I just know that fundraising in general is is pretty difficult. Yeah. But so then going back to your point about monday.com, I I think it's topical because, maybe a later stage startup that I've been following pretty closely is rippling by Parker Conrad, formerly of yeah. Of Zenefits. I I think his story is honestly amazing.
Mhmm. I've watched so many podcasts, read so many of the articles he's been featured in, not only from just, like, him building it, but his own journey, has really captivated me and, you know, given me some insight into how super high level startups and VCs interact. Welcome to The Investor, a podcast where I, Joel Palafinkel, your host, dives deep into the minds of the world's most influential institutional investors.
In each episode, we sit down with an investor to hear about their journeys and how global markets are driving capital allocation. So join us on this journey as we explore these insights. Okay, great. So everybody, thanks for popping on, and I'm excited to have an amazing guest today from Canada. His name is Kendall G. Wing from B Dev Ventures. So excited to have you here, Kendall, and learning from you.
So excited to maybe kick off about your background and maybe tell us a little bit about your career and how you navigated into VC. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for the the intro. I I wouldn't think of myself as as amazing. Just so I appreciate that. Thanks. A little bit of background on myself. Obviously now in VC, but just kind of entered the industry the September. Prior to that, I was a co founding member of an ecommerce startup.
The kind of thesis at the time was aggregating a lot of these ecommerce assets, including brands, product marketing, etcetera. So I helped build the investment team, as well as helped out with product logistics, of, you know, wearing all hats as a as a startup does. Prior to that, spent about four, four and a half years in private equity, mainly, you know, the financial construction, things like that.
Everything from sourcing sourcing leads to negotiating to integration into main portfolio companies, as well as helping out on, like, the corporate strategy from, a board and and C level kind of playing field. And walk us through your career. So you what were some of the challenges that you face kind of switching from being a founder to moving into private equity? And, you know, many people have joined my community, because they face challenges making that switch, right?
So I think what are some things that helped you maybe make that switch and what was going on in your mind when you decided, hey, I'm going to start bundling up these brands together and think of a more consolidated approach to kind of manage these assets? Yeah, so it was definitely like a chance meeting.
I think at the time, the reason I was kind of helping build out this ecommerce platform is, while I was working in this small PE shop, we came up across an entrepreneur that had built out this asset selling, you know, widgets online through like Amazon, Shopify, a lot of success, but he didn't have, like, the sophisticated back end structure that, you know, was typical of businesses we're looking at. So we didn't really have, an accounting or marketing or any sort of dedicated assets.
And so the general thesis was if we're able to acquire a bunch of these things and take advantage of the cost synergies, you know, we would be able to to kind of supercharge the growth in addition to the typical, like, you know, throw MBAs at the problem. Obviously, it didn't really come to fruition. COVID threw a wrench into a lot of those plans as well as just the flooding of capital. And so the environment changed quite quickly.
And that's one thing I kind of took away from it, as well as needing to understand that, you know, building the team is probably the most critical part of of a startup, and especially in the the early days. Speaking to, like, the main challenge of transitioning. Yeah, it's it's like a huge ordeal.
I think what really helped me was speaking with my network and and my support, really just giving me objective feedback because, you know, all of the sayings, you can't see the forest without the trees or you can't like, you know, look outside if you're in the bubble, all those types of things. I thought at the time was kind of corny, but looking back and being a bit more introspective, I take a lot of value from that.
Even now being removed from the process of making that move, almost all of my moves throughout my career, really just taking the time to evaluate and look from a more objective lens has really helped shaped at least the way I see my journey. What would you say are some of the hard skills and soft skills that you think are important for being a founder? And then what additional skills need to kind of evolve to to become a good private equity investor?
Yeah, so I would say that and to be clear, like I wasn't making like the founder esque decisions. I was more so just part of the the founding team, helping drive more of the operational side. But I would say the main skills, especially in a startup environment, is being comfortable with kind of going into the unknown or like the fog of war. Because when you're building something that's new, there's not really a playbook that you can follow.
It's more so having to do things on the fly while maintaining in the back of your mind that you need to eventually make this into a playbook that's understandable not only to investors, but also to people that you onboard. Like onboarding people is something that I kind of enjoyed because, you know, aligning vision, aligning culture, all of that fun stuff really helped me learn to become a better manager as well as it helped me understand the gaps that I had.
You know, if you're not able to train someone kind of means you're not the expert of your domain. That's interesting. On the and then as far as the the product that you guys were offering, I guess what was the service that you guys were offering? It sounds like it was a consumer brand. Yeah, yeah, it was essentially consumer brand. And so going back to your original question of like some of the harder skills, I think I mentioned like the soft skill.
Yeah, the hard skill really is being comfortable with research, taking from like a bunch of different sources and being able to distill that into insights for a wide range of people. And not I'm not just talking across the organizational hierarchy, but also being able to communicate that across, like, different personality types. For a very simple example is some people are visual learners. Other people are, like, audio centric learners.
Yeah. So catering that type of material is definitely important. In terms of like the stereotypical, what's important for private equity, would guess, you know, financial construction plays a part in it where a lot of emphasis is for people at least outside the industry. A lot of emphasis is on the financial modeling.
But I think a lot of people in the industry would agree when I say that you can really make a model do almost whatever you want, depending on the numbers that you input and the assumptions that you make. I would say that it's kind of a chicken or the egg problem. You kind of need experience in understanding what assumptions are gonna be fair or more fair than others, and then how you're going to be able to execute and realize on those assumptions. Yeah. No, you're right.
I mean, just very pessimistic or very optimistic assumptions could kind of throw the model out of reality. And I think it's kind of good to kind of model out the best case, the base case and the worst case, and then maybe use your use your analysis to determine what what's more closer to reality, I would say. Yeah, exactly. But like, at the end of the day, you know, spreadsheets are very different from operations.
Yeah. And if you don't have, like, the familiarity or if you don't have the ability to impact ground level metrics, it can be very difficult for you to to bridge that gap. Yeah. As like going into private equity, just understanding how valuations work, understanding the levers and how they correlate to to ground level ops, I think is gonna be super valuable.
But to, like, distill that even further, understanding the macro environment and how, you know, the economy, whether that's just in your own country or whether that's globally, depending on the business you're looking at, how that's gonna impact, you know, top down, as well as understanding how the business is gonna operate and go into the future.
You know, whether that's looking at the macro style that I just mentioned or the micro style on the ground, having some sort of story to tell and combining that with the assumptions you're using for your model are really going to be helpful. Yeah. And on the on the sourcing and screening process, you know, what are some things that you would recommend if you're starting your career in private equity? How are the best ways to find interesting deals, maybe inbound and outbound?
And then as far as screening, what are some of the KPIs that you analyze? Maybe it's, you know, just top line revenue, maybe it's profitability, but maybe you can kind of unpack that a little bit as far as kind of when you're taking deals to investment committee, the differences that you've seen for private equity and then for venture capital. Yeah. So the first point, screening and sourcing deals, it's pretty much a grind.
Would say that the shop I was at, we were giving a lot of leeway in kind of developing a thesis and then kind of looking for confirmation on that thesis, then going out to screen for deals or for for leads rather. And so because we're so lean, it was a pretty it was a pretty, like, primitive process of, like, just manually outreaching to to firms or potential targets.
And then if there is interest, obviously, you kind of go into the more sophisticated process, you know, NDA exchanging financials, looking at their books, understanding if there's something there, which kind of leads into your second point. I think it really depends on the industry and the investment strategy that you're you're doing. Like, think private equity can be pretty wide because you're essentially able to buy a lot of companies with that.
So top line revenue growth obviously is important, but I think also margin margins and how they break down. So how they're constructed, how they're allocated across different cost centers, whether that's like sales and marketing, just straight up labor or some of the CapEx costs. It really depends on the industry.
And so, you know, doing your your research, whether that's just like reading news articles or listening to podcasts or like even reading SEC files to understand how the best players are operating, you kind of get like a sense of, you know, what's a fair amount of revenue that's being allocated to like sales and marketing or what's like a fair amount of cost of goods sold and how does that, you know, impact the the gross margins over time.
So it really is going from, like, top line revenue all the way down to EBITDA, sometimes like net income at the bottom, just understanding how the margins really break down. Yeah, no, that's helpful. So that was a great foray into kind of that transition. And then maybe we can talk a little more about B Dev Ventures and how that came about. Yeah. Yeah. So the transition was honestly super fortuitous. I kind of took like the same approach as I did for like sourcing deals in the beginning.
Like I had sourced so many different leads and really just casting a wide net. Seeing what was interesting to me at the end as kind of like myself being the IC process. So I had some opportunities in, like, biz dev, PE, and other areas. But I had to kind of look at my experience and find what I wanted to do. And I landed on wanting to really help out the startup community because coming from, like, an M and A background, you know, you're essentially fully acquiring companies.
Sometimes the owner can stay on or sometimes they have, some upside through earn outs. But for the most part, you're completely disconnecting them from the business. And and that's like a I guess can be a lot of fun. But for me, after going through the startup journey, I wanted to try and help startup founders, you know, continue along the journey, inject them with capital, provide some assistance where they may not have dedicated resources. And that's why I kind of landed at, Beta Ventures.
The other reason I landed here is that we have a very, very unique model, in my opinion. So in addition to providing, startup capital, we have like this proprietary lead generation platform that our founders developed about 10 ago for a company called Buyer's Dev, which they continue to to run to this day. Essentially, it's an IT outsourcing firm based out of Buenos Aires that provides software engineers to US companies mainly taking advantage of that labor arbitrage.
And so the company is quite large now, 400,000,000 plus revenue estimated for this year, but they don't have like a stereotypical sales team or a biz dev team. It's all run through this proprietary lead gen platform that has, you know, 300,000,000 plus contacts, two fifty plus software engineers, all underpinned by AI and machine learning to really help automate the sending of dynamic emails.
And so it's allowed buyers dev to grow very, very quickly from a bootstrap position and now using that to help start up companies essentially expand their sales funnel and reach their target market a lot earlier than they would because they don't need to really use whatever startup capital we provide to then drive their sales and marketing.
Yeah. And tell me a little bit more about your thesis, I guess what, you know, what's your, you know, your portfolio construction, you know, the sectors you guys are interested in, and then maybe just some trends that you're seeing, especially in, in your region, and then just kind of at a macro level. Yeah, so I would say right now we're still a little bit in an exploratory phase.
The reason for that being is the centerpiece of our investment strategy really is this like lead generation engine or this platform. And like thinking of it in first principles, right? Email marketing is gonna be conventionally catered to shorter sales cycle companies and companies that have like an online presence or some sort of responsiveness to emails.
Yeah. And so thinking about it from that standpoint, a lot of our, you know, conventional targets are gonna be SaaS companies that are catering to like small, medium sized businesses that are gonna have, you know, individuals or or leaders that are gonna be able to have some responsiveness or conversion to to that outreach. Yeah. So for the most part, you know, not looking to engage with startups that are solely looking at enterprise or B2C at this stage.
And so for the most part, you know, HR tech, I think, is one that is quite interesting for us. But for the most part, like we're pretty, we're pretty agnostic, like even geography wise, very agnostic. We have portfolio companies in The US, LATAM, I think we're looking to bring on some from EU UK as well. Yeah. There was a pretty interesting post breaking down monday.com's revenue. So I think they're at like $550,000,000 in annual revenue.
So I think they've raised quite a bit of money, but what I've observed with monday.com and several other platforms is if you've got one platform that kind of combines a lot of capabilities and it's kind of a natural workflow, they seem to be super sticky. And then I think also if you can have a lot of integration. So it kind of reminds me a little bit of HubSpot. So I wanted to hear your reaction to that as far as companies becoming platforms. I mean, see this with Carta too.
You know, Carta started out only doing cap tables. Now they do fund admin. They do a lot of other things. So maybe you can talk to me a little bit about your thoughts on that, your reaction, just kind of the natural trajectory for companies kind of growing horizontally. No, I think that's really topical. And like speaking of, I just wanted to finish up the last question you had prior on the macro environment.
Yeah, I think that fundraising in general, whether you're a startup or, you know, emerging fund manager, very difficult. I think we've also seen some more established funds have some slowdown as well. I think this morning I also read like layoffs are also hitting some banks maybe to like a lesser degree. So it's definitely, I think the avalanche is starting a little bit. I don't know that we foresee a lot of turbulence or much more turbulence, but I don't know.
It's kind of like a crystal crystal ball, I would say. I don't know too many people that can predictably or reliably predict what's gonna happen. I just know that fundraising in general is is pretty difficult. Yeah. So then going back to your point about monday.com, I think it's topical because, maybe a later stage startup that I've been following pretty closely is rippling by, Parker Conrad, formerly of, yeah, Zenefits. I think his story is honestly amazing.
I've watched so many podcasts, read so many of the articles he's been featured in, not only from just, like, him building it, but his own journey has really captivated me and, you know, given me some insight into how super high level startups and VCs interact.
But to your point, you know, his one of his tenants of the thesis of rippling is that startups in general have been kind of looking at it the wrong way, you know, focused on being super compartmentalized and a single niche, whereas, you know, Rippling wants to kind of control the entire HR plus finance plus, you know, whatever other option there is in the in the employment side.
So I would agree that, you know, if you're able to grab as much real estate as possible through, you know, horizontal expansion is definitely gonna be worthwhile. But I think an advantage to some of the companies now that are taking this lens is they're able to raise a lot of capital and grow in a very different environment to what it's now happening.
And so if you're a new startup, you know, you might be able to take the same path, but it's definitely going to be a lot rockier, if you're not well capitalized, or if you're not cash flow positive, you don't have some unique wedge. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, I think another thing that kind of supports this is the concept of really not knowing who your customers are when you first build a business.
So I watched this quick video by the founder of Superhuman and Superhuman, obviously what they do is they help you check your email much faster. But the issue is like when you start a company, don't really know who your customers are. Know, they could be students, they could be teachers. Like look at LinkedIn, right?
So LinkedIn, when you think about LinkedIn, you wonder who the customer is, but they've built it in a way where the customer is recruiters, it's people that are looking for jobs, it's advertisers, it's data companies that want to build on top of it. So there's at least like eight different customers that you don't think about. When you think about LinkedIn, it's like, let me connect with other professionals.
But they have multiple revenue streams and they obviously buy out other companies too and you know own different verticals, whether it's education or whether it's, you know, supporting people that are in a transition. But I think something that was profound that Superhuman said was when they first built their landing page, they didn't really list the customer, they just listed what you could do. And, and they list also the features that they provide.
So whether you're an investor or a founder or an instructor, you need to be able to see emails within thirty seconds. Right? But if it said like, hey, great platform for investors to, you know, close capital, then you're kind of missing the mark on other potential customers. And, you know, at that point, don't even know who they are. So one learning I had was just to kind of list the features and what it does and then see who that resonates with.
And then obviously you can create based on customer feedback, you can create new niches. And you know if an investor is like look you know I love how you can send emails, but I want to know if the person saw it or not, and like how much time they spend on the email.
You know, that's kind of a new feature and you understand that that feature is a little more important for investors, but the challenge is kind of prioritizing all those features and working on the most impactful, the ones that make money first. And that's like in my mind, that's like the tenant of product management, which was like my previous world before. No, I I completely I completely agree. I mean, I think a lot of my team uses superhuman, so definitely familiar with the product.
But yeah, product market fit is always a challenge. I think for startup founders, if one, it's really difficult to find and narrow down from like a more nebulous idea. But to what really I've seen is, you know, the pitches get a lot more refined similar to, you know, what I had to transitioning to to be tough. I found that my vision of what I wanted to do became more refined over time, just kind of like repeating the same thing over and over again.
But yet to your point, you know, PMF is like very, very critical now, especially in this environment. And I've seen that founders that can communicate more effectively from that angle, I think, are going to get a lot more credibility and, you know, first, second meetings with investors, as well as probably key hires. Yeah, I guess what are some of the biggest skills that helped you as a founder kind of transition now into both PE and BC?
I mean, I would say one thing I want to call out too, which is important for the audience is, you know, the concept of NDAs, you mentioned this. It's not really as important to sign an NDA if you're in BC, but it's quite normal to sign an NDA when you're in private equity because you could be shopping around and sharing a deal that could have a potential other acquirer. So NDAs do get signed in private equity, they don't as much in VC.
I just wanted to call that out, know, because I think that might be helpful for the audience to be aware of. Then on your end, I guess maybe it's two pronged. What are the skills that helped you if you were to summarize break into private equity and VC? And then what advice would you give to somebody who is not in the industry to pivot and switch careers? Yeah, I think really two main skills, maybe one, depending on how you look at it, but communication and networking.
They're probably being to death like a horse by now, but really communication, I think, is my strongest suit, whether that's like written or verbal. Obviously, like we're speaking English now, but that's like my only language. So I've tried very hard to be deliberate in developing that skill, like reading, listening to podcasts, whatever I can to consume as much information about what I think is going be important for my career.
And so, you know, not only having the ability to speak fluently and have comfort in speaking with, you know, people such as yourself or founders or people that are like just associates or whatever. Very powerful in being able to to frame what you want to do and have people, you know, become internal champions for you.
I like to think that, an extra kind of nuance to that skill is changing the way you inflect or even present your ideas depending on not only the person, but what you think is gonna resonate most with them. And so, you know, the other piece to that that I mentioned, networking, I I'm still kind of, like, trying to network. To be honest, it's, like, pretty interesting, especially being in, like, Vancouver. The the world is very small here, but VC in general, found to be like pretty small.
But it's a huge reason why I wanted to go into VC is that the community is so inclusive. A lot of people are looking to just build everyone up. And I love that type of environment. It's it's a lot of fun. And it's, you know, it's more collegial than like, you know, competitive or adversarial. Sure. And what are some of the biggest observations you've seen when comparing, I guess, the Vancouver ecosystem with Toronto? And then just kind of the other ecosystems that obviously we know about, right?
So like New York and San Francisco, I guess, where where do you see kind of the cultures similar or different? Yeah. Yeah. So like full disclaimer, I'm still like getting my feet under me. So don't take anything I say as gospel, but I think Vancouver in general is is like a pond. Would say there's definitely very strong operators that I've been able and fortunate to meet, also very strong investors.
And, you know, there's some talent here, but I think we're still lacking in sort of the the talent required to, you know, build up a strong ecosystem. Like a good example I like to think of, which was before my time, I guess, but Slack, you know, was formed in Vancouver, then kind of went to San Fran to build up there. Oh, I didn't know that the founders from Vancouver, right? Stuart Butterfield? Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, they had like an office here in Vancouver and then kind of translocated to San Fran. But Toronto, I think, is a much better ecosystem for startups to develop. But one thing that I kind of internalized is you really need a market to build your company. You know, Vancouver is not super dense. Not a lot of people, to be honest. Toronto is definitely much more dense, but I think the type of consumer there, you know, it's still limited.
Like, even though it's more dense than Vancouver, it's not going to be as populous as like New York or San Fran or any other hubs, like even Austin, Texas. And so a lot of things are kind of linked to that population density. You know, you have talent, you have demand. You also just have the collegial idea of of like innovation, right? You have a lot of smart people together, a lot of talented people together. There's going to be an output of very unique and innovative ideas.
And so, yeah, for me, like that's an ambition of mine is wanting to help build out that ecosystem, not only in Vancouver, although that is kind of a focus, but also just in Canada, because I've been very lucky to know that there's a lot of talented people here. We just need, you know, a little bit more focus. Yeah. And what do you think is kind of the opportunity in in Vancouver? I guess what are the industries that are like the hot industries there?
And we talked about Slack, so we're seeing a lot of like B2B brands coming out there. And then how are they also tapping into like the oil ecosystems? There? Is there like a lot of petroleum technology and AI and software that kind of helps that industry as well that you're seeing? Yeah, I would say that if you're from Vancouver, you would automatically say real estate. Real estate is kind of as a really command. So like prop tech.
Not even just like prop tech, but straight up real estate, like construction and, and like boots on the ground type of real estate. It's really commanded the economy for, I would say decades maybe at this point. And so like, just because of that, there's not a whole lot of appetite for software innovation. Been able to meet like a couple of B2B SaaS companies here, but they're like kind of from the old guard or people that had like experience with prior startups.
So yeah, yeah, to be honest, there's not a whole lot of of established innovation yet. I'm like super lucky to to be working with like a couple of university clubs, hoping to, you know, start that stage of the funnel. But for the most part, it it is pretty widespread. Like, there is prop tech for sure. There's also some, like, b to b SaaS and the sales aspect and marketing aspect, but there's nothing really that we can like hang our hat on. Yeah. No, that makes sense.
And then what are some things that you're excited about when it comes to startups and technology? I guess, there any emerging trends that you're super bullish on? Yeah, that's a good, that's always a good question. I think that I'm kind of all over the place. I'm not sure how many people here have kept up with GPT-three and all of the iterations of that, but just playing around with that and seeing how quickly we've moved forward to something so advanced.
I think that generative AI I've heard is kind of going to be the next topical or flavor of the month technology. But for myself, I think that really HR tech is something that I've been following just because, you know, I brought up rippling before and seeing how they're kind of changing the space. But there's also a lot of things in in industrial settings.
Like I've seen a couple of startups where they've helped increase productivity through of training, as well as just the production line through a combination of like software and hardware, essentially condensing like 100 plus stage workflows into something that you can have like an attachment to your glasses and just help people work through those.
Think it's kind of like a a descaling or like upscaling or something like to that nature of the production line, allowing for a wider range of the labor force to help power those those workflows, I think is going to be really interesting. But I think, yeah, I think those those would be the two that I'm really interested in seeing. Yeah, no, I'm really bullish on GPT-three as well. I mean, there's there's a VC on Twitter. He's become a friend. He graduated from my fund accelerator.
His name is Yohei. I actually forgot his last name. It's Yohei Akajima. Yohei is essentially like an AI developer, but he's also a VC. So he's just posting some really amazing stuff on Twitter. I mean, he built he built the ability to upload a deck into a system and then it creates a memo. Now he can upload a CSV, and then some generative AI will analyze the CSV and give a summary. And then I think the third thing that he did was a chatbot for founders.
So if you're a founder and you want to be considered for investment, you follow and respond to the chatbot, and then it kind of captures all that data. So you could essentially, like replace an associate at some point, right? Because if you think about it, the first call as an associate is essentially just asking questions and synthesizing data. And then you take that back to the partners meeting.
If you're able to already get all that information conversationally, you know, even before you talk to the founder, that's pretty amazing. Yeah, no, for sure.
Mean, the whole reason or not the whole reason, but one of the major reasons I kind of started playing around with GPT three when it came out is there's like a clip, I think, on like the Holland podcast, David Friedberg mentioned that because of how advanced it is, you know, it's almost comparable to a Google search engine on steroids because you're able to, you know, obviously find the answers, but in a more precise and concise way and able to take actionable insight from it.
Like I've played around with it, just kind of asking how it would build a VC fund, for instance. I know one of my friends is using it to like, teach his executive assistant to like, you know, answer emails or just think about go to market strategy, sales, etc. So it's like, yeah, it's super fascinating on kind of the capabilities and how people have started to train it with their own data sets. Yeah, no, I totally agree. Well, this was amazing. Thanks for coming in. I do believe you're amazing.
So thanks for popping on just for the record. So you know, I always try to end the episode. I'll give you guys back a few minutes, but I always try to end the episode with you sharing a few pieces of wisdom, maybe from a mentor or from a family member. And then if anybody in the audience has any quick questions, we can tackle those too. So audience, if you have any questions, speak now or message it.
Then in the meantime, Kendall, maybe you can just share a couple pieces of wisdom or like maybe just a piece of feedback or learnings that you got from a mentor. Yeah, definitely a lot of learnings, but I think the best one that I can put forth is the they were showing me, the statistics, at least in Canada, for the amount of businesses that kind of succeed. It's super low. It's like less than 10% over a period of like five or ten years or something.
And so thinking about that as a founder, it's definitely is definitely scary. But it's you can also apply that type of thinking to, you know, going after a new job or going after, like, you know, a new challenge in your life. In the moment, I can definitely say it's super intimidating and super difficult. But, you know, if you continue grinding and you continue grinding in a smart way, I think, you know, the results will follow.
But how you grind in a smart way is, you know, look for external feedback. People that maybe aren't following your journey, and just asking them for for some guidance is is what I would do. Yeah, it's all good feedback. Cool. Well, hey, thanks so much for your time. And everybody's busy. Oh, it looks like we have one question here. Is there any question? Sure, go ahead. Yeah, Okay, so just answer the question. So okay, so Mateo's got a question.
Is there any source where we can see a demo of GPT-three tech? So any any recommendations for resources to kind of see more demos of them? Yeah. Yeah. So one of the ones that I'm just starting to play with, I'll post in the chat here. But I think this GPT or this this version of GPT was trained off of like a dataset relevant to VC. And so, you know, I haven't gone super in-depth into it.
But I think the, the reading or the pre read that I saw, it was able to like differentiate between like a unicorn as like an actual mythical creature versus, you know, a company or startup valued at over a billion. So like just playing around with that would probably be a lot of fun. Yeah, and then again, know, follow Yohei on Twitter. He posts a lot of really cool stuff on GPT that he's building. So really excited about that. Some of you guys got to meet Yohei in person a couple weeks ago.
I think Matteo did. And then Lulu, what's your question? I want to ask a general question. Know in VC, we need to network in both ends. One is the entrepreneurs or other VC, right? The other end is for fundraising. I know the fundraising is extremely difficult right now, but just wondering how do you generally think about your fundraising strategy? How did you network or who you reach out with? Yeah. Yeah. So a great question. Again, like a little bit of a disclaimer.
I really only helped build the thinking around fundraising. I maybe was in like one or two meetings where there is an actual pitch going on.
But I would say that it's I would approach it similarly to how I look for for mentors, you know, like you go into the call pretty prepared, understanding the objective and having, you know, not a prescribed script or not like a script you stick to, but at least having some side objectives in what you want to learn and what you want to gain from, you know, the other party. And so if you're looking to fundraise for your company, right?
Some examples of what you would want to get out of or what I would want to get out of that rather is one like validation that the investor you're talking to is actually gonna be interested in that specific in that specific startup or whatever you're trying to build. And to like, you know, a random one is, they able to introduce you to people? Are they actually in an ecosystem that's gonna bring value to the cap table instead of just money? Right.
Because those types of investors, I think, are gonna be the most valuable and the the best bang for your buck in terms of effort. Got it. You. Cool. Well, thanks so much, Kendall and everybody else and look forward to catch up soon. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Joel. And you're also awesome. Thank you, Matt. Appreciate it. Take care.