Mark, tell us about an exceptional founder you've worked with and the specific thing they do that's unique.

I'm going to give Pete Sullivan from Jackpocket a shout.

Pete was one of, I think, the first entrepreneur to come through our Accelerator program.

And we had known each other.

He was an entrepreneur who was a bit of a unicorn.

He has a rare combination of design and sales skills.

which put together is quite magical for front-end consumer plays.

Mark, if you could share one piece of advice with a young new investor, what would you tell them?

I think the thing that a lot of people in a lot of industries miss, I heard Howard Marks speak recently at a little event I was at.

And what I found a bit magical and a bit validating was, for those who don't know, Howard Marks is one of the greatest, biggest, most successful public markets players in the game.

His company, Oaktree, I believe has 250 billion or so of assets under management.

And in his storied career, I believe he has bought the bottom of the market five times, including putting $10 billion into the market in 2008.

So if you're not thinking highly enough about the name I'm setting right now, stop, read about him.

and then come back around, in my mind, a contemporary of Warren Buffett at that level.

with venture.

Mark, can you tell us about your anti-portfolio, a startup that you passed on?

Oh, there's a bunch.

I'll throw out, uh, one of the earliest ones I remember was, uh, my first venture role.

We missed Zocdoc.

Why I bring up that one, and there's pro- there's been at least a hundred since.

There's so many logos that are out there that I saw.

Sometimes I even forget that I saw them by the time they're successful, 'cause we're talking years, years and years.

Mark, what is the biggest mistake or hardest lesson you've learned as an investor, and what's the story behind it?

This is one I couldn't talk about for a year.

Made a really good bet into a unicorn we all know, and I sold twelve months too early, uh, and left another ten X churn on the capital on the table if I'd held it for twelve more months.

And it was not my first payday as an investor, but meaningful for where I was, so that matters, and would've completely changed my net worth if I'd held onto the asset for one more year.

I didn't have perfect information, and I had a really hard time forgiving myself.

But if you're not having those experiences, it means you're not at the table.

Uh, but I learned a really valuable rule of thumb.

And, uh, if it goes, you know, to the moon, then it's like, "Oh, I preserved half the upside." [chuckles] So-

Mark, without revealing specifics, talk about one of the highest stakes conflicts you've faced as a VC, why the issue occurred, and how it was resolved.

Uh, I've had people steal money at companies.

I'll just throw that out.

That's probably the thing that always feels like the biggest salt in a wound.

The irony is, you know, for some of the people, it's happened a couple of times.

You, you do it-- We have over 200 portfolio companies.

You do this long enough, you're gonna kinda see a lot of different permutations and a lot of different human psychological dispositions.

Um, how are you thinking about that as, as new markets are created by agents, AI, machine learning, computer vision, other tools?

I think the story you're kind of dipping into on the cost reduction is really a story about jobs.

And, uh, there's a big debate and a very healthy debate happening.

We're, we've been having a lot of debates in our firm.

We're all constantly reading, not just the headlines, more academic books and papers.

We're trying to look for historical models and comparisons.

Um, and I don't have the answer, but I do have a perspective now.

But if you had to describe sort of the software losers versus the software winners of the future, you know, what would be the, the characteristic on the lose-- characteristics on the loser side versus, you know, the characteristics on the, the long-term durable and defensible winners side?

When you're competing as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, that are building these war chests of services, how do you go about doing that in this hyper-competitive venture market? And how do you know, how do you track internally whether you're on that path?

So everyone's got a different approach to how they play in this market, and it is a hyper-competitive market, and a market in which the surplus of capital has been increasing over time.

And I would say the negotiating leverage has shifted over the two decades I've been in the business in favor of the entrepreneur.

So the VCs are in a weaker position now than they were in 2006 when I started in the business.

Um, we, our approach to it is we've had a very high success rate at getting into extremely competitive deals.

Uh, for us, the solution to that, what's enabled that success, is we have carved out a really unique niche in the space.

We seek to be the dominant value-add institutional non-lead partner for Series A founders.

Tell, tell me more.