Vince Hankes: Why We Put $300M into OpenAI; Sam Altman's Pitch; Lessons from Josh Kushner | E1009

1. 0:00 – 10:22

   Who is Vince Hankes?

   1. VHVince Hankes0:00

      There's only two questions that matter for a company: Who is the customer? And what is the product? And you'd be shocked at how many folks can't really answer that question with clarity.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:10

      (instrumental music) Vince, I am so excited for this. I've heard so many good things from Kareem, from Josh, from Jack Altman, from Brad at OpenAI. I've clearly got far too much free time. But thank you so much for joining me today.

   3. VHVince Hankes0:23

      Thank you so much for having me, Harry. I'm really excited to be here. I'm a big fan of the show.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings0:27

      That is very, very kind of you. But I want to start with a little bit of context. I always like to understand how someone makes their way into this glorious world of venture. So how did you make your way to Thrive and become a partner at Thrive where you are today?

   5. VHVince Hankes0:40

      Well, I don't know if it's that interesting of a story, but I started my career like many folks. I studied business and accounting in undergrad. I went to a big bank out of school, which was Goldman. And in a lot of ways, going to these big banks is like doing an MBA. It's a two-year program for the most part, and if you go there, you want to work on these really complicated big companies. And so, uh, most of what I worked on were th- was that. It was things like AT&T and Verizon, or actually, you know, Dell announced it was gonna merge with EMC at the time, and so they shipped us down to Austin. And we worked on carving out a bunch of software companies to go finance that big transaction. And after doing that for about 18 months, I ended up wanting to do something different and I got staffed on Flipkart, which is this e-commerce business in India. And lo and behold, the la- largest shareholder was Tiger. And so I worked pretty closely with the folks at Tiger on Flipkart for about three or four months. And as I was gonna leave Goldman, the stars kind of aligned and I ended up joining Tiger to go work, uh, really on private company investing for this guy, Lee Fixel. Um, and as luck would have it, the first company he handed to me was a software company. And so I spent the first three years of my career with him looking at lots of software companies and trying to really find what were the next generational big companies there. You know, Lee ended up leaving Tiger and I was also, uh, chasing Airtable at the time, and the folks at Thrive, Josh and Miles, had led a round at the company. And, you know, I, what I've learned from Thrive is always be recruiting. You know, one coffee chat led to another coffee chat and, you know, that was about four years ago, I ended up joining, uh, the team at Thrive.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings2:16

      I mean, uh, so many things we need to unpack there. I think Thrive's recruitment machine is just incredible. I, I'm always trying to unpack from Josh how he does it. He never quite tells me. Wonderful, Josh, but secret sauce he keeps close to his chest.Uh, I do wanna ask, you know-

   7. VHVince Hankes2:29

      (laughs)

   8. HSHarry Stebbings2:29

      ... Lee is one of the most special people in this business in my eyes. I love him as a person. He's gifted in many ways. What did you learn from working with Lee and from your time at Tiger?

   9. VHVince Hankes2:39

      First of all, I feel really lucky to have started my career working with Lee. He's, you know, I think he's a really special investor, and I credit, you know, a lot of where I got started to working closely with him. Tiger also is, you know, very ... Obviously, they've become, uh, in the news a lot more recently, but the firm's been around for more than 20 years. And, you know, I think if you look at how it got off the ground, it is very much, uh, in these kinda hedge fund roots. You know, Chase Coleman, who started the firm, he was in his mid-20s, he was really young. He had this hedge fund mentality, mindset, coming out of Tiger Management post the dot-com bubble. And the way we thought about investing in companies was very financial. Look at the P&L and understand deeply how do the numbers tell the story of what the business does, and how does that ultimately make a good business a great investment? And I learned a lot just from the financial rigor of doing that. But what's interesting is when you compa- contrast that to what we do at Thrive and how Josh has built the firm, you know, we, we started from the roots of where Josh was, which was a founder. He was the same age as Chase when he started Thrive, but ultimately, he was trying to build a startup. And so the mindset was very much, how do you empathize with the entrepreneur? And we focused much more on the product and the customer, and ultimately, how does that manifest itself into a business? And at the end of the day, we're looking for the same thing as looking for a Tiger, which is iconic, market-leading companies that are gonna generate great returns. I think every investor wants that stuff. But to make it tangible, at Tiger, I would have asked the question, "If you were the founder and I'm trying to figure out who your customer is, I would say, you know, 'Who's your ICP?' Or, like, 'Who's your core customer?'" That's very investor lens. At Thrive, the way we'd ask that same question is, "If I'm a SDR on your sales team and I'm trying to qualify a prospect, you know, what am I looking for?" At the end of the day, it's really the same question. You could even argue that the way we do it at Thrive is less efficient, but I think it shows a much deeper level of empathy with the founder. And, you know, both these institutions I think have great things that I've learned from them, but, you know, it's a very different mindset.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings4:41

       I think the words we use are very important. I often kind of change my tone and say, "We." Like, "What do we need to do to achieve the next cool milestone?" And it's little things like changing from "you" to "we" and how you address that question which I think actually make a big difference in how tones go in terms of founder relations. So I, I totally get you there. I, Vince, I, I heard you had a fascinating background. And so before we dive into, you know, many, uh, more technical things, um, I have to ask, um, I always believe that we're all a function of our past, which means we're all running from something. What are you running from, Vince?

   11. VHVince Hankes5:16

       (laughs) Uh. Well, I mean, Harry, that's more like a off-site topic or a dinner conversation. I don't know that's, uh, that's gonna get covered in 20 minutes on this podcast. (laughs) Um.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings5:27

       (laughs)

   13. VHVince Hankes5:28

       You know, listen, I think everyone's motivators are so hard to actually unpack and understand. We talk about this a lot in founder assessment, and I'd, I ... Just like you were saying, I believe that we're all a byproduct of these accumulated experiences, and I sure have had a lot. I grew up in Michigan. I've got three brothers. I've got, you know, two parents that are divorced. And so there's lots of things in that I'm sure manifests into, you know, who I am today. But I'm sure like a lot of people that are listening, or listen to your show, I'm trying to figure out who I am, and I'm trying to figure out how that impacts the decisions I make and how I react to what I'm seeing as I go through the world. And so-Yeah, I think for me personally, the motivator is just maintaining this mindset and I think folks that know me know I say this a lot, you know, how do you maintain the steepest slope possible that you're learning on? And one of the things I've grown on a lot over the last eight years of my career is, I think when you start you take a very solo mentality to doing things 'cause it's a chip on your shoulder, you wanna accomplish things, and so you do that really on your own, but over time I've realized your friends, your spouse, your coworkers, the people you're around, and so forth, all of those folks, you can compound your learning curves together. And so for me, I think a big part of where I've come from and where I'm going is trying to make sure I utilize all of these people around me in the ecosystem to really compound how I learn in that slope, and ultimately that's been I think the most powerful thing for me over the last, you know, 10 years of my short career and really, uh, you know, my entire life.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings7:00

       How do you approach trust, Vince? Trans- trust is a tough one. It's... it's very difficult. It's, like, hard to gain, easy to lose. How do you approach that?

   15. VHVince Hankes7:11

       Yeah, I mean, in some ways if you're trying to... we, we talk about this as a team from our culture, a lot of when you join the Thrive team, you know, the focus is how do you build trust with the organization? And, you know, I would tell you trust is one of these things where in great organizations it can be given by default. In many organizations you have to earn trust. I think we have a culture in Thrive that definitely, you know, people get a lot of trust by default because of how small our team is and how automon- autonomous our model is. For me personally, I actually had, uh, you know, a really great investor that you guys would know tel- told me something that was interesting which is, trust with founders is actually just being very predictable. People want to not feel like they're getting surprised by how you're thinking. They wanna understand how you think, how you're gonna react and feel like, you know, they understand you and that ultimately kind of breaks down these boundaries between people and allow you to have some mutual trust and empathy with each other. And so I think with founders in particular, when we talk about building trust, it's like any partnership. You've gotta increase the reps, get in the water and the trenches with them, and they have to understand how you think and ultimately I think you've gotta telegraph how you're going to make decisions with them and make sure that they get there alongside of you, they don't feel like you're superimposing things top-down on them, and they don't feel like they're getting surprised out of left field because if they feel that mutual level of partnership with you, I think it's really actually pretty easy to have trust with founders.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings8:34

       I spoke to many of the founders who you have that trusting relationship with, and I promise we're going to bring it back to schedule, but I'm enjoying this too much, um, and they said bluntly your ability to keep a level head is actually one of your strongest points as an investor. How do you think about maintaining an even keel in terms of mindset? It's, bluntly it's rare, especially among younger investors. How do you think about that and how you do it?

   17. VHVince Hankes9:01

       Well, I think part of it is, you know, you're a byproduct of your environment, and I think for me I've gone through a bunch of different waves in my career, and that's helped me understand what volatility looks like, feels like, and so I don't think you just become level-headed as a person. I think you kind of build into that psyche over time. Uh, you know, someone said to me once, uh, which is a line that I've been saying to the team a bunch internally is, you know, "Things are never as good as they seemed and they're never as bad as they appeared." And I think just keeping in mind that the rest of the environment around you does react to these peaks and troughs of your emotion in the market and the volatility, and ultimately, you know, in good times people over-extrapolate and in bad times people under-extrapolate, and if you maintain this kind of more balanced approach, I do think it helps you hold more clearly, you know, like what are we ultimately looking for in solving around for a given investment, or person, or situation? And I've just found that it's not productive to necessarily get caught up in the emotions. You've got to try to think clearly and if you can remove that noise from the volatility of the emotion, it allows you to focus on the core a lot more easily. But that said, I think you do need to trust your gut and you do need to be emotional and react that way, and so I wouldn't say it's all about being just this kind of robotic levelheaded person. You need to figure out when are the times to do that and when are the times

2. 10:22 – 14:11

   AI: Hype or Generational Defining Transformation

   1. VHVince Hankes10:22

      to lean into your instinct.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings10:23

      Speaking of kind of leaning into instinct, uh, I think everyone's leaning into the instinct around AI being the fundamental next platform-

   3. VHVince Hankes10:31

      (laughs) Oh.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings10:32

      ...that changes all of human history, which it very much could be, but I just want to ask on the hype cycle there and the ups and downs that we mentioned, hype for AI has never been greater. Is AI the next big thing or is it the new hype cycle that will fade?

   5. VHVince Hankes10:47

      Well, this is the question I think every investor is probably asking themselves right now, or certainly the ones I've talked to, and it's the quintessential question of, like, do you sit on the sideline and be patient and stay disciplined, you know, or do you jump in on the gold rush because if we don't get in now we're going to miss all the seed and series A companies that create tens of billions of dollars of value? (laughs) Which understandable, I think there's a reason why we're in the op- business of being optimist in adventure capital. And so, you know, I think for us and really Thrive in general, we try to get into the psyche of why are people so excited and less about chasing the next deal and more about what's the core value to the customer, what's the product, what's happening? I mean, crypto obviously has had an amazing run and I think has kind of pulled back a decent amount but, you know, we've been comparing and contrasting how much is AI potentially the thing people are latching onto like crypto maybe for the marginal investor a couple years ago versus how much is it real? And I think just to use crypto as an analogy, it was very ideologically driven so, you know, Bitcoin came out after a financial crisis and it was all about take this centralized financial system and make it decentralized. You know, allow people to take their money anywhere, don't let the government insert themselves in the financial ecosystem.And really, like, you have to believe in that as a concept to take all of the trade-offs of using crypto. As a consumer, it was a pretty bad user experience. And so when we think about other hype cycles, I mean if you go back even to the dot-com bubble, uh, when that ran up, I think the, I don't know the exact stat, but, and people, I'm sure people on, on the show will fact check me, but I think Microsoft, Intel, Cisco were the top three technology companies in the peak of the dot-com bubble. They were all infrastructure related in some way, and they were 50% of three trillion in market cap in the hype cycle. And so people really latch onto these companies and they can run for a long time when people believe, and speculation fuels more speculation, and so at the end of the day, you know, if you invested in Microsoft in 2000, it would have taken them like 15 or 20 years to break even on your investment. And so it's hard to really time and predict hype cycles. Um, and so what we go back to is we ask ourselves, what's the core parameters of AI? We don't know them all today, but we can try to figure out what some of them are, and we can really try to understand products. And there's obvious benefits to those things today. You know, obviously all the search that's coming with ChatGPT and the LLMs, but also just like companies that allow you to trigger actions without having to do 20 clicks or, I mean, for your show, I'm sure you're using AI in some way to edit or create content or something like that. The marginal cost of content production has come down a lot with these tools. You know, people are able to learn more easily with them. I think when these are the foundational questions you're asking because of technology shift, it forces every company to think about what could happen to their business over the next five years that would be really disruptive, or how should we be thinking about re-disrupting ourselves to ultimately take advantage of the new platform? And all the boardrooms I'm in and many of the founders I work with are thinking about that question.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings13:53

      Uh, the, the question which really came to me was someone posted on Facebook this picture, put a picture of themselves below, and said, "Is it AI or is it real?" And I genuinely was like, "I don't know." Like, I'm, I'm not sure. And that's a real realization moment of like where we are

3. 14:11 – 22:23

   How Thrive Capital Invested in OpenAI

   1. HSHarry Stebbings14:11

      today. I do wanna kind of focus specifically-

   2. VHVince Hankes14:13

      Yeah.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings14:13

      ... on OpenAI. Obviously, you know, Thrive kind of very prominent in the latest round. Tell me, how did the deal go down? How did it come to be, Vince?

   4. VHVince Hankes14:23

      Yeah, I mean, you know, we really first started focusing on the company maybe 18 months ago because there were a number of startups that were really rising with software products with these kind of tools that you could use to do marketing copy or you could create blog posts with them, I think, you know, many of these companies. And we spent a bunch of time with them, and we kind of kept coming back to the fact that there were thin user experiences on top of this cool thing which was this model which really no one talked about, at least not mainstream, 18 months ago. And so that triggered us to go spend time with the company, and ultimately, I mean, maybe in the classic Sam kind of way, the way we kicked off the round was he did almost like a closed demo with lots of investors on a couple of calls of the technology they were working on and ultimately GPT-4, and, you know, we were on that call, like many other investors, and I think I remember getting off the call, and Josh was also there, and we looked at each other, we're like, "Wow." Like, the way companies are going to get changed is going to be incredible. Software is going to look so much different. And we were reflecting on it, and s- and that kind of transformation is just so rare in our job. You see company after company after company, and so many things seem marginal, but when you see these things that are discontinuous or seem so different, we trigger this inner instinct to pause, focus, reflect, and ultimately, you know, we obviously spent more time learning about the financials and the products they were releasing and the customers, but that's what encouraged us to really lean in.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings15:52

      Can I ask you, you said you have many, uh, one of, you know, several firms who saw this, why do you think they chose you? Because this was one of the most hotly competitive rounds to finance. Why do you think they chose you?

   6. VHVince Hankes16:04

      Well, you know, I, I think there was a lot of people that said no, so at the end of the day, I, you know, there, as much as I like to think we won a really competitive deal, I do think it was not obvious to everybody. And even now I don't think it's still obvious to everybody, even folks that use the product. I do think one of the reasons that-

   7. HSHarry Stebbings16:20

      Why do you think it's not obvious? 'Cause you have to assume that essentially we'll move from a search interface to a chat interface as the primary UI of engagement. Is that why? Or are there other reasons why it's not obvious?

   8. VHVince Hankes16:32

      I think a lot of investors get tripped up on trying to be so precise on TAM and market and defensibility and the moats around businesses and trying to map it all to price, and those are so important in the investment decision-making process, but when it's so early in a technology cycle like this, it almost is a little bit more of a venture mindset where there are gonna be 50 reasons you can say no, and we're not gonna have answers to every question, but we would need to really think about the things that can go right. I mean, we're not talking about building the next unicorn or decacorn. We're talking about disrupting search, or Google. I mean, that's a trillion dollar opportunity, so sure, I can't put a TAM around ChatGPT, but I can tell you, like, we're not talking about a small prize at the end of the day. And so I think when we say it's not obvious to people, people aren't thinking about it in this lens. They're thinking about it in the box of, you know, what does this chat interface do? And oh, those use cases aren't that valuable. And I think it does take a, a higher level of creativity or imagination to ultimately think about the world that way.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings17:34

      I totally agree with you in terms of applying that kind of different lens and mindset, but then there are also core that you have to do, which we all do when we make an investment. When you thought top-down on market analysis, how did you approach top-down market analysis when you were sitting with Josh on this one?

   10. VHVince Hankes17:51

       I go back to, as these new technologies scale, it's so hard to be precise about a TAM, and so more of what we got into the psyche of thinking about is if you looked at other big technology movements and releases, how did they scale? I mean, the iPhone went from a million phones a year kind of post-launch to 100 million in five years.AWS took six or seven years to get to 100 million dollars of run rate, but they went from 100 million to 10 billion in, like, six or seven years. Google went from nothing to 10 billion in the first six years of monetizing. And so obviously this is rarefied air we're talk- I mean, these are three of the most transformational companies on the planet. But the technology, if you really think about it, and the zeitgeist it's captured, I mean, it is of that ilk, in my opinion, of the transformation it can have on the world. And so for us, again, it's, it's less about thinking about the exact TAM and it's more about if we think about what the world's gonna look like in five or 10 years from now, how are we gonna look back and say, "Wow, I can't imagine the world without this kind of thing"? And when you have experiences like that, I mean, that's what gets us out of bed. These are the kinds of things that create new categories, new companies. Um, and so I, that, that was what a lot of the discussion was, and, uh, you know, maybe that sounds less precise to people and they think it's a little bit too finger in the air, but I think for us a lot of this is instinct mapped with why it's a really great business.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings19:18

       I, I think something that dictates whether it achieves that scale and, like, enterprise value is whether it is actually kind of the one defining model to rule them all, or whether there's an alternative mechanism that will kind of bifurcate the market. Now, when we look at, like, you know, OpenAI and fundamentally says that there will be one model that rules them all, versus the world of many models with Hugging Face and the like being others, how do the two views differ and why do you think there will be one model to rule them all?

   12. VHVince Hankes19:52

       Well, I mean obviously these are my opinions, not the company's, just to make that clear to everybody. I don't think I would characterize OpenAI as one model to rule them all, and obviously there's all kinds of talk right now about it being closed-source and the model should be open-source for the value of the community and all, all of those factors. But I'd say actually if you give the company credit for the stuff which they've released, they have done a lot in the open-source and contributed back to the community. CLIP was a model that they put out there that helped a lot of the image generation open-source models. Whisper was for audio. They open-sourced the inference framework called Triton on top of GPUs and CUDA to, to ultimately drive more efficacy and scalability of inference. And so they have done a bunch on that side. They obviously have kept the core GPT model behind an API and pay wall, but, you know, I think thinking about it as this entirely closed ecosystem, in my mind, doesn't really give credit to what the company has done on the open side. You know, and the dimension by which we're, I think founders we at least talk to are choosing their model has quickly changed from who's got the biggest model and who has the lowest cost model to these new dimensions, which is if you're gonna build a company today, Harry, you don't want to have to, you know, think about the scalability of it, or the reliability of the infrastructure, or supporting all of that stuff. If you use an open-source model, you've got to go figure out all of these infrastructure problems. And so now if you talk to OpenAI and you think about what they're spending time on, it's how do you support this onslaught of scale that has come into their system, and that's infrastructure engineering problems. It's the same thing we talked about in cloud 10 years ago. I'm sure there are banks out there saying, "You know, we're not gonna move to public cloud because we can run all our infrastructure ourselves and do it really well." You know, you would never have told a startup 10 years ago to go run your own infrastructure if Amazon was there doing it for you. I think we're kind of getting into this world now where, sure, there are lots of open-source models and they can be used for great things, and some companies will choose that path, but by and large for the vast majority of companies, particularly ones that have scarce resources, which are many of the ones I work with, you know, I don't want you spending time building infrastructure and scaling open-source models. I want you just getting your product out there with lots of value to your customers. And I think OpenAI is quickly figuring out the cost curve, which is probably the biggest, you know, competing interest against that. They put out 3.5 Turbo, which is, I think at least, at least one if not two orders of magnitude less expensive than before. And so, in my opinion, I'd just bet on, I'd bet on these ecosystems to scale the infrastructure, and ultimately that's becoming

4. 22:23 – 33:17

   How Will OpenAI Commoditize?

   1. VHVince Hankes22:23

      more important than decision factors.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings22:25

      You mentioned that kind of the model still being kind of behind, um, lock and key. Um, can I ask, how do you... People often suggest, like, the commoditization of the model is a challenge. When you thought about that when making the investment, how did you get comfortable in terms of model commoditization and long-term edge for OpenAI, if that's kind of current edge potentially being threatened?

   3. VHVince Hankes22:45

      This is a question we talked about a lot. I think part of it we're already seeing the evidence of, in my opinion, where commoditization of the core model output is not really what people will make decisions on over time. You know, I'm sure there are lots of companies that give similar search results to Google, but the reason these companies get built up to scale is because the ecosystem around them grows. And you're even seeing this, they launched plug-ins about a month ago and ChatGBT has taken off and taken the world by storm. I think it's the fastest company to 100 million users ever, uh, in like three or four months. And so even if the raw model is, does get competed against, there are maybe companies like Google or Facebook or Microsoft or some of these startups that can compete on that, I do think, again, the dimension by which people are gonna think about this in five years from now looking back isn't gonna be about the commoditization of the model and the raw output. It's gonna be, oh, the ecosystem around the model has become much more robust such that you can do a lot more with the model than just get text outputs, you know, or the convenience of putting these things together such that it's not just text. It's now text, an ima- image or video and audio all through one, you know, interface. That's complicated, and so these are, you know, again, it's not to be dismissive that the model doesn't matter in terms of accuracy or size, but it's to say that people are gonna optimize for companies, builders are gonna optimize for the inputs that allow it to be much easier for them to build and much easier for them to capture this new channel of hundreds of millions of users that are flooding here.And that is not about, you know, commoditization model. That's about ecosystem and the kind of classic things that make great businesses.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings24:24

      I, I totally get you there. In terms of the ecosystem around it, you would highlight competitors or competitive threats when making... I'm seeing you've literally going down the investment memo here. It's great training for any, like, you know, wannabe investor. Um, but, like, going down the competitive threats, who did you identify as the competitive threats that you saw as having potential to be noticeable?

   5. VHVince Hankes24:46

      Yeah, I mean, the elephant in the room is big tech companies. This is not, uh, something where they're sitting flat-footed. Facebook, Google, even Microsoft. I know they're a great partner to OpenAI, but they also are a competitor-

   6. HSHarry Stebbings24:58

      Do, do, do you think so? I, I, I, I had Tom, I had Tom Tunge on the show recently, and he said that Google have been the most disappointing of all, and they were his former employer. And he said, "Terribly disappointing." You know, we've seen AWS partner with Hugging Face. Who do you think is doing well?

   7. VHVince Hankes25:15

      I think it's hard to be dismissive of these companies. If you think about where the best talent in AI is right now, I think it's OpenAI, and then I think you'd, everyone would tell you it is Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Amazon! And maybe there are folks that have kind of dripped their way into the startup, startup ecosystem, but by and large, the talent is so clustered in these big tech companies. And so I get it, that they're tripping over themselves trying to figure out how to navigate these giant organizations they've created, but let's not also kid ourselves. You know, we've talked about this maybe outside of the context of OpenAI, to uplevel it to AI. We work with lots of startups that compete on things like presentations or content creation. You know, what's scary to me right now is if you're a startup, large companies are shipping product. The kinda canonical examples were that, "Oh, the big incumbent can't move and they're slow-footed and you got years to execute before they do something." I mean, Microsoft's a 200,000-person company. They've shipped AI in Bing, AI in PowerPoint. They're rolling out other products. Adobe's got the content creation in their product already. You know, even the big startups like Notion. Those, those folks, I've been so impressed with how much they've shipped in their product so quickly. And so if you're a startup, I get that you have the advantage of speed, but you need a multi-year execution window to be able to take advantage of all that product you can ship quickly. If these big companies are able to ship this quickly, they've got so much distribution, so much talent, I just think it's gonna be very hard to compete with them.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings26:46

      So the reason I'm also so bullish on OpenAI is like Alex Rampell says very wisely, "The big question when investing in startups is, will the incumbent acquire innovation before the startup acquires distribution?" And I think the challenge for everyone with OpenAI is it's still really a startup in terms of processes and a lot of its structure. But it's got the distribution of a large incumbent, so it can move as fast with the distribution. That is a very real and competitive threat (laughs) that I would not want to come up against. My question to your point there, though, is, the big question for me is, actually, in this next wave of AI, is the value captured predominantly by, uh, incumbents or is it captured by startups? And I more lean towards 90% of it being captured by incumbents, which isn't great for us as venture investors. But do you agree with me or would you say something different?

   9. VHVince Hankes27:42

      I think it's too early to call. Maybe that's a cop-out answer. But to put it in context, if you go look back in time at these big technology cycles, they are great moments to create new categories. And so maybe that's a better lens to look at it through. Where will new categories get created where being an incumbent or being a startup won't matter? And if you look back at the dot-com, Google, PayPal came out of it. Google about finding information, PayPal about, uh, bank online. Social came after. You know, Facebook was connecting all these people online, and Twitter was the town square for broadcasting information. You know, mobile, the answer wasn't Salesforce was gonna build mobile CRM and that's where all the value was. The answer was you put a computer in everyone's pocket, and DoorDash and Uber came out of that because there's geolocation, the ability to have connectivity. WhatsApp came out of that, which was, people take it for granted now, but, you know, 20 years ago, it was a regional telecom that managed all of your SMS. WhatsApp abstracted that as, uh, you know, protocol on the internet that was encrypted and allowed people to communicate more seamlessly. So, in my view, what we're looking for, if I was to answer that question, is, yes, if you're going toe to toe right now with an incumbent on their home turf and their shipping, I think it's a hard bet to take the opposite side of, you know, in our business. But if you're creating something that's totally a different user experience that no incumbent has today, I'd bet on the startup, you know, 10 times out of 10 in that case.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings29:07

       Do you know what I'm, I, again, the reason the show's successful is 'cause I just get to interview smarter people than me and just ask questions that I'm thinking.

   11. VHVince Hankes29:13

       (laughs)

   12. HSHarry Stebbings29:14

       Uh, (laughs) brilliant model I've built. Um, uh, but my question is, like, also, uh, where... So if the value accrues, like, incumbent versus startup, the other question is value accrual at the infrastructure layer-

   13. VHVince Hankes29:26

       Mm-hmm.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings29:27

       ... versus the application layer. How do you think about value accrual there? Because you quite rightly mentioned earlier three companies, two trillion, you know, and I think in the prior application layer, there's about a similar market cap, two trillion, but 50 companies, so much more distributed, uh, kind of enterprise value. Where does the value accrue, infrastructure or application layer?

   15. VHVince Hankes29:48

       I have to believe it's gonna accrue mostly to the application layer. I think if you think about infrastructure companies as platforms, you know, if you think about the software market as the relative s- the value of AWS and Microsoft and Google Cloud versus the software companies built on top or all of the internal software tools built on top, I think it's probably an order of magnitude to one. You know, so I just have to believe where value gets created to end customers is where it will get captured. And the nice part about the infrastructure business is that they're effectively toll roads.... on that whole ecosystem. And so, you know, applications might compete more aggressively with each other, and OpenAI or Amazon or the infrastructure provider might be able to clip a coupon on it that's really valuable and we might capitalize it at a high multiple. But I- I just, I have to believe that there's gonna be a lot more value in the new experiences and applications than the infrastructure.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings30:38

       How do you think about investing, like, in- in the space when it moves so fast? You know, you're- you're an investor in Benchling, uh, Airtable, uh, Lattice. Like, respectfully, these markets are not changing on a daily basis. They are fantastic markets, but they're not changing on a daily basis. Here, like, I'm making a seed investment in London now and it's kind of like, "Let's see what the market's like tomorrow." Like, I don't know what we'll see. They're great founders. So how do you get comfortable with the rapidly changing market like we haven't seen before?

   17. VHVince Hankes31:10

       There's no magical answer to this, Harry. It's hard. And I think at the early stage, uh, you know, we think about investing in founders first and foremost. You want extraordinary people in really great sandboxes and those folks will be able to figure out how to pivot and adjust and iterate to take advantage of opportunity. And so I think in this environment, if you told me would I rather be, you know, in the sandbox with the great founder experimenting and iterating or sitting on the sidelines, I'd rather be iterating, even if things changed a bunch from under- underneath you at the early stage. But that said, I think you can't make every investment without knowing what's gonna happen. And so some things, there is an obvious, you know, evolution that makes your business less interesting than it was six months ago. If you think about where we were on infrastructure companies nine months ago, there were all kinds of companies branding themselves as ML ops, or these end-to-end solutions for AI. Now, in this environment we're in now, there's specialized companies that are doing individual components of the infrastructure stack, whether it's, you know, LangChain on connecting all these tools and stitching them together, you know, or- or these vector databases that are allowing you to store information. And so things specialize. I think, you know, our reaction just comes... I don't want to keep saying this 'cause I- I feel like we're being so repetitive and, on it, but it's not that hard to say... You know, I- I have a friend and mentor of mine that I spend a lot of time with who says there's only two co- two questions that matter for a company. Who is the customer? And what is the product? And you'd be shocked at how many folks can't really answer that question with clarity. And if you can answer that question with clarity, everything else about the business stems from there. And so if you're really answering that question and you're struggling 'cause you think in two weeks from now there's a chance that the customer doesn't care or the product won't have any value, well, that's hard to build a company around. And so in any of those environments, I think you'd rather just wait for that, there to be more clarity than tryna, like, keep firing, you know, investments into that market.

   18. HSHarry Stebbings33:09

       You know, I made an investment and I lost money in it, and I lost money because of an externality that was outside of our control, which is a very frustrating

5. 33:17 – 45:40

   AI Regulation

   1. HSHarry Stebbings33:17

      reason to lose. How do you think about the impact in coming year or so of regulation? Like, y- you know, Elon has been very clear in saying, "We can't wait until it's in the hands of everyone because then it is too late." How do you think about regulation in the next 6 to 18 months?

   2. VHVince Hankes33:34

      I don't want to speak for the company on anything 'cause I know this is a topic that's out there, uh, in the mainstream. I think regulation will come to AI and it will be necessary. Like, that's, I- I don't doubt that at all, in my mind. You know, I think it has to be done in partnership with the companies that are building because, you know, regulation for the sake of regulation is not gonna be what solves the problems people are concerned about. You've got to go understand the nuances, you have to understand the technology, and so I would hope that, just like we know OpenAI is, I would hope that other companies building in AI are also working with regulators to understand, what is the technology? And help educate them to get to, uh, the right decision. I do think, you know, there is kind of some negative stigma going around OpenAI on regulation and security and safety. And in, in my view, I think they're being pretty proactive, you know? I don't know all the things that they're doing internally but, you know, as an example, on GPT-4, we saw the demo in the fall. They didn't just release the product then. They took, I think, four or five months to test and learn about safety and the edges of the model, and then ultimately released it to the world. And so they're not gonna get it perfect every time, but I do think trying to let people build it and understand it is important, and poorly designed regulation on a technology this early is not gonna be effective for anybody. And so, you know, we've got to find the middle ground.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings34:57

      My concern is the chasm of knowledge between private and regulator side has never been greater. How do we set effective regulation when the regulators do not understand so much of the infrastructure and the opportunity?

   4. VHVince Hankes35:15

      Listen, Harry, I- I don't know any of the regulators personally on this stuff and so I don't wanna make any generalizations. Like, I- I think this is, in my mind, um, this is a solvable problem. There's information out there, there's experts out there. Regulators, I've been impressed with how up to speed they've gotten on crypto and they've really taken time to learn about it. And sure, they're gonna make mistakes, but ultimately, you know, I think that gap is solvable. And so, you know, you just gotta start the dialogue between the people working closest on AI and these regulators. And it might take years to get to a solution, so people got to be patient, but, you know, this isn't an unknown unknown. This is something that you guys can work together on.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings35:54

      Final one on OpenAI and then we are gonna move to kind of your investing style before a quick fire. I have to ask. Uh, I- I would get, you know, in trouble if I didn't, Vince. I'm, you know, very charming British guy otherwise. Uh, the price was high, a reported $29 billion.

   6. VHVince Hankes36:10

      (laughs)

   7. HSHarry Stebbings36:10

      Um, what was the discussion internally around price? 'Cause you still have to see real upside. Like, what was the discussion and how did you project upside scenario planning?

   8. VHVince Hankes36:20

      Well, we certainly had a discussion, a heated discussion, around it.You know, we have a very team-oriented firm and so we disagree and commit once we make decisions. And we make decisions as a team and we live by that. No one, no one person makes a decision. And the price here was high, just on an absolute basis. It doesn't matter what company you're investing in, at the prices that this round was done, you know, you're talking about very upper echelon type outcomes to justify good returns. But I, I kind of come back to the, the intangible that it's really hard to understand the pace of adoption of these major technologies. And any numbers I would put on paper for you would look insane. You would look at them in a spreadsheet and tell me, "There's just no evidence to support this." But then you look at these iconic technologies and the great ones all follow that insane curve. And so the balance we try to hold, I think that's what makes Thrv a really special firm, is we're able to kind of separate ourselves from the kind of quantitative rigor that, you know, we rely on for a lot of investments we do, and hold the tension of what could go right, think creatively, understand how this could look like the most transformative things. And if that happens, again, I, this is, you know, we're talking about search potentially getting disrupted or something that enables workflow automation for hundreds of billions of dollars spent on, you know, different jobs and categories out there. And even now, you know, we didn't know this at the time of the investment, but with ChatGPT Pro and the traction that's seeing, maybe that won't be the durable, you know, revenue engine for the company over time, but the velocity with which that's ramping ... You know, Karim, my partner Karim has a way of saying this, the scalability properties of what they have built are so good that, you know, we'd rather bet on the compounding upside of that scalability than sit on the sidelines, because once it's clear it'll get priced up very quickly. Um, and so we ultimately decided to lean into that.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings38:22

      How do you determine when to throw the financial rigor that you do have in the team out of the window versus when it's needed to make a sound and wise investment?

   10. VHVince Hankes38:34

       It's less about throwing it out the window and it's more about putting it in context. A financial model is a tool to help you make a decision. You need many tools to make a decision. And so it's less about, is that the only thing we use and we throw it out the window, and it's more about, what's the weight by which we put on the financial rigor and model as the tool to make the decision? And I think for us, there aren't that many iconic companies that could create it. And so no iconic company, you know, at least that we've been a part of was it clear and obvious in the early days of that technology. They always get priced well ahead, and they look cheap in hindsight because they defy the gravity of the model. And so it's kind of the quintessential humans think linear and the best things happen exponential. You know, we have to understand and, uh, you know, going back to being level-headed, when do our psyche or heuristics break down in an investment decision-making process? And when they do, we need to compensate them with a different tool in our toolkit.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings39:34

       Can I ask you a bit of a weird personal one, Vince? But this is a big check for you. Were you nervous about that?

   12. VHVince Hankes39:40

       I think we had the same level of excitement that we've, that we have in most investments. Uh, you know, again, I, I give credit to Josh. I give credit to the rest of the Thrv team. We don't have a culture where there's this kind of, you know, sharp elbowed mentality or people feel on edge for making investments because prices are high or checks are really large. We have a culture where we support each other and we have a growth mindset and learn. And so if this ends up not working out, I don't think we're gonna look back on this and put all the onus on one person, you know, or two people that made a decision. I think we're gonna look back on this and say, "We got there as a team. You know, it was the right thing at the time, but here's the learnings from it and here's how we're gonna adapt our lens and course correct in the future." And so it is intimidating and it's nerve-wracking sometimes to write large checks and investments, but in the right team and culture, you know, I think this is how we enable ourselves to make these kinds of transformational investments. And frankly, I think there are a lot of firms that could not have done this because their organizations are not set up to make these kinds of big decisions.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings40:48

       And the, your ability to make these big decisions is the one single fund? It's the one single team? Sorry, help me understand specifically with Thrv about the structure that enables you to make a decision that others maybe couldn't.

   14. VHVince Hankes41:02

       I think, I mean, you know, I don't know that I want to go into extreme detail on all this stuff, but I think the, I think the thing that enables us to make this decision is we have this single small team that thinks extremely creative about how the world works, and we are ultimately trying to concentrate our investments in the best products that are out there in the world. And so when you simplify it down to that and we allow this autonomy and focus to happen on a single team across the entire investment cycle, from early stage all the way to growth, you know, we are enabled to go find these kind of iconic companies. And, uh, you know, we're young in our career, obviously, but we also, um, we can appreciate when these kind of transformational technologies come around. And certainly this was the most transformational thing I've seen in my career, and being able to lean into that and not be afraid that if it goes wrong we're gonna get fired, or if it goes wrong we're gonna be, you know, pushed down in the firm. I think having that psychological safety and a culture that supports that stuff, that enables a firm to do it, and I think we have that at Thrv.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings42:15

       What does Josh do to create that safety within the team? Because it's crucial, but rare. What does Josh do to create safety in that way?

   16. VHVince Hankes42:26

       I think it comes back to where we started the interview. It's, uh, it's trust. We have a strong degree of trust with each other and we're not judging each other based on one decision. You know, we, we joke around and we get into the kind of investment discussion room, and we're gonna intensely debate, and we're gonna intensely push back on each other. We're gonna try to ask each other provocative questions and try to get to the right answer, zoom up, zoom down, that kind of space, doing that, and then getting out of the room and laughing with each other and having a high degree of trust and humility, I think being able to facilitate that, Josh, from the top down, emanates those kinds of values and that kind of, uh, both warm empathy when we're working with each other, but also intense spirited debate when we're kind of trying to make decisions. And it sets a great role, uh, you know, example for the rest of the people at the firm, and we put a lot of trust in our people. And so that combination, again, I don't know that you could just ... It's easy to say and hard to do in practice, um, but I think it's one of the things that makes our culture really special as a firm, and it's enables- enables us to get to kind of these interesting investment decisions.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings43:37

       I think we change so much as investors over time in terms of what we value in the companies we invest in and the founders we invest in. When it comes to what's changed in what you appreciate in an investment, what has changed about that mindset?

   18. VHVince Hankes43:52

       It's actually very clear. The thing I've developed the most on in my investing mindset is this deep empathy for the customer and trying to really think deeply about not just what's the product and trying to write that down on paper, but really to understand how the business is gonna get built, and mapping those nuances to who the person is, what the product does, how does that manifest itself in the business? You know, do you have a sales-intensive product that's going to require people to be kind of constantly out there and on edge and with their customers? Do you have a product that's more middle ware and so you need somebody who's going to be willing to grind it out and not be in the limelight? Do you have a product that requires a lot of creativity and that means you need to set up your org. to be creative? Well, there are certain org. structures that promote that more. And so, you know, when you think about where you can develop as an investor, I think where I have developed the most by far is continuing to understand the connectivity between this rigorous financial lens, uh, very much of where I started at Tiger, to how do you build a company? And at that intersection, you know, it's really hard to get to clarity on, but when you do, it is clear, and I think, you know, the best companies have very, very simple explanations that, you know, it tr- it trickles down in the company. The CEO can articulate in one sentence, but the manager four rungs down also can articulate it, and that means that that manager knows how to go left when they should go right, or they know how to make that decision and communicate it to their team. And so having an appreciation for that I think is where I've grown the most on these investment decisions. And again, it's, it's hard to quantify, uh, but I think it results in just, like, a deeper empathy for what a great company looks like.

6. 45:40 – 50:18

   Biggest Investment Mistakes and Wins

   1. HSHarry Stebbings45:40

      Final two questions. I think we learn a lot from wins and losses, and we don't often analyze the wins as well in the same detail. If we start, say, on, if we start on the loss and then we'll move to the win, what's been the biggest investing mistake for you, and how has your mindset changed as a result?

   2. VHVince Hankes45:58

      Well, I mean, I've made lots of mistakes. So, uh, there's not a, there's not a single biggest, but there's so much to learn. The one that I think stands out the most to me, you know, or at least comes back to me a bunch in my psyche is when I was at Tiger, I flew out to Sydney and spent a bunch of time with the Canva team in person, and, uh, you know, it's obviously now people know about it. It's a remarkable company. At the time, it was much smaller than it is now. And at the same time, we were so focused on investing in enterprise software as an emerging category at Tiger. And so, as we were spending time with Canva, you know, I very much, and this is early in my career, but I very much let the pattern matching and the DNA of what I was thinking about of a great enterprise software company creep into us looking at Canva. And the learning, I think, just to distill it down to something, is, you know, every company is unique. Even within the bounds of enterprise software companies, they're unique. And we took this lens of what a great enterprise software company was, we retrofitted to Canva, and we said, "Okay, well, the churn looks a lot higher than what great looks like." And, you know, the engagement looks very whimsical relative to deep workflows and integrations, and so we shouldn't value this like a highly recurring software business. We should value it like a consumer subscription business. And there's merit to that, but ultimately, because we were so much in this one-dimensional mindset of enterprise software, we missed what was so special about the company. And the learning for me is just, like, you can't walk in biased about what you're looking for out of the metrics of a company or what the product, you know, should result in in metrics. You should walk in and try to have a very open mind and say, "Do these metrics explain the qualitative of the business that I'm so excited about and reinforce why it's special?" And if you think those things are true, I think then you should lean into it a lot more and try to really get to the guts of could it be a great investment. But ultimately, when you get too ... And I see this a lot with investors. When you get too pattern matchy on why companies should be the way they are, I think it leads to a lot of mistakes.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings48:08

      I totally agree with you there. Okay, flip side, because I, I, that could, like, lead into another fucking hour. Um, you can see why I-

   4. VHVince Hankes48:15

      (laughs) .

   5. HSHarry Stebbings48:15

      ... I do this for a living. Uh, (laughs) but on the flip side, like, when you think about kind of biggest investing win or success, I get it's, like, earlier and, you know, DPI takes time, but when you think about biggest investing win or success, what was that and what did you learn from that process?

   6. VHVince Hankes48:32

      You know, I- I mean, the thing at Thrive, we don't really focus on the win. You're only as good as your, you're only as good as your next investment, Harry, and, uh, I've still got a lot to prove. So, it's hard to say, "We've won," by any means. But I do think an important part of winning and just understanding how to embrace kind of this culture of making great investments is you've got to figure out how to be authentic to yourself and map that to how you go win. You know, what, what a founder might be attracted to for me might be different than you, Harry. It might be different than the next investor that's listening to this podcast. And so, you, you can't just, like, apply someone else's style and say, "It's gonna work for you and you're gonna win." You've got to try to figure out how to map what's really authentic to you and evoke that emotion in the entrepreneur and get them bought into why that could be a really fruitful partnership for them, and it's hard to do that. You can't do a lot of those things at once. You can't treat it transactionally. You've got to invest the time. There's no substitute for the time. But I think the things I look back on that were the most exciting and rewarding for us to be a part of, we've been able to establish that kind of ground with whoever is most important in that process, so the team. And when you do that, I think those things become obvious, and the decision is less about all these other variables in the process and it's much more emotional because they want to work with you.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings49:57

      Vince, that was bizarre. Like, one, most people are like, "Oh, I'm not gonna give an answer to the mistake, but I'll give you the answer to the success." You did the opposite. And then, two, when you were, like, being political at the beginning, I was like, "Ugh. Come on, man." But that was a really good answer.

   8. VHVince Hankes50:16

      (laughs)

   9. HSHarry Stebbings50:16

      (laughs) Which,

7. 50:18 – 56:42

   Quick-Fire Round

   1. HSHarry Stebbings50:18

      which was fantastic.

   2. VHVince Hankes50:19

      Thanks, Harry. (laughs)

   3. HSHarry Stebbings50:19

      I r- I really liked that. Um, and I want to move into a quick fire. Um, so I'm gonna say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

   4. VHVince Hankes50:28

      Sounds great.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings50:29

      So, uh, Karim told me that you are basically the encyclopedia of business. What does your content consumption look like? What are the favorites?

   6. VHVince Hankes50:38

      Oh, man. There's so many... I mean, I think the short answer is just reading anything. I think, for me, I like to try to subscribe to lots of different angles of reading. So, sometimes it's podcasts on topics, sometimes it's newsletters. Sometimes you go find the, the blog focused on the developer to go learn about the thing, you know? But most importantly, like, learning about the history of things is really important. All this AI stuff is happening right now, and some of where I've been reading is trying to trace the key figures from all the way back to, like, 1980s in AI to today. And so, for me, um, it's really just about variety. Simulate the personas, simulate the different people that are in the ecosystem, and go learn about them, and wherever you can find content on that, I'm willing to read it.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings51:23

      Vince, if you can invest in one multi-stage firm other than Thrive, which ones do you invest in and why them?

   8. VHVince Hankes51:31

      Harry, I'm only investing in Thrive. There's no other answer to that. (laughs)

   9. HSHarry Stebbings51:35

      No. Like, you could do, you could do Founders Fund, nice upside, ni- nice upside, or you could do, like, um, Sequoia. Are we going for a Sequoia? Give me one.

   10. VHVince Hankes51:44

       We're c- we're concentrated. We only, we only invest in ourselves. I, uh, I can't give you one, Harry.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings51:51

       (laughs) If you were to invest in one seed firm, can you give me a seed firm?

   12. VHVince Hankes51:56

       (laughs) I can. I don't know him personally, but Nat Friedman, uh, who's now focused a lot on AI and I think has his own fund, um, I've really respected some of the stuff that I've seen him go do and, uh, I would be certainly interested in putting money in his fund.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings52:12

       What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months, Vince?

   14. VHVince Hankes52:16

       This is probably more k- this is not for the rapid fire, but, you know, one thing that's become clearer as we've kind of come out of or gone into this more, a difficult environment to operate in, is, in the good times, we probably over-attribute to teams and products how good they are. And in the bad times, you can't just blame everything on macro, but I think it makes you reflect on the over-attribution you probably did in the good times. And so, you know, one thing I've changed my mind on is, you've got to be more balanced about how much credit you give to the momentum of a company from the market environment versus the actual execution they're doing, and know that there's the balance there, and, you know, good execution doesn't always mean that it leads to great momentum. Sometimes great momentum is also influenced by these market environments or variables that are harder to quantify.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings53:13

       What do you think was the craziest thing we saw happen in the low interest rate environment of 2020 to 2022?

   16. VHVince Hankes53:21

       I mean, global pandemic aside and lockdown, you know, obviously I think that was the most, uh, I think we'll remember that forever. Crypto stands out. I mean, we talked about peak market cap and dot-com. I think crypto's peak market cap for, you know, tokens was like 3 trillion, somewhat similar and, you know, the most iconic company that people talked about, you know, was a fraud. I th- I think, like, we're gonna look back on that, particularly from an investor lens, and say there's these hype cycles that lead to massive speculation, and sometimes even the things people think are most real are just not.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings53:55

       Yeah. No, I totally get you. Okay, you're on incredible boards. You can choose one board member for your company. Who would you choose?

   18. VHVince Hankes54:04

       Well, I think it depends on the company, but, you know, this is like picking favorites. I'm lucky to work with so many great people. You know, the person that stands out that I've learned so much from is Erik Vishria. He's on the Benchling board, he's on the board of this company I work with called Airplane. Erik is, I think, just an incredible blend of has the operational instinct rigor but also is fun to be around and he's able to land his messages in a really effective way with entrepreneurs, and he also just has, like, a really great balanced perspective on being commercial and understanding how all of that works, interplays with the strategy of the company. And-I found that perspective to be something that I'm continually learning from as I'm listening to him and when you find those kinds of people, you know, I think you just want to surround yourself with them.

   19. HSHarry Stebbings54:50

       What's your biggest lesson from working with Josh, Vince?

   20. VHVince Hankes54:54

       The- there's so many lessons, it's hard. Josh is an amazing person. I think, and this might, you know, this is not about investing but I think with Josh, my biggest lesson is, is really that, like, to be successful you don't have to compromise on all of the things that are important that are not your career. Your family, your friends. Josh, you know, one of the most amazing parts of being around him is his warmth and empathy and his priority of his family over everything else is so obvious when you spend time with him and I've respected that so much about him and I think it's even changed the way that I prioritize how I run my life.

   21. HSHarry Stebbings55:37

       I, I, I love that and I, I totally agree with you. Um, that's lovely to hear. Um, tell me Vince, final one, uh, what do the next five years hold for you? When we sit down in 2028...

   22. VHVince Hankes55:49

       (laughs) .

   23. HSHarry Stebbings55:49

       ... where do you want Vince to be then?

   24. VHVince Hankes55:51

       Well, hopefully we'll be talking about some amazing AI companies we invested in that created lots of value for us both, but I think, you know, we have a lot of ambition at Thrive as a firm, and I hope to be a big part of us building it and ultimately going and backing some of the next trans- transformational companies, but also building our team and maintaining this amazing culture that I think we have and attracting some of the most talented people that want to go invest in these kinds of companies to come work with us and so I hope if we talk again in five years, we're talking about those companies, we're talking about the people on our team and ultimately, um, you know, we're, uh, we're really excited about all that stuff.

   25. HSHarry Stebbings56:28

       Vince, thank you so much for putting up with my prying questions and kind of not letting you get off on some of them.

   26. VHVince Hankes56:34

       (laughs) .

   27. HSHarry Stebbings56:34

       I really appreciate it, but this has been fantastic man, and I've wanted to do it for a while 'cause I've heard so many good things so thank you so much man.

   28. VHVince Hankes56:41

       Thank you Harry, it's really fun to chat.

Episode duration: 56:42