Show notes
Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.As we move towards the end of 2021, we wanted to record an episode that focused on the LP perspective on current capital and ventures. To that end, this week we are joined by joined by Chris Douvos, founder of Ahoy Capital, Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson, Managing Director of Sapphire Partners, and Guy Perelmuter, founder of GRIDS Capital.The three of them have spent decades investing in venture funds and companies across multiple cycles. While we didn’t come into the discussion with any set agenda, we ended up covering everything from emerging manager views to global capital trends. This was a fun one to record, so hope you enjoy. A word from our sponsor:Vouch Insurance is a new kind of insurance platform for startups. Built by founders for founders, Vouch’s fully digital coverage takes minutes to activate. 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Because Vouch is an insurance platform, and not a broker, it works with its clients to manage, mitigate, and avoid risks. http://www.vouch.us/ventureunlockedIn this episode we discuss:02:22 Complete this sentence: Venture today is "[Blank]04:51 How are they as LPs navigating the seed and early-stage market for manager selection15:39 View of the late stage boom and potential for returns24:40 Perspective of Opportunity Funds and whether they represent a good product for LPs34:29 Returns Beezer is writing to on a multiple cash on cash basis on different types of managers40:05 Things they look for beyond track record in emerging managers44:41 Common mistakes and red flags for emerging managers that can scare off LPs47:15 Tangible characteristics that they look for in emerging managers53:15 How non-traditional and non-mainstream managers can attract institutional LPs56:08 What emerging managers should lead with when they don’t have a track record beyond the last few years60:22 The investment category each are most excited aboutMentioned in this episode:Episode 013 Chris DouvosEpisode 021 Beezer Clarkson(Guy’s episode will drop in early 2022)I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Chris, Beezer, and Guy. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Transcript:Samir Kaji:All right. So I'm super excited about bringing the first LP roundtable to Venture Unlocked, where we dive into a number of different topics that relate to venture. And we'll look to dive deep. This will be an unscripted conversation, so we'll let it go where it goes. I want to first introduce three of the best LPs in the business, Chris Douvos from Ahoy Capital, Beezer Clarkson from Sapphire Ventures and Guy Perelmuter from GRIDS Capital. One of the things we were talking about before this podcast started was how fascinating a time we live in right now. And within venture, it certainly seems A Tale of Two Cities where it's the best of times, and it's the worst of times. And we'll get into that during the scope of this discussion over the next hour or so. But let me first start with an icebreaker for the group here. If you were to complete this sentence, how would you complete it? Venture today is X. Chris, why don't you start? What is X today?Chris Douvos:To get hype for this is discussion I watched some TikTok so I'm feeling like I've been around a long enough time that I got to stay current and stay youthful to be relevant in venture. So if I had one word based on what I've been hearing from the kiddos it's "lit," this market is lit. And that's both a good thing and a bad thing. I mean, we can go into that, but hey, for the moment, we're lit.Samir Kaji:All right, Gee, are you going to top that? What's your description of the market today?Guy Perelmuter:Top Douvos? Never, sir. That's impossible. I will say that, for me, the current venture market is extraordinary. And I mean it literally, right. I mean, it's beyond ordinary. We're now a few standard deviations from everything we've seen before. And again, as Chris said, this could be good and could be bad. So for me, in one word, it's extraordinary.Samir Kaji:That's a great word. Beezer?Beezer Clarkson:I think I'm going to go with "spicy," "spicy."Chris Douvos:Oh, caliente.Samir Kaji:I like it.Beezer Clarkson:Caliente.Samir Kaji:I like this.Beezer Clarkson:I was going to say fuego, but I'll say "spicy."Samir Kaji:So between spicy, lit and extraordinary, it's very clear that all of you think this is a very heated marker with a ton of momentum. And I would agree with that. And I was looking at the Q1, Q2 numbers and roughly $300 billion went into venture-backed startups, two-thirds of that, as you can imagine, was late-stage. And it seems like the venture market has, or at least the capital market for tech companies, has moved into a barbell where on the right side, you have large aircraft carrier type of firms that are investing across stages, have the ability to pump a lot of dollars in at those late stages, let's say series B and later and series C and later. And then on the left side of the market, you have a ton of seed funds, which by number, are quite high, by dollar amount, are still pretty low.Samir Kaji:I feel like from an LPs perspective, it's harder to navigate than ever before to figure out where can you place capital to get the best risk-return? And we've all talked about this, it, feels like managers are coming back really quickly. There's not always that much differentiation that matters, and it makes it really tough. And so, I'd like to start with, maybe, Chris on this question, how are you navigating in today's world?Chris Douvos:I'm old enough to remember, as we all are, but I started at Princeton's endowment back in '01. And I remember I became a venture guy because our then venture guy left. And at a Monday meeting, somebody was like, "So who wants to do venture?" And it was like that nose game where everybody touches their nose and last person not touching their nose gets stuck with whatever task. And that was me, and I became a venture guy. And I remember like 2002, 2003, 2004, the wreckage. And those were years were like $5 billion, I think, in 2003, went into startups and like 20 billion... I remember Bill Helman at Greylock was like, "What is the rational size of the benchmark? Is it $20 billion a year?" It's like those numbers seem quain. But in fairness, the scale of exits has made those numbers seem reasonably quain. It's not like this is an outrage and people are just spending like drunken sailors.Chris Douvos:But what I'll say is, there are a lot of risks that have been taken off the table, and like a main risk is financing risk, right. And it's because there's so much like plentiful capital out there. I come from like a classically trained institutional investor standpoint, you're always thinking about risk-adjusted return. Well, how do you adjust return when there's like actually no risk and it's been like such a one-way market for so long? And I think people have forgotten that actually the trees don't all grow to the sky.Chris Douvos:And that's something that for the last, maybe, year and a half, has really influenced my own thinking, which is why, maybe to my great detriment, I've doubled down on what I call the "grownups" in my portfolio. So we're doubling down on firms where the investors are really kind of seasoned. Maybe seasoned is a fancy word for geriatric. Whether they're established groups that we've backed for a long time like First Round, or True, or newer groups like Neil and Trae over at Defy that have a long kind of history of investing. But I want people who have kind of seen what actually happens when risk exists again, because I think too many people have grown up in a world where the only answer is buy, and if you can't if you can't buy yesterday, buy today.Beezer Clarkson:I think I went through a bit of like... What is that called? ... the trough of despair, and then there's like the arc of euphoria, whatever those like sine curve is. I think right now I'm finding it actually really fun, which I know it's a little bit of the... If you don't need to sleep, it's actually a really fun time to be doing venture, because it's unbundling in a way that I love. I think the options now for where an entrepreneur can get money is awesome, for an entrepreneur.Beezer Clarkson:It's interesting questions for an LP and where to put your dollars. But there's so many more alternatives now, you can do the classic funds, you can do what Chris is talking about. We've been trying to keep some dollars available for newer managers and trying some newer methodologies, not just... We've done some sort of new but classic kind of structured funds. We're trying to look at, are there other alternatives? The rise of the solo GPs, there are syndicate structures, there are some service for equity structures out there. We haven't done a rolling fund, but I find them fascinating.Beezer Clarkson:So I think right now, I actually feel really greedy because I'm like, there's so many different things I'd like to invest in. And it's just a question of, no LP has unlimited capital, there has to be the constraint, because nobody has all the money in the world, and you wouldn't want to index venture anyway. But I just find that hard time picking because there's so many awesome things I'd like to do. So I find it right now, a fun but challenging market from that perspective.Guy Perelmuter:Yeah, one thing that comes to mind when I look at this market right now, it reminds me a little bit of what happened in 2000, 2001, in the hedge fund industry, because that was a time where a lot of prop desk folks were leaving their jobs at investment banks to start their own hedge funds. And you could see like on a weekly basis, there was a new long-short equity fund sprouting from nowhere. And it was not really long-short per se, if the manager had like 40 longs and two shorts, he would call himself or herself a long and short fund, right.Guy Perelmuter:And something that really catches my eye in this environment is the sheer amount of new funds coming to market by people, by "portfolio managers." And again, that's fair for people to try their hand at running other people's money. But to get your stripes and to be called a portfolio manager, that's a process, right. I feel like this title is misused a lot. We had to have some sort of standard process to make sure that someone can put that in their resume.Guy Perelmuter:So right now, the venture environment, and I agree with what both Chris and Beezer said before, the options are incredible and we are living in a world where the opportunity costs, to Chris' point, is zero, right. Interest rates have been almost zero for longer than any one of us have ever experienced, paradoxically, the pandemic has accelerated so many trends in the minds of so many different people from different walks of life. And it seems like, at this point, all roads point to venture, right. Everybody has their own reason to think of, "Okay, I should expand my venture portfolio. I should add more chips to this particular asset class." And it doesn't feel like this is going to necessarily end badly. And I'm sure we're going to go into that over the course of this conversation.Guy Perelmuter:But one thing that I think it's inevitable is that some of the GPs out there who have already earned their stripes, I think they're going to be at the premium in this market because, inevitably, we're going to see failures over time, it just takes a little longer in venture, but they'll be there. And these GPs I expect them to continue to do well. And I think there's a list of probably 20 to 30 names out there that are going to be in great shape in another three to five years. And for those newcomers, I think the environment is going to be increasingly challenging for raising money and for being able to be in the cap table of really interesting deals.Chris Douvos:And by the way, that's a great point because, in venture, all of our train wrecks happen in slow motion, right. And what's actually has always been kind of acute to me is, in the public markets, if an idea goes sour, the capital is destroyed and the managers who were pursuing that strategy get kind of lit up and exit the business. In venture, we're surrounded by melting ice cubes, right. And all it takes is one great deal to get that melted ice cube back in like kind of solid ice condition.Chris Douvos:I was having lunch with a good friend of mine the other at the Creamery here in Palo Alto and a GP walked by, and this is somebody who like literally had been an incinerator of capital. And this person leaned into me and said, "Oh my God, can you believe that guy's in company X and they put in like a million dollars and it's now worth like a billion and a half dollars and it's going to like rescue this fund, which has been on life support for years?"Chris Douvos:So in addition to like these funds that like kind of never die, you got what Beezer talked about is like all these, not only all these new managers, but new modalities of investing. And for somebody like myself who tries to do like one new investment a year, it's crazy. It's like we always used to when I was at Princeton's endowments, "It's harder to get into our portfolio than it is to get in our college." And that dilemmas only been kind of magnified by an order of magnitude.Samir Kaji:I sort of look at where the market is today, and I remember starting my career back in '99 actually, and it was like the height of the tech bubble. And remember, I forget if it was '99 or 2000, like a hundred billion was raised by venture funds. And it was at a time where the public market cap was like $13 trillion. Venture was still very much a vertical industry on the fringe. And technology, in particular, right, we were still internet 1.0, less than 350 million people were online. And you sort of look at the maturation of technology in '06. What happened was AWS came out and it made software development cheaper than ever before. In '07 was the iPhone. And that made, not only you had the development cheaper, but now you had the distribution channels. And today, of course, over 5 billion people have smartphones. So part of me thinks this is just a continued evolution of the technology market and now capital is starting to catch up.Samir Kaji:The 14-year bull run has certainly helped. But the size and scale of these companies now are at points we've never seen before, right. If you look at the top five public companies, they're all technology companies, total market cap of 9 trillion. But look at what their revenues are, look at what their profits are. And then you see some companies, even like a Canva, for example, if you look at their revenues, we would've never seen companies hit those type of revenues, but now you have the distribution and tech being truly horizontal.Samir Kaji:Now, I do have a question though, which is related to one side of the barbell, which is late stage, which most of the capital goes into. And again, that's two-thirds of the capital. It seems like investing at that stage, the risk levels are more aligned with what we have seen with traditional middle market, with maybe a slight higher alpha potential given the size and scale of technology companies. But in many ways it does seem that companies as they achieve scale, even at 10 or $20 billion are still private in nature. And we've seen that on many different occasions with some of the best companies. From my perspective, there's some parallels to investing at that stage as we might have seen maybe 20 years ago in the markets right after public offering, let's say, the 12th to 24 months after in terms of risk-return. Do you agree with that? And how should we be thinking about the late stage markets?Chris Douvos:It's really interesting because about 10 or 12 years ago, Josh Kopelman from First Round did a blog post where he looked at the market caps at IPO of a bunch of different kind of tech stalwarts from kind of Microsoft through like the early 2000s, like getting Salesforces and their Netflix. And he figured out that of the eventual appreciation in the public markets, 97% was available to the public investors. Whereas, since then, we've seen radical shift into the late stage private market. So I think, the late stage venture market certainly looks like the IPO market of old. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but partially, what it's... I mean, I look at my own portfolio in my funds and it looks like the S&P MidCap 400. And I think that's really unhealthy for market structure, and I think it's really important for investors to be able to access emerging growth.Chris Douvos:But the thing that worries me about all that is that I always think about Buffet's equation, which is opportunity equals value minus perception. And what happens is the private markets like really feed on themselves and create these like fire storms almost where the temperature gets hotter because the fire's burning, which makes the fire burn more, which makes the temperature hotter, and it's this big recursive circle. And there's not as much discipline with respect to price and the sale prices and all this stuff. And so, you get these like crazy valuations. And I think, Samir, you alluded to this earlier, we've seen some companies really struggle in the public markets, and I think it's because there's so much exuberance in the late stage private market that's disconnected from Buffet's equation.Chris Douvos:And so, that's something that worries me. But running an early stage portfolio, I'm actually kind of delighted because it kind of really minimizes financing risk and gives the portfolio companies that we're backing much more optionality and much more survivability and anti-fragility. So as long as that capital is there, it's great. The problem that I worry about is, what happens when that rug gets pulled out?Samir Kaji:One comment on that. I just want to read out off a few things. So percentage of first 20 billion in market cap captured pre-IPO, so Airbnb, first 20 billion, 100%, Snowflake, 100%, Slack, 100%, Twitter, 82.5%, Facebook, 100%, Salesforce, 8%, Amazon, 3.2%, Cisco, 2.4%, and Dell, 1%. So it does go to show how much scale of valuation happens in the private markets. But yeah, I mean, I think your point in terms of what happens if the public markets retract, what does that mean for all those late stage rounds that are done, where you're buying basically at almost a peak? And oftentimes, even right after the IPO, it drops below what the last private market valuation is. Again, I think that's a real risk, but Beezer, I know you were going to maybe take a different position, perhaps.Beezer Clarkson:So one of my colleagues wrote a paper literally like last week on this topic, which is why it's just top of mind, basically, Long Live The Tech IPO and Steve Abbott did it if people want to Google for it. And it looked at this question of how much money gets captured privately versus publicly. And the answer is, in a bull market, there is still a lot of room to run in the public market. So, just going to shout out, people can read that because it's all very data driven.Beezer Clarkson:But it is predicated to the point Chris was making, is that, yes, it's worked out well historically. If you look over the last 10 years, because even if there was a high valuation privately, there was still so much more publicly in the strong companies. But you have to have this bull market to make it happen, and if not, we all know it happens, companies go out, they flounder, either they get recapped or sometimes they get taken private by a private equity tech company and repackaged. So if they're there, things can continue.Beezer Clarkson:I also just think there's been a much healthier IPO market in the last 18 months than there's been before if you look at the number of companies that are going out. And I do think from a venture perspective, that is very healthy. The venture market wasn't predicated on people staying private forever. The circle of life of capital flow is critical. No one wants to work at a startup if they're never going to have their options worth anything, that's the whole premise of why you join a startup, right. And the same thing for an LP, the premise is that you invest money into a fund that goes into a company that comes back around so the dollars can be redistributed again back into venture. So, we're positive on the signals that are happening right now. But yes, everyone worries about retraction, and my crystal ball does not have a date for when that's going to happen. I'm very sorry. Maybe Chris' out of the shop, and he knows when the market will dropChris Douvos:My crystal ball is still in the shop. I mean, I want to get by your repair person because mine's still busted.Guy Perelmuter:So, here's something that I believe we can kind of expect... right. Because if history has shown us anything is that markets will correct, markets will fluctuate, we'll see those prices going up and down. But here's what is unusual about or unique about the environment that we're living in right now... And I think your point about the barbell approach has a lot to do with it. If you think about each round or each series that a privately owned company raises and you stack them on top of each other, and you think about the IPO or the listed company at the very top of that stack... I'm not talking about capital structure, I'm just illustrating the path of a specific company right.Guy Perelmuter:Whenever things happen in public markets and they're there for everybody to see, right, and the results and the actions and the volatility is abrupt, it's intense, it does capture headlines, that's what people are going to read about in the evening news or hear about in the evening news. So what happens is that the shock waves they get from the public markets, they will start going down the structure of the stack, right. So they'll hit head on the late stage, the mega rounds of still privately owned companies. And it'll go all the way down. But now, there's this gap between the late stage and the very early stage, so there's no dampening of this effect.Guy Perelmuter:So my concern here is that this eventual correction in the public markets, that may or may not have anything to do with the private markets, will create a ripple effect that could make capital scarce, which basically is what fuels this industry, right? Capital people are interested in financing new companies and new ideas and new technologies. And I think that this is probably one of the most important aspects of this market that we should keep a close eye on because when the dampening effect of those intermediary rounds, if you will, are not there, then that's something quite unique to this specific moment in time and we should be on the lookout for the first signs of trouble.Samir Kaji:Yeah. And it's hard to really understand if there is truly a canary right now in that coal mine that can be actually identified. I can't seem to find anything that would suggest there's going to be a near-term retraction in the economic cycle. But historically, you're right. When you see drops in the public markets, it affects capital flow, which then... Usually, it starts with the late stage and then goes to the mid stage and then goes to the early stage in terms of capital and of course, valuation.Samir Kaji:But even if you plan the early stage today where, yes, valuations have gone up, but if you redefine what the outcomes could be, it really doesn't matter too much. At least it's not as sensitive and fragile relative to late stage markets. A lot of the early stage funds are playing both, because they raise a core fund and then they raise an opportunity fund. And I think over the last two years in particular, I've seen more opportunity funds than maybe the 10 years prior to that.Samir Kaji:The historic LP view on opportunity funds was actually very negative. And I think I've talked to everybody about at this. And now, it seems to be thawing either as a function of being forced to do it or viewing it as the late stage market where a manager has an asymmetric view into a company could be a really interesting place to put capital and still get a nice risk-return. How has your thinking either stayed the same or modified as it relates to opportunity funds today?Chris Douvos:This calls to mind my favorite quote from Keyser Söze, which is, "The greatest trick that devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." And what I mean by that is that there was a time, not too long ago, and people believed that kind of modest fun-size actually was a creative to positive returns. Then if you raise too much capital, it was tough to compound that capital. And so, I think a lot of funds started raising... A lot of people were consciously small. And I think that then they saw that they had all these kind of pro rata rights. And so, you'd see this kind of people go through this process of where they had a modestly sized fund and then they were in hot companies. And companies are kind of more hot than they normally would be because there's no risk in the economy right now or risk isn't getting priced, I should say.Chris Douvos:And so, people start offering SPVs and they're like, "Oh, too many SPVs, that's a pain in the butt. Let's raise an opportunity fund." And before you know it, your friendly neighborhood $200 million fund is now raising $600 million between the two vehicles. And it's like, "Wait a second, you guys used to say fun-size matters and now it doesn't matter." So I've done my fair share of these because I think the risk-adjusted return is actually okay, but it just makes me think that people aren't being kind of terrifically, intellectually honest with themselves about keeping their fun sizes small.Chris Douvos:And I think we're kind of whistling past the graveyard in some of this stuff, because what happens when you got different securities in the two funds, and if there's a downturn and the securities find themselves in conflict with each other? Somebody's going to get crammed down and somebody isn't, or both people are, and someone doesn't have capital to do a pay-to-play. It's symptomatic of the world of live in. I think, if you're in the full send economy, if you're going to send it, send it. But this is something that I think has worked really well to date, but makes me really nervous about the future and hope that we don't step in any holes in the bottom of the airplane.Samir Kaji:Chris, can you maybe explain just for a second, when you say "conflict of a certain security," what does that actually mean for people that don't know what that actually relates to?Chris Douvos:I remember in like ‘99 and '00, a lot of funds were raising, actually, like, "Our VCs have raised two funds in a single year." Like a lot of people had 2 ‘99 funds, and sometimes, they do crossover investments in those funds, so similar to what you'd see in an opportunity fund and a core fund. And then, when the downturn hit, you might see like fund nine is in the A of a security and fund 10 was in the B. And you might have like a pay-to-play where if you don't come into the round, you're going to get kicked to common. And fund B might have reserves and fund A might not. Or fund B has some kind of preferences and fund A doesn't and fund A gets buried behind the preference stack. And the fund B investors make out and make out well, and the fund A investors don't.Chris Douvos:And that kind of stuff created a lot of drama, I call it the Great LP Wars of 2002, where you'd see like some GPs, who are today, kind of top five GPs, spent like half the year dealing with the crankiness of the different constituencies of their LPs.Beezer Clarkson:The opportunity fund discussion has so many different implications, right, because there is the one that Chris was talking about, like what swim lane is a fund in anymore? And there was this beautiful time in venture when everyone had a swim lane and we don't have swim lanes anymore. And I think, it'd be lovely if it was that way, and it's just not. And LPs are going to have to deal with it. You can't crush people back into the old ways of working, it's just not going to happen. You can assess each opportunity fund for it's still return potential, to Chris' point about the risk-return. And we treat them all very individually, that way, we have return targets for our dollars. And the question is, will this opportunity fund deliver it? Some can, some can't. Right. It's each one's its own specific little, beautiful snowflake.Beezer Clarkson:But the complications of the business exist no matter what. Right. Like, is it the same team? Is it a different team? The security questions Chris is raising... We have a fund who has successfully invested in multiple times in the same company in different vehicles. Actually, the company's doing well, but the question about when you sell is still different for each different fund, because if you're investing at series D, they might want to hold that for longer. But you're at the series A and your fund is smaller and you want to start creating some DPI for your LPs, who do you sell to because they're not the same LPs in these funds anymore? And the business complication has just gone up so astronomically and I don't think until you've lived it, to Chris's point, it's as clear to a GP, but to LPs who are looking at the paper, you're like, "Oh, this is going to be an awesomely difficult question to answer." And there's not as many of those conversations.Guy Perelmuter:I absolutely agree. And actually, this is an interesting segue into something that I have learned over 20-plus years of allocating capital and investing, which is, there's only one thing that LPs hate more than losing money, in my opinion, it's surprises. An LP will understand the rules of a game if you explain them in advance and say, "This is how this game works. This is how this project works. This is how this fund is going to work."Guy Perelmuter:But to Beezer's point, after four and a half years or five and a half years, you got to start going deep into the weeds to start talking about specifics because of cross-investments in different vehicles and different timings and downturns. Those are the bombshells, those are the hits that LPs take and that will ripple throughout the industry, because that's when you start getting the domino effect, because then there's a credibility issue, then that GP is going to have to spend 95% of his or her time explaining himself or herself to his LPs or to her LPs.Guy Perelmuter:So I think that the whole opportunity fund versus individual SPVs versus what is your core competency, those are questions and issues that have to be thoroughly understood prior to writing a check. Because again, Beezer is right, this is not like a hundred meters race, right, that's it. "I only run a hundred meters." "No, no, I only run a hundred meters, but on occasion, I'll do a long jump, and eventually, I can do a 400 meter race as well." And you can mix it up and do everything as long as you are in agreement with your client base. Surprises are very, very unwelcome to LP, that has been my experience time and time again.Samir Kaji:As you were all talking about opportunity funds, we actually had looked at 25 very successful seed funds that have been around anywhere between five and seven years, on fund 3, 4, 5. Out of those 25 that we looked at 22 raised an opportunity fund along with their last fund. And I remember in the past, and this again, dates me a little bit, but we used to talk about swim lanes and we used to always say there's different muscles that you have to exercise to be successful at early stage versus late stage. And some of that has been just eschewed by the fact that there is capital chasing these and the pro ratas are there. And candidly, a lot of the institutional investors, be it the endowments or foundations, are actually not set up for doing SPVs. And so, the opportunity fund has offered them, no pun intended, an opportunity to place more money behind a seed stage manager than they otherwise would. And so, it also fits into a little bit of the demand of the LP market and what they're looking to do per manager.Guy Perelmuter:I agree. There's a market. And if you are a successful seed stage venture capital fund and you're seeing your companies go off the charts time and time again, and you have a limited pro rata and you see a clear opportunity where you can do more and you can bring more of that, to your LPs, why wouldn't you do it? Right? That's just markets being efficient and trying to... The old adage that says, "Nature abhors the vacuum, right. There's no room for vacuum in this industry. So people are going to feel that in as fast as they possibly can.Guy Perelmuter:I'm not against the opportunity funds because I think the reason behind them is very, very in line with the LPs best interests. And it's been my experience that out of a lineup of LPs, maybe 15% will be interested in doing directs, in doing SPVs. Most of them are, "Okay, I'm paying you to take care of my money. I'm not here to start cherry picking on company A, B, C, or D, that's your job. So don't bring five SPVs per year to my attention because I don't have the bandwidth, the interest, the knowledge to analyze them." So I think it's the market being the market in adjusting itself.Samir Kaji:Beezer, you mentioned something earlier about risk-adjusted returns on opportunity funds and core funds. As you underwrite to the different stages, what are those returns that you're actually underwriting to on a multiple cash-on-cash basis?Beezer Clarkson:Sure. Well, historically, and I say it this way because I we're in the process of reconsidering this given the performance recently, we said if you're series A investing, right, the bulk of your dollars are going at series A and whatever, however the vehicle is being structured, we need to see a 3X net potential performance, that's our bar. And so, seed therefore should be greater because there's higher risk, so that's 5X. And this is why the seed fund's doing a series A opportunity fund, it can still work. It gets harder if you're... And sometimes, this is like a shout out to GPs, if your opportunity fund's going to out on your early fund, your math isn't working or your opportunity fund is a lot smaller, which is also fine. And sometimes that is true. But if an LP is doing the math and saying it doesn't stack up, get ahead of that and make sure you understand your return profile, because we can talk about things that turn off LPs, but if we have to do your return profile math for you, that's not a positive sign.Beezer Clarkson:But what we're seeing in the market right now is because there's been so much strong performance, we see growth funds. We don't tend to do these, but they pitch us and they have 3X net performance, legit, or more, in which case, the series A funds, we have high single digits, we have double digits, we have seed funds doing double digits. And again, in this bull market, it's hard to then say, should this be the new norm for forever? But it's certainly the standard today. So when looking at adding new managers to the program, you have to believe someone's going to outperform pretty incredible existing performance right.Chris Douvos:This is so top of mind for me right now because... I call this syndrome Syndrome. So if anybody remembers the Pixar movie, the Incredibles, right, the bad guy is named Syndrome. And he always said his aim was to bring superpowers to everybody because when everybody's incredible, nobody will be. And I feel like, literally, every single fund that comes across, my transom is like sporting numbers that would, in different times, make me drool. But performance is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. And then, we don't even need to get into like, "Okay, who's going to put moolah in the coolah." Because I always remember when I was at Princeton at the endowment, we had a big conference table filled with tombstones from Wall Street deals, whether they were acquisitions or IPOs. And all of the tombstones on that "Graveyard of Broken Dreams" were companies from which the only distribution we got was that tombstone right. They literally went public and we got zero because they went to zero. So, I've always been kind of super sensitized to that so this is why this is top of mind.Chris Douvos:I was just talking to one of my biggest investors and when this guy invested in my fund, in my first independent fund in 2012, I told him like, "Look, our return target, the baseline is at 2.5X net, and hopefully we can get up into threes net at the fund level." And today, that fund sits with a lot of public companies, and some about to go public, in the mid threes. That's not even a humble brag because I don't even think that's good anymore. I don't know it's good anymore because I look at other things and I hear about people putting up five, 7X funds and I'm like, "Holy smokes, how can I get me some of that?"Chris Douvos:To extend the metaphor of like the Olympics and events, I feel like we're all doing kind of pole vault on the moon, right, where there's no gravity. And at some point, gravity's going to kick back in, and I think there's going to be a fine line between who was lucky and was able to get out of stuff. It's inevitable that the markets will come back to earth, it's just a question of when and how, and will people have been able to generate enough liquidity in the interim to kind of sustain these kinds of returns?Samir Kaji:I think there's probably something in the middle that's directionally true in the sense that, yes, there's going to be some gravity at some point. Some of these companies are never going to live up to the valuations that they've been given in the private markets. At the same time, a lot of these funds are investing at a stage of these companies where the exits that do happen, that are successful are going to be a step function far bigger than they ever have. And so, do we redefine what a successful seed fund is? I mean, I remember a few years ago, we said 3X, if you can get to a 3X that's great. Most people would say today it's at least a 5X. And I've seen multiple 10X type of funds. And then, we'll see if the DPI gets to 10X, but this kind of reminds me of like the '80s and your early '90s, when you saw a lot of that when there was very little capital, very few firms.Samir Kaji:But moving to sort of the emerging bucket for a second, if we are looking at 5, 7, 10X, I find with track records, track records can be very, very lacking in indicators. And sometimes, there are indicators that are just far too old to matter. Oftentimes, you're looking at a track record that's like eight years old when they had this great return and it's too long ago, too many variables have changed, the teams changed. And the track records that are more recent, there just hasn't been enough maturation or any sort of resiliency that portfolios had to show.Samir Kaji:So, if you're not looking at just track record, which again, has a lot of false positives and negatives, what are the things that you evaluate when you're looking at a manager and saying, is there a potential for this early stage manager to be a five to 7X? What are some of those things that are non-obvious?Guy Perelmuter:Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is, basically, everybody's looking for that golden ticket in their chocolate bar. And I'm talking, Gene Wilder Willie Wonka, not Johnny Depp Willy Wonka, because all of us, we know that's the legit Willie Wonka. And I think that emerging manager, at this point in time, the equation is a little bit flipped and I think that's going to be something that we'll see for a long time, which means there are far more managers out there, then talented and really awesome entrepreneurs, meaning that entrepreneurs, ultimately, I think, have their pick on who they want to work with, specifically at the fringes and specific niches and sectors. But I think we can paint with broad strokes this picture. And that means that when you look at the manager, you have to figure out why would this particular manager be able to attract, have enough gravitas to attract extraordinary founders and entrepreneurs and have the audacity to back ideas that are going to be 5, 8, 10, 12... Pick a number, any number, I don't care.Guy Perelmuter:The fact of the matter is that right now, I think that's the key question that one has to ask oneself. What's his or her background? What's the edge they're bringing to the table? We don't need to look at their track record because more often than not, there isn't one or there's one that they use at their old firm and now they're starting something new. So, I mean, there's so many variables in there. So I think the core question one has to ask himself or herself is why would this person be able to attract great talent and build a fantastic portfolio? And that's why I use the golden ticket metaphor, because I think it's a little bit like, you can buy all the chocolate bars in the world and you eventually get to your golden ticket, but you'll run out of money before you do that. So you have to make that golden ticket get to you in the first place.Chris Douvos:See, I always say we use lottery slogans of Ivy League veneer, it's things like, optionality is the same as saying, "Hey, you never know." You got to be in it to win it is the same as asymmetric payoff, right. We've co-opted some of this stuff, it's like, "Some days I think I'm not an investor, I'm just heading down to the bodega to buy a couple of Lotto tickets along with my diet coke."Chris Douvos:It's really interesting because one thing I think a lot about is, I don't know how you underwrite to kind of 10X returns, because the portfolio math on that is such that you have to underwrite to one outcome that's just so extraordinary that you can't underwrite to it. I remember when First Round invested with Uber, I was spending a lot of time hanging out with Rob Hayes. And nobody knew that that was going to become Uber. In that same fund, they had Roblox, which ended up actually distributing more to First Round than Uber did. And Roblox was like the 10-year overnight success story you just didn't know. Who knew that that was going to be the company that it is today distributing literally billions of dollars to that fund.Chris Douvos:And so, what I kind of underwrite to is I want managers that can demonstrate sustainable competitive advantage, which drives repeatability. And I've got some kind of short hands for what I think about that in terms of people who are leveraging specific ecosystems, and that manifests in a couple of different ways. And I feel like that kind of thinking can get me to like a 3X, but the gap between 3X and 10X is filled with just being really f-ing lucky.Samir Kaji:Another thing I've been really curious about is just the common mistakes that managers make that, over time, atrophy returns. One of the obvious things for me is when managers move out of the swim lane too quickly, to suddenly, and whatever comparative advantage they had dissipates because they're playing a completely different game. And an example would be somebody that's raised a $10 million fund writing small frictionless checks, non-lead. And then, all of a sudden, jump into 75 and being forced to really lead every single round. And those things can come at the expense of returns. Are there any common mistakes that you see or red flags that you think come at the expense of returns?Beezer Clarkson:When you're in a meeting and sort of like the magic happens, there's all sorts of like structural things, to Chris's point, like they have a team and they have a vision for market and there's all this stuff that everybody has. But there's something about an investor who's playing in a space. And it's just so true to how they think. The stupid phrase is they can see around corners. But the reality is that's the experience you have sometimes with an LP when someone's talking about something, you're like, "I have now understood D to C crypto enterprise software." You pick it in a different way because this investor is thinking about it in a different way, or is able to sort of capture something about their investing scheme that other people just are sort of more like paycheck venture capitalist.Beezer Clarkson:This sounds derogatory and I don't mean it that way, but people kind of go to work to be a VC versus someone who's like, "No, I'm compelled to do this because this is like what's going to be true in the world and I have to be there." And they can be emerging managers, they can be established. There's just something about their presence. And they don't have to be an extroverted charismatic, they can be super quiet about it. But when you're in the presence of one of those folks, be it brand new or established, it's just as different. And it doesn't mean to say they're not going to make some mistakes in investing because venture is a risk business, and that's fine, we sign up for that. But that's just really different.Beezer Clarkson:And I think when people don't have that and you have too many people that just want to write a check, you can kind of feel that too and it just feels very middling. Or if someone's super special because they work really well to your point, Samir, at seed, and all of a sudden, they're doing growth at seed. And somehow they're magic intuition. Some people can stretch both ways. It's hard, not everybody can and that can just sort of diffuse it. And then, you're also competing with a different set of folks. It's a really different game and people have different tactics and understand different things about companies.Samir Kaji:Is there anything from a behavioral characteristics standpoint that you can point to that's actually tangible? Because what we're talking about here is you feel something, right, you're across something, which by the way, I think the risks that all LPs have, including all of us, is we form biases about what somebody should feel like because we've seen certain type of people be successful and we've sat across people. What are some of the tangible things from a behavior or the way somebody thinks that is actually a good sort of heuristic or at least a heuristic that you all use? Is it hustle? Is it hungry? Is there self-awareness? What is it that you're looking for?Chris Douvos:This is a flummoxing topic for me because a lot of the stuff that I've, in my career, been kind of trained as like really important actually hasn't been in the last few years, and one is portfolio construction. If you look at the great funds of a lot of different eras, when they've been successful, they've owned a lot of their big winners, they've been thoughtful, they've been disciplined, all these things that we think of as asset management.Chris Douvos:And Beezer and I are in a fund together where we literally like kind of were yelling at this GP across the table because he was kind of just spraying and praying, and he his response was, "Look, you got to understand this isn't 1999, it's 1996. And the more investments you make the better because the rising tide's going to lift all boats." And I said, "Well, you don't know what the tide is going to be like at some undetermined time in the future." And of course, and so I'd sit here and I'd be like, "Oh, those guys really suck at portfolio construction and here they've got a big public company that's going to return somewhere between four and 6X their fund on its own." Right. That's one that historically has been really important to me, people are thoughtful about the craft of investing as opposed to just throwing money around.Chris Douvos:And a second one, which actually, I struggle with a lot and this is like the Swanson training in me is like alignment of interest is really important, right. And it can be financial, but more important, it's psychic. And you can tell when somebody's really all in. And I think what we've seen in the last like 4, 5 years is like the delantatification of venture capital. And we're seeing a lot of people who are just like, "Hey, I'll start a rolling fund and I'll do this for like six months and then I'll be onto the next thing."Chris Douvos:And I remember Swanson used to talk about like, "You want to manager like lash to the mast where like it's not that they own a free option, but rather that they need this to do well for them to be fulfilled both financially and psychically." And we just see a lot of people just kind of spraying and praying. And we as the LPs are short their optionality. And that's actually a super uncomfortable situation. But at the same time, a lot of those people have actually been successful. And some of the people who run what I'd call lifestyle funds have crushed it. And so, I sit here and go like, "Maybe everything I know is wrong."Beezer Clarkson:Yes, we always worry that everything we've been trained on is wrong because you do get these, to Chris' point, you get one kind that does so well and you're like, "Oh, well, guess, none of that other stuff mattered." And that's the glory a venture. [inaudible 00:48:34] to me like, what is it? Because I do agree with you, I think one of the challenges that has kept LPs from taking... There's a lot of reasons why LPs don't invest in net new managers to their funds, but one of them is there are a lot of classic training on what a venture capitalist looks like down to demographics. And that's really stifled the industry. It's just wrong. There's no one person who's genetically better at being an investor. If that was true, would know it, right. And it'd be seen throughout history. It's just more about who's been given opportunities.Beezer Clarkson:So I think when we listen to people when they talk, I'm not sure if it's quantifiable, but we ask a lot of questions because we want to understand their strategy like, how are they going after what they're going after? What is the opportunity set that they're seeing? How are they understanding the businesses they're going after? And for some people, it's very quantifiable. And some people, it's about margins. For some people, it's about consumer behavior. So the metric that's being used isn't as relevant as the fact that they're using something to help drive their decisions and they can explain it. And if they can't explain it, there has to be some other way of presenting it. Somebody literally asked me this question today, they're like how important is communication to being a great investor? And I was like, "I think it's probably really critical because if you can't explain what you're doing to somebody else, it's going to be really hard to fundraise.Beezer Clarkson:In the beginning, you're going to have capital from somewhere. And if you don't have your own capital, you can do it yourself until your track record grows, and people will invest in you even if you never say a word. Otherwise, you have to be able to articulate, in some form, maybe it's a TikTok video, maybe it's an Excel spreadsheet... I guess my point is we ask a lot of questions and try to take in a lot of different data to understand who these people are and where they're going to invest.Beezer Clarkson:So you can see what they see and where the puck's going and where we fall off with a lot of people is, to Chris' point, a lot of people haven't thought through it that much. It looks fun. You can start with nothing these days, which is awesome. And it does help create more entry rounds for folks to come in. But it doesn't mean they have thought through the whole entire business of where they're going and what they're doing. And if you want to raise institutional capital, the bar does get set somewhere around there, right. It's not just, "Hey, I want to invest." Well, everybody does, so it has to be more than that.Samir Kaji:As you were all talking, it reminded me of a question from Twitter that I saw, and it really spoke to thinking about how do you differentiate? So all of us have seen hundreds, if not thousands of decks, and they all follow a similar pattern around team, and what's your asymmetric differentiation, your value add? And over time, people become a little bit immune to decks themselves and the stories because everything looks the same. And the question was really centered around, if you don't come from a place that has unique points that LPs look like, or at least the points that LPs tend to weight heavily, i.e., coming from a big firm like NEA, living within certain Silicon Valley circles for a long time, having built a network. How do you actually stand out from the crowd when you may not have any of those things? How do you all think about that? And are there things that managers that aren't part of the mainstream Silicon Valley circles and haven't been for a long time do to really stand out with LPs that are institutional.Guy Perelmuter:Well, I think one of the key aspects of investing... You asked before for concrete, palpable pointers, to be able to answer those kinds of questions and effect of the matter is that investment is a blend of art and science, right. There is a technical aspect to it where you run the numbers, you look at the correlations, you try to do your back testing, you try to do forward thinking... I mean, all of that stuff, it's fine. But there's a lot, to Beezer's point of communication skills of being able to kind of get into the other person's head to make sure they can articulate an idea or a thesis that makes sense to you, that fits with your view of the world.Guy Perelmuter:So for me, one of the things that we consistently do is we look for whatever is inevitable, right. What trends are being now accelerated and that are inevitable? And when there's a manager, to your question, Samir, that is able to articulate the inevitability, why it's inevitable, how they are able to explore that particular trend, and why they are in a unique, or in a privileged position to be able to do that. That's something for you to start paying attention, and picking that particular deck and say, "Okay, that's a conversation I want to have." It doesn't mean you're going to follow through, but that's, I think, a great start. It's when someone is competent enough, they have clarity of thought, they have a reasoning that has a beginning, a middle and the end. And it's not just trying to take some buzz words from whatever and trying to pitch phenomenal numbers, because...Guy Perelmuter:Guess what? Now, phenomenal numbers are the norm right. That became almost jaded at this point, with the numbers. You want to see something that is sustainable, because this is not something you can get rid of in another month or two, you're stuck with that position for a decade or so. So you have to be very, very confident on your evaluation process, on your analysis, and on that specific thesis that is being presented to you.Samir Kaji:You made a point there that I think is really important about track record, because everyone has track record. And I actually sent a tweet that, if your fund isn't at least three years old, no one gives a s**t about your track record over the last three years. It really doesn't matter. It's immaterial, there's too much gamification that can happen. But if somebody is approaching you, what should they lead with if it's not track record because a lot of people that are coming out to market don't have a track record that's more than three or four years.Chris Douvos:One thing I think a lot about is... I've been doing emerging manager since 2004. And not withstanding what we've seen in the last year, the vast, vast majority of these have been completely unfulfilling in terms of returns. And everybody's got their different heuristics for what might work. For me, it really comes back to, what is your unfair advantage and how can you articulate your own repeatability? This is actually Andy Weissman at USV who really kind of hammered into me the, "We're not investor's advice." The time I spend with him, he's always talking about repeatability and process driving repeatability.Chris Douvos:And for me, one of the things, and I tell this to all the managers that approach me, I'm looking for people who are leveraging ecosystems. So like, what are you part of? I've been doing a lot of university investing of late and so I love people who are really leveraging innovation on campus, particularly in hard tech. Are you leveraging some sort of community like Ross Fubini, a manager of ours kind has a couple of communities that he's very kind of embedded in and see some stuff through there? Or kind nontraditional managers. Do you have some sort of kind of position of authenticity in some sort kind of new and emerging area that has a lot of upside? And how do you maintain that authenticity?Chris Douvos:One fund that we didn't do, which I regret, although I haven't seen the numbers, but I'm sure they're crushing it, is somebody like Cross Culture. I thought they had an extremely nice kind of footprint and a lot of upside potential there. So, that's kind of my watch word because looking at each thing and saying like, "Huh, what are there? 4,000 managers out there, Samir? I don't even have time to meet with 400 of them," which is why I almost use this like, "What is your leverageable ecosystem?" That's my first screen.Beezer Clarkson:Don't know if we have something as specific as that, maybe we should. Chris Douvos:Well, you're smarter than I am so...Beezer Clarkson:We don't meet with 4,000, but we do... One of the processes that we have used is when we start getting interested in the space, we do try to meet with as many as possible. And it's certainly easier if this space is like... Seed generalist is not the great way to do that. But for example, when we started looking at a certain category in enterprise or in big data, or in consumer, we might meet with a range of investors or funds to try to get a sense for what's existing and then you also then hear different voices. And again, it can be the established manager, this isn't just the emerging managers, but it's easier, at least for me as an investor to understand what's going on.Beezer Clarkson:COVID makes it really difficult to do that geographically, but to Chris' point LA. If you can go walk the streets and see what's going on while people are talking about they're investing, we love to do that too. We've done that very extensively in Europe and Israel to understand ecosystems. And then, when you bump into somebody who just brings something different to the game, even if it isn't obvious from the outside, when they talk about something, it can land, because you're like, "Oh, I see your world that you're playing in and I see who you're playing with, and this lands for us." But it's really time intensive. We consider ourselves venture specialists, but it's a lot, it's a lot of work. You can't just meet with one fund a year and do that.Samir Kaji:I feel like we can... I mean, we've only covered a small subsection of the topics that we could probably cover, especially within the emerging manager ecosystem. We haven't gotten into nano funds or solo GPs, and really the shift in that. I do feel like we need a part two for that because there's so much meat on that bone. But I do want to end, in the interest of time, with maybe a question on where there might be opportunities. We've talked about established managers, we've talked about growth funds, we've talked about series A, seed, I just alluded to nano funds and seed funds. Going around the table here, what is one area that you feel currently has the best risk-adjusted rated return of all of those things that I just mentioned?Chris Douvos:I've had a several years long kind of deep tech hypothesis going. Part of that is I'm really nervous about weaponized balance sheets and there's actually still financing risk in deep tech. Maybe there's capital intensity, but I think that keeps the company's honest. Then again, back to Buffet's equation, opportunity equals value minus perception, right, the perception of so many things is so high that I think it kind of constrains the opportunity and I think there's a lot of good value to be had in deep tech. But the reality is a lot of your deep tech has gotten mainstream a lot faster than I imagined it would so maybe that's going to constrain my hypothesis. But that's probably the area where I'm most focused in. And one articulation of that is a lot of the college related funds, I'm doing like House Fund at Berkeley, E14 at MIT, Freeflow down at Caltech, Rhapsody that does a bunch of material science stuff across a bunch of campuses and other research institutions. That's a lot of fun.Samir Kaji:So I never thought I'd hear the day where the guy that told me LP should invest courageously would say he's scared. But I think that it is a unique time and certainly deep tech is highly interesting for a lot of us. And Guy, I know this is core to your investment thesis. Let's move over to you and tell us a little bit about what you're most excited about.Guy Perelmuter:There's this quote that comes to my mind on a regular basis, and I think Chris is going to love it because it's a maritime quote, so I think it's right up his alley, it says, "There's no favorable wind for those who don't know where they're going to." And I think that's on us as investors, right. You have to have a plan, you have to chart your course and say, "This is where I'm going," because otherwise, how do you even know that something is of interest? Right?Guy Perelmuter:And to your point, Samir, we basically started GRIDS as a niche shop, deep tech only, that's the only thing we do. And hence, within that world of deep tech, and I fully agree with Chris, I think it has become relatively mainstream very quickly. And again, I think COVID plays a big part on that trend. But I think that within deep tech there are a few, and again, inevitabilities that we are clearly seeing now with climate tech, right, after the disaster of the 2000s, where climate tech was basically solar and that ended in a blood bath. But right now there's so much stuff going on in climate tech, the supply chain optimizations, the whole food tech revolution, because we're going to be 10 billion people in 2050, there's no more real estate for us to do more crops, we'll have to come up with inventive, innovative solutions. There's synthetic bio, which again, I think now everybody's pretty familiarized with. So these are areas where I think there are hu... aerospace in general, space, and so on, so forth.Guy Perelmuter:So in deep tech, there are those clusters of opportunity that are almost like brand new markets that, thanks to the history of technology, are now available for private investors to kind of dip their toes on the water. And I continuously, I've been excited about this particular market ever since I did my first angel check back in late 2000 and I still feel that there's a lot of room for that trend to unravel. So yeah, I absolutely am with Chris on that one, I think deep tech is going to be a phenomenal run for the next two decades if you know where to look and who to choose.Samir Kaji:So we got too deep tech and I'm not surprised. And it's something that I've spoken to a lot of both GPs and LPs about. And I do think, to your points both, it has become mainstream, but it's still very early stage in many different applications. So I'm excited about that. So last but definitely not least, Beezer, where are you excited? Let's go to the smartest person in the room here.Beezer Clarkson:Oh, I hope this answer doesn't disappoint you. I was thinking more generally. We're looking for the best early stage investors. We launched our business around... I don't have a specific area because one of the things that I've just discovered is I can't say, "I only want to do X" in advance, it doesn't work for me. I have to go meet the people. And we have a portfolio where we're just looking for great seed and a series A investors, and it can come in any shape and form.Beezer Clarkson:And there certainly are times when we find a trend that we're really interested in. We've been spending a bunch of time in FinTech recently. But that doesn't mean we're only going to do FinTech in the future, it just means we're trying to understand it right now. We have been spending a bunch of time with nano funds and some of these other structures to understand that we may or may not do anything. We just solve for the best early estate investors in whatever form they come in. I still think it's an incredibly exciting space, and all of the innovations that are happening are awesome. And yeah, I just think there's a ton going on and think it's a great place to play. I love where we invest.Samir Kaji:Yeah. Well, I'm glad you brought up nano funds because I was going to say that's an area that I'm extremely excited about. And the nano funds where somebody has something really programmatic on how they go about their business, having an incredible amount of self-awareness of what swim line they should be in, and when they factor in things like network effects, I mean, the returns have been through the roof. And I know many that are just starting that I have a lot of excitement about. And so, I hope more people do nano funds. I think right now it's still family offices and individuals. I know there's a couple funds that are now starting to do it, but that's my answer. I mean, this has been such a fun jam session. I know it's Friday, late, and we don't have a glass of wine, next time, we'll do part two with a glass of wine. But thanks everybody for being on the show here.Beezer Clarkson:Thank you for having us.Chris Douvos:Thanks guys. This is awesome.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency This is a public episode. 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