It's fascinating to look at what strategy are you using to navigate the current volatility in growth stage investing?

Yeah, I mean, I would say volatility is an interesting word because I would say it's dynamic, but I wouldn't say that necessarily it's been particularly volatile.

I feel like when I think of volatile, I think of like a lot of ups and downs.

There's been probably far more ups than downs, I would say in the last few years, which does bring to mind, I mean, one of the things that I think we care a lot about as a risk, and we always try to assess is valuations.

And the fact that valuations are quite, I would say, rich in today's world, where a lot of early stage startups, even when they're just getting off the ground, they can raise billions of dollars at like, you know, billion plus valuation.

We've seen a lot of these opportunities and situations where it's literally a team, an outstanding team and outstanding founders, obviously, but they're able to raise an enormous amount of capital with nothing to really show and no pre-revenue, pre-product.

And I think that's something that gives us a little bit of pause and caution because we want to make sure that we're investing responsibly.

Well, given that we're riding more of an upward wave, has your approach to capital allocation changed over the last 12 months?

You've talked about just applying what you've learned in school to the business world, but what did the challenge teach you about actuarial work in specific? Kevin, how would you like to take this one?

Well, participating in this challenge, actually, I think the biggest thing that it taught me was that actuarial work is so much more than just numerical analysis.

Uh, I actually walked into this competition with a bit of a preconception that the numbers would speak for themselves.

After all, uh, pure mathematicians love to say that the mathematical proof will speak for itself and the absolute truth is already hidden inside the numbers.

But that was never the case with actuarial science.

And as we did more work on interpretation and modeling, we actually found that the numbers, in fact, did not speak for themselves.

And so let's just go first into modeling.

Kevin, do you have any advice for next year's or any future years case study challenge participants?

So this forest fire smoke rolling into town, are there any kind of differences in terms of what is in that air?

Not a dumb question at all.

I think that's a fantastic question.

And, you know, there are actually a lot of overlap between wildfire smoke and smog.

Smog typically, you know, refers to human-made sources of pollution, you know, car exhaust, industrial pollutants.

While wildfire smoke obviously refers to smoke released by burning wildfires.

And they both refer to, you know, visible signs of pollution.

Sorry.