Peter Lacaillade

The benchmark would be kind of the top five and then the emergence of the Union Square Ventures and a handful of other more boutique-y, Chris Sacka, boutique-y firms.

And we made the decision to back some of the emerging leaders.

So we're early checks into Founders Fund, early checks into Thrive, early checks into Green Oaks a couple of years later, and Andreessen Horowitz.

Those are really helpful.

Having the good partners in venture has been a really good run.

And I think as Josh has scaled up Thrive, Neil has scaled up Green Oaks, at each step of the way, just being like, does this make sense from a bottoms-up perspective, given the flow, given what you're trying to do?

That's great.

What we noticed, though, was our dollars were going more and more towards growth as those firms.

I think they made a lot of sense while they were doing what they're doing.

But then what that led to was us thinking we wanted more early stage.

But then there was this emergence of these solo capitalists and these early stage investors.

And so we basically carved out about a third of our venture budget to invest in these emerging solo capitalists.

You had some very credible people deciding not to join firms, but be their own kind of firm and get access to the best companies.

Really, Elad Gil, Oren Zev, Ray Tonzing are some that are well-known, but also people like Jack Altman, Nico Winnenborn.

Rampton, at Abstract.

There's been a whole host of next-gen VCs, a lot of them operators, not all of them, that have emerged.

And we've backed a lot of them and anchored a lot of them, often introduced through... Thrive has been the most prolific introduction for us, but Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, the connectivity around our network, or the case of Jack Altman, we get introduced to Jack Altman through Thrive.

then Jack connects us to Zach Gray and the team at Mischief.

Sometimes there's a thing that goes that way.

Deals beget deals.