So, my name is Ben Boyer, 44 years old. My background and experience are largely in venture capital. I've been working in venture capital for the past 20 years. I started in the industry in 2000, and prior to that, I worked in investment banking. I did tech banking for a couple of years, right out of college. Most recently, though, I started a business, so I'm moving to the other side of the table and becoming an entrepreneur, which is an extremely time-consuming experience, but one that's at least thus far has been very rewarding. I think my background is pretty similar to a lot of people that end up doing venture capital. I think there's a couple of distinct career paths that you typically see. One of them is a technical background. Another is working in the management or operation side of an organization, and then the third would be somewhat of a finance background, which is mine. Before I joined Lehman Brothers and started working in investment banking, I majored in human and organizational development, which is in essence social psychology. It was an extremely broad major and I chose it simply because I didn't know what I want to do with my life. While I was in college, I took a couple of internships. I worked at a talent agency one summer called William Morris Agency. I spent a summer working at Prudential Securities, another one working at Merrill Lynch. And it was through those internships that I realized I enjoyed finance and when I was getting close to graduating, I had a very good, career counselor at my undergraduate school, which was Vander Bill and she encouraged me to apply for jobs at investment banks. Her perspective was that while most of the people that end up working for an investment bank have a finance background, about a third of the analyst class is just people that have tested well or had good grades. And she thought that I would learn a lot and be able to go through the training program and, in essence, catch up with regards to the finance that I lacked and so I applied for a handful of investment banking jobs. I got a couple of offers. The one I accepted was the Lehman brothers. I previously said I chose it because they allowed me to move back to Los Angeles, which is where I grew up, and I wanted to go back home. So I worked in that group, which was technology banking on I did that for a couple of years. Found it to be a rewarding, extremely time-consuming, and a bit repetitive. But for someone like myself that did not have a finance background, I had never taken accounting or finance before graduating from college. It was extremely useful, and I learned a lot. While I was an analyst at Lehman Brothers. They raised a venture capital fund. And they were looking to staff up that group with people from my year. My analyst year at the bank. So I applied for that job during my second year, and I was accepted into the Venture Capital Fund and so I moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area. Officially, I think, I started in January of 2000, which was a very interesting time to be in the industry. We were very close to the top of the bubble and by March of 2000, we had hit the crust and we were on the precipitous decline. I think that joining at that time was chaotic. I'm not sure if I learned a lot of lessons in terms of what to look for with regards to investment. The experience that I gained as the bubble deflated, though, was actually quite useful and rewarding in hindsight, not fun at the time. And that was really to gain an understanding of how to triage business and figure out which ones are worth saving, which ones or not. And that really forced a very deep, deep-dive into union economics and understanding, revenue growth at all costs doesn't necessarily drive any sort of value. And so there has to be a second-order, elements of the business that are also leading to dilation increases in real firm value creation. But I did that for a couple of years. And those were dark days simply because most of the work was centered around letting people go and figuring out where you're gonna put more money in a business. Valuations declined very quickly. The NASDAQ lost about 80% of its value from peak to trough and so it was very chaotic. But again, I do think that those were helpful and informative years and I think they may be more cautious as an investor and also someone that focused a lot on, does this revenue actually draw Value. I stayed with the venture fund until 2002 and then I applied for business school. I went to Stanford and got my MBA. and Lehman Brothers offered to pay for business school if I were to come back for two years. So that was a very easy decision. I did not envision staying much beyond that. But while I came back to the fund, they had raised an additional fund while I was gone and I stayed, I rejoined them and during my second year of being with the group I was promoted, And became a principal and within a year after that became an investing partner and so really fortunate that there was an opportunity for me to be able to make some investments and really start taking more ownership of, investing and managing the capital. I was also fortunate my first couple of investments worked. That's a really important thing, It's, you're trying to get a seat at the table and try to get an opportunity, to continue to invest. And so I was very fortunate with that. While I was at Lehman though, Lehman went through the bankruptcy and so our group spun out as a standalone entity. The venture effort at Lehman, The Capital came from a number of third party limited partners. Lehman was an LP, but not the only one which was the saving grace for the business, post the bankruptcy. So at the time of the Lehman bankruptcy, we were working out of our fifth-generation fund. It was a $365 million fund, and Lehman was $75 million of that. We found a group called Harbor Vast who came in and bought lemons LP interest in our active funds. And then there was me plus four other individuals and we bought the minority interest in the general partner that we did not own. And so it ultimately was a three-handed deal between the Harbor Vast, who bought the LP interest, and then the five of us that bought the GP interests and we were able to send out as a standalone entity. And we rebranded it Tenaya capital, that was in February of 2009, and since that time we finished investing 5, fund 5, we raised fund six and we raised funds seven on so, we've had a very successful run over the course of the past 11 years as Tenaya. The reality is the Lehman Brothers venture partners and Tenaya are pretty much the same thing. It was the same five GPs that managed both pools of capital and for the most part, it was the same limited partners. We lost Lehman, we picked up Harbor Vest, but the others were generally speaking the same on so it's a really interesting, dynamic and so far as this partnership has been together in essence since 2000 so, for 20 years, we've worked alongside one another in deploying capital. And I'm not sure what more I can tell you about the story elements of it, but one thing the highlight is our focus as a fund as early growth stage investing, which tends to be second institutional rounds. We lead most of the finance things that we do, we're usually taking a board or board observers seat, so we try to be pre-active in managing the investments, and we're strictly tech investors, although, we define that pretty broadly. That's anything from health care IT to consumer services, and largely US in focus, although opportunistically, we do go outside the U. S. and I have a couple of investments in Indonesia right now, one in China and one in Germany, and that's pretty much about the story, I think in terms of incidents and experiences that shaped my career path. I mean, I think I intimated it but, going through a big market dislocation like 2000 was, I think, a very useful tool in my experience that I had to witness the downside of making lots of investments and hyper-growth businesses. And that's when the capital dries up, you're gonna have to call the herd. And so going through that process, I think, gave me a real appreciation for the human elements. I mean, these are businesses and these businesses are managed by people, and these people have families. And so I think I have, a greater appreciation for that. Having gone through the process of watching a lot of those businesses fail and those that survived have to be significantly restructured and so that was a very impactful thing. In my career, there's been, I'd say, three separate market dislocations. So 2000, and 2009 with the Lehman bankruptcy and now this. This is a weird one in so far as, there are businesses, businesses that have actually benefited from covid and then there are others. Generally speaking, a lot of the consumer focus, marketplaces that have actually been hit very hard. Given that I invest in consumer companies. It's been a lot of my companies, businesses like event private left and things like that on so I have worked in three very severe and distinct market dislocations. I think those certainly have shaped me, as an Investor, I probably would have a different perspective around risk and upside vs downside, had I maybe ended my career before two of these, but I'm very happy that I have experienced it. I'm at least used to them, and I don't get overly concerned about them. There's only so much you can do is what is really what I'm trying to say. But there are things that can be done that gives the company the best opportunity to get through the difficult times, and it's really just focusing on Union economics burn. A lot of the motherhood and apple pie elements of building a business.

I think I hit some of this. I mean, my philosophy is really driven around looking for, either a network effect business, those are very hard to build, but to the extent, you can be successful building it, they're very hard to break. It takes a black swan opportunity, like COVID to actually really damage them. But for the most part, if you get supply and demand meeting and you do so in a cost-effective manner, It's very difficult to unseat that business. And Craigslist is the perfect example. It's a horrible product, but it still is a very vibrant marketplace. The founding team is really, I'm very flexible in founding teams. It all depends on the culture they're building, really who are the founders? I've seen businesses be successful that are kind and gentle. I've seen others that have been a bit more aggressive and I think it's fine to build in however lightness you wanna build. The important thing is to be consistent and to ensure that you're recruiting people that share your same beliefs, that you are incentivizing people with the same goals in line. In terms of industry, I have strictly invested in Tech. My experience set is really oriented around either a consumer-facing business or a business that, is a vertical application or something that you can be bought through an app store and so that's the sandbox I limit myself to and with regards to business models, I've invested in marketplaces as well as subscription businesses and I think that's I would say 90% plus of the investments that I made thus far. And so I think I am flexible. I'm happy to look at the software businesses charging a monthly subscription or a marketplace that's more transactional and then from a stage perspective, really 2nd, 3rd institutional round. Historically, that has been Series B, Series C. What you see now is a lot of seed financing is actually institutional rounds and quite large on so a number of my investments are Series A from a series designation. But really, it's the second institutional round.

I want a short email. I don't feel like there is any one statistic I want to see, but I would like the founder to be able to articulate in a very concise manner really what they're doing. And what's the value proposition? What's the problem they're solving and how and why does this matter? And, I get lots of emails. And It's incumbent upon the founder to not send pages or expect me to go through a 50-page document. They should be able to articulate very simply as though this is your one shot to get me interested as to why they're spending countless hours working on this project and why they believe it's a meaningful space and opportunity.