What I would say is how I got here today is really interesting, I started my career with WordPerfect Corporation back in the late eighties, went to New York City and their sales organization, went to Seattle in their sales organization, then Novell Corporation acquired us, acquired WordPerfect in 1994. I went to work for Novell and through a series of interactions with the gentleman brand name of Eric Schmidt, who was at the time Novell CEO. He got board of directors approval to create an in-house corporate venture fund, and through that relationship, I was asked to be involved and then ultimately run the organization. It was $300 million in size, 100 million that we invested into companies. Our biggest winner. was a company called Red Hat. We were an early investor in Red Hat. Also, we invested into venture capital firms. That's what they call a limited partner. And when I first was given the opportunity, this was 1996, I had no idea what venture capital was so I actually drove the parts to Novell because this was pre-Amazon and I bought the only two books on venture capital I could find, and I started reading, and that was really the basis. And then I had some wonderful mentors who helped me. I did that from 96 to 2002, left in 2002, I guess when Eric Schmidt went to be CEO of Google, I probably should have gone with him. But it wasn't apparent Google was going to be what Google is, so I end up going. I joined a couple of other individuals, and we created what is now today Pelion Venture Partners, which is an early-stage software technology-focused venture firm.

We really look at three things. The first thing we look at is the technology. How disruptive is the technology? Is it disrupting a market, disrupting an existing technology? What is the disruption mechanism? Then, on top of that, we look and say, how big is the opportunity? How big is the market? It's one thing to disrupt a market that's 50 or $100 million. It's another thing to disrupt the market that's a billion dollars. And then the last thing is the team, which is really important. The team doesn't necessarily have to be assembled, but you have to have a core function of entrepreneurs who have passion, who have Drive, who have desire and who have the risk taking capability. But I would say coupled with that, if they have a spouse, a partner is the plus one, signing up for the same sort of entrepreneurial journey that the founders are. So that's why we spend a fair amount of time looking at the founders because at the end of the day the people who are creating these businesses, they're the real rock stars. They're taking the risk, they're creating really big companies that when we add vast, it's a dozen people, and maybe some code has been ripped so that those are the things that we look at and then from a business model standpoint today we like Sasse companies, but that's just simply a business model. A decade ago that didn't exist, it was enterprise cells. So the business models are, Can you get to product proof or product adoption with a small amount of money? And sometimes the business model like Sasse helps to get there. So product market, fit from investment to acceleration is super important. So can you do that with a minimal amount of money invested?

'Less is more' meaning, one of my partners at the firm here used to say, "Tell me your value proposition on the back of your business card". So, find a way to make it simple, concise and compelling, but do it in five sentences. So what is it that's going to be super compelling. The other thing is, know who your investors are. One example, we don't invest into medical devices or biotech. Those were wonderful businesses, we just don't have the expertise. So when an entrepreneur sends me an email and it's all about a biotech that tells me right away, he's not done his research on who are we, so what are the metrics that you've hit? And then I'd say the other thing is, you can through LinkedIn or something, you can find a warm introduction to a venture capitalist, and warm introductions always take priority over cold emails. So if you're sending in just a cold email, there's a low likelihood because we just have so much coming at us. So spend the time to think about who you know that I know as an example and then leverage that relationship to get an introduction because the conversations become a lot more interesting at that point. I would say that the product prime needs to be in beta with some beta customers. (that's just the stakes that we invest) we are typical what I would call a series A investors, there's great friends who do more of the seed states investing. So having a beta product, we have some beta customers. Having said that entrepreneurship feel free to reach out to us a lot earlier than that, because you can start to build and formulate an opinion on your investing partner. We start to foster and develop our relationship because at the end of the day, it's all going to be about trust. And so how can you have deep trust in that relationship?