Brian O’Malley

You know, better than if you had to pick up the phone and call someone long distance before.

If they hadn't done it, I believe someone else would have come along and solve the problem with the scale that they did.

You got to remember, they were not the first mover in that category.

There were companies like Friendster, there were companies like MySpace, and each of those had their own, you know, degrees of success.

When you invest in consumer, is there any way to invest free traction?

Is there a way to say, well, this entrepreneur is going to build something special in this space before they've actually gotten traction?

So these days, there is less interest in some of these consumer companies.

And so that gives me the ability to look at seed investments or even pre-seed investments that actually have a live product.

It might be a smaller sample set, but you can see that level of

user engagement before you invest.

But I've also been the first investor in several companies before they even launched.

And in that case, what you're really looking at is what problems are there and do they have a really unique understanding of how to solve those problems.

So I'll give you an example from the Forerunner portfolio.

We were early investors in HIMSS and invested in a pre-product there

And that was a category where you had Andrew who really understood some of the changes going on around how people were circumventing their doctors or just the medical professionals to try to solve their challenges on their own.

They had a unique legal structure behind the scenes where they could both have a medical office as well as be a technology company.

And so that unlocked capabilities.

that previously weren't there.

And then you combine that with a really special founder.

And so that was one where we ultimately had comfort getting in early before they were launched because we had confidence that their solution, A, they were going to be able to deliver it and B, once they delivered it, it was going to be pretty special.