Ramtin Naimi

far, far, far away from that.

And I think Silicon Valley is a more friendly place than the art world.

Silicon Valley has been nicer to me than maybe the art world was to Larry Gagosian in the early days.

So I don't want to draw the direct analogy, but I think the main thing is just staying consistent and maintaining the reputation and building upon that reputation and then producing great results.

Venture is the only asset class where historical results is somewhat indicative of future performance.

You can actually somewhat forecast how a venture capital firm will do over time based on how they've done historically.

So I do believe if we just stay consistent, we have a pretty long trajectory and a long career ahead of us.

I'm 34 today.

I started this when I was 26.

I think I have at least 20 years left in me to keep doing this.

And I think you could build quite a brand and quite a platform in that timeframe.

I think brand would trump anything else that the machine doesn't have today, primarily because when a founder comes referred to us by an existing portfolio company, most of the work is done for us.

You're not going to find much about these guys online, but they've been phenomenal partners to me.

They've opened doors for me.

They knocked it out of the park on our fundraise.

They brought together the most solid angels to fill out our cap table.

And he's always available when I need him for anything.

If we don't have that and we're cold reaching out to founders, it's much more of an uphill battle to convince them why we should be in the same conversation of all of the other venture capital firms they're talking to whose names they've heard of before, which is why I mentioned that winning deals for us is a very manual process.

Other firms just get to win because of their brand.

They don't have to spend the man hours that I have to and call in all the favors that I have to to win the deal.