How The BEST Founders Go From Seed To Series A - a convo w/ Brett Berson of First Round

00:00:00 - Tyler Hogge

OpenAI will kill everybody, potentially. Is venture capital changing in real time? Do founders need to raise venture capital?

00:00:07 - Brett Berson

There's a whole series of questions that, when you try to answer them, I think it makes you a worse investor. What's the success rate of all of the companies we have the chance to partner with? At seed? It's like 82% raisin A. Jeez.

00:00:18 - Sterling Snow

82% is incredible. It's phenomenal.

00:00:20 - Tyler Hogge

I wouldn't have guessed that.

00:00:21 - Sterling Snow

I would. I would have.

00:00:22 - Brett Berson

Yeah.

00:00:29 - Tyler Hogge

So Sterling and I are in the plane yesterday, flying over here. He gets off the flight, we walk in through sfo, and he had already started texting me while we're landing. He's like, tyler, my mind is blown. I've just created a very complex app on repl.it and software is different, man. Software is not going to be the same. Venture capital is not going to be the same. The best founders will not need to raise venture capital. Everything's different. And I'm not quite sure what's going on here. What do you think about this? Like, is software. Is venture capital changing in real time? Do founders need to raise venture capital?

00:01:10 - Sterling Snow

And let me just. Before you answer, the idea is that because anything you can think of, you can build. And it's very, very cheap and very, very easy. And so the software will be like air. We're gonna breathe a lot more of it. But will it yield big software companies, like application software companies, like we've seen? So anyway, that's.

00:01:35 - Tyler Hogge

And if you don't have any takes on this, great. But I would love to know what you think.

00:01:39 - Brett Berson

I think a lot of these things are very hard to figure out, actually, how they sort of instantiate themselves. As an investor, one of the most powerful things that you have is the ability to choose the questions that you want to answer when you're thinking about investing in something. And founders have those choices as well. So something that we briefly talked about a long time ago is like, you're meeting a founder and they have a prototype and no revenue. Yet you can choose to ask questions like, where is the compounding advantage of this business? Or where is there defensibility in this business? I think the founder is really good, but what about them running a publicly traded company at some point? Because that's what ultimately matters. And so you can spend a lot of time sort of asking those questions and trying to answer those questions. You could also say, I will not ask any of those questions or think about any of those questions, and I'll only spend time thinking about. Can the company get to a million in revenue? Can the company get to 2 million in revenue? Can the company get 1000 customers or whatever sort of proxy you want to use. And I think sort of the way that I tend to look at things is it's very hard for anything to ever work at all at any scale in the context of what we do. So like we only meet pre product market fit companies. The vast majority of the companies that we partner with have no products. And so sort of said slightly differently is if you were to look at all the times we partner with a company and it doesn't work, the reason it doesn't work is it never works. One way to answer it is to basically be very short term oriented, which is counterintuitive, I think in venture, which is so long term because a business that will be consequential to us will take 11 to 15 years, probably in the totality of the whole journey. But in that lens, I think you don't necessarily have to answer this question of like is all software going to change? And sort of so on and so forth. So part of the reason I haven't spent a lot of time or have a strong point of view is that it wouldn't change. Sort of that general lens that I tend to look at things in. And again, I tend to be more skeptical that it is knowable. And so there's a whole series of, there's a whole series of questions that when you try to answer them, I think it makes you a worse investor and potentially a worse founder. If you go back to the thing we were talking about earlier, which is like, it is true that all great software companies and all great businesses develop some form of power over time. Having said that, if you spend a lot of time trying to answer that question, there's a lot of companies you would never invest in that end up being spectacular businesses.

00:04:52 - Tyler Hogge

So you're saying it's the wrong question.

00:04:54 - Brett Berson

I'm saying in the way that I tend to look at things, it's the wrong question because it introduces so much noise and the error rate is so high. I actually think that your decision ends up being worse. Said differently. If you look at the type of investing that you do, there are many companies that you can tell me, both of you, that if I'm wrong, there's many companies that you will invest in that will end up at, call it 80 million in recurring revenue and stall. That happens for all sorts of different reasons. But the number one way, if you're investing in a company that has a million and a half in revenue. The number one way you're going to lose your money is it's not like it's doing great until 80 million and it hits a wall because quote, market size is not there. The competitive dynamic sort of on and on. It never really gets to 5 and really working in any and 10. And so it's not a particularly satisfying answer. Like I think if you were to talk to really smart people in Silicon Valley, they would give you very compelling answers to this question. And so maybe I'm not sort of sufficiently intelligent, but at the same time I think you have to, when you make sort of a macro bet, you end up increasing the nested bets that you're making. And there's positives and negatives to that. Like certainly at the macro, if it is correct that the cost of software is going to go down by orders and orders of magnitude, it's going to be like this, thousands of flowers blooming, everyone's going to DIY build their own software. And you are right in that. And then you are right in all the micro bets in terms of the founders and markets and all. That's a fantastic way, I think, to invest and, or build a company. I think it's very hard to do.

00:06:44 - Tyler Hogge

That because of the multiplicative effect of how many things you have to get.

00:06:47 - Brett Berson

Right and the time horizon problem.

00:06:49 - Tyler Hogge

So then what's the alternative? Like that multiplicative effect exists regardless. So how do you navigate that?

00:06:55 - Sterling Snow

Well. And the counter two, is that sort of by. Because by the way, this is fascinating because you can, if you ask the wrong questions, you're just dead on arrival. Right. But the other thing is if you ignore important questions, trends, you're also highly likely to just get everything wrong too. So there's kind of an interesting dichotomy going on.

00:07:19 - Brett Berson

Yeah, I mean, I think sort of the way that I think about it is that if you shrink the time horizon, the questions you ask are different and I think are more tractable. Now, if there's a tectonic shift, you could be blown out.

00:07:36 - Sterling Snow

Yep.

00:07:37 - Brett Berson

But like I'll give you another example right there was in, in this cuts so many ways. But you go back to 2012 or 2010, there's a bunch of new things happening in crypto. You have the boom and bust cycle of the last call 15 years. There's a lot of people in 2014 that were saying all of the financial industry is going to be rewritten around crypto primitives. If you bet everything on that, you might be very challenged and by the way, there's been tremendous opportunity, incredible things that happen in blockchain and crypto. But also there's been a lot of fintech companies that have been pretty spectacular. And so if you wanted to short Robinhood because there was going to be a crypto enabler or take any of these things, you would be wrong.

00:08:25 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah.

00:08:27 - Brett Berson

And a lot of it I would say is not that I think there's a correct way to do these things, it's just more the correct way in the way that I tend to think about these things. And to a certain degree us as a group of investors are, although I tend to be, I think, more extreme than most of the folks that I work with, sort of in this thinking, which is this sort of short termism. And it's also sort of born out of the stage that we invest in and just our sort of taste and sensibilities. So I wouldn't say it's globally correct. I think it is true, like said differently, if you take my way of thinking, you could easily wake up with a portfolio of companies even if they got into product market fit and however you want to define it, that it just gets blown out because there's zillions of other. You basically lose all your pricing power basically over time. But I don't know, it feels like it's going to be a while before people rip workday out and are building their own workday internally or a lot of these, or sort of a lot of these tools.

00:09:26 - Sterling Snow

So this is a debate that Tyler and I have because that, that is one of the things like, hey, how long do these things take? And even if you do believe in some of these things, you're now debating when, you're now debating a question of when. But everything moves so much faster. Every bit of adoption. And we were talking about some of the things that slowed down other waves, right. And there were sort of infrastructure things that slowed them down. And with AI and like application software in particular, the barriers feel like, it feels like we've laid a lot of the groundwork for this stuff to just go and, you know, talking to more and more companies who are doing more and more of the DIY model. And I think we'll continue to do more and more of that. And, and I just think it's happening much faster than anything we've ever seen before.

00:10:16 - Tyler Hogge

We could probably go an hour and a half on this one. I do want to cover three things with you today. The first is like kind of your unique background.

00:10:24 - Brett Berson

What's your take on this. Oh man, are you two just on the two sides?

00:10:29 - Tyler Hogge

I don't know. We agree on some things like Sterling and I agree that things are changing very fast and I actually think it's definitely true that software is going to be like air, it's all over the place. Where I think we disagree maybe is I think there will still be very large startups to invest in who capitalize on this and they could actually be software startups and the tip of that spear of an application is probably Agentix software and that there will be big startups that are there. Whereas I think your position, and I don't want to misstate it is like no, OpenAI will kill everybody potentially and there won't be new startups that are created in this space and therefore venture is up in the air existentially.

00:11:11 - Sterling Snow

Yeah, I mean I do think that there will certainly be large providers of these types of things, you know, replit or lovable, you know, like you can name them OpenAI, anything you want to talk about for sure. But I don't know, I don't know that there's another QuickBooks that's gonna go gather 20 million SMBs that use the application. That's where I think we differ because I think the other thing we agree.

00:11:40 - Tyler Hogge

On is there will be moats in networks and potentially data moats, but the software moat, to the extent that ever was a moat, you can argue that it never was. But it was difficult at least to build software. It's less and less difficult every. And that one's hard to argue against. And so what are the implications of that is really the broad question anyway.

00:12:02 - Brett Berson

But I think, and there's always kind of this interesting dynamic which is like what can you take from the past to apply to the future? And what do you sort of have to update sort of your previous perspectives. But it has been interesting that in almost every dimension it's vastly easier to build software pre ChatGPT or three year for forever, but still it has not. Yes, it has meant that there's been more competition in software, but value still gets created. But value gets created. And by the way, Oracle's probably never been a bigger company. Salesforce has never been better than ever. Even if you remove anything that's happened in A.I. now, you could say that this is a totally discontinuous event. And yes, software has gotten easier to build, but it's not a thousand times easier to build, but cheaper, but it.

00:12:50 - Sterling Snow

Wasn'T a thousand times cheaper.

00:12:51 - Brett Berson

And so that's sort of the question of does that sort of change. Change the paradigm. I think you could argue it in both ways. Again, it may just be that I'm insufficiently sort of creative in my thinking. But as software has gotten so dramatically easier to build pre LLMs and pre codegen and everything else, it was not the case that there's 20 workdays or 50 workdays all clobbering each other. That hasn't really been the case. And software has been much more sustaining over the last 20 years, which I always think is interesting. Even in mobile it's been interesting that you can. It was sustaining in so many ways and disruptive in other ways, but it wasn't this sort of sort of steamrolling. And this is sort of the rate of change thing. That sort of, I think, may be a reason why this is different than what's happened in the past. But the thing that I'm amazed at is that you talk to a lot of enterprises, how many workloads are still on prem. Yeah, and we're now 20 years into SaaS and cloud and like you go to enormous percentages of spend are still on prem.

00:14:01 - Tyler Hogge

They're not even on the last wave yet.

00:14:03 - Brett Berson

And so that's the type of stuff that I think makes it complicated. I also think so much of the economic opportunity, at least in B2B software, exists in kind of the global Fortune 10,000. And so it's easy to sort of forget and look at SMBs doing this, but like an enormous amount of total global spend happens in like 10,000 businesses around the world. And sort of. That's a little bit. That's sort of one of the things that makes it even more complicated. Like it seems inconceivable now that so many workloads are still on prem. And so those are the types of things that I think make it complicated to have a high conviction, high accuracy sort of call.

00:14:42 - Sterling Snow

The fundamental question is, is this time different than all the other times? That's what Tyler always says. You're making an argument that this time it's different and why, you know, but.

00:14:52 - Tyler Hogge

Because in the past, every new technology has actually increased the amount of jobs. We have increased startups. And so AI, that argument would be like, well, yeah, they will increase jobs, increase wages, increase startups, increase market caps. Or this time's different. And that's a great. A grenade in the whole model. It's a discontinuous thing. And now everything's different. And I think there's arguments for both sides, I really do.

00:15:16 - Sterling Snow

But because, you know, you hear the.

00:15:18 - Tyler Hogge

Unemployment, like we're going, no jobs, universal basic income. Like it's all happening.

00:15:23 - Brett Berson

Well, we should enjoy the next handful of months then, right before it all goes.

00:15:27 - Sterling Snow

I think we're going to enjoy the, I think we're going to enjoy the other thing too, I think with the UBI and everything. Yeah, well, just like so many things become abundant that were scarce and you think about what you can do and you know, medicine and poverty and things that will cost you pennies that used to be wildly expensive. And so it's not like a doom and gloom kind of. It's more like it's just a very different reality. And so how do you think about it from an inventor, from a venture perspective? This is, the other thing is, well, the best startups want to raise money. So let's, let's just, you know, this is a fun debate, but let's move on, move on to the next thing about how do you make sure that raising money isn't just getting adverse, selected for people who aren't smart enough to use and build and craft these tools.

00:16:14 - Tyler Hogge

And without venture capital.

00:16:15 - Sterling Snow

Without venture capital, that's right. Will the smartest founders, if you started a company today, does the smartest founder raise money? If so, why?

00:16:25 - Tyler Hogge

What are good reasons to raise money? Is another generalized form of that question. I'd love your take on that because he asked me all the time why, why should people even raise money?

00:16:32 - Sterling Snow

And his answers are dog shit.

00:16:35 - Brett Berson

I think it's for a bunch of reasons. I think one is that, you know, you basically want to go into deficit for some period of time to eventually the dream is eventually to generate a profit. So that's sort of the number one reason at almost every part of the stack, but certainly a necessity to burn cash basically to do the thing that you want to do. And it exists at sort of every phase, right. If you don't self fund the business, you need some group of people to build the thing. And maybe it's you and a friend of yours who are both technical and so you don't really need to pay anybody. But as soon as you kind of get going, most people want a small team and that costs money before they're generating significant money, particularly if they're building something that's relatively substantial. Not something I can build in two or four weeks, but I'm going to spend 6, 12, 24 months kind of building this sort of thicker product. And then sort of as you can, as you sort of continue to build the business, it's basically you're spending money Ideally to sort of grab market share, most in all sorts of different forms. Some of it's in sort of basic R and D and some of it's trying to win the market in distribution or go to market or sort of sort of those sort of general flavors. You know, I think if you look at the last 25 years, there's a lot of people that have chosen not to raise venture money. Like I think, you know, people forget that in Silicon Valley. But like most of modern software, private equity is oriented around smart people that have chosen to bootstrap their business. And then there's all sorts of hybrid examples of qualtrics and 1Password and others that have basically used capital mainly in the form of just secondary liquidity for people. So there have been all sorts of examples of people choosing to finance companies in different ways. You could certainly say that with CodeGen and what's happening in building software today that you need either smaller teams or a two person team can do so much more, or you only need five people. And so you could easily argue that there's going to be much more Zapier style, one and done rounds. I raise a million or three million and then kind of can do everything else ourselves, particularly if it's distributed more. Bottoms up. But as sort of, we were talking earlier, you could make the case that everything's going to be more competitive and you're going to need to spend more money on distribution and go to market or teams are going to continue to grow. Because if you can build more high quality software, you want to continue to build more and more and more high quality software. Like in the sense of when you were building your last company, you had a roadmap for years and years and years. You never got to a point where you said, all right, we're done here. So you could just say that everything can be compressed, you can build so much more. And at least in the old paradigm, I think people understand if you look at almost all software companies that are valued at, call it more than 10 billion, the pure surface area of software is immense. Even if you look at your category and adjacent categories, let's look at ERP and others. There's all sorts of reasons why even in mid market, netsuite still has basically no competition. There's a bunch of interesting new companies sort of in around the space. But part of it is if you look at that product closely, you could spend years and years and years just to get to parity. And so I think with going now we're going back to sort of topic we were talking about before. But you could just imagine that roadmap is accelerated, but it's not like anybody runs out of things that they want to build.

00:20:12 - Tyler Hogge

Basically infinite demand for more software.

00:20:15 - Brett Berson

But I do think like I generally there's obviously sort of lots of conversation forever about how bad venture money is and how bad raising VC is. And like a lot of these topics I just think are inane. I just think it's a tool. There's all sorts of ways to do anything. Like the best part about building companies I think is you're building your own civilization. You can do whatever you want. You can choose your immigration policy, who you'll have on the team, you can choose how you work, you can choose everything about remote or this cities becoming a new thing or I just think there's so many different ways to do things. And that's the beauty of it. You choose whatever you want. I think there's many companies that are destroyed because they go down the venture path when they could have built a wonderful bootstrap business. But that's the choice of the founder and CEO. There's nobody that showed up and put a gun to this person's head and said you're signing this term sheet. And so I think it's a lot of people with buyer's remorse basically, but it was their choice. If you're raising money, the shape and style of the company has to fit the model of venture capital, which is a power law business. And I think in so many different categories you can see certain companies that chose to bootstrap in the properties that they have, certain companies that chose to sort of raise venture. And so I think they're just kind of different tools in my mind. And I think you could easily make the case that that venture capital will still exist, but maybe it changes. Like maybe it's there's a little bit of money to get something started, then it's immensely capital efficient and quite profitable. And then there's a secondary market to give people liquidity. If you assume people still need money at some point in the future, you know, maybe that ends up sort of, sort of being the configuration of the market.

00:22:12 - Tyler Hogge

Fascinating, man. You asked earlier why we started this podcast. One of the main reasons is there's a bunch of people I admire and I want to learn from and firms that I admire and I want to learn from. And the top of that list or near the top of that list is first round.

00:22:26 - Brett Berson

Let's just have it at the top.

00:22:27 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah, we'll stick with the top.

00:22:30 - Brett Berson

I got to edit that little thing.

00:22:31 - Tyler Hogge

I think I got to know you first on Twitter and then I was lucky enough to go through the angel track thing. And I've interviewed many founders, one of which, Ted Ferrin from Revit, he pitched. We probably don't remember him, but many founders, including him, who have told me their experience with First Round is like, bar none, the best. And I just think you guys have this reputation among early stage founders as everything you do is high quality. And so part of the reason for this is we want to learn about that. We want to learn about First Round. What makes you guys have that perception among founders? And then there's two things also we want to dive into that you give to founders advice around product market fit and advice around getting ready for a Series A. And maybe we start with like your story at First Round. You're an intern when you started. Like, you don't have a traditional path into the partner seat at a venture capital firm. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself for people who aren't familiar?

00:23:26 - Brett Berson

Yeah, I think it's kind of. I get a lot of people emailing me, oh, I want to get into.

00:23:31 - Tyler Hogge

Venture and learn 10 a day.

00:23:34 - Brett Berson

And I don't think there's that much to learn because it was such a peculiar, sort of bizarre, sort of dynamic. But basically I was. I have a very obsessive personality. So I had like, growing up, different things that I was really into. In most of my teenage years, I was just obsessed with filmmaking. And that was like what I spent every sort of waking moment sort of focused on. And I ended up going to film school at nyu. I took a year off between high school and college to work on a bunch of film projects. And I came back after that year. I'm like, I don't know if I want to spend the entirety of my life sort of working in film. Sort of after I kind of fully did it for that, moved out to California in LA and sort of did all that stuff. And so I think it was between my sophomore and junior year. I just wanted to try something entirely different. So I sort of sat down and figured out, well, who are all the people that I had interacted with that I could go beg for some job because I had no qualifications, because I was doing cinematography, basically. And Josh, who's now my partner first time, who started the firm, I had met a number of times when I was a teenager through another friend. And so I reached out to him and kind of begged him in 2008 to come and do whatever other people wouldn't do at the time, because there was probably eight or nine people here. We had just raised our first institutional fund. First round was actually started as a series of annual funds, almost like some of the stuff that solo GPS do today. But in 04, 56 and 07, or 056 and 07, it was like a $7 million fund and a $9 million fund. And then the first institutional fund was 2008, sort of that summer I joined and I just really connected with what was going on at the time. Kind of technology was a little bit of a cottage industry and it was so vastly different than it is today. And then the firm itself was its own startup at that point that was like a couple years old. And even though it seems very odd to say that it was doing a very different thing, like all the Silicon Valley firms thought that this was like a little cute sort of side project and that what we're doing is real investing and these are, you know, hobbyists over here. But. But as we were talking about earlier about sort of like macro observations, it was Josh that sort of identified that companies could get started with less capital and maybe it would cost more to scale them, but at least to get the thing going was coming down from when he was building companies in the 90s and there weren't institutions that would do those rounds.

00:26:03 - Sterling Snow

It was more.

00:26:04 - Tyler Hogge

It didn't really exist. Right.

00:26:05 - Brett Berson

It was basically friends and family. And then you would raise a 3 to 8 million dollars Series A. Yeah. And so if you wanted to raise 1.25, there was no branded firm. And so that was his whole idea to sort of get going. And so when I joined, it was this very small new thing and I just really liked what we were doing and I knew nothing, but was trying to find ways to take things off of people's plates and do those types of things. And I ended up staying on practically full time while finishing College. I was 20 when I joined, and then I joined full time in 2010. And then I've kind of had most different jobs in the firm over the last 15 years.

00:26:49 - Tyler Hogge

So beg, borrow, and steal your way into the firm and then make your way to partner. That's the path you got to follow, Right?

00:26:54 - Brett Berson

Exactly. A lot over 17 years. Excellent.

00:26:56 - Sterling Snow

Excellent at delivering the coffees. And that's probably how it all crumbled.

00:27:01 - Brett Berson

Yeah.

00:27:02 - Tyler Hogge

So when we talk to Jesse and others and even Pete Kazanji, who we just interviewed, asking them about you and what. What we should ask about, one theme that comes up is that you're just this student of the game. Like you just love startups. And does that come from like, were you that way before startups and you just transferred it? Like where does that come from? This.

00:27:22 - Brett Berson

I think a lot of it's just curiosity. Like I like, I like understanding things. It feels very good to have somebody impart a new perspective and that's probably one of the most fun things like I'm sure that you find like now you've been building software companies and now investing for a while. So you know, but you know, a lot of times you have pleasant meetings and you read things but every now and again something's like, oh wow. That sort of shaped something in the way that I think it's like a net new thing. And so for a long time it just feels good to sort of find those things. And I also think that almost all goodness comes from just crazy obsession. I don't think there's a lot of good examples of anything ever that isn't born out of like tremendous obsession. If you look at great artists, musicians, on and on and on, it's not like, yeah, I kind of liked art and I did a couple things and I think when you're really interested in something it is not a forced thing.

00:28:26 - Tyler Hogge

That's right.

00:28:27 - Brett Berson

Artist is not obsessed with art out of sort of an obligation. It's because it pulls them in in a certain way. And I organically one is I have an obsessive personality. But then when I sort of got as a 20 year old interested in investing and company building and that type of stuff, it just sort of like has sort of sucked me in. And I think something I was just reflecting on of late because I spent a lot of time recruiting and when you spend a lot of time recruiting and you found this when you were doing a lot of recruiting, why are you here? What keeps you at Divi or this? That. As I was reflecting on that question, I think the thing that I landed on is after 17 years of these questions about trying to build a firm that can endure and why do certain companies work or don't work? Why aren't there more startups? On and on and on. I'm not bored of those topics.

00:29:23 - Tyler Hogge

It's never ending. Obsession.

00:29:25 - Brett Berson

Yeah. And I think like most times in your life, you know, there are phases and chapters where you find something interesting and a lot of people leave companies because, you know, they're tired of talking about payments or pick any topic. And I, for whatever reason I am equally as excited today or maybe more excited to talk about all these things than 17 years ago. And so that's been like the most sustaining thing is that it is not boring and tiring. It's as energizing as ever. And I think it's just because it fits my brain in a certain way.

00:29:59 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah, I think one lesson to draw from that just kind of for the record is I started by saying First Round does everything with such a high quality bar. And I think that's the answer is you have a group of people who are obsessed with something that's the quality bar. The craftsmanship is a result of an obsession. An intense interest in a subject's required for you to drive up Quality bar. I think that's. That's true for founders, true for investors, true for anyone. And when you see something that has a high bar, it's almost certainly due to some person's passion or obsession to make it that way, because those things don't happen by happenstance. One of the examples of this that I would love to spend some time on is you guys. As a seed investor, one of your metrics for success, I assume, is what percent of seed companies graduate to Series A. And we've got a couple thousand at least early founders who will listen to this podcast. And I would love to give them, like a distilled version of what first round does to help founders go from seed to Series A. You've even branded it as a product. In fact, I think you think about these things as products. Pitch Assist, can you give us an overview of what it is and then we'll pry a little bit about how you do it so that remember, the goal here is founders listening to this right now. I want them to learn five or six things on how they can take their seed stage company to a series A readiness without having be your portfolio company. That would be the best outcome if they pitched you. But without being a portfolio company and.

00:31:29 - Brett Berson

We come back to it. I think, I mean, the most uninteresting answer is it starts with building a company that is worthy of people giving you additional capital. So we can sort of come back to that. That's sort of the right.

00:31:40 - Sterling Snow

The pitch assist is really like build assist.

00:31:43 - Tyler Hogge

It is. It's like be so good they can't ignore you type thing.

00:31:46 - Brett Berson

But that's not sort of a particularly satisfying answer.

00:31:48 - Sterling Snow

You mean it's not just the deck?

00:31:50 - Brett Berson

Exactly. I think I'll answer sort of your question directly and then we can come back to, you know, maybe why don't most companies work and sort of those type of things A lot of the way that we sort what to build and work on is we spend a lot of time trying to figure out where are there gaps that are not easily closed in the teams that we have the chance to partner with. One way to think about it is when a company is maximally successful in every part of their business, they will have extraordinary people. But when we have the chance to partner with companies, in most cases it's three to five people. Maybe the biggest company would be six or seven people, something like that. And when you're a six person company, there's a lot of things that you don't have by definition. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about one, what are those things that you don't have? Two, what are the things that if you had, could give you some sort of advantage? And three, are there a subset of those things that give you a disproportionate advantage?

00:32:59 - Tyler Hogge

Yep.

00:32:59 - Brett Berson

And so like one very simple example is we have, we noticed that product marketing, like positioning language, you know, you can sell something or articulate the value prop in many different ways, is an example of this. I think very good founders that are close to their customer kind of intuitively do this. But obviously when you are running an at scale business, you have incredible product marketers that are doing a lot of this work. But you know, when you're four people, you don't have a product marketer. And so something like 10 years ago we started to build an offering and we had this incredible person, Ariel, that sort of runs this, that just does go to market positioning when a company is building the first version of their product. So that's like a way to sort of think about it. And it's our belief that positioning is one of the most underrated things when you're getting going where people think about sales or distribution and product, but they haven't thought about the exhaustive way of how they're articulating the value prop of the company or the narrative of the company, those type of things. So that's like an example of something that we really like doing versus like, like we don't offer technical resources because we think as a five person company that should be something that if you're leaning on us, then there's sort of a problem, right? Yeah. So sort of a while ago we started to think about raising Series A capital and it was sort of a flavor of this, which is a lot of the founders that we had the chance to partner with, this is the first company that they have built and by definition the only round of capital that they had raised is the seed round with us. And in general, although depending on where you are in the cycle, sort of these things ebb and flow. Generally raising, call it a down the fairway, 15 to $25 million A in 2025 numbers is just different than raising a 3 to $5 million seed round. @ the same time we also have this unique information advantage where as an investor we, we had observed and supported hundreds of at that point capital raises. And it's kind of one of those interesting dynamics where in most parts of a business as a founder scales up, by definition they will have more experience in that thing than an investor could have. But actually capital raising or for example, going public, if you have a good investor, they will probably have more experience going public than you will.

00:35:24 - Tyler Hogge

So just like any product, you almost have a right to win here you've got some proprietary insight or knowledge that allows you to build a product for a user. In this case, a venture capitalist knows about fundraising. You can put together a product for a user who knows less about it. Is that.

00:35:38 - Sterling Snow

And there's an interesting question here of why didn't first round do what everybody does and raise enough money to lead the Series A's? Because you also have proprietary insights. Watching these teams operate and you know which ones you know you'd rather back the trucks up with. And you had the debate on, you know, like hey, do we, how do we avoid the pitfalls of that? And you decided not to do it. Like why?

00:36:00 - Brett Berson

In terms of leading Series A's, yep. I'd say there's a number of reasons. One is that like in general, I think institutions have a dominant hand and it's very hard to have multiple dominant hands. And so what we wanted is like the core obsession to meet small teams that were building a first version of the product. And that is the core. I think if you looked at, if you look at most of venture capital, that's actually flip where that is now a non core activity. It's basically a loss leader. And the core activity is how do we deploy 50 to $500 million in a company over the course of its life. And so that's sort of one sort of part of it. I think sort of the sort of second part is that you kind of quickly get into sort of this odd cherry picking dynamic and sort of issues in signaling externally issues in choosing certain ones of your companies that you want to support, certain companies you don't want to support. And I think a lot of sort of the mega Capital allocators have sort of made this work again, because seed is not the core thing they do anymore. And so it's fine. They have a bunch of seed stage companies, and it's sort of a side thing, and so it works. But if, like, that's your core, it's hard to then sort of cherry pick and try to anoint a certain subset of companies. And I also think it's not blindingly obvious 10 months after we invest that Company X is going to be a $50 billion publicly traded company. I think you have an inside perspective. But again, and it may be that I'm not smart enough, I just think everything's more complicated than everyone thinks. So I think it's for a bunch of those different reasons. But I think that sort of going back to Pitch assist, it was basically this idea that we were talking about earlier, which is like, we have this information advantage in working with so many companies, and there was an opportunity to provide a lot of leverage around that point. Going back to sort of the thing we were talking about earlier, there are certain kind of moments for discontinuous value creation. And one of the things that I think founders forget that is raising capital is one of those things. In a lot of cases, it's going to be two weeks to two months. And getting either the partner that you want to be a stakeholder in the business or to raise a round that allows you to be aggressive in a certain way matters a lot.

00:38:26 - Tyler Hogge

It's a game changer.

00:38:28 - Brett Berson

I think a lot of founders capital raising is looked at as like a tax. I have to go do this. Like, what I really like is building product. I really like spending time with customers. I really like building the people in this business. And at the same time, it could be like in six weeks, a lot can happen around sort of who ends up leading your A or B or sort of whatever else. And so for all those reasons, we sort of started to build this. And basically sort of what we built is we both work on, put a tremendous amount in the narrative and structure of the way the story is told, and we roll all the materials and all of that type of stuff.

00:39:14 - Tyler Hogge

Funny, it builds on your positioning point earlier. You're probably.

00:39:17 - Brett Berson

Which is all the same.

00:39:17 - Tyler Hogge

It's the same stuff.

00:39:19 - Brett Berson

And it's funny, when you start to poke at these things, you end up. One of the great things I think about positioning is if you take it very seriously, it ends up exposing a lot of problems in the business. And I think when you zoom all the way out and do A really good job preparing for a fundraise. It also allows you to have a certain amount of clarity and authentically answering important questions. So we sort of built this whole process with Chris and Jared from 10 years ago. Who are the people that sort of run this? And we had this idea and I spent like nine months trying to recruit somebody to build this for us. And I ended up sort of. I do a lot of cold emailing and I've hired so many people over the past 17 years via cold emails, but I had emailed one of them when they were at Duarte, the presentation design firm, and they were just leaving to go somewhere else and they said, oh, you should talk to my friend. And he kind of wanted to leave to start his own agency. And we kind of all got together and kind of got this thing off the ground. And then they've built the business off to the side as well, which is really great. But we built this sort of whole end to end process where we basically do narrative. All the materials, all the rehearsals, and then all the fundraising strategy, who you should talk to, in what order and sort of those type of things. And a lot of it is just sort of elevating the importance of it and not. And trying to making it deliberate and intentional and simple things. Like if you're doing a good job telling the story of the company, there's a bunch of very simple things that most people I think don't necessarily do. One is that I think if you're doing a really good job on narrative and storytelling in your fundraise, as you are running your fundraising process, your story.

00:41:05 - Tyler Hogge

Should be changing because you're getting feedback from a market.

00:41:08 - Brett Berson

Exactly. And at the end of the day, you have, in this case, a set of customers, which are investors. That's a different set of customers than your actual customers. But that's who you're trying to get to want to be an equity holder in your business. And every day that deck should be changed so that in the third week when you're getting to partner meetings or whatever, there's a bunch of things that have been changed. And there's like tons of things like that that I think a lot of people forget about or don't do. Another example is like, I think a lot of narratives just lack clarity. I'm sure that you both see this. You meet someone interesting and. And you leave the meeting in some cases more confused.

00:41:49 - Sterling Snow

Almost always.

00:41:50 - Brett Berson

I think it's hard for a lot of reasons. One is, I think when you're building a business, you're so in it. So then to kind of zoom out and recontext that and simplify is very hard. But I just think the ability to one, tell a simple and compelling story and two, try to put yourself in the shoes of an investor and then build the narrative around the things that that person likely cares about.

00:42:16 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah.

00:42:17 - Brett Berson

Instead of trying to tell them the story that you want to tell them. A very simple example would be you're building a company and there's three very obvious competitors. Instead of just in slide 17, having the normal boring competition slide, maybe in the first five minutes of the conversation, you should be threading sort of the narrative around the competitive dynamic and your point of view on the market and those type of things. So there's, there's dozens of these things that we've kind of assembled into sort of this, call it four week process to try to get somebody ready to raise their round.

00:42:51 - Sterling Snow

So I have a zillion questions because this is fascinating. But first one is, when you do that, do you worry that you're not, because you're so adaptable and you're trying to read the person on the other side of the table that you're not gonna get a good match? One of the early episodes we did was with Henry Ward Carta and his whole thing is like, fundraising isn't about me convincing you of anything. It's about me show up authentically telling you my thing. And, you know, if you're attracted to.

00:43:18 - Tyler Hogge

That, then you call it a sorting mechanism.

00:43:20 - Sterling Snow

Yeah, called it a sorting mechanism. So do you worry about that with the way that you've kind of outlined how to. How to go and have a successful fundraiser?

00:43:29 - Brett Berson

I think it is basically the same as sales. And so there's two versions of, I think this idea applied to sales and you would obviously know better than me. One is that obviously if you're constructing a narrative around the product that is not aligned with the value the product is actually going to deliver, it's not going to be any good. If you're a great sales leader, you want a retained, happy customer, not just revenue for the quarter. Having said that, there's lots of ways to construct the narrative around the product that is aligned with the product value. And so I think if you're trying to come up with some whiz bang story that is not aligned with the actual company, then I think it's not any good because ultimately you have this person on your cap table forever.

00:44:20 - Sterling Snow

Yep.

00:44:21 - Brett Berson

But I think, I think, having said that, there are so many different ways to articulate what you're doing that. I think there's a lot of space sort of inside of something that's both authentic. Like if you tend to be a complexifier, I don't think finding an investor that just wants to mire through all the complexity necessarily is Right. I think that getting good at distilling it so that somebody can actually see the gem of the thing that you're working on would probably not create a bait and swish dynamic. Sure.

00:44:55 - Tyler Hogge

I think it's both are true. Right. It is a sorting mechanism, but you want to present it in the best way so that the right people sort.

00:45:00 - Sterling Snow

You're not saying be inauthentic. You're saying be tailored. Don't be lazy.

00:45:04 - Tyler Hogge

Show your best self and then let people pick.

00:45:06 - Brett Berson

Yeah. And I definitely think different version of this where. Where it. It is very bad is when. When you see someone when they are fundraising, that it feels like a shtick.

00:45:20 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah.

00:45:21 - Brett Berson

That either they're trying to be Steve Jobsian or, you know, they tend to be more technical in their personality and they're trying to be Mark Benioff.

00:45:31 - Sterling Snow

Yeah.

00:45:32 - Brett Berson

You can't just decide, I'm gonna be charismatic Marc Benioff now. It works incredibly well for him. So you have to find like that through line of authenticity or not only is it like a bait and switch dynamic and you're not finding somebody that actually wants to work with you, you're not gonna be good at it. It's gonna feel horrendous.

00:45:50 - Tyler Hogge

And does pitch assist help people discover what's authent their style?

00:45:54 - Brett Berson

And a lot of it's through rehearsing and just going through it and giving feedback over and over again. That it's just. I think it's just a practiced thing is sort of one of the very simple ideas.

00:46:04 - Tyler Hogge

Can I ask you of the pitch assist process that you've gone through probably hundreds of times? What are the couple big mistakes people run in a series a process that you would say, look, if I could tell any founder on this podcast to not do these three things when trying to raise a series A, it would be this. What do you see? People screw up.

00:46:21 - Brett Berson

I think.

00:46:24 - Tyler Hogge

In authenticity we've already covered. I think that's probably one of them.

00:46:29 - Brett Berson

The second one is less about sort of how are you telling the story of the company. And it's more that you are sort of half running a fundraising process.

00:46:37 - Tyler Hogge

Half in, half out. Yeah.

00:46:38 - Brett Berson

And so it comes in the form of there's two or three people that emailed you and you sort of start to have conversations, but you tell them that you're not raising.

00:46:46 - Tyler Hogge

Because this shit happens all the time.

00:46:48 - Brett Berson

You know, you tell someone that, then they have three conversations but they're not raising. But they are raising. And there's all sorts of problems with that. But one is that like I think that if you, if you're actually raising capital and I actually think there's a reason to build relationships with investors, which is similar to what you were talking, which is that I actually don't think that's true.

00:47:12 - Sterling Snow

Because an investor, when they say, hey, I know you're not raising, but let's just spend 15 minutes, what do they want to talk about? They want to talk about the metrics, they want to talk about the business. And before you know it, you're in a process. And by the way, if the business is good, it immediately goes to like, well, I'm interested, I'm going to get more interested. And I've like lived this a handful of times and like, man, it's just the stupidest thing. It's like, so you can't actually say yes to the 15 minute get to know you because either one you're gonna look like a standoff douche who won't talk about anything and like, oh, I'm super close guarded. Or you talk about stuff and you immediately get drawn into a process. So I've debated this with Tyler. Cause I've said you can't respond to the emails and you're taking a different position. So I just want to understand that.

00:47:54 - Brett Berson

I think the way that I think about it is that long before you are actually going to raise capital, there's the ability to relationship build with a small number of investors. I think that if you are doing it in a disingenuous way, which is you want someone to preempt, it generally goes wrong. Or if you're doing it, let's say less than three to six months away from when you actually want to raise, I also think it's a bad idea because in that case you're very susceptible to sort of these half in, half out fundraises, that most of the time you end up losing credibility and it ends up going very badly. But I think that if there's five or six investors who you are likely to want to lead your next round 12 months before you're raising it. I think having coffee with them and saying, I know that a lot of people tell you this, we are genuinely not raising. I wanted to get together because I actually thought when we raise in about, you know, 14 to 16 months. It could be a great fit. I would love to meet you. I'd love to not talk about like all the details of the financials of the company. I will tell you that when we go out and raise this summer, I will reach out to you and have a proper conversation. I just want to tell you more about what we're doing, why we're doing it. I think it's useful for a couple reasons. One is that if you are lucky to be able to choose between multiple investors, a lot of times it is hard in a fast paced fundraising environment to say, do I want to be in business with this person for the next decade? And so having multiple touch points and understanding how they think about what you're doing is really valuable. The other is most companies have a small number of things that a lot of investors don't like or get confused about. And it gives you the chance to sort of lay the groundwork to both learn about those things, but also start to say, listen, I know that we're going to be clumped into category X or category Y or whatever. And just when you're having. This is not an actual pitch, obviously, you're literally getting coffee or having a meal or something like that. Getting to sort of stake that out in their head, I think is really helpful. And then also you kind of get a sense if they totally dislike what you're doing or aren't interested and you can kind of remove them from your list. But I think if it's done long before the fundraise and it's proactive, meaning I think the best ones are not even, it's, you know, a partner or associate, whomever reaching out to you, it's you. In our case, what we would do is we sit down with the founder and say, I think from all the people that we know, there's like seven really interesting names because of sector experts and then just literally go and get coffee with them in an authentic way. But I think there are a lot of traps and there's so much half fun raising. You know, a lot of times it's I'm not raising capital and there's a deck and it's like, well, if you're not. And I think most of that stuff is bad.

00:50:49 - Sterling Snow

Well, you made. It's a very subtle difference, but you basically said you kind of state the expectation very clearly. And so because if you just leave white space, investors are going to ask about the metrics and the performance and the stuff, or at least most of them will. But if you very clearly state, hey, I don't want to do that because I'm genuinely not fundraising. I think that's the nuance that I got from you.

00:51:11 - Tyler Hogge

Jack Altman has a tweet on this. I'll post it in the notes of this, he essentially says that you make it very clear I'm not talking metrics. Hope you understand, and hopefully they respect that.

00:51:20 - Brett Berson

And I also think there are some instances where there's some investor, for whatever reason you want to work with, and you have a buy it now price. You could say, hey, if you hit my price, we can work together. But in most cases, you want an open auction process and you want price discovery. Now, the thing that you have to. I think the thing you have to remember as a founder is the investor wants the inverse of that. Right. The reason that this, you know, get to know you breakfast turns into what are the numbers? Do I want it? Is that they're disincentivized from this. An auction, for sure. And so you want to be careful that you're not running an auction with a single bidder in this case. And that's what a lot of times tends to happen with these faux processes or things that happen. I think it's a little bit different. If there's, for whatever reason, there is one investor, then fine, don't run a price discovery process and just go work with them. And that happens from time to time, and that's fine as well.

00:52:12 - Tyler Hogge

Okay, so we got inauthenticity in any of its forms. We've got half fundraising, half not fundraising. Any other pitfalls you'd call out?

00:52:20 - Brett Berson

Another one was the one we were touching on earlier, which is when you were assembling the narrative that you just want to have a generic narrative arc, you know, like the problem solution, market size.

00:52:30 - Tyler Hogge

Tailor your narrative to the audience and.

00:52:32 - Brett Berson

Update it daily and base it on what are the biggest questions that an investor is going to have and what are the most compelling parts of the business? Because what ends up happening is if you're an investor, you're meeting with a founder, and the biggest question you have is, I don't know, market size or something like that. When they're meeting with you, they're thinking in the back of their head, even when you're talking about something else, this market size question. So if you can clear that in the first 10 minutes. Exactly. And so that's why I think sometimes you talk about the market dynamic on slide one, sometimes you do it on slide 20. I don't think the formulas work particularly well. Another thing on market size, which can trip people up. Do a bottoms up build of a market. That's sort of another very simple thing. If you're building something in fintech, just don't put global payment volume as the market. If you're selling something to an end buyer, just do a bottoms up build of how many unbuyers are there on planet Earth. What are you actually going to charge for the thing? To sort of actually show what the market could look like. You could show how it could change or evolve or when you go multi product or all this other stuff. But these huge crazy $700 billion sort of numbers I think generally lose credibility. I think it's very hard to manage more than eight conversations at once. And so I think the way that you want to sort of run a process is generally do it in waves. Pick eight firms, call it seven of which you don't necessarily want to lead your round. As the first week, get all the kinks out, start to get a little bit of momentum and then generally on the back half of week two or the beginning of week three, then you sort of slot in the wave of the firms that you are most excited about. And that does a bunch of things. One is that we see this all the time. At the end of week two, you are so much better at articulating what you're doing as a company. So you get sort of all the kinks out on folks that aren't necessarily your top choice. It also increases the chance that you can get to a term sheet from somebody even if they're not your top choice. But then you can use the term sheet. Exactly. And the most obvious thing is the number way to get multiple term sheets. The number one way is to get a term sheet. And so for all of those reasons, I think sort of running it in sets. I also think it's. You can't manage 25 active conversations. And so breaking it down to six to eight is a time two week.

00:55:02 - Tyler Hogge

Waves, eight firms per wave is kind of your rough.

00:55:05 - Brett Berson

And you can do it in a couple of ways. One is you can introduce another wave. The other is if there are investors that pass call it. You have eight, you start with eight at the top end. Five are really digging in three, it's not a fit for whatever reason. Then add another three in and you can kind of constantly recycling. But where you're kind of keeping 8ish active conversations. And certain fundraisers will go fast and certain fundraisers you have to talk to 60 firms and that's fine too. We have spectacular businesses that talk to 55 firms that raise their A. That's totally fine, too.

00:55:33 - Sterling Snow

So have to know what percent of the time is your advice? Actually, you shouldn't go raise an A. Like, what percent of the time does that happen a lot of times? Like, what are we talking about?

00:55:42 - Brett Berson

How often is that the advice? 30% of the time.

00:55:44 - Sterling Snow

30%. So it's a good chunk. And then the second percent question is, with the 70%, who you do, what's the success rate? Generally speaking, I mean, something.

00:55:54 - Brett Berson

I think it's like of all of the companies we have the chance to partner with at seed, it's like 82%. Raise an A. Jeez.

00:56:00 - Sterling Snow

And that's assuming 30% you actually counseled them. Hey, this isn't like a. It doesn't look like eventually, by the.

00:56:06 - Brett Berson

Way, of the 30%. No. A lot of times when we're providing advice, it's not that they shouldn't raise an A at all. It's just that right now they're not striking. Why the I top.

00:56:14 - Sterling Snow

Yeah, yeah, got it.

00:56:16 - Brett Berson

And of those companies, many of them choose to disagree with us and just go out and raise anyway. But my test for sort of how functional the market is, even through all the ups and downs in 2021, 2022, like, how often do we think a company is fundable and then it is not fundable? It's very, very, very rare.

00:56:34 - Sterling Snow

And that's incredible. It obviously speaks to first round, the picking, but also this process and this product you offer the founders. 82% is incredible. It's phenomenal.

00:56:42 - Tyler Hogge

I wouldn't have guessed that.

00:56:43 - Sterling Snow

I would have.

00:56:44 - Brett Berson

Yeah.

00:56:45 - Tyler Hogge

We unfortunately are close to out of time, but we should wrap up with a couple other questions.

00:56:51 - Brett Berson

I just feel like we're scratching this.

00:56:53 - Tyler Hogge

We'll do a part two. We'll come back out sometime.

00:56:55 - Sterling Snow

Or you come to Utah.

00:56:56 - Brett Berson

Yeah, I would come to. I'll come to Utah.

00:56:59 - Tyler Hogge

All right. Three questions. You want to kick us off?

00:57:02 - Sterling Snow

So the, The. The first question we ask is, who is an investor that you really admire, that you look up to? Like, who's kind of. Who's the pinnacle for you? We'll say, you can't say anyone at first round.

00:57:15 - Brett Berson

You can't say anyone at first round. I'll give you kind of a couple of really quick answers. As a firm, there's a small number of firms who have such a strong integrated point of view that you can think of. You can meet a company and you know, whether they would be intrigued with it or not. There's very few firms that are like that today. I think Founders Fund is one of those firms and I think they've been relatively consistent for a long time. And I just really like opinionated strategies. And it's almost like when you hear the name, you can imagine the founder that they want to want to be in business with and which they wouldn't. They're also one of the few firms that I feel like if you just look at the last 15 years, there's been so many great opportunities in enterprise infrastructure. They're one of the only firms that said, oh, we're not going to go build an enterprise infrastructure practice area. They just have something that fits their eye that is also communicated with a lot of clarity to the market. And some of that is the consistency of the people that are there. But it all fits together so well and I really, really like that.

00:58:24 - Tyler Hogge

Is there a person there or just the firm you'd say is your answer?

00:58:27 - Brett Berson

No, I would just give you sort of that as, as sort of a firm answer. I think in terms of an individual and all my. I have a very tight group of friends who are mainly investors and I'm going to talk about one of them, but now all the others are going to. It's going to cause a whole sort of group thread.

00:58:47 - Sterling Snow

The thread's just going to blow up.

00:58:49 - Brett Berson

One of my good friends who we have sort of all these ups and downs and debates and things is, is this guy SAHM at Greylock. And I think there's a number of things that makes him really, really exceptional. Some of it is the amount of work that he puts in after he invests in companies. He's like exceptionally low volume, incredibly focused.

00:59:15 - Tyler Hogge

The next one is an operator you really admire and then we're gonna follow it up with what drives you as a person.

00:59:24 - Brett Berson

I mean, a lot of the founders that we get to work with, I think one of the best parts of this specific type of business in early stage venture is that at least in the case of the way that we have built first round, we have shareholders and our limited partners and we absolutely have customers. And our founders, they drive the entirety of our business. Basically being a part of what they're doing, building and being in service of them is just awesome. Because I think if you love your customers and you're inspired, like all good things happen and if you don't like your customers, generally bad things happen. So there's a bunch of founders that sort of come to mind, but one person that sort of just popped to mind mainly because he's underrated is this guy Rick Song, who has built this company called Persona that's doing something pretty interesting in identity verification. We partnered with him probably seven years ago. But the thing that is so interesting about him is he was an eng manager for I think six years at Square before and is a super, super technical person. But he's also phenomenally commercial. And I think that's probably one of the things that we're most obsessed with trying to find is just immensely commercial people that ideally have really good product sensibilities and I think and or technical sort of capabilities. Very, very, very hard. And I think we could spend hours talking about, well, what is commercial? Because it's not. People think commercial is selling. That is a small subset of what it means to be commercial. But he is both so technical and then has learned how to be commercial in a stunning way. The way in which he talks about the go to market strategy in that business relative to the technical components. Equal. Those two things are equal. And you just don't find that in a lot of engineering managers. But it is stunning in how he has grown and evolved the commercial side of the business. I actually think now his dominant hand is sort of all the commercial bits and the strategy that he's executing. And it just blows me away.

01:01:28 - Tyler Hogge

Brett, this has been phenomenal. We should do it again. Let's do it again at some point. Thank you for taking all the questions. Pitch assist is awesome. The whole firm's great. So thank you.

01:01:38 - Brett Berson

Thank you.

01:01:38 - Tyler Hogge

Thanks, guys.

01:01:38 - Brett Berson

It was really fun.

01:01:39 - Sterling Snow

Appreciate it.