How Dakota’s Gui Costin Masters Capital Raising

Gui Costin [00:03:03]:

Support from the road fundraising has always been a hard job and it’s always going to be a hard job. And it’s a business that a lot of people want to be in. So a lot of people have formed funds in the past 1015 years in investment firms and for good reason. Its high margin recurring revenues. Its very interesting business. And so what that means is theres just a lot of people calling on all these allocators, but all the allocators actually need the calls because theyre looking for new and interesting investment ideas. Another thing that makes the job difficult is the first part of the job is a very pedestrian activity, which is you have to send emails to schedule meetings. The only way you can raise the money is face to face. While the environment might be grim, we’ve had a lot of success this year, and it’s really just from being out and staying in front of all your buyers. You just have to be out there in front of your buyers. I would say we have a philosophy that we created in 2006 that every day is a great day to sell, whether it’s raining, whether it’s sunny, whether market’s up, the market’s down. It’s always a great day to sell. And I don’t think it was ever easy, but maybe the past couple of years when the public funds were putting out a lot of capital in the private equity. While I know it might be a little negative right now, my advice to everyone is just to continue to be out there in front of investors, because when you do that, good things happen.

Jeff Williams [00:04:18]:

Yeah, that’s Dakota-ism, maybe. I love these Dakota-isms on your website, the video bios of your team, everybody mentions their favorite Dakota-ism. So I want to talk a lot about Dakota and the culture and stuff, but that’s just presumably one of those sort of things that just kind of organically came about.

Gui Costin [00:04:36]:

Right. Because you have to eliminate the excuses I don’t want to do this because of this. And really, I think what you’re getting there at is really what I learned in building this business. And there’s a lot of business books that talk about your core principles, your mission and all this stuff. And I’ll tell you, a lot of people just do it right. They use the same words everyone else uses. We decided to form these principles because I needed people to buy into a way of doing things and I needed to do it in a way that was real. Just like what I said right there is like if you just keep getting in front of people to buy what you sell, over time, good things happen. A lot of people dont want to do that and so we just have to reinforce that message. But at the same time, when you put your core principles out there that are in your own words, like walk, gate, feet, throw your hat over the wall, dont go cowboy. All of those things. Everything that you do points back to that. When you have situations that happened and all your teammates, your employees buy into those core principles, its a great way to run a business. If you have those core principles there, you’re guiding light. And everyones like, yup, thats how we do things. And really defining how you do things as a company is one of the most important things.

Jeff Williams [00:05:43]:

“Don’t Go Cowboy”, I think is one that I hadnt heard yet. Id heard the “Walk The 8 Feet”. I love that one. Explain “Don’t Go Cowboy”. That one’s interesting.

Gui Costin [00:05:52]:

It happened one day when we were having our sales meeting. In general, we are a team and we know what everybody’s doing and it’s basically don’t go it alone and don’t come in on your white night. Oh, I’m going to save the day. And we looked at the guy. So what are you working on? He’s like, well, I’ve been working on this $900 million subsidize opportunity and literally the place blew up because if that even came up, the first 2 seconds of that ever happening, the entire team would have known about it. But this guy, after three or four weeks, he was a new guy to the company. He thought he was being Mister Hotshot. Our whole thing is put everything that you’re working on in front of everyone on a daily basis because you don’t know, phone calls, meetings, people have had things they’ve read, whatever it might be. So you need to tap into the collective knowledge of the group tap into the collective knowledge of the group where they could be heLPful. So you want to be so transparent in sharing everything that you’re doing.

Jeff Williams [00:06:43]:

Yeah. The serendipity is a powerful dynamic, and I love that. What is your favorite Dakota-ism?

Gui Costin [00:06:50]:

One of my favorites is we grow apples and we sell the apple buyers. We don’t try to convince orange buyers to buy apples. And a lot of people are in the convince, they try to get in the convincing business, and that’s really tough. What that really means is in sales, you’re looking for the quick. No, but you’re not trying to convince someone when they already say, hey, listen, we only index. We don’t use active managers. Move on to your next prospect. Don’t try to convince them. And I think that’s something that really is a through line throughout our entire sales organization.

Jeff Williams [00:07:17]:

Yeah, love that one. All right, cool. Well, we’ve been working closely together, via and Dakota, on a partnership that we’re set to announce here pretty soon. And we’re super excited about that and thrilled to be working with y’all. And we’ll get into a lot of that. But on the same thread, I mean, I think one of the things that jumped out to us immediately as we started discussing this a while back was just the sort of alignment of the companies and principle and culture and things like that. And I gotta tell you, I mean, you know, coming from somebody who’s the part of building a company with a very unique culture and legitimately so. Right. I mean, we’re sort of in between Denver and Boulder, and you wouldn’t believe how much talk there is about company culture and stuff, which I think in a lot of cases is life balance over work balance, if I’m honest. But ours is special, and a lot of people tell us that. And it’s easy, I guess, coming from that position to bump into companies, our culture special. And it’s not always the case. Yours is. I think you should be very proud of that. And there’s a lot in there, I’m sure. But what would you say about having built the culture that you have? I mean, the Dakota-isms are sort of the posters for it.

Gui Costin [00:08:29]:

I mean, it’s obviously something that’s very important to me. And what you realize over time, a lot of people do like to sort of work in an environment that is, you’re constantly complaining about somebody or talking about people’s backs or complaining about this or I. You’re mad about that and you’re not being productive. And it really is bad for people’s growth. It’s bad for our customers, it’s bad for everybody. And so the culture that we’ve created is, I call it, we’re super hard charging culture, but we do with kindness, and that’s not a fit for everybody. But doing it with kindness, where we’re not yelling and screaming, we’re not unrealistic. Everybody’s given their jobs. They know what their jobs are. There’s tons of transparency. And so what ends up happening when everybody buys into that? Transparent, accountable, getting after it, growing, anticipating, because it’s one of the most important things in sales, is being able to anticipate upfront what someone wants to know. And so you frame your remarks that way. Well, it’s no different than internal communication. I shouldn’t have to jump on a call after ten check ins that we have and have to ask the same questions. People should anticipate what’s required on the call, if you will. And then when you do that, you can get so much accomplished. Because people aren’t being demeaned, they’re not being teased, there’s no teasing. You’re all for the team. And it becomes really enjoyable to come to work. It becomes really enjoyable to work with people that are nice to you, that respect you. And there’s low Agia, right? Low volatility. I can’t work in an environment that is high volume. As I always say to everybody, if we’re talking about somebody behind their back, that means they’re not a sit and they’re probably going to have to go every single time. We just don’t do closed door meetings, we don’t talk behind people’s backs. There’s no passive aggressiveness. People just come to work and get their job done and they’re respected and listen. And for me, selfishly, it has to be fun. I have to love the people I work with. We’ve never had a teeny policy, we’ve never had a vacation policy, so we just treat everyone like adults.

Jeff Williams [00:10:18]:

Well, having spent time with your team, it’s apparent and very clear that they love working with you and for you, and there’s really something there. So big ups to you. Cause I know that’s hard. You know, you mentioned how, you know, Dakota marketplace ultimately came to be. I love that story. Basically, you know, you’re a sort of fanatic about CRM. The agent business was maniacal about using CRM and making calls and stuff. And then one day it was sort of like, wow, this is such good data that we’re keeping here on these folks. It might be worth something to other people. It turns out it’s worth a lot. Companies doing outstanding. Was it that simple. I mean, that obvious. That’s how marketplace came to be.

Gui Costin [00:11:00]:

Yeah. I had this idea for a content platform and read all these books on platforms and launched the idea in 2016, finally built a product which took forever in June of 2018 with 14 paying customers. And once they were up there, they had their content. They said to me, where are all the people? You said, you’re going to drive due diligence analysts to this? And I said, well, not really. And so they were getting really restless and angry at me in July. And we have a very detailed sales process team meetings on our investment sales team. So I said, hey, what if we just invited these 14 people to our investment sales call and share information? And I said, for them, we’ll just choreograph it. We’ll bring on a CIO and interview. These are all the institutional investors you want to call in in Boston. We’ll cover a key account like JP Morgan or Cambridge and associates, and map out who to call on and where you were, the wins line, all the key people and their phone numbers and stuff like that. So we did it the 24 August 2018. It was a grand slam. Everyone loved it. And then we did it the following week. Now, at this point, we’ve done it for 200 episodes. It’s called Dakota Live. And what happened in that is no one cared about the content platform. That was a failed business. And then what they cared about was accurate information. So leads, basically, and we were sharing leads with people, and we kept doing it all through September, Fridays at 11:00 until finally, at a point, they’re like, hey, d, we need all the names, phone numbers, email addresses of all the people we talk about on these calls. I said, well, we can’t give you that because that’s our proprietary database. We’ve raised 25 billion. That’s not going to work. Then I looked at my team on October 1 and I said, look, I’m going to lose my share on this other business. What if we just commercialized our database and provided it to other investment firms to subscribe to? So we private label the CRM and launched it on April 1 of 2019. And today we have 781 firms with over 3000 individual salespeople using the product. And it’s been, it’s just been a blast of the business to run.

Jeff Williams [00:12:53]:

So you mentioned Dakota Live. I love that. We were talking before we started taping here. I was in your studio. Facility’s amazing. I’m sitting here in a home recording studio, and I had major moment when I came home from Philly after spending two days in your incredible studio. I kind of sat here like, I’ve outgrown this studio. I need one like geese. And so very cool the uses there. I mean, the team showed us some of the sort of blooper reels and some of the funny videos. I mean, I just love that. But very unique. I mean, this Dakota Live call is like a classic. I mean, the production value is incredible, but very, very useful practically. And it’s just become this thing. I think that members of the team, while we were there told us that a lot of folks that are interested in marketplace will try live, if you will. It’s available only for marketplace customers. The conversion rates are incredible. It is a high value thing, never mind the data in marketplace, but this is a practical, useful thing for capital raisers.

Gui Costin [00:14:02]:

Yeah, big time. The thing that we just backed into it, I had no idea because we were shooting at our offices for years and years, if you will. I said to the team, I’m like, you know what, there’s a space on the third floor. I was like, wow, we could do a studio here once we were moving on the fourth floor. So I went online to college game day and I looked at who produced those college game day studios and I saw this guy Joe Roy up in Connecticut. So I called him and I said, hey, we have a 2500 square foot space down here in Philly. Could you build us an ESPN studio? He goes, yeah, I’d love to. He goes, I’m down doing the Eagles, the Giants, the Commanders. He does it for Cowboys. He’s a professional studio creator. Yeah. And so we just got going with a designer and we designed it and did the whole thing and it was very cool. It was a little bumpy once it launched. There’s a lot that GFG got going in terms of lighting. That was a little bit of a challenge in the beginning, but once we got it all set, it’s been great. And the studio team is like a family down there. They’re like a whole, just the most lovely five people. Just awesome culture that they have down there.

Jeff Williams [00:15:01]:

Yeah. Amen to that. Team’s amazing. The quality. Everything’s amazing. I didn’t know the backstory about the ESPN file. That’s cool.

Gui Costin [00:15:09]:

It was really fun. And Joel makes all our signage and he’s got the client list that he has is second to none in terms of universities, pro teams. I mean, he’s done them all. They’re incredible. It was really cute yesterday because I called him. I needed to do some golf, teamworker, source in the Dakota brand, I will say that’s probably the most fun project.

Jeff Williams [00:15:27]:

I’ve ever worked on, I’m sure. All right, so Dakota Live, amazing. Very practical. And I think that that’s the story, largely from my point of view, about Dakota is kind of talking about the evolution of it, how it came to be from the age of business live, all this. I think, put simply, it is a very common sense, very comprehensive approach to providing data for capital raisers built by capital raisers. And that’s no accident. I mean, it’s just been very logical how it’s come to be. What makes Dakota different, I think, is in large part that, I mean, it’s not like a bunch of technology folks that were like, ooh, imagining all these things. That could be right. I mean, that’s the thing. Having built software products for me, that drives me nuts, is you have to interact with software everywhere you go every day. And you see so much of, like, all these things that somebody did simply because you could, but not because somebody wanted it or would find it useful. It was just, like, available, and it could be done, and so let’s do it. Dakota has evolved to be just very practical because it was built by folks that are doing the same thing as the users on a day to day basis.

Gui Costin [00:16:39]:

Exactly. And it’s also, there’s the law of unintended consequences. It actually allows our investment sales team, on a weekly basis, to have to comb through. So we don’t have to really have the meetings we had in the past, because we have to go public with covering a key account, covering a geography, covering a city. So that keeps us sharpen, you know what I mean? So it’s really unbelievably useful to the team because we’re basically just doing our sales meeting publicly. We’re talking about all this stuff, then you capture it all. And then here’s the crazy thing. All that information, all that content that we currently could alive, all goes into the product. Both all the videos go into the product, and all the transcription, all the written talk spoken about words get transcribed and put into the different accounts and contacts areas. So every single week we do Dakota Live, we enhance the product with new content.

Jeff Williams [00:17:28]:

Yeah, that’s one of the things, by the way, that in talking with some of the customers that we share already and hearing about their use of it, I mean, being able to search through transcripts was a huge point that was called that. And so, too was how comprehensive and differentiated the data is on rias as well.

Gui Costin [00:17:47]:

Yeah, it’s huge. I mean, that’s because we, we have over 250 RA clients and we have 2100 in the database. And as you know, when you talk Raas, there’s 14,500 ras we’re sitting in the SEC website and then you have to sell down only to those ras will actually invest in outside managers and that’s the work we’ve done. And it’s also all the proper contact information so you’re not wasting your time. But we’ve also curated it where it’s only the 2100 ras that matter most to a salesperson.

Jeff Williams [00:18:16]:

And so coming back to whats going on in the market, obviously very nice dataset to have these days. A lot of growth in private markets coming from Rias, I just want to get your point of view. Generally you talked about what its like to be out there raising capital right now. Im going to dub you most interesting man in the world here and run with it. Lets get just your point of view on whats going on. Its obviously a tough time to be outraising capital. I’m on the record as feeling like I’ve had a couple cycles now where these downturns in hindsight proved to be good times for innovation, whether it was technology driven or not. I think the evolution of managers telling stories is amazing. I’ve even equated this a little bit to Napa Valley. I think Napa Valley is amazing. My first trip there, I really appreciated how well wineries in Napa are able to kind of position themselves and tell stories, right. It’s all sort of grapes and wine at the end of the day, and yet the price points, what makes them all different is this story, right. So you go visit them and they tell these amazing stories. And I think that that’s the case with private managers as well, is that, you know, there’s got to be a lot of stories there. And so the evolution through these downturns of the stories as they develop, again, the technology that’s developing and all those sorts of things, whats going to happen, what got us here?

Gui Costin [00:19:41]:

I think back to the comments I was making before. Success in sales, success in anything youre doing is just doing it consistently every single day, doing the right things for us. The right things are getting meetings with our potential buyers on a consistent basis and doing that every single day and not getting sidetracked and trying not to listen to the noise because theres a lot of noise out there. The thing that happened was you just had an egg through a snake with the whole COVID and then all the stimulus and then all of this, it just pumped up all these asset prices to stupid levels and they just all came back down to earth to where they should be. But during that time period, I think the winners at the end of the day just ignored everything and just kept putting 1ft in front of the other, serving your customer, creating a great product, taking care of your employees, and just being consistent. I think the bummer for a lot of people is that some people went up with it and then went down with it. We had our ups and downs, but we just execute it on a consistent basis. And I think where we are today, I dont know where things are going. Theres so many things we cant control. Another big time Dakotasm, which is number one, really is focus on what you can control. And I think thats really the theme of it all of any business, any organization, theres so many things that are the uncontrollables and you just cant worry about them, cant think about them. You just got to focus on the things. And theres only a few things that the salesperson can control. And that’s part of our Dakota way. Know who to call on, know what to say, have a killer follow up system. And we live by those things. Both on the software team and the investment team. It’s very easy to follow. And anything outside of that, you’re in trouble.

Jeff Williams [00:21:12]:

Yeah. This little phase we’ve been through with emerging managers, how many of those folks are going to be around still? I mean, what’s it like out there right now with being an emerging manager that spun out in a minimal track record? Is it the case that the right story and the right execution can get you there, or is there just too little appetite? Right now it’s all shades of gray, right.

Gui Costin [00:21:35]:

Because emerging managers can mean a lot of things. But I think starting out with $2 million with no track record, yeah, that’s going to be a slog. I mean, the smartest emerging managers stack the odds in their favor so they make sure that they have some level of asset base. They make sure they’re just not going out with no track record. Right. They can point to where they’ve had success in the past. I think the people that are perpetually in trouble, right, is if they just go out there and just hope they can get it done. And I’m not saying they’re not smart. They’re probably very, very smart. But if you go on a very low asset base, you don’t really have a great track record in the past to point to or you’re just doing it. I think the emerging managers have done properly. If they’re executing from a sales perspective, there’s no doubt that the emerging managers can win. If we distinguish between emerging manager and pure startup, I think the pure startups are always going to end up filled battle, whereas the emerging managers, if theyre getting our story in front of enough buyers consistently and theyre disciplined to it, how they can win.

Jeff Williams [00:22:33]:

Yeah, there is a desire from certain LPs to hear stories like that, but they have to really be differentiated and there has to actually be something to the story. I was just at an event last week for fundraisers and I made the comment, it’s inherently not differentiated when you ask the question of what differentiates you to 100 managers. We both talk to these folks all day, every day. For the most part, the answers are the same. Oh well, we’re lower middle market focused and we’re operators. I come out and tell people, but it’s like I just heard that in the last call I was on. That is inherently not different. Really developing a differentiated story. Theres an audience for it 100%.

Gui Costin [00:23:18]:

I always think about when you mentioned culture, I learned definitely throughout this process is you cant talk about it per se. You really have to live it. What I mean by that is you have to walk the talk, Jeff Williams, when it comes to those discussions about managers and then how they add value and how they invest, that really has to be brought out and people will buy into that story, but there really has to be a story there. There’s a lot of private equity firms that’ll just be the money and they don’t really want to be the operator. They don’t want to dig in, they don’t want to assist, they don’t want to heLP with business development. That story sings. But it’s maybe a little bit different. They call those sometimes index funds where they just make so many investments. Then on the other hand, you have these other funds that only have ten to twelve investments and they’re ridiculously focused on heLPing those companies succeed. And so I think there’s that story there too. And then I think also just passion is a big thing that needs to come out when you’re talking to a manager and a portfolio manager, just seeing the passion, like what really motivates you to get up in the morning and come to work? And that’s the number one question I ask salespeople to ask their PM so they can then communicate that to the prospective LPs.

Jeff Williams [00:24:22]:

Yeah, I want to get back just quickly to the Altvia-Dakota partnership, super pumped and again, say all the things. Your team’s amazing. It’s been amazing to work with you all, get to know you. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s our hope to empower fundraisers to raise more capital and that it’s a little bit cliche even, but for us, from our perspective, from Altvia’s perspective, we think about trying to provide managers with the tools to be more effective doing this, even to telling a story. Right. We’re really interested in combing through data and being able to find and sort of explore the possibilities of, oh, interesting. You might be talking about this, but did you know that there’s this interesting sort of story in your data about how you do that? And maybe you’re not talking enough about that. At the end of the day, the fundamental problem for capital raisers is you can give them the big bad machine, that they can just push a single button and it can do all these things for them. But if they don’t know who to do it to or who to start, you know, reaching out to and to your point earlier, you know, if you just stick with, with the reach out and stuff, then you can get there. And so that’s really where the combination, you know, comes together, right. Is empowering process and systems and workflow with data and getting people, you know, into a sophisticated workflow where, hey, understanding how to go after people, how to leverage the information that Dakota is providing in context inside of the workflow. Save time, save steps, automate some things here and there. Again, on the surface, it’s like, oh, it’s a pretty straightforward partnership here, but it’s so much more for the everyday than a capital razor.

Gui Costin [00:26:07]:

Yeah. So I would say Altvia, the most important thing a salesperson had is their CRM. It’s their number one tool. There’s not a second tool, it’s their number one tool. And the investment in an all via okay should over time end up being free and actually additive to your revenue. It should heLP you generate revenue. There’s not another leverage point that a salesperson has other than a CRM, okay, and getting the meetings that people have scheduled for the salespeople, you can’t use exchall, you can’t use outlook. You got to get your meetings you scheduled into Alvia, into your CRM. We’re talking on this call Altvia. But you guys have also created a very highly customized product. But it’s the only way to ten x. I mean, if I’m you, it’s the only way to ten x your productivity. There’s no other way to get two x, five x, ten x than your CRM and specifically your product. I always felt when we started with Salesforce, because I know you guys are built on Salesforce, I literally should say to myself, this product is literally free. They should be charging more just because of the efficiency that it creates for a salesperson. It actually makes your life sane. And all you have to do is a couple of things. Enter the meetings that you scheduled into your database. Obviously the underlying data is very important, which is what Dakota marketplace solves for in that data. But at the end of the day, if you’re using Altvia and you just get your meetings in, that changes your life because you can go back and you can associate so many things just with that one activity through the object oriented database. So yeah, what you guys have created from a workflow standpoint is amazing. And every salesperson should be literally addicted to their CRM.

Jeff Williams [00:27:44]:

Thank you. A lot of kind words in there. Were super excited to be working with you all. You and I discussed a follow up episode here of digging into that sales process. So we’re looking forward to that and the listeners ought to as well, but kind of want to just get your thoughts on where the market’s headed generally. We talked earlier and I mentioned the concept of marketplaces. I lead partnerships now and potential m and a opportunities for Altvia and going back through and canvassing and mapping out the market. There is this clear theme of data infrastructure companies. And I’d say Dakota is probably a little bit more of a data company than a data infrastructure. But the data infrastructure being almost listing like services list your product and then the distribution of that as data gets into CRMs and into portals and everybody in the channel thats selling. Theres just this thought in my head about where is this headed in marketplaces or one. You mentioned that Dakota, the marketplace product started that way. At the end of the day, theyre sort of used the analogy. You can match people up based on data and what have you, but they’re still going to want to date and go through the process of having sushi dinners and getting to know each other before they’re going to get married. Right.

Gui Costin [00:29:09]:

Listen, I’m a big fan of icapital and what they’re doing and a big fan of these platforms. However, at the end of the day, everyone’s searching for the holy grail of investments where it’s a self serve. You can just come in and you’ll invest without talking to anyone and it’s just not a reality. I just don’t think it’s ever going to happen for numerous reasons. Number one, it’s a fiduciary based business. So as a fiduciary, you really have to know who you’re investing with. You’re going to want to do meetings on this. And if you work at a warehouse, that’s not the case because they’ve already done their work for you. But if you’re not at a broker dealer and you’re doing your own work, investment products are sold, not bought. That’ll always be the case. Working in investment, sales and fundraising is an extremely pedestrian job on the front end because you’re just having to literally just set up your professional meeting. Shutter Upper. The people who embrace that reality are the winners because they just do more of that activity because that’s the key activity. Then you get in the meeting, you have to bring your story to life. But I don’t see a time where you’re not going to have investment salespeople and you’re not going to have PM’s that need to get out and get face to face with investors. You’re investing people’s money. They want to meet the wizard. That’s just the way it is on the fringes, maybe here and there on larger platforms where you can have that opportunity. But for the most part, you’re going to see advancements in technology and ease of making investments in private funds. There’s no doubt about it. Then there’s a bunch of firms doing it really, really well. So I see a future there where you’re going to see really serious automation and you’re going to be able to deliver really high quality investment strategies at very low investment minimums. You’ll still have to be a qualified purchaser. So 5 million net worth and above. We’re seeing an explosion right now of some of the sophisticated technology for facilitating investments in private funds. So that’s definitely the trend that’s not going to stop. But even those products need to be sold. No one’s just going to dial in, go into the website, oh, yeah, this looks great. Okay, I’m going to drop this in and a little shopping cart and invest 100 grand. It’s just not going to happen en masse, which everyone says, yeah, can you.

Jeff Williams [00:31:11]:

Imagine the potential scandals of like, got these high tech Silicon Valley companies and, oh, we’ll just create this sort of marketplace and, you know, for the user it’s free and they just pick from the screener and then it comes out with the algorithms and like what the compensation behind the scenes was for that, you know, promoting the screener and stuff. There’s a be some interesting scandals to watch play out. Not gonna happen. I love that phrase. They’re sold, not bought.

Gui Costin [00:31:41]:

Yeah, exactly. Thats always going to be the case just because theyre investments. Efficiency can be on the facilitation of the transaction, but the actual selling of it is going to be a safe to face game, I think, forever.

Jeff Williams [00:31:52]:

Yeah, for sure. Agreed. Ive used this analogy before, but it used to be that if you wanted to meet your match, you went out to all the bars and stayed until close. It couldnt be in all the bars in one place and meet all the, the people. And then there became this idea of like, well, you know, if you want to kind of set up what you like and stuff like that, we can kind of use some of this data to find some folks and create some leverage. Right. At the end of the day, that’s really what the technology does. And so perhaps you know, some of that and getting to know each other. But again, it’s just not sort of a mail order partner type situation. It becomes how much leverage is there in consuming information and productive and meaningful ways and telling stories with technology and with data, but spending time getting to know each other and building the trust and the relationship, that is really what’s required and not just to sort of match.

Gui Costin [00:32:45]:

Right. I think the one thing that I think we’ll be able to do is use the data of public underlying investments of certain institutions that then you can create a profile of over time what they’ve invested in, and then you’ll be able to show different investment firms, private equity, private credit, private real estate, what have you. This is your target list based upon ten to 15 years of past investing. I think we’ll be able to start to create profiles to short circuit the process, if you will. It still requires a face to face meeting, but we can use data. Have investment firms target certain institutions that would be amenable to have been amenable in the past to their exact type of strategy. Yep.

Jeff Williams [00:33:25]:

All right, man. Well, listen, I am extremely grateful that you came on. I love talking to you. The insights you have is amazing. You built an amazing company. Very much admire what you guys are doing and how you’ve, how you’ve done it, and thrilled about partnering with you and looking forward to what’s to come there and your offer to come back and talk a little bit more about sort of sales execution. Can’t wait to, we’ll talk soon. Be well and keep doing your thing. We’ll talk soon.

Gui Costin [00:33:54]:

Okay. Thanks.

Jeff Williams [00:33:55]:

All right. Take care.