Jordan Nof of Tusk Venture Partners

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that explores the evolving landscape in the venture capital world. We'll have candid conversations with today's VCs and entrepreneurs who are shaping those changes. I'm Jim Veer, the managing partner of Veer, Negron, and Troff, and the president of CMEG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. It's great to be a cofounder of your own company, and I think that that's what really probably drives a tremendous amount of satisfaction to my day.

Being able to talk the talk about what it's like to be a founder, what it's like to be an entrepreneur, what it's like to not think that you're gonna be able to pay the bills and keep the lights on. And, you know, am I gonna get to that next point in this journey and get to a first close, get to a final close of our first fund? Are we even good at this job? Today on the Puck, we sit down with Jordan Noff, co founder of Tusk Venture Partners. Tusk specializes in investments with early stage technology, guiding startups in both heavily regulated markets and non regulated cowboy environments.

We unwrap the decisions behind their series a's choices, navigating their healthcare system investments, and the journey they traverse to walk hand in hand with founders. Jordan off from Tusk Venture Partners. It is great to have you here. Welcome. Before we talk about the Tusk story and where the puck is going, can you take a minute and give us a little bit about your background?

Yeah. Absolutely. And, Jim, thanks for having me on. One of the cofounders, managing partners of Tusk Venture Partners. My background is pretty unique in terms of how we ended up, me and my partner Bradley Tusken, ended up founding Tusk Venture Partners and what our focus is on, and we can dive into that a little bit later, but just a bit about my journey into venture capital and how I got here, where did I come from.

I've been in the venture capital industry for over ten years now, spent about half of that time building out Tusk Venture Partners, which we launched in 2016. But prior to that, I was at Blackstone working directly with the CTO on making strategic investments across our portfolio and trying to use those portfolio companies to further accelerate growth across the portfolio companies in the private equity space in the real estate buyout funds. So when we're looking now to this transition you've made to Tusk, tell us a little bit about the mission statement and the unique model that Tusk has. Sure. So I was introduced to my partner now by a cofounder that actually was the last deal I invested in while at Blackstone.

And I was introduced to Bradley, who was, at the time, really dabbling with working with startups and cut his teeth in helping companies navigate political and regulatory nuance with this little small transportation start up called Uber and helping them launch in New York, ended up meeting him and really understanding his background, which was very different from mine. So as I just mentioned, my background coming from your more traditional investor side, Bradley's coming out of the world of government and politics. And we started asking ourselves, wouldn't it be really unique to have a value proposition where our platform isn't focused on helping companies maybe hire their next twenty, thirty engineers or helping them with go to market strategies? But really our focus is on helping them navigate political nuance and regulatory hurdles that we can then turn into potentially opportunities by creating really a regulatory note around those businesses. When you're looking at potential companies that you're gonna invest in, and I think you work with companies like Bird and FanDuel, for instance.

How do you determine which companies are ones you wanna work with and that you should be attracting into your portfolio? Absolutely. It's a great question. So really, the idea is that we're looking at companies and our investment thesis is that instead of avoiding companies that are operating in highly regulated markets, we wanna be the go to fund for investing in those sectors. So we love regulatory risk because we believe that we can help founders execute against those risks associated with that better than any other venture capital firm on the planet.

That's a strong value proposition that we truly believe in, and we put that plan into action as exemplified by our portfolio being that, you know, we're a concentrated fund. We're only investing in 15 to 25 names per vehicle. And that's because we are betting on those founding teams and our ability to help them execute as they continue to scale in their regulated markets or help them scale with the new business model that they're introducing because there is no regulatory framework that exists like Burbn. So that's a great example, and I can kinda give you that background on how we got involved with that team and how we were able to translate that into what ultimately was a win with Burbn in the city of New York and helping them getting licensed and legalized in the state and the city. Yeah.

I'd love to hear that because Jordan, as you're talking about that you, from a VC perspective, are the premier firm that specializes in helping companies with regulation. And there may be some secret sauce trademarks or trade secrets that you don't wanna give out, but what is unique about your team that allows you to solve these challenges better than other people? Yeah. So what is unique and what are those challenges are the big unknowns. I would say that from a qualifications perspective, I can give you a few overviews of some of the companies that we've invested in and how our platform has helped them across various verticals.

One, transportation wise, so Bird fits the bill. So that company was when we invested, we invested at the series a. There were 68 scooters in Santa Monica. We're working out of a very small WeWork with no windows, nothing like the current company today. They knew and they understood the fact that this is a regulatory battle very similar to Uber's, that is not taken up with the Department of Transportation at the federal level.

This is a fight that happens at city halls across The US. That's where we show up and that's where the platform team really excels, is understanding how state and local governments impact technology investments and how to help navigate that type of politics because those are the areas where expertise really is a big deal. It's not knowing who to call. It's knowing how how to influence and how to drive that regulatory framework in a proactive way as a founder and helping shape that regulation going forward so that you're not necessarily keeping the door open for yourself because you don't want the door to stay open for others as well. So it's how to create that regulatory mode around your business and create a win win situation for local and state governments and yourself as well.

I can understand there are scooters being left all over the sidewalks. People are tripping all over them. There's people falling off without helmets and getting in car accidents. I mean, there's a million issues where regulators and city officials can be getting called saying, get these darn scooters out of here. And so from a lobbying perspective, from a common sense perspective, being able to work with challenging situations and make sure that there's a plan for that, I can see where that all would make a lot of sense.

But then how do you pull up the drawbridge and create a moat? That's obviously the hardest part to to execute on because you have to marry the operational element of the business with how fast something is moving from a regulatory perspective. A very easy one that's much clearer now that we're in a post pandemic era and that HAFSA has been repealed is actually FanDuel, as you mentioned earlier. By coming out and saying that we're a game of skill and working collaboratively with your largest competitor to essentially capture the market on a state by state basis and really create a very compelling case to if you're a state governor right now and you're looking at the balance of your projected revenues coming in through tax dollars, you really wanna align your coffers with some additional taxable revenue. So we've really seen these businesses take off as they've gone on to legalize not only daily fantasy sports, but sports betting in general across what we believe will be close to 40 states by the end of next year.

So it's not nothing from that perspective, but it also working in a way that's compliant with the states creates a certain dynamic that isn't favorable for new market entrants. You need a significant amount of capital to run one of these businesses, being a licensed sportsbook. So that is actually how you would close the door on really providing context to the market that you cannot be just a peer to peer sports wagering platform. You need to be a fully regulated sports book. In that situation, the barrier to entry is capital as opposed to the intellectual knowledge to do it.

It's not like there's one license and no one else can get a license. The capital is the moat now. So at the beginning, it was coming out with a narrative around we're not sports betting as daily fantasy sports was at the time. We're a game of skill. If you remember that context, sure.

That's the strategy. That's where that phrase was really the key to everything. Being defined as a game of skill, and therefore, this is not the same as sports betting, provided FanDuel and DraftKings with the ability to go out and become those households brands that they've become today, to then be able to be in a position to capitalize on the PAPSA repeal, putting the decision whether or not to have this be fully legal on a state by state basis and not determined by the federal government. And it sounds like, again, in the same way that anybody can go online and sell goods like Amazon, but the fact that matter is Amazon's got such a head start that it would take trillions of dollars to catch up. It sounds like when you understand the regulatory climate and you can help a company really take advantage of the local and state regulations such that they can be the first adapter, and they can get out there and capture a certain amount of the market share and revenue that from a value proposition for someone else to then come in and catch up.

It's not that they can't do it, but there's always a risk reward ratio, and the further ahead you are, the more risk they have and the more capital they're gonna have to put out, and they may not be successful. That's right. Look. There's two types of companies out there. There's companies that are creating new business models where there's just no regulatory framework that exists.

Those are some of the companies that most VCs are chasing day in and day out because those are companies that are operating in a white space that really everybody's optimizing for. And then there are companies that are doing things ten, twenty, thirty, forty times better, even more than the preexisting companies, like an Uber, saying that the taxi industry, the concept of taking a fare to get somebody from point a to point b has existed for a really long time. Except for, you know, here's a an industry that really has become a victim of its own success, particularly in urban areas, like New York, where that market was largely capitalized on by people that could afford to buy medallions that were they were issued by what probably were some politicians at the time. When you look at the types of companies you're seeing and the regulatory challenges, if you're prophesizing out a few years in terms of the things we're gonna be talking about, is there anything you can share with our audience today in terms of what are you seeing right now that would be interesting to people? Yeah.

I think that the pandemic really painted a light for a lot of people and what the future of health care has in store or at least what we think we want. I think that the real key to that has a dose of telemedicine in it. I think that putting that back in a box, the genie's out of the bottle at this point. And so from a telemedicine perspective, it's particularly on the behavioral health side. If I can look in my crystal ball and tell you five things, I'd probably one of them would be that behavioral health.

So really dealing with your psychologist, psychiatrist, and their ability to provide care via telemedicine and be reimbursed as if it were an in person visit probably is here to stay, but we'll probably see some reversion back to in person for primary care and others. I think that that's a question that a lot of people are asking themselves right now, particularly a lot of our portfolio companies, as we've been pretty early investors in the space, and we've invested in companies leading us in the seed stage and further of RoMin, which has paved the way on the digital health side from our perspective in providing people with accessibility to medications that they probably weren't comfortable asking their doctor for. So one of the things that we're seeing a change in post COVID or during COVID is that there's more and more demand for virtual health care, for instance. I understand that there can be certain things monitored over the Internet. If you have a rash, you can send a picture of your doctor and they can prescribe something.

In terms of the changes that you're seeing taking place in that industry, can you give us an idea of the regulations? Like, I know there's HIPAA, for instance, but in the area of online medicine, what are the challenges that these startups are facing? It's really a reversion back to the mean and where we came from in terms of where does the market go from a reimbursement perspective. That's the real incentive for doctors and for insurance companies to reimburse those doctors. It was really driven by CMS.

The decision maker for Medicare and Medicaid kind of sets the gold standard here. And what we saw during COVID was reimbursement levels went from 20% of what an in person visit would be to being on parity with that. Because of that change in regulation, we saw the behavioral health market really open up. And we saw a level of adoption that was almost unfathomable. It's really great to see people that had those first interactions.

And it's not just psychiatrists. These aren't necessarily people prescribing medication, but psychologists, psychiatrists, life coaches, executive coaches, you name it. We're starting to see insurance companies reimburse for telemedicine consults in the same level that they would reimburse you for an in person visit. What we saw providers' reaction to is it was met with open arms. So a lot of the friction in the ecosystem was removed.

And then at least in the relationship phase of a patient and a doctor on the behavioral side, which is really key. And incentivizing those doctors to do more telemedicine consoles, put more dollars in their pockets, and actually got more people the care that they needed in a win win scenario, whereas there's been a lot of scrutiny over primary care telemedicine practices, and that's really surrounding kind of a level of fraud that has increased year over year. So our view is that on the behavioral health side, this is something that probably will not end up being reversed, but we'll likely see changes that do go back to requiring in person consultations for more primary care, anything that's not really treating a chronic condition. I would assume if you need your blood drawn, for instance, or you need a chest x-ray, it's probably not too convenient to do that. Blood drawn?

I don't know. The labs element is something that we're pretty excited about. And what we've seen is potentially the ability to maybe you don't wanna go get your blood drawn at a Quest or a Lap Court. What if we could send you a kit and then have a nurse practitioner come out to your house and get that blood drawn from wherever you are? Maybe not your house, maybe your office at that point in time.

But meeting you where you are instead of having you go to some clinic is probably something that got people's interest during the pandemic, and they may be willing to pay more. And who knows? Maybe their partners at La App Core and Quest are willing to split the cost with them. Well, and it's funny. I think about notaries, for instance, that in a COVID world especially are making house trips and they were doing that before as well.

I hadn't really thought about this, but the insurance companies and as you said, Medicare, the government, they're not gonna wanna be paying more money to send people to your house, presumably. Having said that, if they're able to save the money on not having rent and they're not having other expenses that you take for granted at a business, I could see a world where from a numbers perspective, it's actually not more expensive. Yeah. You're enabling people to practice at the top of their license. That's, I think, a critical component here.

So that nurse practitioner is now able to really pay the bills and keep the lights on without working so closely with a doctor that there it really takes any ability to work autonomously out of their toolkit. Here, you're letting them go out and really be an entrepreneur and work for whoever they wanna work for and be tied to those businesses and go and practice at the top of their license by going and being on the front lines and meeting patients where they are instead of having them come to the doctor's office to only then be passed on to a nurse practitioner who draws your blood and waste two hours out of your day. Right. It sounds like the health care is a big area that you're seeing change in. Are there other industries or other things that are changing rapidly like health care?

I think you hit the nail on the head with the insurance analogy there. So in financial services, we're continuing to see a tremendous amount of change that's occurring across the spectrum, whether that's payments, whether that's new ways to finance emerging companies, whether that's cryptocurrency, insurance, you name it, and it's changing very, very quickly. So on the insurance side, you know, I think there's a big light bulb that went off for the market with some property and casualty disruptors, like Lemonade, who, full disclosure, obviously, we're investors in, but is one that really kinda challenged the market norms where all of a sudden everybody started to revisit their initial assumptions about what they thought they knew about the millennial generation. Turns out that, you know, we're not as reckless as people thought that we were and that really it all came down to just we love buying financial products. We just don't like to be sold.

And if you give millennials the ability to buy insurance and other financial products and services without interacting with another human being, and they're all for it. That was a big moment, I think, for financial services in general and a real call to action by carriers to really take some of these challengers seriously because you can start to see in a world that insurers haven't really been able to grow successfully without m and a activity. They've never really been able to drive growth, organic customer acquisition, or even paid acquisition. Here's a company that came out of nowhere with a very straightforward and simple value proposition that really resonated well with consumers. And the idea that, hey.

We're gonna be able to take this consumer away from Allstate or State Farm. Three years before Allstate and State Farm ever knew that they wanted them was something that really worked out quite well. So they built the relationship with a brand that was lemonade, not with an individual salesperson or a broker. And then the idea was that, look, it starts out like a $5 a month printer's insurance contract. That turns into a a not $5, a much more substantial dollar amount.

Life insurance policy, homeowners policy, pet owner policy, you name it, and you can get it in clear and transparent way from somebody's new market entrants. In terms of the investing that you're doing, are you geographically tied to any particular regions, or can you invest anywhere? Where are your typical investments being made? So we're not geography constrained or, you know, we are focused in terms of the value proposition that we bring to the table for companies, and that, you know, market expansion is actually a pretty big driver of that. So as companies are thinking about expanding into new states, that they're gonna have to think about new regulations that need to be followed.

That's an element that we'd like to get involved really post product, so your seed your seed extension series a is our typical entry point. Really, what we're doing is we're looking for companies that are not necessarily in the New York. We're New York based, but that doesn't our portfolio is spread interestingly across The US, and we're investors in companies that are in, obviously, New York, but also in Miami, in Austin, Texas, in Portland, Oregon, and all across California with Los Angeles being burned and companies like Dibs and obviously in San Francisco as well, but we're not like a traditional c fund that really is looking to build a presence with being the first capital into a company, but only in New York, for example. Now do you typically take a board seat, and do you typically lead rounds? Is it a mixture?

How would you describe your sweet spot from that perspective? So we lead about 50% to two thirds of the deals that we do. And that's where we're gonna look to take a board seat. We're gonna look more similar to your generalist fund. With that being said, our target ownership is typically a little bit lower than some of your big, you know, half 1,000,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 funds that are looking to put capital to work and really will not pick up the phone for less than 25% ownership.

We don't fall squarely into that bucket, and we like to be thought of as, hopefully, a valuable resource that is very different than other investors that are on the cap table already or potentially would be investing later down the line. And that can come through really working hand in hand at the board level with a with a founder as well as what we bring to the table in the platform. Has COVID helped your business in the sense that you're able to do more meetings over Zoom as opposed to being in person? Does it make it easier to interview with or have pitches from different parts of the country? How has COVID affected your business?

I think that it's helped inter it's hard to really net net out on it. I think that having so much riding on the technology sector in general, I'd say that it would be really hard for me to make a case to say that it's not, you know, five steps forward. So I I definitely think that what's happened over the last two years will be a net positive for us. Like you said, look, just like people pitch us to raise money, we also do the same thing. So we go out there and we raise money from other investors.

So that element, obviously, is a welcome change working remotely and being able to make those connections via Zoom much more efficient. Also, like, the ability of being accessible to founders in a way that really wasn't on par with the level of communication that happens today whenever board meetings always had to be in person. It just was far, far more rigid in structure and found that now we're able to connect with founders. We truly are available to have meaningful discussions where decisions are made at the board level at really the drop of the dime and not something that needs to be tabled for months on end. When you think about companies going all virtual and or giving up leasing space or otherwise, from a fund perspective, do you have any philosophy in terms of all virtual versus not all virtual and so forth?

It's something that is really gonna be driven on the stage that the company and not to sound like I'm caveating it with a bunch of it matters complexity, but it kinda does matter. So if your new hiring base is primarily consisting of engineers or whoever it is that are just out of school, It's really hard to train anybody if you're in a fully remote environment, and you're really kind of hampering your new hiring ability to that end. I think that the onus on being flexible here is really on companies to figure out, not just start ups, but big companies as well. Actually, big companies probably more than start ups. Start ups typically can move much more nimbly to changing macro environments than a big company would.

But I think that the ability to be flexible and meet kinda halfway with the best talent, Start ups are really doing themselves a disservice by not being flexible here. Just as you mentioned, giving up leases and really jerking the wheel too far in the other direction is also a risk that really needs to be evaluated whenever thinking this through. And there's not just a a one size fits all philosophy here. I do think that people need to be really thoughtful about how they implement hybrid work models, though. The worst thing that can happen is you really start losing the most talented employees that you have because they feel like they don't have access to the founder, they don't have access to their managers, they don't have access to whoever they think they need to to gain influence and support behind their ideas and feeling like they're the odd person out if the rest of the office is back in person.

So those are some of the more challenging environments versus, fully distributed or fully centralized work environment. I think there's a lot of companies that are experimenting with this and whether or not they're doing hybrid models or fully remote or fully back. And I think that over time, as you said, like, the training to me is a natural thing. But I also think that there's a subjective element of team building, where you work better when you really care about and like, and have that personal relationship with people. And I think one of the things we're gonna add to millennials is if you haven't gone through that, you don't necessarily know what you're missing.

And I was I made a point the other day when I was a young lawyer, for instance, and a senior partner called you out of their office and they needed you on a project. There was a certain kind of ego gratification and pride you took that you were part of the team and you were wanted in otherwise. And I think a lot of that is really lost on Zoom, for instance. Building that rapport with individuals, there's just something that happens in person context where, you know, the first thing that whenever people are reintroducing connecting in real life, the first thing that would happen is people were, oh, it's great to really put a face to a name. And given that we've developed this relationship thus far in a fully remote setting, but it really takes up until that in person meeting to take that trust to the next level.

And I think that it's hard to find people that will push back on that being the reality of the case. It's interesting to see that people, for some reason, they need that. They wanna be able to bifurcate out. It's all or nothing, and it doesn't necessarily need to be that. I think that people value the ability to work remotely in certain times.

Who knows if that's Tuesday and Thursday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Monday through Friday, but the ability to go and work from Aspen for two weeks a year is super important to them. It's something that just if the job's getting done, and I think that people have demonstrated the ability to really execute in a thoughtful way in those jobs in the last year or two being fully remote, and it it kind of tested everybody's disaster recovery plan. Let's put it that way. Where overnight, everybody all of a sudden needed to prove that they had the plan in place, and they were able to execute in a fully remote setting. And now we're seeing, yeah, you know, it turns out, you want the proper setup and a chair that's actually comfortable, people can actually be really productive working out of their home.

And I think they just need the discipline and the reps working in that environment to get there. Yeah. It's gonna be interesting because I think that you're gonna have head to head competition with companies, and you're gonna have some that are fully remote, and you're gonna have some that are not remote. And we'll see if there are advantages and disadvantages, and who's gonna come out ahead. I talked to somebody the other day, and they were talking about, you know, they can make allowances for their employees for their home offices because they're not paying rent, for instance.

On the other hand, as a business owner that pays rent, we were talking about being part time recently, and one of my employees said, well, we'll come in two days a week, as if it was like they were telling me what they were gonna do. And I started thinking about it afterwards. So I'm gonna go rent a suite at the Ritz Carlton for a week, but I'm only gonna go there two days a week, but I'm gonna pay for seven days a week. What business owner is gonna wanna have a five year lease on space that is good enough for people to be there all the time that are coming in two days a week? So, I mean, that's gonna change the terms of leases, whether or not people share space with other firms or how they do it.

But it's gonna have a lot of complexities. And again, for the company that is paying rent and having people only come in two days a week, but the company that for sale environment is not paying rent or is paying rent seven days a week, there are gonna be economies of scale and people there's gonna be, from a profitability perspective, I would think, an impact on those businesses. Yeah. And I think that the dynamic gets even more complex whenever you're not in a vacuum and you're saying, well, if I don't offer this, this is actually worse than if I were not, you know this is impossible for me to retain the best talent because what's most important to them is flexibility, not necessarily what their salary is. And people are scratching their heads, like, I don't know how to work with that.

You know, if talent is directly correlated to how much I have to pay them, that's really easy for business owners to understand. Whereas in this dynamic, it's just another form of compensation that people need to be comfortable with. And if that's the number one ask that the most talented or highest potential employees have, that's where that company is gonna go. And I think that once people, in a example that you just described, challenging the employees to take off the agent, put on the owner mindset, and think about, would you do this with your own money? Can change the dynamic quite a bit.

And I also think we've just started doing this. But when you think about an escape room or you think about a project where you're working with a team, yes, you and I on a Zoom or or SquadCast or otherwise, we can work as a team and we can have study sessions and brainstorming sessions. But I imagine sitting around an office and having people eating lunch together and creatively sharing ideas and running down the hall and asking this person and then asking this person and creatively working together that there's a certain synergy from a creativity perspective that's gonna be lost online and not in person. Maybe that's being too naive and that people really can get the same level of creativity and camaraderie online, but I'm not so sure. Neither or not.

Even if we were able to do it, there wants to stop my three year old from barging in the room and telling me that she has other plans. It's something that I think navigating the environment and kind of those external factors is a big ordeal. I think that there is a lot that's lost in finding somebody that says that they're on the top of their game relative to being in person. That's a really hard press. You know, I think that I'll buy the argument that, okay, well, you lose two hours out of your whole day just by commuting, and there's just a lot of these external factors that make for the amount of time and energy that I'm able to put into my job as an employee of a company at whether that's small, medium, or large is gonna be driven by those external factors.

But in a vacuum, I think that most people would probably agree that in person is always gonna be preferable. Yeah. That makes sense. You were talking about being a VC for the last ten years. In terms of cycles, do you think we're nearing the end of this cycle?

I mean, I think valuations are pretty high these days. Where do you think the VC market will be in twelve months? Kind of the beauty of this market and having my job is that, look, we're not paid to time the market. We're paid to make the best investments that we can at any point in time regardless of fund cycles, but that's kind of a a naive approach to it. I would say that where we are as a ecosystem is really gonna benchmark in the past.

And if you asked me this exact same question in 2016, I would probably have had the same feeling. And in 2016, when we raised our first fund, it felt like we were at the top of the market. It did. And I remember specifically thinking, it'll go back to the four on 20 being a series a. No.

That never really happened. And that kinda gives you that framework. If you were to try and time the market then, you would have missed probably the best five years in venture capital that you could have been around for. And so I think that that's kind of a double edged sword. As we've seen valuations in terms of the entry point increase in size or in total dollar, you've seen exits grow in lockstep.

So the thought of investing in a company at, series a that was, you know, at fifty, sixty, a 100 post, it was unfathomable at that point, at the entry point, but it also was just as ridiculous to say, well, now I'm just gonna have to underwrite companies, not for that strategic m and a most likely outcome, which is gonna be a sub $1,000,000,000 exit. The thought of telling me five years ago that there were gonna be companies that were exiting for enterprise values where they are today, that would have been unbelievable to me. And so I think that from a investor perspective, the cash on cash return multiples have been roughly the same just given that while the entry points got more expensive, the exits have been much larger in size. Switching gears a little, Jordan, as we're looking at your life from a personal perspective, what areas are you passionate about? What gets you up in the morning other than the investing part?

So it's just like yourself. It's great to be a cofounder of your own company. And I think that that's what really probably drives a tremendous amount of satisfaction to my day, being able to talk the talk about what it's like to be a founder, what it's like to be an entrepreneur, what it's like to not think that you're gonna be able to pay the bills and keep the lights on, and, you know, am I gonna get to that next point in this journey and get to a first close, get to a final close of our first fund? Are we even good at this job? These questions that founders find themselves thinking that they're alone thinking about, obviously, it's a little bit cliche to say, like, we understand that.

But, you know, I think that it doesn't need to be said, and that just comes down in the laundry. But I I can speak for myself here that I definitely get a lot of satisfaction in watching my team continue to grow and our firm continue to evolve in the way that we help serve founders and the companies that they're building. And I think that that piece and personal life aside, obviously, I wake up and, you know, I'm excited every day to see my family and my daughter and everybody from that element. But, you know, I think that really kind of focusing in on building out the relationships and the teams that we have as a as a firm is something that, obviously, I'm I'm really excited about. That makes total sense.

Do you think that in some of the challenges that we're having, whether or not it's global warming or you talked about COVID and the health care issues. Do you see some of your companies and you see technology as being instrumental in solving some of these challenges we're facing right now? I do. Look, I think that on the climate front, and I think that this is something that we've been talking the talk for quite some time in the venture capital ecosystem and the technology ecosystem, and I think it's time to start walking the walk here. And I think that going forward, we'll start to see this fall out.

I think that from a full circle back to where our focus is, we need some guidance from a regulation perspective as to what is the gold standard in transparency and what kind of reporting, what are the benchmarks, how do we know if we're good, how do we know if we're hitting the targets, if we're really doing our best, and how do we benchmark that against our competitive landscape? From a big company perspective, small company perspective, people need to start talking with their actions and not just with words. And I think that we're starting to actually get there. I do think that there has to be a price to pay at the end, and I think that the way that we get some real momentum here is by really tying the access to capital with your ability to demonstrate that you're putting significant effort, resources, and plans in place to move the ball forward as a company. If those are all tied together, the incentives all of a sudden are aligned with the players involved, then we can drive meaningful change.

But we do need a way to really put actions into impact and have a framework to level the playing field so that people know what winning even looks like. Do you think in the area of, like, for instance, things like cryptocurrency that we're gonna see more regulation coming down the pike in the next few years? Yeah. Regulation always lags innovation. And I think that we continue to learn from a financial institution's perspective where there's just a lot of trust that needs to be built.

And the lack of trust with financial institutions in The US is really probably second only to lack of trust with the government. And I think that cryptocurrencies filled a void that didn't come out of nowhere. I think that people have really been pushing the financial system to keep up with where average Americans would hit home for them and to provide them with financial products, services that were what they needed. And we've continued to see with this latest wave of innovation in the cryptocurrency space. You know, we've continued to see companies that were very transparent and had that trust built with consumers like a Coinbase.

Some of the players that have emerged in the space as centralized exchanges be rewarded for that. And also that call to action for that next step in corporate governance with this latest movement around DAOs and, obviously, the subsequent NFTs that they're affiliated with. So it's one that transparency at the governance level is probably, if I had to say I mean, it was obviously a change that's in recent months has been very meaningful, but this is a perfect example of where the regulatory agencies are really scratching their heads, playing catch up. That makes sense. Well, Jordan, this was fantastic, and I want to thank you.

Thanks again for having me. This was terrific. I really thoroughly enjoyed this. The Puck