I started off as an engineer. A mechanical engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin. Worked for a few years as an engineer. Then I got an MBA, started a career in corporate strategy finance with Fortune 50 companies which led to mergers and acquisitions. I did with one company, I made 78 acquisitions in 24 months. So very comfortable with evaluating companies and due diligence. From there, I went to a smaller company doing this in the same role. We added a corporate venture capital fund that I ran. Early in that process, I met someone who had a patent and a company, which is not something a corporate VC is going to invest in. But he and I hit it off really well. He had no interest in starting this company because he was 78. I left my corporate role and did a startup and ran that company for 15 years. At that point, I was ready for a new challenge and I was approached by the Alumni Ventures group about starting a fund doing Venture Capital, which is where I am now.

With Alumni Ventures Group, and I run two of the funds within the organization, Towerview ventures and Bascom Ventures. We all have the same philosophy. We're trying to build a diverse portfolio across the history, stage, and geography. My individual funds are relatively small in the venture capital world. But the way our organization invests, it has the investing powers of about $200 million, so taken as a whole we're a larger fund but we're never the lead investor. So we're trying to invest alongside very established venture capital funds that have a deep domain experience in the industry that that particular deal is in. We let them set the terms of the deal. We let them take the board seat. We're just trying to put together a diverse portfolio across multiple industries. Our Limited Partners are individuals. We're allowing people to invest. Accredited investors haven't participated in venture capital very much in the past. Only 3% of the accredited investors in this country have Venture capitalists in their portfolio so, we have taken on the task of trying to allow individuals a simple, safe way to participate in VC so we believe that the first occasion is critical.

Since it says or, I prefer to see a slide deck. Actually, it kind of lays out how they think about their business. And in there you can see some traits about people, and their personalities of how they're trying to get their information across. You see decks, with two words per slide, and expect that you're gonna understand it, some very catchy graphics. And if it's a graphic intensive company, that's good. If it's not, that's kind of interesting. Generally, I want to see that they understand that they're solving a problem. They're solving a problem that people are gonna pay for. They're solving a problem that is big enough to reach a scale, depending on the stage of the company. Since we invest in seed through the pre-IPO round that differs what I would see before in the slide deck. A seed-stage deal, they may not have a lot of things formed about the company yet, but they need to have some idea that they can scale to a size that makes them relevant to what we're doing. On the other end of the scale, a Series B round, the business plan better be pretty well thought out of at that point, because that's a stage that they would go public 10 years ago. The one thing that I do see in a lot of slide decks that actually is a turn off is, I'll see projections for the next 5, 10 years, whatever they feel comfortable doing, which is great. I kind of want to see where their heads at, what they think can happen. But when I see a company that says in six years they're gonna have $175,321,875.15 in revenue, I know that they really didn't think too much about that. They put numbers into a spreadsheet and put exactly what the result of the spreadsheet was. One thing I know about year three, your projection's wrong. Now directionally, It should be accurate. It's more important to me what's in the assumption page because a lot of people will say, this is a huge market. If I get 1% of the market, I'll be 500 million in sales. Great, but how are you getting 1%? There are a lot of people competing, so explain to me how you're getting 1%, it's a huge company.