Brian Bell (00:00.846) Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today we are thrilled to have Ethan Mayers on the mic. He's a venture partner, operator, and self-described agile shepherd who's worked across fifty plus countries and traveled to many more. we have a lot to talk about, so we're gonna get right into it. But Ethan, I'd love to get your origin story. What's your background?
Ethan M. (00:19.493) Yeah, so I started off life like everyone does in venture and startups as a TV producer. Very common trajectory. started way started way back when actually at the University of Tennessee worked for Pat Summit, who was at the time the winningest basketball coach in history. She's now been surpassed by two others, and then then ended up working for Stephen A. Smith, and I did that until about two thousand seven. And then I made the interesting decision.
Brian Bell (00:44.302) Stephen A. Smith, the basketball commentator? Wow.
Ethan M. (00:47.185) Correct. Yeah, I was his producer I was his researcher and producer for his his talk show. You know, I mean, look, he is intense and he expects a lot from you, but he's also a very kind and gentle person. in person at the time I was actually a single parent. So I arrived to New York with six hundred dollars to my name and a four year old and my nineteen ninety sixty son Sentra, and that's all I had to my name.
Brian Bell (00:50.572) What's it what's he like to work for?
Brian Bell (00:59.042) Hmm.
Brian Bell (01:08.525) Wow.
Ethan M. (01:09.553) And so I had to go home early a lot of times for shows because when I say single parent, like I was I was it. So I w I he would let me go home early and although in exchange for that there were times when I would literally pull over. So this was two thousand five and six, early seven, I'm dating myself. But what's important is the iPhone didn't come out
Brian Bell (01:28.962) That's exactly the same time I was on Wall Street, so that's fine. Yep.
Ethan M. (01:32.598) The the important thing is, the iPhone came out in two thousand seven. So what was our primary form of communication? The Blackberry. So Stephen A. mandated that I have a Blackberry. When that thing went off, I would pull over on the side of a road, on the side of a highway. 'Cause it was he was walking into an interview and he needed a particular stat or piece of information or some sort of researchable information and so I'd literally pull over on the side of the road. So a hundred percent.
Brian Bell (01:55.087) And just start researching on the Blackberry.
Ethan M. (01:58.416) Hundred percent. If I had to, I would pull out, I had a big laptop that I'd pull out and I had a hot spot. So I mean l a hundred percent. And and I I would literally travel. I would travel like that was the payoff. I had a I had a I had a really exciting job and I had maximum flexibility to take care of my son, but I was on call twenty-four seven three sixty five wherever I was. I mean, I I have pictures of me in the New York City subway with my laptop on my lap, big laptop.
Brian Bell (02:03.362) Well three G
Ethan M. (02:28.207) that time, doing my work on my way into the into work every single day.
Brian Bell (02:32.748) Amazing. so I'm I'm a huge basketball fan. That's why I I wanted to dig into the Stephen A. Smith story.
Ethan M. (02:33.915) So it
Ethan M. (02:38.435) Yeah, yeah. I'm working for I mean, these were my first mentors. Pat Summit, who was he's who who was w one of the winningest basketball coaches of all time, thirty thir thirty two, thirty three years at the University Tennessee, and then Stephen A. Smith. these were some of my earliest first mentors and taught me how to
Brian Bell (02:53.934) It's amazing. How how'd you end up with that job? I mean, that's like kind of a random not everybody gets to work with one of the, you know, most profound sportscasters of all time. I'd I'd say he's definitely in the top ten.
Ethan M. (03:08.281) I mean, everything is a series and function of saying yes and being in the right place in the right time. Seriously. So I mean, in order to understand how I got a ESPN, so I was majoring in I originally went to school for engineering physics and then realized I wasn't very good at math and also r took a documentary filmmaking class that shaped my entire existence. And what I realized then was the engineers are not the people who build the future, the storytellers are. Obviously the best to me are engineers who can do storytelling, but storytelling is the single skill that has motivated our species and preceded us to do ma massive projects. Like that's where it comes from. And so I took this documentary filmmaking class, changed my life. I changed my major from engineering physics to to journalism and documentary filmmaking. that would eventually lead me to do a couple of things that I didn't realize I didn't like TV news, I didn't like this, I didn't like that. I didn't know about sports production. I was not a sports kid, found out about a job. At the sport sports broadcasting university of Tennessee, got the job, ended up producing Pat Summit's coaches show that connected me to basketball, had a master's degree, decided to do my thesis in basketball just because it was honestly easier. You could argue that's lazy because I had access to all the resources and stats. And so, and then my production company as a gift when I moved to New York gave me a list of every production company in New York, and I literally
Brian Bell (04:16.866) Wow.
Ethan M. (04:31.301) just marched for two weeks until I had a job that had nothing to do with ESPN, but that job, everything's about preparing yourself. They say luck is something that happens to those who prepare. So you say yes enough and you luck. The actual way I got the ESPN job is something that can't be replicated, right? So running for a train, it was a six twenty one, I'll never forget it. It was a six twenty one train. It was Monday. I was like the last person in there. Whatever. Tuesday, same thing happens. Wednesday, same thing happens. And I look over, and the same guy is in the same spot. I'm in the same spot. Like the same things happen three days in a row. So I literally just turned to him and say, Fate has brought us together. I guess we should introduce each other. Turns out he was a CNN producer. I told him my story. He's like, I know about a new show that's coming in. You have a background in sports. You should talk to my friend. And that's literally how I got the job. So
Brian Bell (05:19.288) That's amazing. Yeah. Put your I I love this this lesson because a lot of people don't ever get this lesson in life, which is You know, if it you need to kind of shake things up. like life is like a snow globe, I used to say. I don't know if this is true or anymore, but I used say this. life is like a snow globe. And if you shake it, like if you just let everything settle, it kind of like everything solidifies in your life. and it's hard to break out of the muck of like your, you know, your day to day and and who you are and where you live and who you know and what you do. And and if you shake up the snow globe a bit, you have this opportunity, you've you've released the energy.
Ethan M. (05:42.097) Mm.
Brian Bell (05:56.525) in the universe and now you can reformulate all the all the snow crystals in a new way.
Ethan M. (06:03.473) could have gone in the train not said anything and I want to add a layer to that I love that there's also this layer that I I tell entrepreneurs that from the moment you start a company into the moment you sell it you're always selling and what you mean by is you never know who you're sitting next to. And so I've always been, how do you say, intellectually curious about a person and also willing to share, you know, from storytelling, willing to share my story in a sentence or two. That also helped. So I shook up the snow globe by messing everything up. I had a couple of sentences so it was easy for someone to digest what I did and how, you know, we could help. And we had a pleasant conversation 'cause I remained intellectually curious and Matt mainly mainly asked him questions and So I I agree with all of that. You just you have to put yourself out there, you have to shake up the snow globe and create genuine interest in other people. Don't be transactional. I didn't ask or need anything from this gentleman. I was just excited to share. That's how I got that job.
Brian Bell (06:53.538) Yeah, that's that's pretty incredible. Yeah. So what happened next? So you so you take the job at CNN, sounds like. The ESPN, yep.
Ethan M. (07:00.177) So I ESPN, ESPN. I take the j I take the job for ESPN. We served for two years. it was part of a strategy for ESPN two to change our strategy, but this president of ESPN two would leave about a year in and he went to actually six flags to renovate that business. The writing on the wall, you know, knowing what I know now, that was gonna be the end. we lasted another eight or nine months and then they canceled the show. And then I had a deep reflection on what I do next. I had a a conversation with somebody who was about twenty years older than me and he was living a very similar life. TV is is hustling. It's really bad. You have no job security whatsoever. You're constantly looking for your next job. Your jobs, if you're lucky, are a season, you know, or two seasons, three seasons. You have no idea like that. So I was like, Well, the problem was I originally wanted to get in TV to produce films, documentary films, and I want to monetize my skills. What do I know? I'm a technologist since I was eight years old. And I know business, I have a business degree. So I was naive, but I was just like, I'm gonna do that, whatever that is. And through just complete circumstance and happenstance, it you know, who knows who knows how these things happen, ended up at a portfolio company of Lehman Brothers and Warburg Pincus.
Ethan M. (08:16.923) That was my first introduction in two thousand seven.
Brian Bell (08:19.894) Yeah, nice nice timing. If for maybe you can tell the audience what happened next. Because I was working in mortgage backed securities at the same time. yeah, two thousand seven, yeah.
Ethan M. (08:22.139) Well we know we know what's about to happen. What you were.
Ethan M. (08:31.523) In January of 2008, completely unrelated, I took my son, because I had realized I was about to turn thirty and never crossed an ocean, so I took my son to London. And we just happened to be passing by and you'll know the building. This really strange building. It's a lot of metal and silver, and it looks like a factory, and it's right in the middle of London, Lloyd's of London. And this guy is just chain smoking one cigarette. The the cigarette's not even done before before the other one is. This is basically when Northern Rock is happening. I didn't know any of this. This is just the story that I pieced together afterwards. And the guy was just smoking it. I had to go up to him, shake up the snowball and ask him, What are you doing? And he's like, The world as we know it, it's over. Don't worry, there'll be a new one. But I don't know what that one's gonna look like and he just left. Brian Bell (09:07.83) Mm-hmm.
Ethan M. (09:18.073) That was like January of 2008. So so worked there for a year and a half. It was a fantastic experience from a business perspective. I saw everything. I was there in the Warburg offices when they signed the deal book that gave them the initial funding. It was a $40 million basically pre-seed check. It was to become an auto finance company. I was what you may call today a chief of staff. It was just a weird wool. It was like 50% of my job was pure office manager boring stuff, but then 50% was Brian Bell (09:19.82) Yeah.
Ethan M. (09:47.548) Go fill in confer compliance because we don't have compliance. And this is before Chat GPT. This have been so much easier now. Be like, what does that even mean? I don't know. Just figure it out. You know, hold the fork down with the most basic of things. It's like, okay. And I could figure things out. I remember my the lawyer called me in and says, We need a waterfall model by Monday. And this is Friday. I'm like, do you want me to make a diorama of Niagara Falls? I have no idea what you're talking about. And he just looks and points to the deal book and like section paragraph 78 and says, You need to make that into an Excel. And so, you know, again, this is way before AI. So Google was there. So basically that's me for an entire weekend of like basically staying up, looking at every video and everything that I could read about. What's a waterfall model, teaching myself how to do it and delivering it on Monday. So that was my MBA. And then Lehman Brothers collapses and their business collapsed too. And so I was able to see a business start, launch. I mean, you think about these companies, like the iconic companies, a Coca-Cola Ford, right? Companies have been around for a hundred years, right? You're ne no one person is ever gonna see the start and end. We are I don't know if lucky is the right word, but in venture we do often see the start and at least the the phase shift, you know, when companies exit. But very few people do completely see a company start, really expand, and then completely collapse and go into receivership. And I got to see that in eighteen months. It was a completely well funded company. They had one point five billion dollar warehouse credit, fifty basis points above LIBOR. This is
Brian Bell (11:08.974) Well,
Ethan M. (11:15.813) They were going to become the number one or two auto finance provider in the United States of America. And the dream lasted eighteen months.
Brian Bell (11:24.876) And what w what was it, the credit facility kinda dried up there because of the financial crisis or
Ethan M. (11:30.652) So when Barclays bought Lehman, one of their deals was they were able to line item everything. That was the deal. I believe they had a minimal that they had to keep, but they were able to literally line item. So of course they see one point five billion dollar company for a brand new company that just started in auto finance during what might be the next Great Depression. Because you but you remember, we didn't know how bad it would get. We knew it would be bad. We didn't know how bad it would get. And so they said no. And so the only offer that I'm aware of. Of course, more could have happened. I only get this from my mentors and everything else. The only offer they had was like a hundred million at like eight or nine hundred basis points above LIBOR. And and securitization, you need at least three to four to five hundred million before you roll it up. So basically it was like what they ended up suing some they ended up suing their investor to be able to use the operating capital to fund investments, but even that wouldn't have worked. And in the end they got the IP, but what's the IP work? You you you learn lessons that you don't need to learn. Like I'll never sue my investors. You
Brian Bell (12:22.894) Yeah.
Ethan M. (12:29.691) Boys and girls at home, you probably shouldn't sue your investor unless you're independently wealthy. I'll just say that, because it's a very small community. Unless they do something agre if they do something egregious, fine. But in this case, it wasn't egregious. It was we're not going to let you use operating capital to fund loans. That's not that's not a terrible, egregious or crime. That's not something, you know. If your grandmother believes that what the investor did was wrong, fine. You might have a lawsuit. But if it's some technical thing like that, it's gonna be really hard to work again. So so that that's what I
Brian Bell (12:57.462) Yeah. You know what's funny about that time period is I left Wall Street. and I've told the story. If anybody's listened into any number of episodes of this podcast, I really hated Wall Street and I kept asking myself, Ad ten million, would I go to work tomorrow? And I was like, No. It's like, Okay, well, my wife and I was always wanted to live in Asia. And so we took a job. We both quit our jobs and taught English in Japan. And we, you know, we hit the road in January 2008, same month that you went to to London, we went to Japan and we first drove across the US. And so we're just living out of our car suitcases, right? Japan, more or less the same. Didn't like teach teaching English, it was super boring. And so we left and started backpacking, backpacked for probably like four months straight, like through Japan and China and did a 10 day silent meditation retreat in Kyoto. And and so by time the financial crisis was really hitting. I I I had been living like on nothing, you know, two dollars, five dollars a day in China for for months. I was couch surfing actually a lot back then. yeah, so living in people's houses and random places in China and and hostels and stuff, and hostels were so cheap in China. And so by time we we we knew we wanted to come back to the West Coast, so we thought, okay, we'll stop in Hawaii.
Ethan M. (13:54.226) Would would you be living in hostels or like actually people's homes or combination? Yeah, wow. Brian Bell (14:14.87) And we got jobs in Hawaii. It turned out to be pretty good jobs, but we I was talking to my Wall Street friends, you know, sky is falling. And I had shaken up to Snow Clobe. I was far away and didn't care, you know. And this, you know, I was so like New York felt so far away in the finite whole financial crisis. We felt it a little bit in Hawaii, but it was like things just kind of slowed down a bit, you know. real estate obviously slowed down a little a little bit and stuff. And yeah, it's just an example of just like
Ethan M. (14:24.441) Mm.
Brian Bell (14:42.658) You know, the world's not gonna end. It'll be fine. Just do something else. Live out of a suitcase for a while, you know, adjust your expectations.
Ethan M. (14:47.215) And there's so many ways to live, right? And there's so many ways to live. There's so many paths. There's eight billion of us, eight different billion paths to live. So choose yours. That's amazing. Why didn't you stay though? Brian Bell (14:53.61) Yeah. There are there are, yeah.
Brian Bell (14:59.171) Right. Brian Bell (15:04.31) In Hawaii? well it wasn't home. You know, we spent, you know, a solid six months there, but you know, it just wasn't home and we wanted to get back. And so we stopped in Hawaii and I got a job in real estate. My wife technically she got a tech like a like a startup job and cause she she worked in an insurance in New York. So she got like an insurance claim software startup job where she was head of marketing and I was doing real estate with
Ethan M. (15:05.283) No, no, in Asia.
Ethan M. (15:29.731) Remote remote working remote in Hawaii. Yeah.
Brian Bell (15:31.616) No, working in Hawaii at the time they had a they had a like a a hundred percent dollar for dollar tax credit, state tax credit for startups. And so there's you know, they're trying to, you know, get the develop jobs there and stuff, which it it you know, more or less worked. But anyway, so what happened next, for you?
Ethan M. (15:52.356) I started a consulting firm and then about a year into it, I had a startup idea. And I wrote my friend into it, my friend Phil, who would become my business partner. And we thought it was a great idea. Of course it is. but we realized that we didn't know anything about startups at all. Like not even the slightest bit about startups. We you know, just didn't know how to fundraise. We didn't know any enough rich people who raised funds who could teach us, like we just knew nothing. So I said, well Why don't we use the consulting firm essentially for the specific goal of learning how to start up? So we'll take specific clients that will be necessary essentially to further our education. you could look back and say, you know, was that the right decision? Should we not have jumped? But what should we have just have jumped and just built it and learned along the way? And what I'll say is having traveled been to 94 countries, I've worked in fifty, I've seen every entrepreneur, like every path is different. That was the path that felt right for us. At the time the world did look, I was a little closer to the economic crisis. You know, I was living in New York City. It did look a little scarier. You know, what some of our friends said, you won't be able to raise, or if you raise, you won't be able to take a paycheck. And we're like, I don't think I could afford that. I was raising my son, it eight at the time. And so, for better or worse, that was the decision we made. We said, We will run this startup company, we have some technical skills, and we did a lot of Like th forty, fifty percent of our work was actually like Salesforce installs, paid the bills, right? And then the other fifty percent was fractional executives at startups are helping executives think through their communications positioning or strategy because I knew how to do that generally business wise. And that's exactly what we did for the next five years. while you know nobody knows the future, we think our business idea was great, it was similar sort of to kind of If Slack and Notion had a child. So by the time we ended up revisiting it, the market we don't think was there anymore. It was a way for different businesses to basically communicate together. would have been super useful in 2008 and nine. By the time we kind of got around to it in 2013 or 14. But we started working with different companies, and then 2014 there was a private equity company that said, Hey, we we like your work and we're working on a new project in decentralized finance for tracking global supply chains, really new technology.
Ethan M. (18:10.921) would you like to be part of it and basically took our entire company and went in house in a private equity firm and did that for two years and that started that actually started my entire all my side quest around the world because that gave me access to the whole globe and I'll just speed up the rest of it. Ended up going with a company in London that was doing something similar. We got into Techstars, we raised our first round and then I got recruited to be the head of a corporate venture fund out of India, three billion dollar company. And so I left them at Techstars.
Brian Bell (18:16.547) Mm.
Brian Bell (18:36.174) Yeah. Wow.
Ethan M. (18:40.291) intentionally, 'cause I figured what better time to replace a founder? There there were there were four founders. So what better time to replace a founder than going through an accelerator program? Like if I'm gonna leave, this is the right time to leave. and did that for about a year. Lots of good good stories, corporate venture. Brian Bell (18:48.78) Right. Yeah.
Brian Bell (18:56.814) Wow. Fly flying back and forth to India and
Ethan M. (18:59.745) And we had a team in London and I had a team in Romania and yeah, so just literally bouncing around everywhere. I was not home for a year, just completely bouncing around.
Brian Bell (19:04.898) Wow.
Brian Bell (19:11.224) Yeah, I bet, yeah. Well that probably tough on if I'm keeping track, your son's now a teenager or like early teens. Yeah.
Ethan M. (19:17.659) So by two thousand so so two thousand four I become a single parent. Two thousand ten I meet my future wife who I'm still married to. We ended up having two children. so by that point in my life I was stable and married and everything else like that. So it was it was much better by two thousand ten. And that was the other consideration. Two thousand eight, nine, when I wanted to do startups, I was still that single parent. I'm like, I don't really know what I'm doing. Brian Bell (19:37.74) Right. Yeah, I can't imagine doing a startup as a single parent. If any if anybody's doing that, drop a comment. That's pretty impressive.
Ethan M. (19:45.774) Yeah. it's really hard. It was it was it was it got it gets easier because the kid gets old you know, as the kid gets older. He still yells at me because at eleven years old I sent him into the city by himself to pick up ingredients for a dinner that I was having for a dinner party at eleven. And we're like, our parents dinner is eleven AM No no no god, no. Eleven AM. No, no, age eleven. Age age it is eleven and middle middle of the day.
Brian Bell (19:49.166) Yeah.
Brian Bell (19:53.366) Right, older and more self sufficient, yeah, for sure.
Brian Bell (20:05.538) PM? eleven AM. Well that's that's fine. Yeah. okay, right. Okay, that's probably okay, yeah.
Ethan M. (20:16.173) No no no no. So no, not at no no. He w he was completely fine with it. I look our apparent generation, this is this was normal. Nothing happened. He got to where and and I was so proud because I taught him enough about the city that he knew exactly where to go. So he was okay. So so I come back from India and then I start I again, I check up the snow globe and found a job for an EIR that was being posted by a Swiss NGO.
Brian Bell (20:21.101) Yeah. Right.
Ethan M. (20:42.603) And the guy was being a little he wasn't responding to me as fast as I'd wanted him to, but he told me that he was going to Belarus, Minsk for a tech conference. So I popped there for twenty four hours. I happen to be in Estonia and we shared drinks. You know how they drink there, by the way? They put the drinks in their elbow and they lift their elbow up to their mouth. It was very interesting. I I learned that. I still don't have that scope.
Brian Bell (20:56.206) Mm.
Brian Bell (20:59.744) yeah.
Brian Bell (21:03.438) Yeah, I wonder do you know the hist historical reason for that? No.
Ethan M. (21:08.281) No. And the drinks were good. They were little shots, but they were like mini cocktails. They weren't just like straight vodka. They were like tasty. and so I started that and then, which is what I've been doing for the last seven years, doing a lot of mentorship with the Swiss government, been around the world back and forth again, had a couple side quests. One was to I turned around the fourth largest influencer marketing agency in the country, was in peril. I became the CEO of that for just under a year. and then two, two and a half years ago I got into venture capital, which was very interesting because I really wanted to learn every side of our industry.
Ethan M. (21:46.118) I've been, you failed founder, semi-successful founder, I've been on boards, I've been an advisor, I've been at low level, and then I was an investor. So to really understand the completion. And then about seven months ago, I started my new quest, which was just a recognition that our everything we know about capital is changing rapidly. It's going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 50. And I realized there's just a lot of really, really cool experiments happening in the world. And I wanted to be front and center. It's my journalist background. as like a journalist describing and making a voice for it because I actually want to normalize capital innovation. I think it's great.
Brian Bell (22:23.894) Right. Yeah. And we talked a little bit about this when we first met, but maybe you could give us your your claim here, how venture capital is kind of changing. It's not gonna be like it was, you know, ten or twenty years ago, or at least part of it still will be, right? 'Cause you know, I think any kind of innovation, technologies kind of stick around and institutions kind of stick around, but there are new institutions like angel investing came out, but basically the cloud, right? When the cloud enabled a couple of kids on a laptop to create something. Angel vesting was c kind of invented, right? maybe you could argue that started in the nineties, but yeah, what what is what how is venture capital changing today in in in your mind? Or morphing or evolving? Yeah.
Ethan M. (23:03.761) Yeah, so so to understand where it's going, we have to take a step back to see where it's been. And so, and I'll do this as quick as possible. So, first of all, everything that we know as what we consider private capital or private equity began actually 400 years ago with the Dutch East India Company. And their innovation, so the first thing you have to understand is that capital is an invention. You cannot find any evidence of term sheets, LPs, anything. biology, chemistry, or physics. So you don't find any evidence of that. It's a human invention. It's what we call a coordinating technology. It allows us to coordinate and share in this particular in instance, it allows us to share risk, take risk up front in exchange for a future reward. So spend a little bit of money now in exchange for something in the future, for a piece of something that will be more valuable in the future. That's what all capital is. It started with the Dutch East India Company. The story is the food in Europe was terrible. Indonesia had these spice islands. They would send a ship. The ship was very expensive. And someone came up with this idea. What if we get a bunch of people to invest in the ship? So we don't have to we don't have to do it. Carry itself, which is, you know, we know it very well in venture, was actually the amount of spices the captain was allotted for going on the journey. That was his carry. So we
Brian Bell (24:14.222) Carry was basically how much you could you could carry off the ship. Right? Yeah.
Ethan M. (24:17.531) He that hit no, like the captain. That was the captain's portion specifically. That that's exactly right. And so this hasn't changed much actually in 400 years. Just that concept of being able to allow the public or or private, depending on your situation, to buy into a common vehicle and split it up into fractions or shares, has not changed in 400 years. It has evolved, right? So we invented public markets in the 17, 1800s.
Brian Bell (24:20.898) Yeah. Yeah.
Ethan M. (24:46.427) Private equity came about in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and everything we know about VC was invented in the 40s and really came about in the 60s and 70s. Venture capital, first of all, is a subset of private equity. It's the idea of private ownership and companies. I'm just like laying the foundation so that we can have the basis of a conversation. And it is a particular asset class. And that's where this becomes really important. VC is a very specific and particular asset class. So the question is what is the asset class, right? So people will have different definitions, but the definition that I personally like in venture capital is based on the power law. So, and where does the power law come from? So, venture capital specifically invests in technology because you ever wonder like why does it invest in technology? Couldn't it invest in other things? Well, technology has a very specific attribute that no other thing has, and that is the net marginal cost to the next user is effectively zero. So Instagram doesn't really pay very much money for adding a customer to its base. I'm ignoring marketing, that's a different cost. But like the actual structure, and if you think about like the Ivory Soap Company, if it costs 30 cents to make a bar of soap and they sell two bars of soap, it costs them 60 cents. If it costs Instagram a dollar to maintain their service and they sell it to two people, it still costs them a dollar. And if they sell to three people, it still costs them a dollar. So that particular specific economic model lent itself to outsize returns. So if you can get a market and you can get in there early and you can get single, even low double digit returns, and you could disrupt, as Clayton Christensen talks about, you could make a ridiculous amount of money, not just from the valuation, but because you're basically minting money. I mean, typical startups have like 90% profit. So this has been true for all of venture capital and made venture capital a very particular asset class. And as all the new technologies came out, you know, from cloud, mobile, internet, there were basically green fields all over the place.
Brian Bell (26:42.061) Right.
Ethan M. (26:42.571) So if we assume that that's true of venture capital, there are certain things that have now broken in venture capital. And I want to start off by saying, I actually think venture capital is a beautiful, elegant model, one of the best we've ever created. And I don't think it's going anywhere. I don't think it's going away anywhere. I do have a thesis though, which is that there was an era when, you know, Uber for pet sitting could have gotten venture capital. And I wonder if we will look at that as actually an just not the standard, out of norm. That was a certain period of time that existed from approximately, you could argue, 2008 to 2020, 2022, so about a fifteen year period of venture capital. Because what did venture capital do? Like think of the cool things. We invest in satellites, nuclear fusion, microchips, artificial intelligence. These are
Brian Bell (27:34.562) Yeah. Yeah.
Ethan M. (27:38.658) magnanimous things that are fundamentally changing our lives. But there was a period of time when venture capital went after and became the funding choice du jour for every type of of of startup. So rule number one, I think, is that the economics have changed, right? So and because the economics have changed, shifted with especially with AI, because AI is more linear than the previous technologies, we'll see what happens in the next few years. There's less greenfield opportunities available. And I think venture capital will inherently concentrate. There will be less deals, bigger deals. We're already seeing that. Carta had the release, it was two hundred the ninety-fifth percentile of C deals in Q two of twenty six was two hundred and twenty two million dollars. Up from one hundred and ninety-five million in Q one.
Brian Bell (28:26.818) Yeah, meaning the valuation at the at at the top five percent mark is two hundred and twenty million dollars of post money cap.
Ethan M. (28:34.991) Yeah. Which is ridiculous. That's seed. Like we've all we've all been joking that seeds and series A's and postseeds and pre seeds and bridge seeds and mango seeds have all lost their meaning. Now we're completely detached from gravity. There's a lot of reasons why. We can talk about that if you want. There's a lot of reasons why, but we have to admit what's happening. The asset class has shifted and changed.
Brian Bell (28:37.165) Yeah.
Brian Bell (28:56.398) Well, I think I think also, you know, f from somebody who's made almost four investments over the last, you know, seven, eight years, what I see happening is more of everything. More big, more medium, more small.
Ethan M. (29:09.681) Exact. Hundred percent. And that so that's so this whole thing started. I was at a venture capital conference back in in October and I had a profound discussion because, you know, if if you've been around the circle, there is the ethical argument, is VC good or bad? Is it dead or not? And I think that's the that's the wrong argument because these things are not moral or ethical. but but so the question is VC is fine, it's a fine e economic model. I think it works very well in some situations where upside and risk align and I think it's terrible in certain situations and we've misapplied it for many situations. And because of that, we we are is venture cap so is venture capital wrong for pursuing the unicorn? Is it wrong for pursuing power law? No, but we should not be applying unicorns of power law to every form of startup because in some cases you could make a pretty decent amount of money on startups that don't try to be a unicorn. And so this is where it started breaking. And this was the conversation I had in October. And so I started researching it. And there's already at least 80, and we think it could be much higher funds that are operating what we call venture adjacent manner. So we've identified three particular new asset classes that we don't think are venture capital anymore. These are operating in the real world right now. These aren't hypothetical future situations, and these are scenarios. And sometimes What's happening is they're operating along, let's say, unicorn funds. So for the purpose of this conversation, I'll call like your traditional fund a unicorn fund. That's your traditional power law. You're trying to find the next big Brian Bell (30:36.46) Yeah. I inve I invest low, ten, twenty, thirty caps, and I want, you know, multi billion dollar outcomes. That's the traditional model. Yeah.
Ethan M. (30:42.351) Right. So that that is that is one hundred percent the traditional model. and so there's three there's three new asset classes we've identified, and I think there's more, but these are legitimate. The biggest section of what we found is what we call SMVs, which is small to medium ventures. So what matters is the exit. The exits here are fifty to five hundred million, and they're not expecting ninety percent fail rates. So their portfolio construction looks more like a sixty to seventy five percent success rate. And success there looks like fifty to five hundred million dollar acquisitions. So obviously the time also is different. These are often not ten year out models.
Brian Bell (31:23.436) Right. 'Cause that's one. So S V, v V for venture. Okay, I like it.
Ethan M. (31:29.345) SMP. I I think you said market. You're frozen. I don't know if that matters. If it doesn't matter, then it doesn't matter to me. I was just Okay. Perfect. so so that's number one. So the the second thing is permanent capital. Now permanent capital has existed in private equity before I get killed for years. This is not new. It is new for tech companies. So we've seen this with it's sort of venture debt, but not entirely. So permanent capital assumes no exit. No exit all. Brian Bell (31:35.32) We are fine. Yeah, it records locally.
Ethan M. (31:59.408) So the idea there is basically dividends. So there are companies out there that are investing, you know, it's definitely lower amounts relative, like one to twenty million, thirty million, something like that. But they get paid back in cash flow basis businesses. Sometimes permanently, no end in sight.
Brian Bell (32:15.576) Kind of like revenue based financing kind of businesses, okay. Yep.
Ethan M. (32:18.981) But but these are becoming somewhat, I'd say, normalized and turned into actually funds that you can invest in. So where it's a little diff difference is like, is it just a loan? Well, it's a little bit different. And like I said, what I'm also seeing and what I think the future of venture capital is you know, VCs with unicorn funds might just attach a a permanent capital fund to them or an SMV fund. So these are not either or situations. What you said before is the most important. You're seeing more of everything, and we need to be able to capture that. And the third one is an evolving one, which we call nimble, which is usually small amounts of money for s for fast returns. So sub sub six year exits.
Ethan M. (33:00.953) Yeah, it's just at the edge of what we're starting to see, mostly international, but there are people that are coming out saying we're gonna give you funds. sometimes what's happening, what we've seen is, you know, you know, seed strapping. So sometimes what we've seen is these are companies that haven't actually taken formal investment. Maybe they've been around for three, four, five, ten years. And so now they're ready to basically hyper and and drop exit. in one particular case, there was a company called MDB Capital, which had the most unique model I'd ever seen. they look for patentable technology, they put a team around it, sort of like a venture studio, but it's not really a venture studio, but their entire mission is to microcap IPO in five years or less. That's their entire capital. And they do this like once or twice a year, max. So it's like, okay, this is really interesting.
Brian Bell (33:47.983) It's almost like pre it's almost like late stage pre-IPO, but it's not traditional venture because they didn't raise a seed and an A and a B and everything. These are companies been around five to seven years, maybe longer, and they've hit some sort of product market fit and they're really ready to accelerate towards an IPO in the next, you know, three to five years.
Ethan M. (34:04.113) W no, in MDB case, they're taking companies from zero. Yeah. They're taking a brand new patentable technology that we're like, we think we can go to market, give them essentially a precede and a seed using our terminology, and they go right to IPO as a microcap. So a microcap is like under a billion, so they'll microcap at like a hundred million, two hundred million, three hundred million dollars. So essentially instead of series A, they microcap.
Brian Bell (34:08.462) wow. Okay.
Brian Bell (34:24.322) Yeah.
Brian Bell (34:28.152) This has been another thing that's happened too in venture and and I'd love to get your thoughts on it. You know, the the lengthening of the IPO window, right? And we're starting to finally see some IPOs here in in mid twenty six with SpaceX and and others filing. but you know, SpaceX is a twenty year old startup, right? And so we're seeing this like very, very long and has like, I don't know, what is it, 10 billion of revenue? There's there's been this lengthening ha happening where
Ethan M. (34:36.166) Yeah.
Brian Bell (34:55.598) You know, startups used to go public at a half billion to a billion of out of market cap. And now, you know, I feel like that average has creeped up to thirty billion at least.
Ethan M. (35:06.085) We've seen this everywhere, right? So I I hope I get my numbers right. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong. But it's something like in the early nineteen eighties, you know, forty, forty, forty-five years ago, the number of private percentage of private equity firms, so firms under the hand of private companies, was like in the single digits, like two, three, four percent. Not not anything that meaningful. Today it's like closer to twenty-five percent. So it's not just that IPOs are closer, it's that we as a society have normalized and now tend to like
Brian Bell (35:27.437) Wow.
Ethan M. (35:35.217) private equities asset class as the solution. Ethan M. (35:42.29) So that's that's another that's another factor, right? So that's another that's another factor of what we're happening here. The the IPO window, everybody talks about it, right? So these are exit windows, and you have to understand like there are still economic cycles, right? we forget, you know, the the SPAC thing was the big rage for what two or three years. That was like that became like a really big thing. And so but but your point is more valid. What's what I see happening is a heavy concentration. One of the most interesting numbers that I know, for example, was this you know, you brought up like SpaceX, that the angel investors from SpaceX only got something like under two hundred X return. And before you think that's wonderful, 'cause that is wonderful, it was a generation ago that the people that invested in some of the bigger technologies like Uber of the day would get would be getting approaching a thousand X return for their early stage investment. So we've seen almost a magnitude drop. in basically a generation. And so you're saying like if you're capped at this, I think it was one hundred and sixty eight X, if you're capped at that, that's gonna be like the best company in a generation. I mean, probably OpenAI or Anthropic if they do, but if you're gonna be capped at that, then what's the hope, right? And that's what I said from the very beginning. You're
Brian Bell (36:51.704) What what are the mechanics of that? Because I haven't heard that before.
Ethan M. (36:55.559) it was a it was a tweet from it was a tweet from a long time ago and they were saying the I can pull it up. but that's what that's what he was saying was that the er the people that originally invested at the ten million dollar mark, he just did the calculation and after all the delutions and everything else.
Brian Bell (37:11.404) I don't I don't think that's true. I'd have to look at the stats in the cap table, but I d I just don't think it's mathematically possible. Like if you if you consider that like, you know, you invested at a 10 cap, right? And you I think he's assuming 90 per 95% dilution or something like that. And I don't think that's a fair assumption. I don't know if I agree with that. You know, if you if you inv for easy math, let's just say you invest a million, you own 10% of the company, million at 10, right? And then like every round dilute you like 20%. That's you know, more or less. Sometimes it's 10, sometimes it's 25 or 30. First for Elon, I bet it was probably more like 15. and how many rounds of financing did they raise, assuming you didn't re-up? And then like assuming it, you know, went to market at a trillion dollars, right? It's 1.5 as of like the recording could be two trillion. But let's just say you get your shares eventually at a trillion. I don't know. I I don't know if that maths. Maths.
Ethan M. (38:11.739) Well, I think it was at the IPO. I think that that's what they were basing it off of. Right. And he what what his what his point was and and there's been a number of arguments around that basically look, the the max that you're gonna make is less. It's still great, but it it's an argument for concentration. So d like I don't know what you feel about conviction, high high conviction.
Brian Bell (38:14.454) Okay. Yeah.
Brian Bell (38:28.878) I have that. Yeah. 10 to the fifth power. It's a hundred thousand a hundred thousand X without dilution. And then let's just assume 80% dilution, it's still a 20,000 X. I think that's what I've written before on the topic. So yeah. Anyway, yeah, I'd I'd I'd love to look at that tweet. Anyway, but back to back to the new venture capital. There are new asset classes.
Ethan M. (38:50.735) Yeah. No, I I I
Ethan M. (38:56.497) There are new well, I I I don't know how you feel about high conviction investing. So there's been a lot of chatter about high conviction investing because of all this as well, which is the specific advocacy to write fewer checks at higher amounts. That's been a huge conversation happening right now. Brian Bell (39:13.08) Fewer checks, that's what we do, right? We we write fewer checks and in in more companies, yeah.
Ethan M. (39:20.613) No no no, right? Fewer checks and fewer companies.
Brian Bell (39:23.763) yeah. Yeah. Some people do that. Yeah.
Ethan M. (39:26.659) And there's been a lot of people that I've talked to that are advocating that that's the future adventure.
Brian Bell (39:32.589) I mean, I think like any any asset class, there's lots of ways to skin a cat, right? Lots of different ways to invest. you know, I think you can do the high conviction thing. but I I don't think the math works there, you know, historically. Now, unless the returns change, right? If the return profiles change, his like if if like the last 10 years doesn't look like the next 10 years, then yeah, you have to adjust your strategy. But like Like the way I think about it, and I've read a lot of articles and done a lot of math on this. like there's a probability distribution every time you make an investment, right? And everybody thinks they're really good investors, right? They think they have really great deal flow and they're really good at picking them. And if that's true, then you should absolutely be a high conviction investor, right? You should only invest in like, you know, I think Warren Buffett said this, like, you know, the diversification is for suckers. That's what he literally said. Because you can't get as good returns, you're kind of capped on the upside if you make a lot of investments, right? But you're also capped on the low s on on the on the downside, right? so I think if you if you're really, really good at investing, yeah, make make go ahead and make 10 annual investments, see how that goes. You know? It's not gonna work out.
Ethan M. (40:45.905) So the conversation came the conversation came from the information. So it was a guy named, I could send this to you, Lucas Voz, who wrote a whole thing called The Narrow Path, and he basically arguing that the future of all venture capital is going to be high conviction. And he quoted Sam Lesson from information saying that the it was 143x return for open AI's early investors.
Brian Bell (41:13.486) Open AI, okay. I'd have to see. Yeah, I'd have to look at all the math on that, you know. but I think, yeah, I think there's a space. There's a space for all this stuff, right? Like there's a space for high conviction, low quantity, there's a space for high conviction, high qual quantity, right?
Ethan M. (41:29.909) Well, and my whole and my whole point of capital innovation, what I'm trying to make an argument for is and I actually think it's a good thing. So I have a single goal, right? I want to promote entrepreneurship. What I saw from my days in Lehman Brothers is that we need to build an economy that's built on resiliency and that's not built on dependency. And so we need entrepreneurs in small, big and and and medium, all sizes of all sides, and the future that I see coming is a menu. If you're going after truly a big market, truly a big market, and you think you can capture a market share very quickly and you have an edge, then I think that venture capital might still be for years and years and years now the best asset class that you're gonna choose from. But there may be a different path that you're seeing saying, look, I think I'm I'm gonna be a regional player and I think I'm gonna make my investors a lot of money and we're gonna be great. I'm not gonna make a thousand X, but it's safer or for whatever reason. That might be a different thing. That might be an SMV investment. And that's what I'm seeing. You know, I had a criticism once, which I disagreed with, and I said, Well, there's just not enough capital for enough early stage companies. And I disagree with that. So we have trillions and trillions of dollars, I think it's 45 trillion dollars sitting in uninvested accounts to begin with. We have
Brian Bell (42:38.798) Yeah, the money's there. Yeah.
Ethan M. (42:40.293) The money's there. We have five trillion dollars in dry powder alone. you know, different LPs want different things. I you know, and that's what I see. I actually see the future of venture capital firm not being a venture capital firm. I see it just becoming a capital fund. And it will have a unicorn fund and it will have an SMV fund.
Brian Bell (42:56.162) Right. And yeah, I think you're seeing this too. I think this checks out with the empirical evidence of, you know, Sequoia, A sixteen Z, General Catalyst, other really, really big venture capital managers becoming basically like just capital firms, right? With lots of different funds doing lots of different things and stage different stages, sectors, geos, different strategies is what we're describing here. you know, you know. This company can go from zero to IPO in five years in a micro IPO, like that's one asset class. So yeah, I think I I I totally agree with that. Ethan M. (43:32.08) Yeah, a and I think it's better for society in general. I think what the future of V C will we'll still be investing in really cool stuff, but it will definitely trend more towards fusion or really life changing technologies. I think it will also be the the most visible. So it'll essentially be the PR fr center of it's gonna capture the most column inches if you will it's gonna capture the most words it's gonna capture the most tweets and so vc will still be a viable asset class for decades to come but I do also think that it will become I actually think based on my conversations it will become a little more higher conviction in other words when when you become for instance Brian a capital fund then you might say well My unicorn fund might look different. I'm actually going to write less checks out of the unicorn fund, but I'm gonna have this other fund that I'm gonna write lots of checks out of because we're gonna make lots of money on these other companies that will have a shorter time horizon. So where I see this, where do I see this going? I see the founder, the founder's also smarter. We have a lot of second and third generation founders, people that are kind of know what they're doing. Or you know, back back when I said I want to learn startups in 2008, I didn't know anything and there were a lot of newbies, you know, it's now 2026. a lot of people are smarter and they're demanding smarter uses of capital and smarter investment firms. So I think they're gonna have a menu option. So I think that capital is going to innovate. I think capital's gonna innovate faster in some ways than startups. I think it's actually really amazing and exciting to see what people now, what are the problems? What are the cons or what's holding it back? One is we haven't normalized these names. So like I remember having a conversation in Romania with a venture capitalist and he's like, I'm I'm summarizing here. He was much more eloquent than I'm about to say. But he's like, I'm a great venture capitalist. Okay. He's like, Well, you know, power loss says ninety percent of companies are gonna fail. Eighty percent of my companies are still in business. And I had two six X returns. And I was like, You're fantastic. You're exactly what the region needs and you're a successful investor. But by pure definition, you're not a venture capitalist. And he got really mad at me. We had a whole whole whole conversation and I said, No, the Brian Bell (45:27.47) You're more of a capital allocator, yeah.
Ethan M. (45:30.467) And and by the end of the conversation, he finally admitted he's like, Yeah, but I can't go to LPs and tell them that I'm doing this. They think that I'm a VC. So if I if if
Brian Bell (45:36.483) Yeah.
Brian Bell (45:40.953) Yeah, this this is a little bit of the I think tension that we feel as venture capitalists with LPs. Because LPs want one thing until they don't want it. Right. And so like a lot of LPs will tell me, like, early stage, if we don't do early stage, why not? Well, you know, these are really long funds, right? 10, 12, 15 year funds, right? And we want our our liquidity in three to five years. I was like, Great, why do you want liquidity in three to five years? we just want to cr, you know, have have more options. So I was like, Well, do you want better returns or you want like, you know, your money back faster. Right. Cause that's the liquidity premium that I think you're trading off. Right. And so what I think what ends up happening, somebody explained this in my finance class a long time ago, because finance undergrad. So took a lot of finance courses, right? And some guy came in and he he kind of explained he was at Merrill Merrill Lynch, some managing director at Merrill Lynch. And he came in and he said, basically the market swings back and forth between fear and greed. Right. And I just always remember these he just wrote this wrote this pendulum on the whiteboard. He's like, so if you want to understand what people are doing, just try to understand where the pendulum is right now. Is it all the way at the at the fear? You know, 2009, financial crisis, COVID, you know, dot com bubble, or is it all the way here? Right. Is it 20 2021? Is it, you know, 2007? Is it 1999? Where are we in that cycle? And then you'll you'll basically understand how people make decisions. Based based on where we're at in that pendulum. So what happens with I think with LPs, the psychology is they, you know, they get you know, they get into these funds that have SpaceX, you know, for twenty years, right? They're sitting hopefully on a twenty thousand X, not a two hundred X, but and they're the the LP is like, Hey, look at the T V Pi, it's great. Your DPI is like very low, right? Your t but like there's some probably some funds on SpaceX that are get distributing shares right now that had 30, 40, 50 X T BPIs. And now, now those LPs are finally getting that huge return, right? Probably 50% IRRs in those seed funds. Right. And now all of a sudden they're they're going, I need to do more of that because they stopped doing it because they had no liquidity. They're like, Well, show me the money, right? And now the pendulum's gonna swing all these IPOs in the next, and it starts with SpaceX, and then it's gonna go open AI and Enthropic and a bunch of others. And we had a like a few others earlier this year.
Brian Bell (48:05.056) And then it'll it'll swing. So I predict we'll actually swing risk on in a very dramatic way through twenty twenty seven, barring any c crazy escalation of conflicts and black black swan events. And then it'll crash again. It'll go back to fear. And it just does that every seven to ten years, just like like clockwork. So you just kind of have to know where you're like in the cycle.
Ethan M. (48:24.633) It does. But I also want to add, so Brazil had a problem. Brazil really wanted to adopt Silicon Valley ways and a lot of countries have done this with limited success because Silicon Valley is a very unique place in the world. And so they realized about fifteen, twenty years ago, they just need to do it the Brazilian way. Whatever that is, it's the Brazilian way. And and for the most part, you know, they they've not fully abandoned the power law, but they've they've welcomed other models, they've welcomed other things. But I was talking to some people down there and they were telling me they had to retrain, re educate the LPs to accept it. And it took them years before years, right? in the last year alone, like I was asked by three different occasions, Hey, do you know anybody that can get me into the secondary markets on on on this company? Like, you don't want to. You're not gonna make any money on that. I don't care. And it's like, why are you investing in that? And it's because and and and you know the reasons, right? My friend did it. My my grandkid thinks I'm cool because of it. That's right.
Brian Bell (49:24.078) It's just so you can stay at a cocktail parties. That's basically it. No, I inv I invested. I invested in this big name. Well, great. When did you invest? I invested at a trillion dollar valuation, you know? Yeah. It's like, okay, well. Yeah. But I but like, you know, in their argument, like another way of of framing this is like
Ethan M. (49:34.115) Exactly.
Ethan M. (49:38.405) That's pol that's impolite to say to ask that question at a dinner party. By gosh. Brian Bell (49:46.54) Okay, I invested at yeah, I did invest at five hundred billion, but you know, a year later I exited at a trillion. So I got a two X return in in a year. That's pretty cool. assuming everything goes perfectly, you know.
Ethan M. (49:58.351) Well, and and that brings up the bigger question, right? So I think I think between one third and fifty percent of of early stage ca venture capital will go by the wayside. Now what does that mean? Does that mean fully in? I don't know. They might transition to some of these new asset classes, but I you know, to some extent
Brian Bell (50:14.414) We're we're I think it I already see this, right? We already see more startup funds, adventure funds being started than ever before. I think there's a thousand flowers blooming in early stage right now. And I think decile would like dis totally disagree with you. Go talk to Mike and Adeo over there, who help more, you know, launch more funds than any ever before. But I think those funds, to your point, behave and look different than venture funds did 10, 20 years ago. I think a lot of them are filling all these different niches, all these different strategies.
Ethan M. (50:45.361) I agree. And I I talked I talked to somebody there and they were saying, well, you know, we're not seeing it as much. And I'm like, well, you will. Because the problem is we don't have the language. So one of the most interesting things in doing my research research is all the SMVs and Nimble, these words are my words. Those are nobody else's words. Nobody on earth is calling them this. You know what they're calling themselves? Venture. They'll just say things like, We have an innovative portfolio construction. There's this wonderful, wonderful company.
Brian Bell (50:56.174) Mm.
Ethan M. (51:14.031) up in the Nordics and they talk about investing in camels all day long. And which is fantastic. I think it's exactly what the world needs. But we don't have a shared common language. So we have now created these essentially new asset classes, new mixes of funds, but we're just calling it venture because we don't really have another word for it. So it's gonna get very interesting to see what happens. But
Brian Bell (51:33.634) Yeah. Yeah, it's private capital market allocation. before we close the conversation, because I'd love to talk talk to you for another hour, but we're running out of time. We right before we start recording, you talked about the two types of venture capital funds. Maybe you could tell the audience what that is.
Ethan M. (51:38.653) That's exactly right.
Ethan M. (51:49.809) no no so so well there's active funds and then for there's active funds, right? So those are actively raising and deploying. so we know what zombie funds are. Zombie funds are neither actively raising or deploying, right? They're just sitting there on the assets and correct. So I've identified a third type, which is hopefully won't get anybody mad at me, but it's true. It's called Schrdinger's fund. Because you don't know if it's alive or dead. Brian Bell (51:54.22) Yeah, active fund. Yeah.
Brian Bell (52:04.824) Just sitting there harvesting and not doing anything. Yeah.
Ethan M. (52:15.985) So it's actively cultivating pipeline, but very slowly. And the only reason it's cultivating pipeline is not to deploy because they don't have any money to deploy. They're just raising funds from LPs. So they primarily exist to raise funds. So
Brian Bell (52:27.062) Hmm. I need to find I need to find those guys so they can invest in my phone because I'm actively deploying. interesting.
Ethan M. (52:31.547) No, no, no, no, no. They don't have money. They need money. No, no. Schrdinger Fund is a fund that needs money, that does not have money. They don't have enough money. Sometimes what they'll do is they'll do a deal or two a year through an SPV just to say active. But basically, they exist just to raise funds. Like they can't deploy, they're not really doing anything active. They probably they could be a zombie fund if if they don't raise the fund. But they're keeping everything very active.
Brian Bell (52:40.796) okay. Gotcha.
Brian Bell (52:46.028) Right. Yeah.
Brian Bell (52:56.662) Yeah, that'll probably be me when I'm retired. I'll be a team ignite to be a zombie fund or a Schrdinger fund or something. No, hopefully I can hand off the reins before that. But Ethan, I'd love to love to have you back on someday, like and and talk for another hour or two. But where can folks find you online?
Ethan M. (53:03.593) But but you're not gonna retire anytime soon.
Ethan M. (53:13.703) Yeah, postunicorn capital dot com is probably the best place. We're actually releasing our atlas this summer. So it's gonna be a list of the eighty to two hundred and twenty funds that we found that are actually active in venture adjacent funds. And it's the ground for the reports of postunicorn capital.com. Brian Bell (53:29.39) Well, I really appreciate the conversation. Thanks for coming on.
Ethan M. (53:32.093) Thank you so much.
