Preferred Return Podcast
It’s Time for Angel Investing to Evolve
ABOUT THE EPISODE
I have an interesting deal for you all, who’s interested?
Angel communities have been held back by manual tools and workflows that prevent collaboration on deal flow, slow down investing decisions and, ultimately, prevent broader participation from those that would like to invest in the start-up asset class without the typical constraints of investing in a VC fund.
Jason Burke, Founding Partner at TBD Angels in the Boston area, decided it was time to take matters into his own hands by building software to solve the challenges he was experiencing firsthand. Thus, All Stage was established to provide investment ecosystems with a modern technology platform. Tune in to learn more, the future for All Stage and angel investors everywhere appears to be brighter than ever.
MENTIONED CONTENT
COMPANIES
BOOKS
- John Carreyrou – Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Kjael Skaalerud: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Preferred Return. This is Kjael Skaalerud. I am the CRO over at Altvia, and I am holding the fort or guest emceeing if you will, for Jeff Williams, our Chief Strategy Officer, and with me today, I have Jason Burke, who is the co-founder of TBD angels and the founder of All Stage. What’s happening, Jason?
[00:00:28] Jason Burke: Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to chat about what’s going on in the world of investing as you mentioned, I co-founded with a handful of colleagues, Angel Group about two years ago called TBD angels. We can talk a little bit about that. And I’m also the founder of All Stage, which is a platform business with a suite of tools really focused on investment communities and founders to optimize the end-to-end funding process within early-stage fundraising and investing and really bringing smart software to the investment ecosystem.
[00:01:05] Kjael Skaalerud: I love it. It sounds like we’ve subscribed to the same thing, so I’m all about it.
[00:01:11] And I’m very excited to cover both TBD angels and All Stage in a little more detail. And just generally I was hoping we could maybe start with TBD Angels, and what kind of the Genesis was and, and how that moved into All Stage. And, perhaps as we talk through those items, you can share a little bit more about your general thesis around Private Capital Markets, and the role technology will and should play today, and how you kind of see that evolving from a digital transformation perspective. Does that sound cool?
[00:01:44] Jason Burke: That sounds perfect. Yeah. So, first TBD angels – we are an investment group made up of operators, really a bunch of smart folks who have been startup founders have led teams have had successful and unsuccessful exits, and really have the experience in what it takes to grow companies.
[00:02:02] And that allows us as investors to provide a lot more value beyond the check to our portfolio companies in providing guidance and providing introductions, to prospective customers or new employees, and really help provide that much-needed value beyond the actual investment itself.
[00:02:21] And the way TBD came together is that in early 2000, literally weeks before. Our world was put in a blender with the pandemic. A few friends in the Boston area met for lunch and we’re talking about what we found to be missing with angel investing. And we were seeing really two problems.
[00:02:40] We’re all from the Boston area, which is a really hot, hot area as it relates to things like innovation. And there’s an amazing university system in the Boston area. Lots of VCs, lots of great companies, but they really lack a community of investors, and what we wanted to do was create that community in which we, as members of that community could all benefit from being part of a group of like-minded folks, experienced folks, from whom we could learn from whom we could bounce ideas off of from the investment point of view, to do due diligence with And that’s really what we wanted to bring together.
[00:03:17] There are a lot of, investment groups that exist out there. But we’re seeing that the notion of community was lacking within them and we wanted to create that. And then, two, we really did believe that angel investing within groups is broken. It lacks diversity which, which creates a lot of problems with frankly, diversity helps for making better decisions and better collaboration which at the end of the day drives better performance for the investments that are made.
[00:03:43] It’s also very slow moving. And consistently it’s not much more than just a check. It’s a group of folks deciding to invest. And then writing a check, which frankly in the early stages of a venture, is needed, capital is needed. But that’s just the first mile of a marathon in building a company and running a company and making it successful.
[00:04:03] There’s a long journey beyond the check. And most investment groups are just that check. And we wanted to become more of that. So, it’s really important that we drive value. And we do that through the operator members that come with a lot of experience and large networks themselves.
[00:04:20] Right now we’re about 260 members. We cover about 20 U.S. states and several international countries within our membership. We continue to aim for diversity within our group across things like demographics, but also geography, and experiences. And, you know, we’re not perfect yet. We continue to improve, but we monitor these things as sort of KPIs each month and track where we’re headed, as it relates to these areas of diversity.
[00:04:48] And try to continue to improve. We’re a member-driven group. We don’t have any employees. We don’t have any folks on payroll, it’s all sort of volunteer-driven. And various members are sort of picking up the ball and leading efforts around things like portfolio engagement or building tools to allow us to deliver on what we saw as broken with other groups.
[00:05:08] And now we’re a little over two years old, we’ve seen about 350 deals. We’ve invested in 65. And now there’s a lot of thought about, you know, what do we want to be when we grow up? We’re still in our infancy, but you know, things like do we stand up a fund?
[00:05:19] Do we start to lead deals? How do we think about later stage deals as it relates to opportunities that are beyond a pre-seed seed and maybe series A. How do we think about secondaries? So it’s really fun. We’re sort of growing a startup ourselves. We’re not a formal startup, but it’s sort of like growing a startup where we’ve grown our membership and we’ve grown the ways in which we engage with the ecosystem.
[00:05:42] Kjael Skaalerud: Wow. You know, we interact obviously with a lot of groups, I guess, in the angel category. And most of what we hear is the typical scenarios that they lack kind of a single ringleader if you will or an operating budget for a formal entity, it’s just kind of like a loosely organized cohort.
[00:05:59] And to your point, that makes all those issues acute in terms of organizing, sharing information, and establishing tools and processes. So it sounds like you’re moving in a great direction, frankly. So that’s awesome. And I guess in terms of the actual member contribution if you will.
[00:06:14] So I guess the expectation is that as it’s distributed and all these members have operator backgrounds, and then I guess they’re bringing deals to the table for everybody to kind of review and collaborate on, and then those that want to participate, you structure like an SPV and then they participate that way.
[00:06:31] And then I guess, can you talk a little bit about the origination component and when you post investment, how you start to think of working with the portfolio company and supporting them.
[00:06:42] Jason Burke: Yeah, absolutely. So, our deal flow is from our members. And we’re continuing to figure out ways that we can expand beyond that.
[00:06:51] Things like syndication with other investment groups or with VCs, but as it stands right now, our deal flow is coming from our members. This is one of the things that makes it really valuable for TBD to have such a great membership, in both quantities. But as well as, quality being, of utmost importance, frankly just quality of the network.
[00:07:10] And you know, as we continue to grow our membership count, as well as things like geography and things like that. Growing the expertise within the group opens us up to more opportunities because everyone comes with their own touch points with the ecosystem. So, the deal flow is coming from our members.
[00:07:29] These members are submitting deals into our deal flow. We use All Stage, which we’ll talk about a bit. At TBD, we’ve adopted All Stage as our platform to manage all of the activity that happens from the point of seeing the deal through the actual investment itself or up until the investment itself and then portfolio analytics.
[00:07:50] And our investments are done under SPV. So, we aren’t a fund today. Every member is able to make their own decisions around, are they in or out of a particular opportunity and then how much do they want to invest? And by running it on an SPV, it also streamlines the process both internally for TBD Angels, as well as for the founders who are receiving one investment, one line item on the cap table.
[00:08:15] But behind that SPV, they may have, you know, upwards of 60. Investors on that investment, which means 60 advocates and evangelists of the company, as the company continues to grow and 60 informal advisors that the company can call on when they’re trying to build up their team and they need recommendations on great engineers that they should speak with, or they’re trying to adjust their pricing strategy.
[00:08:37] And first trying to get a sense of, has anyone gone through that experience and can they provide feedback? So it’s a real sort of a win-win across the board to structure it the way we do.
[00:08:51] Kjael Skaalerud: And then you get into the unwieldy challenge of network management, right? And kind of indexing individuals understanding their operating backgrounds, their area of expertise and then matchmaking as needs happen across the portfolio. And that’s definitely a difficult task and obviously, data hygiene plays a part in how you think about structuring data.
[00:09:08] So that you can uncover that kind of connective tissue to find opportunities like that. So that’s awesome. And the scale is starting to get really interesting too. So you mentioned you looked at 300 deals and made 65 investments. Did I get that right?
[00:09:22] Jason Burke: Yeah, it’s a little over 300 deals and 65 investments. Which may sound like a high ratio of deal flow to investments, but given the way in which our deal flow comes in from our members, our members are already somewhat triaging deals in advance. So this really comes down to, you know, each investment group or angel group may have varying rules and ways in which they manage their deal flows.
[00:09:47] You know, some may operate like TBD Angels where all deal flows coming from their members who have an understanding of what the group wants to see, and sort of filters the opportunities down to what they know might resonate with the group.
[00:10:04] Some groups may have a button on their website that says ‘Founders submit here’. And, it’s sort of a waterfall of appeals that are coming in. So you know, that’s what allows us to investigate probably in a higher percentage of the deals that we quote unquote see because they’ve been pre-vetted, but that’s sort of the way that math works out.
[00:10:29] Kjael Skaalerud: Totally. And we are seeing, I guess the model in ventures, especially evolve a lot where the origination and the sourcing is now distributed and a responsibility of the LPs. So you have groups, like Stage 2 Capital out there, which is all the LPs or go to market leaders, kind of VP level and above revenue leaders, sales leaders, customer success leaders that participated in the fund as LPs.
[00:10:52] Like a by-product of just their role in their reality, they have kind of asymmetric access to all these up and coming groups. Uh, the interactive companies on a regular basis, founders reach out to them for advice. So we’re definitely starting to see the actual model start to evolve away from the GP, owning everything from origination through to, you know, diligence investing and then portfolio monitoring and value creation.
[00:11:12] So it sounds like you’re having a lot of success with kind of that same sentiment there.
[00:11:17] Jason Burke: Yeah, I think the common denominator across this is a growing introduction of collaboration of members within an angel group, collaboration of LPs within a fund like Stage 2, in being able to bubble up their collective knowledge and networks, to help inform the ways in which the deal flow is structured and the decisions are made.
[00:11:43] It’s one of those, several opportunities for software to play a great role. Kjael, you mentioned earlier, just trying to try to get your arms wrapped around, who has what types of experience and which folks within the network have connections with the appropriate companies.
[00:12:02] It’s really knowledge management and at the core of that, it’s a place where software can play a role and we’ll likely see data-driven decisioning around the whole end to end process as well as investment decisioning playing a much bigger role as software platforms come to bear with tools to enable that.
[00:12:24] Kjael Skaalerud: Totally. And we see that, don’t want to steal your thunder on All Stage, but I think it would definitely be awesome to move there. I have a sense of, of the Genesis story there just based on TBD and what you all were up to, but that’s something that we hear very commonly too, from traditional GPs.
[00:12:39] Where they have kind of legacy technology in place, or a lot of things are manual or individuals are kind of using their own process and tools to execute different things. And so, you know, Sims and like pitch decks and things like that are coming into their inbox. They’re socializing them with their team.
[00:12:56] They’re trying to stay on the same page about which deals they’re excited about. They’ve got some kind of manual pipeline. How do you collaborate on actual diligence and what you want to see in the end of the deal and how you want to move it forward? And then post-investment right. It’s just a network management, meets content management, meets collaboration on decisioning and all the while having record keeping to kind of keep everybody on the same page, marching in the same direction.
[00:13:17] And so I imagine early days of TBD Angels, right? With a small kind of a founder base. Deals are coming in. These are interesting. You’re socializing and via email, maybe you set up a slack. Hey, what do we think about this one? Let’s meet with the founder, oh we got a term sheet lets socialize that.
[00:13:33] And I imagine at some point you had an aha moment that was like, wow, I’ll bet technology could really grease the wheels here. So can you talk to us about the moment when via TBD Angels, that’s my assumption there, where you’re like, okay. Like there isn’t much technology catered to angel groups out there to support the workflows that we’re trying to do.
[00:13:51] There’s a lot of complexity around information, task, execution, collaboration, et cetera. So what was the tipping point for you all? When it was like, Hey, we need a technology. And then if you could go from there, towards doesn’t seem like there’s much catered totally towards our kind of profile as an investor, maybe we should build something.
[00:14:08] Jason Burke: That aha moment came very, very early. A lot of times, yeah, it plays out the way you described as that, you face a pain, you deal with that pain for a long time until it becomes unbearable and you need to put a bandaid on it.
[00:14:22] You need to put a formal bandaid on it, but very early into TBD Angels we saw the signs of hockey stick growth on both membership growth, as well as deal flow. And we were doing what a lot of the groups do nowadays and we’re using air table to manage all of the deals and all the information about the deals and that metadata.
[00:14:39] And the membership and the activity with the data at TBD Angels, we rely on member voting to move deals forward in the process and to sort of, take some downstream actions, but really quickly recognize that this wasn’t going to scale air table or Excel.
[00:15:03] Using slack and email and text messages all great tools on their own, but they’re not purpose-built for the real problem statement, which is enabling an investment community, to scaled influx of deal flow and a growing membership, and allow for engagement across that and understanding, you know, who’s interested? Is Kjael interested? How much does he want to commit? And trying to do that across 260 members just wasn’t going to work.
[00:15:32] And that was really the Genesis for building what started out as a solution to that problem and helping put a product in front of the end users to do what they needed to do: submit deals, vote on deals, review deals that solution became a product , as that product continued to expand with features and functionality and through many conversations with the wider ecosystem to inform roadmap that became the business of All Stage. I’m a big believer that the best products come from folks who are solving their own problems, who have faced the pain themselves and know what needs to be faced.
[00:16:11] And with that said, no product leaders, know everything, or feel all the pain. So conversations with the market are critical to understand what the wider ecosystem needs, and using that to prioritize. And at TBD Angels, we weren’t dealing with years of legacy process and trust.
[00:16:30] You know when All Stage was being created, we were only several months old. With a lot of groups, one of the challenges with software making its way into the world of investing is that at least as it relates to early stage investment angel groups is that a lot of angel groups may have been around for 25 years and have been relying on Excel and don’t realize what smart software can do to accelerate the efforts of the business.
[00:16:52] We didn’t have any legacy process in place and it allowed us to be agile and adopt tools to allow us to move faster, to collaborate and solve some of the friction points that generally exist in the wider, early stage ecosystem.
[00:17:15] Kjael Skaalerud: Totally. And I know it’s still early days, but I guess when had the aha moment, you committed towards moving in a more tech forward kind of modern direction, as you mentioned, you had a chance to start the house from scratch instead of ripping down, scaffolding, which can sometimes be more of a challenge.
[00:17:33] I guess what are some of the things that you’ve observed in terms of better outcomes, better performance, more efficiency, what are some things that have stood out to you since getting All Stage a little bit further baked?
[00:17:44] Jason Burke: Yeah, I think one of the key pieces of any platform that is being introduced into a space that may have had a legacy process and is you know, aiming to be introduced to human beings who are just generally averse to change is that it really does need to solve the real pain points.
[00:18:06] And it has to do it 10 X better than whatever’s being used right now. One of the key elements that’s just becoming part of our world is, the appetite to be collaborating with others. And that’s what’s happening with an investment group. So tools that help the group leverage the collective knowledge of that community to make investment decisions, to learn from each other is really important.
[00:18:31] Tools need to provide the table stakes, in the world of of investment groups, you just need the tools to submit deals and have a data room and have a portfolio that’s table stakes. That, isn’t a differentiator, but it’s necessary. Without those things, the platform might as well not exist.
[00:18:49] Then you need to bring that a step beyond especially if you’re bringing it into potential groups that have not been using software to date, and now they’re needing to convince themselves that they move towards a different process and a different set of tools.
[00:19:06] And that involves like streamlining the overall process and enabling things like voting, transparency into the details related to a deal, bringing this all into one place versus links to Dropbox and a pitch video, all being separate links, coming over email and slack and enabling commitments on deals to happen all in one platform.
[00:19:27] And then bringing it to a really advanced level, and introducing advanced value to the end-users of a product like this and things like allowing investors to use data, to inform investment decisions. Understanding who might be interested in the deal and marry that with an understanding of what that person’s background is to perhaps recommend deals to the right people, based on data and an activity that is being seen the platform, and really enabling that collaboration both across investors, as well as between investors and founders.
[00:20:11] And as software helps bring those two together there’s a lot of power if you start to connect investors with founders, because there’s a lot of pain points when those are a disconnected relationship in the investment process.
[00:20:22] Kjael Skaalerud: That’s like totally in line with our thesis, just in terms of how we think about tech maturity, if you will, as a concept where like first order of business is to get data and workflow in one cohesive system, under one roof.
[00:20:34] Right. As you mentioned, it’s like, all right, how do we get out of slack? Email text message Dropbox. How do we pull that together into like a singular location? And then once you have your data and workflow in place, you can start to use data visualizations to comprehend data and make decisions more quickly.
[00:20:52] And then as data accumulates over time. You can actually use it to predict outcomes in the future. Right? So as, as the portfolio for TBD scales and you have all that data captured in All Stage, you can start to understand, okay, what are the attributes, the firmographics, the elements of operational performance that identify the real outperformers.
[00:21:10] And then you can get more granular with your thesis, right? Where it gets goes from, you know, we’re going for SaaS business thats pre-revenue, that play in these categories, that have strong technical founders, et cetera, to we want to see this level of adoption and daily active usage. We want to see this concentration of competitor set.
[00:21:29] We want to see, you know, geographic distribution to X, Y it just gets two or three levels more granular, which allows you to be much more predictive and inform obviously how you go to market and originate new deals and how you make decisioning on the diligence side. Cool! This is a very exciting time, man.
[00:21:43] This is all really good stuff. Are you having fun?
[00:21:46] Jason Burke: It’s a lot of fun. I mean, it’s a lot of building the plane while it’s in the air. The plane being just the way in which all of this stuff runs and you know, this is an industry effort.
[00:21:59] The industry is going through change. Some of the thesis behind all stage. And if you think about the name of all stage, the thesis is that smart software will play a key role in all stages of investments. So not only early stage, which is the initial focus of the company.
[00:22:21] But going up through supporting funds, supporting VCs, corporate VC, there’s a lot of common elements across all of those different types of investments. And obviously also a handful of unique things that are unique to early stage groups of VCs, for example. Um, But really the underlying pieces that software will play a role.
[00:22:42] And it’s frankly, it’s not software for the sake of software. It really needs to be solving the problems of the market. But we’re at a point in time where there is a lot of competition for the best deals. There’s a lot of great startups and founders and the entrepreneurial ecosystem has really taken advantage of what’s been going on in the world the last few years and creating great companies doing this in a remote fashion and building great technology and great businesses which creates opportunity for investors.
[00:23:15] There will be more and more competition to get into the best deals, to get into the next unicorn. Which means that I think we’ll start to see the lines between those different types of investments that I was mentioning, start to blur. So we’re already starting to see VC’s moving downstream towards pre-seed and seed and even creating funds that are focused on pre-seeds that they get in early.
[00:23:39] And once you start to do that and you have VCs and angel groups and funds starting to look at the same opportunities. It creates a frenemies situation where these groups can be friends and sort of collaborate and share deal flow. But at the same time, there is a competition for these.
[00:23:57] So, this is where software can help play a role in enabling those groups to better interact with each other so that they can improve their own efforts, but also improve the experience for the companies in which they’re investing.
[00:24:11] Kjael Skaalerud: For sure. Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of really good stuff there.
[00:24:14] And, you know, from Andreessen’s, software’s eating the world, to a Jay Kreps, the CEO of Confluent, has a quote that that is kind of one of our guiding beliefs too, or just a big message that we bring to the market. And I’ll just read it real quick. “It isn’t just that businesses use more software, but that increasingly a business is defined in software.
[00:24:31] That is the core processes a business executes from how it produces a product to how it interacts with customers, to how it delivers services are increasingly specified, monitored, and executed in software.” Right? So the old saying is every company is a tech company, some just don’t know it yet.
[00:24:46] And then the concept that when competition is increasing, right, like in traditional kind of economic business theory, right. It erodes profit until, you know, it costs you to deliver the goods, but what the market’s willing to pay. And it’s the job of a business operator to kind of engineer a monopoly and maintain it as long as you can.
[00:25:04] And it seems like the incumbents who perhaps weren’t as challenged, historically have been running a monopoly for some time. And now that the category is just exploding, right? Like I think 2021 was an all-record breaking year. And obviously there are economic cycles to consider and things like that.
[00:25:19] But we’re definitely feeling the same thing where it’s like, speed and efficiency are really the name of the game in any business you’re at. Technology is one of the greatest sources of operating leverage ever compared to human personnel, historically. And with that said in the context of the industry, right?
[00:25:33] Most are kind of technology laggards, because they haven’t been challenged up until this point. And I know you highlighted some of the acute issues on deal sourcing and origination, which is what we hear most often like being first to the right deals. Right. And then we also feel that and hear a lot of that from GPs, when it comes to fundraising, It’s like, hey, there’s more players in our category.
[00:25:51] It’s harder to stand out from the pack. Everybody’s returns and performance are generally pretty good. LPs have defined allocations to our strategy or to our stage. And we’re all fighting for the same capital. So how do we bring that speed and effectiveness on the fundraising side? Right?
[00:26:05] Cause in the middle is, it is traditionally speaking is a fund, right? And one side of the business is focused on bringing capital and resources and courting LPs, and bringing them into the fund and selling their track record, selling their thesis, et cetera. And then on the other side of the equation, you’re deploying capital out of the fund, where you’re still selling returns, selling track record, you know, helping management teams and CEOs understand, you know, your place for value creation and how you bring kind of wealth and prosperity to them and their employees.
[00:26:28] So it’s, it’s a very interesting time of the category. And I guess, do you see the industry at large being shooken up, so to speak over the next three, four years? I guess I’ll prompt you a little bit, especially with the increasing, rate with which former founder, operators, tech executives are moving into venture, whether it’s as Angels or participating in launching their own fund, following a big exit, something like that.
[00:26:55] Another data point that’s interesting is for the first time ever, there are more Private Capital Fund Managers than Hedge Fund Managers. And we all know the approach that Hedge Funds have historically taken. Very data-driven right, they’re, you know, taking satellite images and blending them with target, purchase, you know, data to understand and speculate on the price of peanut butter.
[00:27:14] Right. So they’re obviously going to bring that rigor to the privates, I guess, do you see the category being shooken up pretty extensively over the next couple of years? Or do you think it’s going to take a longer time? And then I guess how long do you think it’s going to take to get there?
[00:27:30] Jason Burke: I think we are starting to, so yes, I do think that will happen. And too, I don’t think it’s actually necessarily that far off, if you and I were chatting 10 years ago in 2012 than sure. It takes a long time to move a market. I mean, you quoted Andreesen, around software’s eating the world, and we’ve seen this happen in things like media and retail and transportation that’s already happened.
[00:27:50] It’s been slower to investing, but we’re already starting to see that start to appear with the platforms creating commercial tools for things like what you mentioned around workflow and analytics and portfolio management. Some great things coming out of companies for transactions.
[00:28:09] Like what you see out of Angel List and Allocations and Assure and startup pitches what Stonks is doing, and enabling you know, real time activity during pitches and equity management from Carta and Shoobx. And, you know, these are all software solutions to real customer problems.
[00:28:29] And, you know, the fact that some of those company names that I mentioned are very, very valuable companies. The reason why these companies are focused on this is that they see the writing on the wall as well. And yeah, I think we’ll see more and more decisions being made with data, whether it’s something like satellite imagery being used to figure out where the best peaches are being grown or, you know, some VCs are pulling data out of GitHub to start to understand trends with respect to different technology and where things are happening and using that to inform their focus and their investment.
[00:29:02] So we’ll, we’ll see more and more of this. These are things that can’t be done with human beings. Even the smartest human beings, there’s only so much that can be done by the human brain. And it really needs a matter of combining the person and the people with the right tools. And those two in combination can really help move everything forward.
[00:29:26] Kjael Skaalerud: All right. Excellent. Well, we’re coming up time, so we better start to wrap up. If it’s okay. Maybe get a little bit personal. And then one question that I really like asking is and I’m borrowing this from, from Tim Ferris, who was maybe the grandfather of podcasts at one point, but, what is a book that, you most often give away or like the book that you recommend the most?
[00:29:48] Jason Burke: The book that I’ve really, really enjoyed a lot in recent years um, has been the Theranos book. Obviously there’s been a lot talks about both on the news channels as the trials happening, as well as several made for TV documentaries.
[00:30:04] But it’s really great in reading through the dynamics between the founders and investors, the founder and the board, the founders and the employees, and the ways in which the employees reacted to this. Frankly for me personally, it was a lot of fun because I used to live out in the valley and a lot of references to locations of where some of the Theranos offices were.
[00:30:28] And where some of the dirty activity was happening are places that I knew. And it took me a long time to read the book because I would continue to pause and look at names on LinkedIn and seeing where I was connected. So it was a real lot of fun, but, you know it makes for great stories in the media. But it’s also a world that we’re all part of as we’re building businesses and also investing in businesses.
[00:30:54] Kjael Skaalerud: And iconic story. Right. And to your point, I think that there’s always a dynamic between operators and the board, the operators and investors and the board. A lot of times the investors are on the board and then you have the employee populations. And how do you kind of manage expectations and communicate across the board and keep everybody jazzed and motivated, but also, approach those conversations with honesty and integrity.
[00:31:17] There’s a lot of action there. So right on, man, thank you so much for your time. This has been an awesome conversation and thanks to everybody for tuning into Preferred Return and more stuff coming at you soon.