My entire career is formed by accident and not on purpose. So, to get this pushing from people in school, the only way I've found to answer it is I got lucky for the career that I've had. I started when I graduated from the school in 1975. It was a recession year so I had a really hard time finding a job, particularly in journalism, which was my intent. So I ended up bartending and doing various other jobs until I did find a job in journalism and I kind of worked my way up from there. Turns out, I had a kind of natural affinity for the job. So I did pretty well, went from one job to another, and increased by spills. And after 22 years of doing that, I switched careers and became a venture capitalist. And again, I just go out and seek a job in venture capital. But I nailed it because it was 1996 and 1996 is when the Internet was starting to boom. And every venture capital firm in the world was looking for new people to handle the deal. And so I got hired by as a partner at New Enterprise Associates, just now one of the largest of capital firms known to mankind, and ultimately got fired by them, partially because I just didn't fit in the largest venture capital firm. I don't know how to invest a lot of money and make a lot of money. I think you have to start with a smaller amount, end up with a bigger amount. But I learned all the skills for venture capital. So the combination of all these things led me to, once New Enterprise Associates fired me, that I formed a firm with a good friend of mine, Louis. I'm Alsop and we're Alsop Loui partners in 2006, we've been doing this for 14 plus years and we're great partners, we have a great time, and we built a firm that has a good reputation. We've made a little money and kind of a good way to cap a random career.

So we're early-stage investors. We'll form companies if need be. We have a track record of spinning companies out of large companies, starting new ones based on intellectual property as well as investing in companies that have already been started. But we want to be the first, we have a hard time calling ourselves an institution because it two partners and a few other people but we like to be the first institutional investor in a company. Even if angel investors have gotten there before us or if there are other bootstrapping, other ways of getting a company started and we call ourselves the geek and the gadfly. My partner Gilman is the "geek". He is, he's is not a trained programmer, but he graduated us upstate sometime ago and his adviser told him he would never be as good a program as his classmates, he was doing Business Administration, learned how to run companies, which is what he did. He started and ran a company called Spectrum Halaby which was ultimately sold to Hasbro. And then he became the founding CEO of In-Q-Tel, which is a so-called CIA venture capital fund, and so he spent six years embedded in the intelligence community and broadened his knowledge base to such a degree that I cannot find anything he does not know about anymore. So he is the geek. He's our instant technical diligence. He's always right, and I'm the Gadfly. I know everybody, as he puts it, I'm a phone call away from pretty much anybody in the world. And I have a reputation built over several decades. So even if I haven't met somebody before, if I say hi, we're all set to go. "Yeah, I know who you are", and so I can get them on the phone. So we use that technical knowledge and the ability to reach out, to invest in pretty much any kind of company. What we really look for, companies that have hard technology. We call us a hard tech firm, people go like, what's hard tech? That's anything which is hard to do, and so we really like intellectual property. We like proprietary Technology. We like technologists, we like geeks. Then we invest in companies that we believe in our own world, will end up being significant companies out of that technology. So it means we don't really specialize in domains, we do specialize in stage or in business models. But we avoid certain domains. We don't do health care at all because neither of us knows anything about it. And that's a complicated business. We really do need to know what we're talking about. Then we've learned to avoid certain things that we're just not good at like, Fintech. We've taken a couple of shots at it. Haven't really made any money. Clearly something we're missing there. We actually have a portfolio company in Fintech which now it's doing well, but it's like the only one out of 10 of the last twelve years, most of them. We don't like enterprise software, but we have invested in it, made money in it, but it tends to take a long time. And so, we're impatient. We want to make money quickly. And so we've done very well in the game business. Gilman's company was a game company, and I've invested in game companies successfully over my whole career. So we look for stuff there. We have an incredible portfolio of the three-day space, the lead of which is, we're the Investor and Gilman's on the board of Niantic, which is the Pokemon Go company. But underneath that is the leading, the thought-leading company in the AR space, and we have a bunch of others, too. So, we picked out domains and it changes over time but Gilman's background with the intelligence community also leads us to have a thesis around what we call defense dot com, as opposed to defence stuck cover. And that's really where the military-industrial complex, had to learn how to be agile and technology and that affords an opportunity for Venture Capitals to invest in.

My first e-mails, I get somewhere between five and eight a day. It's typically not possible to review all the decks that I get and I discourage people from sending cold emails and I still get them. One key thing I look for is if I get more than one reference to a particular company, I have learned that it's important, I should pay attention, independent of what the captian is. Some people have figured that out, so I get campaigns as well. People intentionally be writing me emails from different people to get me to respond. I try to respond to every e-mail but at some point it's impossible, although I'm now a user superhuman and very appreciative of the productivity of that email client. So ultimately what I want to know is, and this is the hardest thing for founders to do is I want to know what the business proposition is. Don't tell me about the product. Don't tell me about the technology, not in the beginning. Don't tell me about the technology. Tell me what's the point? What are you trying to accomplish, what's the vision and why is it important, because that's the thing that appeals to me and also to my partner gilman and to our other partners. So you really need to start out with a business proposition. I'm not a venture capitalist because I'm a geek, partner is important. It's more like he's a geek, became a venture capitalist. We're both fundamentally interested in what's the business proposition? How does it scale to become a big company? How does it satisfy some fundamental objective? In that case, I do respond to cold emails. Although if I went back and I'm not a numbers guy, I went back through the last 25 years of my Venture capital career, I'd say, out of cold emails, I may have done two or three deals, so it's really you want to find somebody I know that I respect. You will tell me I should take a look at the deal, independent of what content it is.