Somesh Dash of IVP joins Nick to discuss Classical vs. Jazz Leadership, IPO Readiness & Key Metrics for a Successful Offering, Requirements for David to Beat Goliath, and Why Altman and Other Leaders are Pivoting to Open Source. In this episode we cover:
- AI’s Role in Venture Investing
- AI Open Source & Model Layer
- AI in Healthcare, Education & Social Impact
- Globalization of Tech, Broader Trends & Perspectives
- Founder Traits & Evaluation
- Market Dynamics & Cycles
- Future of Tech & AI-Native Generation
Guest Links:
The host of The Full Ratchet is Nick Moran of New Stack Ventures, a venture capital firm committed to investing in founders outside of the Bay Area.
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0:18
Somesh Dash is back joining us today from Menlo Park. He’s a General Partner at IVP, a late-stage venture firm backing breakout companies on their path to becoming market leaders. Somesh has led investments in multiple unicorns, including Rubrik, Discord, Glean, Abridge, and Amplitude. Before joining IVP nearly two decades ago, he held roles in corporate finance and venture at CSFB Technology Group, Luxmi Capital, and Sony Entertainment Television. Somesh, welcome to the show!
0:47
Nick, good to see you again. It’s been a while. Always, always good to see you and get
0:52
your take. You know, I’m I’m really happy you’re back. You’re now. Your your portfolio is kind of cutting edge right now for a lot of the AI that’s happening. And would love to kind of unpack the way you’re thinking about things, but before we do so, can you refresh us on the thesis at IVP and kind of the areas you focus most on.
1:08
It’s a fun time to do this with you. Nick, this is your 20 for me. And the industry has matured and evolved a lot since I joined in 2005 and IVP has also evolved a ton since I joined 20 years ago. If you think about how to frame us, we really are specialists at the scale stage. And so the focus of the founders we are working with is very much about the supercharging of the growth of the business. And I think what we really, as a firm, only partner with a dozen founders a year, and we’re managing close to $8 billion and our current fund, fund 18, is about 1.6 billion. I think for us, what’s been very special is at a time where, I think I gave this analogy a little bit last time, but it’s probably cemented more at a time where everybody is sort of a multi lane highway, and everyone’s kind of swerving into different lanes from pre seed to public market investing to, you know, not just equity, but credit and wealth management and new business lines. We’ve sort of focused very much on venture capital. That’s kind of the core of what we do. And we focus specifically on the growth stage, because it turns out, there’s this interesting observation we have. There is a lot of capital attention and time put into the pre seed, seed and series, a stages where there’s, that’s the getting something off the ground, and yet there’s this abyss when companies hit kind of 10 million, 50 million, 100 million of revenue or traction, where that’s really the difficult stage for a lot of founders. If you ever hear founders talk, they look back that scale point, say that was really hard, and we had to make uncomfortable decisions. We had to take some pretty big risks where you’re the company kind of their version of the Intel, you know, x86 moment, the microprocessor, they all go through that. And that’s why it’s important to have an active investor who’s still on the board, who’s helping out these entrepreneurs and their management teams in that scaling process, so that usually we’re followed by the crossover funds, the mutual funds, the mutual funds, and that’s when companies are ready to go public. Their motion is a little bit more around really understanding the thesis and investing, and they’re amazing, but they’re less involved operationally and at the scale stage than we are. And will you
3:13
remain as owners, you know post IPO? I congrats on rubric and others. But do you continue to hold like life cycle. Or do you, do you strictly focus on venture capital and and sort of pre IPO? Well, you know,
3:26
it’s, it’s a great question. It’s, it’s really situational, because in some cases, when we come in, in a series D, and the company goes public a little bit earlier than maybe we had imagined, you know, we were investors in crowd strike, and we invested in, you know, co led of financing in 2017 and the business went public, actually a year later. We take advantage of liquidity where you get it, like DPI matters, you know, we’ve had over 130 IPOs. We’ve distributed $4 billion you know, in the last few years. So we’ve had the ability to always send back capital when you get those windows, because they’re not common in our asset class, but if we’ve come in later, we believe in the growth trajectory, we sometimes retain a certain amount of our holdings. And the most important thing philosophically is even after we’ve distributed all of it, like in the case of a company like Snapchat, you know, or in a case of a company like Coinbase, or in the case of pure storage, the relationships with the team and the founder are very deep and strong, and so our vision is that we’ll always be a phone call away, a text away to help those people, because they’re really the people help us build our franchise. And we believe, even though we may not be technical shareholders, you know, I still talk less frequently than I used to with Evan Spiegel Snapchat, because there’s a lot of exciting things happening there. You’ve
4:41
been doing this for a long time, and you’ve kind of been at the top of your game. You’ve seen a lot. How has the IPO process changed? And, you know, I know you probably can’t talk about specifics, but you know, in the current area era, so few are getting through we’ve seen like, a 10x reduction in IPOs. How. Has that process changed in from mechanics to strategy.
5:03
When I joined IVP on 2005 it was that it was kind of right after a period where the.com bust had sort of been just ending as I was starting at IVP March of oh five. And if you remember, Sarbanes Oxley was created and sort of proliferated in the early 2000s and that created a higher burden. It was, it was essentially an instrument to create a bigger burden, to decrease the frequency of the number of companies that go out, and the increase the quality of the IPO baskets. It actually had a perverse effect, though. It created a lot more, frankly, revenue for compliance. Folks, audit, you know, folks, then probably, like, you know, created protections. Per se, I would almost phrase it as, like, it’s inverted 20 years later. So back then, it felt like almost every company wanted to go public, but was just having to get through the Starbucks process. Now, actually, you have this real opportunity to go public because of some of the highest profile companies choosing to stay private, and because of investors choosing to continue to double down at 100 billion, 300 billion, 500 billion to our private market valuations, many companies are just choosing to stay private for a long time. I personally,
6:16
is that still a control thing, or is it? Is it because we had this inflated pricing from a few years ago that so many companies still have to grow into. I think
6:24
it’s less inflated pricing. I think it’s control, but I think it’s more philosophical. I think a lot of entrepreneurs will say, I don’t need the capital. And if I could provide liquidity for our employee base and maybe some of our investors, early investors, then that also is a reason that typically people go public, and you don’t need to do that anymore. And I think, candidly, a lot of people feel like we would have to naturally slow our growth. We’d have to make some trade offs and compromises. We’d have to be beholden to a series of public shareholders who only care about our numbers. And I would say, Nick, I disagree with that. In the case of rubric as a case as a case study, rubric was one of the only companies to go public in 2024 they went public last spring, along with Reddit on the consumer side, and what they have shown is that there is a real strength. And if you tell your story in the public markets, you actually capture the imagination, not only of new shareholders, but of customers in the enterprise software space. You know, when you’re pitching the largest financial institutions, government agencies, and you have a public company and people, people put you in a different bucket. I think you have more liquidity as a result of that. I think people say, hey, we want to do business with this company for 10 years. And if you look at Rubik’s most recent earnings announcement, which came out less than two weeks ago, you could just see they’ve actually increased the velocity of both innovation and growth in the public markets. So this notion that I have to slow down be beholden to a bunch of folks I can’t qualitatively invest in R D is, I think, nonsense. I think it’s actually incorrect. Public Market investors are very rational. They’re saying, hey, what do you want to build? What are you passionate about? What is the five year story that’s not that dissimilar from the venture capital process in the series A and Series B. The scale is different. You have to report publicly, but the qualitative things they’re looking for are very similar to what venture capitalists look for. I actually think venture capitalists have done a disservice by constantly discouraging companies from going public. I think the reality is, it’s not for everybody, but there’s a lot of companies. When you talk to them on the other side, if you talk to Evan at Snapchat, you talk to bipo at rubrik, you talk to Spencer at amplitude, they’ll all tell you it’s the best decision we made is to go public, and we don’t wish that we had waited. We’re glad we went when we did. There’s a line that the bull said at one of the board meetings I remember, because people were giving me lots of advice. And he said, You know what I think is the best way to learn how to be a public company. Be a public company. Some of this is just very I’d show you could hypothesize and do tons of non dual road shows and all of that. But the best way to learn is just get in there. And there’s a really active public market looking right now to diversify away from the big tech names. They’re looking at software, they’re looking at AI. They have these tailwinds that they want to start building positions of scale in. And I think the longer companies Wait, the burden just goes up. Right now is a great, I think, window to go out the volatility, notwithstanding, of the last eight to 10 weeks, I still think that you’ve seen offerings core, we went out, you know, we saw this, yeah, and so there is, there is a lot of interest still by the public markets for the best Silicon Valley startups to go public. All
9:31
right, so the best way to know how to be a public company is to go public. But with the IPO market slowly opening back up, what should companies be tracking internally as they start to think seriously about timing and readiness,
9:43
I’ll give you kind of the quantitative way to think about it. The first is, you want to be able to think about it sort of like a runway at an airport where when a plane is landing or taken off, you generally want to basically fall within a range of that runway. You could be a. Little bit ahead, you can be a little bit behind. You just don’t want to be off the runway. So with predictability, when you look at your core financial metrics, whether it’s AR and revenue, whether it’s bookings, depending on your business model, whether it’s gross margins, operating expenses, cash flow, you want to be able to predict four to six quarters ahead and have within a band of call it 20 to 30% some precision about where you fall if you don’t, if you’re wildly off your plan as a private company, where you’re like, I beat by 50% I missed by 40% probably not a great idea to go public. But the other thing is qualitative. I think some of the best companies I’ve seen create the practice of thinking and behaving like a public company even while they’re private. So at rubric, at Snapchat and others, you know, they would use the last board meetings before they went public to do mock earnings calls. Board members would do Q and A as if we were, you know, public street, you know, analysts, they would sort of do a ton of non deal road shows to simulate the process of being public. Because it’s a different muscle. It’s different. And those that start putting like everything in life, you put the practice in, you’re going to bear the results of it and just be prepared for it psychologically. And I think the best companies have shown the ability to do
11:07
that. So despite some activity and some progress like core weave, you mentioned, lots of volatility in the public markets, right, yet seemingly little correlation with series A like, How do you square that circle? And what should we expect, I guess in the venture markets at A and B over the coming quarters,
11:25
we looked at this at IVP over different cycles. IVP was founded in 1980 and so we’ve had the benefit over 45 years of seeing different cycles of boom and corrections. And I think there’s a general trend we see, which is trickle down. The first thing that tends to correct is the public markets when there’s economic uncertainty, where there’s war, when there’s system shocks, Six Sigma events. Right now, if you look at kind of where we are as a country, we have multiple wars being fought, like actual wars, right? In Ukraine, obviously, in Israel, we have a new administration that has come forth and is is doing change, right? And some of that is on sort of what they projected. Some of it’s different tariffs. Obviously, the markets are reacting to tariffs across the board, right which may have some very good long term effects for certain industries, but certainly short term the markets are sort of saying, hey, there’s a lot of volatility here. And so if you look at actually the top tech names right now, or the market cap of software, internet, crypto companies, between 1,000,000,020 billion. There’s a lot of volatility. We’re seeing kind of double digit daily changes in stock prices. And if you look at the VIX, while the VIX is definitely a great proxy for how much volatility exists, yep, then you start seeing a correction and pricing in the kind of pre IPO, late stage market. So the series, D, E, F, and so a lot of those companies are delaying IPOs. They’re raising a little bit of cash before they go out if the markets are still volatile, or they have to push the offering 369, months. And we’re seeing, we definitely are starting to hear and see of price differences where, where somebody wanted to price at 15 times. Arr, they’re pricing at 10 times now, right? Just to raise a little bit of capital,
13:05
is there a standard lag that you see with each of these series? Yeah, yeah.
13:10
There’s, it’s usually, and it’s not precise, but typically three to six months between each of the stages. And so by the time you get to the series A what we’ve historically seen is sort of 18 to 24 months after the volatility begins in the public markets. Now, with the world we live in, everything is just happening faster, and informations weren’t democratized. So it may be, we may be in a world where by the end of the year, like we’re going to see more deltas and changes in the in the Series A, Series B market than what we are now. It is also a world of for all the listeners, there’s kind of AI and everything else. And so in the everything else category, you are a more classical SaaS company, application layer, selling to CHROs, or kind of infrastructure focus. I don’t think this is I think it’s a reasonable time the best companies get premiums, but they’re not unreasonably priced. But I think if you are an AI company and deemed an AI company by an investor, sec. The valuations remind me a lot of what early cloud looked like, or crypto, whenever it said it’s when Bitcoin was at its high and interest rates were zero. And I think the the really challenging thing is some I actually fundamentally believe AI is truly revolutionary, not evolutionary. I think there is a there’s the great quote, which is, all great trends are actually overestimated in the short term and underestimate the long term. I think we’re both overestimating near term. What happens with both AI, you know, for humanity, but also for the companies, but grossly underestimating what the best companies are going to look like 1015, 20 years from now, and in the scope of history, you know, Nick I this is I’m starting decade three at IVP, and it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like I’m in year six or seven. And so like, even though five years sounds like like eternity or 10 years, if you think about Facebook, Facebook. Itself is 2122 years old. That’s it, right? And like it’s replacing companies in the Fortune 50, Fortune 100 that are sometimes 75 100 150 years old. And so
15:09
the iPhone less than, less than 20 years,
15:12
less than 20 years, right? Perfect example, I think we sometimes get so caught up near term that we forget Uber, less than 20 years old, and look at a business that’s worth between 115 200 billion change the world, and we were lucky to be investors in Uber. Or my coin is like, I actually think there’s going to be a lot of companies that people look at the growth, they look at the market, and they say, this is the one I’m plowing in money at a crazy price, and they aren’t spending enough time with the founders. Because if you spend time with founders, one of the things that we the two things we do systematically when we underwrite an investment. The first is you have to spend time in person with the founders and the executive team and really get a feel for what their motivations are. They can spend the entire hour you have talking about the numbers, but if you don’t spend some time talking about the origin story, the qualitative goals, the challenges, you’re not going to get a feel for what the ambition is of the founding team. The second thing is customers. When you talk to customers, and I am shocked at how few venture firms truly do customer diligence, customers will tell you, straight up, this is an amazing product. We just did something that we’ll announce in a couple of weeks in the AI space that touches the legal, accounting, consulting industries. I’ll have to leave it at that. When we talked to customers, they were rating it kind of 11 out of 1010. Out of 10. Couldn’t look without it. I would triple my budget if my manager allowed. And when you hear things like that consistently over 810, 15 customers you had, that’s truly the site of qualitative Product Market Fit beyond just the quantitative the quantitative the numbers look good because the numbers can change. Things can happen in the competitive environment, the volatility the economy, can trickle down to decisions on buying but it’s the people. Part of it. It’s how they support their customers. It’s how especially in enterprise software, it’s how they hire engineers and what they have them work on. It’s how they communicate with leaders that stuff matters the most. Is there
17:04
anything that’s structurally different about this platform shift than previous anecdotally, it feels like this, I hate to use this cliche term, but this Cambrian explosion, you know, the application layers taking off. But is there a fundamental reason why this shift will be bigger than mobile or cloud or even internet. I think
17:25
part of it is back to the revolutionary evolutionary most. The evolutionary changes I’ve seen are more delivery advances, delivery model, distribution advances. So if you think about SaaS, suddenly, companies that were trading at single digit revenue multiples. Start trading at double digit ARR multiples. What happened two things, you’re selling software as a service, and you’re creating, you know, a new category of revenue classification called recurring revenue, right? Because that delivery model changed. But if you look at what the companies actually did, or how much they spent on R and D, they were pretty much the same before and after. Similarly, there’s certain cloud companies that were really essentially building in the cloud what they were building on premise before. And so again, it opened up an opportunity. But was it revolutionary or evolutionary? Now, I’m taking the best cloud companies and infrastructure snowflake Databricks. They’re truly revolutionary. What they’ve done, actually, like none of the behemoths before them were able to do, and I think those are going to be the most powerful companies in software, especially Databricks, which we are not an investor, but wish we were. And what feels revolutionary to me, you know about AI, is that it is very much computer science based. It’s technology based versus just delivery, like you’re fundamentally changing the mechanism by which bits are delivered, you’re fundamentally changing the construct with which applications can be delivered. And if you look at our investing, we’ve very much focused on less of the modeling LLM layer our thesis. When chat GPT was announced in early 2023 we spent a lot of time on this is, there’s, it’s going to be very difficult for startups to compete against incumbents or open source right? Those, those two forces are going to probably carry the day in the modeling market, but it is startups are going to win in the vertical as an application layer that really whether it’s health care, education, gaming and defense in sort of our four verticals, we’re looking a lot in, in the vertical layer, or we’re investors in glean, which you may be familiar with. Glean is actually focused on, how do we increase productivity at work by creating the same search experience you and I have on perplexity, one of our companies, or Google. Can you get that actually, when you go into the to IVP and say, Hey, what is our policy for vacations, right? Or how many people came to our holiday party last year? These are the kinds of things. Normally I would go through Dropbox. I’d look for a file I do, Control H, Control F, Control B, and try to find it. What
20:00
a massive productivity suck that’s been since, I mean, shoot, I’ve been in the enterprise world for all my life, and it’s just a nightmare getting finding docs, getting access to the information you need. Consumer applications just make it look like we’re in the stone ages. And I’ll
20:17
add one last thing, if you think about the other killer app that we’re seeing right now is code generation so that, you know, companies like cursor, codium, I mean, it is remarkable what’s about to happen. I think people are thinking about it from the hey, this company’s a 50 million, that company’s a 200 million. Are they raising a 4,005,000,000 I think that’s micro. I think macro. If you look at the world, and you think about how many people are in the world, co generating AI startups are going to exponentially multiply the number of people that are exposed to computer science and development. So it’ll make existing developers more productive. That’s for sure. We’re seeing that already, but it’s going to bring into the market in the next 10 to 20 years, actually, over, I think a billion new people to this world that we all live in. If you think about what that unleashes in terms of creativity and productivity, I think we can’t even fathom that quite yet. Because if you have at the application layer, if you have a billion new people across the world trying lots of different things, using co generation as one of their tools, we’re going to see improvements in climate, utility, energy, defense. You know what feels different for me about this cycle? You asked the question in AI, then when I started, it was really SAS, web, two, dot, and then mobility, cloud, crypto, and then this. I think the biggest thing is global. I think people in the United States are not thinking about, how do I build the best American mouse track? American mouse trap? They’re thinking about, how do I build the best global company? People sitting in Bangalore, people sitting in Singapore, people sitting in Abu Dhabi, are thinking about not just how do I build the best company the UAE, but how do I build a company that accesses the United States as an end market? So in COVID, I think we have to credit in some ways, COVID and remote communications for that, because, I think, because of the fact that you and I can do this, like using technology versus being in the studio live, it has just unleashed a sense that we’re all globally connected. And so I see the founders I work with. This generation of founders is the most battle tested in my 20 years. They’ve been through, if they’re in year five or six, they’ve been through a pandemic, they’ve been through zurp, they’ve been through the most brutal correction of the last 15 years, and now they’ve seen a complete platform creation and shift in AI, and they’ve seen massive volatility the public and private market. So there’s not much that phases them. They’re pretty tough and of course, not to mention the kind of political backdrop of the last five years in the United States. So so much has happened that I certainly feel what I’ve seen in the last 12 to 24 months dwarfs a lot of what I saw in my first five to 10 years in venture capital. Does your support
23:01
model at IVP change amidst the circumstances? Yeah,
23:05
it does, and it has, I think, when I started, you know, really the venture capital business in oh five was very much kind of the solo operator model, which was, hey, I’m going to source, I’m going to diligence, I’m going to negotiate, I’m going to manage the legal close, I’m going to be the board member, I’m going to offer support, I’m going to manage liquidity. And I think what has happened in our industry is people realize specialization is the way to actually really offer the best product to entrepreneurs. So we have, you know, different teams that focus on different parts of the business. And one of the key things we saw, for example, was each founder we work with, as they’re going through the scaling journey, they’re typically looking for a few things. The first thing they look for is recruiting. They’re always thinking about, how do we up the talent level at our company as we scale? And if you get into the science of it, Nick as you know, it’s not just I’m looking for good people, it’s what are the comp bands I should think about, when do we flip to RSU? Flip to RSUs? When do we think about the right, you know, structure for the executives in terms of, like, how do we think about liquidity and secondary how do we think about taxes and wealth management? And there’s a science behind it. We have a four person Talent Team now that came out of some of our best companies, like Robin Hood, some of the best executive search firms, so they’d spent all of their time working across our portfolio on just the talent side, and so that’s kind of one area we’ve invested in. The second,
24:28
just to ask a question on that, do you measure hiring effectiveness over time and hit rate? Yeah,
24:36
we do. We do. We look a lot actually at we actually have a whole Slack channel as well as we built a custom thing around who is basically recruiting. We’re essentially market makers. And so all of us in venture capital collectively are market makers. Who’s looking for which role Who do we have in the Canada database? How well are we doing on matching? How are our comp bands predictive of where people ended up? And then can we actually it is we’re almost utilizing our. Rhythmic thinking to make compensation more like a science at IVP. So interesting as we get data, I’ll give you a small example of this. What I’ve been on many cop committees, and one of the most common, first of all, like for anyone listening who’s a venture capital, cop committees are time consuming, and you have in there, you have to be very delicate, because you’re typically negotiating with the CEO about his or her own compensation, and you could do the job right by getting all the right data sets. But if you leave a CEO feeling undervalued, then you’ve lost the war. You may have won the battle. You lost the war. And so it’s very important to make sure you ask questions you understand which variables are most motivating and empowering, which are sort of Achilles heel for the founder. So the reason I say all this is we have looked at performance based compensation incentives for founders, and typically now what we’re seeing is, hey, if you’re CEO and you’re year, 789, 10, some of your compensation is going to be in the form of RSUs or options that are equity based, time based, meaning, hey, you’re in the seat, you’re CEO, you get 2550 basis points. And some of it is performance based. Hey, if you get liquidity at an IPO valuation of 3x last round, 5x last round, 10x the last round, you have tranches that open up because it’s tied to kind of shareholder value appreciation. So the reason I say all this is like, the average person isn’t thinking about all this, when they think about what’s going on behind the scenes at some of these companies. But as a board member and active investor, we enjoy it. We love that. The other part I’ll share with you is we’ve hired venture partners who are functional leaders in areas. So we hired recently Kevin Egan. Kevin was actually one of the greatest, great go to market leaders I’ve worked with. He ran go to market at Dropbox and slack, which we were investors of both companies, and in the last four years, his chief sales officer at Atlassian and Kevin just understands that one of the biggest things that founders focus on is, how do I scale my go to market engine? How do we make those hires? How do we instrument the pipeline? How do we think about the tooling, you know? How do we think about the customer engagement? And that’s another almost, subject area. So Tamar Yahushua was the same thing for us venture partner. She was a product leader at Slack and was at Google before. She now is president, head of products at glean, one of our companies. So we have this other model of world class operators coming partnering with the functional leaders at our top companies, ventures, I think a business, you have to be active for two reasons, the way you really get to showcase the value add is just by the day to day engagement. It’s not just you show up in a board meeting, you kick your feet up on the table, and you offer two sound bites and you leave until the next quarter, that world is long gone, right? So I need people who who think that, if you actually ask founders, that is not helpful, what is more helpful is when a founder has a crisis that you’re one of the first people they call and your firm delivers quickly and highly effectively. The second thing that I think has really, I think, dramatically changed is the speed, I think, like, you can’t just sort of expect that things will will get solved overnight. We had a, you know, custom. We had a CEO forum last October in Napa, and the common theme I heard was, you’re constantly refining product market fit in this AI era. You can’t just assume, because I just went public, I just raised a series D that were in steady state from then on, the amount of disruption and change We saw it with deep seek, like that just can happen overnight. You know, with distillation and deep seek, that’s an example of how you could you can’t take anything for granted in this world of AI,
28:27
how do you deal with style differences? Right? You’re trying to help out a founder. You’ve got best practices, you’ve got go to market resources, you got talent resources. But everyone’s kind of their own unique snowflake, right? I know you work with Shiv bridge, and, like, he’s such a unique visionary, right? And he’s just one you work with a lot, right? But like, not everyone has the same style, not everyone. Some people are more results focused. Some people are more process focused. How do you navigate
28:55
that? I love this question because I think it’s actually a more higher order philosophical question. I think, if you the two things I grew up loving were sports and music, and there were two different philosophies in both those fields and music. You know, a lot of training in music is classical based, right? And in classical music training, you have a score that was created 400 years ago, and there’s technique that you have to use to play that music perfectly, and there is not room for improvisation. But I also was exposed to jazz, and I think in jazz, what you find is that there is structure and there’s parameters, but then it gives each individual the ability to improvise. And there’s some people who hit jazz, and there’s some people who love it, and I found I appreciate classical music a lot, but with jazz, I enjoyed that the creativity that came in. Same with sports, there’s some people who say, by I have kids who are, you know, dealing with this every day. Hey, by the age of 10, your fourth grader better pick the sport. Be a one sport athlete. Be Right. And I said, Why? Why? Oh, because at this point, you know, they got to be year round baseball. You gotta be year round basketball. They shouldn’t play any other sport. I, I like fundamentally disagree with this. I think the beauty is, hey, if you’re the next Steph Curry or Derek Jeter, sure, but we both know probabilistically, that’s very, very unlikely. And even they would tell you, you know, they didn’t know that that was going to be their thing until later, and they benefited from trying different sports and just loving being outside and being an athlete. So, you know, I, you know, I have two kids who play different sports, and I’m proud of that, because I think it gives you versatility. How does that apply? The question with founders, Shiv, practicing cardiologists, you know, extremely, extremely brilliant. You know, the way I communicate with him is different than Arvind Jain, a second time founder, who was an engineer at at Google, and co founded rubric, where I got to work with him for the first time. And now Now glean, and they’re all a little different. And I think it’s a little bit like jazz. Part of the fun of it is realizing that you have to improvise. You have to think about investor, founder, fit what is the right way to communicate. There’s certain principles that they have, or we have. We can agree those are the parameters. But within that, I think what’s fun about it is that you have to really think about who your audience is. And this is why enterprise software companies, software founders are the best coaches because they’re always thinking about listening to their customers, right? Like, you know, if George Kurtz at CrowdStrike wasn’t, you know, running CrowdStrike, he’d be an amazing executive coach. He’d be an amazing mentor to founders, right? And Ali a Databricks another great example where, you know, he has advised a few of our founders, and they always just say that 30 minutes he spent with them is transformative, because he’s such a good listener, and he understands very well how to give them the right advice at the right time, when they’re ready to receive it. So part of I think what I’ve honed over the last 20 years is realizing that everyone is a little different, and I’m not the right person for certain companies in certain situations, but I can help them, hopefully, figure out who is, and get them to that person.
32:01
Samesh, you mentioned deep sea and distillation. Would love to touch on that a bit. You know, there’s been lots of coverage of deep sea and distillation approaches last month. What do you think distillation and other wrapper techniques mean for the model layer? Well,
32:16
if you’d asked me the question in January, I would have had a different answer than February. So my current thinking, which has evolved a bit, is, I think So fundamentally, just for so people have some context. I think in a deep sea, had been around for a while, but essentially there was almost a chat GPT, like moment about three or four months ago, where they were able to replicate, this is a Chinese product, and they were able to replicate a lot of what chat, GPT and open aI had developed through kind of hundreds and millions, if not billions, of dollars of invested capital. And I’m not gonna go into specifics. I think it’s not well documented about where they did it, how they did it. I think the bigger thing is, I think open source as a philosophy and a concept is going to win. And I think if the only thing you do is we’re gonna have a slightly better version, it’s a little bit like iOS. Like, if you think about it, why is someone buying a new iPhone now? Like, you know, kind of almost 20 years after the original iPhone came out. It’s probably less because the camera’s slightly better, the chip slightly faster. You certainly are not seeing the price increases you used to. It’s primarily because in the ecosystem they live in, there’s probably five killer apps that they use their iPhone for that they just can’t ever let go of. FaceTime. I actually think FaceTime is the most under appreciated application that iOS came up with, because it connects human emotion, you know, it connects families, friends and community. And I think that’s the reason why, even though there’s so many rational reasons for people to switch from, you know, an apple to a Samsung, iOS to Android, that app native has basically created so much retention for Apple. I see it in my own family where, like, rationally, you know, and everything else, people are very price elastic. And yet, when it comes to, like, going to a Samsung Android phone, people are just unwilling to go,
34:11
not even a discussion. People are willing to entertain
34:14
totally. So I kind of think part of, like, what, part of my own thesis of how this all evolves is it’s the data itself that’s going to be very important. So like, back to the verticals, if you’re a healthcare AI company, education AI company, there are repositories of data or data creation that’s going to be very, very valuable. And if you have access to some of the biggest treasure troves of data, whether it’s NIH in the UK or, you know, some of our big health systems in the United States, or you’re at the point of care. You’re a doctor at Kaiser, like a bridge. It works a lot with Kaiser, and you have the ability to actually have those patient interactions over 1020, 30 years, your doctor, Nick, is going to have, and the software layers around your doctor, the wrappers, they’re going to actually be really valuable, because they’re going to know who you are and what. Your body is saying and doing, and so I think that’s the part of it that people are missing. I think there’s too much emphasis on the latest version of the model and too little on like the proprietary nature and the quality of the data. I think open source actually is less it used to be. I we worked on MySQL at IVP, was one of my first investments I got to support on, and I realized in that investment and many others, it was more a philosophy of giving developers agility and choice. You know, Red Hat had been sort of the best example of it before MySQL. But if you looked at the infrastructure layer and software, open source worked actually for a couple of the key elements, application, server, database, you know, and it worked less so for other things that were kind of more proprietary, like sugar. CRM did well, but it’s hard to argue with open source CRM solution far outpaced Salesforce. We, and part of that may have been just execution and company and timing. I’m a firm believer, though, that like, people are going to leverage these open source models, it’s going to feel like an app store where, like, at some point, if you’re a fortune 500 company, you don’t want to sit here and have to, like, figure out what has the best of breed versus point solution for all these different models, you’re going to essentially have, sort of, like, a turbo mode that’s going to take basically the functionality you need and apply it to your business use case or your particular vertical you’re trying to build in. If you’re a developer, yeah. I mean,
36:22
I was reading an article where one of your CEOs, of glean was talking about this very issue, and how open source he thinks will thrive in the AI age, age and and, you know, funny enough, even Sam Altman was was quoted and said, personally, I think we’ve been on the wrong side of history here, and need to figure out a different open source strategy. It’s kind of shocking. It
36:45
is shocking. And I think what we shouldn’t forget, I think people get very binary. So they say, Okay, open AI is closed source. It’s over, you know, like Sam, you know. And I, I think what you if you think about I am deeply respectful for what open a has done is, in a lot of ways, they kind of evangelize AI in the way that Apple evangelize mobility, right? They’ve evangelized, you know, they’ve become a company that the brand is so synonymous with the sector that the first question in most board meetings the fortune 500 companies is, what are we doing with chat, GPT and open AI? And there’s an intangible benefit of that that people are underestimating. And so if you think about it from that perspective, Amazon, similarly, when they got into AWS and then moved into cloud services, the advantage they had was just the branding enabled them to quickly accelerate sales cycles, get in with the key CIOs and CISOs, and be able to sell a lot of projects and software that a normal startup wouldn’t be able to compete with. So I’m actually bullish about open AI, although I think they’re going to go through, obviously, evolutions in what they focus on and sell, but I wouldn’t underestimate what they built. I’m also bullish and anthropic. I think what I’m less bullish about is llms Three through 100 because I think they have the capital, the scale, the technical talent, that basically enables them to compete with the very best large tech incumbents. But if you’re a subscale LLM, you know, and you’re not going to be able to get the capital, you won’t be able to retain the good talent, or recruit the good talent. You won’t be able to actually develop fast enough to outpace, you know, the Microsoft projects or meta projects. So I think that’s where venture capitalists who put a lot of capital into very it’s it’s interesting, because I think there’s one unifying philosophy I’ve seen over 20 years. It’s sometimes a CapEx heavy venture investment can be good, but usually it’s not. Capex is usually the, the best recipient of venture capital dollars, because, if you think about it, just for people listening, when I started the first summer I was there, we looked at Clean Tech as a market, and I was 25 and I was trying to figure this out, and I was, I was digging into it, and most of the hundreds of millions being poured in was used to build ethanol factories, you know, to build, you know, different methane production mechanisms, so very capital intensive things that my, you know, I was naive. I just said, why wouldn’t? Why is there no debt for this? Oh, it’s very risky, and it’s also extremely capital. I’m like, well, the debt markets don’t want to touch this. And then is there a public finance for this? No, even the public finance, like bonds and muse, don’t want to touch this. Whoa. And so when it’s that risky and it doesn’t develop bits genuinely, usually it doesn’t work out. Now, there’s classic examples that are counter that NVIDIA being a great counter example. AMD, obviously before recently. But I think, like generally the consumer space, the internet space, the FinTech space, the enterprise software space, the best companies are actually quite capital efficient. And you know, if I think about discord, which we’ve been involved in for about a decade now, you know, for many years, they were able to get to 10s of millions and then 100 million users was a with a very, very tight knit, highly productive engineering team, and you didn’t need to have, you know, for that product. Directed that service 5000 engineers, you could do it with 50 to 100 and I think that enabled them to have just a healthier, accretive path. They weren’t delivering quite as much in stock based compensation, they weren’t burning quite as much and pushing up profitability. And so I think you you see that healthy path and trajectory. It gives founders more weapons at their arsenal when they’re not constantly fundraising and constantly diluting, I think they’re creating more shareholder appreciation for everybody. I’m a I think we’ll see it hardware companies, a few who think about hardware as a mechanism to build a great system. A system will have software, hardware and data. Many of those companies will be very successful, but a pure hardware company that’s extremely capital intensive. I’m not sure VCs investing big chunks of their fund at very high valuations are gonna be happy with the end result. So if
40:50
we stay on that thread and talk OPEX, you know, the application layer is kind of finally having its time in the sun, and we’re still very early in the cycle. How do you frame the opportunity at the application layer. And where do you see the most interesting areas to invest one
41:05
we touched a bit on. So I just continue to think, after the pandemic, and what we’re seeing with the United Healthcare incident a big I mean, if you think about a lot of what we read about, broadly, Americans want better health outcomes. Our system has failed us. Candidly, I think the American healthcare system, nobody, even its greatest believers, will say it’s perfect. It’s not even close to it. And I think AI is actually going to be the platform that helps, more than mobility, more than software, you know, bring the American Health System to just a much better place.
41:37
Diagnosis alone is like advanced, I don’t know, 1000, 10,000 100,000, fold when you use AI, yeah, if
41:45
you think about philanthropy, has covered up for the private sector to a large degree to help with rare diseases or things like, you know, tuberculosis, malaria around the world. But you know, even now, if you think about the business model of large pharma, Nick the economics to make, to go through the clinical trial, FDA approval process and make something that helps solve a rare disease. And the way we classify rare disease might actually be, you know, 1000 to 10,000 people a year afflicted with it who are debilitating. And we don’t solve for that part of the population anymore because of the economics, right? Yep, so orphan drugs and whatnot. Yeah, exactly. So some of the companies we’re meeting are using AI to basically enable faster drug discovery and delivery in those areas. A bridge is a great example where I actually really got to know about the company from my my brother in laws for physicians, and one of them actually works at Kaiser, and he was just sharing his experience using a tool like a bridge is Hey, 30 to 40% of my time is spent on administration, actually, like note taking, reading the notes, prepping, you know, sharing with my clinical team. The fact that I can save a big chunk of that now gives me more time to spend with patients and my family. And if you think about our physician population in the US. They’re the most important group of all right, they’re frontline workers in healthcare. And if you think about kind of where they’re at, why do they practice medicine? If you talk to any of your doctors, it’s because they love treating patients. They actually like the clinical part of it. And yet, somehow, we’ve gotten to the point where many of the most successful ones are doing very little of that. And so if AI can enable more automation and digitization of the you know, call it administrative, clerical parts of the job, so they could do more with the patients, they’re actually happy. They’re earning more income, which they deserve to, and they’re more productive. So it’s kind of like that’s one big use case that we’re seeing at a bridge. At a bridge, and we’re excited about the other ones. Education. You know, I have kids in school, and if you think about the data set right now, we have more American children with learning disabilities than ever before in our history. We have more we have more children with mental health acuity issues than we’ve seen before, for a variety of reasons, which are well documented by, you know, Jonathan height and others in the anxious generation. Social media, violent video games, smartphones, you know, proliferation of devices, cyber bullying. All of this has led to like a tough situation for our kids in America. But if you think about like, what if you think back Nick to your educational experience, and you close your eyes, I’m guessing you think about a couple of teachers that really made a difference. You think about how somebody engaged with you that inspired you in the subject area that you’re probably still passionate about, believed in you when you were doubting yourself. And where AI can be really helpful. Is this idea that every kid can have a personalized tutor, coach, co pilot, and some people are visual learners. Some people are auditory some people are night Stuart. Some people are morning Crammers. Some people need notifications to remind them to do things. Some people like to have that stuff turned off. But every kid learns slightly differently, but this is basically a big machine. Learning problem at scale. The reality is, how you and I learn history may be different, but if we can actually utilize this technology to have kids have mental health, co pilots, education co pilots, I think we come out of this with a population of kids in America and around the world that are going to learn a lot more and enjoy and be curious people in a way that has kind of been lost with our education system today, standardized tests, while I think they were developed with the right orientation, they miss the ability to actually create it like foster curious and creative mind. And I think that writing ai plus gaming together and with education can really help. I think there’s some studies you’ve probably seen where some autistic kids have actually found that certain types of games and certain types of exercises that AI is not enabling to personalize are enabling better clinical outcomes for autistic kids than without
45:52
No kidding, yeah, I’m always curious what the future looks like for AI native children in their relationship with technology, there will be an emotional relationship, if they will just grow up with a different mindset than we had and and I don’t know if that means that their relationship will be closer to the AI or treat it more as a tool. It’s just kind of hard to wrap your head around. Every
46:18
generation regroups and refocuses. And I think there’s, there’s always going to be change. It’s just happening a lot faster. So I certainly think our I think our kids, generation, may actually reject in five to 10 years, a lot of the social media platforms, if you talk to a lot of kids, they recognize today the harms that are that are there on the internet and social media, they get it, and I think they’re trying to think about, how do we balance this with the fact that we have smartphones and laptops at schools and colleges, and we have to, like, text our parents, but then we’re getting weird texts from friends, like, there’s all of that that we talk about as parents. I think the relationship, though, with AI is going to be more natural and organic, where, hey, look, if I have a therapist, and you know, I’m on the board of a company called Lyra health, which does a lot in mental health, and if I have a therapist, and I’m used to talking them live, sometimes you just need somebody or a prompt or a reminder or a visual in the middle of the night when you’re feeling anxious or on the weekends when your therapist is not around to give you that reset, to be able to continue through and Power through what might be doubt or anxiety or lighter forms of depression. I think that’s where whether it’s dating, whether it’s religion, whether it’s mental health, our kids generation will very organically, be able to couple the digital world with the analog world in a way that’s harder for us to do when we because we grew up in a much more analog environment. But I actually think our generation isn’t like most of us are also open minded. I don’t think we’re gonna reject everything and say, Hey, I just want everything to look like 1980 again. You know, some people will, but like I think, I actually think I’m excited for how to make my work more productive with companies like glean, or how to make knowledge easier to access through perplexity. There’s lots of things. Defense is another space we’re spending a lot of time in. I just think the amount of cyber attacks happening. I think modernizing the US is arsenals in different areas of land, sea and air. I think New Age startups using AI are gonna be able to do amazing things that maybe the primes aren’t the best suited to do anymore.
48:22
I mean, it is an amazing time to be alive. Like the speed of technology innovation is remarkable. I remember growing up and being frustrated with so many inefficiencies around me. It was just like, I don’t know, I see problems in a lot of you know, the things that I’m trying to do in workflow. And it’s just incredible what we’ve been able to accomplish. My buddy was talking about his self driving experience with his Tesla the other day, and it’s just unreal. And so despite all the noise and political issues and polarization and social media can be a challenge we’re really living, I think, in the golden age of look,
49:00
think about Waymo Nick I mean, you and I get to see Waymo, but when I was talking to a relative in India recently, he was so fascinated with the fact that it exists, it functions. People are finding great use cases. We’re seeing it trickle down to different parts of the country. I think Waymo has the potential to completely modernize and upend this ride sharing world we live in. I think Uber is going to do just fine as they modernize themselves and harness and adapt it. But if I think about my my biggest fear as a parent is like kids the ability to drive, you know, the substance use that happens sometimes when people make bad decisions when they’re younger, whether it’s prescription drugs or alcohol. I actually like the idea that a Waymo more than an Uber is going to be there for my kids to take them from point A to point B locally? You know, totally. I think that’s pretty phenomenal. And I I’m just really, like, I was just thinking to myself, like, is the DMV going to be as relevant like, 20 years from now? You know, are people going to buy cars and if they have waymos available everywhere, and at a price that’s cheap? Within car ownership. We already saw with Uber. You know, a lot of younger people who live in urban areas don’t they, they don’t have cars, and it makes sense. And but I think with Waymo, it goes even further, where the economics can trickle down exponentially, where it becomes, you know, so easy to go from point A to point B that we’re it’s kind of two $3 to go three to five miles. I mean, at that point, it just none of us are probably gonna invest in cars as we used to. If you keep having these tariffs, maybe we won’t have to
50:25
100% Yep. Funny enough. So we pulled my my son out of school. We’re doing a semester of homeschool. He’s like, a couple grade levels ahead, so he’s a second grader, but he’s late fourth grade in math and reading. And so we’ve been traveling. And I, you know, we went to San Francisco, and one of the things I want to make sure that he and my wife did was riding a Waymo, Waymo. And they had this experience. They just took it like two blocks, like they did big circle, but they got out, and my wife was like, you know, her eyes are wide, and she’s blown away. And then my son gets out, and I’m like, what did you think? And he’s like, no big deal, you know. So for him, it’s like, you know, this AI native generation, where it’s just, it’s going to be normalized, like, it’s not going to be this shocking, you know, experience Absolutely. So gonna throw you a bit of a curveball here. We’ve, we’ve been talking about healthcare quite a bit, and you invested in AI startup a bridge. They’re kind of revolutionizing physician experience, as we’ve kind of touched around a bit, but, but this founder, Shiv Rao, right? He’s very unique. I read this article about him taking these side quests, including recruiting a magician to his cap table, pursuing an eclectic interior designer for bridges offices, and, of course, meeting the elusive music producer Rick Rubin, who’s one of my favorites. So we all love visionaries. We all love non linear thinkers. You know, people that borrow and steal great ideas from other domains. My question for you is number one, when you’re evaluating a founder, especially at the scale stage, what are the signals you’re looking for that really make you lean in? And then, in the case of somebody like shiv, you know, how do you distinguish between brilliance in in visionary folks and and maybe those that that have a lack of focus
52:09
entrepreneurship. In my mind, Nick is like, I say it’s a marathon. And I think those that are truly exceptional, the pace at which you have to dedicate yourself, change your life. Change your none of us can fully comprehend it. Who aren’t doing it? It’s it is the, I think among the greatest sacrifices that someone can do is to become a founder. The people like shiv, who are founders can always take an easier path. I think about the Robert Frost poem right. The two paths diverged on the path, and I took the one less traveled by I actually think they’re so talented, but they see the world with a different prism, and there’s something that’s so not financial status, ego driven, that that really propels them to greatness. So in our process, a lot of what I do is just, I like to hear the origin story. I like to hear a little bit about, how do you hire people, what do you look for? Right? What do you spend your time on? Right? Because you could do lots of things, but what do you choose to spend your time on? And the key thing, actually, you know, one of the great piece of advice I got from a mentor of mine was you want to first make an assessment of where a founder is today, because that’s part of that investment thesis. Hey, we’re going to invest in the series B. We got to figure out this founder, but a really great founder is one that also matures and evolves and is so driven to make his or her company successful that they are going they’re willing to take feedback, they’re willing to be so self determined to mature that they’re unrecognizable. Like Mark Zuckerberg, I met my I think it was my first month at IVP March of 2005 for the first time. And if you see him 20 years from now, you wouldn’t have met no one would have imagined like he he’s so much more polished, you know, than he was when I first met him on the like I had the advantage of growing up in Silicon Valley, and I had the advantage a lot of my friends, you know, or when I was at college at UC Berkeley, you would see founders come and they all have certain quirks, right? They’re not the suit and tie corporate executive at, you know, AT and T like, they’re just a different breed. They’re very, I think, effective when they have those people at their companies and they scale, but you need to, I just fundamentally believe founders are the glue that keep the Silicon Valley ecosystem going. So in the specific case of shiv, my first reaction about him is, my goodness, this, this guy is truly brilliant. He’s a practicing cardiologist. He still sees patients once a month at UPMC, and he’s and he’s one. And I talked to a mentor of his, who said, and he’s not just any he’s one of the best cardiologists, like clinically, He’s unbelievable. He is somebody who you know understands design, engineering thinking. He also worked for a while in venture, so he got to see a lot of startups before he started his own company. He worked at UPMC venture group. I think most you. Notably, he’s a curious person. Most of the great founders I have had the chance to meet or work with are deeply curious. And I think so you were kind of looking at the what and that, you know, what did he do? Oh, he, you know, brought Rick Rubin, the amazing recruitment, to his first conference last fall. You know, he was able. He brought a magician to cap table. I think about the why. So, why did he do that? Right? That conference that he held was really about not doing the typical dog and pony show of saying, Hey, we’re going to bring a couple doctors, couple government folks, and just create a boom dog. Everyone goes home. It was about trying to talk about people that are truly transformative and path breaking, because that’s what you know, a bridge is aspiring to be. And you know, Rick Rubin’s talk was just spectacular, actually. And so the same thing goes with the design. It’s about creating an environment. And this is if you look at early stories of Sun Microsystems. I heard this really good one from some from Scott McNealy a few years ago, where he said, You know, when we got our first customer, we kind of wanted to look bigger than we were, because we’re this tiny little store, but they thought we were like the same skill at IBM. I IBM, so they were able to talk to, I think, their commercial real estate landlord, and say, We’re in building four, even though there’s only one building, just a whole Metropolis or something, when it was actually just one little floor of one little building. I think that’s the beauty of, you know, taking on the Goliath of your David is like, you always have to sort of fake it until you make it in terms of, like, really creating, you know, creative ways to sort of put the your best fit forward. I’m I’ve learned from Shiv every day. I learned from Jason at discord every day Evan at snap. I mean, he’s, that’s the true privilege I think I’ve been able to get after 20 years. And I, every time I see you, ask me, like, what motivates me at this stage, when I look at an Uber, you know, that my cousin might be taking, or I get to see a doctor using a bridge, a small part of me, that’s the real joy out of anything, is like I was able to help those founders get those products to the market, you know? And that’s just really special. Semash,
56:58
if we could feature anyone here on the show. Who do you think we should interview and what topic would you like to hear them speak about? Well,
57:04
since we talked about him, if you get Rick Rubin, you should get Rick Rubin. Man,
57:07
right? That would be amazing. I
57:09
think, you know, in the entrepreneurial world, I would probably say, since you brought him up, Shiv would be amazing from a bridge, because he’s just such a fascinating person in both with the work he’s doing in AI as a cardiologist, or Arvin a glean or Arvin a perplexy. Those three, if you AI founders, that’s the triumvirate that I just think are really exciting to work with and listen to. And you know, as an investor, I have to say my friend Sarah Guo a conviction, I think she is doing an incredible job in helping companies the I space. She’s got an awesome podcast, no priors with you, with a lot, and I think it’s one of the first kind of new platforms focused on AI that came out at the right moment, that the market was shifting. And the combination of just, she’s an amazing board member, she’s a great Sherpa to founders, and I think she has a great portfolio. I think she would be a good person to talk to. Awesome. What
58:03
book, article or video would you recommend the listeners? Well,
58:06
we talked about lots of things, Nick but I think never enough. Was the book I was thinking about when we were talking about the culture now for our kids of kind of over achievement that’s become toxic. It’s by Jennifer Grisham Wallace, and it’s a really good book about how our education system has changed, how our how homes should actually be supportive to our kids, versus even more pressure creating so that’s one good one in venture the I just reread it actually, uh, summer. I really like it. But the power law by Sebastian Mallaby, it’s, it’s really the, probably the most well written book, and I’m a big fan of Sebastian’s about the asymmetric risk return that drives Silicon Valley. And I think if you’re not from here, you’re like, why are people paying these crazy valuations for these illiquid and preferable companies? Right? And like, some the joke was, someone was like, Oh, I just focused on nonprofits. And I was like, Yeah, I do too, right? Because it’s always all the companies I look invested, are also unprofitable. But I think the reason is, the returns for the best companies here are just they so make up for everything else that that’s why the business operates. The industry functions the way it does. So I and I love the stories that they told. I mean, Reed was in it, ivps and inception, but also Sequoia Capital, Michael Moritz and others like just really a great read, awesome.
59:26
Samesh. Do you have any habits, tactics or behaviors that are a force multiplier? We
59:30
were talking a bit in this conversation about jazz music, I’ve kind of rediscovered my love of music. I loved music growing up, somehow I lost the ability with young kids and a busy work to discover new bands, musicians, genres, even. And so I subscribe to a sub stack called flow state, and it’s got a lot of every morning I get one album and one band kind of recommended, and it’s in different genres, from jazz to. MBA to trance, and it’s just as someone who has eclectic musical taste, it’s been really fun for me. I think it’s correlated also to just venture capital, because when you go in every day, Nick, like you and I do, you could be meeting a company in AI therapeutics, on in one morning, and in the afternoon you’re meeting a SaaS company, Sonia CHROs. It’s, it’s actually the most exciting thing is the context switching. It’s not for everybody, like some people hate that, but for me, I love it because I’m constantly learning about new industries and new delivery models and new business models, and especially because I get to hear from just these unbelievable founders about what they’re building. Awesome. Love it.
1:00:36
And then finally, here, what is the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow along with IVP, I
1:00:41
would recommend LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. I’m sort of a power user, so definitely, we post a lot on the IVP LinkedIn side. I try to do my part and throw in some interesting content from time to time. But that is probably the easiest. Do not email me. I am not good at responding more to email. It is just the elaborate than a mess. I hope AI will enable we have a company superhuman that’s done some great stuff in email, but we also believe there’s gonna be lots of new tools that will hopefully enable more throughput on email for all of us knowledge workers. Awesome. Well,
1:01:11
samesh, thanks for returning to the show. If you’re listening now and you wanna check out the original episode, I’ll put it in the show links. But Sumesh, this is great. Congrats on all the success with rubrik and many others, and looking forward to having you back sooner next time we should wait four plus years. You know,
1:01:30
Nick, thank you for having me again. I don’t take that lightly. It’s It’s so wonderful to be with you, and also here of all your success, and I just think it was such a fun conversation. Thank you so much.
1:01:39
Thank you, sir, appreciate it.
1:01:46
All right, that’ll wrap up today’s interview. If you enjoyed the episode or a previous one, let the guests know about it. Share your thoughts on social or shoot them an email. Let them know what particularly resonated with you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that some of the smartest folks in venture are willing to take the time and share their insights with us. If you feel the same, a compliment goes a long way. Okay, that’s a wrap for today. Until next time, remember to over, prepare, choose carefully and invest confidently. Thanks so much for listening.
