The Exchanges

Q Oh, well, aren't you trendy? Well, I've been in ICO format, but I want to start today by discussing your foray into the world of And how are you going to be at Bessemer today? So let's start with that.

A It's actually an interesting story how I got to Bessemer. I was finishing up a stint at a startup called Linden Lab. It actually still exists as the company behind Second Life. And I had a business idea that I pitched to one of my partner, one of my now partners at Bessemer, David Cowan. And he told me it was the worst fucking idea he'd ever heard in his life and that I should not pursue that at all. But maybe I should consider a Becoming a VC for a few years to sort of learn what good ideas look like, and that was a trap that he laid for me that I fell for wholeheartedly and came to really enjoy what I do and, um, you know, have stayed ever since. That was nine years ago.

AI assessment note: “It's actually an interesting story how I got to Bessemer.”

Q Oh, well, aren't you trendy? Well, I've been in ICO format, but I want to start today by discussing your foray into the world of And how are you going to be at Bessemer today? So let's start with that.

A It's actually an interesting story how I got to Bessemer. I was finishing up a stint at a startup called Linden Lab. It actually still exists as the company behind Second Life. And I had a business idea that I pitched to one of my partner, one of my now partners at Bessemer, David Cowan. And he told me it was the worst fucking idea he'd ever heard in his life and that I should not pursue that at all. But maybe I should consider a Becoming a VC for a few years to sort of learn what good ideas look like, and that was a trap that he laid for me that I fell for wholeheartedly and came to really enjoy what I do and, um, you know, have stayed ever since. That was nine years ago.

AI assessment note: “It's actually an interesting story how I got to Bessemer.”

Q So you clearly showed your kind of foresight into the future of kind of bottoms up selling. I'm intrigued then. How do you view the future for dev focused businesses and the next frontier in selling towards them?

A Yeah, I think we've seen a number of different innovations around Different categories of enterprise spend that have been developerized is, is, you know, one way to put it. That's, you know, communications with Twilio, payments with Stripe, code sharing with GitHub, team management with Atlassian, things like that. I think the next frontier is to take the deeper technical challenges, the data science, the artificial intelligence, which is, I know, a very hot buzzword these days, but the, you know, the practical applications of it are, are going to be real, as well as neural nets and deep learning and, and other, Technically hard problems and expose the means of solving those problems to developers via, via APIs, SDKs, and other developer, uh, developer-focused platforms. We haven't, we've seen some of those things around computer vision. It's an area we've, we've looked into and are about to announce our first investment in momentarily. I think there's many more deep, scientifically hard, technically challenging problems that will lend themselves to platforms for developers.

AI assessment note: “I think the next frontier is to take the deeper technical challenges”

Q I'm really interested, and please forgive my ignorance, has this kind of, uh, That decentralization of spending power, has it increased the TAM, or has it just dispersed the concentration of, of capital that people can spend on software products?

A I don't think it's increased the TAM. The TAM is quite large. There's trillions of dollars spent on IT spending, uh, just in the U.S. and enterprises, um, you know, across the country, right? There's, it's a big pool of capital controlled by the budgets of IT organizations, and so I think it's more a decentralization of who makes those decisions as opposed to top-down selling, the kind of selling that, Oracle SAP and sort of other large companies like that are quite accustomed to doing and more bottoms up selling the kind of selling you might do that Dropbox might do to get a consumer to adopt cloud storage or something like that. Um, so I think if anything, these products are more efficient. There's less waste. And so if anything, you may see actually a shrinking of TAM. I think Twilio cites some statistics around the communication spend and how they've made that more efficient on behalf of their customers. I think you're seeing that in a lot of different areas where developers can pick the point solution that they need, as opposed to an all bells and whistles suite of things that is decided by somebody that's not actually using those products.

AI assessment note: “I don't think it's increased the TAM.”

Q I'm really interested, and please forgive my ignorance, has this kind of, uh, That decentralization of spending power, has it increased the TAM, or has it just dispersed the concentration of, of capital that people can spend on software products?

A I don't think it's increased the TAM. The TAM is quite large. There's trillions of dollars spent on IT spending, uh, just in the U.S. and enterprises, um, you know, across the country, right? There's, it's a big pool of capital controlled by the budgets of IT organizations, and so I think it's more a decentralization of who makes those decisions as opposed to top-down selling, the kind of selling that, Oracle SAP and sort of other large companies like that are quite accustomed to doing and more bottoms up selling the kind of selling you might do that Dropbox might do to get a consumer to adopt cloud storage or something like that. Um, so I think if anything, these products are more efficient. There's less waste. And so if anything, you may see actually a shrinking of TAM. I think Twilio cites some statistics around the communication spend and how they've made that more efficient on behalf of their customers. I think you're seeing that in a lot of different areas where developers can pick the point solution that they need, as opposed to an all bells and whistles suite of things that is decided by somebody that's not actually using those products.

AI assessment note: “I don't think it's increased the TAM. The TAM is quite large.”

Q I'm intrigued. I recently had Tom Tungus at Redpoint on the show. And he said for kind of machine learning and enterprise to be successful and effective, it needs to fundamentally change an aspect of the go to market strategy. Is that something you'd agree with? Or is it something that maybe you'd see an alternative view towards?

A I'm not sure I agree with that. I think new technologies open up new means of go to markets, but also they make existing ones more efficient. And so you take something like SendGrid, which just makes it much more easier to have an email communication. Based on some sort of a trigger, a transactional email, they're the leaders in that. People were doing that before in very clunky old school ways, and spam was not getting separated from legitimate email and things like that. They brought that process and made it developer friendly and gave them the tools to be able to enhance what they're already doing. I'm not sure they have to necessarily tell all their customers that their go-to-market has changed in order to be, for SendGrid to be a successful business. I think they're doing that, but I'm not sure that's necessary.

AI assessment note: “I'm not sure I agree with that. I think new technologies open up new means”

Q Do you think there's enough of a regulatory framework set up around esports as an industry with regards to the actual regulation down to kind of media publishers and your League of Legends of the World wanting more of the value chain? Given the distribution.

A Well, I think there's a lot to work out in terms of how people are compensated, how players are compensated, how revenue flows from different types of revenue flow from one organization to another. I'm not sure there's a ton of regulatory issues per se. There may be some where it relates to gambling and things like that, but I think there needs to be some evolution as to what the norms are. You know, the NFL has established norms around who controls what, what piece the owners get, how revenue shares between teams. All that stuff has to be worked out as it relates to esports, and I think there will be startup organizations formed that get pieces of things because they do the technology best, or they have the audience that's needed to be part of it, or they have the relationships or something like that, and that's, so I think it's more business development that needs to be done there than particular regulation. I'm sure there will be things that are regulated, but that's, that doesn't strike me as the biggest issue.

AI assessment note: “I think it's more business development that needs to be done there than particular regulation.”

Q And speaking of taking companies all the way, as you suggested there, uh, you've worked with the likes of Twilio, taken all the way to IPO recently, and then also you've worked with SendGrid and Intercom, just to name a few. So I want to talk about the developer roadmap that you came up with a few years ago, and tell me, why was it controversial at the time?

A The traditional feeling about developers was that they can't spend money, that selling to developers is like, You know, selling to people with no income or something like that. It's just a, it's an audience that is not able to make purchasing decisions on behalf of enterprises or small businesses. And that as a result, that was the sort of the worst buyer for your product, the best buyer being the CIO or somebody in an IT organization. And so I think what we did get right about that was to recognize the shift that was happening, that the technologists, the people building the product, people building code, not just in technology companies, but in companies that you might think of as Offline, non-technical businesses, like a, like a GE or something like that, they're still turning to their technology teams or software teams to make those kinds of decisions and decide what technology to buy, and so that's where it was controversial at the time, as people thought, this is a waste of time, and in fact, you can build a big business like the couple that you mentioned selling to that, to that audience.

AI assessment note: “that's where it was controversial at the time, as people thought, this is a waste”

Q So you clearly showed your kind of foresight into the future of kind of bottoms up selling. I'm intrigued then. How do you view the future for dev focused businesses and the next frontier in selling towards them?

A Yeah, I think we've seen a number of different innovations around Different categories of enterprise spend that have been developerized is, is, you know, one way to put it. That's, you know, communications with Twilio, payments with Stripe, code sharing with GitHub, team management with Atlassian, things like that. I think the next frontier is to take the deeper technical challenges, the data science, the artificial intelligence, which is, I know, a very hot buzzword these days, but the, you know, the practical applications of it are, are going to be real, as well as neural nets and deep learning and, and other, Technically hard problems and expose the means of solving those problems to developers via, via APIs, SDKs, and other developer, uh, developer-focused platforms. We haven't, we've seen some of those things around computer vision. It's an area we've, we've looked into and are about to announce our first investment in momentarily. I think there's many more deep, scientifically hard, technically challenging problems that will lend themselves to platforms for developers.

AI assessment note: “the next frontier is to take the deeper technical challenges”

Q developments in the category from an investment perspective, I'm intrigued here whether your thoughts on does the value lie in the teams that become mega brands, say the immortals of this world, Or is it in the kind of mechanics or technology like your League of Legends behind it? Where would you say kind of the key value prop lies in this very exciting kind of rising segment of esports?

A I think for viewers and, you know, audience members, it's going to be in all of it. I think there'll be some really exciting technologies. There'll be some really exciting personalities and players and teams. As far as a VC, interpreting the question is sort of where do we think the most equity value will be Where will the biggest companies be formed? I think it is around the technology around enabling esports to become on par with traditional sports, and so all the various enabling pieces of technology that we take for granted when we tune into ESPN, all that has to be built up for esports, and there's a little bit of a land grab moment right now in that some of it gaming developers themselves are going to claim their own, and some startups will do, and there'll be disagreements about who does what, and Who has the right to do what and how revenue is shared and all of that. And that just creates tremendous opportunity for these entrepreneurs to move really fast, sort of not wait for somebody to tell them to do something, but build something in sort of the way that Twitch did and enable them to take a piece of this pie. And so that, that's where I think value will be created as it relates to sort of company building. I think if you're just a fan or a player or something like that, you'll be able to build a big following, have a really entertaining experience. In all different k…

AI assessment note: “I think it is around the technology around enabling esports to become on par”

Q I'm intrigued. We've discussed some kind of pre-established markets there, whether it's payments or developer-focused companies. How do you assess and analyze companies in the market creation segment of kind of investment opportunities?

A That's a very astute question, because it's very hard, because it's harder to have a framework before you have a framework. You know, in the early days of developer platforms, we didn't have a fully formed framework, and we're relying on incredible entrepreneurs to sort of teach us, you know, folks like Jeff Lawson at Twilio. In the case of some newer areas, we try to find folks that we think may seem cliched to say, but we try to find the most forward thinking entrepreneurs we can find, and then step back from what they're telling us and try to independently come to try to build up to those same conclusions. And if we hear Jeff in the early days, it's all about sort of developer evangelism was sort of the path to build a big company. And then we sort of observe the early makings of that. That's when we get very excited. And then we try to Build out our roadmaps, and build out our thinking, build out our analyses from there. But it's much harder, and it requires much more of a leap of faith, and so you are looking more to the people side of the evaluation of, is this, is this someone, I may not get it yet, but if I recognize that someone else gets it, then that may be enough.

AI assessment note: “we try to find the most forward thinking entrepreneurs we can find”

Q I'm intrigued. I recently had Tom Tungus at Redpoint on the show. And he said for kind of machine learning and enterprise to be successful and effective, it needs to fundamentally change an aspect of the go to market strategy. Is that something you'd agree with? Or is it something that maybe you'd see an alternative view towards?

A I'm not sure I agree with that. I think new technologies open up new means of go to markets, but also they make existing ones more efficient. And so you take something like SendGrid, which just makes it much more easier to have an email communication. Based on some sort of a trigger, a transactional email, they're the leaders in that. People were doing that before in very clunky old school ways, and spam was not getting separated from legitimate email and things like that. They brought that process and made it developer friendly and gave them the tools to be able to enhance what they're already doing. I'm not sure they have to necessarily tell all their customers that their go-to-market has changed in order to be, for SendGrid to be a successful business. I think they're doing that, but I'm not sure that's necessary.

AI assessment note: “I'm not sure I agree with that. I think new technologies open up”

Q today also, uh, we mentioned obviously Twitch and Periscope there, and we've spoken earlier about your Past successes. Now, Bessemer is always famed for publishing. Also, it's anti-portfolio. So, I want to talk a little bit about this, and A, the underlying premise, and how you approach the issue of FOMO. So, talk to me. How do you approach this, and kind of, what's your self-reflective mode towards missing deals?

A Yeah, the FOMO is interesting, because it's, it's more fear of not being successful, right? You know, you want to make the right decisions, and we obviously know we're not going to Be able to invest in all of the best companies, and so it's more of the psychology of how do you learn from the mistakes you make, or you have an opportunity, or you didn't have an opportunity, and you should, felt like you should have had an opportunity, and so that's the reflective process around, quote unquote, the anti-portfolio that has helped us, and also, it's humbling, too. It's very easy to have a few successes and be like, oh, I can do anything, and then the next minute, you're realizing, oh, shoot, I missed this, I missed that, I invested in this, which didn't work out, and so it is humbling to Always reflect on what could we be doing better, or where did we miss something about an entrepreneur, about an idea, where did we get something wrong? Now, sometimes the evolution of things is random, and you don't learn anything, but it's still level setting to be able to do that exercise and go back and say, okay, missed that one, and you know, well, I'll try harder next time. So, and also, you know, we try to not take ourselves too seriously. We obviously really enjoy what we do at Bessemer, and I think VC broadly, but We try to take a lighthearted approach to it, and some things work out, some …

AI assessment note: “that's the reflective process around, quote unquote, the anti-portfolio that has helped us”

Q And speaking of taking companies all the way, as you suggested there, uh, you've worked with the likes of Twilio, taken all the way to IPO recently, and then also you've worked with SendGrid and Intercom, just to name a few. So I want to talk about the developer roadmap that you came up with a few years ago, and tell me, why was it controversial at the time?

A The traditional feeling about developers was that they can't spend money, that selling to developers is like, You know, selling to people with no income or something like that. It's just a, it's an audience that is not able to make purchasing decisions on behalf of enterprises or small businesses. And that as a result, that was the sort of the worst buyer for your product, the best buyer being the CIO or somebody in an IT organization. And so I think what we did get right about that was to recognize the shift that was happening, that the technologists, the people building the product, people building code, not just in technology companies, but in companies that you might think of as Offline, non-technical businesses, like a, like a GE or something like that, they're still turning to their technology teams or software teams to make those kinds of decisions and decide what technology to buy, and so that's where it was controversial at the time, as people thought, this is a waste of time, and in fact, you can build a big business like the couple that you mentioned selling to that, to that audience.

AI assessment note: “The traditional feeling about developers was that they can't spend money”

Q over the last 24 hours. So you, you tweeted, it was a while ago too, so I really am a stalker, uh, Mark Twain, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme with regards to kind of evaluation of investment processes. So I'm intrigued, how do you look to evaluate the investment process for companies of this kind, and are there laws that you follow to analyse companies by?

A It's a great quote as it relates to venture capital, actually, because a lot of people do look for the exact repetition of history, and they'll look for the pattern recognition of this type of founder, this type of company, and just applying it to some other area, and I'd say, you know, it's, it's very tempting to do that, and I think a lot of people have fallen into traps looking at, oh, I, you know, Twitch was a success, so let's look for, you know, mobile Twitch, or this was a success, so let's look for this other thing, and so I do think part of Investment process, the investment process certainly that we have, and that I think has served us well over the years, is to say, what are the enabling factors that enable a technology of, you know, let's take developer platforms, of a developer platform to be successful? What are the criteria? What are the things that are going to, going to lead to those companies working? And then let's apply them to the various industries that developer platforms make sense for. Let's apply them to communications technology. Let's apply them to payments. Let's apply it to security. Let's apply it to keep going. But you have to do a little bit of a de novo analysis each time to figure out, all right, how does the security buyer work? How does that differ from the person that's buying communications tech? And how does that differ from payments and …

AI assessment note: “what are the enabling factors that enable a technology... to be successful?”

Q Do you think there's enough of a regulatory framework set up around esports as an industry with regards to the actual regulation down to kind of media publishers and your League of Legends of the World wanting more of the value chain? Given the distribution.

A Well, I think there's a lot to work out in terms of how people are compensated, how players are compensated, how revenue flows from different types of revenue flow from one organization to another. I'm not sure there's a ton of regulatory issues per se. There may be some where it relates to gambling and things like that, but I think there needs to be some evolution as to what the norms are. You know, the NFL has established norms around who controls what, what piece the owners get, how revenue shares between teams. All that stuff has to be worked out as it relates to esports, and I think there will be startup organizations formed that get pieces of things because they do the technology best, or they have the audience that's needed to be part of it, or they have the relationships or something like that, and that's, so I think it's more business development that needs to be done there than particular regulation. I'm sure there will be things that are regulated, but that's, that doesn't strike me as the biggest issue.

AI assessment note: “I think it's more business development that needs to be done there than particular regulation.”

Q What's the favorite blog or newsletter? What are the must reads when they come in?

A You know, my favorite, it's sort of answering another question, but my favorite way of consuming news now is with Nuzzle. Because it curates all of your Twitter and Facebook friends, what they're saying, and ranks the news according to who's tweeting about it, basically. So it's like a popularity contest for news. And I think that's a great way. Rather than, I've sort of unsubscribed for most of the newsletters that I used to, and now I let Nuzzle pick for me. And, uh, sometimes you go into little wormholes because there's a little, your microcosm of tech is tweeting about Uber or something like that, and you get 45 Uber articles. But generally speaking, I find if you follow the right people, you get a nice cross-section of news, and so I prefer that approach to a favorite particular blog or anything.

AI assessment note: “my favorite way of consuming news now is with Nuzzle”

Q over the last 24 hours. So you, you tweeted, it was a while ago too, so I really am a stalker, uh, Mark Twain, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme with regards to kind of evaluation of investment processes. So I'm intrigued, how do you look to evaluate the investment process for companies of this kind, and are there laws that you follow to analyse companies by?

A It's a great quote as it relates to venture capital, actually, because a lot of people do look for the exact repetition of history, and they'll look for the pattern recognition of this type of founder, this type of company, and just applying it to some other area, and I'd say, you know, it's, it's very tempting to do that, and I think a lot of people have fallen into traps looking at, oh, I, you know, Twitch was a success, so let's look for, you know, mobile Twitch, or this was a success, so let's look for this other thing, and so I do think part of Investment process, the investment process certainly that we have, and that I think has served us well over the years, is to say, what are the enabling factors that enable a technology of, you know, let's take developer platforms, of a developer platform to be successful? What are the criteria? What are the things that are going to, going to lead to those companies working? And then let's apply them to the various industries that developer platforms make sense for. Let's apply them to communications technology. Let's apply them to payments. Let's apply it to security. Let's apply it to keep going. But you have to do a little bit of a de novo analysis each time to figure out, all right, how does the security buyer work? How does that differ from the person that's buying communications tech? And how does that differ from payments and …

AI assessment note: “what are the enabling factors that enable a technology... to be successful?”

Q I'm intrigued. We've discussed some kind of pre-established markets there, whether it's payments or developer-focused companies. How do you assess and analyze companies in the market creation segment of kind of investment opportunities?

A That's a very astute question, because it's very hard, because it's harder to have a framework before you have a framework. You know, in the early days of developer platforms, we didn't have a fully formed framework, and we're relying on incredible entrepreneurs to sort of teach us, you know, folks like Jeff Lawson at Twilio. In the case of some newer areas, we try to find folks that we think may seem cliched to say, but we try to find the most forward thinking entrepreneurs we can find, and then step back from what they're telling us and try to independently come to try to build up to those same conclusions. And if we hear Jeff in the early days, it's all about sort of developer evangelism was sort of the path to build a big company. And then we sort of observe the early makings of that. That's when we get very excited. And then we try to Build out our roadmaps, and build out our thinking, build out our analyses from there. But it's much harder, and it requires much more of a leap of faith, and so you are looking more to the people side of the evaluation of, is this, is this someone, I may not get it yet, but if I recognize that someone else gets it, then that may be enough.

AI assessment note: “you are looking more to the people side of the evaluation”

Q developments in the category from an investment perspective, I'm intrigued here whether your thoughts on does the value lie in the teams that become mega brands, say the immortals of this world, Or is it in the kind of mechanics or technology like your League of Legends behind it? Where would you say kind of the key value prop lies in this very exciting kind of rising segment of esports?

A I think for viewers and, you know, audience members, it's going to be in all of it. I think there'll be some really exciting technologies. There'll be some really exciting personalities and players and teams. As far as a VC, interpreting the question is sort of where do we think the most equity value will be Where will the biggest companies be formed? I think it is around the technology around enabling esports to become on par with traditional sports, and so all the various enabling pieces of technology that we take for granted when we tune into ESPN, all that has to be built up for esports, and there's a little bit of a land grab moment right now in that some of it gaming developers themselves are going to claim their own, and some startups will do, and there'll be disagreements about who does what, and Who has the right to do what and how revenue is shared and all of that. And that just creates tremendous opportunity for these entrepreneurs to move really fast, sort of not wait for somebody to tell them to do something, but build something in sort of the way that Twitch did and enable them to take a piece of this pie. And so that, that's where I think value will be created as it relates to sort of company building. I think if you're just a fan or a player or something like that, you'll be able to build a big following, have a really entertaining experience. In all different k…

AI assessment note: “I think it is around the technology around enabling esports to become on par”

Q assessing your portfolio, you've got the likes of SendGrid, Intercom, and Twilio, but then on the alternate spectrum, you've also got the likes of Periscope and Twilio, Twitch on the more consumer facing side. So I want to discuss the latter in terms of Twitch and esports, uh, particular interest to me right now. How do you see esports evolving in the future? Let's start with a broad meta question.

A Yeah, it's an interesting one because obviously a big part of the success of Twitch, not all of it, but a big part of it was the rise of esports as a viewing experience for folks that weren't necessarily playing but watching and the rise of competition as a means of entertainment and Among, you know, among gamers. And so I think, I don't think that trend has dissipated at all in the last couple of years. I think it's only been, the momentum has only been building, but over the last couple of years, it's not an area I've pursued actively until right now, when we were starting to find this interesting again. And the reason is now you have both the media side of it with, with Twitch, but you also have the sort of sports, the competitive side of The gaming side of it evolved to a point where you have competitive gameplay, and you have a real ecosystem League of Legends with taking some steps to create a franchise system that will enable some stability around teams and players and things like that, and a model for folks to aspire to become professionals and at the elitist level, as opposed to more media personalities being the ones that were most successful in that genre. And so you now have the underpinnings, you have the audience size, you have the interest, you have the teams, you have the players, you have the participants in creating the, you know, the conferences and And the g…

AI assessment note: “create a franchise system that will enable some stability around teams and players”

Q assessing your portfolio, you've got the likes of SendGrid, Intercom, and Twilio, but then on the alternate spectrum, you've also got the likes of Periscope and Twilio, Twitch on the more consumer facing side. So I want to discuss the latter in terms of Twitch and esports, uh, particular interest to me right now. How do you see esports evolving in the future? Let's start with a broad meta question.

A Yeah, it's an interesting one because obviously a big part of the success of Twitch, not all of it, but a big part of it was the rise of esports as a viewing experience for folks that weren't necessarily playing but watching and the rise of competition as a means of entertainment and Among, you know, among gamers. And so I think, I don't think that trend has dissipated at all in the last couple of years. I think it's only been, the momentum has only been building, but over the last couple of years, it's not an area I've pursued actively until right now, when we were starting to find this interesting again. And the reason is now you have both the media side of it with, with Twitch, but you also have the sort of sports, the competitive side of The gaming side of it evolved to a point where you have competitive gameplay, and you have a real ecosystem League of Legends with taking some steps to create a franchise system that will enable some stability around teams and players and things like that, and a model for folks to aspire to become professionals and at the elitist level, as opposed to more media personalities being the ones that were most successful in that genre. And so you now have the underpinnings, you have the audience size, you have the interest, you have the teams, you have the players, you have the participants in creating the, you know, the conferences and And the g…

AI assessment note: “taking some steps to create a franchise system that will enable some stability”

Q today also, uh, we mentioned obviously Twitch and Periscope there, and we've spoken earlier about your Past successes. Now, Bessemer is always famed for publishing. Also, it's anti-portfolio. So, I want to talk a little bit about this, and A, the underlying premise, and how you approach the issue of FOMO. So, talk to me. How do you approach this, and kind of, what's your self-reflective mode towards missing deals?

A Yeah, the FOMO is interesting, because it's, it's more fear of not being successful, right? You know, you want to make the right decisions, and we obviously know we're not going to Be able to invest in all of the best companies, and so it's more of the psychology of how do you learn from the mistakes you make, or you have an opportunity, or you didn't have an opportunity, and you should, felt like you should have had an opportunity, and so that's the reflective process around, quote unquote, the anti-portfolio that has helped us, and also, it's humbling, too. It's very easy to have a few successes and be like, oh, I can do anything, and then the next minute, you're realizing, oh, shoot, I missed this, I missed that, I invested in this, which didn't work out, and so it is humbling to Always reflect on what could we be doing better, or where did we miss something about an entrepreneur, about an idea, where did we get something wrong? Now, sometimes the evolution of things is random, and you don't learn anything, but it's still level setting to be able to do that exercise and go back and say, okay, missed that one, and you know, well, I'll try harder next time. So, and also, you know, we try to not take ourselves too seriously. We obviously really enjoy what we do at Bessemer, and I think VC broadly, but We try to take a lighthearted approach to it, and some things work out, some …

AI assessment note: “that's the reflective process around, quote unquote, the anti-portfolio that has helped us”