Jesse Zhang

It just seems way too easy to raise money.

So many companies out there.

I mean, for us, we've been very fortunate, right?

We don't take it for granted.

I mean, I think in my first company, we were also fortunate.

It was easy to raise, but it was for different reasons, like 2021.

Nowadays, it's just there aren't that many AI companies that have real, real traction on the revenue side, especially in the enterprise.

And so...

I think that's attractive to investors because they want to deploy their capital into AI and that's like the biggest trend.

So I think we've had a great relationship with all our investors.

I think we just really selected for folks that we get along with at a personal level and we feel like will be very helpful for our go-to-market normally.

Yeah, that's kind of an interesting process.

So yeah, pretty much after every single time we've raised a round, we just like almost immediately gotten preempted.

And that alone can't be right.

If you're just thinking of first principles to make an investment, the previous valuation should not be like a super big factor in that it should be like, how well is the business doing?

What do I believe the potential is?

So it feels like there's a little bit of mania.

But yeah, we're definitely I would say more indexed on the other two things like talents and customers.

I don't think there's anything like super crazy.

The main thing that we do, and I would actually encourage more founders to do this, is that during the stage where people want to invest but they haven't yet, that's when they're most willing to be helpful.