And I'm curious for you, is it that obvious as far as investor and founder side that those things marry up and you're both looking at the same information but the output is different

yeah okay so I'll wrap up on one quick thought and then I'll directly answer that the quick thought was when I went into venture I thought I was throwing away all my product knowledge I thought I was like well I'm going to pause on my growth as a product person and I'm basically going to start from scratch in this VC role, which was like a hard pill to swallow because I have all these years of experience, a decade of experience.

I'm going to go in with like zero experience in venture.

And I was like, I will take that hit to learn this new thing.

And then I was surprised to realize like how much of the product stuff I was pulling in and leveraging in venture to do venture like a little differently than I thought it was typically done.

And then a big part of that was product market fit, right? I was like, well, in product...

We need to figure out what to build next.

It can just be good life lessons that you can take from Bluey.

Are there things, I mean, what are in those do's and don'ts, I guess? You can even say the don'ts, I don't know, or some of the do's, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Mercedes and I met through this VC program called Speakeasy, which is Stanford's touchy-feely class but for VCs and is really small, cohorted groups.

So we're in a cohort of about 12 people who are in venture.

And we started that five years ago, and we're still in it today, and we meet frequently.

And Mercedes and I, over the years, were like, here's what we – love about our firms, but here's what we're struggling with.

And then her and I were like, we're, we like the same things and we're struggling with the same things.

So yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on distribution right now, especially having distribution as a moat in a world where AI is allowing pretty much everybody to... build with similar capabilities at this point, right?

Just reflect on the state of that market right now.

Yes, it's very competitive, and yes, there are these eye-popping seed rounds that everyone writes about, right? The billion-dollar seed rounds, but the truth is that those are not the majority of the rounds that are getting done.

There's still a lot of value that can be created at the earliest stages.

We basically see it in three buckets.

You know, at the earliest stages, you have founders who maybe dropped out of school, maybe they are two, three, four years out of school, but they have a great idea.

They have a very enthusiastic initial user base.

We think there's a lot of opportunity there.

The, the risk/reward or the potential exit, like, would factor, I imagine, into the term sheet, but for, like, bucket number one- How do you do the math on the term sheet? Like, how are you modeling for future revenues? Or, like, d- does there need to be a future revenue at that point, like, e- even a business model?

So maybe if you don't mind just kinda giving us the quick, quick background as to how you got into venture.

Oh my gosh.

Okay.

So I-- you, you nailed it.

I never aspired to go to venture.

I studied engineering in undergrad, computer science in undergrad, and went and worked at Microsoft as a PM on the consumer hardware side, so Surface when it was a big table, and then Xbox.

And I- after we shipped Kinect, um, I was like, "Okay, I don't wanna do the big company thing.

Yeah.

So then tell me, what are some of your top predictions for consumer in 2026?

I think this is gonna be the year of consumer.

I have been meeting with founders, you know, repeat founders who built enterprise companies in the last cycle, both PLG and top-down sales motions, and they're excited about consumer.

And specifically, you know, I was having tea with a founder last week, and he was saying, "It feels like selling AI tops-down is great, but slow, really slow." Like, these big enterprises, they know they need it, they know they want it, they have big budgets, they'll sign you on, but to see users actually using it takes forever because they don't know where to start.

The fun thing about consumer and prosumer is people already have prosumer, right? Like, people, individuals, they're buying it like a consumer, but they're using it for work, they're using it for personal life, they're using it for all kinds of things, right? Kinda like how we a- use ChatGPT and Claude.

We use it for work, we use it for personal stuff, we use it for kinda everything, is that people already have in mind what they wanna use it for, and they purchase it, and if it meets the need, they just keep using it.

And they're like, "It's so fast, you can get it adopted so quickly."

Yeah.