 every time a founder raises a big round of funding, I think it's a little bit of a failure. And so, you know, there's celebration, I think some of that celebration is justified, but ultimately you wanna see that company grow without having to raise that money. Now, okay, here's one thing. So how does, like typically now, a founder is not gonna exit in one go. This is another thing. And this is a part of the carrot that larger late-stage funds use in order to get into these deals at the point where they realize that there's an IRR opportunity that's open for them to make back their money with the kind of multiplier they need to show in the timeframe that they need, right? And so they will come and, you know, they will say essentially, look, we're investing $60 million into your company at, I don't know, a 300 million or a 1 billion post-money valuation and 10 million of that we're giving to you as the founder. We're buying secondary from you at this point in time. So founders nowadays, it's a fairly routine normal thing. This used to be considered an exception and something that generally people didn't like, but nowadays it's considered pretty much okay and even expected that a founder is going to sell some of their shares to a late-stage investor and essentially exit early, right? And the justification there is that ideally that early-stage founder has paid themselves the lowest salary of any employee in the company, right? And this also, by the way, tends to be different in Europe where founders tend to assume that they get paid a lot of money and they have credit cards and phones and cars and maybe even their house, I don't know, everything kind of on company credit, whereas in Valley terms, the idea is that every single diamond cent that you raise from a venture fund especially is going to get ideally put into growth of the company. And sometimes that growth means that you pay an engineer or a great marketing person or a great business person well, but you probably aren't going to not pay yourself very well as a founder. That's sort of the assumption there. And you're certainly not gonna be using the company credit card to buy expensive lunches and fly first class, et cetera, right? So there's still, I mean, there's obviously it's been talked about a lot and it's kind of a trope, but I do think there's a difference in just culturally what the expectation is in Europe versus the States. And oftentimes I've seen even Finnish founders who come into the US and Valley struggle with this because they're just expecting a different kind of norm and they don't understand that they're essentially breaking the tacit rules. So just a note. Now, again, so you've got this founder who's now lived in their tiny student flat for two and a half, three years. They've built this incredible company, Smartly Vault, I'm talking in Finnish terms here, but maybe, I don't know, the equivalent of a Zoom or a Slack or a Peloton, right? And so, and they have, you know, frankly, VPs that are getting paid $250,000 a year or whatever, and yet they're still making 50. So in a situation like that, it seems reasonable to actually reward the founder early, for instance, allowing them to, I don't know, buy an apartment. Maybe they've gotten a baby, et cetera, and these things often happen, right? Because you want that founder to keep making wise decisions and actually feel less pressured to have to sell the company, for instance. If you wanna decide between an IPO and an acquisition, then from an investor perspective, it may sense to have a founder that's actually already gotten a bit of money because then they're more likely to swing for the big games, right? To really wanna go all the way, take more risk, maybe wait a few more years before they get the big exit, just in order to maximize the return for the investors. And so this is why this founder secondaries are nowadays a very typical thing. When, okay, we talked about how a company should look, what the ideal specs of the company should be, and also how they should think about how the VC thinks, but what is the perfect approach? How do you get the attention of VC's? The ideal case is that the VC comes to you, but for most companies, that's never gonna be true. Right, well, ideally you build something that starts getting traction. And from our perspective, just as a VC, so the moments that are, you know, there's basically, I have a friend who was, you know, I think a major in Afghanistan in the US Army on actually two different tours. And so I homeschooled my kids and one time asked my friend, well, his name's Kojo, it's like Kojo, what's war like? He said, I was thinking like this would be interesting for my children here, like from a real soldier, like what is war really like? I said, well, it's basically long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. If you want to be very succinct about what war is, right? And so I was like, huh, well, that's kind of like my job. So the VC, you have these long stretches of utter boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, which is when you discover that there's a company out there that fits your model that you might be able to invest in. And so most of the time, VC's get pitched, right? And so as a founder, you're like, well, I've been in this situation as a founder myself, where I'm like, well, why is it that all these VC's just don't seem to warm up to my pitch? Because I think my company's great. And fundamentally, the fact that you are pitching at all means that you're probably not on the kind of growth path that the VC wants to see, right? Because when you are on that kind of growth path, you really don't need much VC. From an early stage VC's perspective, a company should be able to get profitable with I don't know, maximum of $5 million of investment, right? And so that's so little that you can raise that in easily in two rounds. Let's say an angel slash pre-seed round of under $1 million and then a follow on institutional seed round, which is on average about $3 million. So that'd be, let's say $4 million total investments would get you to break even. So it's a pretty quick process for that. And so, but again, early, number one, early traction and growth. Like if you just focus on that, you're golden because the VC's will find you. And oftentimes the way the VC's finds you is that you have a friend, another entrepreneur, maybe a more experienced entrepreneur who you have somehow had a great relationship. I don't like the word mentoring. I don't think mentoring is real. The best founders don't have mentors, they just have other peers. And so you have other founders that are more experienced perhaps, but that you treat as peers. And they are usually the ones or oftentimes the ones who then tip off their favorite VC's because it's a VC they may have worked with before or who they respect. And they're like, wow, there's this guy Rahul who's built this incredible little thing called superhuman that I think we'll, you know, you should take a look at. You know, so oftentimes the companies that I think are the best ones that we've heard about, you hear from other quality founders. Sometimes it's another VC or an angel. But, you know, oftentimes also those investors then want to protect that, you know, they want to kind of keep it a secret, maybe a little bit. And then, you know, if you're a great brand, you may get invited into a syndicate. Of course, you know, people always like to, and it's a good idea to co-invest with a bunch of people, but you know, the syndicates tend to be very small. So that's how I would go about it. Focus on growth, get that early traction, and then, you know, be open, like, you know, share what you're building and exchange ideas with other very strong founders. And those founders are oftentimes the perfect way to get introduced to the best VCs rather than pitching VCs cold. So, you know, it doesn't hurt, but it's just a much, much from a VC's perspective, less likely to be interesting for them. So you're already kind of starting from a less interesting starting point for them that you're gonna have to get around.