Thank you for having me, how did I get here today, a little bit of a circuitous path is the honest answer and, as someone who came out of school thinking that life was a very linear path. I think I realized that over time, that's not often the case. I actually was a lawyer by training and decided midway through law school that while I loved intellectually the pursuit of law, that the practice of law was less intellectually interesting to me that I had hoped, and so I tried to make a bit of a left turn and go into business coming out of law school and was lucky enough to find a job as an investment banker, right at the time when the technology market was starting to heat up very, very actively. So this was kind of 1996 which I know is a long time, probably for many, many of the students, a long time ago. But it was a very it was really the beginning of what turned out to be the .com kind of growth as well as the ultimate of course .com bubble and collapse that we saw later on and it was through that experience that I got introduced Mark in Reason and Ben Horowitz when they started a company called Loud Cloud in 1999, and for people who don't know Loud Colud was basically trying to build what is now Amazon Web services. So we were trying to kind of make computing effectively in utility for everybody and I joined that company in January of 2000 when it was about a four-month-old company and we went through lots of ups and downs, we ultimately sold it in 2007 to Hewlett Packard. But it was a very kind of tough path because we were we started in a very good market and then, after the dot com collapse in 2000-2001 we went through a series of having to lay people off and reduce our expenses and restructure the business and so it's definitely very challenging, challenging time and then after we sold the business to Hewlett Packard, Mark and Ben decided to start the current firm Entries and Horowitz which is a venture capital firm. They started planning for that in 2008 and again, I was lucky to be a part of that, and have been here ever since. So it's an interesting path of, starting out thinking I was gonna be a lawyer or to today where although I don't practice law, quite frankly, I probably use my legal training and legal education more than I ever did in my prior life. Just given that, we're in the nature of doing deals and thinking about securities laws and all kinds of other things, so that's my path from the beginning to today.

Yeah, so we invest in one major theme, which is, Marc Andreessen's written an editorial many years ago called "Software is eating the world", if you haven't seen it, you can google it. It was a Wall Street Journal editorial, I think, from 2010. The basic philosophy behind that is, we view software as a very important horizontal enabling technology that we think will permeate and has permeated on lots of different industries, and will continue to do so over time, and so our main investment thesis is, just to follow the software trail and allow that to take us into industries that could be interesting and then for us to determine, does the intersection of software with that industry actually makes a good business opportunity. So that's our core underlying investment philosophy, in terms of what that means, it is how we affect that, we invest in early-stage and later-stage companies, so early stage could literally be a seed investment where you might have, one or two individuals who are really at the idea of generation phase and maybe they're raising a million dollars or 2 million dollars to try to get to some kind of prototype of a service or product, all the way through a much more mature company where we might invest 150 to 200 million dollars, where the business is operational and working, and maybe they have 20 or 30 or 40 million dollars of revenue and this money helps them to expand their go to market and their sales presence to hopefully grow and continue to be a very large business. So we will look at things all across the board, things that you'd be familiar with, that we've invested in, would be something like on the consumer side, Instacart or Instagram or Airbnb, so traditional consumer facing models on the enterprise side. If any of you were engineers, you may use Github, which is a company that we invested in, and that was ultimately sold to Microsoft, or some of you may use Octa, which is a security software platform, and then, we also have a practice around the intersection of life sciences and computer science, and so think of it as Gino, could you improve the drug discovery process, for example, by using artificial intelligence or other machine learning techniques to help make that both in engineering driven process, as well as a scientific process, and then finally we have a practice around crypto related technologies for people who are interested in that, so thinking of crypto as a platform for developing new types of businesses.

Essentially I guess my best advice would be is first of all, if you can find a way to have somebody that we may know who could introduce you into us, generally, that seems to work better than some pure cold email, if you can't figure that out, cold emails are fine but I would say number one advice as an entrepreneur would certainly be, to try to figure out is there some degree of connection in your network that would allow you to at least get it into somebody's inbox, not unsolicited. And then what we want to see, it depends upon the stage. Look, the core thing we want to see is, what is the thesis of the business, why does this business need to exist today, why will customers pay for this product or service that you're building, and then, of course, any data that actually show or demonstrate or improves the traction. Now, you may not have that, and it may be a very, very early-stage company, and we understand that, and that's fine, too. So it's not just the amount of money that you're trying to raise is consistent with what the kind of relative maturity the company is, that's a fine thing, we don't have an expectation for a crazy amount of metrics and statistics and a very, very early stage seed environment. But as you start to ratchet up your expectations around. If you're looking to raise four or five, or 10 million dollars whatever the case may be, certainly then commensurate with that increase in fundraising, we would want to see more demonstrable numbers that shows us that customers are paying for this, that they like it. You have a sales model that leaves works at that level of scale.