Michael Lewis

So this story is very different than Sequoia.

But we interviewed Doug Leone, who was one of the, I guess, two stewards ago of Sequoia.

And he told us that after the dot-com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the dot-com bubble fund,

Every other venture firm out there after the bubble popped were taking Mulligan funds.

They went to their LPs and they said, you know, there's nothing we can do on this one.

We're going to be more disciplined next time.

We said, absolutely not.

We will never lose money for our investors, ever.

We will do everything we can possibly do to make this fund in the black.

And he said the best line anyone's ever said on Acquired.

He said, we looked at each other and you could burn cigarettes on our arms and we wouldn't flinch.

And they spent the next five years.

They didn't raise another fund.

And they just went to work with the portfolio.

They stopped taking fees, yeah.

And got it back.

And it ended up being a positive returning fund.

Yeah.

But really, like, I think we were just, we both so believe, it was like the burn cigarettes on our arm.

Like, I think we just both so believed that that was the right thing to do.