Marc Andreessen on The Future of VC & Why Labour Displacement with AI is Wrong?

I'm competing with myself. Life just gets a lot simpler if you just assume everything is your own fault. Everybody's feeling very tense and nervous and anxious and fearful, but everybody's pretending they're not feeling that way.

I think every time we passed on a promising venture company over price, I think it's been a mistake. There's nothing that we're missing today that we could solve by going public.

This entire labor displacement thing is 100% incorrect. It's completely wrong. Essentially, every large company is overstaffed. It's at least overstaffed by 25%. I think most large companies are overstaffed by 50%. I think a lot of them are overstaffed by 75%.

Good. I'm thrilled to be here.

You know, we do learn from mistakes. But the problem is learning from mistakes, sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad, right? And if you just talk business for a moment, like in the venture mindset, this is a very big problem. There's a founder version of the mistake, there's a venture version of the mistake. The founder version of the mistake is if a founder starts a company in a category and the founder doesn't work, the founder is then emotionally angry at that category for the rest of his life and will not acknowledge when there's something that's going to work in that category. And I've just seen that like over and over and over again. And that's fine because most founders go on to do other things and that's fine and good and it generally doesn't damage them from a business standpoint. In venture, the same thing happens. If you invest in a category or if you invest in a kind of company or you invest in a kind of founder and it doesn't go well, it's extremely easy to learn from the mistake, right? And to basically say, 'All right, I touched that hot stove. I'm never doing it again.' And then you know you can tell me what happens next, right? Which is the next thing shows up and pattern matches and it's the thing that you should invest in and you have the chance to invest in, but you touch the scalded stove and you know you're learning from your mistakes, right? You're doing the responsible thing and so you don't do it. And so I think there's something that's particularly pernicious about learning from your mistakes in venture capital. And then I think that's also somewhat true about life. You get married multiple times as they say it's the triumph of hope over experience. Like I think probably you want hope to triumph over experience in that domain and I think there's a lot of other domains of life in which that's probably true.

I'm old enough to remember internet search like you can't make money in internet search like the internet search companies in the 1990s did not work out well.

Yeah. So, by the way, just the other example, by the way, is AI. AI was a tremendously good way to lose a lot of money in venture capital from 1945 to 2017. So, there I mean, look, when I was getting my computer science degree in the late '80s, like AI was the one field that you knew would never succeed. Like, there had actually been an investment boom for AI in the '80s and it failed. And everybody, including all the computer scientists, were like, 'Yeah, this field is dead.' And that happened like five times over the course of AI over the last 80 years. And so like you know again another great example. So look, I think a couple things in terms of how we run our firm or how you run a firm like this. So one is as you well know that there are two categories of mistakes, right? There's the mistake of commission and there's the mistake of omission or there's the mistake of cost and there's the mistake of opportunity cost. And so of course the mistake of cost is you invest $10 million in a startup it fails you lose the money that's bad. The mistake of omission is you don't invest in Google and you lose hundred billion dollars of opportunity cost, right? And so of course venture is like the most polarized possible economic field in which this is true and by the way if you're running a bond business or something you know debt business or something where you just can't lose money or the whole thing doesn't work then obviously you can't run in this kind of model in that case you better learn from your mistakes but in venture you're always much more worried about the mistake of omission than you're worried about the mistake of commission. And then to your question, like I think in a lot of ways that's the key thing that Ben and I do at this point in our lives and in our roles at the firm is you know we're not like micromanaging the investment decisions at the firm and we have I think spectacular senior partners and junior partners that are doing a great job of that and we're in the room for it and so forth but we're generally not advocating for against a deal but what we are trying to do is to get everybody to constantly have this let's say risk forward worry about the mistake of omission over the mistake of commission mindset. This anti-scalded stove phenomenon, we just routinely remind people like, yeah, you're emotional about this because of your bad experience 3 years ago or 6 years ago or 10 years ago and just like let that go. You no longer have to pay for that sin and you're completely liberated to be able to kind of let that emotion fade into the distance and be able to focus on the opportunity in front of you.

So, you know, quite honestly, it's the simplest answer in the world, and it's the hardest answer in the world, and it's the answer that I think every great investor ends up resolving to 30 years in, frankly. I actually had this discussion with Arthur Rock, who's sort of like obviously the virtually the creator of modern venture capital. And he actually wrote a paper on this topic. And I'll just give you his conclusion, which is also my conclusion. Arthur Rock, for people who don't know, he invested in Apple and Intel, right, in the seed rounds and like in many many other great companies for like 30 years was that he would have been a better venture investor had he fed all of the business plans and pitch decks straight into the shredder upon receiving them. And if he had spent 100% of his time on the resume and I think that's basically right, which is the great founders will, you know, basically buy you enormous upside that may break rules in all kinds of directions and may break precedent in all kinds of directions. And the world's best business plan executed by a mediocre team will almost certainly get lapped by a great team. Now having said that this sounds easy of course why is that hard is because it's somewhat tautological right because we define great founders as the ones that have great outcomes and so it's a lot easier after the fact to be able to say oh yeah you know Steve Jobs is a great founder when you look at the success of Apple but nevertheless I think that is the answer which is when you have special people you should back them basically almost without consideration of other factors and when you don't you shouldn't and at the end of the day that simply is the core thing.

I'll just say look, I think people have different takes on this. My personal formula is basically as follows, which is you need high IQ as table stakes. Like you just need somebody who's like incredibly smart. My basic test is if I have my notebook open and they're talking, am I like writing out lots of notes or not? And if I'm writing out lots of notes and I'm learning from them, then that indicates that their level of intelligence and some of the other attributes that we'll talk about, indicates clearly that they're very smart. But I think that's table stakes because I think just intelligence, there are many people who are very smart who are just grinders or just, you know, as they say, kind of the clerk mentality, you know, put me in the back office somewhere, or doing research or something and I'm never going to build something. And that's fine, but IQ is not enough. I think the second thing you need really is what my partner Ben calls courage which is basically an absolute determination to succeed and to be able to confront problems directly and to be able to basically pound through anything and there's various kinds of ways to phrase this but I think the Navy Seals have the term 'embrace the suck.' So there's something to that. I always like the old Looney Tunes cartoons and I always like to say I want the founder who leaves a founder-shaped hole in any brick wall he runs into, you know, like a cartoon character.

And then they're suspended midair for a moment and they hold up the sign and it says, 'Oops.' Or my favorite one actually of that is there was one of the little kid characters in it at one point, little pig or something, did the thing and he goes out over the cliff and he's hanging there and holds up his sign and he says, 'I'm in second grade. They haven't taught us about gravity yet.' Right. Which by the way, of course, this also happens in startups. This is, you know,

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that sounds great. You know, get out your knitting needle and get going. And so and then I think the third thing, so sort of IQ plus courage. And then I think it's something and this is kind of courage, but I would describe it as like it's something fundamental. It's like drive, ambition. You know, I occasionally quote Nietzsche, it's will to power. You know, it's sort of this determination because, you know, courage can just be I'm going to solve problems and like that. I would argue that's not enough. And Ben might say that that's not what he means, but it's not just solving problems. There's something about ambition and in the world being what it is, ambition, a lot of people express that as ambition to change the world, improve the world, humanity. I think that stuff's all great. I think those founders are great. I think those missions are often very compelling at attracting lots of smart people. I think that's great but I do think there's a more fundamental ambition which is I want to build something of my own that really demonstrates and I want to really demonstrate what I can do. And I have a very primal drive to do that and you know it gets kind of, people cast moral dispersions on it and they call it greed or whatever. So people don't want to talk about that and it's not I'm not even talking about the money component. I'm talking about like I want to build something. And then what I find on that one in particular well actually number two and three like you don't necessarily see them on the resume but like you can generally see them in the background. I think if you spend enough time with people you can get a sense of like okay was their entire life basically a sequence of things being handed to them. And then sort of credential achievement which is a lot of what we see in the sort of elite workplace. Or do you have somebody where it's like oh when they were 14 they built this when they were 17 they built that when they were 20 they did this and they've kind of always been kind of in that whether that's building a product or a technology or a company or an art or whatever it is sort of this primal drive to create.

Well, of course that would require introspection. So I don't know if I'm going to give you a great answer to that. I will tell you what I tell myself. What I tell myself is at this point I'm sort of competing with myself. By which to say like I am trying to figure out how to be the best possible version of what I can be and what I can do. And so the way I think about it basically is like okay how good did you read was it Jocko Willink's book Extreme Ownership? Did you ever come across that?

100%. And you know his thing on extreme ownership, right? So his thing for people who haven't heard his thing on extreme ownership is just and you know famous Navy SEAL commander, very very very accomplished guy. And the kind of guy people would happily follow into battle or would be a great CEO or great founder that kind of personality. And he has this thing he says extreme ownership and he says look life just gets a lot simpler if you just assume everything is your own fault. Right? And it's just like, oh, I don't know, whatever. This LP didn't invest or this founder didn't take my money or whatever. It's like, oh, okay, it's my fault. It's not his fault. It's my fault. Clearly, I didn't do a good enough job. Clearly, I can do better. And then his argument is it gets you kind of productively focused on improvement. And so, I found it that put it this way, when I'm in my own head and I'm mad about somebody doing something that I don't like, the number one stress relieving thing I can do is I can say, 'Oh, that's my fault.' Right? Because then it gives me ownership of the problem and it gives me something that I can do and then by the way it also drains away resentment, right? It means that I'm not resentful and angry at somebody else, right? Because I'm just like, okay, I'll just improve myself on that. So I operate in that psychology as much as I can. I try to maintain that psychology. I do that. But by the way, I recommended to Ben when that book came out. I fell in love with it and I recommended to Ben, I said, 'We need to send this to all of our founders and like teach this.' And he's like, 'Marc, you're out of your mind.' like our founders already have the problem where they take too much of the weight of the world on themselves they're already miserable half the time like we don't need to saddle them with more of that but I think there's something very very powerful in that. It also has the enormous advantage of it becomes an intrinsic motivation over an extrinsic motivation right so it's not a motivation to put points on a board it's not a motivation to achieve a certain net worth it's not a motivation to be in some league table to win some prize these sort of external markers because the problem with all the external markers of success is are you going to get up in the morning when it really really sucks like the extrinsic motivations don't do that and so you need something intrinsic and for me that's the intrinsic motivation which is like I know I can do this better.

I think I'm my best version of myself relative to all my prior versions of myself but I am still far short of what I would like to be so I know of many many areas of improvement. I guess I put it that way. Yes.

Oh, I mean there's probably like a hundred. I mean so I'll give you an example. I have a strength and a liability which is I get emotional. And so the advantage of emotion is like when I commit I deeply commit. And I fall in love with things and I become incredibly determined. And I'll kind of go very long lengths out of a sense of emotion or love. The negative is, I will get emotional and I've spent a lot of time and people who know me will tell you I've spent a lot of time trying to not let's say get negatively emotional in meetings.

So, I have a bunch of friends in the entertainment business who I basically look at and I say like there's no way I could possibly do what you do, which is like make myself vulnerable on an 80 foot screen that way. And they're like, 'Yeah, that's the hard part.' And then I always ask like, do you read your own reviews? Like, do you read what people say about you? And they all basically say this exact same thing, which is they say, 'I tell everybody I don't and then of course I do.' Right? And so it's very hard to avoid that. I do think don't read the comments is generally a very good life guideline. By the way, I will say YouTube comments have gotten much better. So maybe your YouTube comments are productive now, but I think in general don't read the comments is helpful. I mean it's really hard. I mean, everybody's human. I think it's really hard when somebody is cursing you out or saying horrible things. It's very hard for that not to stick. I would say I'm pretty happy. I'm pretty happy not paying attention to that. Are you aware at this point of the concept of the meme of 'retard maxing'?

Well, so first of all, retard maxing is totally politically correct because 'retard' is no longer I mean we now have 18 other terms that apply to people who are developmentally disabled. And so 'retard' has long since it now means something completely different. And it turns out what it means specifically in the context of retard maxing. Well, let me explain why I came across this. So the internet meme machine is just absolutely spectacular. Right. I think like the process of cultural evolution of internet memes is like absolutely amazing. I think like the whole looks max thing that entire the whole clavicular all the terms now are mainstreaming and obviously there's many internet meme examples one of my favorite websites in life is knowyourmeme.com just the comprehensive catalog of memes and so like the cultural evolution of what's happening online I just think is incredible and wonderful in so many ways and then I got in this dust up online a couple weeks ago about introspection that you mentioned and then a friend of mine sent me this thing and he said, 'Oh, here's your answer. You're retard maxing.' And I said, 'I'm what?' And he said, 'Oh, watch these videos.' And there's this guy we could link to who's on YouTube who has basically I don't know 100 videos on retard maxing. And he's like my new life coach, you know, I haven't met him, but like from a distance. And it's basically just like, you know, retard max, go to work, do a good job, come home. It's fine. Start a company. Succeeds it fails. It's fine. Have too much to eat one night at dinner, it's fine. Go to the gym, don't cut your reps, it's fine. You know, ask a girl if she wants to go out with you. If she says no, it's fine. Right? And so it's the simpler form of the extreme ownership, right? Or it's the form of it that basically says maybe another form of it that says I don't need to take all this in on myself. I can just let it go. And so

They're incredible. Well, it's like a 130-minute videos about retard maxing. And you would think that after the first two minutes, he kind of covered it.

But no. And by the way, they're all hysterical. They're all absolutely fantastic. And it's literally like him on his porch in the middle of nowhere with like a cigar and it's like a half hour. It's just absolutely absolutely absolutely spectacular. And so anyway, I do think there's something to that which is like okay back to your original question. It's just like okay in addition to all the emotional pain that life has already put on us or that we've already put on ourselves. And by the way a lot of it legitimately so for the things that we actually do to other people and so forth. But it's just like okay how much are we going to torture ourselves? And there's something about modern culture, modern western culture or something where we've become like very guilt oriented and very into like self-flagellation and very into the old concept of the hair shirt you know we wear these metaphorical garments that just are tremendously painful and so it's just like all right there's a point at which maybe some of that is helpful to correct bad behaviors but it's clearly gone way too far and people get like way too down the rabbit hole in this and it becomes very disabling and you probably know a lot of people who are like that. So the way I think about it is like inherently what you do what I do what venture startups like look these are high-risk operations right and sometimes they go right but they go wrong in a thousand ways before they go right and then even then they may not work and so the nature of the beast is like just tremendous variability and pressure by the way another thing I always thought about a lot as a founder and I really see this now as a VC is that in particular founders have a very hard time ever finding anybody they can confide in right because if as a founder you feel like if you admit that you have an issue, like you're being a bad leader, right? Because you're showing a crack in the armor and if your people pick that up, they're going to lose confidence in you. Or if word gets around that you're second-guessing yourself or that your thing isn't going well or that you don't have total confidence in it, then all of a sudden investors won't want to invest and candidates won't want to join. And so there's this need as somebody if you're going to lead one of these things, you have to do it with such a brave face and then kind of I always call it a metaphor that the duck looks totally placid above water and then it's paddling furiously underwater. And so I just think like in particular founders have a very hard time finding anybody that they can actually confide in and then what happens is I think everybody individually has an inaccurate view of what everybody else is feeling, right? Because I think in practice everybody's kind of feeling very tense and nervous and anxious and fearful and so forth, but everybody's pretending they're not feeling that way, but everybody thinks everybody else is doing great. Everybody else thinks they're the only one that's like faking the smiles at the party. And so, I think it's like incredibly important to be able to have an internal psychological mechanism to be able to deal with that and not have that overwhelm you. And yes, let me just say at least this week my nomination is retard maxing.

What are you scared of? To me, you're the great Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz. You are nothing to be scared of.

The even better version of it is, oh the glory of it, followed by oh the shame of it, followed by oh the glory of it, right? And so the recovery, right? And you know, getting back up on your feet and then achieving and rebuilding. And so, you know, I don't know, I think as long as you're still alive and as long as you've conducted yourself in a way that you haven't brought some sort of fundamental legal issue on your head or something like that, I think generally, at least in our world, I think second chances are actually available for a lot of people. And by the way, of course, a lot of the great success stories have this in their background, as you know, right? You know, including Steve Jobs himself.

So, I believe, and we try to run the firm this way, I believe the core of the business is a permanent state of affairs. And the core of the business is early stage. The core of the business is a founder or a small founding team with a dream and a clean sheet of paper and, you know, ideally a garage, although these days, you know, it's hard to keep the kids in the garage so maybe they have a house or an office.

Palo Alto garages are indeed expensive. Yes. But you look at a couple of kids, a couple of kids and a dream and a clean sheet of paper. And then first money in and then, you know, the first two years. Like that is the core of the business. Like that really fundamentally is the core of the business. You know, look, a metaphor we use all the time at the firm is, it's like startups are like baking a cake. If you leave the sugar out of the cake, like if you bake the cake and you leave the sugar out of the cake, you can't pour sugar out of the cake afterwards and fix your mistake. Right. Like sugar has to go in the cake. And so that first two years is when you're baking the cake. Like that first two years when you're really figuring out what the formula is of what you're doing and what the product is and what the company is and what the business is and what the culture is and who the team is, like those decisions are like absolutely fundamental. And if you get those right as a founder, like the payoff from that will go for decades. And if you get those wrong, like even if your company succeeds, you're going to live with those sins forever, they're going to extrapolate out. And so like, that's it. Like that is the core of the business. And like many great companies, you know, later on bring in lots of other partners and growth stage investors and, you know, other people to the team and build boards and it's fantastic and it's great, but, you know, there really is no substitute for that kind of inception point, you know, that early moment. There's no substitute for being the investor that does that. And then, you know, as you know, like the investor who's engaged with the company at that stage, it often becomes the key adviser to those founders for the rest of the company's life. Right. And so because, you know, because you build this incredible emotional bond and then, you know, you have like complete context on why all the decisions got made and you remember how it first started. And by the way, you remember how hard it was. And so I think there's just no substitute for the early stage. And I think like a firm like ours, this is what I always tell our folks, like look, at the end of the day, the early stage business has to work. If the early stage business works, we have option value in doing all this other stuff, but that always is the core of the business.

So it's basically, I think it's in two parts. Part of it is, yes, fixing the mistakes of omission, fixing the mistakes and becoming partners later. And look, that can work really well, those can be very good investments, you know, and we do get very close to some of those founders, you know, but again, it's not, you know, they always at that point have somebody early on who they're very close to, so, you know, we do see the difference there. And then look, the other part of it is doubling down, you know, doubling down on the companies that are working or growing. And I would just say on that, you know, look, part of that's just economics, which is if you have the chance to do that, you know, you should do that as a professional investor. But there's another really fundamental thing where we decided why we decided to go so big in growth on that front, which is, this is less true now but, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, these companies would raise money from venture investors and then they would get to a certain point and then they would raise money from a completely different kind of investor that was not tech-centric. And then they would all of a sudden end up in this situation where they had, you know, a conflict between investment mentalities, a fundamental conflict on the cap table over things like, you know, level of risk, level of reinvestment, you know, how fast they should go public, when, if they should sell the company, do they need to replace the founder, bring in a professional CEO, you know, to the extent you bring in non-tech mentality, non whatever you want to call it, Silicon Valley mentality, growth stage investors, you do set yourself up for like you're now going to get a different set of pressures. And so one of the things we wanted to be able to do is to be able to, you know, with our founders that have the chance to build something really great, like we want to be able to be their partner across, you know, potentially every round that they do. And then as a consequence of that, you know, they can basically preserve our mentality on their cap table for longer and longer and longer. And I think that works pretty well.

Yes. And it is, and the reason for that is twofold. One is just the conceptual kind of reasons that I described, but the other is just pure economics, it is. Because as you know, the upside on the $5 million check is every bit as big as the upside on a $500 million growth investment. Right. And this is what's so unusual about venture. If I make a $5 million seed investment and I nail it, you know, I can make $10 billion on that, hundred billion on that. If I make a $500 million growth investment and I nail it, I can make 10 billion or hundred billion on it. It's the same upside.

Yeah, so look, the entry price definitely matters, in particular as the company grows in size. By the way, it matters for a couple reasons, and this is a lesson that gets like relearned over and over again and will be learned many times in the future. Which is, you know, the old Don Valentine thing, which I do think is correct, which is more companies die from indigestion than from starvation. Which is overfunding is actually very dangerous to the operations of a company. By the way, this is the one piece of startup advice that I think is like tremendously grounded in reality for which everybody has many examples in the past. No founder ever listens to it. My track record of ever convincing any founder on this point, I think, is zero. But I will keep trying. And so I would just say number one...

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Then, you know, they come up with 18 reasons, you know, they come up with 18 reasons why. And then they, you know, then, you know, I'll really push them on it and they're like, well, we're going to have a lock box and we're going to put them, you know, it's like, no, you're not. Like...

Nobody's ever seen it. Nobody's ever going to do the lock box. Nobody ever does lock box. So, so back to your question. I would just say look, I think, I'll come back to high valuation in a second, but I think there's an actual core fundamental linked thing that is very important, which is the amount of money, overfunding is actually just as dangerous or more dangerous than underfunding, number one. And then number two, look, the problem with these high valuations is like, okay, God help you if you need to clear the bar next time and you can't, right? And so, you know, every round sets a post. It sets a threshold, a hurdle, for being able to raise in the future. And like, you know, this is something that people learn every cycle, you know, kind of for the first time in a hard way. Which is no new investor wants to do a down round in anybody else's company. If you put the investor hat on and you're like, I'm gonna go do a down round in this company because I'm gonna be the hero and save the company or whatever because it raised too high last time and now I'm going to do the rational investment, like everybody's just going to hate me, right? The employees are going to hate me, the other investors going to hate me, right? The founders are going to end up hating me. And so nobody ever does a down round in somebody else's company. And so setting these posts high is intrinsically a problem. Once again, I would say this is advice that generally people completely disregard. So I think both of those are problems and there will be, look, there are problems like that in the system now and there will be more problems in the future. Having said that, I will tell you at least on the venture side, growth is a little bit different. On the venture side, I think every time we passed on a promising venture company over price, I think it's been a mistake.

So I think the underlying question, and tell me if you agree with this, the underlying question is the question of diamonds in the rough. Is that right? Yeah. Like whenever I've done a good deal, it's never worked out.

So, this is another thing. This is actually an investor ego thing, I think. Which is you basically say, 'Wow, I'm the investor that's going to go find the thing that nobody else knows about,' right? Or the other form of this would be like, you know, all these other investors are herd animals. You know, they're all just copycatting each other and like I'm the one who's going to be different. You know, I'm going to go do the thing nobody else can think of. By the way, Peter Thiel does that really well. Nobody else does that well. There's...

And you're probably, having spent a lot of time with Peter, you and I say I am not Peter Thiel. And yes, and the listener probably are not as well. Like, put it this way. Maybe I could say this. There's a tremendous amount of, you know, like VCs are stupid. VCs are, you know, they're herd animals, they're blind, you know, they're consensus seeking, they're heat driven. You know, they only do the obvious thing, you know, they don't appreciate, you often get this from, you know, they don't appreciate my special thing. Having said that, the general pattern is, you know, and this is like nine out of 10 times or I would even say probably 95 out of 100 times and maybe 99 out of 100 times, which is like if it's got merit to be investable for venture, there are a lot of really smart and hungry VCs out there. And they are working extremely hard to sniff these things out. And it's their full-time job and it's all they do. And so I think it's really unusual to have the diamond in the rough. And usually if it's the diamond in the rough, it usually means two things. It basically means number one, it means a company that's like offside in some fundamental reason. So, and by the way, it's in the wrong place, right? Or it's structured wrong. Like there's a reason why it's a diamond in the rough that actually ends up becoming a big problem. You know, the example people use, which I think is legitimate, was I think there was a point when Uber was available for investment by anybody on AngelList. So it's like, yeah, every once in a while there's one of those. And look, there's a reason, you know this, there's a reason where if you just look at the great outcomes in venture over the last 50 years, if you just rank the outcomes, it's just like it's the same names over and over and over again, you know, and it rotates, you know, every decade or so there's some rotation in the names, but like the persistence is incredibly strong. And I think the core reason, oh by the way, that's the other reason you have the diamond in the rough, the other reason you have diamond in the rough is you have a founder who fundamentally is just too contrarian to just do things the obvious way and they're just like hyper disagreeable and they're just like, ah, and these are often the founders that like have all these theories about how venture is terrible and awful and these VCs are all evil and they're like very focused on like terms and control and like all this stuff and they kind of alienate, and so by the time you meet them it's just like they've alienated like six of the mainstream venture firms and now they're the diamond in the rough. And it's like, and then again, it's like okay every once in a while one of those is going to succeed but like I'm not sure that I would want, you know, I'm not sure I would want that to be my business.

So I say no. Opinions vary. You know, I said earlier I'm emotional both in good and bad ways. Like, you do end up getting very close to people. And you do end up wanting to have a high level of trust and it certainly helps if you like each other and trust each other and so forth. But like I would just say on the other hand, like some of the best founders in history, and you know, look, I give you example after example in the distant past, you know, they were not very likable people. And a lot of, you know, by the way, the same thing is true of many of the great artists, many of the great filmmakers, many of the great, you know, literary geniuses, many of the great philosophers, you know, many of the great, by the way, political leaders, you know, these people, you know, but CEO, there's a lot of cases where these people are like not likable. And yeah, and so I say no, you don't, because I think like if you're trying to fulfill your personal emotional needs at work, like I think that's a very fundamental problem and you shouldn't try to do that. It's the Harry S. Truman quote. If you need a friend, get a dog. Like, the point, or another version of this is, you know, I say, do not bring your whole self to work. Like, whatever you do, do not bring your whole self to work. Like, if you show up and you're professional and you're great to deal with and you're very productive and you add value in every engagement that you do. And if that's true for you as a VC and you're working with the founder and you're never friends and you just like have a great working relationship and you don't, you know, and the company in the later years whatever sells or whatever and you never talk to each other again, like I've seen that work many times and I think it's totally fine.