What is it that's worked for you?

You know what's funny? So I'll give you a couple of examples, but you know what's really funny is that when we look at some of the deals that don't work, at least 50% of the time, my partners are like, you know what? how do we convince ourselves to actually go do this thing? Like usually after that first meeting, we're like, there's something just doesn't feel right for us.

I mean, it doesn't mean it's not a great company, but for us, it just doesn't fit the mold.

And the times where we convinced ourselves or had someone else call us to convince us to do something ended up being very wrong.

So it once again goes back to trusting your gut instinct.

The second thing is, it would be, let me give you a great example.

We funded Ian Swanson and his co-founders Dee and Bidar for Protect AI.

Just catch us up on sort of what is interesting and exciting for the firm today in this AI climate and maybe share some new investments that show the breadth and arc of the firm.

What are startups doing to help large organizations introduce more complete context into their workflows and environments so that AI functions more effectively?

I'll give you some examples.

First and foremost, I get pitches every day.

many pitches every day talking about someone wanting to own the context layer and someone wanting to own kind of the government's layer for enterprise.

And by the way, that's a non-starter to go and say you're gonna own that whole thing because you have lots of large companies like ServiceNow and Salesforce and even like Atlassian trying to own that layer.

So that's one.

So I think if you're gonna do context, it's a very specific context.

Can you talk about this? a whole issue of agents and decision-making.

If intelligence is becoming a commodity, where in the control era are the venture-scale companies? How do you think about it?

Well, I think the best thing that ever happened to any software company is that Anthropic and OpenAI failed to go public.

The reason is because they're like, holy crap, I actually have to start maybe not subsidizing my margins as much.

All of a sudden, there's a wake-up call in the world saying, you know what? Man, the tokenomics, the cost of actually using all these models, we blew through our budgets.

You could hear people talking about it repeatedly.

That was part one.

Part two was then like, okay, if I'm doing that, then maybe I can actually staple together models that I don't need to use state-of-the-art or soda models all the time for everything, right? So then this whole router kind of industry got created, right? So even, look, some of the largest banks I know were already building kind of models where they would actually do a query and it would automatically route maybe if it was a very important question to state-of-the-art and then they would have sub-agents underneath kind of managing kind of Kimmy or DeepSeek or GLM 5.2 or whatever, right? So So then you kind of, now this whole industry is spawning around that.

So, how do you think of it from the investment perspective? Do you think agent identity is a standalone category, or do you think it'll be absorbed by Octand or Microsoft, or how do you see that one playing out when it comes to consolidation and vendors and things like that within the landscape?