Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…This is something I wanted to ask you about. The roadshow is a process where bankers are evaluating someone’s decade of hard work in a split-second decision. Lots of heuristics are being used, people are looking at the same set of financials that they’re used to looking at. They’re getting often caught up in the hype and they’re usually used to seeing male CEOs of these high-growth (especially founder) CEOs, these high-growth companies. What was that like being one of the few women who lead that process? They largely kept their cool, but we actually didn’t see one woman on the roadshow. Actually, sorry. We saw one and I am dear friends with her. That’s Anne-Marie from Capital. I think she was friendly and she doesn’t typically cover companies of our size, so there were zero women. That wasn’t a surprise to me. I give because we’ve done the testing the waters, we knew a lot of investors, we had long-term relationships thanks to Allan & Company. It wasn’t a surprise, but I do think that when I reflect on it I am very fortunate to have allies around me. I think working with Kevin has helped me understand that there is even just the smallest of active support from men in power to women can just be the fuel that they need to run through any wall. I just felt that. I felt like I had people like George Lee, Noah Wintroub, Ian Smith, and Harry Wagner around. These are like my tribe. Roelof. It’s not foreign for me to be the only woman, but yes, we did not see any of my gender on that trip. Ben, just to make a clarification, when you’re on a roadshow it’s actually not bankers you’re meeting with. You’re meeting with portfolio managers of long-only funds. Each portfolio manager manages a big pool of capital. It’s like a venture fund inside a venture fund. There’s a lead portfolio manager that makes that yes or no decision to put an order. So, just to clarify there. Two things just to add is that at the time, really it was clear to me that the student had become the master, and that it was time for Julia to take my place. Thank God there’s now a great CEO in the seat. The second thing I’ll also point out is that during the periods that we had raised the most money privately were the hardest and most difficult periods for me because we were really fighting this gravity of overspending and creating inefficiency. It took us away from our roots as a capital-efficient highly effective perpetual motion machine. That’s really what drove our desire and ethos to be out in the public market sooner, and really learn great practices of capital allocation. That begins at the earliest stage as a founder. You might have a big balance sheet, but you’ve got to discipline yourself to put that money to work in the right way of finding great people, not over hiring, not giving everyone the chance to be a manager. These are the real reasons why the ills of private capital have been so difficult but the [...] and others.…

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