David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…That's the thing. I realized that more than 20 years ago. I got my first venture job back in the '90s, so this is 30 years ago. I know a lot of VCs and over the years are following them. So many VCs have made a lot of money. A lot of them—it was very interesting—would turn their money over to some wealth manager, to other professional investors. It was 30 something years ago. I was very young. I didn't know anything, but I always thought, well, that seems strange. I thought you were the professional. Aren't you a money manager? If you're the money manager, why are you turning it over to some other money manager? That I didn't quite understand. They would have the barbell strategy. It's like, well, the venture is my risk part of the portfolio and I have this other thing, the tax-free municipal bonds or whatever. There's some truth to that. You should always have some amount of liquidity and amount of cash that you are protected on the downside and make sure that you never risk your family capital. There's a certain amount that you have to set aside. But after that, the idea that you should turn it over to some other professional when you are the professional and you should try to be the best professional possible. Whether you're public or private, it doesn't matter. It's just fundamentals investing. You should try to be the best investor possible. That's what we wanted to be almost from day one. That's why the public part of it, even though it was tiny dollars, I'm glad we had a chance to practice doing that for all those years. What I wanted to test out was, okay, after 27 years, if I really suck as a public investor, then I'll be like every other VC. Hopefully, I'll make some money and I’ll turn it over to the real professionals to manage my public portfolio. If I got a chance to practice for 20 years and I decided that I'm actually okay with this, then it's like, okay, now I've had a lot of practice. I'll just continue to do it on my own. It worked out that way. It's like, oh yeah, we feel perfectly comfortable doing it all on our own. That's so cool. We promised at the beginning of the episode that we would get into the whole Altos story. I don't know if we have enough time. I think we're going to have to do another episode. It is amazing, coming out of IGSB and the Jack McDonald Investments Class, but maybe rather than that, we can't let you go without talking Twitter. I pulled some stats here, Ho. As of February, you had tweeted 1400 times ever. I don't think that's because we're late to Twitter. I think you just didn't tweet a lot. But in the last 3 months, you've tweeted 3000 times and you've 7X your following. What's going on? Was there an intentional strategic shift? Did you just wake up and go, oh, this is fun? What is going on?…

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