Full transcript: Max Neiderhofer on London Real
0:29 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. I also host London Real, which is a similar three-person format. We just had Bruce Perry, which is the guy from BBC’s Tribe, in here last week. We had the four-hour work week’s Tim Ferriss, futurist Jason Silva, and even drug smuggler Howard Marks have all been right there in that chair.
0:47 So in your spare time, check that out. But this is Silicone Reel. My co-host today is Mr. Bryce Keene, who is the founder and director of Albion Drive and is also a member and founder of, you guessed it, The Three Beards. This is one of them, folks.
1:02 They run the weekly Silicone Drinkabout, which is right here in Shoreditch. Literally, like, clicks away from where we’re right now, which is a weekly event on Friday nights, except for tonight. You have your second edition of? Chew the Fat. Chew and the Fat.
1:16 Can you just tell us what that is? It’s a monthly evening conversation with a high profile VC entrepreneur, ecosystem player designed to bring the community closer to the people that make the headlines and let them ask questions of those people. Fantastic. Along with beer and food. And beer and food on top of that.
1:31 Yeah, you had Ben Salforth interviewing Rohan Silva, I think last one, right? That was it, yeah. That was our very first one. And tonight we’ve got three VCs, one of whom is with us today, but I’ll let you do that intro. Fantastic.
1:44 I don’t want to ruin the mojo. Looking forward to that later. I love your first one. I watched it on video. It was fantastic.
1:49 We like Ben. Ben was the very first guest on this show, which is cool. Yeah, it’s always good. But moving on, our guest is Mr. Max Neiderhofer, who is a venture capitalist with Sunstone Capital, which is a billion-dollar fund based in Copenhagen.
2:02 I like that city a lot. You were formerly with Excel Partners, Atlas Venture, and you were also an entrepreneur with Quirly, which was a data marketing service. Well pronounced. Thank you. Thank you.
2:14 Welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you for having me. I was curious if you could just tell us what has Copenhagen been like? How is it different from London or from Germany where you grew up? Sure.
2:26 So I actually grew up in Germany and Canada, right? So my German heritage is like half of my childhood and then Canada is the other half. Copenhagen is super relaxed. It’s a very nice town. It is a town where public policy has created large open spaces for people to hang out.
2:43 And it’s certainly just very pleasant, right? The air is better than London. The pace is a bit slower. The food’s very good. So I’m very happy to have made the move.
2:51 After 10 years in London, a bit of a change of scenery was quite good. OK, nice. The air’s better. This is fighting words, right? Well, are you going to really take that fight on, though?
3:01 I don’t know if I am. No, probably not. There are some very good restaurants there. There are some top gastronica places, right? I forgot the name of it, but there’s one of them.
3:09 Noma, which used to be the top restaurant in the world, is there, and now it’s number two. And there’s a bunch of other places. You know, it’s funny. Restaurants are a bit like startups. They spawn this ecosystem.
3:20 And NOMA has had a bunch of people that they’ve imported to Copenhagen, sous chefs, head chefs, people running the front of the restaurant. And they’ve all, after a while, met Danish girls, decided to stay in Copenhagen, and have opened other restaurants. Great, Danz. Great. Have you heard all the Denmark cracks?
3:43 Have you heard that is it rotten in Denmark? Have you heard of it? Yeah, absolutely. Did all of your friends email you that joke? Well, the thing about Hamlet is really that Shakespeare never visited Denmark, right?
3:57 And he based it off of this castle, Elsinore. And it’s, I mean, you go to the castle, but he hadn’t even visited it right now. And Elsinore is marketing itself as the Hamlet Castle. And it actually has nothing to do with it whatsoever. So, yes.
4:08 Tourism. The joys of good farm marketing. So he had never been, huh? He had never, well, that’s what I read. I think you’re right.
4:15 Don’t look it up. It wouldn’t surprise me. He imagined well, right? Right. Very good.
4:20 You know, I saw a quote from you and I thought I would just kick it off with this. And so I’m gonna quote, you’re telling me if I’m right. Yeah, there’s no profanity in this quote. Not in this one. You said the real problem is the Series A crunch.
4:30 There’s not enough of those VCs around. So you have the pick of the litter. Is that accurate? And what did you mean by that? Well, I mean, that’s obviously a little extreme, But I think it’s true that we have a ton of seed financing in Europe.
4:43 There are a lot of successful angels doing investments. There are a lot of micro VCs, kind of small seed funds, incubators, accelerators. So we have a ton of seed companies. I think 2,000 to 3,000 new companies created in the tech space in Europe per year. And then I think I can count on, not two hands, but there’s maybe three, four, five dozen series A financing.
5:07 So it’s a minute percentage of the companies that actually get created. So I think the Series A crunch is very real. I think there are very few Series A investors in Europe. Again, maybe a dozen funds or so. And in general, that’s a huge problem, right?
5:22 And I think governments are kind of trying to create new funds. They’re trying to invest direct partially, at least in Germany and Denmark, partially in the UK. I think that’s healthy, but it’s quite dire. If you’re an entrepreneur in Europe, the best advice is build a company that you can bootstrap. Don’t depend on external financing.
5:43 Okay, so that’s where you come in, and some other VCs. Well, that’s what we had Simon in the studio, and his big thing we talked about this before is the Series B crunch. I mean, one of his lines is that obviously if you raise Series A in the US, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be able to raise a second round, a third round whereas in Europe it’s one in five, or something like that. And that’s one of his things, those growth rounds. Which is interesting, actually, to hear you say Series A, and he says Series B.
6:11 I mean, semantics, right? It’s a question of, I mean, what is Series A anymore, right? When Halo raised, you know, their seed round from Wellington and Etobicoke was $3 million, right? Is that a seed round? Is that an early Series A without having the product launch, and then Accel came in and did, I think, something like a $15, $16 million Series A?
6:31 Or is it a Series B, right? I mean, it’s really a question of definition, so you don’t really know. The fact is there is very little follow on. Financing, there’s very little institutional capital at all in Europe. And I think that is a problem.
6:43 You know, it’s one thing we always ask the guys that are here, and a lot of times are entrepreneurs, but I think it applies for VCs as well. We always just ask them quite blatantly. When it comes to Sunstone, what have you guys done? What do you plan to do? And I always ask, why will you win?
6:58 What makes you think that you guys will win in your space? What do you define as winning? I mean, I say succeed over the others. or what makes things- I mean, I think there are so few people in this market that I think we have to be interested in making everyone successful, right? I think we want the entrepreneurs to succeed.
7:14 We want the funds that we syndicate with to succeed. We want the ecosystem in general to flourish. So I’m not, the market is not competitive to the point of where we are actually very happy to co-invest with other people, to see our companies raise follow-on financing from funds and partners that we consider friends. I think the biggest or the best answer to why we will do well and have done well in the past is that we are just able and willing to accept risks that other people are not able or willing to accept.
7:51 The best example of that is what’s potentially our biggest company. It’s a presentation software company called Prezi. That was built out of Budapest, where We did the Series A pre-launch, and the company then raised money from Excel in the U.S. in the Series B. Today has over 20 million registered users, still growing like wildfire.
8:11 And for us, it’s very interesting because it’s in a strategically important space, right, which is productivity software, where Microsoft has PowerPoint, but PowerPoint’s an aging product. Apple has Keynote, but it’s a software product that’s not as mature, is definitely not accept an enterprise, and Google with Google Apps has a, you know, a good and interesting take on the segment, but it’s nowhere close to the usage that the other ones have. So that’s why we think it’s strategic, and for us it’s a very good company.
8:38 Now the question is kind of how did we get there, and I think the, or how did we get to invest in the series? Say, not other people, and the answer to that is, you know, we have a relatively young team. It’s very hungry, very aggressive, has lots of stamina, travels a lot, and generally when it meets these companies is able to make decisions very quickly. And I think compared to a lot of the other, especially the larger funds, our decision-making processes because we’re for investing partners around the table, we can come to a decision within 24 hours, right?
9:11 So we do make decisions very quickly when we like an entrepreneur and we like a take on a certain market. I think that’s one of the reasons. The other one is that we do do a lot of research. So this is actually something I learned at Excel, so more power to them. that they have this quote internally, chance favors the prepared mind.
9:28 And I think if you keep up with technology in certain segments, if you do the work, then once you come upon an entrepreneur who’s doing something interesting, you’re able to value that more quickly than other people. You know, you say the city Budapest, and I’m sure a lot of funds just shut their radar down. Sure. Yeah. Good.
9:46 Yeah. Is that what you mean by you willing to take risks and look at some things that other people might just So I don’t even want to get involved with that country or that foreign currency. I mean, I can’t think of a single European investor that would say central European countries are off the radar, especially since they’re European Union now. They have well-established legal systems. They’re cheap to operate in.
10:11 So I would be surprised if anyone said, we don’t want to invest there. I think if they can’t invest there is something else. Russia, Turkey are a bit more on the emerging market side of things, and it’s a bit more complicated to invest. I think when we say we’re willing to take risks, it’s not so much geography as it is product adoption risk, market risk to some extent. We like betting on people that our bets that others might consider contrarian.
10:40 We like product-focused entrepreneurs. We like people with deep knowledge of their space that are perhaps not as commercial as other people, right? So we’ve kind of said, of course we like people who’ve gone to HBS. Of course we like people who’ve kind of done it before as serial entrepreneurs. But at the same time, we’re willing to take significant bets on folks who have a great product background.
11:03 I think that’s unusual in Europe, right? There are just not that many engineers, CEOs. And Prezi is a prime example of someone, you know, Peter Arvai, who’s scaled incredibly well. Yeah, I’ve used it before. It’s like an interesting replacement for PowerPoint, is how I remember when it first came out.
11:20 And it just makes you imagine standing in a board room and you’re, one, two, we’ve all done that, right? It visually moves and you kind of just have one big canvas and then the screen kind of moves around. It’s quite, visual keeps people awake a bit more, I guess, than just, it’s an interesting product. And probably now, to date, probably Hungary’s most high profile startup, I would say. By far, I don’t know if there are any others.
11:42 I don’t know, I don’t know. There’s one other one, and I’m glad you can’t edit this, and ignore it. This is not a VC case. Hungary’s best startup is a company called LiveJasmine.com, which is a voice and video over IP startup. Let’s call it that way.
11:58 And it’s… It’s porn, isn’t it? It is. Okay. Just checking.
12:03 It is, but it’s phenomenally profitable. And we had a… We… Apparently, I wasn’t there… I could tell.
12:08 I wasn’t there with… I could tell, because there’s always that voice and video over… Well, it’s webcams, right? It’s cam to cam kind of stuff. And apparently we had, look it up on Alexa, it’s like the top five site in every European country.
12:19 It’s amazing. That’s interesting. We had a chance to invest in it, but obviously we didn’t. Those guys are very, very rich. Wow.
12:27 Now you said obviously you didn’t. What keeps you from investing in something like that? We have investors that are public funds, pension funds, and our agreements with them limit us from doing something that is not generally considered, you know, in the public interest. Is that sketched out in a charter or is that just something that you… It’s part of our limited partnership agreement, absolutely.
12:49 So we can’t do, you know, pornography, we can’t do gambling, we can’t sell hard liquor online. Okay. What’s the definition of porn, like some judge in the US once said, like, you can’t define it but you know when you see it. It’s like art. Is that the definition of a company you can’t invest in, you can’t define it?
13:05 I think anything selling naked stuff over the internet’s probably. Yeah, we had the big debate, which was fantastic here with Wonger and the church. Did you see that story? No. Oh goodness, the archbishop came up and was like, oh it’s terrible, Wonger.
13:19 And then he went on national television to sort of say it was just a terrible thing, and then the next day it came out that the Anglican or whatever the church was had invested in the fun that it invested in Wonger. Oh really? Oh, that was unbelievable. How’s the public opinion towards Wonga at the moment? I don’t know. It sways and it goes. I mean, I think, love them or hate them. They are there and they are here to stay.
13:52 I guess the thing with Wonga is, I can’t really comment because it’s kind of a divisive type of start-up, I guess, in many ways. but at the same time, there is the argument that they are the most transparent of a very shadowy industry. It doesn’t make it right or wrong, it just means they’re more public and therefore the biggest punching bag, but do you see what I mean? It’s kind of one of those things where we can’t pretend that payday loans has never existed.
14:19 It’s been in the UK for a long time, and this time they’re riding off, they’ve got debt or whatever, but there used to be a guy comes around to your house with a big bat and breaks your leg. So I think we’ve gone a long way from there. I think that’s nice. You no longer sends angry letters. Yeah.
14:32 I mean, I think, so I met these, I met Errol and John T for the first time when they were raising their series B and I was at Atlas. They’re great entrepreneurs. They are. They really are. I think Errol is probably one of the smartest people I know.
14:46 John T is an artist when it comes to tech. I think he’s phenomenal. Now, they’ve applied kind of a tech mindset an industry that was very shadowy, and I’m not sure why I came out on it morally ethically, but at the very least they’re selling a product that a lot of people want, right? And now it’s up to public policy to say whether they are too profitable, but in the end, clearly there’s a demand for it, and if people need to get loans, apparently these guys are better at it than the banks.
15:21 Yeah, exactly, and I think we’re going to try and get one girl on the show at some point. I think, you know, they’re in the headlines for these splashy pieces where they’re battling with the Archbishop, but just like any kind of scandalous headline in the sun or something, I think people look past that and then they keep using the service and they keep doing something right. Yeah, exactly. I think it’s going to be here for a while. Yeah, I mean, I think so.
15:42 The nice thing about WONGA is that, and it’s kind of part of the companies I always mentioned, is they will drive a, you know, the new generation of investment in European venture capital. And I think WONGA going public, Spotify going public, Just Eat, to some extent, Wix, but Rovio and Supercell. There’s all these great companies that are about to sell. They’re at a billion plus valuation. King.com as well.
16:10 And I think at that point, once these companies have demonstrated that you can build a very large tech business in Europe. Some of the investors in venture capital funds that have stayed away from the market for the last couple of years are going to come back. And that’s great. I think that’s good for all of us. Yeah, that’s the other thing. It does fuel the next generation. When people are that good, they turn around and say, okay, now we want to start investing in the next generation and we know what we’re looking for. That’s a very powerful thing to have a look at.
16:40 Yeah, and we could use some big exits, like you said, and get some more money to be invested. We always have a devil’s advocate part of this venture. So I’ll start off then you can ask them a question next. I mean, I look at Sunstone and I see a couple things that I’m sure are very obvious. First of all, you’re located in Copenhagen.
16:55 You’re not in like a necessarily a major metropolitan area and your fund size is a billion dollars. So does that restrict you by not having, say, more capital or not being in a London or a Berlin or something like that? Yeah, does it? Okay, so first of all, just to correct that perception, we have a billion dollars in committed capital. So across all of the funds that Sunstone manages, It’s $900 million or something like that.
17:21 Now, two-thirds of that is life sciences. So I have very little to do with that, except I have partners that are running separate funds that are investing only in life sciences. Now, on the tech side, we have three funds that are Sunstone-denominated, and the last one of that is the one we’re investing, because we’re actually investing a fund that’s $110 million. So that’s much smaller, right? So it’s a traditional kind of $25 million per investing partner, that’s traditional early stage venture capital kind of size.
17:52 In terms of the location Copenhagen, I was very skeptical when I joined Sunstone about the location, because I was that all the good companies in Europe come through London. They all travel there to get capital. And I think that’s still true. The wonderful thing about Copenhagen is that you are really smack deck. If you look at a map of Europe, you’re in the middle.
18:10 It takes me 45 minutes to get to Berlin on a flight. It takes me two hours to London, takes me two hours to Paris. It takes an hour or so to Stockholm. It’s very central. So I can hop to anywhere.
18:23 Is it more difficult to get companies to travel to Copenhagen? No doubt. But is it easier for me to do my job when I’m on the road three to four days a week? So I’m living 15 minutes from the airport. And from my house to the gate after check-in takes me 25 minutes.
18:39 That’s awesome. I can’t get that in London. So to some extent, it’s making life easier for me. One of the things that attracted me to Sunstone was we’re entrepreneurs in our own right. It’s not an old fund founded in 2007.
18:54 So we’re getting to build what I consider like a technology asset management firm to some extent. We’re starting off in an early stage venture, and I’m very certain we’ll be successful there. But we also want to do other things. So I think Copenhagen as a location has its benefits, it’s disadvantages, but so does London, right, because the infrastructure is absolutely awful. Yeah, I avoid the airport at all costs. I just take the whole thing. And then when you get into Luton Stansted, it gets even more. It gets even worse. Okay, that’s fair enough. Talk to me, Bryce. So, devil’s advocate question. Yeah. So, my burning question, because this is the first time I met Max now, but I’ve known of Max for quite a long time through the Twitters. He’s at Max Max Niederhoff. He’s very funny on Twitter. One of my favorite tweets actually is, it’s one of my favorites. Your business is in shortage and your servers are in the USA. The only thing in the cloud is you. I quite like that one. That stuck with me. I don’t know why it just pulled. It just made me laugh. However, so Max I knew from the Twitters and around mainly, and it’s obviously the first time we’ve met for the interview, but Max was, as far as I was aware, probably the most high profile face of Excel in London, at least in the and public in the community.
20:06 People knew who he was, he was out there, he was doing his recruiting. So you were the Vice President at Accel. Devil’s advocate question, what made you take a step away from that kind of role, which obviously is a quite very, very high profile kind of role in a very, very central city as Vice President of Accel to go and do sort of this to Sunstone, which again, you’re still, in my opinion, the most high profile of that fund, but that’s more about, because you’ve been around and done lots of things, but what convinced you to take that step?
20:34 And I mean, probably playing into Brian’s point about Copenhagen obviously being a sort of a slightly left of center choice. But this was in April, then you made the move, is that right? Yeah, January, February. I left Accel April, I joined Sunstone. I mean, I think to make a couple of, there needs to be a bit more subtle answer, right?
20:54 Because I think it’s kind of double-pronged. So I think I may have been the most visible part of Accel. But that doesn’t mean that Excel isn’t visible in venues that are not necessarily Twitter or TechCrunch. Excel is incredibly active and is very much in front of a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of very good entrepreneurs. And they are top of mind and top of consideration set.
21:22 And so there’s always, there’s kind of the public face, right? And then there’s what they actually do. And I think, you know, Excel has great people, right? I mean, Sonali, Philippe, and Kevin, and so on. I mean, I think they’re a phenomenal team.
21:40 And that’s why they win a lot of deals in Europe as well. So it was hard to leave. It was hard to leave Excel. But I left for a very simple reason, which is that I was in a position when I was an entrepreneur that I got to make my own decisions. And at Excel, I was in a supporting role.
21:58 Vice president meant I was working for other people, helping find deals, helping execute deals, but I wasn’t doing my own investments. And as an angel, you know, I’d back Last of Am, I’d back One Fine Stay, and Skim Links, and a bunch of other companies, and that’s what I love to do. So, you know, when Sunstone came along, it actually gave me the opportunity to become a professional investor and do my own deals. That’s just, that was just a very good offer, right?
22:24 And I think in terms of kind of the actual offer, they’re very Scandinavian about it, which is that we’re all equal, right? which is fantastic, I think in a London-based fund before you become a fully equal partner, it takes years and years and hard work. So for that reason, Sunstone was incredibly attractive. I think it’s a fantastic platform to operate on. They have a strong brand.
22:45 I actually don’t think I’m the most well-known partner at Sunstone. I think Nicolai Nijholm, who’s probably less known in London but more known in the Nordics than I am, they have a managing partner, Jimmy, who has run mutual funds, run his own companies before he founded Sunstone, and so I think it’s a, and Christian who did the original Prezi investment, so I think it’s a very good kind of mix of people. So for me, it was kind of, you know, the decision to leave Excel was not an easy one, but I also hadn’t been there very long, right?
23:13 It was like a year and a bit. Okay, yeah, so I guess the semantics thing, really, because I think it’s like the perception of the vice president. Yeah, no one knows that vice president is just a supporting role, right? Like, I’m gonna assume that it’s something cool, but- Same in banking. Right, exactly.
23:28 Yeah, it’s definitely not managing director. Analyst VP, director, MD. Right, exactly. And I met some MDs that don’t do a whole lot either. So that’s another talent gets tossed around.
23:36 I had another question, actually. This is actually just an earlier point. Not a devil’s advocate question. This is just something you mentioned earlier, which was about Sunstone being quite proactive about co-investing. And you mentioned the phrase friends and partner funds.
23:53 I was just curious, because this is kind of interesting, from an ecosystem perspective, you know, who’s on that list and how do you define them? Like who’s a friend and a partner fund? Who are sort of the VCs that you know and like and how do you decide who they are? Or is it literally a long time of relationships? Are there people that you might pick up the phone to first?
24:10 If so. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think you kind of pick your list of favorite people and you have, you know, in this business you are always working in the interest of the company. So you’re kind of asking yourself, you know, who could I work with that would make this company better? and who could invest and help this company.
24:28 So I think when I say friends, it’s very personal, at a personal level. There are funds out there that have good brands, where I say, you know what, I think that person or that person with that fund is better. Because they might be more analytical, they might be hungrier, they might not have a huge portfolio, and they might actually be able to put in legwork with a company. Or we might just be very aligned when it comes to how we view this industry and what we want the company to become.
24:57 So yes, it’s based on personal relationships. And very frankly, brand of the fund comes second. And I would tell every entrepreneur always, don’t be blinded by Sequoia or Andreas and Horowitz or Index. In the end, it depends on the partner you’re working with. And don’t get me wrong, I mean, those funds very careful about selecting the people but I’m you know every place has great people and good people and and more average people right so just be sure about who you’re working with because you’re going to be working with that person five to eight years. It’s just interesting to me, I find it’s an idea because you know from the outside VCs you know they often it’s all about sort of competition for deals and deal flow and kind of getting investors but then there’s also this other world which is like people who are kind of close friends, frenemies, chummy, you know there’s a whole world underneath which is like they know every VC knows if they can have to pick up the phone who the first other VC they’ll call is. I’ve always found this like everybody mentally they don’t usually reveal it but everyone’s got the they just know and it’s probably just from years and years of experience and I think I think that’s kind of information symmetry is the biggest issue that an entrepreneur has when raising capital right like you know we do this all the time right we negotiate deals all the time we know the deal terms, right? This is customary, this is what we always get, right? And we know the people
26:23 We want to work with, right? And the entrepreneur kind of goes into it and is essentially within a space of three to six months asked to marry himself and his company to this guy that he barely knows, right? For seven years, right? Right. And I think that’s a really tough decision to make. So it’s like negotiating a prenup without like barely having understood the concept of marriage. And so I think For that reason, we try to be extremely transparent.
26:48 We try to be very entrepreneur friendly. But everyone’s going to tell you that, right? So in the end, that’s probably not differentiating. Competition is fierce. It can be very fierce.
27:01 And sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, right? And I think it’s probably very healthy. We have a lot of people that are listening from the states. And I don’t think they understand the little nuances of what goes on in Europe. and Bryce brought in a magazine and it outlined, what is it, Wired, is that it?
27:18 This is the, just come out today, hold off the press, why are Europe’s 100 hottest startups? Right, so it’s listing like the top 10 startups in a variety of cities from Barcelona to Moscow to London. So if your company’s not in there, are you gonna fail? It’s all press, don’t listen to the press, including us. That is the question, well, that is the question.
27:37 Yeah, but if you could tell us, you know, you live on the continent, you grew up on the continent. What’s the difference if I walked into five startups in Berlin versus five in London? What would feel different? What’s different about the people, the work ethic, the funding, the ecosystem? Can you just break it down for us?
27:56 Well, I mean, I think using Berlin is a very interesting example, because the diversity of startups in Berlin that you find is very interesting. You find startups in Berlin that are operating exactly the same way a startup in London would operate. But Berlin also has very savvy entrepreneurs that have come out of rocket or that have a ton of experience from their former positions. And they are very just savvy operators, good executors. So I think in Berlin, to some extent, you find more of those startups that are just run super well.
28:27 I think the German work culture is not necessarily conducive to a startup. So I think you’ll find people putting in longer hours in London in general. The German work culture is do your nine hours and go home. Do your eight hours and go home? Yes, do your eight hours well.
28:40 Whereas the London equivalent is do your 14 hours in a playful setting. Yeah, yeah, and Silicon Valley is do your 18 hours and shut up. Well, I mean, I think there is a difference. But I mean, it’s hard to pinpoint, right? Because you have different types of companies in London as well, and it’s very hard.
29:01 If you compare the averages, you’ll You’ll find more tactical, less pie-in-the-sky kind of startups in Berlin. You’ll find semi-big visions in London, but often people who were in media and so on. And then in the Bay Area, you’ll find extremely kind of sophisticated tech entrepreneurs who are focused on getting the best kind of talent in the Bay Area that they can recruit and the best investors. You know it’s a different kind of It’s a different level of operating there to some extent because it’s so well established what you need to do in the first couple of months In Europe, it’s more haphazard, right?
29:42 Do you try to put together the best team that you can but I mean just culturally not everyone’s willing to join a startup, right? Okay, no, it’s good. I keep hearing about Berlin, but you know, I haven’t been I haven’t felt the scene I didn’t I just don’t know what it’s like So it’s all about the big debate in Berlin is all about rocket. Do you know about rocket? I’ve heard the term so there’s a rocket internet is a very I don’t know if you want to explain at max But it’s a it’s a very very Unique shall we say?
30:07 Accelerator in Europe as a whole I Mean it’s a company builder right? I mean they’ve built companies. They take concepts. They believe can be potentially big businesses and and supply those concepts with entrepreneurs if you want it or managers right then development marketing capability and so on then they kind of spin out that company from from within rocket so it’s more I mean I would say it’s more than an accelerates really an incubator right it’s trying to really build create new companies they’ve been very successful I mean they they own what is close to the largest e-commerce company in Europe which is the Lando they have a couple of other ones like that in the pipeline home 24 is probably the the second largest one and they do things around the world right so they have things in Brazil and in Southeast Asia and it’s a Phenomenal achievement right you’re a former entrepreneur and and means that you you must miss operating to a certain extent So we always ask people in that chair if you had to To quit your job right now and I put you back in London with say five million pounds And there was an industry that you wanted to get into where you would be the CEO again What’s exciting right now like what would you what would you do if it was London this gave me five million pounds?
31:19 I’d probably invest that very probably in other startups Right, in one company. So I mean, there’s an excellent reason why I’m an investor and not an entrepreneur. I think I’m a better investor than I am an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurship side with the attention to detail and the people management side, that’s just, I’m not as good at it as other people, and I’m a much better stock picker, right? I think it’s a very hard question, you know, if I had to put five million pounds into a company, because that’s a lot of money.
31:51 I think if I were to double down on an industry without amount of money, I would probably do something either in payments or in travel. I think both of those segments are very interesting. Payments is hard to do with regulatory barriers to entry, but you can still do very interesting things. I mean, I don’t understand. I have a friend who runs SumUp.
32:13 I’ve looked for investment at iZettle. Those are all competitors of Square in the US. For me, the mobile wallet is not solved. I mean, there’s absolutely no reason why my credit card shouldn’t be somehow integrated into my mobile phone. And the easiest way to do that is the way Halo does it, which is to do stored card.
32:29 You just store your card on your phone, and then if you want to pay someone, you put in their email address. So why has no one done a mobile PayPal? I don’t get it. And that’s the end game of a square anyway. So I think there’s a way to shortcut that and just go over the top and do the WhatsApp payment.
32:42 And there’s actually a company here in the UK that’s trying to do that, which is pretty cool. I think I like travel in general because it’s a segment that makes people dream. It’s very nice. I love traveling. I love seeing new places.
32:53 And I think travel is just great because it has this universe of companies that want to acquire cool travel startups. And that’s why I think it’s just something interesting to do in that space. There’s a lot left to be done. I think TripAdvisor is not the be-all and all of how to find a hotel. Trevago is not the best meta search for hotels.
33:15 There’s a company in Berlin called Euro that’s actually trying to do, you know, trying to make you compare buses and trains versus flights, because for some distances that are just the better, the better mode of transportation. So I think there’s a lot you can do in travel and travel is the biggest e-commerce segment. It’s very profitable. Interesting. I haven’t heard travel brought up before, so that’s very good.
33:36 When you get an email from someone that says, hey, Max, look at this company or look at our company. Is there like three things that come up first, like, you know, who, what, where or blah, blah, blah. I mean, you know, you must get pitched all the time. Yeah, do you get pitched too much? Those are that well too much is Sometimes I get pitched in the wrong settings right like you’re in the back the urinal in the bathroom is a great one On a plane you’re sitting next to some random dude, and then he starts kind of going on about it That’s your mistake for telling what you do. Yes, I guess so I guess sometimes they look over and they kind of see oh You’re looking at a business plan. I think Ideally, you want kind of one concise sentence about what it is that the company does.
34:20 The people are most important, and oftentimes I find myself having to search for the name. And then what that person has done before, it shouldn’t determine how you see them. But right now, you have nothing to judge them with. So you do judge them. What university did they go to?
34:33 What have they done before? What companies were they at? What role did they have in those companies? I think that is, it is quite important to decide on whether you want to take a call with someone or not. I err on the side of taking more calls rather than less.
34:47 And that means that the days are long, but it’s very gratifying, at least, because also you can, even if you won’t invest in a large majority of things that you see, you can try to find people, and what do you think is the right way? And for them, it’s a data point. I mean, take it with a grain of salt, but it’s a piece of advice, and if they collate that from 10 or 15 people, maybe that’s helpful. And have you met people that three years later you’ve business with, or four years later, that they’ve just come around with a different business idea that you kind of bump into again? Yes, definitely. You know, I mean, sometimes, you know, you don’t invest in them the first time around, and maybe the company does pretty well, not great, and then they come back with another concept, and they’ve learned a lot. So those are, I mean, I really like entrepreneurs who’ve had a, you know, failed or a middling outcome right before, just because they’re still hungry, and they also know what they’re doing, which is great. So you don’t have have to pay for them to make the same old mistakes.
35:42 The other thing is I went through my inbox the other day and just looked at emails that I got from founders today who are very successful, who are asking for seed money. I found this wonderful email from Arno who founded HouseTrip. And he was like, hi, we’re doing something in the home, in the vacation listing space. And we don’t really have a product yet, but people really like us. And, hey, do you want to talk?
36:06 And I sent him back a two-liner saying, dude, just email me again when you have a product. And he never did, right? Which is fair enough. That was kind of my fault for not taking the call with him. And today, that company is very successful.
36:19 It’s raised a ton of money. So you come across people again and again. And I think that’s also why it’s important to just operate in the way that we at Sunstone and I think other people in this industry are trying to do, which is to give the young burgeoning slightly green, maybe slightly naive entrepreneur, their time of day. I think that’s a healthy thing to do for the entire industry. Do you like to see a failure under their belt?
36:47 I mean, I think it’s better than nothing, for sure. I think it means they have some experience. Other people who have had an easy success, as a pattern recognition, that doesn’t necessarily result in another good company. Sometimes they raise too much money, or they’re just the chairman of the company, They don’t really get involved. I mean, there’s a ton of things that come to mind.
37:12 We’re not going to name names. But serial entrepreneurs are not necessarily great entrepreneurs to invest in the second time around. But also, that is a rule that is not necessarily steadfast, right? Yeah, a rule to be broken. Bryce, what am I missing here?
37:28 I mean, I always look at this kind of on the surface, but you kind of know what’s going on behind the scenes. What else do we need to be asking him when it comes from, you know, his perspective as a VC. Are you at risk of finding yourself embroiled in a Scandinavian war? I’ve seen Stockholm and Finland in this wired top 100. I’ve not seen Copenhagen and Lord knows where Oslo is soon.
37:50 Well, I mean, here’s the thing, right? You have these… They’re very competitive in Scandinavia. I don’t know if you know them. They all like…
37:57 It’s like the most stylish yet most competitive part of the world. Yeah, explain that. Or can you? The relationship you guys have with the Norwegians, the Swedens, the Finns. I mean, I’m not Danish, right?
38:06 So I’m kind of an impartial observer here. I’m just given my German heritage. I’m just happy that they don’t look at me and go, well, we don’t like those people. So I think Copenhagen is a very good place to found a company. If you take Just Eat, which is one of the most successful tech firms in Europe, it was founded in Copenhagen.
38:30 Today, it’s classified as a UK company. Maybe they’ve done that for tax reasons. Maybe they’ve done it for operating reasons. I think Copenhagen is a good place to start. It’s fairly insulated.
38:40 There’s not much competition. There’s a deep pool of talent that you can draw from. It’s expensive compared to a Berlin, but it’s not necessarily expensive compared to a London. So do I think right now the hubs in Europe or London, Berlin, and Stockholm? Absolutely.
38:58 Like, no question. But then, you know, Helsinki has a specialty in gaming. Norway has a specialty in oil and gas production technologies. Copenhagen doesn’t have a specialty yet, and I think it’s completely fine. But we have a very strong background.
39:15 We have a deep pool of angel investors with Jesper Bouck, who founded Just Eat, with Klaus Neugel, who ran Just Eat, with Janus Freis, who founded Skype, with Mortenlund, who’s still very active locally, with Thomas Metzenmugde, who founded Podio, which was one of our investments that was sold to Citrix, Tommy Ellis who sold Zip to Vodafone and then did it again with Podio as the CEO. So, I mean, you know, there’s tons of stuff in Copenix. See, this is why we started the first Silicon drink about outside of London in Copenhagen.
39:47 I’m just saying, just saying, we got there first. We knew. Shameless self-promotion. We knew. It’s in there.
39:53 Actually, the reason I asked that, being not flippant at all, but since we started drink about in Copenhagen. We’ve now had emails from .com at Oslo and both of them said we’re not so worried about Norway but we can’t make sure the other one gets it first. Very competitive. We’ve recently had this announcement of the Twitter IPO and I was wondering what we can learn from this IPO as far as… I haven’t read the documents. No, as far as whether it’s profitable or not or whether we think it’s… Have you read the filing? I think it’s not. That’s kind of what I read. How much do you look to the states as far as what they’re doing? Do you see a lot of people in Europe that come to you that are just taking ideas from the US and trying them out in Europe, or do you find that things are completely separate?
40:37 You’re all very integrated. I mean, the information sharing between Europe and the US is constant. We like backing concepts that are already working in the US. We love taking companies to the US, like Prezi, an issue and Podio that are working in Europe and can work as well in the US. The US is the largest domestic market for software products, right?
40:59 And it’s where all the acquirers are. So the large majority of our investments, if they get acquired, they get sold to US companies. So it’s very important for us to know what’s going on in the US. To that end, we have a Menlo Park office with a partner there who is also very active and kind of recruiting and helping our company set up shop there and helping them sell and develop first business relationships. So yeah, for us it’s super important.
41:26 So do you, I was going to ask you, that’s one of my questions, so do you guys invest in US or do you primarily focus on the investment here in Europe and then you take them there when you’ve grown with them? So I think, I mean, over 80% of our investments are supposed to be in Europe and I think up to this point almost 100% are. So we like investing in Europe. We’re local here. This is where we know the market.
41:50 We see the occasional deal in the U.S. that might be good enough for us to co-invest with a U.S. investor, but our business is in Europe. So yes, is it flipping companies to the U.S.? Sure, but I mean, in the end, it’s about building a good business, right?
42:06 And whether that means the first market is Copenhagen, Denmark, or whether it is in Germany or whether the company goes to the U.S. very quickly just because all its customers are there and it has an innovative product and then corporates in the US are more likely to buy than European companies. We don’t really care that much. That’s just interesting. I always like that.
42:26 Yeah, no. I like people in Europe. I mean, as a VC guy or as a fund manager, how much time I asked Simon Cook the same question, do you spend raising money versus investing? I mean, it’s this tough role you have. The jewel, the two sides of the coin.
42:41 Most guys don’t like one or the other, but… I mean, it’s kind of like asking a CEO, how much time do you spend operating the business first? How much time do you spend fundraising? We fundraise once every four years or so. Now with Sunstone, I’ve joined a firm that raised its last fund at the tail end of 2011, made its first investments firm in 2012.
43:07 So we still have another two years or so of fresh investment capital left. That means, you know, the earliest we need to go out to fundraise is sometime in the next two years, probably at the end of those two years. So for me, my experience fundraising has been, is not non-existent, but it’s very low, right? So I don’t spend much time worrying about fundraising. I like taking meetings with limited partners, not just because that’ll help us fundraise, having built the relationship, but because it’s an interesting perspective on our market, I’d say it’s an outsider’s view on which teams are doing well, what strategies are working in Europe, why they’re excited about European venture, why they’re reluctant to invest in European venture.
43:53 I mean, right now, our entire industry has to fight against LPs thinking that European venture capital does not work, because it hasn’t worked in the past, and that’s why I’m desperately hoping for the IPOs of some of these companies, because they will show The limited partners, it seems like we’re under attack. They found out where we are. They fly those double rotor helicopter. They land it right over here by a pitch. Now it’s going to turn my phone off.
44:20 This is what happens when I turn my phone off for an hour. It’s quite a ringtone. Anyway, so just to conclude on that, I think the limited partner view of our industry is super important. That’s how capital will keep flowing to startups. It’s how, you know, it’s how we justify our existence.
44:39 And I think that relationship is very important. So it’s important to me to keep it right now, you know, less than 5% of my time is spent on that. Okay, just an overall question. It’s a very simple question too, but what’s the biggest mistake you see startups making? Is it a lack of financing or is there something, because you get to see a lot of things where you’re just like, I could have told you not to do that, that and that.
45:03 Is there some commonality you see? It’s a very hard question to answer because it’s so different. I think right now, we’re seeing a trend towards people setting up companies for the hell of it. And that’s very sad and slightly scary, right? It’s gotten so easy to set up a company that people are doing that because they feel like they need to or they feel like they can.
45:29 And a lot of people who are first-time entrepreneurs would probably benefit from staying with the awesome companies they’ve been in before, like Spotify or Rovio. It’s nice to see young people gaining more experience in those positions and not leave so early on the one hand. On the other hand, it’s great that people are excited about entrepreneurship. So it’s hard for me to answer that question. The biggest mistake is if you’re not passionate about something, if you’re not really interested in building a large business, there’s a question of why you’re founding a company.
46:08 And I see that quite a bit. And it’s very difficult. You can’t tell an entrepreneur, man, you shouldn’t be doing this at all. I don’t think you’re ready yet. I mean, I do sometimes tell people it’s a terrible idea.
46:24 But telling them, at this point in their career, they’ve already made that decision. They’ve taken the plunge. So all you can do right now is help them see that it goes relatively well. The other biggest issue, I think, is that people are doing things because they think theoretically it needs to be done, or they’re building a product that they think should exist, rather than making sure that they’re building something that people want. I think everywhere in venture, that’s the biggest problem.
46:51 And it’s compounded by the fact that if it makes sense to venture, they’ll raise a lot of money, and then they’ll try to push that product into the market. And that’s even worse, because now they’re not only they’re trying to sell something that people don’t want, but they’re spending a lot of money trying to sell something that people don’t want. I think those are some of the biggest issues. The limiting factor in Europe continues to be we don’t have enough quality management.
47:15 So I sometimes wish we had a bit fewer companies and a bit more focused on kind of making those companies succeed. Is the tech startup the new rock star? Is that why a lot of people just want to be the startup guy? a little bit. Yeah, it’s kind of, you know, it’s the nerdy sheet kind of thing.
47:34 You must, you must see this all the time. No comment? Couldn’t possibly comment. But let’s be honest, I mean, it is, you can track, you can track over the past five to ten years the way that it has moved from a subculture into popular culture in a very big way, and I think, you know, I think I’ve probably said this on the show before, but when you start making films like The Social Network about, you know, that suddenly, that’s a cinema, that’s, you know, millions of kids and young people going to see these films and it’s like all I have to do is get a marker and write on a piece of glass and then I’m gonna be famous and screw my mates up and rich right like those sort of moments I think and also you know the way that I think we talk about quite a lot but the way that technology has become seamless rather than like a thing that only you know the geeky did I mean we have these phones in our pockets we have apps and and like the media covers as mainstream.
48:32 It’s absolutely ubiquitous. Exactly. And that’s where you start to shift. And so people are like, oh, OK, so they see this thing. And they say, OK, well, you look at, obviously, the US is where a lot of this popular culture, cultural kind of influence around startups come from television culture, TV culture, film culture.
48:46 And a lot of people are young. And it focuses on the most successful. And a lot of those are very young. And so then you have this generation of people thinking that this is a get rich quick game. And that it’s a game she played.
48:56 And the question that’s interesting, your point, I had a friend who works at the BBC and she lived in New York for a while and she was kind of looking at this from like a, I’m struggling to find working class entrepreneurs because a lot of the people that come and pitch me stuff are like trust fund kids or middle class kids who they can afford to take a few years out and do this lifestyle thing, because it’s cool, rather than they desperately need to make this work or they are going to lose it all and I think there’s, to Max’s point, there’s kind of arguments for both that you need that optimism to get started somewhere, everyone’s going to start somewhere and nobody’s going to know what they’re doing in the beginning, but there’s also this kind of like, are you doing it because you love it or are you doing it because it’s cool and you saw a film and, you know, like.
49:40 Yeah. No, I can see it. I mean, the one thing I would wish on this industry was better media. I think, I mean, everyone’s going to hate me for this, but I’m not going to name publications, but everyone knows what the big blogs are in media. the quality of news reporting in tech is terrible, right?
50:00 Because they make it seem like a get British quick scheme, because they make it seem like startup lottery, because they don’t properly report on what the drivers of a business are. Because it’s not really the journalist’s fault, right? It’s just that a lot of these publications are run and employ people that don’t have the commercial experience, right? And so you get relatively superficial reporting that just makes people have the wrong idea of what it is to run a company, or how things like enterprise sales work, or how telesales work, or how online marketing actually works.
50:39 And I think that’s a pity, right? I think when Milo launched The Colonel, actually, I was very excited about when he said, I’m going to do deeper tech reporting, Because I want someone to dig into the bowels of a business and tell me what makes it work. What are the key performance indicators that drive decision making? What matters about a subscription model startup? And there are a lot of things that you cannot learn online, which is insane, because shouldn’t this be the biggest repository of knowledge that we have in the world?
51:15 The best place to actually get knowledge about startups is probably Quora, right? Because actually, people who know what they’re talking about are answering questions with some level of substance, right? And there is no depth in tech reporting. And that’s really too bad. So do you think, then, on that European scale, to follow up on that point that the kernel is doing that now, do you think that’s where it’s happening?
51:39 Or do you think that it’s not happening anywhere? Do you think it’s kind of changing? It’s interesting that you mark out the kernel, because, of course, it’s a very unique and controversial And we’ve spoken about potentially having Milo come in at some point to talk about it because it is an interesting concept and divisive, whether or not I think… I think Milo’s taken it in a different direction, which I cannot fault him for, right? Because I mean, first of all, he’s a friend, so I think he’s not had the easiest time and he’s kind of come back and that’s great.
52:12 I think when he said he wanted more depth and longer pieces and so on, he’s taken people that actually have something to say, and he’s created controversy, and that’s attracted traffic, and he needs traffic to sell ads. That’s a media startup. That’s great. What I was looking for is slightly different, but I also think that, had he done that, his business probably wouldn’t be successful. I can’t really fault them for that.
52:42 But if you run a media startup, the most successful one is the Huffington Post. And that’s definitely not kind of deep reporting, right? Jesus, I love Ariana, but the front page of the Huffington Post, it’ll make you want to hang with yourself. Well, I thought the other one is the Daily Mail. So you’re stuck between a real rock and a hard place on that one, but the Daily Mail is being the most profitable for that exact reason about links and traffic, which is a valid point.
53:04 I’ve got to finish up with the advice question, Max. We ask everyone this question. So I’m not singling you out if you could make a phone call to the 20 year old max meter offer and give that young man some advice What would you tell the 20 year old? Yeah 20. All right well The concrete advice, you know, which is kind of like the When you time travel and you get the lottery numbers the concrete advice is someone will offer you a weird founding position in a gambling startup in Antigua take it. Don’t go to the hedge fund. Don’t meet the Goldman Sachs dude. Don’t finish university. Just take that. You know, go for it. Move to the Caribbean because that guy is gonna go on and sell that company for 70 million dollars. He’s gonna spend a payment startup out of that company that he’s gonna sell for 600 million euros and then he’s gonna start a successful hedge fund. Like what are you thinking not joining this dude? So that was the worst financial decision in terms of opportunity cost that I’ve ever made.
54:05 I’ve never heard that answer before. No, that’s the new one for us, I think. No, listen, there are a couple more of those. The other thing is, I think, persistence and tenacity, which is something that, I mean, I think everyone has these things that they struggle with, right? And I’m intellectually a very kind of excitable person.
54:25 I like things, and once I’ve understood them, and then I kind of get bored with them, right? And I think as an entrepreneur, my mistakes have been that I didn’t stick it out. I think we were running my blog, which was a cool company. We’re getting a million registered users. It was Europe’s largest blogging network.
54:46 Blogger.com, it just sold. We met F. Williams here in London for dinner. It was cool, but no one really knew how to make money off of blogging. And we’re growing nicely, but the revenues were kind of not quite there.
54:59 Doing a couple hundred K a year and so I decided to leave and I was the kind of chief operating officer or founder or co-founder of the company and you know and that hit that company hard it was not it was not good if we had stuck it out we might have created you know a tumbler or at least you know kind of an exit that was a couple hundred million dollars that would have been nice not dissimilar right like with with Quirley I sold very quickly right um that business could have been something more now it was a fine exit for me I was happy with I said we were bootstrapped and so on. But I think as an entrepreneur, you need more staying power. And everyone that I see that has gone through that trough and that has come out the other side, I have a lot of respect for.
55:44 And so my advice to myself would be, you know what? Might look very bleak now, but you’ll figure it out. Don’t hop from one thing to the next. OK. On that same advice question, to that 20-year-old young man or a young lady that’s listening to us right now, what advice do you have to give to them if they want to, I don’t know, become a tech startup star or become a VC one day?
56:07 What do you tell them? Right. I don’t know. Wear sunscreen. Floss.
56:15 Right. Thank you. This is specifically to get into the business. Specifically to get into the business. I think go and join a team that you think is very good.
56:29 Work on that win that team for two years three years learn all you can go from one position to start up to the next I think startups are a perfect place to get a lot of responsibility very early That’s what’s exciting about it You can join it as a 20 to 21 year old and you can be running a part of it You know a company that has a hundred people the next year, right? That’s amazing So I think I think kind of putting in that time and learning properly is is very much worth it But I think try and go to the best school, best university that you can, because everyone in this society seems to have bought into the fact that folks who have gone to good schools are better at doing some things. Now, that is not necessarily true.
57:15 So please drop out of that school when you don’t feel like it anymore. But I think going through that experience of being somewhere at university and researching subjects, I think is interesting. I think getting into venture is incredibly difficult. And it might not be for everyone. I can’t honestly not give that person any good advice except for work at a startup, maybe found a startup, get some experience in this industry before you try and make the switch to the investment side.
57:48 You’re always going to be a better VC if you’re a very successful entrepreneur. I firmly believe that. we probably don’t have enough VCs in Europe that are former entrepreneurs. I think it’s getting better. We’re not quite there yet.
58:02 And then from that perspective, I mean, if you look at the most successful VCs in the US, maybe the successful entrepreneurs don’t make the best venture capitalists in terms of returns, right? You know, Michael Moritz, right? Tom Perkins, I mean, all those guys, actually Tom Perkins was an entrepreneur. Michael Moritz was a journalist, right? So all these prescriptions don’t mean anything.
58:25 I think do what you enjoy. And for me, the most attractive thing about this industry has always been the freedom to operate in something that you are a part of defining. You’re not one of those ants crawling out of the tube at 7 in the morning to go into some anonymous bank where you’re just a cog in the machine. You can make a real difference. I think that’s very nice.
58:50 So, you know, find your own way. I think it’s probably the final piece of advice. It’s good advice. Oh, that was good all around. One of our best answers.
58:58 Max, thanks so much for coming. I wish you all the best tonight at you, the fat. Oh, yeah. 7 p.m. It’s gonna be good, right?
59:04 Yeah, we got three VCs and Ben Southworth giving the old Ben Southworth grilling treatment. That should be much more, I’m sure it’s going to be a little bit more jumping up and down and fun and games. But, and hopefully, who knows? Max might get, hopefully not too many pitches at the end of a long day, but you never know. At the very least, they’ll get my email address and they can email me and then we should put that actually somewhere in the video.
59:28 I wouldn’t mind that. Yeah. So how do people get in touch with you? What’s your Twitter and can people email you straight? Right.
59:35 Absolutely. Just email me. I mean, I think my Twitter is Max Neiderhofer. Forget how to spell that. I’m trying.
59:40 Google will correct it. It’s max at sunstone.eu. Okay. And anybody can pitch you anything. Yeah, absolutely.
59:47 Okay. I may not take a call or a Skype with with everyone but at the very least I’ll send you a couple lines back I do recommend following him on Twitter do Google that name at max need alpha some great Pose of wisdom I’m always impressed by how accessible these VC guys are they’re like email me, you know, I thought they’re my this is what I Do I know I don’t know. I think a lot of people have big misconceptions about the VC world I said it before but I think they think you guys are up on these mountains with these long white beards and you choose the people that are going to be winners in this world and I don’t think they understand that you have a difficult job as well and you got to find these companies that are scalable. Am I wrong? So that’s exactly what we’re tackling tonight. Good. Cool people element. Yeah. Excellent. Thanks so much for being on.
1:00:29 Thank you. If you guys are listening to us on iTunes you can see our fresh faces. Bryce is looking extremely good today. Oh you. Stop it. I’m watching.
1:00:37 On our YouTube channel, Silicon Real. We’re on Twitter as well at Silicon Real and Boom, this is episode 15. If you guys have any suggestions for guests, please send them to our Twitter and Contact us and there you go, man. We got a bunch of cool guys set up for the next few weeks We are on we are all nice to have you back. Thank you. It’s good to be back cool man And good to be max finally, actually, it’s a nice nice way to meet someone for the first time Yeah, this is the best way to meet people. So as we say, it’s about the people. Thanks guys for being here. Appreciate it Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, take care Do you see that as a few fly to Silicon Valley and hang out in Mountain View and all that stuff?
