Lucas Swisher

But I agree with you.

At scale, when companies become these platform companies, right, which is our style of investing, oftentimes it's almost like buying a pseudo public stock.

Sure.

In many ways, as a public market investor, I could own Google and Meta.

as a private market investor at the very earliest stages or the early growth stage, should I be investing in like two series Bs that are exactly directly competitive?

That feels really counterintuitive.

You probably don't want to do that.

One, just because you're making a bet that's directly competing.

But at the growth stage, when you get these platform companies, maybe they didn't even start by being competitive, but they grew into it over time.

And listen, that's part of the game.

And as a founder, I completely empathize and understand that, right?

I can understand how that would be, you know, a really tricky situation.

From our perspective, it's when you're investing in large markets, oftentimes you are going to end up in assets that compete because they naturally expand TAMs.

A great example of this is I think we were the only private investor that was invested in Snowflake and Databricks when they were both private.

They started off in completely different areas.

Databricks didn't have a data warehousing product and Snowflake didn't really do a lot of ELT.

It was mostly built around the ecosystem.

They grew together and we weren't invested when they were starting to compete because Snowflake went public a lot earlier.

But at the same time, that happens in big markets.

Yeah, I would separate the two asset classes almost in some way, right?