I'll start with where I am today, so my name is Will Price, I'm the founder and managing partner of the firm called Next Frontier Capital in Bozeman, Montana, and my career path is a fairly securitized one, but I'll go through really quickly. I went to Harvard undergraduate, studied East Asian studies, and my career choice of the time I graduated, in 1994 was thinking that I would spend time working in Asia, and so is a Mandarin speaker and with the rise of the Asian economies, I joined Morgan Stanley and worked in the Hong Kong and Singapore offices, and it was fairly fascinating work. The idea was, how do you finance extreme growth when you don't have domestic capital markets. You take Indonesia or Malaysia or Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, they need to attract capital, so we worked on a lot of privatizations where you would take a stake on assets, whether there's electricity, grids, distribution, generators, oil and gas facilities, telecommunications and then essentially sell them to both domestic and international investors to fund growth, which is a really interesting time for me as a young person to get to work, across the Southeast Asian markets, spent time in India, went to the World Cup of India 1996 (which was fun), and just had some great times, but anyway ended up coming back and went to business school with Kellogg, and I graduated in 1999 and at the time, It isn't like today, Tech was definitely the hot ticket in 1999, ended up in the Bay area. I've always been really attracted to working with highly technical people around commercializing technology and the challenge of how do you position it to a customer? How do you position against the competition? How do you raise capital? How do you attract people to the business? So I spent a lot of time in working with early Stage Founders, that is both the CEO of two companies as well as longtime venture capitalist, working in that area. So my first company was acquired by a venture-backed business, that venture firm has asked me to come and join them in venture capital, that was 2002. I worked in venture capital from 2002 to 2008, and then I was the CEO of a sequoia, General Catalyst #1 blood bank company in the advertising technology space from all way to 2014 when I moved to Montana, and since I've been here, I've brought a venture firm, but I think the incidents and experiences that shaped my career were really trying to understand, What motivates me the most? Where I'm most excited? What kind of environments where I feel the most inspired to be around? And for me, entrepreneurs are the people I love being around. There's something about people that have the courage to take a new idea to market, to quit a comfortable day job, to rally people to the cause, that has always been just a huge source of inspiration for me. I like that 0 to 1 creativity and also the underdog challenge of having to go up against bigger players and to help disrupt. And to me, that's always been just a fascinating place to space that place to play. So I think from Major 28 (I'm 48 now), so it's 20 years, that's really all I've done is early-stage operating work or stage financial work and I know the path and adventure could be winding and securitized, but I've just particularly loved what I've done. So anyway, that's kind of a background on my story and some of the motivations for why I do what I do.

So next, Venture Capital's original focus was to provide seed capital, Montana. It was a very niche strategy in the beginning, and there are some pretty powerful reasons for doing so. The first. If you look at our country as a whole, you have places like Washington State, California, Massachusetts, New York that are tied to the broader economic engines of innovation. Those economic innovations have driven job growth, income growth, wealth creation, but a lot of our country has been cut off from access to that to the innovation economy. And I think one of the real motivations for me originally starting the business was to support Montana based-in companies that weren't able to reach get the capital markets. And in the absence of capital markets, you end up with companies that pursue SPASPIRS Citi loans, and they essentially become government contractors where the innovation essentially funded through research. But you don't ever ship a product. You just kind of work on whatever the research area the government wants to fund. And I was really interested in helping those companies become product entry, customer-centric, and ship products, not just the research. And so we actually looked at Utah originally as a model for Montana. And if you look at Utah, we had 85% Montana of the GDP, about 90% of the research dollars per capita, 1% of the venture dollars per capita. So for every Utah citizen, there's about $200, and for per person investment in Montana was $2. So the original founding vision was, Can we ride the demographic waves of people wanting to live and work in places like both in Missoula, high-quality edge public universities, quality education, and access to the outdoors, Reasonable cost of living, good airports, and provide kind of a necessary ingredient for innovation, which was was equity capital. And what we've kind of come to realize is that there is absolutely a national market for venture now is certainly Utah knows that but that national interest is contingent in condition on being able to evaluate of specific investment opportunities using financial metrics. So in the SAS domain, for example, What's the cost to acquire a customer? What's the renewal rate of that customer? What's lifetime value? And in order to generate metrics that allow the investors to make investment decisions. You're in a Catch 22 as a regional entrepreneur because it by takes 1 to 4 million of paid-in capital the building generates those financial metrics. But if you don't have access to a local capital then, it's a stillborn idea. And so we focus before the series A investors, the big national series A investors. I mean we invest somewhere within the company is $25000 - $75,000 a month and MRR, it's based in the Rocky Mountains, we like recurring revenue, mostly B2B Businesses, we have doubled some stuff that I would describe as deep tech. But since our founding in 2015, we've now emerged from being focused on Montana. The second fund was Montana in Colorado, and now the third fund is a pan Rockies funds. We invest essentially in Utah, in Colorado and Montana. We look in Idaho, Wyoming. We look in probably Eastern Washington, and a very simple idea, which is to try to find the best companies in a region, put together seed rounds of anywhere from $2 - $4 million where we take 50% of the round, and then work with management to attract customers and to repeatability build, in the metrics that would allow for a series A to occur. We also recently have worked out that there's a gap between kind of Series A and Siri and Growth equity financing. So most big venture firms now, are looking for two types of investments. One is that early series A where it's maybe $1 - $2 million with a lot of potentials, and then there are growth teams, which a lot of them have now term it like a specific growth investment firm. They're looking for $10+ million and revenue growing really quickly, where you can deploy tens of millions of dollars into its businesses. So we're also seeing a lot of opportunities, and the companies that are somewhere around $3 - $5 million of revenue- they've raised their series A, they executed but they just haven't reached that absolute tipping point in scale at the $10 million levels for the growth firms, and so there's kind of a null set of investors interested in those companies, so we've now kind of find two structure holes in the market. One is that pre-Series A, which is a difficult deal to get together in the Rockies, and the second one would be kind of the Post Series A but pre-growth round where you're executing, but you just haven't hit the absolute scale numbers that the growth investment firms want to see. So in terms of founding teams, we like scrappy founders as we talk about Forge founders is one of our goals, and these were people that have started a company and run into trouble, whether if the product was wrong or the market took longer to develop, or they lost the co-founder people that exhibited grit and determination to stick with the idea and overcome the challenge. People have hugely pedigree backgrounds that tend not to be the kind of filter for tech companies, but we do like to see people that have been at it for 12 to 24 months and have had to face the accident shocked moment, whether do I want to keep doing this and then stayed with it. So anyway, that's kind of little bit on our investment strategy.

XYZ company is at 25,000 MRR, we're growing a quarter of recorder at 15%, we've raised $1.2 million today in a seed round, and we're raising $3 to $5 million in a Series A or a seat Plus or what have you. Very specific, who are you? What have you done so far with the money you've been given? How much money have you been given? And what do you need to continue to build business going forward and then also have kind of maybe an indication as to the used case and some of the customers, so you are really looking for the headlines like the size of raise? How much you raise so far? What the revenue run rate is? And, who you sell to and some examples of success. A lot of times people are using documents and other methods to track consumption of their investment deck. Kind of email teaser is very effective to get through the filters, and one of the things I find frustrating if I'm looking at a company conversely, for example, where we're six slides in and I don't know, What they're raising? How much they've raised? Or what their revenue is? People or I'd say a lot of venture capitalists are like taxonomy, classifications, machines, they're like, Is this a deal for us? We have a predisposition to a certain bias. Does this company map against our biases? A map against our criteria? And if the entrepreneur takes too long to kind of share that information, you run the risk of people not paying attention. So I'd be very declared about who you are, what you've done, what you're trying to accomplish, and who believe in you so far, whether it's investors or customers. We've definitely learned the hard way that pure concepts Investing is difficult because it's very difficult to underwrite how long it's going to take to get that first customer or the second customer. The product may be wrong. The pricing may be wrong. The delivery mechanism may be wrong, so people that have at least 15,000 bucks a month in revenue or 25,000 bucks. We're not talking about massive revenue here, but there's enough, whether is somebody paying you and he have deployed it and it's working. Because one of the reasons that is so important for us is that, fairly it's a lot easier to predict your ability. Go from 25,000 bucks in revenue to 100,000 bucks revenue. Then it is to go from 0 to 25 just very, very hard to predict that both the probability and the time it's going to take. And so we like to see some early proof points attraction, and then our challenge in our underwriting process. This is to ask, Is this a company that we think over 18 months of capital we provide them can go from 25 to 12000-25000 bucks a month. And at that point, we can really take that company and with confidence, get it financed in the series A markets. The statistics I like to see are pretty basic. But when you get to series A, they want to see How efficient are you on sales or marketing spend? That's basically quarter one, new air are divided by sales and marketing expense or vice versa. And they're looking for LTV or CAC ratios, are looking for net dollar turned retention ratios like how many of your customers renew and when they renew, do they renew for more seats like they did the prior year. So when we invest it's not a purely quantitative assessment, it's a lot about the team. It's like, all right, talk to the customers. But when you get to the series A stage and you're talking to national venture firms, there is the business models around. Ventured to the point, where they are very specific in what they want to see, and typically it's things like lifetime value, churn rate and efficiency on sales and marketing spend. So those statistics, I think, are important to have. And if you want to raise a series A at the C level, I think they're less important. But building through them with your C proceeds is critical to your ability, continued track Apple.