 Well, hello everybody. I'm James Vincent from Founder. We couldn't afford the vows so it's FNDR There's a big Chinese company that had the vows so we had to be called FNDR I'm gonna talk to you about investing in the equity of storytelling I might argue that every single day you invest in the equity of storytelling because you buy from brands and brands are storytelling and you don't buy from people from You don't buy from products from things that don't have a story In fact money is a story everything is a story slush is a story So actually investing in the equity of storytelling is kind of an interesting concept. So let me tell you about it a little bit So firstly, I'm going to introduce you to my team Founder as you can see sometimes has vowels sometimes doesn't So I'm lucky enough to be with three other amazing storytellers. We work with something crazy Brands and founders over the last five years together. We worked together with founders to help them tell their story I'm gonna start with these three guys since I work with all three of them and collectively we work with them So I was lucky enough to work with Steve Jobs from 2000 to 2011 and ran the advertising agency Media Arts Lab and had a meeting with every single Wednesday from one till three and During the course of that we launched iTunes iPod iPhone app store iPad Probably a bunch of others that I'm not remembering And all the time the storytelling was around creative thinking Right, so I don't think Steve Jobs set out to change the computer industry He set out to change the way you think creatively And so now you all have a phone without buttons on it because he was about creative thinking not about Functionally solving a problem Brian Chesky has built a brand around human belonging so I worked with him in 2015 helped launch the brand helped launch the trips platform in 2016 And he was on my podcast a fast company podcast of which I host And telling the story of human belonging so his belief is that seven billion people. I think it's eight billion people now Should have a can belong anywhere so when you travel you can belong you don't need to be a tourist you don't need to feel like you're a alienated or isolated and Evan Spiegel built a brand around authentic friendship and we worked together in 2018. He was actually the first client we had at Founder And you know all the while in social media where most people are lying to strangers on social media You don't have 15,000 friends and just because you took a picture of a sunset didn't mean yet a good day You're kind of lying to strangers and on snapchat at least You're building authentic friendships, so I have teenage kids I know that they have a relationship directly with their friends and it's through snapchat So they're brands their stories and there's real equity in every single one of those companies so That was the found our founding story and since then Founder has worked with 130 founders So maybe there's a brand or two that you've heard of here the beginning We work with Jose at Farfetch we work with David at Roblox and rekay at Brex And then in the last little while I mentioned snap already. There's a bunch of other brands up there We work with Nicholas at so rare and launches NFT Trading cards we work with Titan the FinTech. There's a bunch of brands up there that you probably recognize So we've worked with every single one of those brands, but more importantly We've worked with the founders so our relationship. We don't work with companies unless we work with the founder We're called founder. We work in a peer-to-peer relationship. We work very much like I did every single week with Steve on a Wednesday between one and three where I had to orchestrate a conversation between us and This time it's the four of us where we pull the genius out of the founder and we figure out what their storytelling is We figure out what their existential role in the world is and so we build we build narrative led Strategy together with all of these founders so our relationship is with these founders So, okay, so how am I getting to a fund here? Well in an intimate relationship with all of these transformative founders We on average spend 10 to 12 hours with each one of these founders and we're pretty selective about who we work with Hopefully we're and I'll tell you about some of the criteria But we're working with some really really interesting companies and some really interesting people So we have this privilege of being in a front-row seat and we call it narrative therapy because it's sort of getting very very close to founders I might argue that we spend more time with founders than even a bunch of other funds might spend time with founders and that the time We spend is really quality time because we're asking very provocative questions and we're building their storytelling together So we have a pretty good sense of what kind of a founder. They are when do we work with them? We work with them at this moment so in this growth moment this inflection moment what got them here won't get them there and As soon as I show this slide to founders often people say let me tell you what my got you got me here Is but I really need to figure out how to tell a bigger story and that's when we come in And it helped people do that So during the course of this interaction We got a lot of personal invitations to join cap tables So be like, you know what we really loved working with you We're just raising would you like to put in a check and we're like Okay. Yeah, so I perhaps were somewhat accidental investors because we're storytellers primarily But over time we found ourselves in this position where actually we could put in checks at really critical moments very early on Often where other VCs and other funds just couldn't and they actually didn't have the relationship that we had And so founders were asking us to join their cap table so Over time that basically became this idea of building a fund so actually our first Our first check-in was the wonderful Danny Rimer from index who said why don't you have a fund and so like okay? Well, maybe we should have a fund and so So what we did was we built this fund and it's a It goes that we go we always invest in the founders that we've worked with at founder So first we've already always spent 12 hours with them We've always understood their business and we figured out who they are through that process So we end up building a fund with a point of view and that point of view is as follows It has principles those principles are we invest time before money? Right, so we will never make an investment in a fund in an investor Or a company or a startup unless we've spent those 12 hours with them So I would argue we're you know pretty intimate pretty provocative and we've figured out what a good founder looks like Second thing is our criteria to work with founder is to be interesting and important So I'm actually always thinking about my three partners thinking will it be interested? Will it be important? Is it gonna make a dent in the universe? Is this something important to the world and if so then we work with them and and then the very best of those hopefully we then invest in And we also have a criteria for working at founder which is about can technology Can it create positive human interactions? I might argue Apple has really focused on positive human interactions I would definitely argue that Airbnb is a community is probably the biggest community driven super brand in the world Their hosts the way the the relationship works when you go to Airbnb you bring your best human Because Brian Chesky designed for positive human interaction, and that's exactly what we're looking for too So our due diligence I mean the first step of our due diligence is the fact that we're always pretty much always investing alongside amazing grade A VCs right so Oftentimes there's some of the very best VCs those are our VCs are often the referral that we get So VC might be sitting on a board listening to a founder saying I think they need some help telling their story and We get introduced and come in and help them and so it's in that intimacy We're then able to say to the VC. What do you think I say? Absolutely, that's why we put in a hundred million dollars or whatever they did and so that's the first level event of due diligence but for us actually second level of due diligence is the intimacy that we have with these founders and having worked with a 130 of them we have some sense of the types of tenacity and resilience that it requires to be successful and The fifth one which is beautiful because founders a small company based in Venice Beach, California It's 22 people and everybody gets a little piece of it So we're a typical 20 plus 2 and the 2 the carry gets distributed amongst everybody that works at founder So that is in totality why we're investing in the store in the equity of storytelling Will never become singularly investors will always be storytellers The first thing we do and will always want to be is the founder brand is about helping storytellers People tell their story better the fund comes at the end when we want to extend that relationship and to go further With the founder and often the founder is very very keen to have us on the cap table because the value we can give The number of times I get what's at I'm just about to make a presentation James. What would you say which bits good? Here's our new deck. What do you think here's our new website? What do you think and of course if we're on the cap table then I'm responding probably more quickly than if we're not so So that's it. I just hit zero. Thank you very much for listening Founder fund is the equity of storytelling. Thank you