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The MoneyPot
An In-depth Look at Principle-Driven Investing in Uncertain Times with Amy Nauiokas and Sean Park
Ever wondered what the current landscape of VC dealmaking looks like? Brace yourself for an insightful journey with our expert guides, the Founders of Anthemis, Sean Park and Amy Nauiokas. They take us through the maze of economic uncertainty, rising interest rates, and the post-pandemic slowdown that have led to a dip in deals. We delve into the essence of principle-driven investing and how venture investing has evolved from a craft business into an asset class. You will learn about our steadfast approach at Anthemis, navigating through these uncertain times with a long-term perspective.
Facing the ebbs and flows of the market often feels lonely, especially for underrepresented founders. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on this reality and discuss how market contraction impacts these groups. Our guests share their experiences, shedding light on the unique challenges women and people of color face during these periods of market contraction. We also discuss our strategies at Anthemis to prevent these groups from bearing the brunt of market fluctuations and the importance of investing in founders who are committed to uplifting specific populations.
Lastly, we cast our eyes towards the horizon, specifically focusing on the year 2024. What does the crystal ball reveal for the financial industry? We discuss the potential influence of technology, innovation, and possible new regulations on the financial world. Our guests offer their insights on the shifting landscape of finance and how it may impact consumers and businesses. This is one conversation you won't want to miss as we explore what the future might hold for the financial world and how to best prepare for it.
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Welcome to the Money Pot. This is Rachel Morrissey, I'm the host, and we are here with Sean Park and Amy Nyakas on the show to discuss the state of VC dealmaking, because we all know that there has been a slowdown in the amount of deals in the last year with the economic uncertainty, with the rise in interest rates, with the post-pandemic slowdown there's just a lot of factors going into this, and so we're going to be talking about all of that. So welcome to the show, guys.
Amy Nauiokas:Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. I was just saying to Sean that you are, and remain, one of my favorite people in the FinTech ecosystem. So thrilled to be here today.
Rachel Morrissey:That is so nice. Okay, by the way, everybody should believe her, anyway. Okay, so just to start out, let's kind of paint the scene here a bit. So tell me a little bit of what you guys think about the state of current VC dealmaking is. Are we? What do you think the reasons for the slowdown really are, and what do you think is really contributing to the idea of speeding up? Or where is it still hot?
Amy Nauiokas:Yeah, I mean I think if we kind of take ourselves collectively back to, let's call it, January 2022.
Rachel Morrissey:Welcome to ambulance territory.
Amy Nauiokas:Exactly I told you, it was going to happen. It's totally fine January 2020.
Sean Park:That's not an ambulance, that's one of our sound effects here.
Rachel Morrissey:Exactly the ambulance for VC dealmaking?
Amy Nauiokas:No, I would say, like you know, from our perspective, probably from the world's perspective, if you go back to January 2022, and many of us, you know we were not alone in this a lot of folks in the industry, entrepreneurs, lps, frankly, the entire ecosystem started to really recognize that there were some cracks in what had been a fairly robust and probably the most robust deal environment that had ever been in existence, certainly in our lifetime, inside of FinTech or venture generally. And the cracks for us, you know, as far back as 2022, january. We're actually not unwelcome on so many levels, right? I mean, sean and I have been doing this for so long now, together since 2008. And, and I think that there's a certain amount of kind of I guess it's just reality that had to set in to let people know that when markets go up, they also have to come down. And we had been in such a bull market for so long that I think that the shock and awe that sort of existed in that industry, whether it was an entrepreneur or an investor, was largely met by those who haven't seen the ups and downs of what markets do. And I think the reality was there. The markets were significantly bloated. They did not have to be, and should not have been, at the level they were at in that moment.
Amy Nauiokas:And so, in the first kind of, you know, cooling off period from in the last couple of years, it felt actually a bit of a relief for us, a relief in large part because we recognize that when you're thesis driven, when you're focused, when you're consistent and when you sort of do what you say you're going to do, it's not always in line with what the market is demanding of you.
Amy Nauiokas:And so we've had to be, through much of the market's ups, really, really strong in our values and in our conviction to hold a contrarian viewpoint right, which is that not everything has to be priced at the top of the market, not everything has to be done instantaneously, not every deal that is presenting itself has to be done, and that, during a certain period from 2015 to 2022, was contrarian. You know, it just felt like that was the only answer. You do everything, it comes, you do it at the highest price possible, you just keep going, going, going, and it just wasn't sustainable. And we saw that it wasn't sustainable. And for those of us with high levels of conviction, with a high, you know, sort of propensity towards thesis-driven investing, particularly when our values are aligned with, to the idea that we're not just putting money against the market. We're trying to change a system here. It took a lot and it started to become a lot easier Come 2022.
Rachel Morrissey:So I find this really interesting because we talk about all during the pandemic which you know, who knows if that's really over but all during the pandemic and we talked about how it had acted as this adoption accelerant and it. You saw the kind of money sort of poured into the system right, it just sort of unfettered and almost like a gold rush. And this idea of being principle driven and then having this, this sense of just steadiness throughout isn't necessarily always part of the equation and in the VC space specifically, it feels like this particular ethos is incredibly important, because I understand venture capitalists are not in it for charity nor should they be, but that they, that this idea of always pushing for a gold rush is kind of exacerbates this sort of bust and boom cycle. What do you guys think about that? What do you think about the notion of being like, how does being principle driven sort of take away from that?
Sean Park:Well, I think it's really about, as you mentioned I think you're sort of alluding to venture investing as an asset class. It's a long time scales. And there's something else too is actually, if you back up a minute and historically, venture was like a craft business, it wasn't really even an asset class. There was a tiny part of a bigger asset class, private equity. But there's a lot of differences between historical traditional private equity, which started in buyouts and then became sort of leveraged cash flow driven deals In the background.
Sean Park:Over the last 20 years, really since even the dot-com crash and then certainly since the financial crisis in 08, you've had this macro-unidirectional bull market in asset prices, supported by zero interest rate policy all around the world. That lasted forever During that time, which I think is a really exciting thing for the world for lots of reasons that are not really specific to financial markets, but in terms of how the economy is changing, technology-driven innovation and all those sorts of things. You're doing a montage. You have the introduction of AWS, the introduction of the iPhone, all these things happening. Venture started the century as a craft business with a very focused on Santel Road and woke up in 2021, 2021, 2022 as a major and important and serious asset class and because there was this backdrop of an enormous tailwind of a macro bull market in asset prices, there wasn't any critical thinking around that and most people that come from investors in venture some very, very good ones don't have context in other markets that have shorter time cycles and where you have a higher propensity to have lived through up and down cycles.
Sean Park:So I used to be a bond trader. I'm using capital markets too, or, if you're a public equestrator and you get to our age too, but even younger, you have ups and downs in venture. You didn't really ever have that and so I think it was a venture. In the last 18 months since that macro started to change has been chasing the market. That was completely unprepared. It was a big macro shock. I think we're maybe in the midst of a significant 20 year cycle change maybe not, but it was clearly a big shock. And people that are investing in public markets and bond markets and what have you it took them a while, but they'd seen this before in venture. A lot of people hadn't seen this before and it came back to back. There wasn't this more smooth transition to a different type of environment. It was like overnight almost.
Amy Nauiokas:But by default, and always by definition, venture is supposed to be hard. We're looking for needles in the haystack which tend to ultimately be a human, an idea, maybe two humans, three humans, two ideas, and the risk associated with investing in those needles in the haystack, or multiple needles in the haystack, or trying to find the needle in the haystack, is really high because the returns are so high. So, by default, if venture is hard and from 2015 to 2022, it was made to look very easy there is, by definition, a problem with what's happening.
Rachel Morrissey:Well, and that's something that I think is sort of interesting because, as we were looking, I started covering FinTech way in 2013. So it was sort of before the money became very easy, like in 2013,. It was still a challenge to get the venture money to get your startup going, but somewhere around 2017, 2018, it started feeling like that had loosened up so considerably that somehow there was this sense that everyone could do this and it was less about finding the needle in the haystack and more about just spreading your bets and hoping for the best.
Amy Nauiokas:Yeah, and listen and, to be fair, that's part of the problem of what we're left with now too.
Amy Nauiokas:Right, because when it was easy, when capital was easy to come by and when people had a lot of it, they were investing from a portfolio model.
Amy Nauiokas:That was what we call not capital constrained, and it's very hard to make good investments in a non-capital constrained environment. And we were once again contrarian, as we were raising our funds and building our business and targeting $100 million fund, $150 million fund not targeting these sort of like Goliath-sized funds because we liked, even in the plethora of capital, being capital constrained, because it made us better investors. Right, scarcity as a rule, helps you identify options and opportunities in a way that is more pertinent, and I think that one of the biggest challenges with some of our brethren right now is that they're all sitting on these massive venture funds, early stage venture funds, with a ton of team members that actually have never really invested into this space in a down market. And if I were sitting on that money right now trying to figure out how to guarantee I'm going to deliver 3, 4, 5x in the next 10 years, I'd be really worried, and so I think there's a lot more to come from that.
Sean Park:I mean capital is. What happened is momentum trading became a strategy and venture. And momentum trading is very seductive and, done well, can work in liquid acid classes, whether it's public equities or foreign exchange or commodities or bonds. But in a liquid acid class, you know, as I said, it's very seductive but extremely dangerous and in the sense that it's a liquid, so good momentum traders and it's hard to be a good momentum but if you are a good momentum trader, the cliche or the sort of heuristic is what the difference between a good and a bad momentum trader is the exit, not the entry, right, and and that breaks down in a liquid market, whether it's venture or any other kind of a liquid market, because you have no way to control the exit and while the sun was shining that didn't matter.
Sean Park:And then there's a bit of a perniciousness in how the sort of operating structure of venture is with LPs that people got started confusing marks for liquidity and and you could make a case and you know oftentimes that well, I should invest now at this price because in 18 months or 12 months or whatever, it will be at a higher price and you could make that case very intelligently with a lot of conviction for a long time, but that didn't mean you would be able to return that money to your your choose to take your chips off the table, so to speak. There's a big difference. Whereas if you're trading public equities, you can get it wrong, but if you, you can say listen, I think this is wildly overvalued, but it's going to become even more wildly overvalued and you can make a lot of money doing that if you're good at it. Right Convention, you can't.
Rachel Morrissey:The other. The other side of this, though, is is something I mean, we always talk about. I've always talked about how you know, sometimes the box is actually fuels creativity. The limitations can actually fuel creativity, and I was thinking about what you were saying about how having the capital constraints actually makes you better. Not just and I think scarcity is one model, but I also think it's that it makes you more, more invested where you're invested, and I think a lot of people think of venture capitalists as people give somebody a check and then step back and do whatever you want, but I think that's a misconception about the notion of good venture capitalists in general. I know you two get very involved with a lot of your founders and are there to be an advisor, to be you know a connection for them to keep pushing because you believe in the project so deeply, so maybe we should talk a little bit about the nature of that and the way that capital constraints actually kind of discipline venture capitalists to to be part of the solution as they're moving things forward.
Amy Nauiokas:Yeah, it's. It's funny when we when Sean and I started the you remember this, but when we, when we started working together and we were trying to call up with a name for what's now become Anthemist, some one of the names that I was really keen on that I don't think Sean understood why at the time, but I just kind of thought like we should call this working capital, because I have a sense that this is going to be a lot of hard work To get on what we are trying to get done here and at. You know, at a moment in 2008 when no one understood there was no such thing as FinTech, right, and no one understood what we were trying to do with the hands of, you know, the digitization of the industrial age, of our financial system at the base of our economy. It's not didn't roll up the tongue very easily. So I think the you know kind of the idea that that there is significantly more than just capital in venture capital, right, and for us, we've always said that that and this is more than just about building good companies or making a profit. It's about creating and improving and changing the system that all of our ecosystem is living in and thriving in and suffering through Right. Like whatever this world of financial services, financial system, macro economy is, it is a system right, and our view is that you have to deploy in equal measures financial, human and intellectual capital. And if you don't do those three of those things in equal measures, as hard as it can be sometimes and as robustly as people can push you back on it sometimes, it will not work.
Amy Nauiokas:And I think the one good thing coming out of the last sort of few years for us right now is we're feeling we're at a slightly enviable position for the first time in our existence where our performance, our fundraising, our, our, our kind of you know thoughts, our, our influence, little, little things we've done and said over the years that most of the time we're either ignored or challenged or just kind of like laughed at are now starting to become actually fairly prussian.
Amy Nauiokas:And it's probably going to take many, many years for the rest of the world to figure it out. And I'm certain that there will be no credit given to the hardworking team and Anthemists in the process. And that's OK because in the end we will have made an impact on this system and we are making impact on the system and it's because we've been literally, you know, kind of just bound by our, our sense of purpose, our sense of mission and our sense of conviction on on what these markets need. And so I think you know we've been talking about slow and steady winning the race, like there's a lot of stuff that we've done that has been counter cyclical, quite contrarian, that that is now starting to play itself out, in some cases actually getting back.
Sean Park:You know walls of capital and you know venture is not unique in this, this happens everywhere, but it's very. It reduces the ability to find signal and noise because you know everything is the, the, the call of. That is Buffett's famous phrase that you only see who's swimming naked when the tide goes out. But there's a quote that's been coming up in my sort of thinking around this in the last few months I think it's quite a propo which is that the Margaret Mead quote of never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world. In fact it's the only thing we ever had.
Sean Park:Yeah, that is that is, was and I think will always be the root of the ETO, like even going back to the crafts.
Sean Park:So, like you know, silicon Valley it was, it was that and you know, and I'm sure that this is not unique to us at all, this is across the board. You know, all the good investors and all the great startup companies are actually finding that, under the pressure of these new macro conditions, you know, they're reducing costs, which is often, most often, pretty linearly correlated to headcount, like 30, 40% and finding that their growth or their you know how, their, their roadmap is not being disturbed at all, in some cases actually accelerating. And it's not, you know, but it's not to sort of criticize, it is a little bit, but it's it's sort of human nature when there's this wall. This is the bad side of a wall of capital is that you feel forced to keep up with your competitor. Right, your competitor is 40 people. Well, I better hire 40 people, and even very smart, well intentioned people. I think it's naive I know there is some people, but I would presumptuous to sort of say everyone is, you know, so mentally strong as to, you know, be unaffected by that.
Amy Nauiokas:Yeah, and unfortunately you were, you were you put on something earlier. That I think is worth talking about too is that you were talking a good game, about how the work has made a difference in how we're feeling pretty good, but unfortunately, rachel, as you pointed out, you know it can be quite a lonely game. I don't think that we have a lot of comrades in arms here that are doing it exactly the same way or even for the same purposes. We are In that sort of loneliness. Forget about us.
Amy Nauiokas:A lot of things start happening when markets contract. The saddest part about this market contraction is not that certain companies that were overvalued and never should have been there, run by founders with egos that probably didn't deserve to shepherd capital in the first place, are going to go away. What's sad is that the fund managers who emerged in 2020, 2021, 2018, 2019, who were largely women and people of color, who got their capital from the number of large virtue signaling organizations that had 5 million to deploy or a million to deploy or 2 million to deploy against changing this patchwork quilt of the world, aren't going to get funded for fund 2. They are going to suffer in kind of valuation compression because they were investing into the height of everything and they are going to collapse and they are going to lose wages.
Amy Nauiokas:We know what we are doing about that. We are keeping our eyes wide open for talent and for folks that deserve to continue to kind of leverage what we built to help build out, continue their work or continue the cause. I haven't heard anybody else talking about that.
Rachel Morrissey:Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about that because, as you said, the contraction is going to hit those included last the hardest. That's basically what's happened is those that were included last are the ones that get cut off first.
Rachel Morrissey:We have all the research in the world that says women founders have greater returns. If you have founders who are committed to the specific population that they are, they're from that population and they're committed to helping that population, they usually do better. We have all this research, both inside and outside of companies founding companies that all point to this. I know that investing in these groups has always been part of the Anthemist mission. As you guys have said. You were in this not just to find a bunch of things, but also to really shift the system. What tack are you guys taking? What can other people I mean, I'm just going to say how much of your strategy can they steal so that we can sort of repoint and redirect some of these funds that are getting contracted and keep those last in from being first out?
Amy Nauiokas:Yeah, that's a great question. I'll answer it both from an investor's perspective, but also, as a reminder, I am a female founder and a female entrepreneur.
Amy Nauiokas:I'm happy to also answer it from that perspective because I have some very strong views on that as well what we've maybe answered that question first, so we can end on a high note. The reality is, you're absolutely right the magical world of virtue signaling in the last few years and I don't use that lightly the folks that, to your point, know all the data and have all the information but yet still refuse to do anything substantive to move the needle. I'll give you my own personal example. I've been a female founder and fintech from the day I started this thing, 2008. I have not once yet and, by the way, I'm not just talking about myself, I'm talking about our shareholder base. I'm talking about our employee base, the level of diversity that we have committed to and live every day. I have not once gotten a check from one investor in any capacity that came from an underrepresented founder or a women's group, sort of let's back women.
Amy Nauiokas:There's a multitude of reasons why that is and I don't need to go into them now. That's probably for us to go in and off the record later. It's fascinating, right? Yeah, it's really fascinating, because gosh knows we've been trying and a little sucking A little bit, a little bit. Anyway, it just reminds me every day that if this is this hard for me? How the heck is this not virtually impossible for others that have less of a platform, less of a sense of privilege, less of anything? How are they going to survive this? That was the origin story of our lab product. The first one was launched in 2019 with Barclays, and it's an innovators lab specifically and exclusively for women founders in fintech. We got tired of people saying there aren't enough founders out there that are female. There's not enough pipeline of women.
Sean Park:It's a pipeline problem.
Amy Nauiokas:We said that's not true. We've deployed our capital more than a billion dollars around the world and 50% of our founders are either people or people of color or women.
Amy Nauiokas:There's definitely no pipeline problem and this has been going on since 2008, which means that we're going to make people pour their money where their mouth was we built a lab product that, essentially, is about creating companies in a place that isn't difficult for us to create companies and then bringing those companies to the market and saying, here we've incubated these, We've helped accelerate these, We've studio and lab these and here they are Now. Don't tell us this pipeline problem. Put your money where your mouth is. Even at our small size, our female founders lab is the largest vehicle. That's $50 million and it's the largest.
Sean Park:The only thing in the world. We're largest at.
Amy Nauiokas:Literally the only thing we're the largest at. It's not that big, but also that's a huge part of the capital that we have working right now. My question to the industry is where are you? Wait, your lab is the largest venture studio for female founders in fintech in the world, in any industry, in any industry.
Sean Park:Probably here's where we are $50 million is not a big number, I know.
Amy Nauiokas:If we could do more, we would. We need capital to do more with our capital and we find it very difficult to raise capital and, I would argue, harder than others to raise capital.
Rachel Morrissey:That is so unbelievable. That that is I mean I applaud you. 50 million is great, but it's almost unbelievable that that's the largest lab for female founders. That's great.
Sean Park:I mean metaphorical pictures with some red carpets and things like that, but then they sort of fade into the Would work when the actual tough work comes down to it.
Rachel Morrissey:Interesting. Oh, that's so interesting. Okay, well, I don't want that to be exactly where we end, so I'm gonna ask one more question. You were talking earlier, sean. This is about the venture capital is about the long game, and so thinking of it the same way you think of other investment or other asset classes is probably not only not wise, but it doesn't even make sense to try to apply those logic that logic to it, the narrow set of possible winning strategies.
Sean Park:it's not just one, but like.
Rachel Morrissey:Right.
Sean Park:And the example I gave. One, for example, momentum investing, which, again done well, can be a very successful strategy in other asset classes not available to a venture investor. Now I'll pick up on something Amy said too. I think venture is done well is definitionally lonely, and what I mean by that. I think the right person attribute this to, but I'm not 100% sure. I think it's Bill Gurley, who's one of the senior partners at Benchmark.
Sean Park:He made the point years ago at some conference or panel that it's not sufficient, like it's hard enough, to invest in a startup that succeeds because of all the risks and dodging things, dodging and what have you. That's a hard thing to do. As Amy said, it's not supposed to be easy, but that's necessary, but not even sufficient. To really be a successful, long-term successful venture investor, you have to invest in things that work but yet are non-consensus at the time that you invest in them, because when they're not, it's basically the short version is that it's priced in and that's when you get these like sort of FOMO trades, and we had the whole market do that for a couple of years. But even if you go back in different market conditions and even today in a very, very challenging financial markets in general and venture markets in particular. There's little sub-spots, like, for instance, in AI or what have you.
Sean Park:Where you get these? Where it's? I think it's very hard, even if you know what you're doing, even if you invest in the right ones, to make money when everybody sees it. I remember the example for us is in the earliest days of Anthomus, that that thing that was going to work and going to be important but was absolutely consensus and everyone knew was mobile payments right. And in the very you'll remember this in the very earliest day of FinTech, when it wasn't even quite called FinTech yet. Most of the startups have very I think the plurality of startups were actually some variations in mobile payments and what have you.
Rachel Morrissey:Yeah, it's mobile payments or personal finance management. Yeah, exactly.
Sean Park:And we didn't invest really in any of those. And we would always get the question well, you're a FinTech investor and all the FinTechs are mobile payment like, don't you believe this is gonna happen? To which our answer was absolutely we do. And the winners? Once you can identify their winner that emerges at a late stage, there's probably a good investment there. But that's not our game.
Sean Park:We're an early stage investor and we have enough humility to know that if there's a hundred startups doing the same thing, even if we know that a small number of them will win, to be able to pick amongst them. I think there's no one of hubris there, right, right. So where we've always traditionally tried to hunt and I believe this is true for all the great venture investors, if you look back historically in different industries or what have you is identifying not the mobile payments but identifying the more obscure, less consensus area and backing that. But that is super lonely, right, and humans are social beings, right, and markets are social constructs. So that's why I said earlier, momentum investing is a very hard strategy but very seductive because it actually means you're with the crowd. Strategies that are more in the public market would be called stock picking or contrarian. I think contrarian is too strong a word because the point is not to be deliberately trying to do the opposite of what other people are doing, but it's being non-consensus, I think, is the right articulation, and that's hard to do.
Rachel Morrissey:Yeah.
Sean Park:And it's lonely to do. But that's you have to have a lot of internal sort of fortitude and you're gonna be wrong too. And the other thing to venture is, by definition, you're gonna be wrong. Use the baseball analogy Nobody bats a thousand in venture.
Rachel Morrissey:No, I think the baseball analogy is perfect for venture. I think you're hitting 300, you're doing really well. Yeah, 300 is excellent for baseball and for venture capital.
Sean Park:The difference is I don't think like the great baseball sluggers. They're not invested in every pitch Like and when I say invested, I didn't mean to like psychologically and even when you've been doing it a long time and you know that's how the game is played. These are real people that had real dreams that you believed in and you backed, and when they do, you know, are part of the 700, not the 300, it's hard too.
Rachel Morrissey:It's heartbreaking right and I think that is part of it. One thing you guys, you know, as we talked about a little bit earlier, there's a personal investment. Naomi was saying you know, yes, there's money, but there's also time and personal investment in each of these, and you know that some of them aren't gonna win and you don't always know which ones those are. So you've been, you've invested a lot of time and a lot of heart into something that may not pay out, but that means that that's part of the healthy venture firm. Yes, not, it's not a sign of failure, it's actually a sign of success.
Amy Nauiokas:No, I mean, it's just like. I mean, I don't you know, whether you've got children or you're a partner to somebody or you're a friend, or you're a sister or your brother or your daughter or you're a son, like whatever community you show up in, you kind of bring your full self to that community, your authentic self to that community. You gotta give it your all and you gotta be there for people when things are good and you gotta be there for people when things are bad. And that's part of the job of being a human and I think we forget that a lot.
Rachel Morrissey:That we're humans first and maybe our job is part of being human as part of, instead of human being part of, our job. Yeah, yeah.
Sean Park:And that's one of the biggest differences. If you look at like we were talking earlier about the similarities between asset classes and especially now the venture at least our belief is it's now sort of grown up into being like a serious and proper asset class alongside these others is that If you're trading again in public equities you'll feel losses and gains or whatever. It's very impersonal. The number is on a screen right, and so there's an element of it's hard to lose and all that, but there isn't the additional layer or very rarely of this personal investment and humanness that is endemic to venture. You can't do venture without that right, and so that's something also when we're trying to.
Sean Park:You know we think it's always great to bring new people, and you know we started this new people in venture. But one of the things that we always try to test for is you know people that have been otherwise excellent in their careers in different areas of financial markets or investing. You know, do they have the I don't know what the right? You know the character, the personality or the? You know the makeup to be able to do that?
Rachel Morrissey:Yeah, and maybe, and maybe, just to bring us full circle. You know we talked right at the beginning about how this contraction might be welcome, a welcome correction. A welcome correction for both who is in this space and for why they're in this space and what they bring to this space.
Amy Nauiokas:Yeah, so, so I think it's important that we end on a high note. I get out of bed every morning and just kind of like, slap my smile on and just like, go out there ready to take the next hit. And you have to right, because if you can't wake up thinking that things can change, things can be better than it's not worth waking up for, right, so, so, but they are. Yeah, here's the good news.
Amy Nauiokas:The contraction was welcomed by many of us and I think the that with it came a certain amount of humility, a certain amount of sort of hubris breaking inside of an ecosystem that probably needed a healthy dose of exactly that.
Amy Nauiokas:And it's enabled for some of the companies that probably needed to either go away and or come down considerably in valuation or into the I don't know smoke and mirrors, to do so, yeah. But it's also made a lot of room for those founders and those companies that have the resiliency and wherewithal to keep fighting another day and to be, you know, kind of almost like, like, allowing them to emerge in a way that that like, like, attracts the right support. Right, so that's where 2024 gives us hope is that, you know, there are some amazing new companies being started and out of every market correction, major market correction in the world you could go back probably thousands of years, but certainly in the individual, like sort of in the tech world of the last 30 years, 40 years, every major market correction has yielded the most robust change of sort of thematic, new idea, innovation and fundamental like jumps, leap, jumps forward Like great sort of frog leaps forward, not just like incremental, but like these massive, exponential jumps forward, and I think we're at that moment.
Sean Park:I think that 2024 is much better for the price. Temperament yeah yeah, it's got a absolutely brilliant people that shouldn't never be found there, because there's an element of temperament.
Rachel Morrissey:I love that. I agree with that. I've seen it and I think that there is definitely that.
Sean Park:I don't know if this is a if there's a better adjective, but stick to it. It's resiliency, right yeah.
Amy Nauiokas:Or resiliency in every form right and and you, you know you can test for it right. Unfortunately, one of the ways to test for it is to see how people handle complete and utter disasters. But the reality is that 2024, from what we can see from our perch right now, is looking pretty good for the venture community more generally. On balance, it's probably one of the most robust and and I guess, sort of like needing to be nurtured communities that we've seen thus far, and I think there's going to be a lot of exciting things that come out of that. Okay.
Rachel Morrissey:Well, I think we should end there with the, with the 2024 being a good, the 24, 24 being a go. I think that's exactly what we should end.
Sean Park:You're going to do some music over. I was just thinking here comes the sun, yeah.
Amy Nauiokas:There, you go?
Rachel Morrissey:I should. If I could afford the cover, I definitely would use it. Anyway, thank you guys, so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Thanks, Rachel. Anytime Great. Okay, so to our listeners, this is the end of this episode of Money Pot. Coming up here in the next week, you're going to get a bunch of episodes of us being live at Money 2020, October 2023. And hopefully we're just going to be able to build right on top of this and look at what's coming in 2024. Thanks, talk.
