19: נקודת המבט של המשקיע. אורח: ג׳ף הורינג (English)

Hi, Liori. Hi, Lior. Hi, everyone. You're at Startup for Startup, the podcast on which we openly share knowledge, experience, and actionable insights among startups. Today's episode is about $6 billion. Sounds provocative, but this is the size of the fund managed by one of our investors, Insight Capital Partners. When talking about investors, the usual startup perspective is to think about how to raise money. Today we're going to flip sides and try to understand better the investor point of view. What challenges do they encounter? What are their own KPIs and how do they define success? And this isn't just a thought experiment. We strongly believe that understanding how investors think about their own businesses can be very insightful to every startup and every founder in a fundraising process in general. So today's guest is Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Venture Partners since 1995. Hi, Jeff. Hi, guys. Thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure. Not only Insight is one of the leading venture capital and private equity firms, you've taken a special interest in Israel, if that's correct. That is absolutely correct. And I just want to mention the few investments you've made in Israel to small companies such as Wix and WalkMe and Sisense and Checkmarks, JFrog, Spot.IM, and JoyTunes, and of course, Monday.com. Most importantly. Most importantly, which is why we're here today. So, Jeff, $6 billion. How do you even start thinking about it? You know, we don't think about the amount. We think about the opportunities. And I think when we look at our history, it's really about finding companies that we love, which are mostly software companies that are growing and doing interesting things. And from that, we find a lot of opportunities. And the world is a big place. If you look at the world of software, it's grown by a factor of probably 20 since I first started in 1995, maybe more. And, you know, the opportunities continue to mount considerably. So I think for us, I know that sounds crazy, but $6 billion is not even a challenging number for opportunities out there. So software represents $100 billion probably or more invested capital a year, maybe $200 billion a year. And I think it's certainly reasonable to look for lots of deals. So how do you even raise this amount of money? Between funds typically are not so obvious that we have to give them at least some confidence that what we're doing is successful. And I think, you know, we raise money largely from where the money is, which is savings accounts. People save money in lots of ways. Most save it in, they could save it in pension plans. It could be a state pension plan. It could be a public pension plan. Other people save money through endowments and foundations. So those big pools of savings is really where we find most of our capital. You know, today we have very, very wealthy people who've got lots of savings too. So they look like what years ago were institutions. And we address all those individual markets really for money. For me it was after Insight invested in us, we went to Insight, kind of meet the team. And it was amazing to me to find that your LPs, which is the investors of the investors, have a minimum check size because you can't really manage all those. How many investors do you need to raise $6 billion? So there's a big range, as you might imagine, and some people invest as little as $10 million. Those tend to be relationships we've had for a long time. Every now and then we just have sort of people who are anxious to put money with us and they require very little help to make that decision. I think the average investment size for one of my investors is somewhere between $50 and $100 million. Just to put in perspective, this is like the average size of a fund in Israel. That's true. Well, actually, you know, the strange thing about raising money is it can get a little bit easier as you get bigger because the investors who have lots and lots of money think about sovereign wealth funds like Singapore or China. They can't put money to work in $20 million increments. It doesn't matter to the amount of money that they manage, which could be $200, $300, $400 billion. And so when they look for technology opportunities, there's a very finite universe of people who could accept the check sizes that they look to deploy. So, in fact, it's sometimes harder for smaller funds who have lots of competition for $10 million.

Because there's lots of alternatives for those $10 million checks than it is for us, where we have the benefit of at least being a very small universe of technology, private equity investors, raising larger sums of money. Right, but if we go back to doing some math, you have to return, what, 3x on your fund? 3x would be spectacular, yes, for my LPs. We have been able to manage that over the last decade. So that's very different than, let's say, round-A typical investors that expect to do sometimes 10x. So you want to invest in a startup, you see a 10x. Not only that, the dynamics are that you have one good or two really great investments that return the whole fund. So you have a different model. We do have a lot of 10xs. I'm probably sitting in the room with one right now. It's a very different business model. I think the earlier stage investors are obviously betting mostly on people and to some extent products. We're betting on markets, product-market fit, because we have usually data to sort of support the product-market fit, and then still people, because the people really are what give you the 10x versus the 3x return. But we do have a much higher batting average rate, so we'll lose less than 5% of our capital in a given fund. Only? Only. So you don't write off investments? Not even. We'll just lose 5%. So our write-offs, 100% of write-offs are probably less than 1% of our funds. It's rare for us to lose money. How many companies? Let's just put it into perspective. Our funds probably look somewhat similar to a medium-sized early stage fund. So we'll have 40 companies now. We're probably having a little bit more because we're doing some smaller investments as well to get involved with companies earlier so that we can follow them through their life. So you'll end up losing two of them? Well, that's dollar amounts, right? So we have some checks that are $300 million. We're hopefully never going to lose those checks. And then we have other checks that are $15 to $20 million, which we know we're taking risk with, and those are the ones that we might lose money on. So that's like a huge difference between companies you invest in. You know, there's a lot of benefit for us to be investing on the earlier side of a market because we may never see the deal. Like take Monday.com as a great example. If I didn't put the money into the last round, there's a very good chance I might never have seen that opportunity again. And now I may have a chance to put more money in. I get to obviously benefit from owning the company at an earlier stage. And so for us, we're just looking for exciting businesses. For us, it's all about collaborating. And there are definitely different styles out there. So there are definitely private equity firms that we would put as quasi-competitors that are prescriptive to their companies, in some ways because they have more experience than a lot of the management teams at how to optimize cash flow, as an example. And there are probably some VCs that have a much more sort of loud voice at the table about getting what they want in a board meeting. We've taken an approach that we pick our fights carefully, and we definitely will express our opinions when we think things are going in a direction that we're not supportive of, but we're not going to make the board meeting a grindy experience. I remember when we changed the name to Monday. I don't think that we had a lot of supporters in that. It was hard to grasp. But facts speak for facts. So we like to believe that we're based on a reason, and you guys presented a wonderful case as to why that was a positive name. And in the end, even then, I would describe it as a discussion. You felt our concerns because it was a different strategy. Actually, in that one, I remember well because I'm a horrible marketer, so I was sort of relying on all my team who have a slightly better instinct of how to market. But I think in the end, you guys presented a compelling set of research that said this is the right decision for us. Yeah, and we felt like we needed to explain it. For us, it was a gut decision. Every day, people told us the name is horrible, so it was easy to see that anything else would be better. So that was easy. But it's really important that we need to explain ourselves and convince and convey what we want to do, especially when the other side, like we have trust and appreciation. If it's someone you don't think you appreciate, then you're just doing something you don't believe in. For sure. My life is the same. My investors have lots of questions about our strategy, right? They question the fund size. They'll question why are you writing $20 million checks to small companies. And I find that explaining to them helps me. Understand it yourself? Yeah. My instincts I'm confident of, but it's nice to be able to articulate things, and then it actually makes the…

Strategy, more crystallized so that you can lean in more aggressively into that strategy. We were presented with a lot of questions about size. And then one of my partners and I were just sitting in the office talking about why is it that we feel differently than our LPs? And he finally came up with a compelling thesis that size is good. He's like, why are we running from this? Why are we defending ourselves? Why aren't we offensive? With size, we can hire more people. We can do more things for our companies. We could see more deals. We could institutionalize a lot of things that smaller firms that compete with us can't do. And so by having to explain it to our investors, we were able to actually turn it around and say, wait a second, we can really look at this as a strategy, not just an asset. Not only it's not a problem, it's actually your strategy. It's our asset. And then all of a sudden it made us realize, well, then we should really be building the entire business organized around taking advantage of this strength and not defending it as a weakness. But did you really stop for a moment and say, maybe I'm taking the wrong path just because they ask you questions or was it like, oh, they're just not getting it right all the way? No, I always knew we were on the right path. Just like you. Like you have an instinct that this is right. You feel because you're in the ground every day. And any entrepreneur has the same thing. You see the decisions that are getting made and you know it's working and why it's a better thing. But we were having a really hard time explaining it. And still to this day, I mean, here I am 23 years later and my LP conference two weeks ago was all about why our size is still an advantage. And I've lost a lot of investors just on that one point. Really? Although you bring results and it's just a fascinating thing to hear. Well, as I said, there's a long lag in our industry between what you do and the results, right? So imagine I raise a fund in 2015, which was my last big fund. And takes three years. How big was it? Just five billion. So pretty close. But it took us two and a half to three years to deploy. So that's kind of 2000. You guys are in that fund. That's the fund that you guys are part of. So that took two to three years to deploy. So now I'm in 2018. And then, you know, there's some early signals in that fund. And that fund happens to be going exceptionally well at a very early point in its life. But you'd imagine three years in with the average investments less than a year and a half that there's not a lot of signals to say it's going really well. So if you're now being asked as an investor to give me more money for my next fund and you're looking at my last fund, you're like, well, that was a little bit smaller. And maybe you're not the same. Maybe you haven't confirmed that thesis yet. Right. So every… Is it a fine reasons to… Every fund is a little bit… Yeah, exactly. So it's a chasing target because each fund gets a little bit bigger and then they keep questioning relative to the last fund. Now, our strategy hasn't changed. So we invest exactly in the same types of companies we've invested in for 25 years. Same size, growing faster because the markets are much bigger. But I'd say, you know, other than that, it's a very similar strategy to the day I wrote. You know what's interesting, Roy? I just thought about it that… Ray and I explained just a little context. We talked about how we think that startups should reduce risk as they are talking to investors. And it sounds as if you have the same kind of mission with your investors. Always. You're trying to show them that the risk is lessened and… Yeah. No, they always… That's what they care about. They care about… There's a lot of… You guys have the same challenges I have, right? My investors don't really fully grasp what I do, right? I mean, and they can't. I mean, they're looking at 100 different versions of me, but each one is very different. We struggle with that on the other side. So when we present our story to prospects, there's a lot of noise. And prospects, I'd say the number one criteria a lot of prospects select investors is what else have they done that looks like me, right? Even though that's not necessarily a great metric, that's probably it. The hardest thing for us to explain is that we have 30 people who truly roll up their sleeves to try and help you run your business. Now, sometimes you don't need that help, but in many cases, it can be helpful. But that's a very different story than saying, oh, I'll introduce you to my PR agency firm that I like to work with or my number two recruiting firm that I like to work with. Those are, I think, the stable stakes for any good investor is that they have a network. But it's really beyond the network. What can you do with your experience base to differentiate your story? But it's hard. I mean, we spend every meeting that I meet a new prospect, it's all about… And for me, by the way, and I had a lot of calls of startups who are going to invest in, that consulted with me. And it's always more about relationship, about working together, about… A lot of entrepreneurs ask me, how's Jeff when the shit hits the fan? I run for the hills. Yeah.

Or like, that's what I said. And so like, how is it to work with? So at the end, I think like the biggest selling point is the relationship, is the objective, is the alignment of interest that you want to build a company and not ruin it. And I always tell them you're very much like only on the upside, like you're looking at the upside and trying to see how the business will succeed. And like, if it fails, it's not something you think about. Like even we never like talked about downside protection and all that stuff. So it's aiming for success. So the one advantage that we have with our size, many things we have is when we write checks into high growth, smaller businesses, we don't care about the downside. Like it just isn't relevant, right, to our equation. Like the downside is the dollars I wrote. That's my downside. I can't lose any more than that. And so for us, it really is about helping you guys achieve the upside. And I think, you know, for a smaller fund, a $25 million check might actually matter if they broke that to zero. That might actually be a big blip in their returns. And so I think, you know, we, by the way, SoftBank, you know, we could all look and question that strategy a lot of ways. But when they write a $300 million check, that's like me writing a $20 million check, which is like a $500 million fund writing a $1 million check. So the mentality of risk that they could take at scale is rather staggering. And very few, there is no one else in the world, quite frankly, who could look at the world like they can because of that size fund that they raise. So there is some interesting benefit to the risk profile that you could do. And I think it allows us at least for the smaller companies to be really focused on the ones that we think have exciting, dynamic upside. Right. But where you said that some people call you and you can tell them how great Insight is and how great Jeff is personally. But this is a very specific situation. Many times, founders don't have this luxury of talking to someone they can trust and they can talk to with no bullshit. Yeah, no, they could all ask. You could ask any VC for references. Right. Or you could look at the portfolio. This is in a very specific stage. That's my point. When looking around and just trying to guess who to talk to and who's better than whom. And, you know, you talk, Jeff, about how you really help and you have 30 people helping. But I mean, I can tell you that in Israel, founders are not even sure whether helping is a good thing or not. It's absolutely. We can find so many. By the way, it's not a recipe for us. So unlike others that we work with that have some resources, we don't say you have to take our help. And, you know, I would say actually you guys are on the lower end of help. Right. But you don't need it. Right. Things are going very well. But looking, so let's just have this exercise. If you're thinking as a startup, looking at you from the outside before talking to you, before having a reference call with someone that they can really tell them how great you are. How can you, what do you assess when you're approaching a new fund? If you're just trying to do basic research, I think experience is one of the most important criteria for an entrepreneur. I want to have somebody who actually appreciates the business that I'm in. Because if things do go sideways, that's probably where you really want to understand who understands the whys. And, you know, you may be insecure about that, in which case, by the way, for us, it's a self-selection out. Like if you're worried that we may know a fair amount about your business and how it operates and you prefer to be dealing with investors that have very little experience just to get the capital, that's fine. And that may be your choice. But I think entrepreneurs who really have, I think, thought it through and really want to build something unique, realize that having smart people that actually get what they're doing around the table is a good thing. And you can look at people's websites for that, right? I mean, it starts with how many companies look and feel like me? How many are in kind of my world, my space, my go-to-market strategy, my sales motion, you know, pick your, you know, ideas of what defines who and what you are. And I think so that you could see at least on the websites very easily. You could see the resources on the websites. Some people have five people. Some people have 100 people. Right? So that gives you a sense of what really is behind the words when you hear the stories. And relating to that, when you look on the website, like, generally I get confused. Like, lots of people with titles that you don't understand who's writing the check and those kind of stuff. But you don't know even who is a good person to talk with. That's another question they ask, by the way. Usually the top pictures matter as you get further down. Although you'd be surprised that some VCs also mix them up alphabetically. In Insight also, like, I think there is a lot of voice for the people who make the calls and actually make the first contact. You listen to them while in other funds. Well, that's actually an interesting point. I think the most under…

estimated thing for a lot of entrepreneurs is how important the young guys are in all these firms, I think. Can you elaborate on that? We have a wonderful, talented group of young folks who are reaching out to a lot of companies. And then our mid-level folks are… But I respect their opinions a lot. And they're also the ones who kind of drive things. They keep me honest. They keep me going to meetings. They schedule my day. And I'll give you a good example. There's an entrepreneur who's a nice guy out in California. His company kind of went through a speed bump, but I think he probably has turned it around. And I was out one day, and he refused to basically meet with my younger guys because he wanted to meet with me. I was like, okay, you could do that. And then he kept interacting with me, and he kept sending me emails. And I've got a lot on my plate, and this is just one of many. It was an interesting opportunity, but it wasn't like obvious. It wasn't like Monday. It was like, okay, lean in, run. It was going to take me a while to really look at his numbers and really understand, has he made this turnaround effective? And he never reached out to any of my team, and I never really got around to getting my younger guys engaged. And it's sitting in my… I literally have it in my inbox for over three months now. I'm sure he's moved on as something I might want to follow up on at some point, but it just didn't make it to the top of my mind. Whereas had he gotten one of my younger teammates engaged, they would have been in my office every other day if they ended up liking the deal. And so you can do better sometimes getting the advocates, and it's probably no different than a sales cycle. I think you'll find, yeah, the CIO might sign off on a lot of checks, but getting his team or her team to really endorse the product. And it could be, you know, advocates come in very many forms, and sometimes the top is the best way to go, and there's no doubt you get to the top of a firm like ours and you make a compelling pitch. It's awesome. Like, you see immediately in 45 minutes the reaction of the senior partners. But sometimes, you know, working from the bottom up could be very effective. Letting them become your friend is, to me, a great… that's how I learned the business. I became friends with all the CEOs that I worked with 25 years ago when I first started, and I would kind of basically be my CEO advocate. I really looked out for their interest almost more than I looked out for my firm's interest. Obviously, if it really got to something that really mattered, I'd have to think about the firm first. But generally speaking, I was there to advocate the difficult decisions that they had to make, and they would always want to help me manage them up to the partners that were working on the deals. And so I think that's, you know, that's a big part of it, and I think people underestimate how engaged and how helpful a broader set of staff can be. And again, it's probably firm-specific. I don't think any two firms are alike. And there are definitely firms I sit on boards with. I've never met anyone but the partners of those firms, so as far as I could tell, there are no younger folks in those firms if they are. They're sort of buried in the back. You touched on something that is interesting to me. Like, how did you get started? I was 30 years old, so I was pretty young. I was at a very large private equity firm doing technology investing, Warburg Pincus, which is one of the bigger firms in the world. They had about a sixth of their deal flow was in tech, and I was one of those folks in that group. In New York? In New York, and they kept raising bigger funds, but for them, they wanted to move their strategy to coincide with their fund size, meaning they wanted to write bigger checks. And so I happened to like some of the smaller deals, and there was a few deals that came by that were, you know, five, $10 million checks that just didn't make sense for that firm. And I said, well, this is kind of what makes me happy. And, you know, it's funny. A lot of people start companies for lots of different reasons. I'm a believer that people who start companies to do what they want, not to make money, probably tend to be more successful. It's the passion of what you're trying to build more than it is the objective to make some massive amount of money at the end of the day. And we had no idea what we were getting into when we started Insight. We just liked deals, and we liked CEOs that were running $5 to $10 million businesses and growing. And I think that's sort of what started. And I had no money then. I mean, our first fund was $16 million, and back then that was, you know, not even that small, but it was small. And we kind of scrapped around a lot of money over the years, and my timing was perfect, right? 1995 was about the best time you could imagine putting a shingle up because you had the bubble behind you for the next four years, so we got a lot of exits early, which allowed us to raise a lot more money, and then everyone decided they wanted to be in technology, and the rest kind of played out. Where did you meet your co-founder? He was a consultant to the private equity firm that I was working with, so he and I worked on one deal together that became part of Veritas, a very successful company, or his part of Veritas became forgotten, acquired by Symantec. And we ran around the country

looking to buy all these systems administration tools for back then Unix, which was considered the operating system of choice. And I probably spent, I don't know, half a year on planes with him. So we became good friends. So what was challenging along the way? 2000 was a near-death experience for a lot of folks, ourselves included. And we were lucky enough, I mean, pure frigging luck, that we closed our fund. Second fund. Fourth fund. Fourth already? Well, we did like a couple little quickies. Like they were like one-year funds, but we were up to our fourth fund. We raised $700 million, which then was a lot. And we closed it around 2000, mid-2000s, before the market crashed. And I had a lot of LPs a year later wishing I would reduce the size of the fund and asking for money back. And the first year or two of that fund was probably the worst investments I've ever made. Why? You know, people think that the best time to buy is when the world is cheap. In technology, that's not my view. And the world was, first, we did a few deals when the world was not cheap, right? It was still crazy. So that was like, call it the first six to nine months of that vintage fund were just crappy deals at a peak market where a lot of the ideas, quite frankly, just made no sense based on where the world was. And then when the world got cheaper, we couldn't find anything really growing. So the handful of deals we did were kind of scrappy deals that were trying to figure out how to grow, but we took our time. That was probably the slowest deployment of any capital we've ever had, five years. And that was a huge benefit because some of the deals we started to do in 2003 and 2004 had really successes. And on the back of those successes, we were able to redemonstrate our strategy working. And we raised Fund 5, and that was really the beginning of the second chapter of my firm. I mean, we've been in a very good market since 2006 for technology. I mean, we've really had unprecedented, and it may continue for 20 years, but an unprecedented level of growth in technology for the last decade. 25 years later, right? That is? Yeah. When is enough? Yeah. I mean, enough is not defined by money for me. It's defined by fun, and do I enjoy what I do? And I certainly enjoy working with entrepreneurs. I enjoy coming to Israel to visit my friends. It's nice to be able to work with smart, intelligent people who are growing and… Dreaming. Yeah, and dreaming, yeah. So that part's amazing. I think there's still a chapter to be written about what we're trying to do with the firm. So I think no one's really quite tried to create a firm about the way we've gone about it, which is to do a lot more deals that are kind of the same as opposed to doing bigger deals. So lots of firms have grown, but they've usually grown by writing bigger checks. And we're trying to grow by just doing more of what we know well. Our deals look pretty much the same in terms of financial profile that they looked 20 years ago. But then what is your vision? I mean, you've been doing it for 25 years. You said it's not about the money. How do you know that your vision is fulfilled? I will know when… This is gonna sound unexpected, but I think we actually don't have enough money, right? So while six billion sounds like a lot, we spend most of our Monday mornings shooting things that we like and arguing about whether or not this company makes the cut. And a lot of our competitors invest in those companies, and many of those companies go off to do really well. So we're wrong, right? Our cut isn't perfect. But there's real value to looking at your mistakes, both what you've written checks for and what you didn't write checks for. I think people who only look at the mistakes of the checks they've written are missing out on a massive amount of data on what they didn't write checks to. And I once had a partner who, my problem was he was too conservative, and there was a lot of really good deals that we ended up not doing. And I would say we might be a much bigger firm today had we done those deals. They were more in the buyout space, but we were very conservative and chose not to pursue those deals. So I think you have to be open about both the pros and the cons of that. But I think for me, I think there's, I think we could build a leading firm to doing what we do. The market we're in, software is growing, let's say SaaS software is growing at 20% a year. So you could argue we can grow 20% a year. Like, shouldn't that be kind of correlated? We're not growing anywhere near that, right? My last fund was $5 billion. My current fund is $6 billion. That's three years. So that's 20% over, that's 7% a year. That's not the same as- You're not quite there. We usually talk about how startups sort of chase investors, but I'm sure that you also lose deals sometimes. So what makes you lose a deal? We do lose. I'd say on brand awareness, there's only a-

There are very, very small subset of firms that you could count on your hand where we might lose because of reputation, right? So there's a couple of guys on the West Coast that have spectacular reputations and we may lose head to head even if we try really hard. And then there's a lot of deals where we'll lose because you can't follow up on everything, right? And so at some point there will be somebody else who's more enthusiastic, more aggressive, flies to Australia three times to win a deal or has the senior partner fly three times to win a deal. And we may not have the relationship with the entrepreneurs in that instance that's as good as another firm. And then obviously the most common reason to lose a deal is price. So not everything could be- Right, but that's different. It's just- Yeah, that's a choice. It's more of a choice. Arguably. When do you decide that this one you're not going to fly all the way to Australia for? How do you make these cases? Some of it is decided for you just on schedules and reality and you don't have enough data. So you're like, okay, from the outside looking in, it looks pretty good. If it looks amazing, and there's only a handful of deals a year, like this one I'm pursuing now that I think is one of the most- You went all the way to- I went to California for a day and I'm going to go- So for you, knowing you, it might be harder than flying to Australia. It could be. They're getting a direct flight soon. But I'm going to probably hopefully go back out another day and it's an exceptional story, exceptional team. And I think an exceptional opportunity. So that one, I'll move mountains to win. So I'm putting my heart into that one. I still may lose it. And they've got lots of choice and we'll see. What's exceptional about it? I think the market is massive. I think the market position they have is unusually strong. And I think the management team is really special. Look, we moved mountains to be partners with you guys, right? We were way behind. Yeah, we were way behind. Tell us about it. Well, this was a little bit small for us, so we needed to get knocked on the head a little bit. One of my partners quickly fell in- Jeff fell in love with the deal early. But you guys were down the road with a bunch of other investors and then it so happened we were lucky because Israel is a small country that one of your board members was a good friend of mine, Avishai. And so we were able to spend some time with him to help him persuade Roy that we're good guys. And I think that had a huge influence in your selection in the end. Speaking of Avishai, you invested in us and in Wix, two Israeli companies that are not moving to the States, let alone to the Silicon Valley, as they say, anytime soon. You're going to hit my hot button. What do you think about it? One, I'm obviously based on outcomes, I'm very supportive of it. I think the worst decision you can make probably is to move to Silicon Valley. I'm not a big fan of Israeli companies relocating out there unless they have something that really requires that ecosystem. Why would that be? Like the JFrog, as an example, may need to be in that ecosystem of the Valley to kind of create that open source reputation. But very few companies, I think, have a reason to see the Valley as the best place to open up headquarters. And you're competing with Facebook, Google, Apple, for engineers and for other resources and those companies can spend a crazy amount of money. And I think, candidly, the culture of the Valley is about money. You look at what you guys build in Israel and you look at the spirit of the companies and the excitement that people have. I was just with one of our investments and we're talking about Wix and literally how everybody who works at Wix loves working for Wix. It's just a remarkable net promoter score of employees. And that's a really valuable thing.

thing that means if, and they haven't had that problem, but if something were to go sideways, I think most people there would hunker down and work together as a team. And there's a lot of transparency, and I think you guys probably have a similar culture. So I think culture matters a lot. I think it's very difficult to build that culture in Silicon Valley where people are kind of constantly having FOMO, right? Oh, I want to be on Uber's cap table, not XYZ cap table. And I think in today's world, you know, Israel used to have a big constraint because you don't have a lot of customers, right? That was your limit as a country. So you had to kind of move some sort of sales and marketing effort to the States, which usually meant the CEO had to go with that because the CEO has to be pretty close to the sales and marketing, historically, at least for enterprise products. Today, product matters probably more than sales and marketing. Product market fit is so critical. And at the same time, you can acquire, as you guys have demonstrated, a lot of business remotely. And I think the function of sales or sales and marketing could play a sort of more tactical role, which could be built in the States. It doesn't mean it's a bad decision, like Sisense moved to the U.S. I think that was a good decision for them. Isn't New York different than the Silicon Valley in that case? I think it's very good for Israeli companies. I think there's clearly a lot more similarity between New York and Tel Aviv. You're just Brooklyn here. But, I mean, you still have… Now I understand why you make so many investments in Israel. It is. It's the best. But you still have some of the same money. You know, it's expensive. Resources are expensive. But I do think, you know, because New York's got so many industries going on that there's not the same fear of missing out. Some other startup is doing better than we are. I've got to go change jobs tomorrow. So I think you don't have the same level of sort of swapping out and sort of cycling of careers. So I think you can get real culture built in New York. I think it has a lot of pros in terms of access, time zone, and talent. Is it right to say that, like, the Valley is more into, like, I don't know, visionary ideas that may somehow not have a holding in the ground while New York mentality is more, like, on results or, I don't know, like, grounded in something real? Yeah, I think the benefit of the Valley's dream it big is a couple of them hit it big, and they hit it really big when they do. But I would agree. I think that there's a lot of sort of a lot more vision talk than there is, you know, execution talk. And that's not across everybody. I mean, there's clearly plenty of companies that are about building products, great products out of the Valley with great cultures around that. So I think, and we do plenty of investing in Silicon Valley, so we're not in any way against it. It's just not for every company. And if you had a choice and you had already a great talent pool and a great set of engineers outside the Valley, and we would say this not just for Israel but for European companies where we invest quite a bit, rarely does that make the most sense for talent, which is usually what people think. It's like, oh, I have to go there because that's where the talent is. But there's talent. And money. That's the second thing that people think, oh, can be closer to the investors in this Valley. I'm obviously biased on that. So I think there's plenty of money in New York. Well, there is. I mean, the big checks are actually not in the Valley for tech. Even for consumer tech, there's, you know, real dollars in New York City. Is this whole thing of building a relationship before asking for money something you believe in? Again, startups sometimes think that they should talk to you for a while, get to know you, hang out with you, and then ask for money. I mean, we inadvertently or advertently talk to people for a long time because we're reaching out to you guys more than you guys are reaching out to us, companies. So we're usually sort of staying in touch and keeping track. But if you look like you're ready to raise money, we don't need to have six months to… Long history, yeah. No, if there's clear market traction with what you're trying to do, you know, I could make a decision in 48 hours. We don't need to, you know, have some longstanding history with the company to get excited. Really? 48 hours? I mean, I'd make a decision in one hour, and I have to execute it. But it's pretty… That's 47 hours in. Yeah, for me. I mean, if I… I mean, I've done this long enough now that if I can meet with an entrepreneur and feel like this is… I mean, sometimes you have to validate it, and it's not as obvious. But assuming that what you're being told is true, which is… I think it's pretty easy to have a strong instinct about a business. Yeah, with 25 years of experience.

Honestly, for late-stage investors, if you can't figure out that you love something in the first meeting, it's probably not for you. Why are you saying it for a late investor? Because then it's more obvious, right? It's in the momentum, it's in the story, it's in the market. It's in the numbers. There's enough data in that first meeting, the numbers to value a business on, and then there's the intangibles, which is markets, product, and management. We debate endlessly, and I don't think any firm has a good answer to how much weight you could put to markets. It kind of comes out, ultimately, in your valuation. What is markets? How big is the end market that you're addressing? Now, yours is more challenging to articulate, right? Well, there's a lot of ways maybe I could skin that cat, right? Is Monday going to dominate that entire market, or are they going to get a slice of what is a really big market, and some people will just slice it up in different ways? Or there are others where I have a company that sells software to banks, and you can kind of just see, if you win the few big banks, you're ultimately going to win all the big banks, because it's really hard to build this product. So now it's just a question of when and what's the penetration rate, and you kind of have a pretty confident view of how big you'll get eventually. It's just a question of time. So do you meet a lot of, let's say, good startups that did great execution, and you say, well, the market is not a good market. You're not going to be big just because of the market? All the time. I mean, it's probably one of the number one limiters. That's probably the easiest one to eliminate. Could you give an example for a market that is not interesting enough? Or even a case of a startup that you met and you thought they were interesting? I'm not prepared for that. I will give it some thought. But there's a lot of Me Too products out there. That's probably the most common thing. Some have value props that I don't find totally compelling. They're kind of soft value props where you're trying to make employees happy. I had one, and that may be doing very well. I don't even know. But ones where you feel like you've got to really change the way people work to really get traction. You've got to change the way they operate. They're not comfortable giving feedback to employees on an hourly basis. That might be a great idea, but it might also be a very hard sell. It doesn't mean it's not going to be a big company, by the way, if somebody were going to do that. It just means that's a lot of risk compared to somebody who's got an ROI that's easily measured and easily defined. There's some very vertical niches where you're solving some problem for some pharmaceutical companies, and you realize, well, there's 20 large pharmaceutical companies. Your average ASP is $200,000. I see that you're getting very quick traction, but you're going to quickly run out of market room to grow those 20 pharmaceutical businesses. Very clear glass ceiling. Those are sort of the things. But this is kind of the non-science part. This is the art of what we do. Look, the later the stage investor, the less generally we have skills of doing this. Some have value props that I don't find totally compelling. They're kind of soft value props where you're trying to make employees happy. I had one, and that may be doing very well. I don't even know. But ones where you feel like you've got to really change the way people work. A lot of education. Yeah, to really get traction, you've got to change the way they operate. They're not comfortable giving feedback to employees on an hourly basis. That might be a great idea, but it might also be a very hard sell. It doesn't mean it's not going to be a big company, by the way, if somebody were going to do that. It just means that's a lot of risk compared to somebody who's got an ROI that's easily measured and easily defined. There's some very vertical niches where you're solving some problem for some pharmaceutical companies, and you realize, well, there's 20 large pharmaceutical companies. Your average ASP is $200,000. I see that you're getting very quick traction, but you're going to quickly run out of market room to grow those 20 pharmaceutical businesses. Very clear glass ceiling. Those are sort of the things. But this is kind of the non-science part. This is the art of what we do. The later the stage investor, the less generally we have skills of doing this. It's unusual to find one of our competitors made a killing over the years by recognizing in the mid-2000s that the rest of the world was a big place for the Internet, and we're just going to copy business models that the U.S. has done in the rest of the world. Lo and behold, that was a really smart vision. We all know of them. Their math was all about end market is going to be X because of the number of people and the value per capita of each person, whatever. The use case is already set. The use case is set. I just have to pick the market leader. By the way, if I shovel enough money into the market leader, and SoftBank does a little bit of this now too, I can create the market leader, which is kind of an interesting, unusual dynamic. I could capitalize one company so well that all the other companies can't raise money because I've now set the bar so high. You create a dominance just by doing that. Yeah, and so then you have to be patient. There's probably moments in 2008, 2009, 2010 where that strategy looked sketchy because the world was kind of in a tough place, but then if you had enough patience, the world turned around, and all of a sudden you're like, yeah, there is an Amazon in pretty much every country. Something tells me you wouldn't pick this strategy. No, no. Actually, in 2000, I had that strategy, and then I kind of fumbled on it, and we took our eye off the ball, and we were really focused much more on software, and so it didn't make as much sense. And now today I think it's a little harder to do because of just lots of companies that are thinking about that, and a lot of the more obvious ideas have been, in fact, invested in. Being the Me Too of the Me Too is not quite a— But that's a good example of a late-stage firm thinking about markets and end markets. So that's an example of a late-stage firm really focusing—

Markets and then coming back to valuations based on that, which I think is really interesting. I don't think it's the norm though. I think that's probably maybe 20% of late stage firms put that much emphasis on markets. Obviously, the early stage guys, that's their bread and butter. They think about it more from, they don't really care how to do, they don't have to pencil out the math exactly because they're coming so early. If it's a $5 billion market or a $20 billion market, it's good enough when you're investing. It's $50 million valuations. Late stage have to get a little more precision around the market size because we're not going to make the 100x in that early check. Yeah, you'll still do well at $5 billion if that's the market size, but you really make your big returns if it proves to be a $10 billion market. So what do you think, what is the difference between the way you evaluate a management team at a late stage and the way that an early stage fund does it? Because you just said that there's a difference in markets. I think if I were, I'm not an early stage fund, so I don't know, but if I were an early stage investor, I'd probably put more emphasis on product and less emphasis on execution because the most important thing is to get the product delivered. You could arguably hire and bolster up your execution over time. It's certainly easier than building product. Late stage funds, we already come in to execution. And my selection for management is slightly different. I just want people that I could work with. I mean, it's just like you want, Roy wants an investor that he could work with. I think that's a big factor for me as well. One, I have done this long enough that I don't need to do it anymore. You have the luxury of choosing? There was a generation when I used to invest in Israel that was very different than the current generation. And it was a much more difficult, confrontational sort of environment, right? And you guys have changed a lot as a country, and the people here have changed a lot over the years. But, you know, I want someone who's ultimately willing to listen. For the same reason you guys liked when you presented Monday as a name to us, we absorbed the facts as best you could present them, and we kind of debated them. We debated them. We aired it out in a very open way, and then we moved on. We're like, okay, case made. You win. Or close enough. It didn't even matter, right? We were like, we may never get 100% there, but you guys feel good about it. That's fine. Like, I want to work with people who, by the same token, if I presented something and had a cogent reason for hiring more sales folks or thinking about X, Y, or Z, and the facts were reasonably demonstrable, and it was an area that I may have known more about than you, that you'd be listening. You'd absorb that, and you'd say, okay, thanks for the advice, Jeff. I think we could incorporate that. So I tend to look for people who, first and foremost, want to win, I think, and then secondarily want to listen. And the combination of that is really formidable. It's really hard to beat an entrepreneur who's got the desire to win and is open to listening. How do you see that? Is it because of a big vision? What are the signs for that? I see it when they talk about their competitors. I see it when they talk about their products. And competitors is, like, the best way to see it. You could see when someone gets really detailed, and they're in the weeds, and they know exactly what their competitive products look like. It just means that they're obsessed about winning. I think that's one example. There are other ways of just seeing it. I mean, it's just obsession with the business and little things. Sometimes it comes out in the details more than it comes out in the big picture. To be honest, big picture scares me. People start sitting there on whiteboards painting how they're going to own the world. That's one thing, and that may make them great sort of inspirational leaders. But to me, it's the folks, and you guys are a great example of the little things. We were excited about you for a lot of reasons, but when you guys start walking through the way you run your business, I mean, it was inspiring. It was so thoughtful. I mean, it was so granular, and clearly ROI was really in the weeds. Like, there was no question I was going to ask him that he wasn't going to be pretty close to prepared to answer. And that's a sign of somebody, a CEO, who's really thinking every day about what's happening. And it doesn't mean that you don't have a management team to support you. It just means that you're in the weeds with your management team thinking about the business. On a different topic, how do you value startups? Like, how do you look at their potential, the growth, the whatever? Valuation is a big issue. So the markets generally kind of cluster around multiples of revenue, right? There's some forecast of future revenues that we all start with. And then there's premiums that can get ascribed to that based on either mostly competition, right? So if we get a sense that a lot of people are looking at the deal, we'll start…

Sharpen your pencils and say, okay, well, normally the math would suggest, you know, 10 times end-of-year run rate, but, you know, given we really, really like this market and there's three other firms chasing it, we might have to stretch a little bit on price. So 10 times your run rate, what does that mean, end-of-year? Maybe forecasted year, yeah. Okay, so the forecasted year, the revenue or ARR? I mean, we work off of ARR. Yeah, SaaS. But then we have other variables that are very subtle, right? So, I mean, in our model is net retention, gross retention. These are for software companies now, but even applying to some consumer subscription businesses. Net new bookings growth is probably one of the most defining factors for us. So we want to know that that, which is really what tracks your long-term growth rate, is growing quickly. And, you know, these are things that we've kind of picked up over the years. And it depends on how big you are, right? Net new growth doesn't mean a lot for a $10 million business. It means a lot for a $50 million business. So is it fair to say that when you're looking into the numbers of an investment, you're looking at trends rather than the absolutes or both? Definitely both. Both matter. I mean, you could trend from 50% net retention to 70. I don't really care. Like, that's pretty low. Look, what are we really trying to do? And no one has a crystal ball, but what I told my LP, like, we're trying to be forecasting a five-year model, right, in our heads. How big could this company be in five years? Usually in that fifth year, you're big enough that we can look at either historic sort of public market comps or private equity multiples for those types of businesses. The private equity multiples being like your downside. Like, I know there will be some financial firm that will pay X times revenue for a well-managed subscription business. We met with a founder a few days ago. Sorry to interrupt, Jeff. And he asked us, how am I supposed to really predict the next five years? How precise can I be? I mean, should I go big? Should I go small? Remember? Yeah, and there is a thing. Am I lying here? Yeah, there is his projection for the next three years were based on the actual signed contracts. That would be conservative. Yeah, it was conservative. You call it conservative. And that's probably hurtful, right? Because some people only read the one-pager, and they don't get to the substance of it, and they don't hear the story and the narrative of him being conservative. The flip side is we get the hockey sticks often. And while we will be willing to look through some hockey sticks to understand the growth, it's definitely a red mark against the entrepreneur from the get-go. So to have a hockey stick? Well, if it's a hockey stick based on fact, as yours was a little bit, that's fine. But if it's a hockey stick that really defies sort of historic plausibility. So imagine you were growing at 50%, and then all of a sudden you start forecasting 100-plus percent growth for the next three years. And you're like, well, I'm making all these changes. Okay, maybe that's true, but you probably don't want to lead with that as your base case business plan. Again, it's not like, oh, I won't explore further and try and understand, but entrepreneurs who don't make their numbers consistently, it's not a great trait. So what's the right way to project? I think you do your best with a reasonable conservative. Look, you're going to be partners with these people. So whoever you pick as your investor, if you put numbers on the board that are not achievable, then you can't blame them for being upset when you miss it. That was possibly why they gave you the money. So if you basically created a scenario where you attracted money based on a lot of untruths, whatever they might be, forecasts, product, et cetera, and then they get angry with you when the water level goes down and everyone sees what's real, it's pretty hard for you to come back and say, oh, you guys aren't cooperating with me because I'm hitting a speed bump. Actually, no, you kind of knew the speed bump was there. You might have known. You knew more than we did, and you sort of tried to sell us something that wasn't true. So I think it's always good to try and be – no one's perfect, and I certainly never hold entrepreneurs accountable to every number on a page. That would be crazy. But you want to know that everyone put their best foot forward in an honest way, and if you're disappointed, then you share it together as a team. And then there is, I think, the other side of projecting, which is if we have done it before, there is almost all certainty that we're going to do what we did plus. So like projecting – If you're overperforming. I would say there's a tradeoff that entrepreneurs don't appreciate, which is you could be the under-promise, over-deliver CEO, and you'll sleep like a baby at night because you'll always make your investors happy.

Or you could be the over-promise, under-deliver CEO, in which case you're going to constantly have friction with your investors. But you'll get a better valuation, perhaps, up front. So if you're really—and I think a lot of that sometimes gets to ego, because truthfully, the dilution usually doesn't matter. It's usually a couple million dollars more one way or the other in terms of which scenario plays out. But that to me is almost like if you're so obsessed with valuation, then you'll end up being the over-promise, under-deliver guy, and you'll end up having a very stressful life with your board members all the time. And if you're the under-promise, over-deliver guy, you'll probably take a little bit of a hit on valuation, but you'll sleep like a baby every night. And that's kind of who you are. Like, who do you want to be? If you really, really care about getting the best valuation always, I can guarantee at some point most businesses—not all, but most businesses—you will find yourself sideways with an investor who felt like they overpaid. I feel there is the third kind, which is like what I was, which is I'm not trying to under-promise and over-deliver, which I was. I was too much under-promising. It's like you're so conservative. That's probably not great either. I was like we believed we were going to do way, way, way better, and we're onto something big, but then it's very hard to sell it when to say we're going to reach in three years $100 million. But it looks like it's there, but I'm… So this will be your remorse. You're worth $5 billion. You raised money slightly cheaper than you could have raised otherwise, and you've probably given up 4% of the company that you might have had yourself shared with your management team. So instead of being worth $700 million, you're only worth $650 million. It's just not that bad. So you're saying it's like… I'm not saying it's going to change, but I think entrepreneurs should put it all into one package and say, I need dilution. I want a good investor, but I also don't need every nickel that's available out there because we're going to throw as much money as we can at you guys. Once we like something, we just want to own as much of it as we can. But by and large, you should figure out how much money you need to actually execute your plan and give yourself a cushion if it's cheap and money is relatively cheap to the dilution. There's always risk-reward. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs tend to be overly conservative with the amount of money they need. And then quite frankly, as they get bigger, I don't recommend this for smaller companies, but bigger companies can use debt. We talked about this ourselves. We use it. We do it. But like a lot of debt. You use a little bit of debt. At some point, you could say, I could borrow $50 million. That's what the market will give me. It's a 10% return that's way cheaper than equity. We have a formula. We decided in the beginning now is that we just say, okay, let's take another few millions from debt. We have a formula. Sometimes the money comes back to the bank, by the way. It depends on the month. Look, in your mind is a risk-reward always, right? And ultimately, you realize that you're building a really big pie. And so what you're saying to yourself is,

I don't mind giving up a little bit of slices of those pies if I can sleep like a baby. But it's not necessarily the most capital efficient way to raise money. But that's fine. It's a preference, and everyone has a right to make it. It's easier for us to be a little bit more analytical about it because, to your point earlier, we have a lot of companies, so we don't think about that one-in-a-million black swan event that might make having the extra $20 million worth the insurance policy. And we also, even more so, know that we are the bank at the end of the day. So for us to watch a company overcapitalize themselves, we'll give you the money if you need it. You could come to us whenever you want. We will always write you that check, assuming things are going reasonably well. And if they're not going reasonably well, you probably don't want that money. You probably want to be thinking about other things. How do you make money? Like as Insight, as yourself? We get paid in two ways. Like any asset manager, most asset managers, even people who put money into Betterment or any of those tools, there's a management fee, which for private equity ranges anywhere from 1.5% for some very large funds to 3% for some of the smaller. And that covers all the employees plus the travel to Israel. I mean, I eat all of Israel, right? So unless the board precompensates me for some of that. But most of that stuff is on our nickel, and any other expenses that we pay for running the business, which is more expensive than you'd think. And obviously the personnel for what we have to hire is competitive. Obviously, but it's interesting. It's not a bad life. Yeah, I'm not looking for any crocodile tears here. And then we get paid as a percent of the profits that we make across the fund. So we aggregate our wins and losses, and then we get to keep some, not all, of the carry as it comes out. Over what the fund size is? Like you return the fund and then on the delta? Well, no, so there's two ways of doing waterfalls. One is give me all my money back first, and then you get to keep 20% of all the other proceeds. Others will kind of estimate where the fund is in its profits, and then you can take your share out along the way. Based on? Well, based on carrying value of the portfolio. So we could, in theory, if we sold a company a week after we invested, take some percent of that. Usually we have a clawback mechanism, so for us we kind of don't take a lot of that money early on. But it catches up a little bit over time, but it's not as extreme as what's called a European waterfall, where you catch all the money once the 1x is returned. So we have a preferred return, which our LPs benefit from. Once we kind of feel like the fund is generating more than that and looks like that on paper, then if we start selling things we get to keep some, not all, of the carry as it comes out. You raised your last fund earlier on this year, right? Last year. Last year? This time. Okay. How much have you deployed already, or how much do you have left? We've deployed a lot. I mean, over 30% now. So are you still actively looking in Israel, or are you done for this fund? No, no, no, quite active. So this fund will have a number of really good Israeli investments that we've made, and it's kind of nice because I think the more we do, the more we learn, and I think the easier it is for us to work in this community. So we're big fans. Why do you like Israel? I think you guys have great human resources, so I think your products are great. I think the entrepreneurs here are the most interesting entrepreneurs as a class of entrepreneurs, if I could segment of any, in the sense that you guys have, going to my earlier points of what makes for a great entrepreneur, you have a will to win that is somehow built into your culture, but you also have a willing to adapt. Very few companies I've ever invested in have the ability to create new products and new markets, and I find Israeli entrepreneurs are the closest to, it's not consistent always, but I think as good as, if not the best at actually creating new ideas and bringing those to market, and I think that's pretty unique. So I think ultimately it's a great set of products matched with some really good human resources. We've been told about Israel is like, okay, Israelis are just good at patents and hardcore technical stuff, and then you wouldn't build great products.

We built great products, and now they're saying now, you know, when the CEO was needed to replace in the bubble era, it was an American CEO that you had to take, and then they told us you have to move to the US, and now it's not. And now I think I heard big brands will not come out of Israel, which is now… You don't know how to build your brand. Yeah, you see Wix and… Fiverr. And a lot of others. So what is your take on that in terms of where you see our limits or not limits or stuff that you feel are just not true? Okay, I think the historic prejudices had some basis for sort of statistics, but that was a very different market where the way you think about technology was pushed a lot back in the 90s and 2000s, which meant you need sales forces, and you think of Oracle and knocking on doors and convincing companies that they should buy this technology. And the internet has kind of turned that on its head, and so people find you, and you need to be clever enough to be in front of them, but at the end, they're researching products, and they're trying products, and so it's become much more of a buyer's market, which, in my view, favors products and cleverness over classic brute force sales, which I think plays to the strengths of, I think, the Israeli companies, and then I think the way in which one discovers products today is much more of an analytical process than it is hiring a great advertising firm to create a great message that you sort of blast across a bunch of magazines, right? Which was kind of a very U.S.-centric thing because that's where all the stuff was consumed. So to run a business remotely today generally is much easier from where the markets might be because you could just touch those markets without, or fiber optic cables in nanoseconds. And so I think this now has changed across the board. Also for U.S. entrepreneurs, what an entrepreneur looks like today is very different than what they looked like 15 years ago, everywhere. But I think it happens to play to the strength of both Israelis and European companies who were historically more product-centric in their approach to businesses. If you had a tip for a starting VC, what would it be? Well, I want to give my other chip first. Okay. So when you get the 100 phone calls from the U.S. venture guys, just remember which one to pick up the phone for because Insight, that's my tip. For starting a venture capital fund? Yeah. You know, it's never been easier on the one hand. I think there's a lot of money for a smaller fund or copy sort of stories of smaller funds. I think you just need to know why you're doing things because, you know, for me, and we've had like five or six partners or junior professionals leave to start their own funds. So I've kind of helped some and kind of watched others from afar. Most have been reasonably successful. I think you just want to make sure you do it for the right reasons. Going back to our question on titles, it's a really good point. Do you just want to do it to become a GP? Well, some people want to do it because they want to create their own narrative. Like here's my startup story, right? And that's one reason to do it. It wasn't my reason. Others want to do it because they think they'll make more money. And they're like, you know, Jeff's got the pie and he's not sharing it enough with me. And then others want to do it because there's something that they see in the market that they just don't see being met. In your fund today, yeah. In our funds or we frustrate them by not being able to do the deals that they actually want to do because they've kind of moved to a different part of the market. You know, I've met a lot of, let's say, past Insight, like people that worked at Insight and like every fund almost that we've talked to had someone that worked at Insight. And I always heard the contrary, that they left and then they never got the liberty that they got in Insight to do deals. And like, you know, you let them loose and do whatever they want. Yeah, that's why the grass looks greener, but it's not always. And even when you have your own fund, you'd be shocked at how constrained you are by what deals you could do because at the end you're going to be more risk averse starting your own fund, right? You're not going to take fly risks. It's pretty scary when you're trying to set it up. You also want to realize how long it takes till you get, because you talked earlier about the payday being pretty far out there for some of these funds. It's 10 years out from the first fund. But, you know, Insight fund one, fund two, I did make some money on that eventually, but ultimately it really set me up for fund 10, right? And that's a 25%

of your journey. So I have friends of mine who are pushing 60, and they're like, oh, I'm going to go start a venture fund. I'm like, really? Like, this is a 20-year commitment. Like, do you really want to put yourself out there for the next 20 years? And you make commitments to entrepreneurs that you have to stick with for 10 years, and LPs that you might have to stick with for 20 years. And by the way, the big payday isn't until the third or fourth or fifth fund. So I think you have to at least know where you are in your career in making that happen. And then it's conceivable that the world will look harder, I think, for smaller funds over time. There's obviously advantages. You could be more nimble. You could be more focused, aggressive. But the flip side is we're doing everything we can at Insight to make their lives tougher. That's just like what you do with your competitors, I do with mine, right? So I want to invest and continue to invest in my business to make it more and more clear. What I want to see is that my entrepreneurs, when you look at us, you finally don't hear the same story that you hear from 20 other people. You're like, oh, wow, those guys really are doing something. So you're going to go down the funnel, like to smaller and smaller? We've kind of done that already. Yeah, they're kind of doing it. We've kind of done that. But now, when I still present to an entrepreneur on how we can help them, to your earlier point, there's still a lot of noise around that message. And it's my goal over the next five years to make that message easier and clearer and more obvious. And some of it happens just like we had a situation recently, which I think will end out winning this deal. And it's a pretty competitive deal. Or it turned out the VP of marketing used to work for another Insight company. And he tells the CEOs, like, you have no idea. This is real. This is not like a lot of arm waving about how they're going to help you. They really changed the trajectory of our business by helping introduce us to these five big customers. And I think it had a huge influence on the CEO's view of us. So the more we do it, the more there'll be other employees who've gotten touched by how we've helped our companies. And that'll help. But I think we're working every day to kind of create that story. Thank you, Jeff, so much for being with us today. Thanks, guys, for your time. And thanks for putting this together. My first podcast ever. Wow. Very nervous. What an honor. We couldn't tell. Could be my last. Startup for startup.