Like, and you do all, do all these things and, uh, and then you're long Figma.

Yeah.

Well, I think like what's funny is like Figma is one of those things where the only reason why I wrote about it publicly was because I wanted to see if...

I talk to a lot of people obviously in the tech world.

Dylan is like very central to tech, uh, Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma.

Um, uh, I would say like, you know, our, uh, it's a very San Francisco native company and networks of people, and so I've been very curious about like how, how does the company think about itself on a go-forward basis.

Um, and I hear like the same thing.

Mm-hmm

So why is just the very fact that it's obvious sort of something that makes you not want to invest?

I'll say a bunch of disconnected things that maybe hopefully will form a picture.

One, venture is the lowest conviction asset class in finance.

And so because of that, when things become obvious, similar to how when capital disappears and that illiquidity drops something down to zero, things don't scale linearly on price or on risk-adjusted return.

They scale exponentially.

because everyone moves there because nobody yeah there's a lot of lack of consensus um two i think like what is it that compound believes we're good at um we think we're pretty good at like looking at n of one style things and saying okay this is possible that this could be really really valuable um in times of maximum obviousness two things happen one there's a lot of similar things that are built at the same time.

So you have a lot of competition of companies that all look identical.

And then has it made you a better investor?

What was true in the past might not necessarily be true in the future when there's so many different variables of new founder, new company, new sector, etc.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things, right? One, I think that like we try to get to categories very early and then understand them over like long cycles of time.

So decade long cycles, ideally, right? We've done this for a decade now.

We hopefully will do it for another few decades.

We started investing in crypto in 2016.

We saw a bunch of weights that changed.

in 2018 and 2021 and 2022, like over and over again, AI similarly.

how people are thinking about protecting humanity, moving it forward, you know, anthropics, adding guardrails, refuse to work with the US, the Department of War, for example, like whether you are seeing a lot of conversations that pertain, you know, to the importance of humanity, or whether it is just, let me win, win and win.

Mm-hmm

...

but also in terms of how British people relate to the rest of the world, and how their values and ideals are informed.

But yeah, look, that's gotta be, uh, based in peace, prosperity, and predictability, and, uh, Brexit has undermined all three of those things.

I'm encouraged, however, to see that the British government right now are making approaches to the European Union in terms of something called the European Defense Pact-

Michael, just to finish up a little bit about Brexit, if I'm a, an English voter and I'm sort of assessing how Brexit has impacted my life now that it's quite established, what have the impacts been?

Well, what we're talking about for a small majority now of, uh, British voters is Bregret.

Now, there will be others who we're talking a, a small majority over 50%.

Mm-hmm.

Um, to the point now where venture investors are funding research labs, um, with hundreds of millions to billions of dollars out of the gate.

Um, and so that's, that's kind of eroding or competing with academia and the role that they've played in, in markets historically, which is government-funded/endowment-funded research, and now it's, you know, venture capital-funded research.

What we then say is, "Where is there going to be durable value accrual?" So I think maybe that durable part is the thing to focus on the most right now.

I think a lot of people see, uh, you-Parabolic ARR ramps in a bunch of businesses on the private markets, and they are terrified of the erosion that could happen in public markets.

And I think that our view is some of these things are very real, and people are, like, really sleeping on a bunch of the, the shifts that will happen.

And in our annual letter two years ago, we, we published and wrote, "The past decade of technology was about market cap expansion," like technology ate the world.

Mm

Mm-hmm.

... or for rock, uh, quote tweet, which was like, you know, the actual par- interesting part about all these is just the immense growth and scale of some of these AI businesses and how like, you know, you might have been told for a long time if you could double revenue, that was great.

And you might go down and say, "Hey, you know, I raised my seed round or I raised my series A and if I, you know, have these types of metrics, I can raise my B and maybe I need to pop up, you know, four to six months pre-fundraise to do some of those like conversations and, and prep for kind of my, my raise." And you might realize you're in a vastly wrong ballpark of, of where you were.

And if you didn't kind of model that out in a, in a, you know, step by step process and, and have ways to, to kind of cons- consistently monitor that, um, I think it can be really hard.

And, you know, in 2021, we were really good at forming narratives around companies two to three months before they went to raise money.

And I think now, the structural change means you actually have to be, uh, hitting a runway that might be 12, 18 months of different types of progress in order to raise that round.

Obviously, you know, everyone can point at, like, a Lovable or something like that-

What's been your line on, "This is a science project, this work should be done, uh, but it's not necessarily ready to be a business"? Like, where, where does that kind of line for you and how do you think about that definition? 'Cause I'm sure as, like, a thesis-driven fund, you get excited about a potential future and then you wanna back companies that align to that thesis, but maybe at, at different points, uh, you know, again, there's just a gap between when something should be worked on and when it can be kind of commercialized.