 how did you get to where you are today? How did you decide to become an investor? Like, they give us the rundown. Well, I'll do that and I'll weave into it my connection in New Zealand because it goes back quite a long, long time. So in fact, the first time I was in New Zealand was when I was in high school and my family went there on holiday. My father was considering taking a job in Australia or maybe New Zealand alone thinking he really thought about New Zealand at the time. 1974, there wasn't much going on. So we traveled around a bit and it was fabulous. I enjoyed it. It was really a vacation holiday. I went to university and studied physics with the intent of getting a PhD, which I did, with the intent of becoming a professor, which somewhere along the way, I got off track. After I finished my PhD, I did a postdoctoral fellowship at IBM Research, but I was working actually on neutrino physics, which is what I did for my PhD thesis. So it was very academic research, not related to IBM's business, but just being there in the research center, having lunch with people that ranged, some of these are people you would know by name like Benoit Mandelbrot, who invented fractals, would be sitting across from you at lunch or the person who developed or really invented the single transistor DRAM memory cell, which is in every computer on the planet. Got me thinking, wow, there's a lot of really interesting, challenging things people are working on that are very cool that people care about beyond the 12 people who cared about what I was working on. And so at the end of my postdoc, I decided to stay at IBM, moved into a micro electronics group, and stayed in the research division, which gave me a little bit more freedom than would have been the case in one of the business units. But I also became, this was in the mid 80s, and at the peak of the threat from Japan incorporated, some of you may or may not remember. But in the mid 80s, Japan was beating the US economically in automobiles, in computing, in semiconductors, in many areas. And it was a major sort of policy concern. And for a company like IBM, we were threatened by it. And so I got very interested in that problem, which led me to think about innovation. And that's been sort of the theme or a major theme through my career. I ended up staying at IBM for quite a few years. I spent three and a half years in Japan. I'd been so vocal about what they did differently than what we did in the US that when the opportunity came up, I was sort of handed the challenge of go to Japan and prove it. That was a good experience. And then I ran a couple of other businesses there, the Unix systems business, and created something that's still today called pervasive computing. We would have called it IoT, but that term hadn't been coined yet. But it's essentially the IoT business. But then I got the itch to go do something entrepreneurial. And I left IBM in 2000, probably about 25 minutes after the peak of the bubble. But we didn't know it yet. And I joined a lower Manhattan based company that was building a distribution system for digital content on mobile devices, very, very early stage. Don't forget, no iPhone. There were two way pagers. And there was something emerging called WAP, which was a wireless access protocol, which is a way to put data on different devices, but everyone was different. And that was going along. I wouldn't, I mean, like many startups, it probably would have failed. But the real cause of failure was 9-11, which occurred the day I was supposed to fly to Europe to do the roadshow for the next round of fundraising. And that just wiped us out. So I left, obviously, when that was shut down, I moved to the West Coast. And I've worked in a number of enterprise companies, some of which you might know Veritas Software, Symantec, which is a large, very large, both storage because they acquired Veritas and Security Company. I worked for a company called Newstar, which is a U.S.-based telecom services company, software company, and also for NetApp, a big storage systems company. But the last couple of roles I had were really about transforming those businesses. Now, throughout that whole period, I was spending a lot of time because I was a CTO working with early-stage companies. And I found I really liked working with these very early-stage companies, helping guide them and helping steer them. Mostly they came to us as corporates because they wanted us to buy them, invest in them, sell their product, whatever it was. And it was very interesting to see how that process worked. And I ended up advising quite a few of those and doing a little bit of angel investing on the side. When I left NetApp, we had done a big transformation, and by the end of 2017, it was clear that my role was going away. And so I started thinking about, what did I want to do next? And as some of you might know, if you've been in the corporate world for any length of time, as soon as the word gets out that you're leaving, you get calls from recruiters telling you, I've got this perfect job. It's just like the one you just left, which is not what I wanted to do. So I decided what I really wanted to do is leverage my connection in New Zealand, just to go back for a minute. In 99, I spent a lot of time down there with the America Scott when I was in New Zealand. And I ended up buying a vineyard in central Otago, part of the Amesfield vineyard for those of you who might know the brand. And so I had a good excuse to go back and forth. And I was there once or twice a year, mostly just because it was a great place to go. But I got more and more interested and got more plugged into the tech startup ecosystem, which even 10 years ago was almost non-existent, but it was clearly growing rapidly. So when I left that app, I decided I really wanted to do something with early stage companies. I'm very disillusioned with the approach that the U.S., particularly Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley venture funds are taking. And I thought, hmm, New Zealand's really starting to have some interesting things. I should go take a look at that. I talked to a bunch of my venture friends in Silicon Valley, and they all told me I was an idiot for several reasons. The most interesting one was a friend who said, oh, you don't want to do that. It's hard work. But okay, that's not a really good reason not to do something. But that's his opinion. But one of them told me, and they were being honest. He said, look, New Zealand, in New Zealand, they have no natural predators. Those entrepreneurs, they're just not aggressive enough. You ought to go to Israel. Everyone's trying to kill those guys. They are super aggressive. And having run an Israeli company at one point, I said, I know that's true. And that's not really how I want to spend my time. And they also brought up other things. Well, New Zealand's so small that probably aren't any good companies to invest in and so on and so forth. So I went down there in early 2018, essentially to convince myself that this dream of starting a venture fund in New Zealand was just stupid. And I should abandon it. And what I found was just the opposite. There were plenty of ambitious entrepreneurs. There were even more really interesting companies. And one thing I discovered was that there was also a shortage of capital, which I did not know prior to that, particularly in this seed series A range. There's lots of angel money. But once you get beyond that, it was very hard for Kiwi companies to make that bridge to the next step. And the other thing, which was my hypothesis from the beginning, was that New Zealand companies had to think globally. They had to look offshore because New Zealand was just too small a market, like Israel in that sense. They had to think globally. And I could help those companies that had ambition to come to the U.S. with my network, with my experience, etc. So that was my hypothesis. So I started down that path and I spent about a year and a half, roughly, trying to raise the fund, which, and Chris probably is aware of this, and any of you who are investors will know that. Raising a first fund is very difficult. Raising a first fund for a first-time fund manager is doubly difficult. And then when you say I'm raising a first fund with a first-time fund manager in New Zealand, they go, is that in Africa? Where is that? That made it harder. So I was making some progress, but it wasn't getting there fast enough. And in early 2019, I got a call from a recruiter who said, hey, VISTA equity partners, private equity firm is looking for somebody just like you. And my first reaction was, I don't want to talk to private equity. Those guys are all crooks. All they do is tear companies apart because that had been my experience with private equity. But I started talking to them and VISTA is quite different. They're more of a late-stage venture company in a sense that they really try to grow the businesses rather than extract the value from them. So I joined them in August of 2019 to build out their innovation practice. This is really helping their portfolio companies with innovation. So that's sort of up my alley. And it had several advantages. The main one was they were going to pay me a lot of money, which was good because I was spending all my money trying to raise the fund and not making progress. And the other one was, as my ever helpful venture friends here in the US said, man, if you go there for three years, you might find you love it, you want to stay there, or you might want to go back and do your fund, and you'll be able to raise the fund overnight having that experience because now you won't be a first-time fund manager. So I said, okay, I'll go do that. And unfortunately, COVID came along in 2020, and so by May, it was pretty clear that they were not going to invest anymore in this consulting practice around innovation. So I left there in June, and I'm back on the funding road, and I'm happy to say, and this will segue, I think, into your questions, last night I had, I hope, the last review with the attorneys and the accountants. And today, New Zealand time, so end of the day, I should receive the final drafts of the LP agreements that I could send out to my investors, and I'm raising a smaller fund than my original plan, mainly so I can get in the market. I've already made three investments using my own money, which will roll into that fund, and I have a backlog of interesting companies I'm looking at. So that's sort of my story. Nice. I have so many questions. So maybe to start for this audience, I'm curious to know, are you able to share the three companies that you've invested in and or the types of companies that you're looking at? Sure. And I'll start from the types, then I'll tell you the three, which are anyway on my website. So we've got secrets. Given my background, I'm very attracted to deep tech because it's something where I feel like I have some competency to understand it and some judgment about what it takes, sort of from the team point of view, and the ability to do some due diligence. I think there's, as any of you in New Zealand probably know, there are a lot of B2B SaaS companies, and that's a very compelling business model, but it doesn't have deep differentiation in many cases. Some cases it does, but in many cases it doesn't. It's like a super clever way to build an app. And if you capture enough market, it's a great business. But I don't know that I have any unique insight into that. Whereas when someone comes along and says, we've developed this technique to do, I mean I'm giving away some companies that you guys probably know, this is not one I've invested in yet, to do synthetic biology to be able to create polymers from bees. That's a pretty interesting thing to go look at because that's not something that three, now I'll show my bias, three Stanford MBAs are going to cook up overnight at a bar in Palo Alto. That takes some deeper science and some deeper tech. And that makes it interesting. So the ones I've invested in sort of follow that, but not entirely. The first one I invested in is a company called Ader, which is an AI small business advisor. For those of you who know the company Mint that does a personal financial integration, essentially, you can think of it almost like that it provides for a small business owner or proprietor the ability to do what you could do in a big company with business intelligence and some business analysts and so on. But it also helps tie that business, small business user into the financial advisors, the accounts that are financial advisors and the banks. So that's quite interesting and they're doing quite well right now. They got a round over the summer, I guess in the spring your time in New Zealand, from ANZ Bank. And so now they've got to tie in with somebody who's brought more cash, but also has a very good distribution model to those small business customers. Second one I invested in is a company very well known to you guys probably is Dawn Aerospace. The story there is I met those guys probably three years ago and they were just kind of getting going and they told me what they had done and I didn't believe them because they said they funded it with their credit cards. I said that's impossible. You guys are nice guys, but you don't have that kind of credit. And finally after extracting it from them, they said, well, they'd actually only spent 50,000 euros to do their first test point, which was astonishing to me because I would have thought it was an order of magnitude more. Then they showed me their test plan for their next phase and I looked at it and I talked to my friends in the aerospace industry and every one of the aerospace people here told me that without knowing about this company, they said it would cost 10 times more than they were estimating. So I went back and I said, well, yeah, think of it as a startup. It's not you guys in Boeing. I mean, come on, you guys spend too much money. What would it cost then? So they came back and said, yeah, we could probably cut it in half. So that's only five times more. So I went back to these guys and I said, I think you can't do this. I love what you say you're doing, but I'll watch, but I'm not investing. And they came back in nine months having accomplished their 12 month goals with less money than they predicted. So that third time in, I went into that company. They're doing a great job. And then the third one is a company. Also, I knew these guys right from the very beginning, probably about two and a half years ago called Winely. And they are doing IoT sensing in the fermentation tank of wineries. But more than just that, they're taking that raw data, collection of data that they can get real time. And they're using it together with a model for fermentation that's being developed in one of the universities in New Zealand, so that they can give the wine maker a kind of direct connection to where they are in the fermentation process. Because as you might, I don't know if you've thought about it, I hadn't thought about it very much. But in the wine business, as opposed to say beer, if you screw up your fermentation, that's it. You've got to wait until next year when you get more grapes. Where if it's beer, you dump it out and you get some more hops out of the warehouse, you can do it again. So it's kind of more critical. There's another arena where that's very critical, which they're beginning to think about, which is in the biopharma industry, where fermentation is a major technical process for production of drugs. And again, with very expensive precursor materials or very limited amounts of them, getting that right is really important. So that's a pretty cool little company. So I'm curious, can you walk us through your process? Obviously these first three were a little longer timeline and you've known them for quite a period and seen how they evolved. How are you thinking about the process for the fund and how you like to get engaged with teams? Well, in some sense, I think that is the ideal process. So I've been engaged with the Angel Groups, Angel Community, for several years. And I've joined Angel HQ and the Marlboro Angels. So I've seen those early companies way before they're ready for my fund to be an investor. But I get to get to know them, get to see what they're doing, maybe make an angel investment so that I have a little bit more inside knowledge. And that lets me know them generally for 18 months or more before they start thinking about the kind of round where my fund would be an investor. So that's one thing that's quite valuable. The other thing is that I do get, and this was a concern with COVID, whether there would be deal flow. In fact, even my investor said, well, now that you're locked out of the country, you're even going to be able to access deals to invest in. And the answer has turned out to be surprising to me. I had spent a lot of time in New Zealand in 2018 and 2019. I was there almost a third of my time, and I built a pretty good network in the normal manner, meeting people and getting to know them. But since COVID, I've managed to expand my network and get to know a lot more companies and a lot more people. And so now I get referrals from people I know in New Zealand who say, hey, I saw this great company. You should talk to them. I get literally out of the blue messages on LinkedIn from people in companies in New Zealand who some have heard that I'm an investor there. And then I also find them through the angel groups. So it looks like we, like Chris may have been bumped by the Internet. Yeah, I got bumped. I'm back now. Part of the wonderful Verizon outages in the New York area. So I'm curiosity with regard to here now that the impeachment hearings are over, I think all my neighbors were watching on my local cable system and they shut down the Internet. It was horrible. So that's about right. So curious, have there been, well, two things. One, are there any places where you've found surprising deal flow? So things outside of the existing angel networks or otherwise. And then as you think about the process of getting to know people through kind of a longer period of time, obviously it's a little bit different diligence process. Are there any surprising ways in which you'd like to get to know founders and get a little bit closer and or understand a bit more about what it is they're doing that are outside of kind of the norm as we think about it? I mean, one of the things I would say, and which I didn't touch on before is I also have built a pretty good network with the, I'll call it the research community. That's the universities, including their commercialization arms, like Uniservices, like, or return on science, KiwiNet and some others. And also, and also directly with the research groups, like the McDermott Institute, which is a cross-university material science organization. Obviously, there are connections in through Calhan and others, but particularly given my background, and when I was a CTO, I was very closely involved with universities. So that gives me some ability to have see those things, which are very early. And sometimes they're not even, sometimes they don't even know they have a company. They have a cool technology and they can get some advice. So that's very early. The thing that I think is an interesting challenge and maybe what you're getting at is, given the circumstances, one of the really important things, when you're looking at early-stage investments, even at the stage I'm looking at it, there's a sort of a joke that what are the top three things you'll look at or the top four things you look at? Well, the first thing I look at is the team. That's important. The second thing I look at is the team, because that's important. The third thing I look at is the team, because that's important. And the fourth thing is the market. And actually, it's not so much about what they're actually building. I mean, that's an indication of their capabilities tells you about the team. But in a traditional sense or a traditional environment, you want to spend time with those teams. And that makes it, unless you're physically there and going out to have a beer or eating lunch or dinner or whatever, it's really a challenge. And so that's been one of my concerns. But I found that, and some people dispute this, which is interesting since they haven't tried it, but classic, my US venture friends all say, you can't do that. I said, well, I'm doing it. Oh, that's impossible. And that is, you can actually get to know people, maybe not as well as you can over a meal or over a glass of wine or a beer, but you can actually get to know founders teams on Zoom if that is your purpose. If you get on Zoom to go through their pitch deck, you get the pitch deck. But I did a call with a company I'm talking to right now a few weeks ago and I said, look, I really want to get, I was talking to another investor who'd invested in earlier around in New Zealand, BC. And I said, you know, the challenges I really want to get to know these guys, you've known them for a while. What can you tell me? And he said, well, you ought to just get together with them. I said, well, yeah, except that I'm in San Francisco. He said, well, I'm sure they'll be happy to get together with you on Zoom. So I sent a message off and I said, I'd love to get together. No agenda. There are three of them. I said, just the three of you, just to chat and get to know each other. And so the next thing I know is it shows up on my calendar Friday morning, 9am Pacific time, which is Saturday, 6am in Auckland. So I sent a note back to the guy and I said, I think, you know, I think you made a mistake. I sent you the link, but, you know, I think you picked the wrong. Oh, no, that's, that's perfect. I said, really? He said, yeah, yeah, we're going surfing afterwards. So, you know, we wanted to do it before the surf gets, you know, missed the surf. So we're going to meet with you from 6 to 730 and then we're going to go to the beach. I said, okay, it's fine. But by the way, I'm not drinking a beer at 9am. You can drink at 6 in the morning if you want. I don't care, but it's Friday here and I have work that day. So we had a fantastic conversation, but it really did give me insight, which I was, I think was more than I expected because you're really trying to get insight into the dynamics of the team, into how do they interact. And a lot of that is his body language and other things. And obviously when you're out having a meal or whatever, you can get that. But you can, if you're, if you're focused on, if you're intentional about it, you can do that on Zoom. And I think that's probably the hardest part. The technical due diligence, that's no different than it was anyway. And frankly, getting the deal flow is in some ways actually easier. When I was traveling back and forth to New Zealand, I would go there for typically two or three weeks every other month. So that's a pretty, you know, good amount of time. But what would typically happen is I would reach out to somebody. I'll pick on Alex, because I see him. I call up Alex and I say, hey, Alex, I'm going to be in Auckland next month and I'd love to meet with you. It's great. When are you here? And I say, well, I'm here on this day and that day. He goes, oh, I'm in Christchurch those two days. How about three days after that? So we'll know that I'm in Wellington. Well, when are you here next time? Okay. And two months later. And so it's hard to schedule. Now it's like, it doesn't matter. It's on Zoom. You got an hour free, plug it in. So it's the pace, actually, of contact has gone up. And although it may be a little shallower contact, the amount of time you can spend with these companies goes up dramatically compared to when it was in person. Even to the point where if I were in Auckland, I might get four meetings a day just because I have to travel between them. As long as I don't go insane, I can do six or eight Zoom calls a day. So it's quite a bit different, but not worse, just different. It's a nice segue actually. How do you engage with the teams once you've paid the investment? And what's the superpower that you bring to the table? I'm old. So I had a lot of that's probably my superpower. I've seen a lot. And I've worked in very large companies like IBM, and I've also done startups. I founded a couple startups. I've been a CEO of a startup. I've raised money both as a, we're all getting older. Michelle says, yeah, but I got there faster. The, I think the superpower is that observation and experience to some extent. The other one that's more, really more specific is for most of these companies, they are partly because it's my selection bias. They're companies that aspire to come to the U.S. market. And I think that there's the U.S. and New Zealand seem very similar on the face of it. Hey, we both speak English. We both use dollars. They're different, but they're still, you know, all of these things. We both have pretty good democracies. New Zealand might be a little head there. But in general, it seems similar. If you were saying U.S. versus China, you'd say, oh my God, things are so different. But New Zealand, U.S., they're very similar. But that is a, it lulls you into a false sense of security because for companies coming to the U.S., the market here is actually very different than New Zealand. It's very different in scale. It's very different in, I'll call it diversity. And what I mean by that is selling things in LA is different than selling them in Chicago is different than selling them in Columbus or in Dallas or New York. And yet, you know, the real difference between if you're a company, your customers in Wellington or Auckland or Christchurch, maybe not as big a difference. So that's one thing. The other thing is scale. Years ago, I was helping an early stage company, and they were in the security business when I was at Symantec. So I knew that business extremely well. They showed me their product, which was a pretty cool product. And they were very proud that they had a call, a sales call, with the director of desktop security at JP Morgan Bank in New York the next week. And I said, wow, that's impressive. Because I mean, my company does $20 million a quarter of security software with JP Morgan. They're one of our big customers. I meet with them every quarter. I'm surprised you got in the door. How did that happen? And in classic Kiwi sense, it was because the one of their guys had a cousin whose sister or girl, I don't know, anyway, the guy that was the security guy at JP Morgan was dating a Kiwi girl that they somehow knew. And so they got a call, a meeting with him. Hey, whatever it takes, I give them credit for that. But here's the problem. I said, well, who is that guy? Because I have never heard of him. And we do security software. And I meet with their CIO and their chief information security officer like four times a year. And I've never heard of this guy. So they tell me his name and I text to our salespeople and they come back later. So yeah, that's the guy that installs the software on the laptops. Like he puts in the discats and things. I said, okay. And they were a little devastated when they heard that. It did explain why he was dating the Kiwi girl because they couldn't figure out how she had met him either. But the reality was, in New Zealand, if somebody has the title director, it means probably they're pretty high up in the organization. In a New York City bank, it means that you're probably a janitor or maybe a little bit higher in the organization because of the way they use titles. And the other thing, which I didn't realize until they had left and I sent them an email after they got back to New Zealand, I said, I did a little research and you do realize that, and this was probably seven years ago, JP Morgan employs a number of employees that's equivalent to 10% of the working population of your country. One in 10 people in New Zealand would have to work for that bank to reach their employment level. And that's just beyond their imagination. So that's one of the things that is a, it's back to the superpower question, just having that experience and perspective can be very helpful. Similarly, and this is a much more common problem, most of the companies that I invest in when they get to the next stage, the next phase of investment, they're out of my range. They're going to have to raise money from somebody, probably a US based VC, and they're going to be raising tens of millions of dollars at that point. Knowing which VCs to work with and getting the early introduction, again, by the time they're raising the money, that person's already heard of them is important. And this is an area where I think generally they're not well served by the New Zealand network. It's getting better, but a lot of the advice they'll get from, even from NZTE, will give them a list of the top VCs. And the problem is every one of those VCs will meet with them because they're polite and they have great coffee and they have beautiful offices and they'll have a wonderful meeting. At the end of the meeting, they'll say, oh my god, I love your company. That's really cool. You're a little bit early for us, but let's stay in touch. Which in Silicon Valley VC speak means I'm never going to invest in you, go away, but they don't understand that because they're Kiwi, so they're like, oh my god, these guys loved us. They thought we were great. And so they needed guidance as to where to go, which in most of those companies is a much more targeted, specialized investor. It's not Kleiner Perkins or Andreessen Horowitz or NEA or Sequoia or any Sutter Hill, all the ones that are on the list that NZTE has. It's people that they probably don't know. Maybe going off of that, I'm curious, what's the size of checks that you plan to write through the fund and then related, are there tactical ways that you can try to walk them through that process of identifying the next downstream funding opportunities? The intent is to write a typical check, not necessarily the smallest and not the large, the typical would be about 500K in that range. That would leave me the ability to, in one out of three, double down or triple down in a later round participating. But as I said, if the first round is a million and a half and I'm taking a third of it and the next round is 10 million, I'm not even taking a third of it. I might try to keep my percentages about right, but I'm not going to be able to lead that round. But I also put in earlier money at smaller rounds because that's a way to get into the company at the price of entry, if you will. The other thing I spend a lot of time with these companies and others because I help a lot of them that I'm not going to invest in for various reasons, but I think it's part of my goal to help build the ecosystem is advising them how to think about that whole funding journey. And I've been on both sides of this. It's very tempting in that early stage, you've gotten a certain point, you've had maybe some friends and family money or some angel money, you've gotten to a certain point and now I need to go raise, let's say, a million and a half dollars. And so many comes along and says, okay, I like what you're doing, but I'd like to see this, I'd like to see that and here's some money. The problem with that is once you spend the money, and this is going to sound terrible. And if any of you ever take money from me, you better not tell me that you heard this from me because I'll hate you for saying it. Once you have my money, you don't care what I think, unless I'm going to fund the next round. So what you really need to think about is what do I need to do with the money I get in this round to be very attractive to the investors in the next round. And this is a problem a lot of New Zealand investors have, especially angel investors. I'll pick on you, Chris, and assume you're an entrepreneur. I'll say, well, Chris, with this money, you've got to get to revenue. I need to see you got to get to an ARR of $100,000, because that's what I need you to do. When you come to a Silicon Valley investor and they don't give a shit about your revenue at that stage, they care about what's your customer acquisition cost, what's your retention rate. They're not really looking at the number of revenue for that next early stage investment. They're looking for other metrics. So when you go to them and say, oh, man, I've got $150,000 in ARR, but you haven't demonstrated that you have a go-to-market plan or you haven't, they're not going to invest in you. And now they're going to say, well, go do this. And when you come back, I'll invest. And you say, but I've already spent the money from the prior round. So you need to think about that every stage of that investment journey. The other thing that's really important, and again, a temptation for a lot of investments, but in a lot of companies and even investors, is as you map out each of those stages, you know, this very early, again, my science bias will show the very earliest stages of these companies are really science experiments. And what I mean by that is the founder has an idea. I'll call it a hypothesis. And they're going to validate that hypothesis. They're going to build a product. It doesn't work. They're going to find a market. Is there a market? They're going to test some pricing. Can I get paid for it? Every one of those is an experiment. And as an investor in that very early stage, I really am more interested in, are you doing experiments quickly and learning from them and adapting? Later stage, when you're a bigger company, you'd better not be taking those high risk experiments because you've got something to lose at that point. And it's more like engineering than science. But in that early stage, it's more like science. But you need to be thinking about, if I do this, and if I learn these things, that will allow me to justify a higher valuation for my next investment round. So if I take too much money in my earlier round, more than I need, that's expensive money. So it's tempting to try to raise, and I hear this from entrepreneurs all the time, including a co-founder who's still running the company. And I have to keep reminding her, her job is to raise money. She's the CEO. That's her job. Yeah, but if I just raise this much, I won't have to fundraise for a while. That's not the point. Because if you raise that much, you will have diluted yourself too much for the next round. So mapping out that whole process, especially for first-time entrepreneurs who typically have a really great idea, a passion for what they're doing, but don't have that experience, is also, I guess, a very critical capability to bring to the table as an investor. So maybe two questions, and then I'll pause and see if the audience has questions. Otherwise, I can keep rolling down the list. Can I answer your questions in the chat? Yeah, go for it. Christie Reynolds is asking this. She said, one of the New Zealand businesses I'm working with has been told that unless they're a Delaware C Corp, they won't be able to get investment out of the US. But that means flipping to the US, do you agree or not? There are certainly a lot of investors in the US who will say that. Maybe they're not your investors, but there are a lot of them. But there are also investors who are perfectly willing to invest. New Zealand has actually got a benefit here. I mean, if you were saying, gee, do I have to be a Delaware C Corp, or is it okay if I'm a Chinese government-owned entity and you'll invest in me? The answer is no, I'm not going to invest in Chinese government-owned entity. No one will. Would I invest in a New Zealand limited company? Yeah, I probably would. Well, I certainly would. And I think there are a lot of US investors who would. They would like to see it become a US C Corp. And there are several different ways to do that. One way is to create a C Corp. The C Corp is just a corporate structure. It's a tax statement. But basically, if you create a corporation in the US, it's slightly more difficult than creating a New Zealand limited company, but not much more difficult and not much more expensive. You can make that C Corp a subsidiary company to the New Zealand one. And it can still accept funding and there are ways to make that work. The ones who say, I want to see it be a Delaware C Corp and it has to be the parent, essentially. You have to flip it. That can make sense for a company coming to the US market at some point in time. But it's often later than when you're, it sounds like it's later than what Christie's talking about. You probably don't have to do that that early. I'm just going through this with setting up my fund. I was actually looking at creating it. I already have a US LLC, which I was going to use as part of the management company. We just decided last night, don't do any of that. Make it a purely New Zealand entity. US investors just want to invest. Here's the bank routing number. Route it to Bank of New Zealand. Yes, you'll have some exchange currency exchange risk, but that's, you know what that is on the day you send the money. So it seems like you don't need to, you know, it's not absolute that you have to be a C Corp. It's preferable, I guess. Makes life easier for the American investors. But again, there are plenty of investors who aren't hung up on that. Two questions. One, are there any particular technologies and or sectors that you are particularly interested in right now? Well, I mean, some of these are probably fairly obvious. I think one of the other things that I ask often as I'm looking at a company is the sort of proverbial question, why New Zealand? And so is there some reason why this company is in New Zealand? And so Ag Tech, there's great alignment to New Zealand. And so there's almost anything that I see that's from Ag Tech. Sorry, I think Glenn unmuted when we were hearing something. So anyway, almost anything that shows up that's Ag Tech, I can explain why it's coming from New Zealand. MedTech, increasingly also there's a deep vein of, I'll call it biotech, but I'm personally excluding pharma, because I just don't understand the pharma sufficiently. It's the regulatory rules and the timelines are too long. So I don't really not interested in that. But there's a lot of diagnostic or device MedTech that's very, very interesting materials. There's a lot of interesting work in materials. And there's a depth of expertise in largely in the universities that's being applied there. I mean, it's interesting to me, when you look at things like what's happened in the aerospace industry in New Zealand, that's another sector that's interesting. But it's also created a noncon effect that you now have some very interesting high precision manufacturing capability in New Zealand that came from the fact that there was a growing aerospace industry. And all the other attributes that New Zealand brings of, number eight wire mentality and they don't, you don't know what you don't know, or you don't know what other people tell you, you can't get done. So you just do it. There are a lot of those advantages. Other areas, I do look all the time at B2B SAS, because it's a very broad area. But as I said, most of those, it's hard for me to say why New Zealand. If you look at ADER, the one that I invested in, the argument I would make there is they are targeting small medium business. New Zealand is a small medium business economy. If they were in the US trying to do what they were doing very early on, their investors would have pushed them to go after a large enterprise customer. In fact, this happened in a meeting that I took them to with a good friend of mine is a VC who I was introducing them to because I thought he'd be interested. And in the first 15 minutes, he said, well, you should go after Starbucks. You shouldn't work with these small coffee shops. Just go get one contract with Starbucks. That'll do all your revenue for the first two years. And you can just focus on that. Now, luckily, the founder and I had had a lot of conversations. So I don't know if it's the right answer, but he gave what would have been my answer, which is if we go and work with Starbucks, we'll have to be hooked into their proprietary systems. So we'll do a lot of development that's of no other use. On the second day after they sign the contract, they'll call us and say, can you provide 24-7 support in 140 countries for our stores? As a startup, we can't do that. If we fail, everyone on the planet will know we failed and will never get another chance. If we stick with small business, we can say no to many more customers. If a customer says, oh, I use an accounting system that my uncle wrote, we say, have a nice day and go on to the next one who's using zero or into it. They can trial it in a region. They can say, we're going to go after all the small, all the coffee shops in San Francisco. And if for whatever reason, they stumble and it doesn't work, they can try it again in Seattle because no one in Seattle will know it didn't work in San Francisco because they don't talk to each other. So there's a lot of advantages in small business market, which is in the US extremely underserved. So for those companies that are building up SaaS solutions, targeting particular, I'll call them verticals, although small business not really vertical, where there's a reason to be in New Zealand and gain from that, those could be interesting. Good example is a company I looked at. I didn't invest in it. It was doing some orchard management software. Well, who knows more about orchards from a business management point of view than the New Zealanders? And you'd expect them to know it. If somebody to pick on my Stanford MBA example, three guys who got an MBA at Stanford and did some market research and said there are a lot of orchards, they don't know anything about orchards. They could write software, but they're not going to have the same intrinsic knowledge. So I think that's how I look at my sectors. Thanks. So I thought it was interesting what you said about becoming disillusioned with some of the Silicon Valley approaches. And New Zealand companies, I think, often look to Silicon Valley companies or venture capital there. So I was wondering what you became disillusioned with, or if there's advice of some traps there for New Zealand companies. Sure. Well, there are a couple of things. As a fund, what I'm disillusioned with is that many of the funds have grown very large. They've raised very large funds, which means they make a lot of money from the fees, which means maybe they're less motivated about actually winning with their investments. That's one problem. But of course, they care about that. The other one is that most of these large funds, several things happen when you raise a large fund. The first one is you have to write bigger checks because you can only invest in so many companies. If I want to invest in, if I wanted to invest in 10 companies, I can't invest very much in each one because I'll run out of money. If I had a billion-dollar fund and I could invest in 10 companies, I'd have to write a $100 million check in each one. And that's kind of what's happened. So those have gone on. Second thing is there's more money than deals. And so there's a very competitive nature to get access to the deals, which does two things. It means that the VCs are sometimes not as cooperative or more competitive. And it also means that the company valuations go up because you get in a bidding war, not because they actually need the money or they're worth it, but because I want in on the deal, so I'll offer you better terms or more money than the other guy so I can get the deal. So those are all bad. And the one that's the most challenging to me, and you hear this repeated in over and over and over again as a description of how Venture works. And I dispute that. They say, well, the way Venture works is you invest in 100 companies and 30 of them you should never invest in. They were Lousy companies, but you just didn't know. You failed in due diligence or whatever. They weren't great companies. Okay, fair enough. That leaves you with 70 companies. But what the U.S. investors will tell you, the big ones is they'll say, and out of that one or two of them are going to return all the returns of the fund. I'm going to invest in 100 companies and one of them turns out to be Facebook or Google or Uber or pick the example you want, right, Twitter. And I look at that and go, the problem with that is it's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And there's been a lot of articles about this recently because of these mega funds. If I look in a marketplace and there are three or four competitors who are kind of like almost equal, and I put a massive amount of money in one of them, guess what? That one's probably going to win because it has all the money. It doesn't mean it's the best one. When you look at that across a broader market, what it means is that you may be creating financial returns for your fund, but there are a set of companies in the middle of that distribution, not the 30 that were Lousy and never should have been invested in, but there are some that were good companies that could have had good outcomes, but they weren't ever going to have great outcomes. So when I look at my, now let's make it more realistic, I do want to invest in probably 10 companies. And so probably three of them all get wrong, three or four. Let's say there are six that are left over. I want all six of those to have outcomes. Now that might mean for the worst one that's successful by some measure, it might return one times capital. Now as an investor, that's not a very good metric for me, but as an entrepreneur, if you got some money and you did your business, you built your business and you sold it in such a way that I got back my capital, you probably made a lot of money by your measure. And now you can go do it again. Right? You're not going to be, you know, Kalanek, you're not going to go buy an island or whatever, you're going to have a lot of money, but it's not going to be a crazy amount. But you're going to then come back and you're going to start another one and you're going to be an experienced entrepreneur who's learned something and maybe you're going to mentor some people, maybe you'll even invest some angel money. And that's building the ecosystem. So getting a better distribution of outcomes rather than just getting a massive financial return is actually a more important goal to me. So in that math, if I have out of 10 companies, a couple of them return 10X capital, a few of them return two or three X and a few of them return one X and three of them fail, I can return a reasonable return to my investors, but I've created, helped create six successful companies instead of one or two that were crazy successful. And by the way, all of those people that were part of those companies, including maybe more junior employees, have learned and they're going to go on and do it again. And they're going to build that ecosystem. So that's probably more my goal than it is for the current batch of big Silicon Valley funds. If you go back to the early days of venture in the 50s and 60s and the early 70s, that's more the way it was. The people that were doing venture investing were operating, had been experienced operators and they were trying to build businesses, not just make money for investors. You have to make money for investors or they don't give you their money. But if that's your only goal, you're a financial operation, not in my opinion, a venture company. Thank you. Oh, I see a question here about Yeah, there you go. Blockchain is an interesting one. I have a good friend who is a financial guy and he goes through various obsessions. He's a very good personal friend of mine. And he's always trying to get me to invest in things. So at one point it was cannabis stocks because they were hot. And I said, I'm not investing cannabis stocks. And he wants me to invest in blockchain primarily because of my software background, I could probably do better due diligence than he can. And he just wants me to invest so he can follow me. I'm not at all interested in cryptocurrency investments. So let me separate that for the moment. I think there is definitely something to be said for blockchain. But I think like many things, it's been overplayed. And what I mean by that is there are, and I've seen many of these businesses both in the US and in New Zealand, where somebody decides the solution, whatever the thing is they're trying to solve, or thing they're trying to create, the solution is blockchain. And that's not always the case. There are things where blockchain plays a critical role. I think some of the interesting areas that people have used blockchain and supply chain management are very interesting. Some areas where they're using blockchain technologies and smart contracts to revolutionize business processes are pretty interesting. The thing that I have had a hard time finding an investment that is so exciting in New Zealand that I want to make it is because those are the ones that are almost the hardest for me to say, to answer the question, but why in New Zealand? I mean, now maybe someone will come along with one that fits that, but so far, they've all been, I don't want to call it generic because that sounds too weak, but they're solving problems which are broad based, not unique to New Zealand, not unique experience based on something from New Zealand. And yet they're doing it in a place where they have a more limited talent pool around blockchain. So how are they going to win? Now, if someone came along and I don't know what it would be, but said, here's a problem that is where New Zealand just really, forestry. If there was some blockchain associated with forestry and I could say, wow, the knowledge of forestry is what makes this company differentiated, that would be an interesting one. When they say, we're doing something and it's our knowledge of blockchain that makes us unique, it's like, I don't think so. They're probably 50 times more people in the US worrying about blockchain and you might be super smart, you might be right, but it's hard on the statistics to know that you're going to be right. Does that make sense? Andre has a question. How do I expect the New Zealand startup ecosystem to evolve over the next five to 10 years? Well, I think we've already seen this and it's happened for the wrong reason, but a year ago, pre-COVID, if we had looked at, I don't know, 10 or somebody publishes this thing every year and they pound their chests and they say, oh my God, the tech industry is growing in New Zealand, it grew 19% and it's in third place, but it's going to be the second most important industry in the next five years. And then on March 30th, it was the second most important industry because the previous second most important was tourism and it went to zero. That's not a good way to win, but I do think that I'll call it tech and startups. I'll lump those together. Let me put it a different way. I think knowledge-based businesses, which are, those two are clearly part of that, are going to be critically important in the New Zealand economic growth over the next five to 10 years because they're people-based. You have the talent, you have the educational system, which is almost disproportionate to your population, and they're not, they don't have to be location constrained. And they're clean and they have all those other attributes. So I think the New Zealand startup ecosystem is going to become more and more critical because it's going to be the engine for the transformation, further transformation of the New Zealand economy from primary industries and tourism. Tourism is great, but it's location-based. You've got to be able to get there into something that's a more sustainable and maybe more equally shareable economy. And what I mean by more equally shareable is we have to do a lot to expand access to these possibilities. And one of the things I'm focused on is trying to understand how can I, within my fund, ensure that I'm giving sort of more than fair consideration. Doesn't mean I'm going to make the decision based on this, but I have to overcompensating consideration for Maori and Pacifica and other minority founded startups because those people may not have the access in their own community to the support they need to get over the hurdle to start a business. I'm not going to go invest in them because it says Maori on their slides. I am going to go pay attention and make sure I dig into it and understand it to give them that added opportunity. If it's a bad business, I'm not going to invest, but if it's a good business, I want to make sure I don't overlook it because they're not experienced, they're not part of the right ecosystem, etc. That's, I think, also a question that came up. Who's question was this? Oh, Victoria Blood. What are the New Zealand values that might be attractive to US investors? Look, I think that there are values that range from hard core values of interest to the investor for financial success reasons. There are many. I think the frugalness of New Zealand entrepreneurs is important because as an investor, I want to make sure they're using my money effectively. I said already, I think the number eight wire mentality, this idea that we can just figure out how to get it done. I think this is a funny one because it cuts both ways. There are boundaries in New Zealand that we need to break down, silos between universities and enterprise, even in universities. There's not a lot of cross. It's not as easy to cross-fertilize as it should be, so we'll get on to that. But then there are others that are, I think, important, really important. I don't know that all investors would think they're important. Sustainability, humility, those things that we think of, the focus on circular economy, which has been happening in New Zealand being talked about for many more years. Now when I bring it up here, people go, oh my god, that is such a brilliant idea. When did you think of it? I didn't think of that. These guys in New Zealand have been talking about it for five years, and they're actually implementing it. So I think there are a lot of those factors. Michelle is saying we have time. No more questions. Yeah, I'm just conscious that Chris has to go on the hour because he's a busy VC, so he's got work to go and do. Welcome to be by email or Slack, so if they have other questions. So if you guys want to put your email addresses in there, Chris and Mark, and then people can connect with you, I have already put your websites in there. But I just want to say a huge thanks to Chris for hosting and having been an interviewer last time, an interviewer this time, and Mark. It'd be good to see you interviewing somebody next time in May. So we've got two sessions coming up on Friday. We have got the GM of MB, Peter Crabtree. He's going to be interviewing two investor fellows, Ryan Peterson from Flexport, who have just not that long ago raised a billion dollars. So that might be a cool interesting conversation and also John Herring from Lookout from Vi Capital. And he is also being responsible for getting Starlink into New Zealand, the satellite connection. So that's on Friday lunchtime. It's also, I've just put the, you can connect on there on Zoom. And then another session that's not yet on the thing, but it's in April, we have got Kevin Rose and Mike Mesa as interviews investor fellow. So that'll be a really hot one. So that'll be up soon. So thank you very much everyone for coming and recording will be out there. And we'll see you next time. Great. Thank you. Thanks everyone.