers and you and you know you push the data directly out of what you're probably using this you know is you know quickbooks at that time or zero you so the availability of the you know so we want to see revenue growth we want to see customer acquisition we want to see customers renewing and so in relatively early stage businesses and there you know there have been some extraordinary ones that came out of um you know geographies that aren't very close to silicon valley where people just ship product and sign customers and renewed customers and expanded customers and it's all in the data and you know so it's hard to make that kind of decision in a three-week investment cycle but boy you get to watch that over six months where people say this is our plan and this is what we're going to do and then you can see the atomic data there that's plenty sure yeah no i completely agree with you on that we've got another question um uh from a person who says what is your take on the edutic sector because we've seen edtech rising uh in the pandemic across the world and online learning becoming the way to go so what how do you see the scope of the sector expanding in the yes we um i think the the cause of digital education has been advanced the decade in about three months and and i say that by the way i'm quoting my younger sister who works at coursera uh who is among the experts in the in the in the category uh and we have you know so we've made four venture investments uh in the education sector um two of them are companies that we've already sold one to cornerstone on demand one to uh to a private equity buyer springboard and quizlet are two you know our two beneficiaries of this environment you know quizlet is the world's favorite tool for building foundational knowledge and the everyone of remote all the time has accelerated it's uh you know it was born in the us actually started by a sophomore in high school at berkeley high school trying to learn vocab for his french lessons right 12 years ago and uh and so it's got its strongest growth here and it's it's really helped expand globally i talked about springboard already right now is the time when people know they need to transform their careers into digital careers absolutely and so the and doing it in six weeks uh instead of taking a year or two years of graduate school to get a master's degree in data science is faster it's more efficient it's less expensive it works as well people you know the the payback is immediate it comes with a job guarantee so these things have been swept up and to me the um those are the uh those are the the i'll call it the professional education and the career development is frankly mainly going to happen in the context of uh of these new ed tech sectors right that you know you're not going to build professional skills by going to a traditional university now the question of um how universities get transformed and um how i think is a tougher one there's a whole and i think it'll be different in different geographies i think the us might experience more disruption than international market because we've had we've tied a bunch of stuff including socialization and on you know on campus living and sports and a bunch of other stuff in the university environment that isn't all tied together in a market like india or australia or the uk or uh and i think the question but i you know k through 12 is really hard there are some firms that have done a really good job with tools that they sell into k through 12 environments but i think the um we all know that the you know the under 10 year olds trying to study on zoom isn't working that great yeah right it just isn't working that great and that's just a matter of mental and psychological development yeah i have kids in that age and i can tell you the learning's been hampered yeah so i think the question of um and and and as we talked about in the context of companies hybrid is really hard the idea that oh i've got a class of 20 kids and 10 of them are going to be at home and 10 of them are going to be in the classroom but i'm still we know from business meetings that are in that hybrid environment it doesn't work as well you're better off all being remote or all being in one place so there's um i think there is there's a lot of transformation coming for that sector it's coming very fast and i am really excited about the set of things that we can do for adults in professional education that's the thing that i absolutely know and that i know we can invest in and i know we can build really profitable businesses that serve people well that deliver extraordinary value correct and do you think somewhere particularly you mentioned in higher education or probably skill learning education or education technology do you think it's going to be linked to jobs at some point of time so if i'm taking let's say a course from course era as a student i might be expecting that i might it might give me some job prospects or from universities while every good university was built because they were able to some good universities were able to promise the best of jobs coming from their campuses do you think that expectation would continue to stay when it comes to online uh let's say uh learning environments or startups which are giving these courses absolutely absolutely i think the question of i you know i i mentioned this only briefly but spring springboard comes with a job guarantee they will literally return your money if you don't get a job so they have to be meeting the needs of employers and helping connect people to employers otherwise the business won't work and i think that is the future i think that that is the way that it's going to work and it is a you know i think that partly is the way that the people in that education space are you know part of their market is the employer right and so they need to be adaptive to the skills required and the places where there are job openings and part of their market is the you know particularly in these professional education this for the students you know we in product management we used to talk about what's the job to be done right for a student trying to transform her career in data science the job to be done is to build a foundational set of school skills get a recognized degree or certificate that validates that right and get a job sure absolutely without the third one you haven't completed the job yeah that's true so that's that's going to be more important and i think what you said about university is getting disrupted that's where the disruption is really going to start from because which campus is going to ensure your better job will actually take all the good students away yes yes and i you know and it is you know it is 10 times more expensive to be physically on on campus right to change location to go to a different city to live in the dorms or get an apartment and by the way i think those universities they do an extraordinary job the question to me is i hate saying it this way but does that become a luxury good right and it might i think i mean it's really important that we do a great job educating everybody and certainly that everybody who is has the motivation right so reducing the price points increase has access right we want to access for everybody we want it to be financially accessible and and and that's frankly just world positive and the existing universities they do extraordinary work but they in the u.s. they're ungodly expensive and the price goes up seven percent a year even when inflation is two or three percent a year and it's unsustainable yes i totally agree with you okay we'll take one final question from one of our guests amin mankani if we can have him online please okay let me ask his question greg it says that what trend are you what trend is being observed by international investors in india today if what are the sectors that are best to invest at this time in which to avoid okay i think he's an investor yeah well i think that the single biggest to me there are there are there are two answers to that and in you know you're an expert on india and i'm on as an expert on india and i'm not going to purport to be the investor in india but i do think that the uh there are many things that are hard moving products around is hard right getting groceries into people's hands is hard but enabling financial products that are universally available and into the hands of especially the the emerging middle class but you know but but broader over time and i think that actually uh removing the friction from those right it is an extraordinary opportunity and it is good for the economy and it improves people's lives and gives them access in ways that they haven't had so that that's certainly one i think it's also right to say that the i mean there's been this obvious rapid expansion of mobile phones and connectivity over the last decade in india and and with all of this money coming into geo i think the idea of the mobile platform yes and all of the things that ride on a mobile platform some of which of course will be financial products and payments some of which will be um some of which will be gaming environments some of which like our company apple pie does will be taking existing brands and media and e-commerce companies and helping them acquire customers and engage customers in and around that environment and so to me those are the two things that i would be focused on sure so i think um i will not take more sort of questions here while there is one question uh is that how do you see social entrepreneurship changing now post the pandemic do you think it's going to become more important impact funding or do you think there are going to be different rules to it somebody sent it over facebook yes uh i think social entrepreneurship has been building for 20 years and so when i was in graduate school uh five friends and i started a micro enterprise program in a relatively uh poorer community in our neighborhood called east palo alto uh in our area uh based on what had been done at gromming bank in Bangladesh and you know it was social entrepreneurship was a relatively modest effort at that time and the people really want to be driven by mission and there are sometimes a quizlet a spring board aqua bite ai for fish farming where you can be truly mission driven yes right in a fully commercial environment and there are times where it requires social entrepreneurship and we've seen all over the world people do absolutely extraordinary things by dedicating their lives to social entrepreneurship some of which are nonprofits some of which are i'll call it for-profit businesses but not meant to be terribly profitable just meant to pay for themselves that way right and i think it speaks to a deep need in humans to be attached to their values and what they care about and in a world with um look that um the harder it gets and that's because of pandemic and it's because of international relations and it's because of uh chaotic leadership including um chaotic leadership in our country i think people it drives people to want to make a difference and to want to be world positive and uh and so i'm i'm hopeful that we'll see more social entrepreneurship in this environment well uh thank you very much brek for talking to us i think that was a wonderful conversation and so much to learn from you one of our editors has actually asked one question from you and she's saying that you know as a tech investor how do you judge qualities like tedacity and honesty in a founder so we'll probably close it in that it's a we'll close on that i think the uh there are a couple of things that are really important one of which is you have multiple conversations in multiple different venues we used to do things like this over lunch and dinner and the like in different situations and you you know on some level i'd say face to face you just probe right you you know you you drill it's like little drill a little well and little moments of insight and to some extent it's seeing if those pieces connect with each other right do they all tell the same story or does one point in one direction one point in the other direction at which point i walk the other way the other i'll just have to say and this is the thing that makes investing farther from home harder is i have trust my eyes but i do reference calls and you i just have to talk to references and it's better if they're references from people that i know but they don't have to be and i'm gonna and i'll ask really direct questions and i'll want to do a half dozen of them because people can take something that they botched up badly and tell a great story about how they came out on top and sometimes you can detect that by talking face to face but you have to look around the back by talking to references as well you got to do both sure so thank you once again gregg it was wonderful talking to you and for all our attendees who have questions still have questions please keep on posting them on facebook live i'm gonna ask gregg to answer them at some point of time in the coming days but thank you indeed i think it was a great learning you know for the entire country who's going to see this video and particularly for tech founders who today have a great ambition great ideas but really sometimes you know there is there's they're high on tech and slow on business and sometimes they are high on business and slow on tech and all these things need to combine together to make a great company and you know it's people like and folks like you who really make this possible and make it happen so thank you for taking out the time and talking to us and uh hopefully the next time we'll probably do something like this we'll do it more in person and getting to know each other better instead of thank you i would look forward to it thanks so much for having me i enjoyed it thank you very much