Intro okay we're live hi Charlie welcome to venture with Grace hi Grace great to Great to get the chance to speak um to start the show I would love for the audience to get to know you a little bit more so actually you started your career as a surgeon I was quite surprised I thought like you know I know that you were a funer but um can you share a little bit more about like you know what where's the journey like from being a surgeon to now the chief investment strategist at ARK AR yeah absolutely look I think um you know as a going through medicine you uh and then eventually into surgery ones invested so much time and effort and thought and and frankly just a lot of roote learning and just you know having to learn about a huge amount of things some of which you're interested in some of which are a real challenge to get your head around um and I think for me quite early in the surgical career and I did about five or six years is actually in the end through general surgery and then into reconstructive plastic surgery not the aesthetic kind but the repairing cancer and uh injuries sort of kind um but yeah I realized quite early on that I actually was more interested in creating products and new things that could help people uh at much more scale and that where am I you know some level of design and invention would come in and I could try and fix problems by breaking the problem down down and thinking about different innovations that might work end to end maybe recombining Technologies and so I was constantly kind of at the at the clinic or whatever and daydreaming ideas that would would maybe make for new medical devices and things like that so eventually I just thought if I carry on in this path of wanting to be both an inventor entrepreneur and a surgeon or a doctor I'm going to just do a bad job of both uh so at some point I felt like it was the right time to just jump and go fulltime into one and an entrepreneurship one um there's actually a great analogy on this I think that a friend of mine who was a doctor an ER surgeon actually and then became an extremely successful biotech entrepr Banker first and then a biotech entrepreneur and board member has about this which is that he he Likens it to I me he he sold two very very late stage um biotech companies both for over 10 billion to a large farmer um and you know both more importantly than than the numbers were shipping drugs helping patients and things like prostate cancer I think the number two prostate cancer drug in the world was one of his that he was involved with but anyway his analogy was as a as a doctor you you know you get to help hundreds or hope hopefully thousands or even tens of thousands of people and you really have that amazing opportunity to have the live feedback and you get that that um impact on you you know you enjoy the job because you can see people hopefully getting better and be really a part of their of their um Improvement in their health and their journey and it's the that immediacy is Akin as he put it to to a to a stage actor um where you're sort of standing on stage and you can see the people in the audience and you can see the reactions and you have that immediate feedback whereas if you become then a medical entrepreneur whether you're working in Pharma or medical devices or whatever it's more akin to being maybe a Screen Actor and you might be affecting you know potentially millions of people or there's a lot more risk in whether any of the thing you work on actually work in the end um but you don't have that immediacy and you you have to sort of take it as red and just understand and know that if you build products that then get FDA approved or whatever and then get to patients that they will be helping people um I've actually been thinking recently about ways to to bring that loot back and and and learning more about the actual deployment of some of the products I've been involved with um and to continue that that line of thinking the first company I was involved in co-founding uh was a UK public company recently acquired off the markets working on non-invasive prenatal testing which is so a blood test which is somewhat of a replacement for amnos thesis because you don't really want to ideally dois because has a small risk of actually leading to a miscarriage and that company that I co-founded the first thing I did actually coming out of surgery right back in 2007 ultimately did two million tests um which given the miscarriage rate of amniocentesis and the obviation of many many amniocenteses means that there are certainly hundreds probably thousands of people walking around mainly in the UK and Europe but but but actually all over the world who didn't have who didn't become a miscarriage because of n new thesis it didn't happen I don't know who those people are they don't know who they are because it's just a statistical right but it's amazing to know that there are those people walking around that wouldn't otherwise possibly exist because an AM synthesis would have happen instead of the technology we brought forward so things like that when you sort of run the numbers and you think about those lives that you may have impacted are very you know very gratifying even even though one misses not having you know not being there in the trenches and working and doing operations and seeing the outcomes so anyway longwinded answer to your question but maybe made some sense I wonder so like yeah totally I think like Lessons from the entrepreneurial era one of the things I wanted to learn more about is like you know you are a co-founder of freom and it is a company that reason not Reas but this year they raised like over $200 million again and I went and then now you are the Chief investment strategist at ARC investment and like I wonder um what were some lessons that you've took from the entrepreneurial era to being an investor now yeah absolutely look I think I do really believe in in the idea of operators going to the investment side and vice versa I think you learned so much by being both sides of the table maybe going back and forward um hopefully not sort of too too like a pingpong game but but at least a couple of times in your career makes sense to do that I think I mean one obvious one is fundraising right like in both directions you learn a lot about the fundraising process what investors need to hear and what companies need to communicate to investors to make sure that the the message and the narrative gets across um I think you know so there's a lot of that like advocacy that translates into an investment pitch and really trying to refine that be focused not give excess information not oversell not undersell um and then you know hopefully a lot of those learnings come through to to to thinking when you're on the other side of the table as an investor and sort of thinking reading trying to read between the lines what is this company telling me what are they not telling me how do I try and get some of the subtext you know what skeletons are in the closet or maybe of this company you know whether they're just things that they're not reporting on stuff they've tried and failed that you know doesn't make it to the investment pitch and where can we double click and just just press a little bit more and learn a little bit more about that um also learning you know a lot about building companies about Talent about making sure to keep momentum around you know the different parts of a company because every company is an interacting organism essentially with all these feedback loops and all these things that that go on among and between the different parts of the company and are really necessary to drive balanced growth as it were and and and and being you know not falling over one part of the company because it's it's slowed down or what have you I think so yeah team organizations team build also just the need for incredible operational people and and and really like who is it that's you know coming up with the ideas and the strategy and and communicating those who is it that's actually keeping the trains running on time and why and and you know really having seen all of those different fena types trying to on the investment side of the table double click on those and really think about you know are the obviously in a late Stage Company it's easier to determine because you've got a lot more proof points of whether execution is actually happening and whether it's a longer strategically meaningful Direction you know because one of the biggest failings as we know is companies running very fast and very effectively but in the wrong direction um and when as an investor I think a lot of the thinking that I always look for especially in an early stage company um as again having been born of you know founding companies like freom where I was one of the two original co-founders with Riley who's still at the company as chap product officer I speak to very frequently um but it's really thinking you know it doesn't really matter which domain you're in but every every company I always think needs sort of three pillars to stand on even even if it's got two co-founders you know sometimes those three pillars are done by two people or even one person exceptionally um I think of those three pillars as being someone that's really got an innovation and a disruptive vision and a vision of a new future and maybe some sense of how to get there someone who knows how to keep the trains running on time really deep operations you know right just just loves task management right down to the the minutes and the standups and they just making stuff happen every who gets up every single day and just loves operations and then someone or you know as I say these could be in you know exceptionally all in one person or or often in two or could be three or more coenders and then someone who's much more externally facing often is the person that wants to be posting and doing BD deals often and inspiring people around Partnerships and and you know maybe if if necessary in that in that industry going to the cocktail parties and meeting with people who might then do the partnership so often that that person is quite involved in the fundraising as well and I think if you don't have those three pillars and they often really are very different phenotypes you know and often it very much depends on the setting whether it's biotech or technology you Enterprise all these things are different you know often that inspiring leader who comes up with a disruptive idea is also a technical co-founder and can actually code and execute on things you know you may Al also have the operations person that's highly Technical and to deliver code and big coding projects you know but also so you often see that kind of external facing BD social role also coexisting in the same person as the sort of inspiring person who who's who's got the disruptive Vision so it can really vary by company by founding team and and by industry but but I I always feel if you don't have those three pillars quite well covered off at some level then there's a there's there's a bit of a gap in the team you know the company sort of goes can go either too introspective or too um you know almost too extroverted and not get enough done or can just be you know ex the way need that de to deliver on a I wonder so like since you come from ARK Invests approach to AI the biotch background and then I feel like nowadays like so we met at an AI event I wonder I know that like Arc is very bullish on AI so I was yesterday I was listening to an interview with um Kathy that she basically speak very highly about Nvidia back in 2018 I know that you guys have hired someone from Nvidia um maybe since like 2016 or even earlier um I wonder so like what are some like what are the thesis that you would apply into a venture investment versus a like um basically like you know for like the public market investment like what's a comparison between your strategies in both of these markets and then for from the AI perspective um I wonder what are your takes on the AI Spectrum so since you guys made a lot of bets in the category like anthropic and other companies um what's your overall um thesis about AI That's a very big question or lots of questions in one maybe I take them separately I think in in terms of and that you know maybe I could speak in the general about Venture versus public and then and then I'll talk about AI maybe I think if I can divide them if with you into two separate questions I mean I think you know obviously some of what's different about investing in in in private and public is trying to figure out with the public side what is truly not priced in and you know where where might Market inefficiencies lie um and our our world view for AR is that generally you obviously markets are frequently efficient you know there's obviously raging debate about how efficient they are and over what time scales but what we believe is that there there are commonly inefficiencies that come in over the time scales in which we care about which is typically five and five years and up actually even more on the Venture side often um but even you know most of our Public Market bets are in you know have that kind of mind mindset of that that and Beyond in terms of time scale and we think that there are often Market inefficiencies that come in because people you know maybe over index on on the most recent quarter the earnings you know just the news flow dayto day and under index on things like the you know where really does this product sit and this product trajectory or what new products are coming through how incredible is this team and and the technology and the traction they're getting that that has a like a multi-year payoff um so you know we spend a lot of time studying Talent um really thinking deeply about products and how the future landscape is going to evolve you know as do all investors but but I think that's where we feel that those dislocations often lie is is and you you can kind of see that right when you know it's fairly obvious sometimes when you see the overcorrections and undercorrections that markets are not efficient over certainly some level of time scale um so that you know whereas with Venture a lot of your Market inefficiencies at were or your Edge is coming from a different place like it you know it's often coming from like access or having spotted something very early on and working with and even sometimes coaching Founders and and actually then hopefully adding value um and you know really the best VES are are way more than their money I think you know back to your question before about you know other things I learned as a as a founder and an exec in different startups was you know every investor claims to be more than their money uh sadly that's often not the case just because investors are busy sometimes not that they don't meet to be helpful with it sometimes you know just don't have time and bandwidth sometimes they don't have access to the things you want access to you know obviously some investors are actively unhelpful in various ways either distracting or all sorts of things um and so I think on the Venture side it's it's it's just very different because you can really help a company especially a small early company that maybe doesn't have like a fully developed CRM and a black book of people that can groups that can help them we Tred to also help the public companies actually so there are few recent examples I won't name them but where I I made some introductions to some very senior people in the immune oncology space who I think May then form part of the scientific Advisory board for one of our public companies and you know I just got a text actually from the CEO the other day just saying thank you so much like that was super super helpful and it's it's actually kind of gratifying that even you know a reasonably Siz Asda that company you can still be helpful in that kind of a way but obviously the The Leverage and the impact in helping a five person startup is is is way way bigger so so so yeah I would say the differences are you're still trying to find market and efficiency you know it's not called that inventure but it's the same kind of thing but but it's more driven by you know can you access the company in the first place um because often the Great Deals get quite contested also can you spot um deals that the market for some reason has kind of overlooked right like the I mean this is an analogy but the kind of the Harry Potter kind of thing right where where uh JK rling shopped Harry Potter to pretty much every publisher Under the Sun and then the last one I think was Bloomsbury who finally took it and you know she was about to give up and that became the multi-billion dollar franchise and this same thing happens in Venture but quite rarely I think you know if you see some of the top top 1% top two Venture funds investing that's a pretty safe bet that that's probably going to be a great company or a decent company and is certainly going to have a lot of help along the way and probably will not run out of money because it will you know still be funded because there are lot there's a lot of money chasing the companies that the top two investors invested in the first place um but there are definitely examples of where there is a proper Market inefficiency true marketing efficiency Adventure where it's just not spotted um early on or or or you know only spotted by one or two funds and we we actually really look for those kinds of deals from Arc Venture so we have a a venture fund at ARC which I can talk a more about but what we love to find is where one of the top tier of vs that we really like is leading because we don't lead um certainly at the moment um and so we feel that that company is somewhat validated like someone's done at least some minimum viable homework really established that you know kick the tires essentially with the founders and the background and a lot of the stuff that great DC's do because we just don't have at the moment a big enough team or enough BS to do that and to lead um but to take the the slightly contrarian bets from those portfolios where you know at least one very top TVC might be in there and then maybe a few investors you haven't heard of or family offices or Angels or what have you um but we at The Other Extreme we sort of don't like the party rounds right where you've got everyone just piling in and it's super over subscribed and everyone's doing Small Checks no one's really aligned that company with their reputation in terms of you know being having deep conviction and being excited to really really double down and commit to that company so I think you know again it's there will always be be um tail examples that don't fit into any of those things but I think that's generally what we what we would look for in the Venture cycle um so anyway yeah I can go to your AI question now if you like totally um I What stage do you invest in have a quick piggy backpack question before the AI question is um I know that you guys have literally all the top um cool logos on the Venture side um do you guys primarily invest in call like secondary or like do you um hunt them very early on um since like you know some of them are you know open AI or Discord or data braks um or riplet like so they're kind of um around for a while and then they're more towards like stage um in the startup realm and I wonder like so at what stage do you typically prefer the company to be at and as you mentioned like maybe uh you guys are paying attention to them after they already have a lead investor or like you know more towards um I guess like a more mature side so I wonder like just curious like at what stage do you go in and then um do you guys invest in like the company that's um completely unproven um as you mentioned about like the market inefficiency like I guess like they're not spot by the tiery investors yet and like like maybe if you could give us some example there yeah sure again you're you're testing my memory with these long questions I'm going to do my best but Sor no it's great so I think like first of all maybe maybe I'll just uh I'll just give a quick overview of the um of the AR Venture fund because maybe that'll inform on some of the questions so it's quite a different kind of venture fund from anything that we believe has been out there before and part of that is and that will inform some of the the question you asked I think so there's a few of the big differences are as follows so one it's available to essentially any even non- accredited investor as you know accreditation is usually a million in high you know in assets net worth or over 200,000 or or more um in in in income I think it's more with a spous 300,000 whatever but anyway it's available to non accredited investors who do not meet those criteria for accreditation which would normally have been required for either investing directly in public sorry in private companies or in as a venture fund LP so that essentially that whole private Market high quality private Market investing whether directly in companies or through a venture fund has been essentially excluded from all of these non-accredited investors for the longest time which we just fundamentally found very undemocratic as a concept and so the arc Venture fund is open to all of those people for anything above a $500 check essentially so you know almost any investor who's who's sort of investing seriously would be in that category and so and then we distribute it to those people and make it available on right now a couple of apps but there will be many more coming in the coming time so right now it's on Titan which is an andreon backed uh fintech app a little bit like I mean you know I was going to say it's like Robin Hood it's actually quite different to Robinhood but it's available to people you can download it it has you know we're one of the main um investment opportunities featured on there and I think the only one in private Venture in this way and then we're also on Sofi uh which people probably know of more maybe it's a bit it's a bit bigger um but I think we're going to be rolling out some globally in the coming certainly next year I think there's several several more coming online anyway because it's available to non accredit investors and we're getting constant flows in all the time it's not like a normal Venture fund where we might you know might go and raise half a billion dollars and then start deploying it and then raise fund two or fund three um so it's it's a little different so we have Conant inflows um and then the other thing to note before I talk about the the deal Flow side is we also have liquidity available to the investors so every quarter up to 5% of the fund can be redeemed at the request of the investors so they can essentially put in a Redemption request and get their money out um and so even though it's up to 5% it's never actually hit that yet that that ceiling so anyone that's made any Redemption requests has had their full amount redeemed actually so actually and you know I think it was the full if you look at the full calendar yearly let's say of 2023 the fund was up about 60% actually just over I think so someone who had invested say a million dollars at the start of 2023 could literally have taken out that full 60% performance so at the at the end of the year so um so that you know that that kind of think is potentially quite interesting to people is the the pairing of the liquidity and the access now on the dealflow side then we enter companies we're typically doing one to5 million do checks I think the biggest we've done is five we have done much smaller than that intercede And precede actually but typically think of us as like one1 to5 million checks with an average of like two to three essentially and because of that and the fact that we have a lot of flexibility we can enter companies by a primary round they safe or secondary or other um you safes or or convertibles but we typically do safes because of that we what we tend to do is start building a to hold in a company that we have great conviction you know might only be a million a couple million but then we'll build into it through time often so we may start with the secondary and move to hopefully the primary round the next time that happens or vice versa we've definitely got examples of both but I think of the 30 or so private companies we have in the portfolio around a third of those we have already shown examples where we've concentrated into the company whether it's through secondary followon offering or what have you and with some of those like anthropic that we did quite early on you know we've been happy to pay you know a dramatic multiple on the original investment because we still have massive conviction in the company and we're very excited about it um [Music] and uh yeah and we you know we maintain very active uh ongoing relationships with all the secondary groups in theory we could sell out of a company if we lose conviction by a secondary 2 we haven't actually had to do that yet but yeah so maybe I don't know if that answer to venture question yeah totally um I wonder so What are your picking criteria what's your picking criteria since like there are a lot of company that in a certain space that are pretty hot in a given moment and then what are some cut off lines that you your team that will decide like to not pursue I know that Kath kind of like taking a very different approach in the public market from you know picking the people on the team so for example people like yourself who is a domain expert in a particular category and then maybe like researchers in a certain area that are very plugged into the community with all the resources or like knowledge to um study or research a certain area and then you guys are very vocal about it on social media platforms um I wonder how does that kind of translate into picking from The Venture side because um it it does sounds very similar from like the public market to venture side but like public market you have a lot more data because of like everything is kind of public information versus like private companies that are a lot of it were like unknown or um you know you have to do a lot more diligence and then there's more like volatility like volatility in that domain and I wonder um what would be your selection criteria to make these very um concentrated bats in these companies yeah it's a good question so Who are your domain experts yeah as you say like one of the things that attracted me to AR in the first place Kathy and her passion and I think you know incredible amount of Economics uh knowledge and and expertise and and having seen all of the cycles and she's just an incredible teacher and mentor on that side as well but as you say that a lot of the people d ding the research in the research team a lot of the analysts research directors and what have you are incredible domain experts and actually they've been practitioners so they've actually you know they've had companies they've had some of them have had their own you know either hedge funds or they've worked in crypto or they've built stuff and a lot of really deep product fundamentalists I would say who are really really care about the products and they're buying and earning and trying these things way ahead of you know of in the whole Market or you know definitely definitely our early adopters so that's one whole side I think on the on the Venture side in terms of as we pick companies like clearly We Care a ton about the products even at the early stage and you know that's one area we dive very deep on and try and do as much you can in terms of product demos or try outs and things like that as well as looking at the traction I think we tried to think about the company in itself right like net of its Talent it's you know technology team and traction I guess of some of the big buckets we think about and we we actually have an adapted version of the arc scoring system that we use on the public side so we have a multi-point scoring system which looks at these things like product contraction looks at the team pie stuff um and but on the Venture side so we're How do you evaluate deals also obviously thinking about things a bit differently because you've got valuation and and the actual deal we would be going into so it's almost like we think about the company in isolation the deal and you know we don't want to if the company because we're not leading the company's you know doing a f and round and it's got a new lead who's setting the price then we can get and that's one of the things we look for is being very comfortable that like a fantastic addition you know a VC who does lead is setting the price of that deal at that time because obviously especially in the last couple of years we've seen a lot of flat rounds and down rounds and and you know you really want to look and have a very you know have a lot of confidence that there's a great lead is re has done the digging and reset that price and then thirdly we would look at the the company in context of our portfolio right so net of the 30ish private companies in the portfolio and around 25 public companies that we have in there as well because it is truly a crossover fund um with a strong heavily Venture leaning uh but but there's about an 80 20 split between private 80% and public 20 or sometimes 15% um so yeah so we think about we think about the same five technology platforms that AR focuses on the public What technology platforms do you focus on side so that would be around you know artificial intelligence as this mother of all converging Technologies um multiomic sequencing with Precision medicine energy storage public blockchains um and autonomous and Robotics and so we're looking just as we are on the public side for the convergence among and between those Technologies and the way that they're accelerating each other and driving forward really new you know very impactful disruptions um and maybe I know you asked about AI I can talk a bit about that too because I think but clearly as we've seen from anthropic xai and some of the other companies you mentioned that are in the portfolio you know we think some of the most exciting AI um R&D and product development has happened on the private side right so you know very excited about companies like anthropic X and others um Mosaic we have data breaks as you said as well and that's actually because we had Mosaic ml before that was the company we actually entered and it got acquired into Data bricks which was great because we really wanted data bricks stock anyway it was on our Hit List um and actually we we got around a 700% annualized return from that acquisition into Data brickstock at the time and you very very bullish on data bricks generally as a story too so so you know we're excited to have that and you know that's a company may may eventually have more of um the and and of course on the public side too there is incredible AI stuff Open source going on obviously you know meta just just had its earnings uh this week and doing some incredible stuff you know we're very excited about open source we're excited about the whole ecosystem the Llama that the Llama family models now llama 3.1 is are opening up right in this whole maybe cottage industry is the wrong word but this whole industry building up around them and and great deployments of those models and you know much as with the internet the first time ran and then mobile I think the creativity of people paired with the massively powerful enabling Technologies in this case now you know these huge Foundation models made open source you know there's really uncapped upside in the in the value generation and the ability of ways to help people that could come from that kind of kind of thing you know of course that's counterbalanced by you know potentially um misuse by Bad actors of these very very powerful models you know that's well documented there's this sort of raging debate about open source um or closed Source I think our house view on that is really that given the cost declines that we're seeing and depending on how you measure it if you look at the big The Arc Big Ideas deck for instance from earlier in this year we're seeing in the region of Training costs 75% cost decline per year of of actual training costs for building large models now of course the actual cost of trainer model in absolute terms is going up because the models are getting so big but but in terms of if you if you extrapolate that outwards you know this idea that no one should be making available these large public Frontier models because a you know say a terrorist group wouldn't be able to afford $100 million to train a model but might be able to deploy it you know which is an argument and it really really makes makes a ton of sense at some level the reality is just that that training cost is being crushed so much that even you know obviously it's kind of MOT because these models are being made publicly available now anyway VI this open source movement but even if they weren't the cost is coming down at the moment anyway at such a rate that pretty soon anyone will be able to train these things so at some level right like maybe you know new emerging capabilities come through from these extremely large multi-trillion parameter models and then you know that's a whole other discussion but certainly from what we can see at the moment the cost declines are driving this this Paradigm that you know these things the genie is kind of out of the bottle on this thing anyway um so yeah we're excited about the the public side you know there are companies that we think are extremely well positioned for the coming AI Revolution so we invested an xai elon's company on for the pure AI side but we're also very excited as you know won't be a surprise to people probably about Tesla as an AI opportunity obviously through autonomous um as part of it but but also Way Beyond that of course you know with with um with the robot you know the humanoid robot side but also really the whole concept and this this comes through as well we look for this on the Venture side too but the whole idea of embodied AI where you have to build something like a a pie a piece of Hardware that itself is out there in the world and obviously the the model three let's say Tesla is an extremely good example of that where they're just so many of them driving around Gathering data and it's just a massive Moe if you've got this in bodied Ai and you've got this physical object that itself is very hard to build generating data which then becomes this huge data mode so you know we're very very excited about that obviously we're we're try to be thoughtful on the Venture side because again those things can be very Capital intensive to build totally I wonder so since you were just talking about Tesla so I was um I opened up like your um quarterly report like um one of the most like exposure was like autonomous Mobility sector so I wonder like when it comes to what how does that translate into um early stage investment I know that like you know um since like a lot of the listeners are investors themselves like maybe they are renting their like preed seat funds um since like Arc invest in more like iconic compies that are like towards a um they already finished the brand building stage um I wonder what does this translate into like a um earlier stage investors should they pay attention to these different sectors that um are paying attention to and then how does that translate into investing strategy since at the beginning uh maybe like um to invest in a Tesla it's kind of like once in like like a 100,000 investment and how do you suggest people to pay attention to the earlier stage of these like iconic companies It's Tricky right like I just Importance of talent spoke to a I won't name but a very very you know seemingly a prominent VC who hosted us for an event a few months ago he in in in the barer he said every single one of the companies he's been really glad he invested in had to Pivot that is the single most defining factor which inherently tells you that a lot of this is unpredictable right uh so in fact I just have drinks with another very successful close friend in VC here in Europe last night and said he said something kind of similar right so there I think one obviously just factoring in that this is a game where you know there is a ton of luck as well you know and you know however the quote goes better to be lucky than good but but but one has to engineer that luck by being in a lot of amazing companies and the best driver of great luck is not really great luck it's Talent who know how to do things like pivot in the light of an emerging incredibly complex world right where new opportunities are coming and going and dying and and what have you so I think that's you know the importance of talent is not going away I think there's obviously a really important question one any early stage PS have to ask themselves about about the the sector they want to be in and and technology areas most importantly because of capital intensity so like my Angel Investing portfolio which I don't have time to do a ton of right now but I do a little bit of it's very different like I never do biotech pretty much and you know because I'm just scared of the series of capital intense rounds that get piled up on top um so it's really like in those early stages you know how is one going to add disproportionate value you know how concentrated how focused you want to be a lot of the stuff is is obvious I guess but but again the reason I mentioned the pivot point is you know Tesla itself not exactly pivoted but you know certainly took a Securus path right like like if you read the wter Asics and biography that that much is very clear and you know there were certain thing events that happened like the factory in Fremont and other things and the company would be completely different company if those things hadn't happened and some of those were unpredictable and some of them were sort of Desperate Times Desperate Measures as well and just taking success of courageous big bets on something and so if you're looking at like a biotech or a hardware company or something very Capital intense you know often you're going to see that kind of thing because the companies you know about are the ones that are successful because they did that and it went the right way but of course there are many companies that just dead and they've gone and no one's ever heard of they were the same kind of company and they just went the wrong way or got bad luck you know then of course you've got the much less Capital intense kinds of companies that you can you know you know I personally like those for the early stage investing because at least you know quite early on whether you've got something that looks successful or not you can test traction so if you look at our RVC earlier portfolio there much more in the way of things like fintech you know we'll do some web three and blockchain and certainly AI companies where you know like Enterprise AI where it's pretty much clearer within you know one to three years is is there some traction here has a pivot had to happen what was the outcome of that pivot do we still have conviction in what the founders are doing so I mean you know that that's why you'll see in certainly in our portfolio and obviously different seed investors have different areas of expertise and we you know we work with a lot of really really great seed investors who you know now really now they know we're doing private investing are really starting to send us deals you know we I guess I didn't talk that much about stage breakdown but we we tried to keep the portfolio at least 50 to 60% quite late stage as in series B and Beyond you know a bunch of unicorns and pre IPO companies but definitely Keen to do more in the series a kind of setting you know at least could be 20 20 25% the portfolio and very selectively some seed seed and preed even but those are more likely to be in non- capital intense areas where we're quite deeply expert like in fintech where we could almost be like a strategic investor if that makes sense um and then you know I guess it's Finding leads a related point but you know we try to be given that we're not leading we try to be as helpful as we can in other ways so you know many companies we see and we love and we say actually we'll help you try and find the lead so we'll send it to our network of people that lead series a or whatever and so you know increasingly I'd actually like to do more of that where we have a strong conviction we just say look we put our hands up and say look we can't lead and we don't lead it's not what we do but we'll be as helpful as we can in finding you a lead or in others where we've got some conviction that you know they're already kind of a hot company or or or whatever and they they've got a bunch of lead term sheets in the works and that's fine and then you know they'll send them to us and then we can take a view but where we try to be helpful um relatedly is is certainly we have a you know a rich and de open research ecosystem where we can help tell the story of the company and and the founders narrative and whatever they'd like to get across you we've got good examples like we did figure AI is maybe quite a nice example of of a lot of these things because we we did figure AI in q1 the 675 million round that open AI was in in Nvidia and previous to that in Q4 I think it was we did a podcast with Brett Adcock the CEO who we've known actually from from previous days at Archer um where he'd seen what a loyal and supportive investor AR is on the public side and and you know figured that we we behave similarly and think similarly on the private side which is true um and then we visit Kathy were able to visit Brett and he showed us around the factory super exciting we didn't we did not get our cup of robot coffee as the the the YouTube demo shows but next time hopefully and uh but we were also able to make uh Enterprise intros to potential customers and clients which is the second big area we try to do so it's like you know we're very connected into a lot of large private companies and especially public companies so we can often make like a sea level introduction to to very small companies of other examples of that so they open research ecosystem introductions and then we tried to to to also help with you know direct feedback and thoughts and actually beginning to work with people on talent and and thinking through their sales pitch BD pitch fundraising pitch all L those things so you know we try to be as helpful as we can given as you said we we're a little bit more like public market investors on the private side so we we are taking a portfolio view we have some level of limited bandwidth but we we really have go to try try to go above and beyond for every company we actually do make the make the work and dig into investing totally um I think you just mentioned about like you know you guys would invest like I would say put 50 to 60% in the um series B and above like unicorn kind of like status companies and then maybe like 20 to 25% of series a and I wonder like um do you guys do like full on around the funding so like Keep Falling on until like the coming IPO or I guess like do you have a general like portfolio construction and set of things that you could share with the audience yeah very much where we keep where we keep and oh sorry yeah where we keep and build conviction we absolutely Where to keep conviction want to keep building into that position so really because we're slightly Limited at the moment in the check size to that sort of you know three million is is typically you know the upper end of what we do in our typical check we can do up to five I think into next year you know we may do up to 10 million entry check check but let's you know watch the space but we will absolutely build a position through several rounds um and that's definitely the intention and so for where we keep conviction we absolutely would love to you know follow right through and keep building into the crossover round and actually do the IPO if that's the right thing you know we can whether that's from the crossover fund that we're talking about or whether we actually do the IPO from the ETFs at that point the ETFs can come in and as you know they're much bigger sort of in the at the moment in the 25 billion a range and you know we we've got lots of examples so we did an IPO for instance we did tempus AI recently um both in the IPO and then we and then we traded into it publicly you so we published our trade sorry um as well so people can see that but we traded into it you know in the weeks following the IPO and um you know we're excited about that company as an example so so yeah we we very much see it as a Continuum and part of the philosophy is that great comp companies great leadership teams Founders and great products and technologists you know doesn't really matter if they're public or private or what have you obviously there are nuances that come with those things and certain pros and cons to each route but there are many companies on the public markets that in the old days you know might have remained private and arguably should have there are many private companies that in the old days you know recent old days would have um you know been public and and opting to stay private for much longer those deeper pools of capital that we're seeing and you know for those companies sometimes it can work really well you know we've obviously seen companies like SpaceX is a really extreme example that is in the portfolio in the Venture portfolio but also epic which is in there epic games um and and obviously you know famously Uber and several others um some of the lot of the big large fintech companies staying private for much much longer um and yeah the company that you mentioned I co-founded freenome is you know has raised nearly $1.4 billion on the private markets from incredible investors including folks like Raj um and some of the big late stage funds like tro and Fidelity and and uh Janice and others so you know definitely there is capital there for great companies doing great things but and and and you know see such a so many pros and cons to being public one needs to think very carefully about whether that's the right route for the company and when and and what you know the in the Ever Changing landscape of of news flow that one wants after being public and obviously we've seen huge ups and downs in that whole that whole thing since 2019 it's been a real roller coaster ride right for a lot of these companies especially pre-revenue or or largely pre pre certainly pre- profitable companies um what I was going to say there's actually a Blog I put out built on a space X spasis that we did with Elon Musk in Q4 which highlights a lot of we did 100 minutes with Elon um it's it's up there on the arite or maybe you can share it after a bit but um where he talked about the trials and tribulations of being public with Tesla and how he you know was very very thoughtful about whether he would take companies public again and on what grounds he would take a company public and just ex ex expressed a lot of hesitations for that kind of Route I mean our dream in the long run really for the AR Venture fund I suppose is that with our mission to democratize venture capital and bring it to this big you know non-accredited audience retail investors for the first time and really bringing them access all those folks to this asset class that they've been locked out of and we already have I think around 16,000 individual investors which is you know an unprecedented um bringing of of this asset class high quality Venture deal flow to this asset to to that audience you know our dream is that eventually we have many millions of individual investors deploying billions you know many billions of AUM in capital and we can actually be a significant participant in the e system actually making deals happen that wouldn't would not happen otherwise and permitting companies to stay private for longer that would would have been forced to go public to access those pockets of capital like there third way if you like that tries to to harness some of the this you know the Best of Both Worlds if you like at least for a time um so that that would be you know part of the the ultimate long-term Vision so with that I should probably wrap up soon I have to go to a public company call back totally um so I want to just do like a quick 30 second firearm for you and then we will just wrap up okay what's your favorite book favorite book ever probably is Catch 22 right now I'm uh going deep deep into a nerdy field not really nerdy it's actually a very interesting field of um complexity economics uh from the SFI Santa Fe Institute so my favorite book right now I'm reading is making sense of chaos by DNE doen I think you say farmer from the yeah Santa Fe Institute so it's a really interesting branch of where economics meets biology essentially uh who made the biggest impact in your career probably probably Riley my cender freom who would you invite to your dinner party oh that's a tricky one uh I have this concept that that it's it's I mean I love diversity in a dinner party of every kind right like and I I love an Aon provocateur at some level who's going to turn a dinner party into a into a a fun but engaging debate where not everyone agrees with each other um there are loads of examples of people like that I suppose I spoke to someone that I really like yesterday and I have never invited him to dinner party but I'd love to uh Rory Southerland from ogelby who's the vice chairman of ogal and a great Ted speaker and he's just one of the most fantastically entertaining humans there are uh where can we find you outside work uh outside of work probably asleep at the moment sadly um maybe on a snowboard in in my uh in uh vald amazing well Charlie thank you so much for coming on the show today thank you very much and yeah happy to answer any followup thoughts or questions and just be you know be part of part of the journey and yeah we're uh we're very excited about by all means send us exciting new companies and and great talent we're always here and and for for thoughts and feedback amazing thank you so much let me quickly add