Alex Rampell

It just game over.

Well, I mean, there are a lot of deals that we lose because we're not willing to kind of go the distance on price.

That is a common thing where it's like, did we really lose it?

Like this has happened to us a number of times.

It's like, all right, we want to do the deal.

And this is, again, like consensus and non-consensus, a lot of times the difference is just on price or ownership, right?

If we had shown up and said, hey, we'll do 10% of this company for an A round, we could win every deal.

It's actually, I think, one of the competing elements that has shown up.

I'm interested to watch how Standard Capital does.

This is kind of the YC offshoot, where I'm going to take 10%.

That's very, very bad for big funds.

Because in order to make the math work for a big fund, you have to have high ownership and you know that your ownership will get depleted or will get diluted over time as option pool expansions happen, even if you take your pro rata in every single successive round.

So, I mean, we can win all these deals, but a lot of times, you know, I am much more preoccupied with ownership at the A because we're buying an out of the money call option.

And the reason why I kind of tell this story is because there's something that I've used as a benchmark, which is if you're hiring people,

and 100% of the people say yes to your job offer, what can you infer from that?

Number one, you could infer that you're the greatest hiring manager of all time.

But number two, you might be overpaying.

Would you agree with that?

Sure.

If you only get 50% or 20%, how do you know to test this hypothesis?