Patrick McGinnis

You know, there's no mates rates in these kinds of things.

And that it helps to have outside investors when you do these things.

And number three is don't follow other people.

So I've had so many investors come to me with deals and say, well, Kleiner Perkins is in this deal.

And my view is if Kleiner is in this deal, I mean, I'm honored to look at it.

It's really nice, but they probably are showing it to me because it's not one of their best ones.

Because if it were that great, they'd take the whole thing themselves or they'd get, you know, some other A-list investors.

So I think staying away from what I call the will-to-be syndrome or just following other people, that's where a lot of people make mistakes.

There's a hubris, you know, there's sort of like this personal thing

I was working in the private equity fund of AIG, which was totally unrelated to the crisis.

But as anybody who was around in 2008 knows, or, you know, maybe your company's doing this now because 2016 wasn't much better in many ways.

It doesn't matter when you're on the deck of the Titanic and it starts to sink.

It doesn't matter where you're seated on the deck.

And we have nothing to do with the failure of AIG, but we were, our business, you know, we just blew up basically.

Basically because it's a funny story.

I spent so much time telling people how to do this on a daily basis, so I would every day have a lunch with one other person that I knew who wanted to start doing this because even if they didn't have money, a lot of my friends, and I've done it too, you just trade your time and get sweat equity, right?

So half my portfolio, I've just gotten sweat equity for those things.

And a lot of my friends were like, you know, listen, I have good contacts.

I have things that I want to do outside of work.

I want to make some more money.