 What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sokian. Very excited to be talking about investing in frontier tech. We have Jeff Clavier joining us on the show. Hi Jeff. How you doing? Thank you so much for coming on the program. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so pumped for this conversation. For those who don't know Jeff's background, he is a veteran of the Forbes Midas list of top venture capitalists in the world. He's founder and managing partner of Uncork Capital, one of the original seed VC firms in Silicon Valley with over $500 million under management. Having closed 200 plus investments since 2004, including in companies like Fitbit, Eventbrite, Bleacher Report, Postmates, Bitly, and in companies that were acquired by Intuit, GameStop, Yahoo, eBay, Google, and Twitter. They're currently investing out of their $100 million fund six, making on average 15 seed commitments of $1 million per year in mobile cloud SaaS, consumer services, connected devices, marketplaces, and frontier tech including AI, ARVR, autonomous vehicles, digital manufacturing, material science, space tech, and synthetic biology. You can find all of their links in the bio below on courtcapital.com as well as Jeff's Twitter profile. What a cool job to be able to see all of those fields and how they're impacting our world and be able to help fund the creative minds that are trying to build the future. It is the best job in the world. We see the future through the eyes of entrepreneurs and we're very lucky that we're limited partners, the people who invest in us and trust us with a very broad based sort of set of topics we can invest in and so we're having a lot of fun. It's amazing to sort of meet people. This morning I just had a meeting with someone who was building robots that were vacuuming offices and the guy was just super passionate about it and it was just an awesome time we spent talking about vacuuming and robots. And this is a massive part of our future automation, robotics, AI, autonomous perception systems and just where is this all taking us and what is the nature of this reality that we even find ourselves in the first place? Do you find yourself having these deeper also philosophical conversations with your friends, families, colleagues, the people you invest in about why are we even here? What is the purpose of this reality that we're in? I think as VCs we try and sort of figure out what is the future that we're going to try and build and then work backward to actually sort of okay what does that mean to have this sort of vision, 20-year vision, 50-year vision which is where it takes sometimes when you think about artificial intelligence, full autonomy and things like that but then be practical enough to figure out what can I actually invest in today which will make enough progress in the next couple of years to actually raise the next round of financing and so there's the aspiration, this is what I want to build but then you come back to earth because there's always the need to raise more money at some point and so that sort of keeps us grounded on doing things which are actual sort of practical developments which can go to market within a few years of what we do and I think for us Frontier Tech is where we've allowed ourselves to invest in companies where there's not an immediate sort of go-to-market opportunity you're sort of saying well I'm going to turn the corner and I'm going to assume there's a market for it and we know that Frontier Tech is very tricky for that because no one really knows when autonomous vehicle technology will actually be ready for prime time. It's soon and every day we're getting closer but it's not clear to me whether it's one year, five years or 10 years. I like how you put this in terms of both how you feel and how the people that you work with and the entrepreneurs that are trying to build the future the way that you guys see it happening is you see the new world that you want to build and then you look at kind of today's physical reality and you see what are this maybe some of the archaic systems in place? How do they work? What are the ways that we can actually physically execute and implement this and get it into the path, the trajectory that actually builds that new world? And you have to be very both bold and imaginative and have this really sort of big vision but then have the practicality of actually making it happen. And one of the big questions that we ask ourselves before making an investment is why now? Right? What are the key changes in terms of technology or society or, you know, acceptance, social acceptance, for example, of a given, you know, technology or service or concept that will actually sort of make it happen. And sometimes the why now actually fails because it's not why now, you know, it's like not now. It's actually is too early. People will just not, you know, go and get into a you know, self-driving car because it's just too risky because the technology, you know, it works except at the edge. And then we've heard unfortunately, you know, people dying because of that edge failed edge cases failures. And we'll see, right, whether people actually sort of go for it. So acceptance of social acceptance or risk acceptance is a big factor in our decision making. Man, that's so hard. So you're, you're, you're seeing both the current state of the world, the future that you want to build the entrepreneur themselves and kind of their their own kind of blueprint. What is their blueprint? Are they doing exactly what they're meant to do in this world? Do they can you feel it radiating from them that they're supposed to be doing it? And we need to feel that. Because unlike, you know, when I when I started my own journey in entrepreneurship, being an entrepreneur in France, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, basically meant that you couldn't find a job. And so you basically had to build your own company because no one would give you a job. And when I told my dad that was going to get into the startup game, a long time ago now, 30 years ago, his initial reaction was I don't understand, you've always had good grades. And you're like, what? Come on, I'm telling you about what I want to do. And then you talk about grades, because there was this issue behind, well, you've been successful at school, so you should find a good job. And by definition, being an entrepreneur is not being a, you know, it's not a good job at all. It's very, you know, insecure. It's the one knows whether you'll be able to put food on the table and it's on top of. And so I think over the years, you'll succeed at changing the world and building the future in your own way, right? And so you need to see that dedication to the mission and division and the fact that we try and get the sense that people will be able to work through walls, because that's what it takes to actually be an entrepreneur because it's so, so hard. And some, some sectors are even harder than others. So it's never easy to build a great software company, but it's much more difficult to build a great hardware company. And if you add, you know, like the complexity of some of those new sectors, like autonomous vehicles, I think it's probably one of the hardest things that you can try and build today, because it's a lot of sensor, a lot of hardware, a lot of data, a lot, lots of regulations. And so it's just, you're really trying to hurt yourself by trying to build those companies. But what we try to figure out is this burning desire of the entrepreneur, that even if I tell you for three hours, all the issues are going to face. At the end, you'll still say, yep, but I just can't stop myself. I have to do it. Yeah. And so that that's sort of this commitment that determination that we want to see because, you know, resilience is probably the number one characteristic that we want to see an entrepreneur is before they start, because they will fail, you know, on the ground and have to go back up, get back up and, and try and make things work. Because it's never a straight path. It's riddled with failures, small failures, launch failures, and, you know, you have to find the impulse to get out of bed every morning after a big failure and, and get back to work. I want to hit the ball back with with two of the thoughts that you listed there. One of them is these walls that you talked about. So I want to know that for all of those to hear from you about this from all of those that are aiming to build that future, and there's all these different walls that are coming up in the way. We talk about this a lot on the show as those walls are our gifts that we get to overcome, and we get to learn and then we get to teach other people about how we overcame them and other people can then kind of go over those walls, maybe more effectively. And so, and walls was one of them. And then the other one was kind of figuring out how to be humble along that path. Because even though you're resilient, right, that if you're so resilient, that maybe when you're getting good advice, maybe from a venture capitalist like yourself, or maybe when you're getting really good advice from a mentor, that if maybe, how can you gauge if that advice is actually the right thing for your trajectory and for overcoming those walls to get to that new world? So I'll start with the second one. So humidity, I mean, I like people who are humble in their approach. I like people who are super smart yet sort of listen to the ideas of others. The thing with an entrepreneur, you have to be humble enough to understand the reality in which, you know, you're living in and, you know, the constraints that you have to deal with. But you shouldn't be sort of humble enough to not try. So there is this fine balance between being humble enough, but not too much and having a bit of that, you know, swagger and, and, and, you know, trying to just go for it, because that's what you need to be successful. So it's it's really sort of, and what's hard for us is trying to figure this out. Because we're gonna spend a lot of time entrepreneurs, right? Eight to 10 years on average, for successful outcomes, people in the portfolio, and the numbers are staggering. It's this row 96% of all businesses don't make it after 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so we're gonna spend a lot of time with them, but we spend so little time getting to know them. Because if you look at the typical sort of process that we go through before making an investment, we're going to meet, you know, entrepreneurs three or four times, we're going to spend a toll of maybe five to 10 hours and we're trying to sort of figure out everything about the business, about, you know, the team about their motivation about the potential about the market and so on. So which VCs called due diligence, which we call due diligence, absolutely. And there is there is little time for actually figuring out the personal aspect. And we try and sort of do that. You know, one of the things that we do at the firm is we will always make sure that one of us meets the entrepreneur face to face, which is actually sometimes not tricky, because they may be, you know, in New York or somewhere else in the US. At least we invest, you know, in US companies, but we now have more and more intentional founders. So the hey, we need to meet mean someone jumps in the plane. And you gain a greater understanding of that due diligence from the eye to eye in person. You want to meet the person because this is something that is part of our decision making process. Because sometimes people are great, you know, in a zoom video remotely, and they're sort of awkward, you know, face to face and vice versa, you could have someone who's actually not great through a video conversation because you have this, you know, digital sort of intermediary in the middle, but it's actually great in a face to face setting. So we try and we try and sort of figure this out. So that's that's for humble. The walls is basically all the issues you're going to face as as a startup entrepreneur. And yes, we try and so the key thing, at least in the way we think about our job as VCs is, we'll never tell you what to do what not to do. We'll just tell you in the circumstance like this one, which we're facing. This is what this company or this entrepreneur or, you know, this person in the portfolio has faced as issues. And this is what happened. And this is what we did to try and fix it. So the story tell about other other times that entrepreneurs have faced similar walls and how they overcame or how they maybe fail to overcome. So that part of the storytelling is hey, I'm not telling you I'm just trying to bring my experience or, you know, expertise and story of 15 years of investments and many, many, many failures failures to try and help you make the right decisions. But it's very hard to say Oh, this is like this company in this situation. And so you should do this. So you should do that because they write every company is different timing is different. And, you know, I can tell you well. Fitbit did this, you know, 10 years ago, but maybe it's completely irrelevant. So it's more like here is a frame of mind. And here is the decision making process that we used so that you can then analyze that and then recogitate and figure out what you want to do. So it's very hard. Unfortunately, unfortunately, to have like a playbook that you can take from a very successful company and apply it to another one or another one, like, I could tell, you know, the successful journey of Fitbit to all my hardware companies. But it doesn't really sort of mean anything to them because they're all very different. Tactics can be useful. Right. But the this notion of, hey, there's there's a big wall here, it could be regulatory, it could be sort of go to market, it could be, you know, production, because actually building physical things is very, very hard, especially at the right, you know, on time on quality and on spec. And so all those things, it's not because something worked for one company will work for others. Actually, it's pretty much certain that this works for this one, but won't work for that one. This really takes me in many ways to tribal storytelling about successes that we had with maybe, like immediate return hunter gathering where you went and you found the optimal places to gather or the optimal ways to hunt and you told the stories to the other people in the tribe. And this way, it's telling the other stories to the entrepreneurs that are facing these challenges and helping them navigate through their journeys in building that future. Jeff, for those that may be a little bit. This is a this is a very abstract thing to try and wrap our our minds around. But there's somehow money, you know, is being put into funds. And then so you're pitching people to trust because you have a record, a track record, and they believe in you to manage their money to invest into companies in the seed around $1 million investment level. And then and then you give those people, you know, you take about 10 or so percent at that at that seed investment level. And then you give them all these other things, these these mentorship around the walls and stuff. And but then there's, you know, the all these numbers and cap tables, and then you have to reward those initial people that you had to pitch. So you're pitching people to for your fund to then invest. Tell us about the complexity of that sheer system. I mean, you summarized it well. That's essentially the way the way this goes. So 15 years ago. So I've been a VC for four years before I started in Cork. And that's where I learned the basis of what it means to be a VC, which was very useful. A lot of the people who are entering the seed space these days, aren't actually sort of VC trained, which means that they discover on the on the job what it means to be a VC. And that's tricky. So my first three years, I was just a business, business angel. So I actually circumvented the like, I walked around one wall which was fundraising. So I convinced my wife to take 250k of our savings, we had made a little bit of money at Reuters, which was the acquire of my company, not a ton. And so we said, hey, 250k is going to be the initial budget. We're going to do a handful of investments, 25, 50k checks, and we'll see where it goes. And so 2007 is when I raised my first institutional fund. And essentially, that's what happened that told the story, which was what there is a gap in the funding market as bizarre as people sort of may think it is today to think about a funding gap where there was not they want that many people funding entrepreneurs doing seed stage of tech back in 2006, seven, but it's true. And so I raised one of the first micro VC funds, as we sort of call them, at that time, and I told the story about the potential to the story about, you know, these companies and what they were doing and why it would be a great idea to raise a small fund to write small checks to help them sort of get going. And the idea was, you take a small risk in terms of capital, but you get massive leverage because you invest very early at a low valuation. And if the companies become multi billion dollar outcomes, then you'll make a lot of money. And at the end of the day, the people we pitch the investors, we call them limited partners are trusting us VCs with their capital because our returns are better than the public market. Because otherwise you can just invest in the SNP and you know, here you go. And so the pitch is, hey, I'm going to take $100 from you. And because we're seed stage, it takes a long time for companies to be successful. And in, you know, eight years, I will return $500 or more for $500 or more. You're pointing at something else also, which is potentially the future of micro investing if people can put in even as little as just $100 into such a fund like yours and gain that much. In their case, it's more millions. But I mean, eventually, we'll sort of figure those things out. And, you know, if people sort of find your initial track record convincing and your thesis interesting in your story, actually sort of works on them, then they will sort of write you a check, which is typically, you know, a few million dollars, and you'll tell the story a bunch of times. And most people will say no, and eventually you'll raise a fund. And over time, we got lucky with fun too, because it was literally and it was abnormal to raise such a weird new type of fund in such a short time. It was basically eight weeks also, in the summer of 2007, just before the financial crash. And then, you know, raising the next fund was much longer. And eventually, if you succeed, then raising money becomes something that happens very quickly. So we're less fun. Fun six, as you mentioned, was raised in just a few short weeks. Wow, a few short weeks to get $100 million. The fund that she raised two funds of $100 million each. So we raise $200 million in a few short weeks. Wow. Yeah. And then now the next the next thought around this is so then how do you and then the these are limited partners that are coming in and putting in the funding? How do you what what say do the limited partners get on where the money goes? What say do you and your partners at Uncork get in where the money goes? And then what do you what do you also like recommend for people in terms of observing the emerging technologies that are coming into our world? And and how to kind of keep an eye on the complexity of that? So typically, you try and give yourself the maximum flexibility in terms of where things go. So what you're going to once again, you're going to tell a story to limited partners is one that we call portfolio construction. So you're going to give them rough parameters. In our case, we'll invest in 30 ish companies over three years. Average investment will be a million dollar ish. And we'll try and get as you said, you know, 10% ish. And the ish is actually important because it gives you is flexibility. I'm not trying to get like 10% a million dollar 30 companies. No, that's too restrictive, rigid. I'm basically giving them a sense of what they can expect. I've been very clear with them that we invest in a lot of different, you know, categories and types of technologies and so forth, including that crazy, you know, frontier tech sector where the probability of success is low, which means you can expect an even greater, you know, percentage of failures in that category. But we may actually sort of uncover, you know, really interesting multi billion dollar outcomes in that in that sector. And they sign up for that. And you try and put in your legal, you know, contract, which we call the limit, the limited partnership agreement, as few limitations and rules and boundaries as possible. So I think we can't, for example, invest more than 10% of the fund in any one company without asking our board for permission, those kinds of things. But in terms of individual investments, they have absolutely zero say, wow, none. Interesting. And that's the way it should be because either they trust you investor. And essentially, it's think of it as, Hey, so here is here is $100, the same $100. Wake me up when you sort of send me back money and otherwise good luck to you. And obviously, we're going to give them progress reports. We actually sort of issue reported recorder. And we do an audited financial, you know, report once a year. So it's actually pretty formal. Yeah, yeah. But they don't, they can't say, Oh, I don't like this investment. I don't want it. This is our own decision. And that's, that's the way it should be. Do those same principles go to the next level. So when you put in the million dollars into the entrepreneur, how much do you then get a say in what the entrepreneur is doing? Well, as little as possible in the sense that, you know, it's the entrepreneur's company and you know, we invest super early. So and we own 10%. So there's no voting control, whatever, like, literally, if they don't want to listen to us, they don't listen to us. And to be candid, we try and figure this out. Before we make an investment decision is whether the entrepreneur is going to be coachable and whether they actually going to listen to us. Because yeah, it's their company, we will never tell them what to do what not to do. But we'll give them advice, we'll tell them stories about things that happen to other companies. And we want to make sure that they actually listen to the data points that we'll share with them. Because that's really what we bring to the table is, you know, 15 years of investing at seed stage, 219 companies to date, right, that we've seen go from zero to success or zero to failure. But there's always a bunch of key learnings that we can share. And it's up to the entrepreneur to, I think, respect those, the relevant stories that we tell them. And there's no point in telling irrelevant stories. So that they take those into account before they sort of make their own decisions. And so it's their company, it's their decisions, we try and give them just as much as we can from our experience and expertise and data points to make those decisionizing form that's possible in a world of, you know, where at the early stage, everything is super early. Therefore, super, you know, it's like, you have a lens and it's unfocused and you therefore sort of see a bunch of shadows and you can't really sort of see what's there. You know, there is something there. And we just tell them, well, in similar situations, this is what the shadow was about. And then you were on the board of the National VC Association. Yes. Okay, for four years. Yes. And just 2015 and 2019. Yes. And as doing that, and you guys are sharing best practices around what how to how to make the efficiencies in what you're doing. But also, I'm curious if you guys are also talking about then with about these emerging technologies and how you're figuring out what are the places that you're you know, you listed so many different fields. How do you guys keep track of the different fields? And yeah, that's that's a really great question. So the National Venture Capital Association is really sort of the, the body that represents the industry with regulators and government, right? So this is, we have a team of 10 each people in Washington, and they spend a lot of time on the hill to make sure that senators, house members understand, you know, what tech is about, what we need from them, what sort of, what are the implications of any regulation or, you know, limitations or things that they may want to sort of set up as part of their day to day work, because they don't really understand at all what we do on the financing side on building startups, they sort of see, at least until we sort of did a good job educating them, they was just like this thing in California, and, and startups were only about, you know, San Francisco and Palo Alto and definitely not the case. So we try and really one educate and represent on one side and then bring all the concerns that senators and house members may have and work with, you know, our companies to try and and get tech and Washington to work better together. And these days, it's actually really, really hard. What a crucial thing to get done, though, because you guys also as VCs are also slightly unfamiliar with congressional processes. And so that way it synergizes that is very, very true. I was, I was, you know, surprised, shocked when I, when I showed up as a newly minted sort of bull number of the NVCA, which is a four year service. And it's good that it's four years, you know, of service, because the first year, you're like literally learning money, like what the hell is going on? And yeah, they don't like when you show up like this. It's really like suits and ties and California. Because like showing it like that, like that is your out. Interesting. And so there's a formality that is sort of amusing but but necessary because you know, this is this is a formal job. So the the symbiosis, which is always sort of hard to establish is very, very important because otherwise, they will make, I wouldn't say wrong decisions in terms of rules, regulations, decisions, they will make. But they will sort of impact startups in a negative way. And anything that impacts startups in a negative way, potentially has an impact on the economy. And so yeah, because if you look at the impact of successful startups, an impact on creativity, on building the new world, and jobs and, you know, revenues and everything as well. Right. So that's why the this role was was really interesting. To your point about how do we keep updated with the what's going on in in the world of technology and so forth. It's about keeping track of the key sectors that you're interested in. It's about going after, you know, going to conferences meeting, you know, scientists, having key experts you can trust and you will tap for advice and pointers and and things like that. But at the same time, remember that as a VC, most of what we see comes inbound to us. So people are seeking, you know, capital and, you know, we're fortunate to have a great brand and great track record and people sort of come to us and we rarely sort of go and seek someone to invest in them. What we do seek is advice and validation about, you know, going back to my robotic vacuum cleaner thing that I made this morning. If I was interested, I would go and seek advice about, you know, the commercial vacuum market because I know nothing about it. I recently committed to company in the lab grown diamond space. Yeah. I do nothing about lab grown diamonds at all. Yeah, now they're also doing hair. They're doing it with hair, human hair, with ashes to turn of a such an interesting thing that you can take some of your child's hair and and do the high pressure carbon process to give your like wife a diamond of your like child's hair, like such an interestingly field that's And so, you know, the in order to make an investment in something like this, you have to spend enough time and talk to, you know, experts and get sort of advice, validation about the technology and then figure out that the market is kind of big enough. And so you answer the key, the key questions about thunder and thunder market fit, product and, you know, market opportunity and if ever the three sort of come back positive, then and you sort of like the entrepreneur and you see all the passion and everything we talked about, then you are to check. Yeah. Yeah. And then how about on the, the processes that actually occur with figuring out the, you know, you were talking about this earlier, this, this, this energy, this aura that you feel from the entrepreneur, their vision for building that future, their ability to do so their coach ability, all these, these, these really crucial things. Do you guys, do you guys have some sort of like a process of also knowing, knowing what future you want as, as, as Jeff and as uncork, you guys have this future that you want to this future world that wants to exist. And then do you guys kind of find the investment pieces. So if you guys say, we want, we want to stop slaughtering animals, we want to grow meat and bio reactors. So you go, okay, so now this fund, we're going to have a an investment in the lab grown meat space. And then you also say that you want to help people that may have some sort of, of, of learning disability or so cognitive disability to then have an augmentation of sorts through augmented reality, interfaces, new input output interfaces that helps them communicate with other people in the world. So do you then go and kind of like fun, so you see the vision and then you fund the, the entrepreneurs that kind of help build that, the new world. So what you're describing is, is a thesis driven sort of firm that will have a set of whiteboards and say, those are the, the key sort of sectors or the key feature services that we want to find a solution for. And that's what they will go and do. And that's just not our approach because of the breath of what we do. So at the end of the day, and my wife runs the central for social innovation at Stanford, and she's into impacting testing and social entrepreneurship and double online. And she always say, don't, don't even pretend that what you guys do is impact, you guys just just, you know, after the money. And I'm like, yeah, but you know, when a company like molecule improves the quality of the air we're breathing and helps people who have asthma to avoid ending up in ER because they cleaned up the air that they had in their bedroom, it's actually sort of a positive impact. And she says, yes, and that's making the world better. So it's a world positive kind of investment. And so that's, that's sort of the angle we try and make the world a better place as people. That's our, that's a statement. But then we just see all those opportunities that come to us inbound. And we're always thrilled to see them sort of improving people's situation. Example, we have a company called vivid vision, see stitch company in fun five. And what those guys do is they use today's VR technology. So goggles that you can find from, you know, Oculus or even the gear VR from Samsung. And they have developed special programs to treat ambliopia, which is, you know, crazy eyes, crossed eye and things like that. And thanks to, you know, those treatments within a couple of years, you can basically have someone no longer have any ambliopia within a couple of years at any age, at any age, which is really sort of brand new, because, you know, the traditional technique, which is based on trying to exercise, you know, your eyes with masks and so forth. I think there's a limit of, you know, either 18 or 25 years old, where you can't after that, you can't really sort of do anything. And this company is basically, you know, there's I think 30 million people in the US who have ambliopia. And each of them could be treated by, you know, vision. Yeah. And so this is the type of stuff that we love talking about on the show so much. When you have this, this tie between money and power and status with building the future in a way that is truly about the highest possibility that our world can be. We love that so much. And that that that processes is if that that that to hear that from you inspires us. And then hopefully, we hope to see other because there's some bad. There's some people that also feel and this comes from the actions that people both observe and the way that people behave themselves, but just that there can sometimes be just a focus on money, just to focus on power and status. And so it's great to hear you talking about the social. But there's a point I wanted to make is that I had no idea like, trying to sort of improve people's, you know, condition with ambliopia, or people who have ambliopia, improve their condition wasn't sort of something I woke up to one day and said, Oh, I'm going to go and do that, which is wasn't your thesis. It was just like, Hey, we try and leverage technology to in general, sort of make the world a better place. And sometimes we succeed in making like a dent, you know, in whatever the world's misery is, or, you know, bad conditions or whatever. And that makes us sort of feel pretty good. But at the end of the day, we're measured, you know, rightly or wrongly by our success in returning a bunch of money to our investors, because that's what we need, you know, to be able to raise the next set of funds. And, you know, so that growth engine itself is a little bit strange. I mean, even that is because that's that's the thing is that if it's if it's constantly about returning the funds, then some of the ethos can become shaky. If it's if it's that pressure that's coming to return the money, yes and no, I think just it's just about choosing the endeavors that you back. So they are doing good and their commercial success. Yeah, which is not yes, which is, you know, it's, it's not impossible being vigilant doing the due diligence to do exactly that. So that would be such an important part of what I'm taking from this. And hopefully others are too is that if you to be so first principled around the core pillar of the ethos of building the new world, that it that it never has to become fragmented as you have to return the money to the initial partners LPs. Yeah, that's that's return the money in multiples in multiples, not just yet. It's not like you return the money. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. It was fun. It's like, you know, 45 times is what they they hope as a as a sort of table steak. And then maybe, maybe there's some flexibility in terms of maybe you only return two times, but you make significantly more social impact on one of the funds that you're. Yeah, so there's there's all these types of things, or maybe you make 10 times, but you'd be you were more vigilant about the social impact side of things. I think possible, everyone, everyone is super happy that you're doing, you're doing good as long as you sort of meet their performance expectations. And you know, it's it's completely feasible. I really sort of think it's there's no trade off. I mean, there is some trade off. But you can sort of figure out a way to perform for your investors, people interest you with their capital and build companies that can make the world a better place. And then you can decide to not invest in things that you don't think are sort of on values. And we do that, you know, every day, because for us to get involved in a company, one of us, just three of us, partners at work, one of us has to say, Yes, I'm really excited to go and spend time with this company and help build it. And I know it's going to take 10 years of my life to get it to a large outcome. But I'm ready for the challenge. And I'm excited. And, you know, sometimes we meet a perfectly fine, you know, idea, great team, interesting market, but no one has that sort of interest per se. So it's like, Hey, anyone wants it? And we look at each other and we know that it means well, if no one wants to pick it up, then it's not for us. And this is Ashley Cravens, and Charles Hudson are the other two? No, Ashley has been with me for, you know, a long time, years, almost, almost nine years. She's the director of operations. Charles is a dear friend and was my first partner at Uncork. But he's really sort of focused on what we call now precede, which is very, very early stage investing. So my partners are Stephanie Palmer and Andy McLaughlin. Okay, Stephanie and Andy. Okay. Interesting. Hopefully we can continue doing things like sitting down with partners at the different big VC firms in Silicon Valley and help go through these processes of unpacking their journeys, unpacking their relationship to helping build that new world. I love, I love doing this and hopefully we can do it more and other people can then gain the insights to also bring their creativity to the to the world. This is really close to our hearts as well. The distribution of the rewards earlier we were talking about a micro financing. That's very interesting. Doing something like instead of needing to put in 50 million into your fund, it becomes something like, Hey, Allen, do you have 500 bucks? Because with 500 bucks, you can take, you can invest into Uncork capital fund. This is because this is the really hard thing we were talking earlier about these cap tables and the securities and exchange commission and blah, blah, blah, blah, this this part's really hard to figure out. But as we do figure that out, and maybe, you know, these, these decentralized immutable ledgers become part of the process. That then you can maybe make eight times on your 500 bucks and you can really quickly find outlets that are better than like you said, stock markets in forgetting returns and we can distribute rewards better. Or yeah, how do you guys feel about about that process and as emerging technologies come into our world, how to best like include like an inclusive stakeholder mentality. If like, we always use this example, it's a very convenient one, like a ride sharing company. Can the drivers get part of the success? Can the riders get part of the success? Can the community that like the company operates in? Can they get part of the sex? Can the environment can future generations get part of the success? That's, I mean, we could spend two hours on that. I think that it would be, it would be awesome if we could sort of figure out a way to do what you just described. The challenge is it's a very, very complex regulatory environment and we need the regulators to just define the rules because as much as I would love to, you know, take 100 bucks from, you know, anyone and turn that into four or 500. The problem is it takes 10 years, remember? So, you know, they may sort of not like, they may like the outcome, they might like the time it takes. But at the end of the day, we're sort of regulated in a very, very specific environment. And I can actually not take, you know, money from anyone who's not a accredited investor. And actually, it's been worse for us, because our fund is what we call QP only, so Qualified Processor, which means even if you're an accredited investor, if you don't have, you know, a lot of money, then you can't invest with us because we decided to, because there are very specific rules and limitations. For example, you can't have more than 99 investors, if ever you go for a accredited investor sort of fund, whereas the kinds of funds like us don't have that limitation. So we basically raise money from people who have made a bunch of money themselves, or from institutions like by now, 95% of our capital comes from institutions. But if we, I hope, Reg D and a lot of sort of those advances in in microfinance allow us to actually sort of make money for these people and could be directly or indirectly. And I'm pretty sure at some point something is going to be figured out, because there's no reason that we can only serve with very specific high performance financial products that people already have a bunch of money. I think the one regret I have is that, you know, we have a bunch of family offices and funds of funds and people we're very proud to have as LPs, but I would have loved to have a hospital as a limited part. So we could actually return a bunch of money and then see the impact that our financial performance has on that community. So that's on my bucket list. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So there's all these different ways to kind of codify the protocols and the structures that then make it so that the emerging technologies, the financing of the emerging technologies can then distribute the rewards to more people and to more social good. And that's a huge part of our of our of our new future that that we want to build. Yeah, one of the ones we were mentioning this before we started, but interdependent capitalism, redesigning the social contract through inclusive stakeholder, the incentive price on incentives. These are all things of the UN Family Foundation that we applied for and that we always highly recommend our our viewers to check out because that style of of a process is is so deeply part of of our social fabric of the future. Jeff, I want to ask you also about what are your thoughts on many of the cultures around the world from we were to be mentioned this a little bit earlier, but these ideas of the tribal days of the immediate return hunter gather days. There was this deep, passionate interconnectedness with each other and the environment around us. And it almost felt like there was no, it was way less separation. The West brought in the individual and it was both incredible in many ways, especially in entrepreneurially, creatively, but also it created a more separation as well. How do you feel about our disconnection from nature and its effects on the world that we live in? Well, certainly that that's that's a massive issue as we, you know, we live through massive wildfires which have been created by, you know, climate change in California and we are unfortunately with the government which has, we're from this morning, they would walk away from the Paris Accord, right? And so that means they really don't care about the environment. I do think that it's a shame that not more people are actually thinking about the world we're going to live with our children. I have, you know, a 22 year old and 19 year old and, you know, if you look at the state of the planet that we live to them, it's not brilliant at all. And unfortunately we don't see a ton of entrepreneurs sort of focusing on that in terms of major challenge and how to deal with, you know, plastic pollution or things like that. There are a few but they tend to be more on the non-profit side and that's that's always sort of something which I find to be too bad is how can you figure out how to do good and build a sustainable sort of, you know, company at the same time. I don't have an answer unless, you know, we think about, hey, once we help people sort of make a bunch of money and typically they start being more active in philanthropy and then they start giving a bunch of that money but that cycle is not satisfactory. I wish people sort of could figure out how to, you know, improve the environment while sort of building sustainable sort of companies. Interestingly, you were talking about, you know, companies building those meet alternatives and they are, it sounds like successful financially while making the environment actually sort of better because it consumes so many resources, water and electricity and so on and so forth to grow meat versus those other products. So I think there are ways to find, you know, mission and business and bring them together. And for certain things there's just not going to be, we have to be, we have to be fine with the fact that there's not going to be a profit incentive. And then we need to create new funding vehicles for those solutions and that's a whole part of venture capital that needs, in its own way, a new new vehicles within venture capital. That this is not something that's a five times return after 10 years, but this is something that is funding crucial science, crucial entrepreneurship, crucial reconnection back to our environment in nature. That is not something you're going to get a return off of, but is rather making it so that our have our environment and our interconnectedness with each other is sustainable and prosperous for your children and their children, etc. Yeah and unfortunately the way sort of, that's what I was talking about right, you have sort of venture capital and very specific sort of mandates in terms of funding and we'll do really crazy things, but they have to build, we have to believe that they will build a sustainable sort of company at some point in the future, even though, you know, we've seen all those companies sort of go public with massive losses and still sort of making more losses and you wonder like where the sustainable part sort of comes from. And then there is, you know, fundamental research which is typically sort of government funded or, you know, philanthropic sort of work, like the Gates Foundation and what's interesting is this feedback group where you see Bill Gates, you know, founding sort of Microsoft, becoming the number one, number two, sort of wealthiest man on the planet depending as to whether it's him or Jeff Bezos, but then him through his activity, redistributing, I mean, he's committed to redistributing pretty much everything he's made for very key causes where he will literally change the face of actual disease thanks to the funding he gave for polio and things like that and so think about having a global impact on the worldwide basis thanks to the work of one man who's made a bunch of millions and he's super smart and he's trying to take his entrepreneurial sort of mindset and apply it to causes. Yeah. So that actually sort of works as long as you do it and so totally. So there's funding vehicles already like that that you listed, yeah. And so then, you know, it's about you go to Jeff Bezos and you go like you turn. Yeah. So yeah, we'll see. Yeah. That's a big part of it as well. Completely agreed. I want to know about about your experiences with feelings of non-separation and interconnectedness. How about your feelings with that? Have you had experiences in that area? Well, I think that on one side technology sort of makes us closer because you can really sort of spend like when almost 20 years ago, we went to visit my parents who live in a small town of France called Toul and we brought them a computer. Didn't have a computer and they're like, what is that? And we're like, well, we're about to move to Silicon Valley. Some of the other side of the planet will be nine hours ahead of you guys or behind you guys. And so we'll talk through the computer and we'll buy, you know, video cameras and we'll use, you know, programs to talk to each other because we won't be there anymore. And, you know, I'm grateful for the technology that allowed us to and in 20 years ago, what you were seeing was very grainy the big maps that were not, you know, super high res. But over time, the technology sort of improved and now we can do a pretty good sort of video conference, you know, for an hour every Sunday so we can spend time together. So I appreciate that connectedness. The problem is that we're now, we've pushed it to the extreme and, you know, literally, it's not uncommon to see two people who are having dinner and they sort of just look at their phone respectively and they don't even spend time together and they don't make a contact and do anything, you know, like they don't they don't share anything. It's just like there's a personal experience where I'm here with my phone in my own world and I'm not really sort of connected to the reality I'm surrounded by and that I despise. Maybe something around craving silence is one of the keys there. The process of inspiring those feelings of interconnectedness to all. To really understand that the trees, what they breathe out I breathe in and the cyclical processes that occur on the planet like that. It's I think it's about one thing I've sort of seen as a group so older, I'm 52 now, is it's less about what you have or own, it's more about what you experience. And so now it's much more about hey, can we go and do something together and experience something as opposed to buy whatever. So like, okay, we buy stuff because we have to and you know, or society is very consumerist but I really sort of value just the simple things of you know, sharing a nice sunset or a walk or being somewhere together and do something. Yeah, yeah. Do you think, these are some of our ending questions that we love asking, do you think that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital super intelligence? They would have wiped us out. I think they would be very disappointed if it was true. I'm sure they would delete us. Because if you look at what we've done to the planet, the superior human beings or superior intelligence or superior AI that would sort of look at our output would say okay, let's just restart. You know, sometimes you just say not working, start from a clean slate, boom. So. Do you think it is our destiny to build that super intelligence as biological humans? I don't think we'll build it by, we'll stumble into it if we do. A crooked tree. Yeah. Like, oh, that was a bug and you just created the singularity that everyone is talking about. What has been your most profound experience in this reality? Oh, seeing my two children, you know, being born. And why? Because suddenly you sort of realized that you actually created life. And so I remember when the first time I sort of held my son on May 1st, 1997. And he was and, you know, my wife and I had just created life. Those were very profound. And I had the same feeling, you know, when my daughter was born here. Stanford is a great hospital, by the way. Yeah. Incredible sort of, you know, being supported by them. It's, it's, we've had, we've been fortunate to have a lot of experience, but I think nothing sort of compares to having your first born or your second born in your arms. Yeah, yeah. That's a frequent answer on the program and it's a deeply profound one. Yeah. I'm not surprised because I think, you know, of all the things that, you know, you can do as a human being, giving life is the most profound. I would be curious what people sort of say if they haven't had children. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because that could be sort of a personal experience, could be a trip, could be, you know, one of the best memories I have of my travels was being in South Africa, in the, in the Kruger Park, just walking around the bush and, and, you know, seeing all those animals in their environment, in the purest, most pristine kind of environment. It was just incredible. I wonder if birds also think that when they fly over cities and they're like, look at all those animals in that environment. Yeah, you wonder. And then how about, do you think that this is a simulation? Do I think if it's a simulation? So, you know, the Matrix, when the guy is about to eat a steak and to drink a very expensive sort of bottle, and he says, I know that I'm programmed to sort of like it, but I still like it. I'm a huge wine fan, so as long as I can appreciate wine, it will be fine. Uncork. Funny you said that. Yes, the name of our firm is Uncork, but it's really about uncorking innovation and, you know, the twist of energy. That's what this, this means, the twist of energy when you open the bottle and the uncorking innovation. Uncorking innovation, yes. And the person who helped us rebrand, because before that we were called Softek, we were branded two years ago, is a professor of branding at Stanford and he knew nothing about my side passion for wine. And he listed 10 names that were his recommendation and the sixth was Uncork. And he was actually five year recommended and five he would be happy with. And it was the second comment. It was like, why would Uncork be not your favorite? Because, oh my God, this is so good. And he was like, why is it slightly negative? Un, and you don't want to have something like a venture capital firm to have a slight negative connotation. But, and we're just laughing because all of us enjoy wine and we have more bowls of wine in the war office than the rest of VCs combined, you know, in the valley. Because you never know, you may need 400 bowls of wine, right? Why not? And that's where, you know, we decided to go for Uncork and when we were branded our founders sort of give us a standing ovation because we announced it at our founder summit and they were so happy that the old stuff that was gone in Uncork was born brand. Yeah. What do you think is the most beautiful thing in this reality? When you can experience nature in a way where all the downside and all the, you know, stupidity of us humans and all the relations, you either don't see it or you're not exposed to it, that would be it. So maybe that is the new world where there isn't that stupidity and those downsides but that we have the problem is that we've done so many bad things that getting nature back to just an equilibrium requires a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah. Study. Yeah. And we talked a lot about all of the different ways that social good comes out of what is happening in venture capital and also about how these new funding vehicles for inclusive stakeholders and all these other ways of bringing forth the new world and entrepreneurship is such a critical pillar in building the new world. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on our show. Thank you for having me. It was awesome. We really appreciate you coming on. Glad to hear that. Thank you. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below in the episode. Let us know what you're thinking about investing in frontier tech and all the other subjects that we talked about in the episode. Let us know your thoughts. Also, check out the links in the bio below again to uncourtcapital.com. Also, Jeff's Twitter profile. Check those out. Thank you, Ori Shapiro for co-producing. Thank you very much. Also, support the artists, the entrepreneurs, the leaders in your communities that you believe in support them and help them grow around the world. You can support simulation. All of our links are below. Help us grow. Help us prosper as well. And go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in. And we will see you soon. Peace.