Patrick McGinnis

The other one's called Affinity, and it's a big data company.

And the reason I, it's for the call center space.

And the reason that I came into that one is actually just, it's from my old private equity days.

It's a company I was on the board of.

The team spun it out, and it was a business I knew intimately well.

And then McKinsey came in and invested.

And so my kind of view is if McKinsey's coming in, this is the place I want to be.

Yes.

Well, we know what happens a lot of times.

So when I started doing this, I really thought about what the mistakes I'd seen in my career as an investor, because I had invested in over 20 businesses all over the world.

I always did private equity in emerging markets in the hardest places in the world.

So Pakistan and Turkey and Argentina and Colombia.

So I'd seen...

Basically anything that could ever go wrong with a business and lost plenty of money as an investor working in a fund And when it came to my own money I was not willing to make those mistakes again if I could avoid it and what I see with people that are angel Investors happens all the time and I had a call the other day that tells you exactly the problem with a guy who was a major Hedge fund, you know, he runs his family office now It's hundreds of millions of dollars if not a billion dollars and he was telling me about the investments he had made any invested in friends companies and

And he always cut his friends the sweetest deals ever.

And they always end up in trouble and he didn't know what to do.

So as an investor, there's a couple of things that I think are really critical.

Number one is you have to invest in your areas of expertise.

You have to stay close to home in terms of your knowledge base.

Number two, you have to make sure that you these may be your friends, but you cut a commercial deal.