Narayan Chowdhury

They've essentially created a federated network of founders for them that are helping them look around the corners, that are giving them some insight into interesting use cases, interesting go-to-market, interesting spin-outs, whatever it might be.

They're giving them a little bit more heft, credibility, access into a next-generation company.

But importantly, you have to marry that with, okay, they've been around for a very long time, but they're staying somewhat disciplined in terms of the stage, the type of founder request that has worked for them.

What I mean by that is, okay, so let's say you've been around for 20 years, but that 20 years of history and that great trust and those halo deals and all the great things that happened are not as relevant because that all happened when you were

First finding companies, helping to build culture, helping to make key hires, making those key initial business introductions.

But now your business is, we got to figure out how to get into the Series D. What's the maximum we can pay?

There's five other exploding term sheets.

You're now in a different business than what the founders knew you for, how you competed.

And so it's that question of regime change.

And the team, and they've continued to build that alumni network.

And the alumni network feels very positive towards them.

It's one thing to have just funded 100 things, and we all know groups that have been high-velocity investors, but totally forgettable on a cap table.

That doesn't also mean much.

It's those folks where, again, I'll use USV, they had conviction.

The founders feel a certain way about them.

So all of those things kind of have to work in concert.

The other thing that will undoubtedly work, I think, are more emerging, opinionated, thesis-driven, basically the non-consensus and right, but new things.

And so we have to also be thinking about those opportunities.

Yeah, but those were, for the most part, generalists.

If we look at new managers and, again, crudely bucket them into specialists and generalists, I think the newer generalists are a challenge for us because we're wondering why they might be a sustainable brand in this market where there's 3,000 options for first checks.