How do private secondary markets actually work?

welcome to episode 39 of fundraising demystified today we have SIM Desai co-founder and CEO of Hive a secondary transaction platform that recently raised $4.2 million to centralize and automate the secondaries market for private companies if you're looking for an education on secondaries this episode is for you Sims shares his experience as a finance professional at Setter Capital where he learned the ropes of how secondaries markets work he talks about how the market has boomed over the last 20 years thanks to Facebook but he had experienced a lack of transparency in data and pricing that created a lot of excess fees and inefficiencies in the market that he set out to solve with Hive Sim and I go back and forth on how secondary transactions work who is doing them and why and how deals get done it was a fascinating conversation and I'm sure you'll think so as well now as a reminder to get notified of our weekly podcast and newsletter be sure to join us at join. thunder. BC again subscribe at join. thunder. BC now on to the show hello everyone welcome back to fundraising demystified today we have SIM Desai with us founder and CEO of Hive welcome to the show today thanks Jason it's great to be here no I'm excited to have you you you built an incredible product you a great background that led you to the development of solving a problem for the secondaries Market but for the audience sake it' be great for you to share a little bit about you your background and what you're doing at Hive absolutely so uh you know I I have I come from sort of the business side of the equation you know many Founders are technical Founders but I'm I'm coming from the the sort of the domain expertise side uh I spent 15 years in brokerage of uh of private Equity Investments and you know we call that the secondary Market the secondary Market is effectively when an existing investor in something um is reselling it to somebody else and so uh instead of as opposed to investing directly in the company or directly in the fund and so uh that's what I did for many years and uh you know around the 201 teens period uh we you know the the sort of the trading of uh shares in in private companies especially Venture back companies uh started to become a thing you know it started with Facebook um you know it's it's kind of a a funny story about about Facebook which sort of accidentally became um a public company because they exceeded uh the limit to the number of shareholders that a private company was allowed to have which at that time was 500 then um the uh the legislature passed a law that enabled private companies to have um more shareholders and they increased the limit to 2,000 and that was what actually was sort of a a major Catalyst for uh the Advent of sort of the modern uh BC secondary Market as we know it today so what because private companies were able to have more shareholders uh they were able to stay private for longer I mean this one of the things that enabled them to stay private for longer and that's what created sort of enough um shareholders to uh create kind of almost like trading of these Securities and um so you know over the course of our my time at at my former firm Setter Capital where I uh started that business um we realized that there was sort of a real opportunity to potentially kind of automate uh the secondary market for for Venture you know investors and buyers and sellers needed like a uh you know one Central meeting place uh you know at that time there was a number of different Brokers running around the market with with Excel spreadsheets and the like um we wanted to centralize that into one place we also thought that the transparency into market pricing um fixed fees uh and then automation of the process all all would sort of um add tremendous value for buyer Sellers and the private companies themselves the issuers because right now um the way the traditional Market Works uh you know the each of these secondary transactions kind of bespoke it means a lot of work for the company on the back end of for completing that transaction so one of the goals of our platform is not just to centralize the market um and make it more transparent but also to automate that transaction process so that companies don't have to spend so much time uh in fact they can be almost completely hands-off in the process uh other than obviously you know approving the transfer uh which is you know which is the right that all companies have um o over uh over secondary transactions so let's unpack that a little bit more I think um I do want to talk about you know the the company and the the product a little bit more and what your fundraising experience is but I think for our audience today they might not be fully aware of what a secondary transaction looks like uh so it' be good to kind of have a little bit of an education on this front and kind of explain to you know Founders and you know VCS that you know maybe haven't been in the game for 10 years where secondaries start to become a reality uh later stage companies so you what do you typically see as a the profile of a typical company that opens up the door for secondary transactions to to happen and and kind of how what are the economics of a secondary transaction so the companies that typically uh sort of trade uh in the secondary Market are uh what we call uh and certainly those that are most amable to a platform like Hive um are late stage companies so we first of all we refer to those companies is issuers because they're the issuers of the stock uh but these are late stage companies typically like a series C uh at least B at least B but typically like a c or later company uh Venture backed backed by you know high quality investors um usually they need to have been around for a while uh in order to have sort of uh shareholders who are ready to to start monetizing their holding um and you know they need to have a somewhat diffuse shareholder base meaning that you know there's got to be a decent large number of shareholders because not a large number of shareholders the opportunity to sort of create a market around that stock uh is is is more limited but you know provided those conditions are all in place then typically these companies um can actually create a relatively um liquid uh market for their stock so that's that's kind of the value of this is because you know back in the 990s and early 2000s companies went public so early and much you know lower valuations the public could get access to it and private markets private companies are now staying private till they're tens of billions in value like stripe who's just refusing to go public uh and and secondaries are really the only way to get access Andor to generate liquidity for early employees early investors uh and so basically what you're opening up is this opportunity for that transaction to be a little bit more transparent and seamless through a platform as opposed to the more opaque broker dealer experience where you know it's like oh I know a guy you know that can help facilitate this I got some spreadsheet on the chair so um opening up this Market to broader audience but from a investor side you know who's who's buying these Shares are these retail Traders are these you know family offices are these in tional buyers who's typically coming in at this on the buy side yeah so um you know today I would say that if when we when we look back on the secondary market like let's say uh decades from now um we'll we'll probably see this as a pretty formative stage uh for the market in other words it's it's really underdeveloped and um so today uh the um overwhelming majority of buyers in this market are funds so uh those could be uh VCS who uh yeah especially later stage VCS who um are interested in adding exposure to sort of more established uh mature companies uh but which are still sort of startups right uh and so that's one category then you have um investors like hedge funds uh you have there's an entire class of funds called secondary funds which are funds that are um set up to do second secondary transactions to purchase stock from in existing shareholders uh and in those funds oftentimes also do primary Investments uh and then there are uh so th those would be sort of the major categories but really um any kind of Institutional Investor and then uh and then there is a significant percentage of let's say um you know ultra high networ slamily office uh type groups who are who are also buying um I think that's going to those types of share buyers are going to sort of really proliferate a lot um as time passes but today that's where it's concentrated Goa and and what's kind of the economics of these trades because they are not public they're not actively traded and you know there are other secondar platforms there secondar transactions going on you know how is a price ultimately set and what are the fees associated with those types of transactions yeah so the the price setting thing is sort of one of the key sort of pain points um that we're looking to solve here with this platform right because if you you know as you know um this is a very illiquid and infrequent market right when you have a market like that where you can't just go and uh observe the market price for something uh you know price Discovery is sort of that uh kind of key tension right it's one of the key challenges especially for a seller um so our plat is designed to sort of help solve that problem by creating one central place where buyers and sellers can both go to place their orders and effectively create like an order book um for that market right so if you're a seller um you know sellers tend to be more it more generally speaking especially individual sellers tend to be more price takers we call them price takers because they sort of uh they're not necessarily looking to set a price they want to maximize price so if they heard about a good price they're typically going to be aiming for that price or higher but um they don't necessarily they're not doing some kind of like underwriting exercise on the cell side to you know determine what is the fair value of the stock you know in order to arrive at at a sales price so that's sellers are just sellers are really looking for Price Discovery so that doesn't that doesn't really solve the mark the price setting problem um uh they want price discovery on the flip side buyers because they tend to be bit more um uh sophisticated and they tend to be funds um have the ability to gather information about these companies uh and you know incidentally one of the challenges in this market is the fact that these are private companies therefore they don't have information that's available publicly uh about their performance and and the like but these um these sophisticated institutional investors and funds are able to sort of obviously bring a lot of resources to bear on kind of identifying a price so often times the way a market market for a security kind of starts is that uh the buyer um a buyer uh establishes a price they'll go posted on the platform um so there's a bid up for the stock they can buy you know let's say up to $10 million worth of that stock and then sellers are able to respond to that right so sellers can then come and say okay they can create their own listing for sale and have a buyer then invite buyers to bid on it or they can respond to that bid that was that was independently posted by the buyer and possibly just accept that bid that the buyer put up um at X price once that's the tricky part right is getting the market going right getting a you know it's kind of the chicken or egg problem if there's no seller then then why would a buyer come if there's no buyer then why would a seller come um so that process of getting the initial orders into the marketplace is is the Big Challenge once there is um let's say even an a provisional even if there's a a bid a buyer and a seller or multiple buyers and seller on a platform um once that's there there's some degree of um um of price discovery that uh that that that users other users can get when they come to the platform so they can see okay well now there's an established price if you're a seller and you're coming to um the platform and there's already been some transactions or there's already some bids or listings at um an established price then then you're able to be again like I said you're then you're able to be that price taker you're be able to be that seller that says okay I'm going to just post at the current market price so that's a big kind of your question really hits the nail on the head in terms of what what is one of the key sort of problems we're trying to solve here which is price Discovery um in terms of the uh in terms of the fees for these transactions they range uh in for based on the size of the transaction so uh you know a small transaction that's uh you know let's say even below 100,000 may have commissions uh around 5% plus administrative fees so you know the fees can get high as a percentage of the transaction value for small transactions versus larger institutional trades uh the fees can come down as low as even 1% or even lower depending on the size of transactions that's General range um for these deals we do also though offer um heavily dis counted fee rates when we're working W with the company so those would be sort of open market um kind of transaction fees but when we work with a company and are able to sort of um offer uh a program that's designed for all investors or all shareholders of that company uh we're able to really substantially discount those fees uh you know to make it more Eon economical across the shareholder base gotcha now I think that makes a lot of sense and uh I'm glad you shared that just because I think that's something that a lot of people just don't you know unless they're trading in secondaries they don't really know how this Market works and going back to something that you brought up earlier like the other day like this can't be just be like Oh I'm an employee and I want to sell my stock like there's a process involve like this that you know for an investor wants to sell their position or whatever it might be like they have to get approval for management there there's certain steps that have to go through so it's a pretty arduous process because it is not a public stock that's listed on the public Stock Exchange so I guess kind of give us the quick highlight level of what a company has to do to list their shares on a secondary transaction yeah so um you know as a we we're a we're a finr member and we're uh we operate what's called an alternative trading system uh that's registered with the secc what that enables us to do is it enables us to um put up uh effectively post aboard where um buyers and sellers of a certain stock can come and uh you know Express their interest in buying or selling so the first step really is um the company uh just taking a step back the company's General um like these the shareholders the B of these shareholders agreements generally say that the company or the board in particular has to approve um a transfer now in order for a transfer to be approved there has to be a proposed transfer right so you uh so a lot of um companies have taken the position that they will just be passive um until the point in time comes when you have a trade to submit to them so for those companies we have we have active markets going on in stocks uh where um a buyer and seller meet and then we go to the company and propose the trade and the company um may not have even heard of Hive prior to that date prior to that stage so we'll be matching trades um on the platform then we go to the company for approval and some of those companies are very happy with that process um other uh and those those would be some of the most active stocks on the platform other companies uh want to take a much more controlled approach to uh secondaries and they want to sort of pre-approve um all the buyers H and uh you know only offer liquidity to shareholders once in a while like let's say once a year through a tender offer and the like so that would be a completely different process and um that usually involves the company being a lot more involved at the very front end uh before we even start any kind of marketing of the stock and uh you know they establish a bunch of parameters for the process and then uh we start that process but typically that's more of a situation where um uh you're doing something like a tender offer where uh you know there's where one buyer making an offer to to many shareholders at once so th those would be sort of the two primary sort of paradigms in one case approval happens um at the time of the what after the two parties are matched and in the second case um approval happens before the process even starts gotcha okay so I think that that helps kind of clarify kind of what that experience looks like and I appreciate giving the education to our audience and you know now I'd like to kind of kind of kick it back to to you because you build this product for a reason you were doing these types of transactions at Setter Capital before starting Hive you know was kind of the experience you know at Setter capital you know more prominent firm in this space and kind of what's the the benefit of bringing this into you know the Venture Capital world with a product like this so um you know the the the the traditional approach was like I said a lot of phone and email work you're doing a lot of stuff by phone and email um there is no uh and that that that continues today I mean we still do a lot of uh you know this is a market that's not going to operate completely autonomously right it is always going to require some degree of um intervention from from human beings some degree of service from human beings um but the big innovation that we've done here is to um really productize um the way that you interact with the market right so instead of calling up a broker and which is you know how it worked before um instead of us calling around Sellers and then sellers calling us and you know having a bunch of one-off conversations about price um we you end up you end up you just have one Central place where buyers and sellers can go so really you know things were going things things are going well at set set is still a successful business there are many other uh traditional broker dealers um out there like Forge Global um and and other similar firms who still operate in the sort of traditional way without a product a real product uh Marketplace product um but we felt and and that works and but we felt that there was a real opportunity to add a lot more efficiency uh and value to the process by by giving people that kind of one Central meeting place where they could go and discover price and not have to have you know conversations with five or six different Brokers and not know which broker is telling the truth about actually having demand uh and and and you know what is the real price that that buyers are willing to pay you go to the page on hive and you can actually see uh you get full transparency into that you can see the buyer that there is actually a bid there you can see what price they're bidding you can see how much they're willing the buy um and you can see the transaction history so that you have transparency into what's the fair price you also have fixed fees so that's one of the other big pain points historically dealing with the more traditional broker dealers um it was that you often ended up in these oneoff fee negotiations with them depending on the Dynamics of the trans transaction so if the broker felt that there was significant overlap between a buyer and a seller they may not be entirely transparent to the buyer and the seller about that upfront and rather uh they may try to use that Dynamic to extract more fees out of the out of the transaction and sort of then negotiate that uh kind of that fee amount at the sort of the 11th Hour um once the Stars once the match was already aligned whereas with Hive you know that is that information is completely transparent and it's fixed we're not uh sort of doing oneoff fee negotiations yeah it's it's basically taking a lot of ambiguity opaque process and making a lot more transparent putting product in there but still realizing that you know just given the private n uh the nature of private markets there's still a human element but a lot more technology in the process to be bring transparency to it um and to build a product product takes money you guys raise some money uh that's what the show's you know typically all about is the fundraising Journey uh so it walk us through a little bit about you know the starting of Hive and the realization that you're going to need to raise money and kind of what that process was how much you raised and so on yeah so um you know I guess one advantage we had with Hive was that we were um not inventing an entirely new uh product or service right like as in in you know a lot of the challenges that a lot of SAS companies have have is that um they're they're really kind of entirely redefining the way um people do something right so they introduce a product that um is not really replacing anything else that already exists um uh or if it's replacing something it's replacing something that's completely different so those companies really have a a a long process of sort of demonstrating uh you know product Market fit maybe they go through a lot of iterations in their product and so on whereas our strategy around uh sort of uh creating our technology platform was to take a service that was clearly already a value ad service this brokerage service and which one which we knew we could generate revenues from and moving that uh that that that function that service that activity online right is taking taking that service that's already being done and um moving it into this automated Marketplace and what that meant was as we go through that process of having users adopt our technology uh we are still able to provide them the service that they're looking for um and and be very sort of responsive and customized to what they're looking for and generate revenues from that so long way of saying that um unlike a lot of other uh start early stage startups we were able to generate revenue from day one and um that uh that enable that gave us a lot of flexibility right so even when we went to raise um it was we wer in a situation where we desperately needed the cash in order to uh you know uh operate right the the the business was generating revenues and and was able to um by and large able to sell fund uh but you know the reason we went to Market um you know starting in actually the spring of uh 2023 was because we knew that in order to really um scale this uh we were going to have to build a lot of product quickly so even though we were we were off to a really rapid start um we were going to have to build a lot of product quickly we were going to have to spend significant dollars on marketing um to really educate the market about what Hive is and uh and and so on and um and so we were going to need to have um that capital and we were also envisioning for example uh fee breaks in order for for all types of consti encies especially for the companies themselves to to help sort of that process of bringing liquidity to the market because when you go from being a excuse me a traditional broker dealer to being uh like a an online Marketplace your your your focus changes from short-term revenue maximization and short-term profitability maximization to um Enterprise Value creation right so that's the goal of all startups is not to generate a lot of revenues in the short term and profits in Geor but rather to create a very valuable company so they focus on adoption um getting users there and in the case of a Marketplace maximizing liquidity and so one of the tools we uh plan on using to maximize liquidity is is fee breaks reducing fees for all parties and of course that's uh something that would require us to to subsidize uh the process uh since running a broker dealer is not cheap and um and so that these were sort of the main impetuses for raising one was excuse me in terms of cash uh it was it was marketing it was Building Product and then it was um it was fee breaks with the with the aim of um bringing a lot more liquidity to the platform uh the final kind of reason that we we raised uh important strategic reason we raised is because um we are in interestingly our customers are the same people as the investors it you know broadly speaking which meaning that um VCS are are are buyers and sellers in the secondary Market they are also potential investors in the company and so getting um getting validation from from effectively our own customers as investors in the in the company was was a valuable thing from a PR and communication standpoint but also uh valuable from just a business standpoint because if you've got customers who who have shares in your company uh you know obviously they're going to be more motivated to use you versus your competitors and so uh these are a number of the sort of uh reasons driving the raise yeah and that's been a common theme we've we've had on this show is uh you know you're raising to your custo you're raising from your customers essentially in this case where uh as you mentioned VCS are not just you know potential investors but they're potential users uh of the product so it's a bit of Double Di so in your case running a process and talking to as many VCS as possible is have it a double dip you're you're working on the business and raising at the same time which exactly usually the opposite for most Founders who your traditional B2B SAS they're having to stop selling customers and go sell investors and that's often a loss of productivity so what was your your fundraising process and and how much did you ultimately end up raising yeah so our process took a while so we we H had the the luck of of starting a fundraising process in the midst of you know the worst fundraising environment in many many years um you know uh it took uh it took uh like uh we started around March of 2023 and we didn't really finalize terms with investors until August or September um we ended up raising roughly uh 4.25 million uh us in a safe uh that valued the company uh at a $77 million uh valuation cap in the safe and um the the process was was lengthy um partly because for two reasons a we were um we were not we didn't go out super broadly to Market we uh we wanted to be pretty selective about the people we approached um but but also you know there were you know it took a while to find the investors that were the right fit um we did meet with um some skepticism from some investors about you know the Tam of our Market um uh you know and and those types of things and the to which for example especially private companies uh would be would would adopt um the technology and so um there were uh there were a lot of kind of question marks around that um especially the revenue profile of our business which is not like a typical SAS business where a SAS business you kind of see if you look at the SAS Revenue growth line it's kind of like this this pretty exponential curve because once you sign up a customer um you keep that customer right so you when you add a new customer your Revenue never goes down from one month to another um it just your ARR just keeps Rising right your recurring Revenue just keeps Rising as you add more customers unless you have you know a large trition rate but in our case because we were doing we're we're a Marketplace and because we're we're doing these sort of largish financial transactions there was a kind of a chunky uh kind of Revenue profile right like our Revenue profile was a lot more volatile like generally speaking rising and in fact rising at a at a good rate but uh because of that volatility it that's something that I think uh made some investors bulk because they were just not used to that right most most investors are really used to this idea that you sell subscriptions and and you have this this pretty exponential curve and the only question is how steep is that curve or not right um and so that was that was a that was a so it was it was a process sort of finding the investors we like plus those who really were Believers in in what we were doing and and and could see the underlying growth Trend and and and understand you know the the type of business we're doing I think that's something that in this case you know your business model makes sense it's the traditional model and you know getting the broker dealer F run SEC all that kind of stuff scare you know squared away so you can take basically a transaction fee in the process you know but that's always a common thing is like you you get a big deal you get a big chunk and then you know it's a feast for fam kind of you know Market or you're just kind of winning little pieces here and there and then you get big ones so I'm very familiar with that process with our business but um you know investors are like well we want SAS like up and the right simple charts predictable Revenue but yeah you know in that case in this business you would leave a lot of money on the table and potentially not have the right dynamics of your Market if you you know went down that path so you made the right decision for your business but also it makes it harder to raise money to to do what you got to do totally yeah um um now I appreciate you you sharing that and yeah out of curiosity like how many investors did you did you talk to about your Capital raise um probably in total um like in terms of investors we went out to um it wasn't a huge number like we probably approached 100 or so uh maybe 120ish um in terms of actual conversations uh probably around you know 30 or let's say 30 or 40 um so you know it wasn't a very extensive exercise and then ultimately we ended up getting about five investors five or six investors in um we also had some unique requirements like number one we didn't want to have one investor come in and take 20% because of the um the Strategic value of the investors we wanted to spread it around so we ended up doing this kind of uh deal where we we had um you know we thought the value maximizing thing for Hive what would be the best outcome for Hive would be to have um more investors taking smaller chunks because each of those investors is a potential customer they also have their own network of other VCS that they could be talking to so we felt that that was the way to really maximize value for Hive so in that sense um we ended up getting uh a bunch of smaller investors instead of kind of one large one uh but um uh and that that was also a bit of a kind of a unique process and you know uh but but a great outcome in the end gotcha no and I think that that's you know something I hear often from a lot of Founders that have run a successful process is starting with a list of 100 getting to about 30 40 meetings and then having a few actually invest and that's I think running a pretty pretty seamless process um so appreciate you you sharing that so we talked about your Capital raise we talked about kind of how this you're transforming the secondaries Market yeah and we also mentioned that the capital raising Market when you went out was not ideal um you know how are you seeing the markets today in pertaining to to secondaries and kind of where do you see it going over the next you know call it six months to 12 months yeah so you know with the end of free money year it's interesting because you wouldn't you wouldn't think from the way the public markets work operating right now uh you know hitting new all-time Highs but um with the end of free money you know that's that's something that that has an enduring impact on on earlier stage companies right because um cost of capital has risen all of all of the value in early stage companies is is predicated on future revenues right so if you talk about basic Financial Theory um the value of a of a an early stage Venture back company is dependent on future growth right not not today revenues or even next year's revenues or profitability but but all of the revenue and profitability in the future that is expected to rise at just a dramatic rate right you know 10x 100x 200x but future revenues have to be discounted right uh by U the cost of capital or the required return for for that asset and with a high rate environment that we're in now um that cost of capital has gone up a lot right so VCS are expecting um higher returns uh than they were modeling in before and um you know it is the the current environment um is is also tougher for a lot of startups because a lot of startups uh because SAS companies that you know SAS product adoption has slowed down for sure and um a lot of these early State startups the very s probably the majority of them are SAS companies and um and so uh you know that they're they're being double hurt right so their their end user Market has has has has sort of dissipated um and uh because their end user Market happens to also be a lot of startups as well um but uh but also the the expected return that their their investors have has also gone up so the result is that we we're still in a bit of a quagmire I mean I would say that the market has definitely you know 2023 2023 was definitely sort of the the the low point for the market it seems in terms of um things like valuations trading uh liquidity the bid ask spread between buyers and sellers uh all of that has started to come in a little bit um in the last couple months so January we saw a significant turn up in terms of um average price on the platform uh liquidity is measured by the bid ask spread uh improved a lot uh but yeah we are still at um let's say cyclically low um levels for things like Price Right the average price at which uh these Securities are trading is still at a pretty significant discount to their their last funding rout yeah no and I think that's something that both opportunistic for for investors to come in now but also makes it more difficult because the liquidity might not be there for a lot of investors because they're down you know their portfolios are also down so it kind of creates a know catch way to at some degree but you know for those that have cash it's uh creates opportunities to get better deals um so I really appreciate you sharing your your insights and kind of where you see the market going and kind of sharing your personal story with Hive you know what's the best way for either an investor or a company to to get in touch with you and to learn more about Hive yeah I mean the investors uh issuers should feel free to reach out to me directly by email if they like simsim ave.com so hi.com uh and you can also check us out uh on the web at um hive.com hi.com awesome well is there anything else any other parting advice that you want to share with either Founders that are trying to raise money or investors that are looking at the the secondaries Market um look I would just say that I think that uh the secondary Market is in really early Innings uh the Venture Capital second Market is really in early Innings um the way we see it evolving is that and there's a lot of structural barriers um in place that have to be overcome but the way we see it evolving is that the secondary Market uh becomes a place that private companies can can start to really tap and use to Benchmark things like um private fundraises so as the market becomes more liquid uh and better adopted I think we'll start to see the line between primary fun raising and and and and secondary trading start to blur uh you know you start to have a broader kind of uh pool of capital for um investors and issuers to tap and um you know that's that's the long Vision but I think that's where we're headed and I would just tell encourage companies to Foster liquidity in their stock I mean that's obviously a self-interested statement on my part but at the same time um I think that uh there's a there are many arguments why having a more liquid stock is beneficial for private companies and obviously as long as you're doing it in a way that meets with regulatory requirements there there's not a lot of the common objections um are things that you know we can definitely I would say are are not fundamental uh objections and and the benefits of liquidity are are are are significant no I I think that's Sage advice and and something that you know just in the the hype of private markets that we've seen over the last 10 years and the kind of consolidation of capital in privates uh private alts you know it definitely can hurt uh customer I mean not a customer employee acquisition and bringing on talent and you know growing your team when you know there hasn't been a lot of liquidity where that's what you know how these employee that's why they take these pay cuts they join startups early is to kind of have these opportunities so you know platforms like yours and others are are crucial for creating those types of opportunities for f uh for early employees and high value uh investors and employees so you thank you for the work that you do and you know thanks for coming on the show and and sharing your background and and what uh what's going on with Hive absolutely well look uh thank you so much for having me on I really appreciate it that was my pleasure thanks for listening to the show today we hope you learned something valuable and if you did be sure to let us know in the comments or by hitting that like button and if you're a Founder looking to raise Capital then join us at thunder. VC we provide a free tool to help you identify which VC family offices or lenders are the best fit for you using raai it will save you a ton of time from chasing the wrong investors and since launching our free tools Founders that have joined our Network have gone on to raise over $1 billion do in financing again you can find these free tools at thunder. VC and as a reminder we release new episodes every week so stay informed by subscribing to our newsletter at join. thunder. BC again that's join. thunder. BC and if you or someone you know has recently raised around and want to share your story please email me at Json thunder. BC and that's our show we hope you enjoyed it and we see you next week