Brian O’Malley

In fact, in the example you gave with PairVC, they're

they have a close relationship with Sequoia where oftentimes they'll do the deal and then Sequoia will mark them up later on as well.

So you have these kind of synergistic relationships as well between the larger firms and the early stage investors.

Absolutely.

And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to go start this smaller firm because that's

That's the part of the job that I really love doing, which for better or worse, doesn't scale incredibly well.

There's probably easier ways to make money in venture by managing lots of assets.

But the area where I think I'm special and the area where I've had the most personal fulfillment historically is by getting involved with people before the rest of the market believes them.

Being able to develop trust and rapport to a level where they feel comfortable sharing not just the good news with me, but also the bad news.

And where you can look a couple of years later and see that this thing that was an idea without a whole lot of meat on the bones is now not only solving, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of people's problems, but also now the livelihood for 50, 100, 200 people worldwide.

around the gate.

And that's ultimately, that's ultimately not very scalable, but but really fulfilling for me.

And I think it's an area where, you know, if I get to the point where founders are doing references with other people I've worked with, usually those end up well, because they can speak to me filling that role for them, because it's not economically driven at the end of the day, it's what I love doing.

What's one thing that you want our listeners to know about Tactile VC?

One thing that I think is really important to know about Tactile that's a little bit different from some other folks spinning out these larger organizations is that many people will leave their firm because they got tired of the bigger partnership and they really just love doing deals individually.

Personally, I'm the byproduct of some really phenomenal organizations, organizations that took me in when I was younger, trained me and then gave me upward mobility to be able to grow into the investor that I am today.

These firms still have great training programs in terms of being able to bring in junior people and teach them the business, but they don't have necessarily the same level of bandwidth.

to mentor as much as I got when I was coming up the ranks.

And the upward mobility within these organizations has gotten harder as they're just bigger companies by now.

So one of the things that's really exciting to me about the opportunity in front of us at Tactile is to think about how you can take the best of these heritage firms