John Messer, Founder at Copilot Capital

we're warmed up now yeah AI.

Yeah.

So it's the big question.

Everyone would be disappointed if I didn't ask you.

No, yeah.

So look, the nice thing for us is we founded it two and a half years ago.

The whole team did software.

So we all knew it was coming.

If anything, I expected the good models to drop earlier than they did.

The whole SaaS apocalypse in February, we had like 18 months, two years of runway without that really blowing up, which surprised me.

We called it Copilot because we'd all been playing around with the different systems.

And at the time I was like, it's a whole nod to Microsoft Copilot.

We're idea is we are partly the investors who come alongside you to help you with AI.

That's one of our big growth levers.

So none of that was like a massive surprise.

I think it just means you have to be more selective in what you do in software.

I think you've seen the whole industry very rapidly say what they think is the right place to play.

It's proprietary data.

you know, verticalization, context.

And we'd add on top of that, it's also about backing founders because the founders, why we love this end of the market, the small cap, these founders have been experts in their industry.

Like you take one of our businesses in cybersecurity, they were VPs at cybersecurity at JP Morgan at a very young age.

You know, they're real industry gurus.

And then when they see a problem, they go and build a software business with AI as part of powering it to deliver on it.

So We're bullish.

We don't think it's without risk, but I think it's very much, you know, we spend a bit of time also going out to San Fran to connect him with what people are saying there.