Lucas Swisher

Your gross margin might be lower, but your operating margin, which is ultimately at the end of the day is really what matters, may end up being higher.

what else do you think a lot of investors oscillate or focus on which is total shares one of the places where we don't spend time these pre-revenue companies are really high valuations i think this is a lesson that at least we've taken about ourselves from 2021 is that is not our business the pre-revenue company at a really high valuation with no product is not our business and i think a lot of investors are focused there right now because what ends up happening is if you can't invest in open ai and anthropic and revolut and spacex and canva

and all of the companies that are these great platform companies, and you're locked in to a certain part of the ecosystem, you make decisions that you can make.

And so I think a lot of people are focused on that part of the ecosystem right now.

And for us, that doesn't make sense from a risk-reward perspective.

Our focus is real businesses that are growing really fast, that we think are going to be really durable outcomes and actually generate liquidity for our investors.

And again, it goes back to this principle around, if I have a zero, I need a six.

And a six is really, really hard.

I mean, I think it's gotten harder for two reasons.

One is you do have this mega fine dynamic, but the other thing is we're in a different world than we were five years ago, right?

Which is in general, people are coming out of the gate with bigger check sizes and bigger valuations.

And that just raises the risk dramatically over time, right?

So I think those are the two dynamics that are really at play.

It's harder for a seed fund to buy 20% today or 10% today or 5% today than it was a few years ago because of this dynamic.

And that has to do with a lot of different things.

One of them is in a SaaS world, you didn't need that much capital.

You started up, you kind of get going, whatever.

In this world, businesses tend to be more capital intensive.

They may be actually more durable at scale because of this.

makes it harder for the next entrant to come in.