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This is Scott Becker. This is a special sort of edition of the Becker Business, the Becker Private Equity podcast. We've got four great panelists today. I'll ask each of them to introduce themselves in one second. Those four panelists for our session on private equity are David Greer, one of the leaders and I believe founders of Keystone Capital, which works in the lower middle market. Tremendous track run that they have had. Jeff Cockrell from McGuire woods, who heads up sort of the healthcare private equity area and has built an incredible practice around healthcare and private equity. We have Holly Buckley, who chairs the healthcare department at McGuire Woods. Tremendous leader, lives at the intersection of healthcare and private equity. And then finally Matt Wolf, who's a brilliant analyst who works now at Elliot Davis. I've known Matt for several years, one of the smartest people I get to visit with regularly. I'm going to ask each of you to start with taking a moment to introduce yourself, talk about the core trends that you're watching in the private equity space. And, and then I'll ask you finally. Third, you know, is there an area or a place that you're most excited about in private equity today? I'll ask you to start with just a 30 to 60 second introduction. David, let me ask you to kick us off with a quick introduction of what you do and what Keystone Capital does. Sure. Thanks Scott. Appreciate you having me today and, and appreciate everyone joining in the seminar mentioned Keystone capital. We are 30 years at this as a traditional control private equity investor based in Chicago. I've been here for the last 20 plus years as one of the partners. You know, we would define the area that we invest within lower middle market as, you know, starting with a platform that would be between 5 and 20 million of EBITDA with an intent to, you know, work alongside our partners to create a foundational business that has sustainability. And at some point we're not the right partner anymore. And that's often when it gets to 40 or 50 million in EBITDA and they find a bigger version of us to move on. And David, just for the moment, can you tell us some of the sectors that you spend time in? I know I've seen you work closely with a couple of really large consulting firms and businesses, but you work across a lot of industries. Can you give us a sense of the different industries that you spend some time in? Yeah, for sure. And it, it has evolved and tightened with regards to our discipline over time. So I would say 20 years ago we probably every business that we had made something and I would say today 80% of what we do is in services sectors. So we will participate in what we'd call engineering or technical services largely around infrastructure or the built environment as one area. Tech enabled services, which are going to include systems integrators, consultants and tech enabled marketing services firms. Commercial industrial services, again often in the built environment, but not exclusively so these could be industrial services in production and manufacturing and then last as a vestige of some things we've done historically, we do a fair amount in the food space as well, which is the one kind of continues to produce tangible product for us. Fascinating. Thank you. Some people will ask you how you ended up narrowing more fully on the services area and how that became the focus of the firm Bus Foods as well. Jeff, you've built this incredible practice around the intersection of healthcare and private equity. Represent some of the best known funds in the world that invest in healthcare. Can you take a second and introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Jeff Cockrell, a partner at McGuire woods and I've worked with Scott for a coup couple decades now, learned most of what I know from Scott, but I represent private equity funds and, and platforms that have been backed by private equity funds and all versions of healthcare and life science transactions. Thank you. And. And Jeff, was there a specific period of time because when, when you came over to McGuire woods, which was a couple decades ago, I think now you were a general private equity lawyer. At some point you ended up specializing almost like David Greer did in the services area area. How important was it to ultimately really get to know an industry well. And do you still do some work outside of health care as well? I think specialization, this is probably true in a lot of different contexts. So many things. You're competing against a lot of different people and in our universe you're competing with a lot of other lawyers and a lot of other law firms. And if you can combine kind of the good core technical skills with some very specialized knowledge, it really helps you cut through a lot of the competitive noise. So kind of coming in contact with you and slowly learning kind of specialized knowledge in healthcare and healthcare services has been really transformational in building my practice. Thank you. No. And Jeff can give me praise, but the reality is he and how he built practices that eclipse the practice that I built originally. Over the years they've just done an amazing job of growth and building fantastic healthcare driven private equity practices. Howie, can you take a second and introduce yourself? And Howie today is the chair of the department and the leader and so I have to be nice to her all the time. She's my boss now. But Holly, could you take a second and introduce yourself? Thank you Scott and glad you realized that. So totally kidding. So it's got said I'm a partner of McGuire Woods. I'm in Chicago with Jeff. Jeff actually arrived while I was a summer intern back in 2008. So we've got a long history together. I'm very focused on the kind of all kinds of healthcare providers. I do a lot of private equity work, both on sponsor investments as well as private equity backed portfolio company work and I assist on the regulatory side of the transactions as well as ongoing regulatory and compliance work for the platforms. I also work with more traditional healthcare providers such as hospitals and health systems and other non private equity backed health care providers. And so it's certainly been an interesting few years and look forward to the discussion today. Thank you. We'll come back in a moment to see where things are busy, where they're not as busy, where they're exciting and interesting and what you're seeing. Matt, can you take a moment and introduce yourself and talk about what you follow and watch? Yeah, thanks Scott. So Matt Wolfe met Elliot Davis newly at Elliot Davis. I was recently at RSM where I was there for 15 plus years. I led the healthcare valuation practice at RSM and was essentially one of the healthcare economists. So same role working at the intersection of healthcare and private equity from evaluation and overall transaction perspective new firm. So I really enjoy my role getting to ride kind of shotgun in the sort of total deal making, funding, financing environment of private equity and private credit. Matt, I guess the question of course that you'll know the answer is a health care economist, are rates coming down and will that lead to a lot more exits more quickly? Yes and no. Right. So the, the current path of rate reductions have been priced into the macroeconomic policy, right into rates. You know people, some people talk about hoping for massive reduction in interest rates over the near term. You know, when you come down 50, 100 basis points. I've hear say the reality is is if that happens it will be because of underlying weakness in the economy which will increase the term premium and will do very little if anything to lower the cost of capital that we're seeing in private markets. So we'll really do little if anything to bolster that. We'll know more a week from tomorrow. We'll get the September non farm payrolls report. But generally the the answer is no, it won't. It will not be the boom like we saw in the zero interest rate environment. Right. Because, because Your point is it's already priced into the stock market and in terms of the private market environment, if it goes down a lot, it's because the overall underlying economy is in more stress and more challenging spot. So it's not necessarily going to lower interest rates, at least private interest rates. Like it might lower the fed funds rate. Is that, is that your sense of it in terms of. Exactly right. And there is no longer a sort of one to one relationship in for example the five or ten year treasury with the federal funds rate that there used to be because there is this term premium that's been introduced into the market which existed for a long time but did not exist when rates were super low. Thank you. I'm going to come back around the turn here and I'll start with Holly and then go back to Jeff and David. Holly, what are you seeing in the private equity deal environment? I know that your group is fairly busy, but the environment itself seems to be still in some stress. What are you seeing out there in terms of deals and what people are looking at and what they're excited about and what they're not? Yeah. So I think we have seen an uptick in deal volume through kind of a little before the back half of the year started. I think sponsors are really focused on good assets. So assets that have really good infrastructure, kind of compliance operations that they're kind of real businesses. We are seeing I think downward pressure on valuations. Kind of curious what Matt seeing there and David, but certainly from our end it seems like valuations are certainly lower than that a few years ago. But platforms that are well scaled with good infrastructure, good relationships, tech enabled efficiencies and the like are still pulling in robust valuations. I think the regulatory climate has been super interesting of late. We're seeing a lot of state level interest in private equity transactions. We've seen a proliferation of new laws from states at the AG and other divisions looking to approve and receive notice of new transactions. We're also seeing some new laws around things like corporate practice and PPM models that are certainly creating some. I'd say, well, the notice and consent laws are creating timing delays. We're not really seeing them actually prohibit transactions. But then on the CPOM laws we're starting to see folks contemplating avoiding particular states such as maybe Oregon and California where it can be more difficult to get deals done and the future of those models could be a little more uncertain. Right. And for those that are at healthcare centric on the call, cpom, corporate practice of medicine, either allowing business Entities to own physician practices or not. Before I go back to Jeff and David on trends that you're watching, let me tee them each up on the valuation question for a moment. David, you're an investor, you're also an owner of a lot of assets. What are you seeing on valuations? I mean I tend to see that we don't see the sort of exuberant valuations we saw a few years ago. What are you seeing in terms of valuations? And then Matt, I'd love your comments on the same question before I go to Jeff. Yeah, I think Holly hit on a consistent theme which is quality businesses are still going to be in demand, right. A assets that have a number of the characteristics that she walked through. I would add elements of a recurring revenue stream or reoccurring revenue stream to the business model. Again, what's a high valuation? It's, it's subject in the eyes of the beholder. But you know, an asset like that at the right size, it's going to trade in a mid teen multiple. Right. Which I would still call a really frothy kind of business. I think if you have a B asset or one of those elements is missing, you know, you might be a turn or two below where that might have traded. I think that's in this environment. I do agree deal volume down year to date, challenging market. But that supply, demand imbalance, there's still businesses that need and want to trade and there's still a trillion dollars of undeployed capital that's got to break. So you know, similar I think deal volume, Lower Middle Market Q2 this year was the lowest since Q2 of 2020 and then 21 was an explosive year for deals. And you might see a similar kind of environment kind of coming out of this kind of period of softness. And David, let me ask you one more question about the services side and the recurring revenue side. Everybody over the last four to five years has picked up on the concept that we want subscription or recurring revenues versus transactional revenue. Or how do you see that evolving in the businesses that you hold? How many of them are able to actually move to a recurring revenue type of business? I mean the software as a service businesses office often that many services firms are not. What do you see as the mix out there? Because it seems like to be the, you know, the golden ticket is that great recurring revenue. I don't know if there's any investment bankers on the call, right. But they've been clever enough to introduce the concept of reoccurring revenue Right. There's this middle ground between transactional project based work and truly a subscription kind of SaaS model. Right. And so whether you want to be able to point at, you know, a protracted period of backlog, you know, contractually obligated revenue that's going to come from clients and that revenue we know can pause. I think we've kind of gotten comfortable in our businesses where there are strong regulatory drivers. So the using the service the company provides is not discretionary for the client. Using our firm as the provider, maybe. Right. So illustratively, we're in a business that does inspections of elevators. That's not, you know, JLL does not have discretion as whether or not they do that. But it has to happen, right. In City of New York, it's got to happen every six months. You need to inspect an elevator. So I see that as a regulatory demand driver for that business. And to the extent we own, you know, a top three market share player in that market, I feel pretty good about the recurring nature of that revenue. Even though it's not SaaS under contract. Right. Even though it's not contract for the long term, you know, a ten year contract with somebody. But you know, they got to go back to one of the few of you in that business, one of the, one of the companies. Jeff, let me go to you before I come back to Matt. Jeff, what are some of the trends you're watching currently and what, what are you seeing out there? It feels like the market is opening up for some of the larger platforms. And, and it's true that A assets could always transact, but there's lots of B and C assets and private equity funds have now held those assets for five, six, seven, eight years. And they're ultimately not built to hold them forever. So there's kind of some forced sale pressure on part of the market. And then there's a fair amount of distress as well with companies that within the four corners of the business are not kind of operating at a loss, but they have a lot of very expensive debt that has become difficult to service. They have balance sheet problems. But all of those pressures are kind of pushing more assets into the market. And you combine that with some rationalization on pricing and it feels like more things are going to transact, either because they have to or the other pressures. So the larger end of the market, we're seeing things come more alive and then also kind of the flipping that around for some of the larger platforms that had grown through, doing a lot of acquisitions that for two years that had gone to close to zero. And we're seeing those opening up again. Platforms that hadn't done add ons for quite a while. They're now back in the market ramping up their, their, their BD functions. And so the, some of that is just kind of rationalization on pricing and some of that is you can sit for a little while, but you have to ultimately build something. So we're seeing a lot more Lois, coming across our desk than we had for quite a while. I would just jump in on that real quick. I think that's all right, Jeff. And then the other piece is we've seen a little bit more forward lean from some of the limited partner community around desires for distributions. And that's what I wanted to touch on real quickly because Jeff, let's talk about, as David talked about A versus B assets and aside from them in trading, when a private equity fund is holding them, they're now at a spot where they might be four to six years or longer into the hold period. If they're an A asset, even if they're not selling, they are doing certain kinds of things to get limited partners capital. And I wanted to have you talk about that for a second. And then if they're a B asset, they've got more pressure on them because it's harder to go back and recap and do special purpose vehicles and so forth. What are you seeing there in terms of assets that are being held a little bit longer? And can you divide it between A and B assets? Yeah, the A assets probably have greater access to doing debt related recaps. So that's a vehicle for getting, getting some dollars back to the LPs as you kind of move down into the B and C assets that maybe have constrained balance sheets already, that ceases to be available. And a lot of these have just been kind of parked. But eventually they can't keep doing that. For the LP pressures and just the administrative burden of doing that. There's often a private equity fund has got some anxiety about posting a less than desirable return on a particular asset. But eventually those things are going to have to post and they may be now two funds removed from the fund that had that investment. So some of that pressure mitigates. So ultimately that huge backlog of port codes that have been held for a long time is just going to have to clear. David, take one moment on that as well. When you're holding a variety of different assets, at what point do you say we can't take a loss since we will take A loss in this and so forth. Then Matt will come back to you on that because you do valuations, mark to market and so forth. David, how do you look at some of that? Well, try to never take a loss. That's, that's one. But you know, I, I do think, you know, a couple of points, you know, Jeff made there. You know, if you're looking to extend the clock, there's one or two reasons, right? You have a fantastic asset that has a great future. It was hard to build, it's unique, it's differentiated, like why get rid of it? If you have some like minded LPs, you know, some folks might want liquidity. You can pursue a liquidation, I'm sorry, a continuation vehicle or a debt related recap if you want. I think you got to probably be north of 40, 50 million in EBITDA to start thinking about something like that in terms of a size to think about in spv. The other reason you're looking to run out the clock is you haven't executed on your value creation and you're going to have an underwhelming exit. Right. And then, you know, the bar goes up for LPs to be patient with that. You know, give, give me three more years. I'm not going to seek an exit. I'm going to bring in a new leader. We're going to pivot to a new strategy. Sometimes they'll say, again, to Jeff's point, you've raised two funds since you did that deal. I want full time and attention on the dry powder to cut your losses, move on. Matt, you get charged with helping private equity funds mark things to market and constantly have to do so talk about that, the art and science of that and what that looks like and how people feel about that. Yeah, happy to. It's become much more difficult. There's so much more noise in the valuation multiples. Right. We try to look at market data to help build credible valuations, of course, as an opinion of value. But there's so much more noise now because of the way consideration is structured for new deals. Right. So it used to be, you know, maybe you'd have 70% of the purchase. Consideration would be cash. Call it $70 million, $20 million of rollover and a $10 million earn out kicker that maybe the seller could realize over three years. And that mix has become very different. Half or less cash, higher rollover percentages, more and different types of earnouts. So as you think about what makes up that valuation multiple, we don't really understand what's in the numerator for all of these deals. We don't really understand what was being paid. So as we try to say, well, okay, this company exited at 14 times EBITDA, it's always been a question of what do they call ebitda? Now there's a question of what do they call purchase consideration, what do they call enterprise value? And so making that comparison has become much more difficult. And how much pressure is there? I. I get the updates periodically from funds that were an investor in that show. You know, we're up this amount, we're up that amount, but of course it's not liquid, so you don't really know until they actually exit on it. How much pressure do you get from funds? And, and I know you have to be careful in what you say here, but how much pressure is there to sort of like have a number out there that doesn't scare LPs away from reinvesting with that fund? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's. There's no pressure if it's going up. Right. The value is creating. Right. To David's point. But I mean, really, I think part of the process is very beneficial because we're working through arguments and Data points that LPs will bring to the table or others might bring to the table as we're helping to mark these things to market. And so it is sort of a robust. It's not really a price discovery process. Right. We're not buying into anything, but it's about as close as you can get working through it. And it's some. Contentious isn't the right word, but, you know, we're all a bunch of math and Excel geeks arguing about numbers. So, you know, people get heated and passionate and it's a good discovery process that I think leads to the best outcome possible for LPs absent a truly liquid market. Right. And still a lot of uncertainty about truly values until you start to see distributions and see things come back and so forth. There's a difference between the value and the price. Right. So the value is sort of a hypothetical construct, and then the price is. Well, whatever you end up exiting at. No, absolutely. I'm going to ask each of you, starting with Howie, what sectors or areas you're seeing the most excitement in or what you're most excited about as you look towards the end of this year, into next year. Holly, let me start with you in terms of areas that you're seeing the most interesting that you're most excited about. Yeah. And so I really live on the Healthcare provider side. There's kind of a whole other world out there with respect to life sciences, pharma services. And so there's going to be a lot of activity there and I'm excited for it, but not as personally excited for it. So within kind of my own practice realm, the things that I'm excited about are I'd say women's health and fertility. I think we're finally starting to see some interesting opportunities there. It's an area that as a woman, I believe is underserved currently. And I think it's exciting to see the opportunities and it's exciting to see the deals coming. We'll continue to see activity in the behavioral health space and I think more on the tech enabled and AI side there. So I think there's going to continue to be exciting and fun things happening on behavioral health. We'll continue to see movement of care to less expensive care venues. And so this is going to hit a number of areas within health care. I've been personally very busy with hospice this year. That's a big one. Infusion is another one where there's really a movement to get people out of hospital and into either the home or infusion suite setting. And we expect to see a lot of continued activity and then just in general tech enabled services. And it sounds so generic and there's so much within there, but we will continue to see a lot of activity in tech enabled services. You can't get very far in a given day without people talking about AI. But AI is a huge part of this. And so I think those are the big areas for me. And then just in general, again, companies with really strong infrastructure in those areas I've talked about are going to be the assets and we're going to see a lot of, a lot of competitive processes with respect to them. Thank you. It's fascinating listening talk because it's a wide variety of areas that there's interest in and that you're seeing movement in from women's health, behavioral health, infusion therapy things moving to lower cost venues. Tech enabled services of course is a broad area, as you said, hospice and so forth. I mean it's a lot of different areas you're seeing. Jeff, let me go to you and talk about what you're seeing and where you're most excited and focused. Then I'll come back around to Matt and then David to finish this up. Jeff? Sure. And I also spend a lot of time in kind of provider services like Holly and one kind of different cut on the areas that she described is to describe them from the negative perspective, meaning the areas that are getting a lot of interest now as opposed to three, four years ago are areas that are not retail, that are not multi site, that are not doctor led and those are some of the characteristics of the provider services that are seeing a lot of interest. So that's part of what I'm seeing a lot of the other is a lot of investors are still services investors, but they're migrating in different directions. So there's a lot of interesting investment thesis that we see in different versions of payer services or thesis around kind of employer based health care where there's just massive opportunities for large employers and sometimes even mid sized employers to change their cost spend because the rate of growth of just traditional insurance has gotten unsustainable. So people are scrambling for other ways to go about that. So different business models that are built around that kind of cost containment for larger employers. That's been a fascinating and pretty expansive area that we see a lot of activity, right. And a lot more movement towards things like direct primary care, other ways of trying to cut those costs. I know the average employer costs for insurance have gone up to 25, 26,000 a year and I know at our firm it's even more than that. But you end up with an of that 25,000, 18 to 19,000 is paid by the insurer, 6 to 8,000 is paid by the family itself. And those costs have just become very, very high in a world where the vast majority of people make less than 100,000 a year. So lots and lots of interest and fair enough, there are real ways cut the cost of healthcare delivery. Matt, what are you seeing in most focused or excited about what are you seeing there? Yeah, I agree with all the healthcare stuff. I guess I'll take a little bit of a different broader spin which is corporate divestitures. So now that we're in a higher real positive interest rate environment, we're seeing a lot of companies, particularly health systems, but across industries look at what are their core assets, divest of non core assets. And to Jeff's comment earlier about specialization, we're seeing more a sort of small group of sponsors emerge as you know, very good at taking that corporate divestiture, creating value and then exiting in some way or hoping to exit in some way. So I think that'll be a really interesting corner of the market to watch as, as corporations divest themselves of business units. What is private capital's role in that? I think there's a lot of opportunity for Value creation. You know, Matt, I can't agree with you more and so thankful for you saying that. It's almost a return to something we saw a lot of, a lot of focus on 10, 20, 30 years ago. Were people really looking to take parts out of big corporations that are trying to narrow what they do and sell off assets that they're not as focused on? Our business are not as focused on it. I think it's a great point. And we're seeing more and more private equity events that really focus on exactly that and independent sponsors quite frankly too. David, what are you most focused on and excited about as we head into the end of this year, in the start of next year? Yeah, I'll give you a couple of examples, Scott, and I apologize. We do less around health care so there'll be a little bit outside of the purview of some of the other inputs. But you know, I think I would characterize both as being kind of froth adjacent or tailwind adjacent. We have, we've had a long history of and we had a couple successful investments around infrastructure, particularly transportation and water infrastructure. That's an incredibly active and well invested area these days. So we're trying to avoid that in terms of directly participating there just because the price of entry on a net new platform becomes prohibitive. But then it's looking around the periphery of that. Right. So something that might be what we call a CMPM construction management project management firm in the water transportation infrastructure space that's adjacent to that, that's going to benefit from that, you know, bipartisan tailwinds and the dollars that are going to continue to flow into there. But try and come in, as I said, at a less frothy kind of valuation as an entry point for a platform and built from there. And then the second, David, just give us an example of what a company looks like in that space. Just so that you know, this is not intended to be healthcare centric. Some are healthcare, some are not. A broad audience. But, but give us an example, I understand the elevator example from earlier. Give us an example in that area of what a company would look like. Yeah, so there's a business that we're partnered with now that again CMPM is construction management, project management. If you've ever done something in your house, you know what that might mean. Right. Like it's an owner's rep who's going to oversee a high ticket project. There's a business we partner with, it's kind of one level above that, it's called EPM or Executive project management that operates in the aviation space. So they're gonna, they're gonna renovate, you know, Terminal 1 at O' Hare once every 20 years. And that's gonna be a $4 billion project. And there's no one at O' Hare that's done that or had that expertise at the executive level to kind of oversee that. So we have a business that has a team of talented senior executives who say, you know, we're going to come in, you're going to do this project. I'm effectively going to sit sidecar with you while you go through this project and, and help you get through. Right. It's a CYA risk mitigation. It's a, it's a huge project. There's a lot of reasons they want to do that right now. That's aviation centric. But it's the exact same issue as people on this call would know to do, you know, a major new, you know, 500 bed hospital. You know, that happens, you know, once a decade in a hospital system or a marine terminal that's doing an expansion in Long beach. Like just large ticket big items to kind of play not in the meaty AECOM Jacobs, you know, area of that on the $5 billion project. But if we can take a 30% EBITDA margin, you know, $20 million fee on that, like I like that. Yes, no, a great, a great business. The projects that have to be done over the next whatever decades are going to get done and somebody's got to help manage them side by side with it. Where the actual operator of that terminal, the operator, whatever it is, doesn't have the expertise to do so, at least to watch it closely. Manage closely F any other area that you're really excited about, I mean, to cut you off there. No, no, no. So I think data centers and again adjacent to it. So you know, anybody that has any technical or engineering capability around data centers. You look at the billions of dollars that are being announced to be spent just in calendar year 26, the world of service providers around that are choking on the new construction. I think there's a whole market of renovating and retrofitting existing data centers that are largely on. Not to, you know, get into the details, but a largely air cooled systems and you can retrofit them to being water cooled. And you know, anyone with technical expertise really isn't paying attention to that because they're all busy building new ones. And I think there's a, you know, a huge opportunity there. Well, and there's got to be a shortage of people that really know how to oversee and watch those things. They're just there's such an explosion and building. There can't be enough people out there that actually know what they're doing and doing that and watching. No way I'm going to go buy a business that's doing new data center construction because I'm not going to pay that price. But we could probably start with a couple small regional players to do data center retrofits and come in an area where people aren't paying attention. Thank you very, very much. I want to thank each of you, Holly Buckley, Matt Wolf, Jeff Cockrell, David Greer for joining us on this session on private equity sort of trends focuses into more Our next session in today's discussion of startups, private equity and AI focuses on startups and we've got today with us just an incredible panel of leaders from business who have been involved in startups or have advised startups. I'll ask each of them to introduce themselves in a moment. Just briefly. Andy Friedman, founder of Skinny Pop, Bart Walker, leader at McGuire Woods, Just a brilliant healthcare transactional lawyer and brilliant advisor. Dr. Bo Gu, also founder of a company called Ulify, has been funded by great, great funds. Fantastic. Krista Bragg, a leader in healthcare and also the author of an authoritative book on on startups. And finally, Manav Sivak, who I had the chance to work with in one of his startups. Just a brilliant, brilliant leader and founder and extremely busy with lots of life stuff going on right now. And congratulations to Manav. Let me ask each of you to take a moment to introduce yourself and Manav, I won't ask you why you're missing our Health IT event in a couple weeks to have to discuss it publicly, but it has to do with getting married and very exciting. Congratulations. Can you take a second to introduce yourself and I'll ask the other four of you to take a moment and introduce yourselves to you. Manav Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Scott My name is Manav. I'm formerly one of the founders and CEO of a healthcare technology company called Memora Health. Prior to that was a scientist, so was a computational biologist and did cancer research for a short period of time before starting a healthcare technology company. That company was acquired last year after going through kind of the full journey of going through a startup accelerator called Y Combinator, raising several tens of millions of dollars of venture capital money and was acquired by a strategic partner in the healthcare space called Kamier and post acquisition, I'm starting to think a little Bit about what's next, but in parallel also spending a lot of my time on the investing side, mainly around kind of AI services. So very, very excited to be here. Imani was humble, but started the company while still in college at Georgia Tech. It was funded with Andreessen Horowitz, ultimately combined with the company sponsored by General Catalyst, and it's just had a tremendous, tremendous success with it. If you ever get a chance to invest with Monif, I highly encourage it and recommend it. As good a person and leader as they come. Krista, can you take a moment to introduce yourself? Yep. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. It's a pleasure to be here. So I founded a firm, KB Kinetics, that's very specialized and focused on hospital operations as well as helping startups enter the US market. Many of our clients within our portfolio are global from other countries, but I've spent the past two decades managing hospital operations as well as health insurance operations, which has provided a very unique view into the healthcare industry and I think offers different perspectives to founders, especially as it relates to market entry points and opportunities. And I took that two decades or so of experience and put a lot of the learnings and patterns that I'd seen with companies of all maturity levels into the startup book that you mentioned. Startups Guide to US Healthcare More as a client's view or a buyer's view is kind of like, here is the book we wish you would have read before you met with us type of application. So, you know, I'm hoping that more startups will take the chance to purchase the book because the applications are very practical, it's grounded in reality and I think it's going to be very helpful. And we've been, we've already seen with some of our companies we're working with that they've been able to use some of the tools and the tactics to move forward. No, it's a terrific, terrific book and thank you, Chris. It's literally 700 pages. Brilliant and thoughtful. Incredible. Thank you. Bo, can you take a second to introduce yourself and tell us about what you do and also your background because you're also a fantastic physician who left practice to found the company that you founded. Tell us a little bit about yourself and about Ulfi. Yeah, thank you, Scott. Thank you for having me with this entire panel. And my name is Bogu. I am a former cardiothoracic surgeon, emergency physician, and foolishly decided to get on the administrative side of hospitals and was a physician executive. So that included overseeing medical billing and revenue cycle management, specifically through kind of my journey on that side, a lot of pain and frustration led me to create my own company, Ulify to oversee and deliver end to end AI medical billing. Well, fantastic. Tell us a little bit about the funding journey of that if you're, if you're comfortable doing so because it's a fascinating story and sort of venture funding and getting going and all that stuff. Yeah. And I think you were also practicing at Stanford, Right. And so tell us a little bit about that. Just take a moment. Yeah, yeah. So I've been fortunate to both practice on the academic side as well as the private community side. I think leaving the clinical aspect of that and kind of delving into the VC world and kind of getting that backing with fortunate many offers and support. I think it was relatively painless journey. Although I'm sure Manav can empathize here. It is not an easy journey for most, but I think it's about really tackling something that's meaningful, that's really more of a systemic problem and understanding that you demonstrate domain expertise all help you kind of get through that, I would say investment phase. Fantastic. Thank you. We'll come back to you in a little bit on that. Both. Thank you very, very much. Andy, tell us a little bit about yourself. I know founder of Skinny Pop, you had a partner in that, Pam, a fantastic partner. And there's so many lessons in having a great partner in the business as you drive as well. Tell us a little bit about your background and introduce yourself. Sure. Thank you for having me. Nice to be here. Name is Andy Friedman. I'm the founder and former CEO of Skinny Pop Popcorn. Prior to that I spent a long time as an investment banker and I did a bunch of other things leading up to getting into the Popcorn space, which we eventually sold the majority of that business to a private equity firm. And about a year after that we went public on the New York Stock Exchange and I was a very, I was on the board, very active board member and eventually we sold to a strategic in the Hershey company. And so I currently for the last seven, eight years, I advise a bunch of early stage food and beverage companies. I invest in a bunch of stuff and I see all kinds of deals. Andy, let me start with you and then we'll start coming back around around the turn on this. Talk a little bit about the drive for energy to found a company and sort of what that looked like when you got started and any advice you would give to other founders. And then I'm going to ask you a second question and we'll come to that in a second, which is you've invested in a ton of different startups from watching those, what advice for what works and doesn't work and what's critical to success. But start with your founding journey and any advice to founders that comes out of that. Yeah, sure. So you know, I, you know, we started this company not to, you know, not for the exit. We started the company so that we could feed our families and one thing led to the next. We pivoted and all of a sudden, kind of, we were living the entrepreneur's dream in that we started a company that became a hot product. And from an energy standpoint, which you had asked about, you would be shocked as to how much one person or two people could get done in a day when you are building a business for yourself. And so a piece of advice that I have for a bunch of, because I see it all over the place with earlier stage food and beverage companies is that they tend to over hire early on. And I would argue that with one or two people that have the proper incentives in place, you can get a lot done. So you don't need to have a head of marketing and a head of operations and a head of procurement and this, that and the other thing, you can get a lot done as a, as a, as a startup. And you know, as an example with SkinnyPop, you know, we, we sold our first bag in August of 2010 and we hired our very first employee in September of 2012. So we went over two years but for, there was a short period of time when we were popping, packing, ceiling, shipping it ourselves and then we found a third party provider to, to do the manufacturing for us, for us. So ultimately it's all about outsourcing some of the areas where you're not an expert and really leaning in on some of the areas and digging deep to figure out kind of the how can you make this work for yourself? And we were just doing a lot of things that made sense. Kind of not following the typical CPG playbook. And talk for a second about so many companies want to build sales in sort of a grassroots type of way, but obviously if you've only got two of you, that's kind of hard to do or in a small startup and this is, this is endemic throughout business whether whatever you're building. Commercialization, how did you start to think about distribution and commercialization when you started to have a product? Because you could either go door to door and sell it to grocery stores, which maybe you did some of, but it's hard to get scale that way. How did you sort of look at figuring out distribution and scaling distribution? Yeah, so by the way, we did go door to door and we were knocking on doors at grocery stores one at a time. And eventually we found a distributor that may knock on 50 or 100 doors on our behalf. And so initially we, you know, we started with one distributor, and by the end, when we sold the majority of the business, we were working with about 66. 0 distributors nationwide. And so that was kind of a. It was an opportunity to leverage experts and their relationships with retailers. But that's one way that you can really ramp up the sales. And how was it building those relationships with those channel partners? What was that like? And how much your time and Pam's time was spent building those relations with channel and distribution partners? Yeah, we spent a lot of time. I mean, we were, I would say, Pam and I were. We joke that we were kind of at this 24, 7, 365. And we were constantly. We were at food shows that were sponsored by distributors. We were at food shows that were kind of industry food shows where distributors and retailers were walking by. So we were constantly on it, trying to build relationships and, you know, selling the gospel of. Of skinny Pop, you know, Fantastic. Bo, you're, you're working through this founding journey. You had an incredibly successful career as a cardiothoracic surgeon before this. What advice for founders and would you do it again? Are you ready to go back to surgery? Where's your head at on being a founder and what advice would you give to founders? Yeah, that's a great question, Scott. And you know, I would say despite having done open heart surgery and taking care of the sickest patients in the er, I would agree wholeheartedly that creating a company and being a 24 hours, seven days a week job, it is definitely the hardest job. And actually, speaking of right now, in the middle of a ASC conference regionally here in the Midwest, and obviously, Scott, you'll have a great conference coming up in a few weeks for ASC as well as the one coming up in a few days. So exactly what Andy kind of hit, you really have to understand your distribution partners, your network. I mean, you know, with that first question of how was that fundraising journey like? It's like, well, the first question investors are going to ask is, what's your distribution network? How are you going to tackle this? And honestly, no matter what you say, there's never a perfect answer, but it really comes down to kind of just that resilience and just hitting everything within your territory and geography and helping raise your brand awareness. A lot of people have this false belief that it's product led, but it's really about making sure people know who you are and the value they can bring. And always kind of have a problem based approach in all those discussions. But your point is, well, so well taken that you might have the greatest product in the world and there's this old concept of the best mount trash people will be to beat a path to your door. But most of us know that that's not really true. You better have a great product, but you better be working on distribution and commercialization really early as well. Yeah. And Bo, what about the effort towards small, medium versus larger customers? How do you sort of attack that? I know Andy did it ultimately through channel partners, distribution partners. How do you sort of look at, you know, are you first working towards smaller and mid sized customers or large at the same time? How do you sort of look at that? And any advice there? Yeah, it's excellent question and, and I don't want to sound like, you know, I'm the foremost expert in this. This is always a dynamic kind of work in progress. I would say from a humble perspective. You know, I, I think you definitely have to have that grassroots kind of small market approach in the beginning and really try to build something that people really want before you start scaling up and moving up market. And obviously that product looks very different selling to a healthcare system enterprise level like a large academic center versus somebody who's a mom and pop shop down the street who's a primary care physician. But believe it or not, I think there's a recurring theme of that pain of frustration, of not understanding, let's say for example, their cash flow or if they're going to survive two months from now because of declining reimbursement. So that conversation sounds the same, but the way you approach that is very different. Thank you. And Manav, let me go to you next, then Krista and back to Bart. Bart, thank you for rejoining. Thank you very, very much. Monav, let me ask you this sort of advice for founders both on the product side, the commercialization side. What are some of the lessons that you learned in, in building Memorial Health? Sure. I think that the biggest I frankly what Andy said at the beginning really resonated and was very similar to our story of we, we waited a very long time to hire our first person. So we started the company in June of 2016 and our first employee started in September of 2018. So roughly two and a half years. And part of the reason was that it took us a long time to actually figure out exactly what the company should do and how to find the right kind of product set, how to find the right users for that product, how to aggregate a lot of feedback from those folks and make sure that we're not just building something that's, that's, that's kind of a nice to have. It's something that people actually need and it's critical to the way that they do work in clinical settings. And as painful as that process was of, you know, going through lots and lots of iterations and probably changing the product dozens of times, I think it was necessary to build a good foundation for finding something kind of a set of use cases that people really actually found integral and valuable over the long term. So that was one. I think one thing that's uniquely true today when you see especially technology companies grow from like 0 to 10 to 50 million of recurring revenue in the span of a couple of months or a year or two years, is just having really good moat around what you're building. Right. In the long term, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint. It's not about how you get the most revenue the fastest. It's about what is most defensible, what is actually scalable, what is sustainable over a very long period of time. And a lot of that is just grounded in building two things. One, the best possible products and focusing a lot on delivering truly a 10x experience. And then the second is on making sure that you're actually solving a problem. Like, you know, the unfortunate reality is that there's lots and lots of companies that are started and funded that are things that are kind of nice to have and they're hot for a very short period of time, and they flame out really quickly. Talk about that founder engagement early to really try and understand what you're doing and what your customers need. Because so many people get money, want to build teams very quickly, and sometimes they don't really get clarity about what their exact product market fit is and what their customers really need. Can you talk about that effort early on in that pivoting back and forth and figuring out what customers really want in your journey and. Any advice there? Yeah, I mean, there were, There are two kind of components to the philosophy for us. I think number one was it's. It's very hard for me at this point in time. Like, like when our first employee started, I was 20 years old, so it's very hard for me to say, hey, I have a really good sense of how to hire the best go to market or salesperson if I have no sense of how to actually do go to market in any capacity. So I need to learn this muscle. I need to, I will be very bad at it for a long period of time, but I need to at least learn the basics of how to do it before I can figure out what good actually looks like for that particular role and what is best for our company. That's one. The second is it's like, I think an integral part of our company's DNA, probably even today that everything we do is built off of feedback that we get from customers. And if the entire kind of inception of the company wasn't designed around that of the founders need to spend a lot of time with the customers, listening to them, understanding them, building really good relationships with them, building trust with them, I don't think that that would be the company's DNA today. The company would, would not be run the way that it is. So yeah, those would be maybe the two kind of big philosophies around being founder led early on. Thank you very, very much. Krista, you've worked with a ton of different startups. Any advice that you would give to startups, what do you sort of see as, you know, keys to success versus things that don't succeed? Any advice for founders? Yeah, I think I would just add on to what Manav was just mentioning. You know, making sure that you're solving a real problem and that you're building it with the end users in mind. Great example. We're working with relayed R E L A Y D and they are designing AI enabled inpatient nursing workflows. But the way they're doing that is walking through the unit with the nurses and allowing the nurses to contribute to the design so that it becomes a product that's very usable, you know, to the end user. I think sitting through company pitches over the years from the client's perspective, it's so common to have a founding group come in and pitch their solution without having any understanding of our current problems that we're trying to solve and lack of understanding to our current systems and integration possibilities. You know, right now across the healthcare ecosystem. I'm sure BO could add to this. Hospitals are managing dozens if not more of disparate apps. How can your product come in and supplement and enhance what's already in place instead of creating a brand new offshoot that needs to be managed differently? So I think to summarize I would say tailoring the pitch in the product to solving a problem. You know, healthcare leaders are not looking to just buy tech for the sake of buying tech. Same with AI. They just want the problems to be solved. If AI is part of it and supports it, that's great. But if not, that's fine too because operational excellence types of activities are still needed across the healthcare ecosystem. And then second, I would say making sure you have the right stakeholders in the room. Because with C suite turnover being such that it is, it is not uncommon for a founder to establish a deal with one set of executives only to find when it's time to go live they have an entirely different set or completely new priorities that suddenly have outranked them. So making sure that they have a broad base of stakeholders and have really brought forth a solution that solves their real problems. Thank you very, very much. Let me come back around for a second. I think we've got Bart back with us. Bart, you've been involved with lots of different companies. Give us a second on where you've seen companies have success versus not success and any advice you would give to leaders and founders. And then I'm going to come back in a moment to Andy and Monif on a question about investing in startups because each of you have done a lot of investing in startups and what you've seen is continuing where keys to success versus versus maybe challenges. Bart, talk for a moment about where you've seen businesses led and advice you that comes out of some of that. Thanks everybody and thanks for having me. Scott, you know, in terms of advice I would give and what's worked and what hasn't worked, the things that have worked the best from my perspective. And again I work mostly with mature kind of operating profitable cash flowing entities. I also work work some with early stage companies and joint ventures that are two strategists coming together which is effectively a startup. One of the things that I've seen is that people that are expanding into adjacent areas to areas that they know well, not something totally out of left field but rather something that's complementary to the experience they've already got. That may sound pretty elementary, but it's often overlooked. The places that we've seen people have great success are if you have a surgery center management and operating business and you're growing into billing and collections or software or it. One of our clients is a big multi specialty physician practice and they've got some homegrown technology that they've managed to commercialize and then turn that into a brand new division and spin that out. And those are the kind of things that I see most frequently in my day to day practice. And so there bar the premium on people being able to connect the dots and then pursue it. And then do they have to put a team in place that really pursues that separate business business or that spin out part of the business? Yeah, at a certain time you do first, at least in my experience in that type of a startup where it starts with a company that then has a product or a feature or some kind of solution they've created that could be valuable to other people, they grow it internally and then they offer it to somebody else that's in the space, usually not in the same market as them, and grow it organically that way. But then eventually you have to jump off from that and really staff it as its own thing and hire and recruit talent and really add on to it. But it's that incremental approach which, you know, rather than just starting off as a kind of a garage startup, seems like the old, old saw or the old tail. Instead you're kind of starting with a stable platform and then you're creating something out of that. So there's one way to think about it, a way to be innovative within an existing company. No, thank you. We see a lot of that type of success sort of things that are adjacent to the cores that used to be talked about. And I love that, you know, Andy Amanov, let me ask you this question. Each of you have invested in a lot of other companies, other startups. What's the most important thing that you see there when you see success? Andy, I know I've watched you really closely with, I think it's good sport. Is it the driver, the founder? Is it finding private market fit? What's the most important thing you see in all the things you've invested in that gives you indications of potential success versus not? So for starters, you have to have product market fit. Without that, you can't muscle your way through it and make it succeed. So you have to have a great product and it needs to work and you need to have an identified addressable market that demands this product. That's number one. Number two, the team or the founder is critically important because on the early stuff, especially the real early stuff, you don't know if and when there's going to be a pivot. So the product may become secondary and the team becomes the primary driver of that investment and then they pivot and it becomes something completely different. So you have to look at the product, you have to look at the team, you kind of look at the whole package to see do we think this, this has got a reasonable chance at succeeding. And quite frankly the early stage stock off, it's a bit of a crapshoot. And so you have to be really comfortable with that team. Let me ask you another question, Eddie. What time is the right time for a founder to take in outside capital, to take in venture capital? What point is the right point for that? As late as possible, whatever that means? You know, once you, because the, everything kind of changes once you take on venture capital or private equity capital. You go from running an entrepreneurial venture to having a job and reporting to stakeholders and shareholders. And so it's just a, it's a really monumental change in the operations of the business from, from a founder once you take on a third party capital. Right, and let me ask you a couple related questions. You've also, aside from founding your own business literally in college and having this tremendous success, great investors. Talk for a moment about as you invest in other businesses, what are indications of success versus not success? What, what do you look for? What do you see that recurring that this works, this doesn't work, or what mistakes you see people make? Yeah, sure. One is I, I think that I care a lot about investing in founders who are very passionate about the problems that they're working on. People that are kind of building things for the sake of building things or because it seems like an opportune time, especially for many of these like venture scale businesses, takes a lot of time. You have to work through a lot of stuff. It's very painful, it's very hard. And having the endurance to do that requires you to just care a lot about the problem that you're working on. So that's one is I index very heavily on who is this person, why do they care about this problem, why are they trying to solve this? The second thing that I would say matters a lot is is this something that I personally genuinely believe the world actually needs? And it kind of goes back to what I mentioned earlier, people who are actually kind of solving problems and focused on finding things that can have lasting value in the world. The problem with venture companies generally is that, that you don't really know if they're going to work out for a long time. Right. Like they go through so many ups and downs and it's so hard to go entirely from zero to building something really long and kind of large and meaningful that you have to be willing to kind of be there for the long right. And like the majority of your just financially the majority of your return really comes in kind of the last turn of the company which may be 10 to 15 years out. So it's, it's essentially impossible to predict. And the kind of indicators that you have to rely on are is this someone that I believe in, is this someone that is working on a problem that's meaningful and is this someone that I think cares a lot about that problem? And it's I. Those are things I echo some of your thoughts. I find it fascinating. I remember a discussion with on a seed investment on something with a large fund and the investment firm having a discussion with the two leaders in the investment firm and then basically saying, you know, think of this as a 10, 15 year horizon and depending on what your age you are, that either seems daunting or okay, the older I get the 1015 year horizon seems like a scary thing on the seed to venture to then total exit 10 to 15 years later. But good for my children I guess is great. I'm going to ask each of you one last question. 30 seconds each, sort of. When you look at what's going on in the startup environment, the world today, what are you most excited about? And Dr. Gu, I'll start with you because I've been so impressed with your journey, your persistence. You exactly have the kind of passion that Manav talks about. Talk about what you're most excited about currently, my problem, what I'm currently working on. And I think both Andy and Manav just really touched upon that. You really have to be passionate about this problem that you can work on for this journey of 10 years plus. I lost so much sleep and frustration trying to handle the billing and financial side of our department hospital so much that now I have to turn it into that true passion. That's honestly what I think about and what I'm excited about every single day. And honestly hearing some of the frustrations of my customers who are physician partners and peers and then hearing and seeing their relief after we provide that service is the most rewarding and incentivizing motivated thing to keep on going this journey and realizing that this is like said, not a sprint but a marathon. Both. Thank you. We love watching what you're doing. Congratulations. Krista, tell us what you're most focused on and excited about currently. Believe it or not, I'm actually excited about how difficult healthcare is right now because I do think it's driving disruption and it's bringing in innovation in areas maybe that hadn't been considered before. I would say I'm most excited, though, about the talented people that I meet with every day. The founders come up with the most innovative and creative ways to solve problems, especially if they are outside of the healthcare industry. Bringing those perspectives in, I think is going to be a game changer. So I do look forward to a lot of the upcoming innovations around hospital operations, throughput and overall patient care. Thank you very, very much. You guys have not had a chance to see Bart's face today, except for a few minutes, but absolutely brilliant, brilliant lawyer and person. Also runs his own school as well, and a brilliant, brilliant leader. Bart, can you, can you take a second? What are you most focused on and excited about currently? There's a fascinating story on Bart running his own school that we won't talk about here, but really remarkable. Bart, take a moment and tell us what you're most focused on and excited about currently here at the firm. I'm most excited about our expansion into pharma and pharma services. We've traditionally been a healthcare services powerhouse and we see a lot of opportunities in things like pharma services, outsourced contract manufacturing, clinical research. So growing the practice in that regard and also just seeing the leaps and bounds in technology in that sector has been really exciting for me. Simply remarkable. Andy, I know some of the things that you're focused on and following, but take a moment on what you're most excited about currently. Outside of being a scratch golfer and outside of other projects, what are you most focused on and excited about? I mean, just keeping it to the food and beverage space. I love seeing innovation of these entrepreneurs that are trying to create a cleaner version of something that we already know and are comfortable with. And I think the key to success in a lot of these cases is this is a real simple one. The product needs to taste great, period, end of story, full stop. You can have a great name, packaging, but you need to deliver on what's inside of that, inside of the package. And so I love seeing new, innovative twists on something that we're already somewhat familiar with. Thank you. And you might take a moment and give a shout out to the colleague you backed or worked with at Goodsport. I think it's called Just one moment on that, because that's a tremendous story, too. Oh, yeah, sure. Michelle McBride is the founder. She's an incredible force of nature. It is a sports drink that has three times the electrolytes and one third of the calories of any of the major sports drinks out there. It's called Goodsport. And it's the only scientifically proven hydration beverage on the market that will enhance your hydration performance. And the list goes on. No, no, I appreciate. You've got to be so impressed with her drive as well, and her team's drive. It's really remarkable to watch. Thank you. Manav, give us a moment on what you're most focused on and excited about in your business life. Yeah, what I'm most excited about is probably just amount of agency that people have today. The ability to start something from scratch has never been easier. The ability for people who traditionally wouldn't have had the resources to be able to build something that's interesting to them or that they're passionate about is easier than ever. And it's resulted in people having a ton of agency to work on the problems that they really care about. And that's really exciting. Obviously, that means that a lot of things that the world may not need, they probably also get built. But at the same time, it also means that there's a ton of people finding their passion and building things that the world does a lot faster than we normally would have. So that's number one thing that that gives me a lot of energy and optimism. Thank you. I want to thank the five of you for joining this session at Becker Business and Becker Private Equity. On startups, Andy Friedman, Krista Bragg, Dr. Bogu, Bart Walker, and Manav Sivak. Thank you very much for joining us. Our next session, We've got about 30 minutes on artificial intelligence, practical use cases, and a lot more. We're joined today on this session. We're here today. This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business, Becker Private Equity podcast and webinar. We're joined by two brilliant speakers. We've got Bobby Becker, who is an engineer at Teacher. We've got Venkat Mukurla, the founder of Midstream Health, who's also prolific investor throughout healthcare, former operating partner, and Teresen Horowitz. I've known Venkat for a long time. I've known Bobby for longer. Thank you both for joining us. Let me ask you each to take a moment to introduce yourself. Venkit, let me start with you and ask you to spend a few moments introducing yourself. I'm considering changing my last name on this particular webinar. I feel either very special or left out. So. No, no, it's an honor to be here. Scott, thanks for doing this. And Bobby, always good to see you. By background, Scott, been passionate about the new things in healthcare for the last 15 years I got to start a company when I was at davita, thinking about the new thing at the time, which is in direct primary care, a company called Paladino, which is now part of Marathon Health. We got to really think about the revolution in value based care and Medicare Advantage in a four and a half billion dollar acquisition through Healthcare Partners. And then I moved internationally. I got to work for the advisory board internationally. And then about 10 years ago, Scott fell in love with this intersection of machine learning applications for healthcare. And 10 years ago when people were asking, you know, what really is SaaS? It took 10 years for AI to get mainstream in healthcare. And here we are, that was a company called Cue Ventus, which is really great to see something so early blossom even till today. And then as you mentioned, six years at Andreessenhoris as an operating partner, we got to see about 70 companies, $8 billion of capital deployed into healthcare and life sciences companies. And then got to start Midstream Health, which is all about transforming financial operations for the largest hospitals. So really, really excited to be here and so many fascinating pieces there. And let me ask you a couple follow up questions really quickly. So Mood it a tremendous leader. You worked with Mood it talk a little bit about what it takes to be a great leader and to evolve in the AI space, the machine learning space and add value for customers, because that's a great example. And then talk about what you're doing at midstream and sort of what you're doing with artificial intelligence. I know you're working with Common Spirit Health and some of the largest health systems in the world. It's been an amazing journey to watch. I love watching what you do. I love investing with you. Talk a little bit about sort of, sort of what, what, what you're, what you're doing at Midstream and what it takes as a leader to evolve in the AI space in the. Yeah, yeah, I'll, I'll do the, I'll do the midstream question first and get to leadership. No, no question. It's just a fascinating topic. In fact, just heard Ben Horowitz 2 minutes ago Talk about this in person. So, you know, interesting to see his viewpoint. But Midstream's focus entirely on financial operations. It, it's so interesting, Scott, I think for the longest time, I think, think when we think about technology, new solutions, technology, even 10 years ago at Kiventis, you think about technology budgets. Now you really think about, hey, what's the workforce that we're applying here and are there budgets that you know, sort of when you think about top of license, there's bottom license, where people just don't want to do this work or it's getting outsourced. You know, a lot of what we do at midstream is really focused on thinking about, hey, there's financial decisions. If you think about rocks, pebbles and sand, there's a lot of the pebbles and sand that either just people don't get to it because it's not important enough or they get consultants to do it, which is very expensive. If you have software agents tackle that, not only can you give the fish, you can actually teach the person how to fish all the time. And it's much more sustainable, it's much more cost effective. We've done that on the cost side and supply chain. We're going to manage care in pharmacy and other areas. In terms of leadership, Scott is, It's, it's funny, 10 seconds ago, before this, you know, Ben Horowitz was asked in this small group I was part of, you know, hey, what do you think of the leaders today? He was like, you know, I think leaders are always evolving. You know, entrepreneurs are always evolving. But I don't know, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs are pretty good too. So there's some, you know, things about leadership that never changes because we're human beings. But I tell you, Scott, I think, think the mental model I had 10 years ago to what's today, which is dramatically different, is I think a lot of times we'd look for entrepreneurs who were, hey, you've been there, done that, you've done this for 15 years, 20 years. And therefore now you earn the right to go build this new company. What's really fascinating, Scott, in this next round are people with 2, 3, 4, 5 years of experience are running circles around the so called experts. And it's a very different wave. It doesn't mean they have not partnered or surrounded themselves with domain experts who've been in the industry for 30 years. In fact, all the top performing entrepreneurs I know now have those domain experts. But it's just super impressive to see that this generation of entrepreneurs in technology run circles around people who've been in the industry for 20, 30, 30 years. And there's a lot of that because they're just so much more almost computer native. They came up early in technology and so forth. So they're just like their minds are just so much further ahead of people that are, you know, I has to say, like my age. But they're just in a different, they're playing a Different game because they just understand and connect dots so much easier. Is that part of why that's the why that's happening? Yeah. I don't, I don't want to inflate Bobby's ego too much, but, but I do think that I was in college when the iPhone came out to date myself. And when I look at my niece who grew up on all the sort of devices, she's sort of Native in the iOS and I think that people who are native to your point with ChatGPT or anthropic or any of these platforms, you kind of of see this now even in the production of code. Right. Engineers who use Cursor or Windsor for any of these tools are just 30, 40, 50% more productive than engineers that don't use it. And for them it's like using the iPhone. You know, for me, like 10 years ago. Right. And so I do think that the other, the other thing I'll sort of say, Scott, is it used to be about 10 years ago, you know what, when we were building these companies, we'd say, hey, you know, Bobby, you studied computer science, therefore you're an engineer. And we'll give you all the technical stuff, but really the business stuff, that's like up to us, you know, we're the, you know, sales, marketing, strategy, whatever you want to say. What's really different in today's era is it's all the one person, this same person who studied cs, like, you know, Bobby has learned the health system, go to market, has learned marketing, has learned strategy, has learned the domain expertise, and they're really a triple threat. And so they just go faster. They, they are able to iterate faster. And I think the last thing I'll sort of say is when you're young, you're unafraid to get on a plane and go see the customer. And not only do you listen to their problems, but you observe what they're doing and then you say, hey, you know what, I know you asked for this. What you actually want is this, this and this. And Palantir is a company that kind of showed that you needed a forward deployed motion for that. And now every entrepreneur does that. They're forward deployed in their nature. So so much of the way we're building companies, the entrepreneurs, everything's changed. And so you're seeing these companies go from zero to tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Anthropic went from 0 to 1 billion to 10 billion in two years. And that's sort of just in revenue run rate that's that's just, just you don't see that often. That's an incredible, incredible grocery. Bobby, can you take a second to introduce yourself and talk about what you do and you know, and so forth? Hi, yes, huge pleasure to be here. Obviously I'm the son of a very bright and successful entrepreneur, but I recently got my master's in computer science and since June have been part of a very small, very young, very lean and I'd say very talented and very driven team of applying AI in the EdTech industry. So what we do specifically is we provide different tools for teachers to create different types of resources for students. And on the product side the idea is we make the process as easy as possible for teachers to create a learning material, whether it's a test or homework about any subject for any grade level and share it directly to students. And then kind of on a deeper side, we're trying to use the best techniques, engage with the resource, the research to try to align these materials to be the most effective so that students actually learn from them. So I'd say that I've been, you know, I've been part of the startup for like four or five months now, but definitely a lot of what has Venkat has just been saying, has I. My vision is definitely aligned from what I've seen. So I think something that. So yeah, gone. We'll talk about that for a second because you talk about that often how the engineering leadership, the people that founded the company are also very, very forward deployed and very involved in touching customers and how important is that to making sure that you guys get product market fit. Right. Talk about that for most something that can mention so that you mentioned to me regularly, you know how closely tied these people with great engineering backgrounds are, are also to being customer centric. Can you take a moment there? Yeah. So first I want to speak. So for myself I have been focusing mostly on the AI side, but kind of the term AI engineer today probably means something very, very different. Five years ago. Where before is very math heavy, very machine learning training models yourself and it took years and years of experience to get good at that. Whereas now in this new domain of AI in the application layer, which is what I consider companies like us, it's a lot more of a well rounded skill set of both and it's open to a lot of young people because both on the technical side there's a lot of interesting new innovative ways to apply them. And then it's also a lot about engaging with some sort of problem or product market. Fit. But yes, both. It's definitely very much in the DNA of the founders and company culture to be talking to customers, talking to, you know, the main people who, we who are main customer taste are teachers who, you know, designing systems to save them time and really be a painkiller to them. And then also on the other side of being a product for districts, making sure that we're aligned with different curriculum standards and learning techniques and then also making sure that in selling to them, we're not forgetting about the people who will actually be the end users of our product, which will be students who will receive the resources that were created by the teachers. So I mean fascinating and what a fascinating journey and what you. What it's so interesting to hear both of your perspectives because Venkates at this now for 10 years plus in, in, in this area but 20 years in healthcare and, and some of those with Mudit and Juventus and some of those with Andreessen Venkate talk a little bit about how important it is to sort of, you know, usability for your systems. Like you're working with large systems like I mean common spirits, a 30, 40 billion dollar system, but they've got so many different solutions to work with. You know, how do they choose what solution to work with and how do you make it so easy for them to work with you that they could see these bending the cost curve on supplies, on management, on other things. How do you sort of. Yeah, I think it's, it's, it's an incredibly important question because I think that you know, health systems and obviously the very largest ones already have platforms like EPIC or ERP systems, et cetera. And you know, the, the famous quote is the race is always between the incubator who can innovate or the innovator who can distribute. And I think for us in any area. Scott, what, whatever you choose as a startup, you have to be 10 times better than the status quo for you even to get a chance to be in the door. Right? Like otherwise, like it's, it's, you're not gonna, it's not. The ticket is not worth it, I think. But talk about that for a second because people would rather use the existing platform for sure. If you're developing a point solution or something else, you got to be so much better than the existing platform because they don't want to bother to make a change or invest the time, the energy, the staff. I love that concept. Bob, we'll come back in one second. Yeah, go right ahead. You, you, you have to be 10 times better, number one. Number two is you have to have a speed to value. So these platforms that can do everything, EPIC and ERP systems, et cetera, they are so they can, you could check the box on any particular area and say, you know what, I have that particular feature. But what you don't have is someone who's concentrated to say, you know what, if I don't deliver value to you in the next 12 months in this area, I'll walk away. And you don't have to, you know, it's a no brainer thing, right? So it's like, so you have to make it such a no brainer value prop for them to engage. And the speed to the roi, not just hey, I have an ROI in five years, but the speed in which you can give money back to the organization to say hey these guys are or and gals are very legitimate in the way they can work with us. And they are, they time is money and they are actually delivering points on the board for us, not some hypothetical prototype that they show in a demo or something like that. It just doesn't work. So I think the stakes are very high. But I love that concept of speed to value. Bob, you were going to add something in. Go right ahead. Build off Venkates point real quick. He talked about different coding tools earlier like Cursor and Windsurf and that was definitely a case of the race between the, the innovators or the incumbents who have to innovate or the innovators who have to distribute because you know, they integrated basically AI into the workflow of coding faster than the traditional platforms to code. And then at this point the traditional platforms to code have caught up. They've tried to integrate AI in a lot of ways, but the first to market because you know their product was really, really good, they were able to capture a bunch of distribution. So, and I've seen that in a lot of, lot of cases just in again AI in the application layer of applying LLM specifically to different domains. Yeah, that's interesting. And talk a bit more when you're talking to, I'm going to ask Bobby a question. When you're talking to teachers and teachers are excited about what you're doing and I know you're, you're both distributing both the teach but more so to systems, to the districts and so forth, what is the value propositions they have to see and what are some of the things you hear from customers when they're using the AI and technology that you're working with? So I think something that I have learned has been a huge learning curve is building a software is not the same as maintaining it. So, you know, we have people who are using legacy parts of our platform and like if we, when we update our data, sometimes we were just dealing with a huge issue with that. But just over time, there's definitely always the need to provide a lot of support to them. Even we find that our AI tool makes their overall makes. I think the main selling point to most people businesses are either a painkiller or vitamin, but the painkiller is what draws people in. So really saving them time, making the process as seamless as possible for them to create any resource for any and then like directly to share it, directly grade it all in one platform and then talk about the company's commitment to constant improvement because that's a key issue, constantly improving the software. How focused is teach here on that? Yes, so very. So again, and this is, you know, regarding the new techniques and new ways to apply AI. As, you know, companies like us, we pay the big providers, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, kind of a little bit of money to make calls to their server basically to use their technology, their large language models for our specific products. And there's a huge, you know, just like how the main providers is a huge race to make their models as good as possible. There's also a race in the application layer of finding the most, you know, being creative and finding the most effective ways to apply them. So I think we actually have a fairly interesting and innovative tech stack now and then, constantly working to keep up with the latest innovations because this specific industry is growing, you know, this specific domain of research is growing so fast. Yeah, I think this is a, this is, this is a great point, if I can write off of that, which is that, Scott, I think 10 years ago, when we're building software and selling it to organizations, you know, could be pharma, could be payers, could be providers. I think the thing was you'd build this software, you'd work on it for a year, you'd build it and you say, hey, these are three things I can do. And then you do a RFP processing, compare it to all these other tools that you have, build, buy, et cetera, and you make a decision. But today what's happening is, you know, there's this concept of neuroplasticity in a person, like how fast can you learn and grow? This is applying to companies today. And the reason why I mentioned people with a couple years experience are running laps around people with 20 years experience is that you did three things today as a company this week you can do 30 more by the end of the month in production, right? So the speed at which you have to figure out, hey, you know, Bobby mentioned, you know, OpenAI, anthropic, Gemini, et cetera, hey, maybe there's the new GPT5 came out. Okay, shoot. Let's just figure out, let's how to use this latest model and fine tune it and get the data right to work for this particular use case. And so the speed at which people are able to iterate is the competition. So the, the kind of very provocative thing to think about as an investor is what is the moat? It just might be execution, it might just be just speed to execution. That's it. And so for a executive who's at one of these large organizations making a purchasing decision, you have to say, is this the pirate crew that's going to work, work 10 times faster. And the concept in San Francisco now is 996 9am to 9pm Six days a week. That's the speed at which people are in the office working hard to build these software solutions to go execute for the customer. So it's just the most fascinating time that I've ever been in the last 20 years in technology. Talk about Venkit. Because so much of this is so much work. You talk about996, but it's all about, I mean the thing that Steve Jobs is genius was making it easy for us to use, I mean, tremendous amount of trillions of hours put into making it simple for us to use the iPhone. And that seems very similar when you're working with a health system. There's not enough brilliant technical people internally to be able to, to do stuff unless you make it easy for them. So there's so much work done on the AI side to make it easy for your customers to use. Is that, is that a fair statement? Absolutely. Yeah, I think that, I mean, I think the interface is nlp, right? It's natural language. I think it's like the thing that's so crazy to me is, you know, when I was an analyst, like way back in the day, if you learned Excel, it's one thing, if you learn SQL, it's another thing. You know, our agents today run the SQL query. They show which SQL queries they're running. You know, they do very complicated scenario planning. And so this is like, like frankly, we're automating the role of an analyst or a senior analyst. We can, a lot of companies are doing this today. It's not just, you know, us. A lot of companies have those capabilities to augment, you know, analytical capabilities. So I think that the interfaces become so easy to use. It's way easier than using excel, but it's 10 times more potent. And so what, what like that's the, that's the, the difference is anybody can use AI tools tomorrow in regards of age, background, et cetera. It's just really your willingness to type things in English and how well you could use it to access it. Want to add one small thing to that which is I, well, I do largely agree, but I do think there is some spectrum in terms of, you know, you always want to make something easy, inviting to use. But then some platforms are more built for depth for people who are more technical. So you know, when it comes to the huge area of using AI to help coding, there are some platforms like for sure and Lovable that are built for non engineers and then there are some other platforms that have a little bit more of barrier for entry, you know, more for people who have like three, you know, two, three years of experience of coding. So but yeah, no, 100%. I mean, I mean some of the tech is built for tech people, some of it's built for lay people and spectrum on that. But yeah, 100%. And then when you're working though, when you're working to develop teacher for a specific teacher, you've got to make it tech easy for them in some way. Take it with school districts and systems. Yes. So I guess the couple things. Well, yes, we do make it easy to them, but also we have a lot of things built in our platform to both make it easy, but give them the ability to customize and improve and iterate if they choose to do that. Which we've actually found that making it easy draws people in but then, you know, giving a little bit more depth is what is why a lot of teachers have spent a lot of time using our platform for more and more and you know, really retaining them. Right. And that, that's a really good point and Venkat talk about that because in any system you have users and super users and we talk about that in almost any business set you've got people that are really, really users and talk about that at midstream. What does it take to push people to become or not a push pull almost to want them to be. Because I love Bobby's point. I mean it's that 10, 20% that really dig deeper and want to be super users that, that make the product really stable for the long run. I love that point. What do you see in that in terms of users versus super users of what you're doing in AI tools? Yeah, I think, you know, in a. This is why, I mean enterprise software is, is more complicated. And you know, my observation when I was in venture was the, the younger founders tend to build consumer products and the older person used to build B2B companies. You know, but, but you know, the thing that's really, you know, important is I, I believe that first of all, you know, every person who believes their own, you know, you built your own app or whatever, believes they'll be using it all the time. And I think, think you have to just recognize that most people don't even want to use your application. Like that's just, let's just start there. Like sometimes the best kind of UX decision is no ux. In fact, you know, I believe in sending, you know, if you're a busy leader, send them an email, send them a text that just assume actually that they don't have the time to go interact with it. And then I think, Scott, these relationships that you build, what, not just doing the deal at the high level but with the people who are these analysts or whoever who are going to be your power users is all. That's why those forward deployed motion is so important. Because I think what you have to do is observe. Not only is it, hey, I have X problem today, but observe their entire workflow and say I'm going to do this. And then by the way, I'm going to do two more things on top of that to make your life way easier. I noticed that you have 50 tabs on your Excel and you all tab through the entire day because you read three portals and you go through this Excel sheet and let me just make one click for you. And so that sort of iterative journey and I think what's very addictive for this, and I'll end with this for the user, is that hey, on Friday you push this out, the next Friday you did something new for them that is actually relevant to their workflow and then it becomes addictive. This person is listening to me, they're responding to me and they're building iterative software that's way faster than any other software I've used. Right? Because this is moving literally week to week. But that user mapping is like very important and you can't be sort of, you know, so you know, thinking in your own world that oh, everyone's going to be using your App all the time. The reality might be most people don't use your app and they don't care about it, but the users that use it that the sort of really mapping what they do and what you do. This has become so a part of software development, of code development and so forth. How intrusive does the user feel about that? How does that feel? How does that look, look like to a user when you're following every one of their keystrokes and stuff like that? I mean how does it. Because that's become so common but it seems to me so. So in some ways so privacy intrusive. How do people feel about that or how does that look, Bobby? How do you guys do it on the, on the teacher side? I'm happy to answer that. We're. That's definitely something the, the privacy end of it. Definitely something we're dealing with because that seems to be not something that is in the front of mind for teachers who are, you know, we're sort of a kind of. Our strategy is bottom up. So teachers oftentimes subscribe and then once we have enough teachers in a school then we try to make a sale for the school and enough schools we have a districts. So I'd say more the higher upside. That's where the data and privacy becomes more important. I think for us, I would say Scott, I mean privacy in healthcare is the game. It's the ball game. It's like the one thing that will basically end your company. So we take security and privacy incredibly seriously. And I think we sort of say to a user, you know, this starts with the little things like, you know, every. Now basically everybody has some version of a note taker. AI note taker these days on calls. And I think the first thing you do on any call you're on is like, hey, I have an AI note taker. Is that okay? And you ask for permission every single step, right? And so I think it's very much. That's a small example I'm giving. But every step of the way you're sort of asking for people permission. But the truth is every single person in their job, you know, people are always asking. I'm so worried, you know, are you so worried about replacing jobs as AI companies, et cetera? I think every. The reality is that healthcare the demand far outstrips the supply and we don't have enough people to hire for these jobs. That's the state of the of truth in that 100 in higher ed I'm assuming in healthcare. But I think the even More dark, deep, dark. Truth is there's a big part of or a small part of your job that you just don't like to do, and it just goes down in your pajama time or whatever. And it's one of those things like cleaning the house and those chores that if you had a Roomba going around, you would do it. And so what are these agentic roombas equivalent to your job as an analyst or a director or a cfo? I don't care who you are. Everybody has a list of things that they just don't want to do that I think they should just give it up to the agents to do. And that I think is actually a very interesting value. No, I. I absolutely love that. I'm gonna. I've got a couple audience questions I want to tee you both up on. I know we just got a few minutes left on the AI discussion. I'll start with one that's a more general question. I'll get to more specific one about around the pet business and pet services. But the first question is somebody asked a question about line of sight into the promise of Vibe coding is coined by Andres Karpathi. Do you guys. What is vibe coding? Do anyone want to take a quick, quick shot at that? What is this? Why should we care? Bob, you want to take a quick shot of what is vive coding? Do you. Are you familiar with the term? I'd love to go first, but would love to hear Vetkin's thoughts as well. But Andre Karthi has been a very big thought leader in my subsection of engineering, which is the new wave of AI engineering of applying AI to products. And the idea is the workflow for coders were using AI more and more. And this was a term he actually just, you know, he didn't write a paper about it, he just made a small tweet about it and it ended up coming viral. But the idea is people with less and less experience, if you use it can be as simple as like asking Chachi BT to write a Python script to automate something in your job, which I have many friends without a computer science degree who are finding ways to do that. So the. And so over time, if you think of the development of software, it has become easier and easier to use and has become less training or has continued to require less training, less background because all these different tools and frameworks, you know, not. I don't want to get too deep in the technical before people are coding assembly, now they're coding in Python. And this is another Layer where it allows you to build software faster more quickly. And, you know, again, there's a huge spectrum of this because, you know, it does take a little bit over time of actual coding as well as the vibe coding to do things right and to do things securely. But I think especially for early stage startups where speed is the priority, the new AI tools to work faster has become a very big and very important, important thing. I think everybody should Vibe code. I think it's phenomenal. I think it's like, I think vibe code is a very fancy way of saying making things, you know, using the new tools. And I think that I view it as an extension of if you use PowerPoint slides, if you use Excel, it's just another tool. But what's really powerful is before you had to ask an engineer or a designer, you know, to say, hey, can you, I have this idea, what do you think? You know, can you come up with something? And then they would take a week or two or two months or whatever time frame, and you'd be amazed. You could do that in 30 seconds yourself. And that's a very powerful changing thing. You could be a poet and you can Vibe code an enterprise financial tool, obviously to baby's production. You know, vibe coding something in a demo to actually putting something in production in a safe way is, you know, the difference between nursery and PhD. That's a big difference. But actually getting there to capture people's imagination, selling things, et cetera, it's just a phenomenal tool. Everybody should Vibe code. So we've got a question from an audience member that's domain specific and Venkate, I'll try you on this first. And I'm not sure either one of you guys will have great thoughts on this, but would love your thoughts. So we've got somebody who's built a pet business and they're asking, and I need you to put your hats on outside of your own businesses, any thoughts on how to incorporate AI in a pet related business? This where services are the core business. And this is someone I know, the person who's asking the question because they were featured on Marcus Lemonis's show. Brilliant people. But where do you think about AI? The founders of this are brilliant, but what do you think about AI in a pet services business? Venkat, any thoughts there? I think it has massive implications. I think, like, I think that, I think that, I think that any services business has massive implications. I would just sort of, I think the, the sort of starting point is I would just observe the workflows that you have for, hey, for onboarding a customer, right from the reception desk perspective, from registration. Think about all the workflows a customer has to go through to get to know you, to market to that person, to once they walk in that door for the service, for the billing, there's all these aspects. There's buckets of workflows that you can have AI applications doing and you can have a much more profitable business. I think you can have a much better or 10x patient experience. So I think a pet business and the fastest way I would do it is if I could convince a guy like Bobby Becker, you know, to come, someone of his ilk to say, hey, you're going to the startup, but actually come to my company, work for me as a CEO of a pet business. Observe those workflows. I guarantee you someone like Bobby, his background can go automate or augment a big portion and make the experience a lot better. So I think there's like a massive amount of implications that they. Pet pet business. No. Fascinating. Let me give you guys each 30 seconds. More like best advice for users of AI and, and not so much technical users, but, but end users of AI. Best advice for, for an end user of AI, you know, someone who's a business trying to use it, that's not a tech forward person or tech forward company to begin with. I guess they might have to become a tech forward company. Nine of the top 10 companies my market right now are tech companies. Does everybody have to be a tech company but Bobby? Any device for users. Okay, well, I want to say one last thing beyond learning to use AI and it depends where you are, a lot of people should learn, you know, just try out the new AI tools, see if you like them. But also don't forget to not use AI as well because I think there are, you know, there are many cases and I think I see this a lot in academia where, you know, beyond using AI to like help you write, to help augment your abilities, to help you code, it's also useful to take a break and a detox into work sometimes without AI because you know, I think they, they really are, you know, something that can enhance and expand our abilities. Though they're, you know, there are many places where I'm sure they can automate workflows. There are many other places where they really do, you know, they're as strong as the user. So, you know, keeping your mind sharp and not being too reliant on it. Get your news from places other than Chachi bt you Know, read some books, write yourself. But I think your point is so well taken. There's a whole thought today on the difference in the world with people that can go back to deep work as well, which has been discussed a lot recently. Not people that could just, you know, tweet back and forth and do things back and forth, but actually spend time devoted to deeper projects as well and be able to connect dots. I think your point is so right on that and I just love that point actually. So thank you for that. Venkat. Any final advice to users? Yeah, I think, I mean, I'll take the counter to that because Bobby lives and breathes into stuff, so I like the refreshing. But I think, like, look, I think whether it's Replit or Figma make or Anthropic or ChatGPT or any of these, I think just using some of these tools, it just seems so daunting on the outside and people use buzzwords and all this. But I guarantee you once you open up some of these apps, even the current apps, you might be using Canva or Figma to like, you know, just make like, you know, my, I'm getting married soon and my fiance, who's a GI fellow made this incredible animation using like Canva. And these are not, these are very simple tools to use. Not to discount her work, but I think the first step is just opening these things up. And so my thing is just like poke around. There's, there's no, you know, obviously there's different stakes at work work, but in your personal lives, like just if it's little things that you want to do, whether it's planning a trip for a loved one or planning a wedding, in my case, you know, there's, there's so many of these tools. It just requires exposure and comfort like everything else in life and they're just really easy and user friendly. So just take the first step. That's my only advice, I guess, Frank and I'll ask you the more challenging question. Was it hard to find a spouse that's so much brighter than yourself? Was that very challenging? And how did you manage to do that? Well, it's relatively easy, Scott. If you're me, it's relatively easy. No, Yeah, I think I'm married up. I got some good advice from people like my mentors like Scott Becker, but no, there's a lot of luck in life and that was definitely one where I got lucky. Well, congratulations, Bobby Venkat. I want to thank you so much for joining us on this segment on AI for the Becker business podcast, the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Thank you folks so much for joining. Just fantastic, both of you. Thank you very, very.