Ramtin Naimi

And he just returned cash.

He had all this money from benchmark.

Nobody was telling him to shut the company down, but he was like, I've only been thinking about consumer social for the last three years.

I know if I pivot again, it's going to be another consumer social idea because it's all my brain is wired to do right now.

So I need to shut this company down.

I need to return cash and I need to just go back to the drawing board.

And if and when I come up with another company, I'm going to come back to you with a seed round.

So I don't have the series A valuation hanging over my head.

And then there's other founders who have turned their entire team, maybe even half their founders, but they maintain the balance sheet and they went to like skeleton crew mode until they figured out things that had nothing to do with their first version of their business.

Clay is a really good example.

We wrote a small check into the seed round of Clay, I think eight years ago.

I think they hard pivoted two years ago into what Clay ultimately is.

Bappy is a company in our portfolio that was originally called Superpowered.

They're doing very, very well.

They've scaled from zero to double digit millions of ARR within 14 months of launch.

But that was four years after I seeded them and seven pivots later.

Craya is another example of multiple pivots until like they finally caught fire with the latest version of their products.

Craya was originally called Geniverse.

The idea needs to be thematically interesting to me and not an overly saturated market that shows some sign of novel thinking.

And what I mean by that is there is this weird phenomenon in Silicon Valley that every time a tier one fund or maybe two tier one funds finance a company in a category, in the next three months, I'll get pitch 15 companies doing the exact same thing.