Transcript
A (0:00)
Narayan, you're a co founder and a partner at Franklin Park. Tell me where Franklin park sits. At an AUA basis today we are.
B (0:08)
About a 21 billion AUA AUM firm based out of Philadelphia.
A (0:14)
And you said, last time we chatted, you said it's the most confusing untethered sentiment today, investing in nature that you've seen. That's quite the statement given that you've been in the industry for a while. Why did you say that?
B (0:26)
Every week there seems to be some event, some pricing, some scaling thing that you know, I can't, I. There's no basis for, no precedent for. So, you know, things like a single person getting a $1.5 billion comp package to leave a company that he just co founded months before. That's. These things have never happened. You know, trying to figure out trillion dollar spends on data center build outs, the, the sort of growth and death and retention metrics of some of these companies that are just, you know, a few engineers are, are, are creating incredible products for enterprise and consumers. It's just unprecedented. I'm in awe. The amount of options founders have. Seemingly many. But when it gets down to the nitty gritty of those financings and those fundraises, the haves and have not stories seem so insane to me. It's just a very bipolar market. All these little niches. I can't imagine how confusing it is for all the market participants when you have all these really, really spiky events. Our ground truth has always got to.
A (2:02)
Be.
B (2:04)
Why do founders want to give up part of their precious life's work to somebody else? That's, that's kind of at the heart of the venture equation, right?
A (2:16)
Adding to this complexity, there's companies like Midjourney. Some report they're at 500 million, half a billion ARR with no outside capital raised. So they've scaled without outside capital. So VCs aren't even getting to those opportunities. Then there's people. I had the founder of HF0, which is a 12 week AI accelerator in San Francisco. It's one of the most interesting podcasts I've ever had. And they put people in these monk Mode modes for 12 weeks and these companies go from 500,000 to 10 million ARR just in just focused work and development for 12 weeks. They take away all the distractions from their lives. So there's the. And now they've actually evolved. They used to give a million dollars for a 20 million take, 5%. Now they've evolved. Some people don't even want the million dollars, they'll just take 3% for just the services. So they're basically being paid in services. There's so many different models emerging.
