I think you see two types of individuals ones that have a very definitive long term plans about their career, who can tell you exactly where they want to be in five years or three years, I tend to be in the other bucket, who is let's say in the right place at the right time. Being passionate about certain activities or certain areas or interests and creating the space for opportunities that aligned with those interests to naturally come your way. I know that sounds a little bit hard to kind of pin down or define concretely. But that's been my journey. So how I got to where I am? You know, I was a Cornell undergrad and mechanical and aerospace engineering. And if you look at my professional career since then, it's not like I was ever practicing as a mechanical engineer, whether it was designing airplanes or cars or anything of that sort. And so it was really being prepared to do critical problem solving critical thinking, being analytical, which is what I took away from my engineering degree. but ultimately a career that first started at Microsoft, and focused on enterprise technology, Enterprise B2B. IT technologies and from there, evolving into roles where I was doing product management, I was doing product planning early on. In my career, I developed a passion for mobile technologies. If you can think about the current excitement about AI, if you rewind the clock back to the early 2000s in the mid-2000s, the hot new Coltec was mobile smartphones and tablets. And so my interests were to be a part of that helped bring new propositions to market on my enthusiasm and passion for space allowed me to take on and the ability to do product management a product planning at Microsoft to create new propositions and ultimately commercialized them. After that, continuing in that kind of function. But getting a taste of what it's like to work in a Time Valley companies that were in the leading space to certainly at old, but also palm as they were working on Web OS and then from there, moving on to work at Samsung. Also doing mobile but really getting a taste of business development. Thinking about how do you work with startups? How do you engage with VCs? You know, in some ways, that role was related to what I'm doing today as a VC. It was understanding what startups build. Why's it compelling, how they can partner with big companies to get scale and bring those propositions to market? That really helped me build my network in the Valley and build the right set of understandings of the leading startups are in different areas. And then who were the leading VCs all that invest in those companies? Moving on to Qualcomm and being able to go really deep on the technical side for all things mobile, everything from silicon to computer infrastructure in this interesting on-device applications. Today we talk about things like machine learning on mobile platforms or doing real-time security analysis or real-time behavioral analysis on mobile devices. We were starting to think about these things back in 2013 when it was not mainstream when it was not something that was in the confronted center for most of the ecosystem. So being a trailblazer, I think that's the other thing that I see is a unifying theme in my career is being on the leading edge of what's next. And that was being driven by my own intellectual curiosity about learning about new areas and connecting the dots and seeing what are the implications of that for how you compete, how other big players will respond, where are their unmet needs that startups conserve and address? And so and while I was at Qualcomm I also got close to the corporate Ventures team and had an opportunity to work with them to develop their thesis on investment in certain areas. I'm also finding opportunities to work with their portfolio companies to see if they could do something with Qualcomm Research. And so about five years there and really kind of having an opportunity go deep on the understanding AI and deep learning as it applies to mobile. And then having this opportunity to come back to Microsoft in an investment role is a managing director on M12 and bringing what I had learned over the last 10 years working in mobile, working at AI and now applying it to seeing what investments would be most interesting for Microsoft to make. So my journey, I would say, is not typical of a VC. I mean, yes, you have people that are seasoned operators and then move into becoming venture capitalists. So, yes, there's some of that, but I think a lot of it is being passionate about what you're working on and being in the right place at the right time. And, others being able to see that passion that you have for taking on certain problems or certain types of job types.

I would say I'm probably the most oriented towards deep tech and early stage. And by deep tech, meaning these are not just the pure execution play to stand up a SaaS business or, sell widget A or widget B and just do it faster than the other guy. Deep tech means there's a concerted effort to develop defensible IP that can take more time than a company that's just about to launch some cloud service or launch a mobile application, and you do a land grab for users or revenue. And so then, if you think within Deep tech, I mean, there are many different sectors, but I focus on all things AI, that includes applied AI, looking at AI across verticals. But it also includes horizontal AI where you're looking at innovations in the field of the AI itself. It includes things like autonomous systems and robotics, everything in the self-driving ecosystem, but also extending that to things like logistics warehouse automation. I also look at silicon and specifically silicon to accelerate AI workloads, and I also take a look at to lead our investments on anything related to quantum computing. So again, it just turns out that these are all areas and personally passionate about. I don't distinguish between spending time researching or getting smarter or knowing what's happening in these segments because that's what I would do with my personal time. And so having that very, let's just say very kind of smooth transition from what's for work and what's personal is a great opportunity. It allows me to really work on things I'm passionate about. I think it's it's a great opportunity to doing that at Microsoft M12.

I don't know if there's a standard template. I think there are a few signals that we look for. What are you building or before revealing, what is the problem that you are claiming that you have identified and that you have done your homework to know that no one is in fact solving that in a way that meets a market requirement our customer needs? Then why you're in a position to go and tackle that problem? Why should I believe you that you're gonna be successful in solving that problem and then as a founder, depending on you know, how early or late you are getting a sense of who are the other participants in this venture in what kind of team have you built are one of the skill sets of those people? Are they complementary to yours? Does it create a well-rounded set of expertise to be able to do all of the hard things that are required to successfully execute a startup? Why are you raising venture funding? I mean, I would ask that at your very early stage. Obviously a later stage I would ask, why are you raising? Now, what have you accomplished? From the last fundraise that would justify asking for more money or asking for another round. No matter what industry you're betting on, your betting on people. And so to get a sense that the person you are potentially investing in has a vision that you buy into as a way to bring others along in putting the effort in to realize that vision have some clear-eyed view on how they're going to go about doing it in the short term, the midterm and the long term, why they're differentiated, why they're able to sustain that differentiation. And then, of course, what is the plan for how they will create economic value? What is the business model? What evidence do they have in that business model that will work? What evidence do they have that customers buy into what they're building on the proposition that they created? So those are kind of high-level themes, and you tune on one versus other parameters, depending on the stage and depending on how much they're looking to raise and what their expectations are.