 Well, good morning. It's a great privilege to be here today, and I guess we get to start out the day with a nice and light topic of how to raise money. I want to walk through a little bit of the journey where I've learned some of the lessons, some of the positive lessons, well, there's few, and the negative lessons, and there's many, about how I've kind of come to the way that I think about fundraising, but frankly how one builds a company and how one thinks about bringing money into that company, effectively go hand in hand. So I want to talk a little bit about some of what I've learned along the way and some of the methodologies have been, I've been putting in place over time. So I spent about 18 or so years with with flagship pioneering. Flagship is a, if you will, a company builder. Now when I joined flagship, flagship was at that time an investor. We invested in technology companies. We invested in life sciences companies. And one of the things that we realized is that when you sit on that side of the equation, what you end up doing is you end up competing for deals. When you get into series A's, for example, if you have a nicely syndicated deal, you'll end up with about 30% ownership of the company. And what you start realizing is that as you bring in more and more capital, your position, your control, your ownership decreases pretty quickly. And so especially when we were doing this, which was in the early 2000s, where you weren't talking about 10x's between rounds or 5x's or 2x's, well I guess today it's like negative 2x's, whatever. But you were talking about 10%, 25% step-ups, you realize that the risk reward isn't that fruitful. And so I was given an opportunity to start thinking about what if we were to create our own companies inside a venture firm, which meant we had our own capital, but our own ideas. So what we ended up doing was we built a, if you will, a platform that allowed us to systematically and reproducibly create companies and create those companies from scratch. So the way that process works is it's a four-stage process. The process starts with, if you will, an exploration, moves into a proto-company, then moves into a new co-phase, and then what we call a growth co. Now the context of what we're doing here is we start out with a big question. That question can be anything we choose it to be. Everyone thinks the question is important, it's not. Because what the process does is we spend about six weeks trying to separate truth from belief. That is, we'll read everything, but more importantly we'll talk to everyone and ask these sorts of questions. The reason we think about it from that standpoint is in a lot of literature what you find out is people need to say the same things as everyone else in order to get time of day. And those are just errors. I'll give you some examples. It's often been said that we use three to ten percent of our brain. If you ever wonder where that comes from, it turns out about 150 years ago, German scientists took rats, stabbed blunt instruments into their brain, and found that in about ten percent of those spots, they saw that the rat changed in the way that it was behaving. Okay, that's persisted and we teach that to like kindergartners now. Here's another one. Genetic mutation is the cause of cancer. Well, we all believe that to be true. But it turns out there's types of cancers called appendemomas, pediatric cancers, that have never had a recorded genetic change. So how can it be the cause of cancer? So from our standpoint, it's not that we're trying to buck science, it's that we're trying to find out what the facts are. We then figure out what our hypothesis can be and we go out to the world and we tell people exactly what our idea is. Because one of the things that we found is the single most renewable resource in the world after the sun is people's willingness to tell you how bad your idea is. And so what we're able to do is take that information, find out everything that can go wrong with our idea, and it allows us to iterate over and over and over. Now, when that all consolidates and we can't find other things that are wrong with our idea, what we start realizing is that, hey, we have a hypothesis. That's when we move from the exploration phase into the protocol. And what the protocol is is we take a very specific hypothesis and we try to disprove it. Now, the reason for this, right, anyone who's been an entrepreneur knows there's always this critical question and you don't want to ask it. Why? Well, the wrong answer is your secret and your accelerated path to unemployment and no one wants that. So often what you find is these special secret questions never get asked until too late, but they can still kill the company equally. And that becomes a problem. So we try to ask that question directly because at this point there's no special names. We number our companies. We number them intentionally because that allows us to kill them and we try to kill them early. Now, when we fail to kill them, we then launch what we call a NUCO. A NUCO is run by someone inside the company, inside the firm. And what we'll do is we'll bring in over 18 plus or minus two months, 23 plus or minus four people, and we'll go try to advance the company to try to prove some key, if you will, milestones. But something magical happens every single time, and it's always around nine months. And that is something funny happens. Now, I mentioned this because when I think about building a company, right, anyone who's gone out and raised money, anyone who's built a company always tells a narrative. And the narrative is always how perfect our idea was on day one, how we've advanced exactly how we planned. In fact, everything's gone better than we expected and everything's amazing. Right? The reality is anyone who's been a founder knows that your idea is wrong. It's just wrong, right? And what good founders and good builders do is they accept that as you're moving across that journey, you're figuring out faster than other people. What's wrong and how to fix it. And you're being attentive to those signals to figure out why that thing might be wrong and what the right answer might be. Now, that's not that's not meant as a criticism. This is just the reality, which is you form an idea and with no market signal, with no insight, with no background work, how could you get it perfect? So it just is the reality of it. But I look at that as a framework that if you accept it, you build a company a different way. So in our new co-phase, we're looking for that magic signal nine months in. What we do there is that we find that signal and we change everything. Then we go build the company that was intended to be built. That takes another nine months. And at that point, when we finally realize that we have something, we can go move it into what we call a growth code. Now, there's some very important things that we do in this point. One is we bring in an outside CEO. Two, as we move into a growth, growth co phase, we bring in outside capital. I want to highlight this. The reason we do it internally and the reason we fund it alone during this period is because this gets into some of what I've learned painfully over the course of raising capital is that your syndicate is only as strong as your weakest link. So when you get a syndicate of investors who come in, one of them will be in a worse position, right? They might be late in their funds. They might have had a couple of bad hits or something along those lines. And they will, some partner or junior partner or principal or associate or I don't know, summer intern wrote a memo. And that memo described what the investment thesis is. And when you find that thing that's off from what their investment thesis is, you now gave them the excuse to not pony up for the next round. Because this is one of those things that you find is that investment theses are narrow. And as an entrepreneur, as a builder, you have to be consistent with the thesis that you presented to your investors. Otherwise they might and they will often walk. So we've learned this the hard way, unfortunately. And what we've realized is, well, don't expose the lowest common denominator to that issue. We learn the issue. We make the changes. And only after that do we think about bringing in investors. And that's why this growth co phase is so important to push later because when we bring in that outside CEO, we have the very clear value proposition. We have a very clear set of statements that we want to bring to the outside world that we think are going to be more likely to be more consistent and more durable over time. Now, this model is something that we started building in about 2009. We moved into this whole phase of trying to implement it. We found some flaws. We started improving it, et cetera, et cetera. But the single most important thing that we did was recognizing that we will not share the economics in the near term, meaning everywhere between from the beginning through the end of the series A we fund by ourselves. And that gives us effectively a hundred percent of the equity. And the power of that is it allows us to be entrepreneurs. The other power of it is, frankly, it helps from lowering the cost of capital, but we'll call it spade to spade. But along the way, I decided having started about 35 companies over my course at flagship that I wanted to become more of an operator. And this gave me the opportunity to take some of the lessons that I've learned and put them into practice in a bit more of an intentional way. So I'll walk through a little bit of our journey at Valo and I'll try to bring a little bit of fundraising, our fundraising experience out of that. And for those of you who are wondering, yes, Valo does come from the Finnish word. So Valo is a company I launched about four and a half years ago. It's probably why they invited me here just because of the name being finished. But we'll leave that aside. I launched the company four and a half years ago as an AI company intended to build better drugs for patients faster. But let's be more specific about what we're actually trying to do. In every single industry, when you get to a certain data and computational threshold, you have an opportunity to rewrite the entirety of the tech stack of that industry. The pharmaceutical space has been historically recalcitrant because the data that's needed is so complex. It's so diverse that it's effectively been thought as an area that you could not do that fundamental rewrite. Reality is in about 2019, we crossed the threshold from a data availability perspective and a computational intensity perspective. So we launched Valo on that prospect. I won't get too much into the details of it, but ultimately we launched the company in about 2019 formally. And what we did in this case was we built out this big broad vision. The first thing we did before we did anything in the company was we went out and we raised $100 million. Now, that's not a typical thing because literally was raising $100 million on a PowerPoint. Now, often when I say that to people, people say, oh, well, you did it for a while so you can do that. What we were really doing, and this gets into the essence of fundraising, was we were selling the vision of where we thought we could take something. Because if you had the opportunity to rewrite how drugs are discovered and developed, making them faster, making them cheaper, you have the opportunity to build an enormous company. When you think about what the SAM of a company like Valo is, we can go and replace the R&D value of drug discovery and development, which is about $275 billion. And we can do it with an economic profile that gives us reach into the $1.25 trillion, if you will, pharma segment. So it's about a $500 billion SAM. So on the prospect that we might be right, people were willing to take almost a leap of faith. One of my investors, not too long ago, I was visiting him in Singapore. And he said, you know, when we put money into this, we did it as one of what we call our two Illuminati investments, which I was like, I don't know what that means. I really don't know what that means. He said, look, this is a massive vision. It was a huge idea. We didn't think it would work, but we wanted to take a shot on the upside. I'm like, good, I've got the honest truth now. You didn't think it was going to work. But when I told him about some of the updates, he was like, and somehow you were able to stick the landing. So I was happy about this sort of like sarcastic, you know, compliment that I got or the underhanded compliment that I got. But at the end of the day, you know, early, I look at early stage fundraising is around reaching people with your vision. Right. And it's not the technical proof points because there is no technical proof point that compels people in the early days. It's about this is a massive opportunity. I say that because the risk profile is incredibly high for any company. And so the notion that one is going to have a very carefully orchestrated plan, a very carefully orchestrated set of details and you're going to be able to deliver on that and give a massive upside. It's just not possible. And so this is where I think vision becomes incredibly important precision of vision. A plan to be able to get there, knowing full well, as I said, that it's going to be wrong is important. And getting behind this, what are the investors really looking for? Every investor wants a low risk chance at a 10 X. And so when you think about the message, the question is not, what are you going to do over the next 18 months from an operational standpoint, but how do the next 18 months create an ability for you to substantially reduce the cost of capital for the company going forward? So I investor have a chance of reaching that 10 X. And that means you need to make this money last and you need to make it work really well. Doesn't need doesn't mean doesn't mean you need to be capital efficient. You just need to be very targeted in the way that you you raise capital. So then what we did, we went around around the world. We did a map of all of the world's data. We found a number of data sets that you can count on one hand that had the right quality. And we put in place unique deals for all of them. These are national scale data deals. They bring to us about 10 million patients of data with data going continuously back to 99. Now, the cool thing about these, since they're national scale deals, nations have laws typically that say you can't do exclusive deals for data. So we did unique deals. This is the one time you hear me say I love lawyers. The only time you hear me say it because they figured that out and so good for them. We brought the data together. We use that to build a set of computational models. We built about 28,000 of them very quickly. And this allowed us to span the entirety of the drug discovery and development continuum. And we did that between about 2019 and the end of 2020. At the end of 2020, we went out to raise another round. And in this case, we raised a $300 million series B at a nice step up. Now, what we were doing here is now we're moving into that next phase of fundraising. And when you think about what that next phase is, is we went through that big, big vision phase. People want to now know how you're going to make money and how this thing is going to be durable. The challenge with pharma companies is their binary risk. That is if a clinical trial fails, the entire investment is wiped out. So there's this alternative. It's called a platform pharma company. What happens there? Well, now you spend more money for a binary risk. So some investors like that, but frankly, from my standpoint as an entrepreneur, I don't. So the question becomes, how do you get the upside in a company like this of drugs without the risk? And so we built a model where we basically get ownership over time of hundreds of drugs through selling three different things, what we call partnerships, pipeline and products. And what we're able to do here, we've now accessed about 41 or so drugs. We'll do about 60 plus million in revenue this year, just as a set of context. But what the B was is about presenting exactly the plan to make money. Because what we needed to do is to convert from a vision to reality. And that's exactly what we went out and presented to the investors that we spoke to at that point. And when you look at the transformation of the investors that we brought in, you would see people who are not focused on Illuminati investments, but very clear, if you will, growth investments. So our largest investor was a group called Coke Disruptive Technologies, which is the venture capital group that the Koch brothers, or there's only one of them, run. And what they really think about, so when they think about investing, they're very simple. And I say this because when you get into the minds of investors, you can start telling the story that they resonate with. So what they want to hear, when they think about any investment inside their company, is they want a 14% riskless growth rate. So when they build new oil fields, 14% riskless growth rate. Now, think about that in an economy like this, right? The riskless rate is now, oh, six, seven, eight percent, depending on how you want to measure it, put that on top of the 14% that they want. That's 20%, then you need an 8% growth premium on top of that. So for an investor like that, you need to walk through for them how you're generating 30% year over year, very consistently. And this is what an investor like that wants to hear in a low risk to no risk kind of way. This sounds kind of impossible, but at some level what they really want to hear is the conviction of the plan, the concreteness of the plan. And frankly, the fact that you know what's going to go wrong, what's going to go wrong, when it's going to go wrong, and what might happen when it goes wrong. So we were able to pull that off. Now in 21, this was a bit of a go-go time. So we have to be a little careful about how we interpret things. We had an opportunity fall on our lap. We got approached by our friends over at Coastal Adventures to do a SPAC pipe. This was April 21, SPACs were cool at the time, so I'm going to give myself a pass. But we ended up securing $550 million, $200 million through a pipe, $345 million through the SPAC, a list of top tier investors that came into this. We executed during this path and we ultimately, in November, were ready to take the company public. We didn't. Now, one of the things that's really important, I find, whenever you're in that position of having to raise money, is you have to be willing to make the tough decisions. And this is a really important case because we're sitting there. Let me just paint this picture. $550 million in hand, $2.8 billion post-money valuation as the round. Our revenue at that time, zero. I don't know if anyone thinks that's a bubble or anything along those lines. I thought it was a perfect valuation for a company, perfect, perfect. Anyways, what started to happen over the summer of 21 was fundamental desks started shifting to ARB desks. Owners of SPAC properties started to be owned by arbitrage funds. And what you realize is groups that you intended to be long-term holders were not long-term holders. So we did some quantitative analysis. We figured out that there was going to be a pretty significant redemption rate having nothing to do with us. By the way, every single SPAC that wasn't involved, that did not connect to Donald Trump, and I'm not making this up, had the same statistic. They were going to have 90 to 97% redemptions for the same dynamic. And my hair is not nearly red enough to be able to get the credit there. So we'll leave that aside, but I won't make any other comparisons to Donald Trump. That'll be the last mention today. Anyways, so we decided to pull out. Now, you can imagine when you're sitting there at the finish line, when you have 200 employees who are all excited about liquidity, you have investors who are all excited about liquidity. There's only one person who's going to make that decision. And it's an incredibly difficult decision. Now, I can tell you what we knew was going to happen by doing the math was that we would have the redemption rate. It would mean there was incredible selling pressure on our stock. We would have fallen about 40%. Our pipe investors would be underwater. They would clear out their investments. We'd be down another 40%. So we'd be down about 80% within the first six months. And that would mean unless we operated perfectly and got to profitability, the company would be out of business. When you looked at the companies that went public by SPAC pipe at that time, 80% of them now, actually, I think it's 90%, are trading at less than a buck. And there's something like 30% of them that are out of business. And so we had the willingness to be able to make that decision of walking away from a lot of money. And I think it's very important to go through that process. On the back of that, we raised $115 million in what I would call the single hardest raise I've ever done in my life. And that was around we raised in 2022. The reason I called it difficult was the markets were shut. So how do you raise money in a market that's shut? Well, what we did in that case was we got very precise on the minimum amount of capital that we needed to get our company profitable. And we raised just enough to get to very important milestones that would prove what our business would look like. Because investors at that point and investors at all points, frankly, are like this, but investors at that point in particular, we're looking for how to say no. Not what to say yes to, but how to say no. And I'll say this because when I got into the venture world in the first place, someone I've known for a while gave me some advice. He said, look, you know, doing being a venture capitalist is not a question about figuring out what to invest in. It's a question of figuring out what not to invest in. And he said, when I look at what I do, right, I see a thousand deals a year and I say no to 997 of them. So the question is, how do I say no to so many, right? It's not figuring out this exact three. It's my job is saying no to 997. And when you think about that, right, really, your job in fundraising is taking away all the reasons that someone would say no. And when you're in a really bad market, like 22, and frankly, we're not in a great market right now, that is the question that people have, is why should I say no? And you need to eliminate all of those reasons. There's no specific single answer as to how one ultimately achieves that. But that's sort of the journey that we walk through. So on the back of that fundraise, we've had great success. I won't talk about it. We've signed two major partnerships. One is the single largest partnership that Charles River has ever done. We did a $2.7 billion deal about two months ago with Novo Nordisk. And so we're very excited and that's put us on a great path. So I won't spend too much time talking about that, but I want to share a few kind of very simple lessons. And hopefully something here is useful. But as I was saying, you know, one of the things you have to remember when you're building your pitch, when you're building your story, no one needs to invest. Yes, every venture firm, every private equity firm has been given money by their limited partners, their investors, pension funds, endowments. And yes, they should use it, but they don't have an obligation to invest. They have five, sometimes seven years to find the right sorts of investments. So feeling like they're under pressure is going to create the wrong framework. And what that interpretation does is sometimes people think, wait a second, I just got to get anyone who's going to say yes. And that's a mistake. Because when you get the wrong investor, it's like being in the wrong marriage, right? They will not see your vision. They will do things to undermine what you do. And you'll want to figure out how to get divorced. But frankly, a divorce from a marriage is easier than breaking up with your investor. And that's because they have legal, durable legal rights, and they can change the course of your company. So it's very important to make sure that the people that you're bringing in are aligned, and I would rather bring in less money from the right investors than the wrong money. Even if it means bringing in that money at a lower valuation. Because as I said, you need those investors that care about your long-term vision. Now, your pitch has to be focused on how you will be able to drive success for the company. But at the end of the day, there will be decisions that you have to make that are very difficult. For example, our pulling out of the spack. No one but you can make that decision. When people talk about the CEO job being a lonely job, it's because only one person can make that decision. Everyone who you go to get counseling from will have some bias in their view. And from that standpoint, you have to be willing to find that confidence from within to make those difficult decisions. And you can't look to anyone else. Not your investors. Not even your founding team members. You have to make those decisions. Sometimes they're unpopular, but it's incredibly important. With that, you also have to make sure you're very clear on how you're defining how you're gonna make money. And you need to be explicit. You need to repeat it. And you need to be invariant in it. Because if you leave voids, your investors will work in ways to try to define the things that are undefined or undefined. And so this is why having a very clear, cogent, compelling, defined pitch that tells your investors how you're gonna make money, how to know that your plan is working, how to be able to see not only the leading indicators, but frankly the lagging indicators, all of those shaping up in the right direction, then you get the followership of your investors and now you build a syndicate that's gonna be long-term supportive. Now, at the same time, not everyone stays on your team. Some people will start to turn. They'll start to say, hey, this lagging indicator, this leading indicator isn't looking as good. And this is one of those things that's very important because not that I wanna get into boardroom politics and things along those lines, but this is where this alignment from the day one becomes incredibly important. You need to find exactly who's there, who is on your team. They're the ones who are gonna be your biggest advocates because the best way to raise money is have your investors do it for you. And that way, by having your investors fully supportive, breathing your mission, breathing your vision, you're gonna be able to sell that. Now, this becomes fundamentally an important component and it's something that I think is incredibly powerful where when you're building your company, right, you have to be very careful about what you're sending. The messages that you're trying to deliver need to be strong and compelling messages, but you have to ask your advisors, your friends, what they're hearing because if you're not sending clear confidence, if you're not sending clarity of your vision, if your business plan is not locked and loaded, everyone else will hear it and you're giving people reasons to say no. Making sure that you're sending those strong messages is probably the single most important piece of what you can ultimately do. Now, I'm gonna wrap up here, but I just wanted to share that it's been a great honor to talk with everyone. What I've been blessed with is great teams that have helped me to raise large amounts of capital, but one of the things that I also aspire to do is to help others and my brother, who's also an entrepreneur and I, have formed something that we call Bedford Bridge where we work with entrepreneurs and help them build their companies coming at it from the entrepreneur standpoint. So with that, I just want to thank everyone. It's been great to see everyone here so early on a Friday and thank you.