Thank you for having me, and I'm from the Boston area. After college, I went directly into a presidential campaign, which I recommend to anybody who has the opportunity to do it, regardless of what your political affiliation is, it's a great opportunity to meet a really, very broad range of people, and it built a great work ethic, I was working 100 plus hour weeks every week, and after that, I went to her Business School, Kennedy School of Government, got out, started a project ahead of the 2012 election called fantasy politics, fantasy football politics and the goal there was to get young people more involved in politics ahead of the 2012 election, had some phenomenal folks on board, ranging from, on the left, the treasurer of the DNC to on the right we had Arnold Schwarzenegger's political director of communications, and we did not do what we intended to do, instead of getting young people involved, we got older people who are already spending two hours a day on CNN and Fox News to spend four hours a day on politics, but it was a very fun ride on. Then, after that started a company out here that basically enabled people to figure out what career they wanted to go into and show them the school educational path to get there. It's a company called Path Source, sold into K-12, a little bit of higher education, adult education, expanded into direct to consumer and that got acquired by Academics tract in March 2017. And then shortly after that, I came on board here at 1984 Ventures as Partner.

We invest in seed-stage companies that are using software to tackle unsexy and antiquated industries. And when we invest, we do have a set of some thesis, but really, we're not thematic investors, we're opportunistic investors, and what I mean by that is we're less trying to look at every single company that fits a certain industry bucket. Instead, we're taking a look for companies that at the highest level are solving a screaming need for some type of customer, right, that there's some customer that just has an enormous problem, needs it solved and you as the company are able to solve that, and then beyond that, we're looking at team, market, product in that order. And to break that down, what we're looking for really phenomenal teams where you've got, ideally, somebody who has insight into a given industry and somebody with really fantastic technical skills tackling that industry. When I talk about market, I'm talking about an enormous market size of a minimum of $1 billion and ideally substantially larger than that, and then building a really terrific, compelling product, ideally, that when you put it in front of a customer, they say, wow, yeah, I would buy this. We invest in both B2B and B2C companies, It's about 70% B2B, meaning business to business and 30% B2C meaning business to consumer. And when we're looking at a business selling to another business, we're able to invest earlier on than business to consumer. And so and I'll sort of walk through why that is, in a minute. But we invest at pre-seed and seed-stage companies and we define that as in terms of evaluation. So we invested at up to a $15 million pre money valuation, meaning that the company is valued at 15 million before this round of capital before they take in this money and, but our norm is more in the sort of 5 to 8 million range, and when we're investing, there's usually 2-3 or 4-5 people on the team, so it's very, very early on, right? We're investing when there's a couple people in a garage, right? And so, that on the B2B side often they're generating 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 in revenue per month, but not always we have invested in companies where you have a business selling to another business, earlier than that. When they just have a product and what we'll usually do there is we won't invest solely based off of, they have a powerpoint and an idea, but if they've built a product and we can put that product in front of, a prospective customer and say, would you buy this and have the CEO pitch that prospective customer and then we've done this a few times where we have to find some customers for for the company, put the CEO on the phone, have the CEO pitch, then have him/her get off the call and say to the customer, Well, now that you heard that, would you buy this? That's the way to sort of validate demand. So that's sort of how we think about that piece. On the B2C side, it's a lot more difficult to validate whether a consumer company is going to succeed before they've launched then its with a B2B company, right? B2B company. If you're creating a product that makes the enterprise procurement simpler, right? You could go to a large B2B company or a large enterprise company and say, Hey, here's what this company is doing, if it solves this problem for you, would you buy it? And the answer is going to be yes or no. When it comes to direct consumers, consumers are just a lot more fickle, right? And so, for consumers, we don't really invest before the company has launched. And we really need to see very, very rapid revenue growth in order to come in and invest in consumer and usually that that sort of translates into somewhere in the range of 20% plus month over month revenue growth. For the first three or four months before, we'd really consider taking a serious look at the company

So I'm a big fan of having an intro deck that you send ahead when you're trying to get on the radar screen of a VC and get your meeting, right? This doesn't have to be your full deck, but it can be seven slides that has kind of your sizzle. It says, here's what we're doing And by the way, we've got initial data that shows our traction is going up into the right and here's who we are, here's the team. It's a strong team for, xyz reason. And so I would ideally do that, and you want to when you're trying to get in the door and get that meeting, ideally, try and come in through a warm introduction through somebody who that investor knows. And when I was on the entrepreneurial side of things, I actually thought this was an exceptionally unfair way to look at the world, right, because some of us just don't have those connections and so, now, once I got onto the venture side of it, I was like, well, I'm not going to do things that way. I'm just gooing to open it up and I'll go on LinkedIn and I'll say, Hey, if you've got an idea, send it over to me. Well, behold, what I found out is that when people reached out directly with their businesses and pitches, that was actually tending to be a lot worse than the businesses and pitches that I got through contacts who knew what I was looking for, right? People would send me the social media companies that they were starting. Even though we don't look at social media companies, it's not disrupting an unsexy or antiquated industry. They send us companies that were crypto-based, where they're starting the latest and greatest cryptocurrency based business. And again, not something that we invest in. The folks who know us, know what we do invest in, and would only forward us those businesses that fit that description. And fit kind of the narrow box where we focus and so that that turns out to be true for a lot of different VCs, regardless of what they invest in, and so if you're reaching out directly you could get a response, but it's just gonna be a much taller hill to climb if you're doing that, then coming in through warm intro. Now, if you do reach out directly, personalize it, if you're sending out this generic email to 100 different VCs thinking that it's a numbers game, in that sense, you're not gonna get any replies. It is a numbers game, but each of those has to be exceptionally tailored. You need to come in and say, Hey, I saw this article that you wrote, thought it really spoke to me and here's how it connects to the business that I'm running. I saw this article about how the staffing industry is changing. I'm starting a tech-enabled staffing company, and I think that this is just an amazing fit for what you're looking for, that type of thing. And so, that's really how I would think about it and the type of data that I would include by the way in, that initial deck again is, make sure you've got revenue data. Make sure you've got a team and make sure you've got market size. The piece around market size, don't include that thing that you found in the McKinsey report that says, that this market is $30 billion. It's useless. Well, the only thing that matters is your TAM-Total Addressable Market. And what that is, the number of people who could buy your widget. Whatever your widget is, multiplied by the price of your widget, that is the only number that matters. The bottoms-up number, that says, here's the total revenue that you could potentially generate with your initial product in the U. S. in year one.