Summary

In this conversation, Jothy Rosenberg interviews David Verrill about angel investing in startups. They discuss the role of angels, the evolution of angel investing, and the benefits of a fund structure. They also touch on the importance of supporting first-time CEOs and the criteria for making successful investments. David shares his passion for sports and spending time with family, and Jothy reflects on the importance of grit in the startup world.

Takeaways

• Angel investing has become a significant segment of the investment ecosystem in the last decade, with the number of angel groups and individual angel investors increasing.
• A fund structure for angel investing offers benefits such as shared ownership in portfolio companies, consistent access to capital, and the ability to provide ongoing support to companies.
• Supporting first-time CEOs involves helping with day-to-day decisions, providing strategic advice, and finding complementary mentors or board members.
• Grit is essential in the startup world, and it can be fueled by competitiveness, curiosity, and a desire to punch above one's weight.
• Investing in startups requires thorough due diligence, focusing on the leadership team, market potential, and revenue models.
• The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the acceptance of remote investing and virtual meetings, but location still plays a role in angel investing.
• Personal interests and family time are important for maintaining a balanced life outside of work.

Sound Bites

"The role of angels and what it used to be and what it is now."

"If you're the entrepreneur and you've got 20 angels that each invest at $25,000, a fairly high percentage of them feel like they can email and call you."

Links

Please leave us a review: https://podchaser.com/DesigningSuccessfulStartups

David's HUB Angels: https://www.hubangels.com/

The book Think Like a Tech Startup Toolkit: https://www.manning.com/books/tech-startup-toolkit

Jothy’s site for speaking, podcasting, and ruminating: https://jothyrosenberg.com

Jothy’s non-profit foundation The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk on why people with a disability over-achieve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Chapters

00:00 The Evolution of Angel Investing

09:38 The Role of Angels and Investor-Entrepreneur Communication

14:28 Assessing Startup Success and Making Investments

22:55 The Screening Process and Selecting Companies to Present

27:07 Supporting First-Time CEOs and Navigating Leadership Transitions

30:40 The Importance of Grit in the Startup World

35:14 Investing in Technology-Driven Companies

38:41 Personal Interests and Family Time

Hey, hi David. I am great. I see you're in your MIT office with a giant list of things on the back, but don't worry, we can't read them.

Hey, Jhati, how are you?

saying I hope you can't read any of those.

No, it's super secret. Don't worry, the secret is safe. So first of all, always ask people, where are you originally from and where do you live now?

There you go.

I am a Maine native, was born and raised on the coast of Maine, went to high school in Yarmouth, Maine, went to college at Bowdoin College in Maine, and then made my way to Boston. My wife and I raised our children in the suburbs of Boston. Now that they're out of the house, we have a condo in Waltham and a place in Maine that I'm headed to.

in about four hours to enjoy a long weekend.

Great. Yeah, my folks retired from, I'm from Michigan originally, they retired to Harpswell. So basically, I mean, they would basically come into, right around Bowdoin just to do their grocery shopping all the time. I mean.

Harpswell.

Yeah, for sure. And Bowdoin really has helped the town of Brunswick become a really interesting place. There's some great restaurants now. And of course, Bowdoin has terrific theater and sports. So it's really become a nice, pretty little town. And it's right next to gorgeous oceanfront and Harpswell and Oars and Bailey's Island. It's a gorgeous part of the world.

Yeah, it is. By the way, a fantastic restaurant, but they're having trouble getting staff is Tao. It's a great place. They built this whole building that's essentially a giant greenhouse to grow their own fruits and vegetables. And.

I know it will, yeah.

Mm.

And they have an offshoot in Portland that's focused on dumplings. It's called Bao Bao, I think.

They have a fish tank, a giant fish tank in that building as well. And I don't know if they're pulling fish out and serving them. They probably are. What a great restaurant. There are people that drive up from Boston to eat there and then drive back.

Yeah, yeah, that's a perfect place.

Okay, so what we're really here to talk about is angel investing in startups. And what I'd love to get you to talk about because you've been so deeply immersed in the investment community, in angel investing and everything, which you hopefully will get a chance to tell us something about. But let's start with,

the role of angels and what it used to be and what it is now.

Yeah, I think in the last 10, 15 years, angel investing has become a real segment of the overall investment ecosystem. And if you think in any terms, the number of angel groups, the means with which individuals can now invest as an angel, all of those things have taken shape in the last.

decade or so from regulation. So the SEC was considering restricting or changing the rules of accreditation. And through the efforts of the Angel Capital Association and other lobbying groups, they had a moment of wisdom and decided not to restrict the number of angel investors, but to increase the number of them. And so,

That kind of opened up the floodgates for a lot of the platforms that are out there now. It opened the floodgates for crowdfunding. And I think it's really enabled the number of groups to grow, the number of people that are acting as angels to grow, the number of investments that we've made. So it's really matured quite a bit in that last decade. And one of the real signs of that is,

the segmentation in the market. So there are angel groups focused by region, by sexual preference, by skin color, by background. So when you see things like that, that segmentation in the marketplace, you know that a piece of the industry is matured.

Absolutely. Now, one of the things that's unusual about your firm, which is called Hub Angels, is that you're organized around a series of funds and you're on fund seven now. And I think when you invested in Dover, it was probably fund five, I think.

It was fun. It was fun. Five. Yeah.

So maybe you can say a little bit about how that works and pros and cons of that versus the loose affiliation kind of model, the more common loose affiliation model.

Yeah, and we've always been structured as a fund, and we're, as you mentioned, we're on Fund 7. We're 24 years into Hub. So we made the decision early on to form a fund structure for a couple of different reasons. One was my co -founder, Charlie Cameron, and I were doing a boatload of due diligence and ultimately recommending that

our membership consider an investment and we kind of felt like that was a pretty heavy fiduciary burden and we wanted to codify that in an appropriate structure. We also wanted to pay ourselves and we wanted to be incented to act like the VCs of old where the carry was the important part of the equation, not the size of the management fee.

And so we used that structure. There were two or three angel groups, we're talking 2 ,000, that had that structure. One of them was John May in Washington, DC area. And unfortunately, John's been on my mind this past week because he died a week ago.

And John was kind enough when I called him out of the blue saying, hi, I'm David Barrell. I'm starting an angel group at Boston. I'm thinking about the fund model. I know you've been using it. Can you tell me about it? Not only did he tell me, but he gave me their documents for our first fund. And it saves a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of money. We use venture capital quality.

That sure saves a lot of time and effort.

documents for each of our funds and they don't give you a discount because you're a 10 million dollar fund versus a billion dollar fund. So it ain't cheap to do it that way but I think it's got great benefits and here are a couple of tangible ones. Number one, because all of our members are LPs in the fund, they each own a piece of every company and that makes them available and interested and motivated to help

any of those companies. If you're in a club model where you and I are in an angel club, you might decide to invest in Dover and I might not decide to invest in Dover, but I might have some expertise and I might not be motivated to help you because they're not in my portfolio. The other tangible benefits are that A, you always have capital to invest and having been through

a number of up and down economic cycles. We've convinced ourselves that that was a correct decision early on. We always want to have capital. And if you look at the two biggest outcomes in all of our portfolios, Zipcar, my first investment ever, and DraftKings, each were made in the doldrums of an economy. And I could probably argue that we might not have seen either of those companies.

in the high flying days. We might not have seen them within our deal flow or they might have been priced out of our range. And then the last tangible item is that I think we're perceived well by entrepreneurs because we are one item on the cap table. And given the fund structure, we reserve capital to follow. And when you're an entrepreneur soliciting people for an investment, it's really nice to know that their first check is not going to be their last check.

And so those are some tangible reasons why we believe that the venture model, even in a small angel group, has some real tangible benefits.

There's one more besides just the statement that there's only one entry on the cap table. And that is that if you're the entrepreneur and you've got 20 angels that each invest at $25 ,000, a fairly high percentage of them feel like they can email and call you. And when they see something,

happen in the market, they think that somebody might be a competitor or they have some idea that they think might help you. And they all are very well -meaning. But when you have 25 or I guess I said 20, when you have 20 people that feel like they can do that, and of course, you're going to be nice to them and you're not going to say, please stop calling me. But when you're dealing with someone with a fund structure,

and you've got a paid managing director who's very experienced, those communications are going to be very efficient, appropriate, and not very frequent.

Well, thanks for giving me your problem. I might have 20 people in my group that are calling me asking about Dover. But I'm happy to take that responsibility on my mantle. But yeah, look, I think everyone is well -meaning and some people may have really super information. If you're hiring somebody and maybe they've got a candidate or if you're...

talking with another VC, they might be an LP in that. So there are real tangible reasons why it's important to engage folks. But yeah, we sort of, the one neck to ring becomes part of my responsibility rather than yours. But I think that we all wanna be helpful to our companies and that's a requirement for us. You'll recall that it was a requirement that Hub be on the board.

early on in Dover. And of course, over time, we're going to lose that right because deeper pocketed people are going to come in and the board dynamics are going to change. And, and let's face it, you know, VCs are terrific at growing and exiting companies and angels I think are terrific at helping them start and get running in the right direction. So it's, it's, it's something that that is not uncommon to go through over time, but we really want to be involved in the company. And the best way is to do that.

as a formal member of the board or as an observer on the board.

Right, absolutely. And that is a benefit to all the people that are part of that fund because when you're a series of sort of loosely affiliated angels doing 25 ,000 each, you're not going to have an observer, you're not going to have a board member, and the documents are all written about information rights for major investors. And...

Mm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, you do have the benefit of negotiating a set of terms. So there are really excellent angel groups that use the sort of individual investor model that organize and aggregate them well. So it's not that it's impossible to do, it's just a little bit more difficult to do. But we syndicate almost all of our deals to other

like -minded investors, mostly in our region, we're Northeastern focused. And regardless of their structure, they make for terrific investors. We have a terrific ecosystem here in the Northeast.

Yeah. So by definition, you are going to tend to invest very early, where the risk is, well, it's high, but it's also pretty hard to assess completely. And you can't really say whether this one's going to be successful or not.

Mm -hmm.

And I think you probably use a different criteria to assess whether something's going to be successful or not. So how do you sort of deal with that and make sure that you're still going to have a reasonable percentage of portfolio companies in a particular fund that are successful enough so that the whole fund is successful?

when they're so risky and they're so early.

Yeah, I mean, the risk and reward is appropriate for the stage. It's what we do. And I think that any investor in the private equity space will kind of tell you there's a lot of pattern recognition, that you know it when you see it. You focus a lot on the people. I would say that if you look at the failures in our portfolio and touch wood, we have a very high success rate, well over 50%.

is the fact that we spend a lot of time assessing the leadership because that's the most tangible component of the company that you have at hand. Sure, you can do an assessment of the size of the market, the growth rate of the market, and obviously there needs to be a product or a service there, there needs to be a revenue model that will generate interesting multiples along the way. But...

And we use, we're pretty flexible on the types of terms that we use. We're not just using preferred equity, we're using a lot of convertible notes and mostly safe notes because you can't really value a company when they don't have revenue, their product is in a pilot. So you've got to use a little bit of black magic and pattern recognition and kind of focus more on the jockey than the horse as you get started.

But we perform 30 days of due diligence that's just as thorough as anybody else's due diligence. And we hopefully find the issues with the company. And that's what we focus our diligence on. And if we can get comfortable with those issues, then we're going to consider an investment.

And so I have the experience of doing of getting an investment from you, the fund model. And also I think I have 83 individuals on my cap table as well. And that's not a scenario you really would want to brag about. And it happened because,

of the basically the pandemic timing and when I was trying to raise a Series A and the only place to go, and this is, I'm trying to, I'm saying something really good. The only place to go was to individual angel investors. They were at that time, it wasn't that long ago. So we can all remember that all the VCs,

basically closed their doors and said, we're protecting our portfolio companies. We're not doing any new investments. But I had, of course, to not run out of cash. And so, right, I get what my job is. And so I just started to just internet search for angel groups. And

Yeah, that's your primary job. Don't run out of cash.

I don't think I ran into a single one that was a fund model. It was all, you know, the Lutz affiliations. But they're pretty well organized as you said in your first, you know, kind of opening comments. They tend to have a screening process where one person is kind of doing a phone or a Zoom call with you. Then they invite you to a pitch session.

and they do those typically once a month. And somewhere in the middle there, they almost all use a service called Gust where, and I know you guys don't, but you use the same kind of information. So anyone who's thinking about using angels should go to Gust. So it's free. And you put a bunch of information in and it asks you really good questions.

And it gives you a fairly small amount of space, like problem statement, 450 characters. And they mean it, not one character more. And I got to tell you that when I started to do that, I thought, well, this is really, really restrictive. Come on. And it took me longer. It's actually a guy named Ambrose Beers that said,

Yeah.

I could have written a shorter letter if I'd had more time. But great exercise. So you answer all those questions. And then even if you're not working with somebody that uses Gust, those are really, you thought those out nice and carefully, and that's how you would provide it to anybody. And then three or four people from that group would decide to invest.

Thanks for watching.

So I had to actually do this for, and I kept track, I had to do this for 16 groups and get a fair number of investors. Ultimately in that process, I raised $4 .1 million from individual investors and it kept the company going.

There you go. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Mm -hmm. Yeah, I mean, all of us have some sort of, I'm not gonna use the word application. It's executive summary with more information than most entrepreneurs are already willing and able to provide. So it can be a little bit of a task, but at the end of the day, like any venture capitalist, we're looking at, we're looking at,

just hundreds of deals a year. And you need to compare apples to oranges as best you can. And these executive summaries do it for you. And Gust is as good a template as any other. And that's sort of the conversation piece that we use in our screening process. So we have two screening sessions in advance of each of our meetings, where we do present three or four or five companies to our group. And...

Charlie and I do all of the screening and when we have a company that is right down the alley of somebody within our group, we'll send it to them and say, Jothi, what do you think about this chip company? And you'll say, I've looked at 50 of these in my career and this one is the best or the worst or what have you. So we take advantage and leverage our members. Ultimately, Charlie and I,

bring a number of our top 10 if you will in the first screening session and then we criticize each other's companies, we ask questions, give some homework and then the second session, okay let's talk about your top two or three and let's figure out if there's a theme for the next meeting or the companies are compliments or it's they're all about AI enablement or they're all life sciences or they're all

out of MIT, whatever it may be. And that's how we ultimately choose the companies to present. And then we prep them well. We want everybody to give a great presentation. Being able to pitch your company is important, but we're dealing with a lot of first time entrepreneurs. In fact, our last meeting was last week, and we had a presenter who is getting his PhD in a month.

And we were the first time he'd ever pitched to any organized source of capital. So I really worked with him to prepare his deck and he did a terrific job. And we just don't want anybody to give a crappy presentation because that'll kill him right there. And so that begins our process and it's enjoyable. It's fun. I mean, I'm feeling like I'm doing a little bit of detective work and trying to find experts.

Mm -hmm.

that I have ready access to to get their two cents on. It's fun, it's a blast, it's really stimulating.

Yeah, it does sound great. And the variety of sort of structure that the different groups would set up, and I went through yours and I went through 16 others, was really interesting. And some were, when we were, I did some of this one before the pandemic, so we were all still doing in person. And,

And they had a, they said, be here, be in this address by this time. And it was their pitch day. And as I walked in, I could see there was somebody pitching through the, and it was glass, glass wall conference room. And I could see their slides and everything. And then there were other people sitting outside. And so these were my competitors basically. But.

Yeah.

But what was one of the things that was really interesting, and I talked about this in the book because I sort of warned people that, look, some of these groups are going to say, you have 20 minutes. And when they say that, they really mean it. And so practice your setup because mine started the clock before you were hooked up with your PowerPoint deck. And get that right because they really are trying to.

Yeah.

move people through and the 20 minutes is like real.

Yeah, and the way that we describe our session is you've got 15 minutes to present, and I want to work with you on your deck over the next few days to make sure that it has all of the things that our group expects to have in a deck so that we can spend the 10 minutes of Q &A talking about the nuance, your passion, your deep knowledge of the space. Let's get the basics of the company.

out there so that everybody has a good feel for it. But then let's spend time getting to know you and focusing on you and your knowledge of the space. And you have to run a tight ship. Our meetings typically have three or four companies and you just can't get off by 10 or 15 minutes at the beginning because you just kind of screw everybody else up.

No, I get it. I get it. So one of the things that I think is particularly, would be particularly exciting about your, your stage, your job is that you're dealing primarily with the founder who's got the vision, probably knows a lot about the market and the problem, because a lot of them are going to have been working in that market.

Maybe they work to a big company or something and they're out. And one of the things that happens to people at that point is that if they think that they are going to be the CEO, but they get some pushback and feedback that says, well, wait a minute, you don't have any experience being CEO. And then they start to suffer from imposter syndrome. And...

really sharp experienced investors know that that person without experience is still the ideal person to be the CEO at the beginning. And I had this experience where when it was my first time, I had an investor, someone in Boston who said, what makes you think you're qualified to be CEO? And he was kind of harsh about it. And

Mm -hmm. Mm.

And I was already not sure I should be CEO, but the other founders of the company said, look, you're more experienced, you're older than us, you're the guy, and you're really articulated talking about the problem. And so it's you. And, but this investor said, no, it's not. And, and it was, it was someone very famous in Boston, Ted Dintersmith, who was, came in as the other investor.

who said, no, that's not how it works. You are the right person to be the CEO. And you may not be the CEO after 18 months, but that's okay. Be prepared for that. But you have to get it started. And that was such an important lesson and imposter syndrome. And you're in a great position to help counter, you can be as great as Ted Dinnersmith.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

in that.

Well, I will say that you aside, most of our CEOs are first time CEOs. And I like to think that we have the right type of empathy and the right type of support system that we put around these first time CEOs. I mentioned on the outset that human error is 99 % of the cause of failure in the startup space. And I'm speaking out of experience with that.

And what we, as an angel group, want to do with respect to helping a first -time CEO is maybe threefold. One, you want to help them with all the little decisions. Need a new lawyer? Here are three we've worked with for a decade. Need a new accountant? Here are three we've worked with in the last decade. Those sort of little things. You need insurance? These are the brokers that.

So the little things that every CEO must do in a four, five, six person company to get started, you got to do all that crap. And it can be a real burden on your time and take you away from raising money to get your product to market. So that's sort of point number one. Point number two is really important strategic advice. Do we need to hire a VP of sales right now? Who is that VP of sales? How can we find the right VP of sales?

We need a new independent member of our board. These are big, big, big, big decisions, not what accountant or what HR system I'll be putting in the company. And then the third is putting compliments around people that need it. So we made an investment last year in a company that had three very recent graduates of Northeastern. There were early 20s.

And it was clear which of the three was going to be the CEO. And he was the right person to be the CEO. But we put a chairman of the board on his board, who is a multiple -time CEO, once in the space, sort of was really there to provide that mentorship and guidance so that a bunch of little mistakes didn't get made and the big ones were not made at all. And so finding compliments and the right way to help people is really the key.

It's unlikely that we are going to remove one of our CEOs. It's more likely that in a subsequent round of financing, somebody is going to say, well, we have a better CEO, or you're going to be on the board and the president. You're always going to be the founder or co -founder, but we need somebody who knows how to scale the company from $5 million in revenue to $100 million in revenue. And you're not that guy. You're not that person. So.

Those are, I think, the three ways that we think about supporting our first -time CEOs.

I've been through that scenario and it wasn't a bad situation at all to be told we need to get this other CEO. It was obvious to me that was the right thing to do. Partnering with that person, what I did was kept a board seat and moved into a CTO role where I was supporting the much more sales and marketing oriented new CEO.

And it did happen out of financing, you're right.

It's pretty typical. And the last thing you want to do before a financing is remove a CEO. That's hindering your ability to raise money. So timing can be everything sometimes.

Yeah, yeah. OK, well, changing gears slightly. So you've got this job at MIT. You've got this very big job at Hub Angels. So what do you do for fun when you're not doing those two things?

Well, right now I'm done skiing for the year, although I skied very late. I skied, I think, April 22nd was my last day and it was glorious. And now I've got my golf clubs out. I'm about to pump up the tires in my mountain bike. So I'm sort of a sports.

oriented person outside of my work life. Lovely wife, two kids and a new dog. So family is important and we're planning on being together for the bulk of the month of August this summer. So it's going to be pretty exciting to have everyone together. We have, we do have a place in Maine, so we're starting to spend a little bit more time up there. The black flags are gone now that we've had two 82 degree days in a row. So aside from the pollen,

Fantastic.

We're just about ready to enjoy Lakefront living in Maine.

That's great. That's great. So are the boys in college or are they done with college?

I have a boy and a girl and they're done with college. My daughter lives in Austin. She's working for Yelp. My son lives here in Boston. He works for an ad agency in town. He does social analytics for them. So really interesting space to be in there as well.

Well, it's great that your daughter can get away for a month, and I guess she's going to work remotely for them, huh?

Yeah, they allow. I think Yelp is pretty enlightened about this. For remote workers, they can change their location for 90 days out of the year just letting them know. So it's really kind of interesting how remote has been enabled by COVID. But we're the same as a group. I mean, we typically have six meetings a year.

sometimes seven and we try to get together in person for at least two or three of those but all of them have a virtual option and some of them have a virtual only option and it was really kind of interesting during COVID we were very active in our fund and we made I think it was six investments in CEOs that we had never met in person and that was really kind of fun.

a scary thing to do, but it just seems relatively commonplace right now. And you might have thought that that would have an impact on the location of companies that we might consider and or invest in. But frankly, for us, it hasn't. We still focus on the Northeast. We want to be able to attend physically board meetings. We want to bring our network, our local network.

to support companies. So we still are very parochial in terms of our location of investment. We're focused on pre -seed seed stage companies and we measure that by their valuation or cap depending upon the vehicle. About 15 % of our portfolios in the life sciences, the rest is pretty broadly across a number of industries and like everybody else, we're chasing technology. We're in a technology driven economy and so those are the companies we chase.

So I have one final question or topic that's sort of a theme throughout all of these episodes of this podcast, which is about grit and making risky investments, working with startups. All of this takes grit. And I'd love to know where you think yours comes from.

Hmm.

My grit comes from being the youngest of five boys and I don't know if I'm close enough to the camera so you can see scars here, here, here, and here from rough housing with older boys. But being the youngest gives you a lot of competitive fire to keep up and get there faster, quicker than anybody else.

You

I shouldn't laugh, it's not funny.

I'm ultra competitive, but I don't let that sort of overtake the way in which I play the game, regardless of what the game is. And I'm just, I'm curious and learning about new technologies, the impact that they'll have on people, society, the economy is just really cool to me. And so I don't have any problem with motivation.

in my space and like you, I want to win at everything that I play at and I want to punch above my weight. So that's kind of my ethos.

Are you close with all your brothers now? Yeah.

yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. We're spending a week together. This summer we go on a couple of golf trips together. I'm the only one who's left skiing, but golf is sort of our currency at this point.

So they were all skiing in their younger days, but they've given it up. Is it because of, you know,

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just can't handle it. They're too old, they're brittle, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're...

They're going to be listening to this podcast.

I'm going to send them the link to this so that they know how embarrassing I am of them. But no, they're into some non -contact sports.

Yeah, you know, for me, skiing was the thing that after, you know, losing a leg and everybody telling me, you you can't ever ski again. It was my way of sort of filming my nose at all the two leggers telling me I can't ski. But it took an incredible amount of work to learn how to turn the left ski in the left direction, because, you know, we all are trained.

Mmm.

you steer with your big toe. But that meant that, and it was true, the right turn felt just normal, because I was steering with my big toe. And it took, basically I was a ski bum at Alta for a season and I skied 100 days straight to get that right.

Yeah.

That'll do it. That'll do it. That'll do it.

and eventually did.

Well, if you really want to cause yourself the next level of pain, you'll convert to being a Telmark skier rather than a downhiller. You really want to cause them some pain.

Yeah, well, no, I don't. I've had plenty of pain. And in fact, so this is a great, huge admission. But I went to ALTA then after, you know, how much I got to know it for 35 years, every year I went there. And it's extremely hard on the body.

Mm. Mm.

and on one knee especially when you're pounding like that. This past year was the first time I didn't go there. I still went to Salt Lake and as I was driving the car, it wanted to go towards Little Cottonwood Canyon, but I made it go to Park City instead. I still had a really great time, but it was much easier on the...

Mm.

there you go, there you go.

on the body and I think it enables me, it'll enable me to ski 10 years longer than I would have.

Good, good, good. Well, I tell you what, there's still snow at Tuckerman's Reen on Mount Washington. If you carry my shit up for me, I'll go with you.

You know, usually the people that ski with me get half price ticket. My tickets are half price and your Sherpa, they always call it that. Your Sherpa gets a half price ticket. And the Sherpa is at places like where there's a gondola or where there's a place where you have to take your ski off. And so it's very handy. All right, so we.

Was that right? I didn't know that. That's funny.

All right, I'll be around this coming winter when you need me.

That would be great. I'd love to ski with you. Well, this has been incredibly fun and I think informative. I really think people need to hear this episode because they need to understand how important the angel phase is when you're raising money and how it works. So thank you very much.

Awesome, my pleasure.

I'm gonna stop.