Jordi Hays

But what are you seeing?

Why is now the right time to invest what sounds like, you know, nine figures into your own robotics and AI products?

But I'd love to sort of have a reflection on that.

incredibly influential on my career and journey.

You needed $20 million to be a business person.

For me, as somebody who just grew up obsessed with startups, I'd be on TechCrunch every day and all the startups that I thought were cool and crushing it were in TechCrunch.

every, you know, 12 months raising all this money.

And it feels like out of, you know, it feels like out of reach when you're a teenager.

And then you realize like, hey, capital is way less of a constraint than you would think.

So thank you for that.

The other kind of startup that's emerged is the lean startup that ends up raising a lot of capital, but simply because they were lean and they were really scrappy and they grow super quickly.

I'm thinking of a Turbo Puffer, our friend's company, where it raised very little money.

It's at a nine-figure run right now, but extremely attractive to capital.

But his entire approach is like, how do I maintain that scrappiness even once I have a Fortress balance sheet?

Because that's what made the company great from the beginning.

It's just like doing things that customers want that they'll pay for, you know, all these things.

I have the best example of this.

My favorite hotel in the world was bought by private equity.

And one of the things that every guest would talk about didn't matter at all.

It barely contributed to the cost of having a guest there.