How do you sell a $100M startup when a crisis hits?

welcome to episode 47 of fundraising demystified the show where I interview Founders and investors that are actively deploying capital in today's markets I'm your host Jason Kirby in today's episode number 47 I chat with win-win lab an early employee at LinkedIn turned wide combinator backf founder of the company NeXT travel a travel tech company that did over 100 million Topline Revenue before losing it all during Co and having to sell the company after selling her company she accidentally fell into the role of becoming a VC where she backed amazing consumer AI companies at Grady and Ventures win-win shares what it is like raising Capital as a woman in her early days and how she navigated fundraising to eventually getting into y combinator to where the now famous Justin KH called her out and called her an idiot as she didn't accept the YC offer to which she did accept and said it was the best decision of her K what's really special about this episode is our conversation about how she navigated selling her company after it went to near zero Revenue during covid-19 and how she ran her m&a process to get a potential buyer at the table she shares insights into realistic examples of deal making that can Inspire any founder so again please be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at join. thunder. VC now onto the show welcome back to the show everyone today we have windwind Lamb with us former founder of next travel and current partner at gritty Adventures welcome to the show with hi nice to see everyone I'm great grateful to have you on the show uh our preliminary discussion before hopping on the recording has been already very interesting I'm excited for everyone to get to know a little bit more about you and your background so let's just go ahead and kick things off can you just tell us a little bit about your background and kind of what led you to founding next travel what happened there and how that led you to going BC yeah definitely um so I actually have always been in Tech probably from the GetGo um when I was you know just out of college everybody else was doing banking Consulting and I for some reason decided I really wanted to work at a social network and I I really really wanted to work at Myspace because you know like Tom was cool and there's a top eight and all of that type of stuff and I applied to all the different social networks except for Facebook because I thought Facebook was lame how smart was I in 2005 and I ended up getting a job through Linkedin at LinkedIn and so you know I was like this seems pretty cool it's the future of work um people were like stop sending me these like spam invites I was like no but this is amazing and so kind of started running products so I get there and they hand me a product called LinkedIn for groups so I'm immediately like a PM at you know like just right right out of college just being like okay great I get to kind of product manage um so I was part of like the initial sales team there um we actually didn't make Revenue pre pre uh pre pre that time so we kind of brought in the first dollars and I think the product line still still exists today is what recruiters sell for draw packages and premium packages um after that um you know I went to business school at USC I worked at a couple small startups in between um and then I actually worked with the Myspace Founders at slingshot labs in my jol games after that because I was you know pretty pretty focused I was like I want to work with the Myspace guys um so did that for a bit um really interesting experience really tough industry actually at that point in time and I decided at that point that I wanted to start a company definitively um so I think it was like 2011 these Singaporean investors found me and they brought me to Singapore to like join a founding team and we started a company that was ripping off Airbnb so we copied Airbnb for Southeast Asia because that's what you do when you start a company in Southeast Asia and at that point in time there's no way for me to raise money there's like no money for women so I was like great we have a million dollars to go start something this is amazing which like in today's world a million dollars is like like a preed so um pretty different Dynamics back then um didn't work out probably because the team didn't know each other and kind of got cobbled together but then I like I basically started next travel off of the back of that as a consumer travel company so I loved to travel um I thought that this whole Genesis of like everything after flights and hotels was really interesting it's how every travel company starts by the way and none of them ever succeed and so we ended up pivoting to um corporate travel mostly because of my experience at LinkedIn to be honest like I knew how to sell to businesses we had started the sales team there and I was like well I need to figure out something that people actually want to pay for and I don't want to go do consumer because it's really rough and it's very expensive and a capital intensive and we just started getting customers from the get-go before we even launched to be honest so we had like partnered with a company called y um Birchbox was telling us all of their travel issues and there's just something there and that's kind of how I started next travel actually okay so you went from LinkedIn to you know startup after startup and then you're doing your own up next travel how big did you get at next travel you made a comment about the difficulty for women raising Capital um and then you go out and do this company did you raise money for next travel and what was the journey for next travel I did so actually the story of next travel is one of the funnier ones because we didn't raise that much Capital but we got it to be pretty big so at the end pre pandemic um we were about a 100 million tofl which is like you know like decent size like probably seven or eight in revenue is um and you know the margin on travel is small but we had actually partnered with expensify pretty early so we actually didn't need to raise that much money for customer acquisition um so after our pivot I um applied to YC on a whim so I knew Justin con from prior to that and all of my friends were encouraging me to apply to YC so during my interview I think it was like my first slate of interviews Sam Alman and Jessica Livingston and then my second one was like Justin and Gary and Cat who were my partners at YC and all of them were obviously very obviously very famous now but this is 2015 and Justin gives me a call and he goes in his like deep voice like you know you're an idiot if you don't do this and he hangs up because I was like 7% That's a lot you know um and it was the best decision that we ever made so um did YC you know it took forever for travel uh the agency to issue tickets so we were kind of sitting around um you know sitting on our hands for a little bit because our customers were waiting for us to be able to issue plane tickets um and you know a as we were waiting um you know like you couldn't really get that product Market fit so we were a little bit slower but the but we started actually Building Product around some of our batchmates while we were waiting for these like licenses and we ended up building our product largely around a company called sloty which is a huge Latin American um education company out but they were traveling everywhere they were flying their teachers in and we built a best-in-class product off of them they had like 40 people and we just built this the best-in-class SMB product for for small businesses to travel and there just wasn't anything on the market so we found out over time that people were using corporate travel agencies even as like small boutique firms like if they you were over 20 to 30 people you really needed a way to M manage your finances you wanted to book everything on the corporate cards a lot of times people don't want to front the expense on their own cards because they just don't have the credit lines and a lot of these people are like 22 23 24 they're just you know out of college so they don't even know some of them don't even have a credit card and then they're getting asked to you know put like 20 30 40 Grand in expenses you know over the course of a year and it freaks them out so um we built we built the platform and we just started getting a lot of traction and then right after YC um David Barrett contacted me I think or or expensive I did and they were like we'd like to work with you um we want to compete against Concur and so we did a partnership then and like even year one year two I remember at some point we were working with Lyft and we were like a very small company at that time and LIF was 5,000 people and they were about to go public in twio and we were I was thinking like how are we G to be able to do this but you know you kind of fake it till you make it so that's an incredible story of especially the the ramp up you got to uh as far as top line revenue and the clients that you got to to bring on especially after realizing you know the consumer travel maybe not the best place to beid which you know a lot of Founders do especially you know first-time Founders they love the sexiness of an appeal of consumer problems but then monetizing those are very difficult and you found a better way to monetize and you built a real business but let's talk about what Co when Co happened how did that impact your business being that you were um that was actually a really difficult time so one of the things that was very interesting about our compan is because we had that partnership with expensify we raised a lot less Capital than our competitors so our biggest competitors were a company called trip actions which is now called Nan and another one called travel perk who we eventually sold to um there are a few other players in the space but we were pretty big um considering we we ended up raising around $4.5 million um over the course of that four years and we actually had term sheets for more than that but because um trip actions had raised so much money I thought it was like wiser to keep the raise really small so we could return money to investors and we're talking you know like if you're if you're you know only raised five at 25 everybody gets a 5x if you sell for 150 and if you sell for more everybody really does really well right so um we were in that range right like we had we were talking to like you know big big companies about buying us like companies that are public um so so pre-co we were already kind of starting those acquisition talks so we kind of had everything teed up Co happened and we went from going like you know like I think we were doing $10 million in travel a month at that point to like an absolute zero and then three months later we were at maybe like 500k 500k in travel so we were like you know a fraction so I had to do you know my first round of layoffs which was smaller right because I was hoping that Co wasn't a real thing you know people were just going to get healthy and we all know how that played out it just lasted for two years and so I did like a smaller round of layoffs because I was like we still have to support the business it kind of seems like it might be coming back somebody's traveling um there's a few companies still kind of going for it and this was like you know but then that second wave of covid came you remember in like September October and I knew that we had to get like term sheets so I literally went and I took the entire list of PSPs which is like potential buyers and I contacted all of them so I was like just like hitting the ground talking to anyone that I would ever thought that I would had to talk to like before so I knew the Travel Park guys prior to this and they had been interested in buying us for quite a bit more before all of this because they wanted to us pres and all that kind of stuff and we and they were not even on my first list of companies because it was more unlikely because they were a European company they were on my second list of companies and as we went on the process they were the ones who ended up wanting to buy us and like I remember my exact pitch I was like AI this is the time to roll up travel companies I'm not that great at raising money but you're great at raising money and so he literally went he bought our company he made it into the US expansion then he quadrupled the valuation of travel perk that same year so he used the acquisition to actually raise money for for the parent company which I thought was such an interesting move because that was the thesis and so one of the things that I had been thinking about generally during that period of time is that you have to psych psychologically train yourself to look for opportunity when stuff is really bad like that and I was like look if I could do anything in the world right now I would stop my fingers I would raise you know like two billion dollar and I would buy all the other travel agencies and I would literally like be the biggest when it came out obviously people were not like we want to invest into travel right now which Wasa the mistake at that point right because you know they would have gotten stuff for a steal but would have been a killer deal been a killer move but I had been thinking about that and so you know because I couldn't do it myself you know I kind of pitched that idea to someone who could and they did and you know it it really did grow their business quite a bit so they're now I think at like at least a billion Top Line they're a unicorn all of those things um they're the biggest player in Europe they have a lot of defensibility because of the European and us uh models so um that was kind of the net results but it was a really difficult process we did have multiple term sheets we had multiple suitors um and I remember psychologically just being like this is just something I have to get done I don't care about the actual outcome I'm probably G to make no money my investors are going to make something but like it just has to get done and so that was the mentality I had going into that acquisition and that's really like when I'm coaching my Founders today who are going through acquisitions I have that talk track with them and it really works actually so I really want to dive into this I think this is a very interesting topic that a lot of Founders listening will be very interested to kind of poke at and pick at and kind of really extract some value from I do want to get to gradient Ventures but I think this is really cool we'll stay on this topic for right now so when it comes to these Acquisitions or you're running your acquisition and then you we'll talk about helping others you mentioned something very you know briefly but you ran a you ran a process and you had compiled a list you had hit that had a pitch you had an offer can you walk us through one how you came up with the idea to run a process how you educate yourself to do that what mentors education you know what resources did you use to kind of understand how you should do this yeah so actually um a friend of mine his name is Pete bendor I was trying to hire him to do specific things and he actually like wanted to be a free agent he didn't really want to come and run my company or be the COO or something like that but he had sold his company called pointtown for like $10 million and he goes when you've got to read this book The Magic Box Paradigm you've got to read this book and you've got to follow the process and you I literally every single founder the first thing I do when they want to sell a company is I'm like you got to read this book because like it basically sets you up to sell a company so there are many ways to sell a company and ours our our two ways of selling the company were not the same so the first preco it was the right way to sell a company and postco it's like or postco it was the distressed way to sell a company but how it works is you basically need to figure out why a buyer or a list of buyers might want to buy you and position yourself strategically to be a good acquisition Target so obviously when you're doing a hundred million in bookings and you're making like a few million dollars a year like you're very attractive as an acquisition proposition but you're really getting bought because you're bringing some strategic value or you know there's like Tech involved and a lot of these you know travel agencies didn't have any Tech right so you've got this scenario that's like that and that's how you would do it for a strategic acquisition and I do coach my Founders if you don't have product Market bit something you might want to do is build to get bought if you have a good Tech Team and you know how to build things why don't you just build to get bought um and so that's one thing and the way you do that is you talk to product leaders you find out what's on their Road map you find out what they can't get done because their organizations are too big and too bloated and they can't be nimble and you can build something strategically very interesting for a big company and you know I've seen a bunch of Founders do this actually quite a few times so it's like a you know a flip and it's a different type of thing but like it happens right and I I would actually highly recommend um founders with no product Market fit to kind of go through that that process because it's interesting as it's not the same as like just a aqua hire the other thing that you can do um and so for for for just selling a company you basically have to say I'm going to sell by this date this is my timeline and it has to happen I'm going to shut down or not and I'm okay with the prospect of just getting Aqua hired into somewhere and you know maybe returning money to investors but that is still a win so you're just looking for any sort of win and you basically go through the list of anyone who would ever want to buy you for any reason and you bucket them into different reasons like this person wants to buy me because they want AI Talent or this person needs operations Talent or this person needs an engineering team or this person actually needs what we do and you bucket them and then you pitch them so it's basically like selling your product but selling your company as a product to different companies and so you go and you run that process and then the the the important thing you have to do now is you have to figure out how to get one Loi and then that Loi usually leads to a second Loi and so like it's pretty important to figure out that first Loi it doesn't matter what it actually says it could be like here's a shoe for your company well maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration but it should be you know it it doesn't have to be the best Loi but once other buyers know that like other people who are especially if they're in their competitive set are looking at you then they get worried about that and then they want to snap you up and I've done a few of these Aqua hires that have netted 1020 million just because of that like people are worried that this team is going to go to their biggest competitor and build something amazing did 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VC now let's get back to the show so I can speak to this personally because this is very similar to what happened to us at liquid Sky when we sold the Walmart we had an acquisition everything was gravy we had this amazing offer from Samsung and then Samsung had an internal implosion management went to jail there chaos it was a day of closing that that all happened so we were dead in the water and like what the hell do we do um and we basically ran we knew there was already a couple prospects we had in the PIP that we think could be interested we had a value proposition and we basically did a similar thing we didn't run a huge process we had basically four companies that we were already deep in with because we only had about a 12 you know eight to 12 months of Runway um and we did exactly we basically said we have to sell the company by the end of the year like period That's there's no alternative to this because raising money we'd have to raise 100 million no one was going to give us 100 million to do what we had to do at that time so selling was the only path and we we had to pit companies against each other we had a it's the most psychologically though to be like we have to sell this company and I I can't emphasize this enough people don't get it they're like oh maybe I'm gonna sell I'm just going to sit here for another 12 months do not sit there for another 12 months commit to selling because also remember as a Founder if you have an opportunity cost you could be starting another company you could be sailing around the world you could be become a VC you could you know there's many things that you could be doing but sitting on your hands is probably the worst use of your time I could agree more and it's it's so important to have that that first Loi or just those conversations and basically say oh these other guys are doing something like they're gonna give us an offer or they gave us an offer and that legitimizes the intent of the other parties involved exact they're like oh they're validating and they're competing then we got to do this and it creates that you know what might have been a lower Val value opportunity at the start you know to kind of boost up those values you know these bigger companies you so like Walmart like tens of millions of hundreds of millions of dollars is to drop of the bucket for them and so pushing you know giving them something that they want giving them that narrative drafting that narrative and knowing kind of where you fit in the orc and making sure you're talking to the right people building those relationships so that they're an advocate for the deal to get through and so on so these are very important tips for you know Founders that might be looking at a situation where they're unicorn dreams are no longer realistic or practical and they're maybe not profitable so creating an outcome like this could be a great story a great narrative maybe a great financial outcome usually not massive Financial outcomes but something that can turn into credibility and you know build your next thing like you said go sailing around the world or become a VC well the other thing is like the thing people always forget is often first-time Founders their first company isn't the company that hits it big their second company is the company that gets really big you know and so I think that's something else like it doesn't I know it feels like the end of the world when you have to sell your company or you're selling your company but the reality is like there is a huge spread between a a Founder who can actually get it done and who can't and this is something that I've noticed and I um this is something that I actually didn't use to credit as much as I do now there is a big difference because there's something about the perseverance of a Founder who's been able to get it over the line selling a company is incredibly hard it's really taxing you don't sleep you don't eat like you work 80 hours a week you're like stressed out the data room is crazy you have all these things that could go wrong and so as a Founder like it really says a lot about you and like where you are if you can get it across the line so I think that's something that's been really an interesting process to watch you you just you just gave me PTSD just like they like oh my God yeah I didn't sleep I didn't was like I was like what if this blows up we're screwed and all this work went to nothing and just the scenarios you play in your head and like me and my just like constantly like running scenarios and just like but we were just we have to punch through at all costs and like it felt like you're kind of just holding up this house of cards and you're just like please no one blow on these cards yes ex get get through and like you it passed everything everything's you legit and everything but you just as a Founder you just have the Imposter syndrome you're just like can we actually get this deal done so it's incredibly stressful but you're right you know there's it says a lot about a Founder that can deal with that level of stress and and punch it through because sitting in your hands and saying well me you know it didn't work out you know it's a an option that a lot of Founders take but you know doesn't really yield any net value to anyone um so yeah that's a phenomenal story so going into kind of how you're helping Founders now um how'd that come about you know founder you know being able to kind of do this and what you did for next travel but for you other Founders yeah so um I ended up accidentally becoming a VC which happens to nobody ever but also a pandemic happening to a travel company has happened to like seven people right so in in travel sort of plan so it's not like a huge spread um I um my first investor actually was is a partner at gradient and he called me up and I was not even paying attention at all I was in the middle of an acquisition process I was like I'm probably going to end up working at the Spanish company in Spain that's going to be odd and I'm like running the process right and I'm waking up at 6 I'm going to bed at 2 I'm like moving data room stuff right and so I get this call and I start having conversations with people at the fund and I have like no idea what's going on I was like I might as well talk to them this is my first investor and so they like basically recruited me and I had I just really wasn't sure because I had never really thought about doing VC in that way like maybe when I was like very young like right out of college but I was never really like aspirationally wanting to do venture or like thinking about it I was like I'm gonna build a big company and I want to build a bigger company and all that stuff so gradient is Google's AI fund um one of the reasons I think I was able to end up there is because we built a ton of machine learning into our customer service operations so like one of the sweetest like most interesting things is like before AI like I was looking through our first five decks before AI was super hot like it was zenitz for travel was one of our pitches and the other one was travel Ai and so we actually legitimately did make it like our I think our customer service or was like probably like 50% more efficient than a normal agency so we had like probably one six the amount of people and our MPS was much High and it's because we had just already built a lot of that stuff and I think about that a lot today actually um are talking about it how you can build that into into like a lot of like existing organizations that just don't have the bandwidth or know how to do it and you it's the same business at the end of the day like a call center um a personal like you know claims center uh travel agencies are another big one but like AI is like a big big um you know use case for that today and so because of that experience and because I understand stood practically how how to apply AI um you know that was probably how I landed the role but I didn't think about it that way at the time right I was just like I did YC I worked with every haot company like so I mean our Client List was insane like we started working with like I think snowflake Computing when it was maybe 10 people or something like that and I was like this seems like a cool company they're traveling with us and they like you know like brand names like that but it was really really like any of them back in the day and and um all of our companies just grew with us which was awesome no that's a that's a great outcom and um so going into gradi you get a call from one of your investors who's already at gradian and they basically they make an offer for you to join after the acquisition like how did that how did that happen I me yeah like I I I just remember the one day it was like okay we'd like to put you through the Google process and I was like Google process so it was I I really was a little bit just like surprised because I was just working so hard on everything else um and so like once I joined gradient I had to learn how to invest right and I had done a bunch of Angel Investing and it's very different actually being like a partner at a fund than doing Angel Investing Angel Investing is just like YOLO give money to your friends um like um you know being a partner of fund there's like a process you have like IC you make investment decisions uh like you know either at some funds it's obviously consensus based some funds need all buyin some funds don't need that so it just depends but it's a very different kind of motion that happens um then than operating as well so um started grading in 20 I think 21 2021 so been there three years and I learned a lot I mean learned a lot about AI um learned a lot about structure I've learned a lot about Google and and what that's like and so um I would say my big takeaway is that the nice thing about investing is that you get to look at a lot of different things but not go very deep whereas an operator you go deep into one thing and that becomes your whole life and I think those are like the two like the the biggest difference between the two but there are some similarities right like you do have to like for example I've spent a lot of my time in the past six months selling companies and helping companies to fund raise those are core functions that you have to do at your own company as well so let's go back to just you being as a a BC getting a lot of exposure to a lot of different deals you know for the founders you know listening here you AI is obviously the Hot Topic every Founders trying to throw AI into everything that they do to you know attract VCS like yourself what's actually standing out to you as a VC and the capital allocator now someone that went out and tried to raise money now you're the you know giving out money investing you know what's standing out to you in the market right now sure um so basically like we have a core thesis in gradient we focus on three different things um one infrastructure two future of work and three consumer I primarily uh like consumers so my personal thesis is that infrastructure is really crowded and it's pretty tough right now because all of the big llms are backed by the major Cloud providers and so if you look at like open Ai and Microsoft as an example or you know you know anthropic or whatever everybody's got like their kind of like thiefs right and it's all you know like acre value to the cloud in my personal opinion like this obviously is not a Google opinion but um it's a creting value to the to the cloud and also it's commod it's becoming more commoditized so these big llms you know like they're you know it's kind of a race to the bottom computes very expensive we're waiting for compute to get cheaper that kind of stuff um future of work is also like a lot of the stuff is not super super defensible and that's why you can switch from like a Jasper AI to like some other copywriting like write or or copy AI very quickly they're all the same so from a pricing perspective also kind of like you know it's like UI based but still quite rised to the bottom because they're all built on the same foundational models and so I actually chose to to focus on consumer because if you think about consumer generally right back in the day there was a company called Orit I don't know if you remember it it was this like Brazilian social network that Google wanted to be the next Facebook and it got big in Brazil for like a minute and then it was gone but Facebook ended up building Facebook and you think about that for some reason number one consumers don't really like to go with the big Brands like they're never like let's go use whatever weird social network that this big Corporation has has built that they're not into it and I think it might be because of the way products are built internally I I'm not really sure why but that is held true so if you look at YouTube YouTube Google could have easily built YouTube right but they had to buy YouTube and so if you think about the Dynamics there you're able to build a brand you're able to build a bit of a differentiated product and then you have to leverage the social graph so those are kind of like the three things that I really like um about consumer and so as a result I actually started focusing highly on consumer at gradient and I looked at three different things and um the first one is chat Bots and I know that's really weird and we could talk about that a little bit more um the second one is Creator economy and the third one is social so um fire away with the questions so let's talk about chat Bots I'm personally interested in that just because I I see a million of them they all to me they all look the same so I'm curious how does a you know chatbot product for Consumer stand out to you yeah so actually like one of the things that I think people don't really understand is that not everybody is like old like us like there's a younger generation that isn't talking to people and so end of the day they are actually using chat box act chat Bots actively and you know like so there is a a company in my batch called replica and it's before it's time but it was like the OG chat bot right and like the first like big press launch she had was like I can talk to my dead F friend which was like a whole you know crazy thing and everybody was super scandalized by that but now if you think about it people have like their virtual best friend they talk to like some random chat bot like they they they feel more comfortable in some ways interacting with someone that's not a human on the other side um I think there's an effect of covid but I also think it's a gener a generational shift and so you see a bunch of these up upand cominging chat Bots actually like getting a bunch of Engagement character AI being one of the most famous and one of the use cases I heard is the biggest for character AI is actually therapy so people are feeling that this need to express their emotion or talk about the things that they feel like they can't talk to other people about and so so one of the biggest issues actually for chat Bots is trust and safety right like if you think about it like you have to make sure the models are trained to like be safe you know like not be you know like doing dangerous stuff self harm all of these different types of things become issues but that doesn't mean they're not engaging and it doesn't mean it's not a new social phenomenon so like that's my view on chat Bots I think it will continue to grow I think the corporate chatbot route hasn't worked as well but like Snap AI hasn't has done okay but not as well and I think character AI has done well and if you look at like The Meta chat Bots I think I've talked to like two of them once yeah I haven't I haven't really dug into any of the the chat BS myself but you bring a good point like I know older married you know have a already established life and you know connections and stuff like that but if I was younger you know current circumstances especially you know if you're in school and you got taken out of school for a year like that's a a pretty dramatic you know psychological shift to a young brain that you know was in its Solitude for way too long um so that's an interesting perspective and from kind of the another top you brought up as Creator economy you what are you seeing in the Creator economy leveraging AI that you see have you know massive unicorn level value so this is actually my favorite my favorite kind of um category so you can literally make anything using AI so I actually have done a bunch of Angel Investing specifically in creater economy but like one of the first deals I ever looked at for um Creator economy was called pseudo write and it helps you write novels I've known the founder for years I literally wrote like an outline for a novel in literally an hour all I did was put like one prompt spit out on outline spit out stuff and there's other ones for scripts there's I've seen two for scripts um I've seen a bunch obviously text to video so you can start making short clips and we all know that how that story goes right like creators want to create things for YouTube that people show um I just announced an investment in a company called jars um they make you be able to manipulate any animated cartoon type of thing so you could have like a Judge Judy kind of you know um thing um and you could do like a Rick and Morty thing which is what they started out with but they've moved towards more generic stuff to not infringe copyright but people like to do that and people also like to watch it right like think about how much time most people spend on like Tik Tok watching memes straight up right and the easier you make it for people to like create funny engaging content for people to watch it you know um you know like the more the the more the more stuff is just content is just going to be out there in the world the other thing it does is it just makes it so that anyone can become a Creator I literally wrote half of a script the other day just for fun I was like here and like they do the character development for you I wrote in like one prompt and it literally like described the character I was trying to create as to the te and I was looking at Infinity AI it was in this last YC batch you can literally make characters of people that you know as talking to the founders I was like how do you get past copyright like what if you use elon's face is that bad is that good that type of stuff are you allowed to use public figures and obviously they used a lot of the YC Partners you know likenesses with their consent but I was like I mean Michael cyel was one of my personal investors and I was like I would love to make Michael just like talk and say whatever I wanted to just for fun and one of the things that the founder told me is like we want people to not think this is serious we're not trying to do deep bigs we're actually trying to create something fun and engaging yeah no I love I love just how you kind of teed it up with like just our addiction to memes and our addiction to just kind of fun you know not serious content but now being able to do it at a scale that anyone can do it make it more original you know yeah yeah I think there's some value to like original me you know the memes that were all very familiar with to see over and over again but I am starting to see a lot more diversity and less recycling of memes and it could be just due to this nature of how quick and easy it is to spin these up whereas before you know just took a lot more work took a lot more you know originality and creativity but now you can kind of Leverage The the speed and quickness of AI yeah and the other thing is like career economy didn't really exist 10 years ago right and now it does so I think you're going to see an expansion of that and just to kind of since you mentioned jar how did they get your attention h i I actually just thought right away I think I actually think jars today is going to be something really different tomorrow um but I I saw immediately that people have this need to to want to create small things right and the thing that was really interesting about them is that they were funny they were creating funny content so it's like a vice type Conta I think that plays really really well um I think one of the reasons I particularly liked that was because like they had a very big focus on trust and safety and so like it was a good fit for us as a fund but generally I think that you know people want to see like all sorts of content and like I think that that's kind of what really struck a cord with me but to be specific how how did how did they get on your radar did they oh somebody to me someone said yeah so War int what a warm intro into you yeah but I do also go out and like cold email people like I co I cold emailed Infinity AI like I I do find this one pitch actually I actually funded this company one founder literally brought his friend to a pitch and I ended up funding the friend I'm curious what he feels about that now um that's fing and I'm glad you're kind of giving some insight because you know I think you know on the podcast everyone talks about you know their founder experience raising money but you know kind of having you come on and kind of share both you went out and rais money as a founder and now you're actually hunting down and chasing Founders to throw money at you know so it's very interesting you know to cutom me from what you were to where you are now um I don't know is there anything else that you want to share with uh with our guest before before we wrap up I think that's good okay well wiwi it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show and just sharing your unique background as a you know kind of employee early stage you know startup employee to founder to getting the 100 million GV for your company to then selling that and moving on to to BC world uh so you had a pretty interesting career you know throughout you it's fortunate to to share share this with our audience cool thanks it was good to see you all right thank you 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 RI 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 in financing again you can find these free tools at thunder. BC 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 Jason thunder. VC and that's that's our show we hope you enjoyed it and we see you next week