Brian O’Malley

which is this network of angels, other seed funds, groups that can add strategic value along the way, where I can come into a five, $6 million round, say, hey, I'm going to do two and a half to 3 million, or historically at a larger firm, I would have been doing four and a half million dollars

taking the vast majority of that round.

And I can now give the founders almost this smorgasbord of alternatives of saying, hey, we can work with both phenomenal investors who I used to compete with, who are now angels investing in companies.

We can bring in executives from people who have taken their companies public, built 10 plus billion dollars of economic value.

Let's say you have a challenge of taking a bottoms up product and then trying to think about how that evolves into an enterprise investment.

sales scenario, we can go grab the guy who ran sales at Dropbox, Slack, and then Atlassian.

And so I'm able to be a lot more strategic about what value do I bring to the table, which is really very simple.

It's I want to make sure the founder's vision is crisp.

I want to make sure that they're hiring the right people around the table.

And I want to make sure that they never run out of money.

That's what I'm bringing to the table.

But along the way, we can go work with other people who don't just used to have an operating background, but are still very much the tip of the spear, the best people in market.

And we have capital available and we have a history of investing with those folks to make it really easy on the founders.

At the end of the day, we're probably not going to win every deal we get after, but we can win the vast majority by showing up more informed about the business, showing up a little bit earlier than everyone else, and then having this roster of other individuals we can bring to bear to make sure that in a lot of ways we're punching up our weight class as a relatively small firm.

The best answer that I've gotten to this question so far, JR from industry, and when he said that the best...

early-stage investors, they essentially act as the second-and-a-half co-founders.

So there might be two co-founders, they'll be the second-and-a-half, or there might be three, they'll be the third-and-a-half.

And they do the one thing that the multi-stage firms can't do, which is give their time.

It's the unscalable asset.

Give senior partner time early on, essentially help build the company, which is quite a value add.