Venture Secondaries: 3 Steps to Escape the 12-Year LP Liquidity Trap

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This episode of Making Billions with Ryan Miller & Aman Verjee delivers the secondary market playbook that gives managers a structural advantage over every fund ignoring this shift.

How do venture secondaries solve LP liquidity problems in 2026? 

Former PayPal and eBay CFO Aman Verjee reveals the exact system for buying into elite VC deals at 70% below market value. Fund managers face a quiet crisis: DPI timelines stretching 10-12 years while LPs demand exits far sooner. 

What separates fund managers who retain LP trust from those who lose it? 

Verjee breaks down how to audit your fund structure today, identify liquidity gaps before they become emergencies, and build relationships with secondary buyers years before you need them. He shares the due diligence framework used to evaluate SpaceX, Anthropic, and Canva positions when information is limited and markets are opaque.

[THE HOST]: Ryan Miller is a fund manager, capital strategist, and former CFO turned angel investor in technology and energy. He is the founder of Fund Raise Capital and Aequor Capital Partners, and has mentored over 1,000 fund managers across private equity, private credit, venture capital, real estate, and alternative assets globally.

[THE GUEST]: Aman Verjee has more than 20 years of financial and operational experience from both private and public technology companies. He has been a member of the management teams at some of the most successful companies in the world, including PayPal, eBay, 500 Startups and Sonos. His new book, A BRIEF HISTORY OF FINANCIAL BUBBLES, comes out in December.

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Transcript

Ryan Miller

If you're managing a fund right now, there is a quiet crisis building inside your investor base, and most managers will not see it until it's too late to fix it. A former PayPal and eBay CFO who has structured over a billion dollars in financing just revealed the exact system for buying into the world's best deals for VC funds at up to 70% below market value. And how to give your own investors a liquidity exit before they start demanding. The managers who understand venture secondaries right now will have an unfair structural advantage over every fund that does not. This is that conversation. All this is more coming right now. Here we go.

Ryan Miller

Aman, Welcome to the show man.

Aman Verjee

Thanks for having me, Ryan. Great to uh great to be here.

Ryan Miller

Yeah, it's great to have you. Um I have been so impressed with your background as CFO of eBay, and you worked as part of the PayPal mafia as it's so uh the Affinity Term. It's really good to get in here, and we're gonna talk about venture and uh secondaries and really everything that you've been able to do, man. So I'm excited to talk about this. So let's dive in, brother. You went from writing the first draft of PayPal's S1 to CFO at eBay and Sonos and to COO at 500Startups, overseeing $500 million AUM investment committee to founding now practical VC. Every step of that career was a deliberate acquisition in skill. So for the fund managers who are listening and trying to build their own credibility and track record right now, what would be some of those specific sequence of moves that you would tell them to start accelerating their process starting today?

Aman Verjee

Well, you make it sound very uh very linear and very logical. In reality, it wasn't quite that. I'll tell you a bit about the jury and how it went from one to the next and you know what lessons that might have. I don't really know if there's a single way to get to where you want to go to. It's the being a venture manager is a role that's not really path dependent. I think it's an accumulation of skills along the way. And when you're at the point where you can manage money, you should be able to do a few things like evaluate investments. It's gonna entail a bunch of fundraising skills and talking to investors. And there's a whole administrative side of the business too that is really important to managing money. My my background was I began on Wall Street. I think if you'd asked me when I was 16 years old, I grew up in Toronto, where do you want to be? I always said I want to be an investment banker. I want to work on Wall Street, I don't want to work in New York. Uh why do you want to do that? I'm on, well, I, I loved Michael Milken. I was enthralled with the American finance. Uh, I was good at math, I was good at economics. Michael Milken was one of my heroes growing up. And so you kind of follow what you want and follow your passion, and that's where my passion led me through Stanford undergrad, studied economics, ended up on Wall Street. 

Aman Verjee

And then from there, the I the, I think if you'd asked me when I was 24, what do you want to do? I would have said that I probably want to stay an investment banker. But the rules of most of the Wall Street firms at the time was like go and get a graduate degree. So I did from Harvard Law School. Came back thinking they wanted to be an investment banker, and Peter Thiel talked me out of it. I met Peter undergrad at Stanford. I happened to meet him. He happened to start a company called PayPal while I was in law school, and he talked me into leaving that track into operational finance. I learned a ton in operational finance. I learned a ton on Wall Street. I think if I'd advise any, if I'd advised my daughter getting into, she's now 15, but in seven years she'll be graduating from college and she says, hey, what should I do? I'd be like, Well, if we wanted to be an investor, running a company has a lot of you know difficulty and complexity. If you want to be learning from the best, I think starting at a company where you're gonna be around the best and learn from the best has a lot of value. In finance, you get a ton of training on in investment banks and in uh bigger companies that are going through audits that do it well. In uh startups, there are a lot of you know, bad habits and loose behaviors that kind of get communicated throughout the team. Bigger public companies will teach you a lot of things that you need to do, need to uh to do to manage a business and interact with people and I think that's those are all good skills. 

Aman Verjee

And then for me, getting out of the operations and learning a lot about Ven was a good transition into venture. I think if we try to get into venture right away and making investments and managing money, you've never run a business before, you know, you've never been on, you've never been dealing with boards or never haven't had to go through all the things business managers have to do, pivots, layoffs, um, MA, you know, fundraising. Like to do that as a first-time founder is uh is hard. Not everyone is not everyone's gonna be Mark Zuckerberg. And if you are, you have to have a Sean Parker or Peter Teal, I guess, around to help you through it. So I would just say learn from the best, be around the best, take jobs, we're gonna learn the skills that are the building blocks to what you want to do, and uh and think about for your next role what's your passion and where you're gonna learn from the best.

Ryan Miller

That's absolutely brilliant. You know, I've heard it said that you spend the first half of your career building your resume and the second half building your legacy. And so it sounds very much so for you. Yeah, same with me. I remember that, and I, I remember catching heck from my own mother, was like, why are you doing this for free? Why are you helping all these rich guys for free? Like, she didn't understand it. Uh, like, you know, well placed. It's a mother and she wants her son to whatever and I graduated in the height of the recession. So not a lot of investment banking jobs. So, and I said, you know, I'm working on something here. And uh, I remember it was the phrase from uh in college, I read uh, Rich Dad Poor Dad, right? So a lot of people have read that book from Robert Kiyosaki. He said, The rich don't work for money. I  said, cool, I have aspirations to be well off, um, but not from just the money, but from the ability to add value. So I said, okay, what does that mean? They don't work for money. I mean, how do you pay bills? And that put me down a track where I was like, they don't sell their time, they sell their value. And so I was like, okay, I need to create value. And that's what you were able to do when you were working with Peter Thiel and Musk and all those guys, is you were working at these companies where it allowed you to create yourself, your resume, so that it's pretty obvious that it's like, well, I can have higher roles, that's fine. But I think what it showed is I'm able to add more value. And I think that's what you at the heart of what you would advise your daughter is to say, you can go to these companies, you're gonna learn some really good things. And those learnings you're going to take out into the world and add value, especially if you're running a venture fund. When you got founders  and PortCos, you got to add value to these people because your own reputation is on the line. So you did a good job. So I think that's what I'm hearing is just make sure if you're just just starting up, make sure that whatever skills you're doing, make sure that you're always allowing yourself to have the space to gain the skills that you can add value and then you know allow your career to go from there. Would you say that's an accurate  assessment?

Aman Verjee

Yeah, I think that's right. And if you choose to, if you are in a big company and around great people, it's easy to get good habits and become valuable or acquire the skills that will make you valuable. If you join a startup or you start a company, um, you can still get there. But then I think what you have to do is figure out all right, if I'm a if it's three people in an idea in a garage and we're all 23, I'm not gonna learn from my 23-year-old bestie in college how to be a world-class, whatever, you know, whatever it is that you want to be. Let's take the case of a fund manager. You've got to be a world-class investor. You're not gonna learn being around 23-year-olds trying to become a world-class investor. But you can you can recruit a you know a top investor on your board, you can raise money from folks like you know, uh Mark Andreessen or E16Z Partners, or find the VCs that you want to be like, and then have them in your network, have them on your board, just deal, work with them, and you can create other networks. I think that's a lot easier now than it was 25 years ago because the world is so connected. So if you take advantage of those networks, I think you can still get there. But that I think that's the homework, right? If you join a small company or a startup that doesn't know, let's take the finance example. As a startup, you're not doing audits. You know, you're uh you're dealing with kind of loosey-goosey revenue accounting. It's not gonna be gap or accrual, it's maybe cash accounting, at least until you're series A. So you better have people around you who can educate you about what it means to be a world-class finance person. Um whether it's a good finance lead, an auditor, an accountant, somebody you're you're who's advising you along the way and helping you with the fundraising and build the company the right way. That's the missing skill set that you have to build. You kind of get that when you're in a big company, right? Everyone's you're you're in a meta or a um alphabet. Then you're surrounded by great accountants, great, you know, great leaders, great IR people, great fundraisers, great product people. So they're in the hallways. It becomes easier to do that, I think. Where's the advantage of a big company, but then there's disadvantages too. But that's how I think about it exactly.

Ryan Miller

Brilliant. You know, you've identified a liquidity crisis in venture capital way before most people were even talking about it. So my question, you can talk about how does a fund manager audit their own fund structure today to know if they are already building that problem for their LPs.

Aman Verjee

Yeah, I can do this and just basic math around um what these portfolios look like. If you're a Series C or Series A investor today, on average, these funds, and and this is just from investing in startups through founded startups or founded Global and and being around venture now for the past decade or so, to get to a 1x of DPI, it takes 10 to 12 years for a typical fund starting out today. So you have to plan ahead on what am I going to do in terms of DPI over the next 10 to 12 years? First of all, can I and my LPs hold out that long to get 0.5x or 0.7x or 1x DPI if I'm a median or above median fund, it got to been  blown me in, at least in distributions, I'm not even there. So how do I, first of all, message and set expectations for LPs? 

Aman Verjee

The next thing you can do is to create those liquidity dynamics. You could figure out from your portfolio, what am I going to do to make sure this portfolio, either I know the companies in the portfolio that are planning on going public or that are potential MA candidates. If I can list those companies and be realistic about an exit timeline, I can begin to forecast and think through liquidity. If IPOs are not there, if MA is not there, the third stool is secondary markets. So having your portfolio, I think, prepared for secondary evaluators is just a good thing. You don't need to do that in year one or two, I don't think, but um year five to year seven, your LPs will get squirrely. That's what we found. And the fund can be doing well and the companies can be doing well, but the LPs need liquidity and they're, they maybe didn't sign up for this 10 to 12 or 15 year journey. So you want to be talking to second-way investors, I think, you know, by year four or five. You want to know who they are, you want to be communicating to them, you want to be able to educate them about the portfolio. You have to have information about the companies in your portfolio, just have the quarterly updates, have the financials, know, have a relationship with the founder where a second-way investor can come in and kick the tires and do the research and do the homework and get educated about the portfolio. All that takes time. So I think just prepping the portfolio, identifying the buyers, and then giving them the information that they need and building that relationship with them will give you those avenues for liquidity in years five to ten when some of your LPs will need it. And um, and that's just a good, you know, it's just a good planning mechanism, I think, to give your give your portfolio some uh some air.

Ryan Miller

Oh, I love that. You know, I always say the three most valuable assets in your possession as a fund manager is your reputation, your relationships, and your results. And you talked about the second R, which is relationships. And I just wanted to underscore that the importance of what you're saying is when you started out, so you said, okay, DPI, that's a liquidity thing. Are we returning money to our investors? And under that, how do we do that? So, like you said, could be you didn't say these words, but could be a 10-year lockup, 10-year trap. And these investors, some of them go in and they're like, that's fine, 10 years, whatever. But some of them, life happens. And maybe they were fine, but they're not now, whatever the reason is, doesn't matter. You need liquidity before you thought you needed liquidity. So we're in a little bit of a situation. And so I love what you talked about, and I just want to underscore this for people who are listening, for the emerging fund managers, is to say, is what you're saying is actually have those relationships of secondary buyers early on. Build those relationships. Um, just it's better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them. So build those relationships, and then you go through it and say, you know what, we might need to roll off and have some liquidity and roll off some of our position. Okay. Well, we're prepared for that. We have the relationships for that, and we can start setting that up, man. I absolutely love that. Anything else you can add to that, or did we pretty much nail it?

Aman Verjee

I think that's perfect.

Ryan Miller

Awesome, man. Well, I'd love to talk about using venture secondary uh secondaries as a solution here. So once a manager recognizes that problem that you were talking about, what are the specific steps that they take either to access the secondary market as a buyer or just restructure their fund to attract one? What would you suggest?

Aman Verjee

Well, I think if you're a manager and you've recognized now that you need to have a you, you want to explore the secondary option really on behalf of your investors, right? Some some GPs need money, but let's start with the premise that your LPs are the ones who are pushing for having secondary options. I think what you want to do is you want to give them um a couple of things. You want to probably be engaging with two or three secondary buyers, and you want to give them time to evaluate the portfolio. So um you don't want to be running, you don't want to go into a uh a secondary market where your LP needs money, you know, right now, or they have a loan to pay back or a house to buy, or they've got a tax bill to pay by like April 15th, and they come to you on April 1, and they tell you, hey, I need to liquidate my portfolio. What can you do for me? That's not a great situation to be in because you're gonna be negotiating with a single buyer in a short time frame. You need the money that, and they just don't, they can take and so you're not putting yourself in a good position. 

Aman Verjee

So I would start the conversations with the secondary buyers before you think you can meet them. Identify the top two or three, think of the space so there'll be a bit of a bidding comp competition for your assets. You can talk to us,  there's Industry Ventures. There's uh Sendana, there's 137 Ventures, there's 3SPOKE,  maybe Klein Hill, depends on the category, depends on the sector. So get educated about who those people are and start those conversations early. Uh, I want to try to spend time with them, you know, even before you have this conversation with them. Educate them about the companies that you've got in your portfolio. Hey, we've got this portfolio's got 50 companies, these are the 10 or 15 that really matter. Here's the information I have. Do you want to meet the founder? You know, do you want to talk to the uh you want to talk to the team? Come to my LP meeting next quarter. We're gonna be deep diving on one category, maybe highlighting a couple of our companies. We'll provide you that they're audited financials when we get them. That might be a couple of weeks. So prepare the data room and start to give the, start to give these guys a sense of what the portfolio looks like long before you think you need them. They'll be educated, they'll be informed. If you get two or three educated, informed buyers, they'll probably give you the best price for you know for the uh for the asset. 

Aman Verjee

So that's I think that makes as a secondary buyer, that makes my job easy. If a fund manager hands over, here's the financials, they've been audited, or they haven't, here's all the companies, here's where we're holding them, here's our accounting policy. Uh, you pick the 10 that you really want to deep dive on. Maybe, maybe I, the buyer, maybe I know seven of them already from my own research. I don't know about these other three companies. I'm gonna do a sum of I want the as a secondary buyer, I'm gonna do a sum of parts and figure out what the portfolio is worth. So help me fill in those gaps and help me do the research that I want to do and give me the information, help me deep dive and have that data room ready. I'll be a much more effective secondary buyer and just that you'll end up with a much better price at the end of the day.

Ryan Miller

Brilliant. So uh it it almost comes right back to I think you've gone deeper is back to those relationships, but also under the subtext of saying, but know who the real players are in that industry just in case you don't have a relationship. Better if you do, just in case you don't, you gotta know who are the big buyers. If you gotta move a lot of product, and I know I sound like a drug dealer right there, but if you gotta move a lot of shares, please don't be aware of it. Yeah, like if you gotta move it, you gotta know who's gonna buy it, of course. And um now I gotta be very careful what I said. So we set that frame. But you know, it it it in all seriousness, Aman, um, when everything underneath a secondary position is private and disclosure is limited, talk about the exact process you use to evaluate whether to pull the trigger or not.

Aman Verjee

So when we're buying a fund position, what we would look at it as just a portfolio of the companies. So I'm gonna go through all the companies. And usually what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start with um are you guys are you familiar with the power law, power law dynamics and venture? Yeah, hopefully your listeners are. That's not as common a theme in uh private equity, but it's kind of a well-known venture aphorism that most of the value is gonna come from a very small number of companies. Usually out of a portfolio of even 100 companies, maybe five of them will really determine the total value of the portfolio. The other, uh, you know, the other companies are gonna be write-offs or close to zero, or it's kind of gravy for us. So we'll buy diligence probably the top five percent of the portfolio. 

Aman Verjee

And what we'll do is we'll go through, first of all, give me the financials of your fund and are the audited or not, and let me talk from the auditor. Let me go through the top five companies and see where you're holding them. How many shares do you have? Do you have common? Do you have preferred? Uh, where is that in the capital stack? Uh, what's the price per share you're holding it at and why? Was it the last price round? Is it, you know, the uh where the secondary market is setting the evaluation? If it is the last price round, which is typical, well, who set up who set the last price round? Is this uh is this Benchmark or Founder's Fund last month? Or was the you know, is the price you're holding it at set by some family office in Thailand in 2021 when money was flowing through the hallways? Uh or was it set by Tiger or SoftBank, you know, in uh in at the height of like the COVID bubble? Uh and so based on that, we have our own, basically our own heuristics on which trust, which funds we trust, who did the homework, are they on the board, are they not on the board? There really what we're getting to is the is the valuation reasonable or not? Does it deserve a 20% discount, no discount, or a 70% discount based on the price setting and based on the lead investor? 

Aman Verjee

And then we'll try to re-underwrite the top companies and try to get the financials. So if you have them, top line growth, revenue, cost of goods, unit economics, try to get down  to EBITDA, net, net income, sure. Um, I'll try to get to a free cash flow number. We'll base it on that. And for big companies that are closer to an IPO, maybe we'll use comps that are um in the public markets. For a company like Databricks, you know, we'd use Snowflake. For a lot of late-stage private companies that are maybe not that close to an IPO, but we kind of know what Series C e-commerce and SaaS companies should trade at. Just given growth rates and unit economics and you know, valuations in space. Some of the stuff, you know, we kind of have to figure out, hey, what do we pay for this rather unique asset? One of the big companies in our portfolio is SpaceX. Neither I nor my partner really knew how to value SpaceX before we got into it. But we got we got in at $73 billion valuation. My partner Dave McClurry complained about the revenue multiple at $73 billion valuation. He still complains that $1.25 trillion that you know the revenue multiple is too high. Um, but there it is, it's a 20x to end in our portfolio, and we're still complaining all the way up. So some of the stuff you just have to So, what do we know about SpaceX? You know, we didn't do the research on the team, the technology, the defensibility, the market size. So we go through this exercise for all those companies in the portfolio that really matter and uh and pull that from the fund manager, from the seller, we pull it from our own network, our own resources, and try to cobble together the business strategy for it.

Ryan Miller

That's brilliant, man. So you've bought positions. I didn't know you were in in SpaceX. That's incredible, and among many others. Um I'm assuming you know, working directly with Elon at PayPal certainly didn't hurt. And your partner Dave is just as impressive as you are. So I'm not surprised you guys get these uh elite tiers. So, you know, you you've bought positions at discounts from 20 to 70 percent below NAV. That's amazing. What is the say the step-by-step method that a manager should use to price an asset that really has no market? It's tough. 

Aman Verjee

 Well, if it's no market, you've got a couple of choices. You can take a um, if it is a company like, you know, uh like a late stage, a late-stage Series company that is either in a category or just at a growth rate or at a scale that is just hard to hard to find in the public market. So you can take OpenAI and Anthropic as examples of how do you, you know, how do you price those things? One way to do it is you just kind of work backwards from what you think an IPO is going to be and why? So what are the multiples that the public market would would apply to a late-stage company like that? Anthropic is an example of something like $30 billion in ARR right now. If you're an accountant, you already know that ARR isn't isn't a real thing. You have to turn that into revenue and gap revenue and what's been recognized. And um, so let's assume you have to kind of go through all that process to figure out what the top line looks like. They're adding about $8 to $10 billion in ARR every month. 

Aman Verjee

So if they keep doing that till the end of the year, they could be at $80 to $100 billion at the end of the year. Um you can see how based on public company comps, a company at $100 billion in uh in ARR closing in on it might be like eight to ten times revenue, uh, just based on SaaS indexes and stuff like that. So that could be a trillion dollar IPO, and you've got to figure out if it's a trillion dollar IPO with some risk and time value at the end of the year, what do I want to pay for it now? Um we also could just benchmark OpenAI to Anthropic. Which one would you rather have? They're both around $30 billion in ARR. Um what one's got a big lead in the consumer space, open AI, one's got a really big lead in uh  enterprise, Anthropic, and Caude. Which one's grown faster? How do we compare the reverec of the two different companies? Are there both of them are raising a ton of money? I think OpenAI is burning a lot more money. My partner and I, by the way, we do this breakdown all the time to compare, you know, which one do we think is the winner? And we have a weekly podcast that we do where we just did recently did the OpenAI versus Anthropic Bet. And that was at a time when OpenAI had a higher valuation than Anthropic, but we actually convinced ourselves on literally on the pod, it should be the other way around. And you might ask why was it financials? And I think it's part of its financials, part of its growth rate. Part of it was the team. OpenAI has had a lot of turn over the past two years. They've had just key roles of uh folks dropping out. Their founder and chief scientist, Elliot Husker was dropped, they had a couple board members who left. They've got um their COO, their CMO out on leave, their Fiji CMO, who actually used to work for me at eBay. She's uh at OpenAI and um she's the CEO of their applications business, their advertising business where most of the revenue is going to come from. She's had a health problem and she's out on leave. So I'm looking at all these things. I'm like, how do you go public? Honestly, if you've got like half literally half your management team on leave, or it's six months in, or you've just rotated people in and out of worlds, you've lost your CTO, CMO, head of applications, you've lost a couple of board members, you've lost two founders, all of this, and and Sam himself is come and gone, right? So you've actually lost your seat brought in that. I've been on it on these IPO roadshows. There's no way this team, until they can form and build a policy data, there's just no way they're gonna be an IPO ready company in the next three months. So I we end up talking ourselves for all these reasons. We go into team, strategy, financials, comps. Um, eventually we get to maybe a model where we do a discounted cash flow analysis, just a salary chapter evaluation. And then we say, Do we think this, you know, this is reasonable given everything we know? Um if there's no usually you can find comps within Series C and Series D companies, series, you know, C and Series A, find buckets of companies that's a comp to it as well within similar categories and uh and try to as best you can to triangulate on evaluation, but it is a lot of just a lot of judgment at the end of the day.

Ryan Miller

Man, so I love this.

Aman Verjee

What's the name of the pod? It's uh Trading Places VC, Trading Places Podcast. Okay on YouTube and Spotify, and you'll see the uh shorts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Ryan Miller

All right, man. Well, I'm a fan of you, so I'm already fan of the show. I'm excited to dive in, brother. So, you know, there this is an interesting this one, actually, one of the things that is equally impressive about alternatives, but also very frustrating about alternatives, is sourcing deals, right? Like you don't have this open liquid market like public, and there's really no listing service that I've ever heard of, at least at scale, that would compete with public markets. So give our listeners the sourcing playbook. Who do they call? What relationships do they need, and how do they get to the other side of that secondary trade?

Aman Verjee

Well, if you're after companies, you can probably find a uh there is no one listing place. You're right. There are exchanges or brokers who make through third-party transactions, they'll make companies available. Um there's Techities, there's  Forge, Hive, there's uh, you know, a few other places like that where you can find companies. Um the way we don't really do that. We have a broad network of investors and LPs and people we've been working with for many years who are essentially giving us looks at companies and um for funds, secondary funds, there's really no exchange. So that's just a lot of legwork. It's just a lot of meeting people don't go to talk to talking to LPs, talking to investors. The things we've done, I think, that's served us really well is we have good relationships with GPs here in the Valley. So when you and that's because we've been in the Valley for 20 years, co-investing  with XL and Founders Fund and Andreessen and uh and Benchmark and you know all the top funds through our 500 global network. So when those funds think, ah, I need a secondary buyer, one of my LPs, one of my hundred LPs wants out because they have a situation, you know, family office stuff happens, tax bills, people die, families, you have state planning issues, corporate VCs change strategy every couple years. They'll refer those people to us. So the reason we got into SpaceX is, you know, we got through Founders Fund, for instance. So we figure out how to source from that network of uh, you know, of colleagues to get us into deals that not everyone will see.

Ryan Miller

Brilliant. Hey, if you're finding value out of this discussion, could you do me a huge favor? Could you just take a second and hit that like or subscribe button? It costs you nothing, but it tells the algorithm that this is valuable information and it helps us to get it to more people. Thank you. You're incredible. Now let's get back to the show.

Ryan Miller

You know, the first time that you and I met, you told me a story of the three blind men and trying uh and you related it to trying to figure out when there's no solid market, maybe you can walk that metaphor through of trying to say, you know, you ask three people, you get three different pieces of or three different takes on a company. Walk us through a little bit of what that's like using that fable of the three blind men.

Aman Verjee

Yeah, this really gets to diligencing the company. If you can use your sources to find companies, it's still very much a game of asymmetric information where nothing is public and nobody will tell you the full story about the companies that you may want. And so the question is, well, how do you get the information then that gives you comfort that you've you're seeing the whole picture and are making a good, you know, a good uh a good investment? And the thought that comes to mind is there's uh it's an old fable, I think it's an Aesop's fable, or it might be just an old Indian parable, about a group of blind men and the three of them and three blind men encounter an elephant for the first time. So they have no concept of what the animal looks like. And uh these three blind men decide to see the elephant by touch. So each man feels the elephant. But elephants are big, so you get the three of them are essentially touching different parts of the elephant. The first man touches the leg and concludes, ah, the elephant is like the uh it's like the a pillar or a tree. And the second guy says he's handling with the the tail. Second guy says, no, no, no, the elephant's not like a tree, it's like uh it's like a rope. And the third guy is over by the tusk, and he's like grabbing over the tusk and he's like, What are you talking about? The elephant is like a spear. You guys are smoking something. And so the free of them now have to collaborate. Wait a second, wait a second. I know no one of us saw the entire picture, right? So you can go to Pitchbook, you can go to uh Precon, you can go and get information from Carta insights, you can get from uh CB insights, and you'll get press releases, and you'll get little snapshots. You'll get you'll be like a blind man running around feeling up the elephant and trying to figure out what does this thing really look like? There's the do I have a full picture of everything that I need to need. And the answer, inevitably, if you only rely on one source or one set of conversations, is you'll probably think the elephant is like a spear. And then the next day you'll realize, wait a second, there's like a rope element to this thing. And then the third day you'll realize now having talked to another source, maybe it is a tree. And so you just have to be an investigative journalist, man. You got to go hunt down all these different sources and talk to investors, former employees, uh customers, uh, talk to the company, but companies won't always share information with you. If you're buying from a fund manager, ask the fund manager what they have, and you gotta pull together through all these different clues. What is it that you're really buying? Um, and then where's the price you're gonna pay? So that's my best advice, is just be a sleuth about this stuff.

Ryan Miller

Yeah. So it's almost like putting each puzzle piece together and you know, adding that and customers and former investors and and uh insider management information and really trying to understand the pieces of the elephant before you can actually see it, you got to get different components, man. I absolutely love that. Now, you worked alongside people who went on to build some of the most valuable companies in history. You got one hell of a resume, brother. What are the specific behaviors you observed in the best of them that perhaps some fund managers can use right now to evaluate whether a GP or a founder is even worth backing?

Aman Verjee

There are a couple of traits that so on that early PayPal team, as I said, I had the opportunity, just a fortune to work for. It was Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who were the CEOs of the company, and and uh and on the board, then we had Steve Chen, who went out and found YouTube, and we had Jeremy Stoppelman who uh founded Yelp, and we had Roeloff Botha, who until recently with Edith Yeung with Sequoia, and we had Reed Hoffman, and Keith Rabois is uh, you know, he's he's uh CEO of Square, and he's done all kinds of amazing things since and uh and is a venture investor. So very early on, I think my read of it was first of all, the the best of them, the best founders that I've met, and even in the in the days since those early PayPals has been reinforced, I think just being super smart is like table stakes. How do you know when you know when someone is uh extremely smart? I mean, they're very capable, they're very thoughtful, they're inquisitive. One of my tests is if someone is talking and I find myself like, you know, taking notes or wanting to hear what that person has to say about a certain topic where they that they clearly know, they're an expert in it. I don't really, that's somebody that I want to invest in back. But that's a table stakes, that's a starting point. 

Aman Verjee

The other thing that they all have in common is that I guess I'll say, you know, politely, these are not normal people. Elon Musk is not a normal person. There's a drive, an ambition, you know, there's a desire to build something. I've gotten further in my career and and and older, so I've seen it in a different way. And I see this in younger founders. And some people are smart and they show up with great academic credentials, and you're and you kind of you dig in and you realize this person went from one school to another. They had some, they, their life gave them opportunities, they took them, but that's what got them to where they are now. Maybe they're following credentials. So they're smart, but I don't know if they're driven to want to build something. And then some people show up and they don't necessarily have academic credentials, but they built something when they were 17 and they, you know, they wrote a book or did a podcast or did something remarkable as a teenager or as a young founder that shows this person has an edge to build something. And there's a creative energy about them. They want to, you know, there's some there's some impact they want to make for some reason. They're driven by some other reason. Money could be part of it, but typically it's not just money. It's like the money at some point, you know, the thing, the downside about money is if you're a successful founder, you do well financially, and then what do you do? Because that may not be the end of the journey for the investor, right? Uh like a Zapier keeps doing things that are amazing, even though he doesn't have to financially, but something else drives them. 

Aman Verjee

So, what is it that drives that person? Is that something you think that you can back? So it's some combination of the you know, the wherewithal, the financial acumen, um, the uh the desire to build something. And the last thing that's hard to figure out is what's gonna happen when this person runs into obstacles. Like are they gonna get knocked out? Have they been through things in their life that knock them off their path, that that you know, that shows you they're motivated to run right through. And some founders who are smart and ambition wanna build will hit those inevitable obstacles and just kind of run out of steam and then um you don't know what happens next. Some of them will just run right through the wall. And like, I don't know, do you watch Saturday morning cartoons or do you remember Wile E Coyote and the Roadrunner? If you have kids, you know what I mean. Wile E Coyote and the Roadrunner, man. Wile E Coyote, that's that's the founder. I mean, he's not always, he's not always gonna catch the roadrunner, but very very few founders actually catch the roadrunner. They keep going. Elon Musk is still chasing Mars. He's done everything there is to do. He's the most successful entrepreneur maybe in human history. He's still chasing just a roadrunner. And for him, that's Mars. The Wile E Coyote, you remember, he put like a coyote-sized hole in the wall. Went through the wall, and it's a what you want is gonna leave a founder-shaped hole in the wall, the obstacle that they want to run right through. That's what you're looking for. That's what these people have.

Ryan Miller

That's brilliant. And you know, one of the things you taught me about working alongside Elon and Peter is, especially Peter, you mentioned that he was always testing his assumptions. I absolutely love that, especially in startups, right? Very thesis-driven, and you're testing those to really make sure we understand what's working, what's not, what's true, what's not. And I I think you're what you're hitting on is really the the DNA of of people that can run through brick walls and and really just not afraid to roll up their hands and put their fingers in the soil and get dirty. So I love that. Um now you structured over a billion dollars in financing at Sonos and CanCapital. What are some of the most common and most costly capital structure decisions that you see emerging fund managers get wrong? And what should they do instead?

Aman Verjee

Well, for a fund manager, I guess the question is uh what's like a portfolio? Let me treat that in two ways. One, what's the mistake that fund managers make as far as like allocating a portfolio? And then the second part is that what does a founder make or a CFO make as far as like uh just the cap structure and how they raise money? I think on the emerging manager side, it's easy to set yourself into a particular strategy and not have the flexibility to shift off of your allocation. So funds will raise and they'll say, we really want to put, I don't know, 80% of our money into uh uh SaaS, fintech, and e-commerce companies. Because that's, you know, those are the companies that we know. We all worked at those kinds of companies. That's where we've had some prior investment success. And so that's gonna be our 80% of our money is gonna go to that. In fact, that's what Dave and I did when we started our first fund is we we said, this is our plan. We want to put most of our money into these types of companies where we've had success. Worked at PayPal, worked in SaaS, had a lot of success at eBay and e-commerce. So that's where we're gonna put most of our money. And this is like six years ago. 

Aman Verjee

Well, the world's changed a lot in the last six years, right? The SaaS and e-commerce and fintech companies, one of those categories is still great, fintech, but SaaS and e-commerce have fallen out of favor. And we gave ourselves the flexibility, luckily, to move into Space Tech and Defense. And now, six years later, our biggest winners are gonna be uh Canva, which is SaaS, kind of AI and SaaS, but mostly it's a SaaS company. Uh SpaceX will be a big winner. I think Android is shaving up to be to be a big winner. And we would not have gotten into SpaceX and Android based on our stated investment strategy. But what we did is in our documents, we said this is the plan, this is our target, but we gave ourselves a lot of flexibility to kind of move off of the strategy. And so we kind of skated to where the puck went to quote Wayne Gretzky, my favorite hockey player, and figured out, well, this is if AI is coming, we better get ahead of AI ahead of AI. 

Aman Verjee

I think another thing emerging managers do when they shut themselves off of that flexibility is they also spend a lot of time thinking about why they made mistakes. And that's a I think that can be a real problem. When you get burned a couple of times in the category, um, you then just don't see that category, you know, ever, ever emerging. And so you avoid it. Um and that, you know, and I can understand that as human nature. I think of Samuel Johnson, you have a famous quote uh maybe with Oscar Wilde about a second marriage. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. In life, I think you want hope to win over experience. I'm not saying go get married a second to third time. This is because that's the big thing  but if you if you're taking that if you've taken that first marriage that blew up as a you know, as a uh, oh I'm never gonna get married again, you might invest on it on some really interesting free. I'm old enough to remember internet search when it was like a place where you would have lost money on internet search in the 1990s. Lighthouse and AltaVista.

Ryan Miller

 AltaVista.

Aman Verjee

And the Dogpile, you remember HotBot, uh Yahoo  and  next like InfoSeek. And you would have lost money on internet search until Google came along. And then imagine if you passed over Google because you'd lost money on the four or five people before. If you passed up Facebook because you invested in Friendster. In fact, AI was an amazing place to lose money from 1945 to about 2020. You would have lost money in AI. And you would have, if that was, if that was your mindset and you never thought about the future and you kept learning your lessons of the past, the point is you would have missed out on some great opportunities. So I think those are some of the mistakes that you know these fund managers make. Um so we encourage them to keep flexibility and don't spend that much money worrying about your, why your first marriage blew up. Just go for the go for the make the second marriage work and um and you know and keep keep hunting the perfect woman. She's out there. Um and and so that's how you find those you know, those unicorns. 

Aman Verjee

I think on the other side of the uh on the on the on the founder side, the cap table mistake, and it's a similar, it's a similar thing about flexibility. It's easy to raise money as an early founder from equity, you know, when you have a good idea and the equity gives you flexibility and the ability to shift strategy. A lot of founders, you know, when the equity runs out, they look to venture debt. And I think venture debt is a potentially really big problem for early stage companies, especially if you haven't raised debt before. Debt can be, first of all, venture debt is usually senior to everything in the captain in the cap staff. So if you're a startup and you're a rough patch, you miss a quarterly target, you see a growth stall, uh, you miss the, you know, you miss the payment, you trigger a covenant, God forbid. But the lender has the ability to, once they trigger covenants, they can seize collateral, they can sweep cash, they can, you know, block your business, and uh and they're senior to everybody. So I would generally encourage these younger stage companies, you know, to be very, very careful about debt until you're really ready to take it on. Now, I've raised actually more debt than equity in my career just by the companies that have been in. So I just have firsthand experience being on the other side of these covenants and how to comply with them. Um so that's the other cautionary tale. It's just be really careful about debt and try to focus on equity. 

Aman Verjee

The last piece of advice I would give them, which no one ever takes, is when you do a round that gets ahead and the valuation gets ahead of where the business really is because uh, I guess of the triumph of hope over experience. Um, your company's hot, it's 2021, there's a lot of money. You will be able to mark up and mark up and mark up, but don't raise more money than you need. When you raise more money than you need, inevitably what happens is people, you or people on your team will want to spend that money. And inevitably that money goes through stupid ideas, poorly thought-through marketing programs, a lack of financial discipline, hiring the wrong people. And when the business resets, it's always uh really, really hard to dig your stuff out of the hole. The other side to it is if you set a valuation that's really high and you have to grow into the valuation and you miss a number and you don't go into the valuation, uh, then you have to raise money to down round. Nobody likes to down round. You know, it's your employees are mad, your early investors are mad. You know, the the example  of Anthropics is a good one. They just raised it a $350, $380 billion valuation. I hear now they're turning down term sheets at $800 billion plus. And um, and yet even last week they gave Amazon and Google a chance to get in at a $350 billion valuation. And you might say, well, why are they giving those guys a $350 billion valuation when they could be at $800? Well, they're well, you know, there's a reason to raise at a more modest valuation. One, they they they're raising what they need. Two, when you have the valuation set at $350, not $800, all your stock options price at $350, not $800. So all your employees are getting these the benefit of lower stock option pricing and they're in the money. They're motivated, they're incentive to stay, it's a recruiting tool. And then, you know, go back to, well, what if they do raise at $800 and they miss a number? OpenAI, they have this exact situation. They're doing great, they're a great company, but they're they're they raised at $850. If they now have to reset at $450 billion valuation, they would still be like the fastest growing company of all time. They went from zero to $450 billion in a matter of about six years. Um, and everybody will feel like shit. So, you know, just again, think about the consequences of raising more money than you need and evaluation that's too high to support. Now, every single founder is not going to listen to my advice. They're gonna raise as much money as they can at the highest possible price. And I'm gonna say I told you so. I've never once talked the founder out of raising, you know, money, but I will continue to try, uh, Ryan, and get this message across.

Ryan Miller

Well, Godspeed on that, man. Good luck with that. I know uh that's great advice. I know a lot of founders do try to overraise, and that could, like you said, lead into a lot of trouble, specifically a down round, which sucks for everyone. So I love that. That is a great advice. Um avoid the down round, don't overraise, um, and have discipline on the capital that you do have, because especially as a fund manager, managing someone else's money is the privilege of a lifetime, and it is quite a serious task. And so that is a big vote of trust. So I absolutely love that, man. Now, at 500Startups, you my understanding is you were deploying across like 50 countries at a volume most firms will never see. What's the actual system a fund manager can install today to separate signal from noise going at that kind of speed and volume?

Aman Verjee

Well, I think in the case of 500, we were deploying through every quarter, we'd be doing 30 or 40 companies through a uh through a batch process. And so what I think we tried to do is um we we had we decentralized our process to have a couple of partners interview and talk to all the different companies and force them to go through things like um just stack ranking, you know, how do you feel about the companies? We gave them a lot of flexibility, but we also gave them some standard questions to ask, they kind of diligence the companies. We did have some protocols in place, but it should be two interviews for every company, a blind interview, so one interview is and then the next person interviews, and you guys are gonna compare notes. Um and then you're gonna you know come back to the investment committee, which I chaired, and uh let's have a discussion about what you like. And ultimately the companies, you know, the fund we trusted the partners to make their to make that decision and pick the companies to  work for. But we also try to give them a uh a framework of what questions to ask, how do you ask the questions and what sequence, what makes sense, what are the traits you're looking for, you know, a little bit of a checklist of what are you looking for in order to in order to make the company. And then we try to standardize the deal terms as much as possible. So when I was there, the standard deal was a $125,000 check for uh for 7% of the company, and that was it. You know, very little negotiation. Inevitably, people come back and want to negotiate. We made a lot of side deals, but for the most part, that was our portfolio strategy. And so that also helped people with a bit of a structured you know negotiation framework. So they weren't reinventing the wheel on every negotiation. It wasn't um de novo. They had a they had a standard turn sheet, they couldn't really deviate from it without my approval. So they tried to sell that deal, and if they couldn't, they had to get my approval. So it just forced a certain discipline on uh here's the here's the here's how to structure the deal the the the right way. And if you want to go off those guardrails, you know, then um then you have to lobby for the exception. Uh and that way I think we got a lot of uh you know, a lot of continuity, just a lot of standardization around that around the repeatable process that people could just understand and then could execute the playbook.

Ryan Miller

Brilliant. So great advice for people trying to move at speed and volume at the same time for sure. Sounded like you had a standardized deal offer, and then you know, if it was still a really sexy deal, you were open to that, and you said you did some we call them side letters, as you well know, um, but on the other side is side deals. Yeah. I love that, man. Now, your seat as a buyer, what is the specific fund terms, reporting standards, and perhaps some portfolio construction decisions that make a fund easy for you to acquire versus one you would never touch?

Aman Verjee

Uh I think we would want to see the ideal is just you're doing quarterly reports on your companies, we're getting updates from the uh from the companies. You've got a valuation policy that is consistently applied. Like we want to be able to see the you know how you're carrying these companies and where why you're valuing them the way you are. If those companies are doing uh great and there's like an honest communication between you and the company, and you can share quarterly reports and updates, that's that's great. That documentation is very helpful. Um, if you're not in communication with the companies, the uh the thing we look for in our portfolios of like, are you you have a bunch of companies in there you're not talking to, you don't have any information on, don't have information rights, you're not getting the updates, and you're still carrying them at something more than you know, more than zero. So then we have to go and research those long tails and figure out what it's worth and what's not. So, you know, just being buttoned up, I think, about your uh your information and your reporting and being able to document that in a clean way is really helpful. The uh the valuation, you know, the valuation policy is always a debate with VCs, people do it different ways. I've seen one company being carried through different valuations, three different funds. That's not the end of the world, but you want to have an explanation for why you're marking stuff up or marking stuff down and what the, you know, what the basis and documentation of that is. That's those are the best practices we look for.

Ryan Miller

Okay, brilliant. So family offices are asking about liquidity before they even commit. I don't know if you've noticed that. We certainly are. What specific structure, term, or language should a manager bring to that meeting to turn the liquidity question into a reason to invest? Because I know you guys are really good at this and you have a great strategy. Can you walk us through a little bit of that?

Aman Verjee

Yeah, I think if liquidity is important, the first thing is to assess whether it's even important to your LP. So they they're they'll ask and they should ask, but I guess the first test question is, hey, what's your timeline of getting money back? Let's say it's 10 to 15 years, would that be a problem? Um and if it is, we should solve for that now as opposed to finding out about it later. Like you don't want to be, you don't want to be getting into a 10 to 15 year relationship and then being surprised like halfway in, like, oh, we need money now. It's like getting married, you know, and then oh, you want kids after five years? We should have talked about that maybe before. That was the thing to get over. Right. But you know, you and and and opinions change and feelings change and all that, just like it does with kids. But at the same time, just having a level set, like you want money  now, 5 years, 10, 15 years, what is your timeline and why? Let's start with that, you know, basic set of assumptions. If you can wait and uh for the if you can wait until 15 years, because that's how long it'll take for the money to come back fully in all probability, then uh then we don't need to overstress on the liquidity solutions. 

Aman Verjee

If this is a seed fund and you're telling me now you need money back in  like 5 to 10 years, well, first of all, it's the term of the fund is probably gonna be 10 years with some extensions. So you should be honest about how long the fund can continue to go. Uh in our case, we have a seven-year fund. We can do two one-year extensions, but then we need an LP majority vote. So already our LPs were like, okay, we've got some control over when, you know, when and how to terminate the fund. Um if it's going longer than we think, we've got we can take control of the fund and then we can figure out how to liquidate if that's what we want to do. So giving some legal options to LPs is one solution. 

Aman Verjee

Uh, I think the more reasonable one is start right out of the gate telling your LPs, here's how we will get you money in year five. Chances are we're gonna have some funds, like right now, I can tell you in our fund, we we're gonna have uh, you know, half of our half of our NAV is gonna be in uh these four companies, SpaceX, Anduril, um, Stripe, and Vercel. Those four companies today, and Canva, actually five companies, those companies today could probably find a secondary buyer if we went hunting for one. We can sell a uh we can do a strip sale, which is like a piece of every company. We can sell off some of our assets, we can sell your particular LP position to these three secondary buyers that we've already talked to and are having quarterly updates and conversations with. Those are all options at the end of the day. No guarantees you're gonna get 100 cents on the dollar. You might only get 80 cents on the dollar. But if you if you're telling me right now you want the credit in years five to ten, that's gonna be our solution. So that way I think you've given the LP, you know, you've set expectations on the timeline. Um, you've aligned yourself and your interests with their interests. And to the extent that they need to hit an escape valve, you've given them, you know, two or three secondary buyers you're working with, you're educating, and uh and they can use that as their way to get liquidity from you and the fund and be in a good position. And that's that's kind of all you can do as a general partner, I think.

Ryan Miller

Brilliant. So my my final question to you one concrete action, 90 days, every manager listening. What is it and why does it matter more than anything else right now?

Aman Verjee

One concrete action that every manager could take. I think the most obvious one um that we see happening right now at a at the speed of light is AI and the move to AI and AI native companies in it is dominating our portfolio. Either it's not just because companies are adopting AI technologies. Um half of them are, but then half of them are getting hit or wiped out by AI and AI native competitors. We don't think we're an AI fund, but the fund we started even like three years ago, that the biggest company in it is SpaceX. SpaceX would now call itself an AI company, not least because they acquired X AI, but they think they now need AI as a capability to get into outer space. So they are an AI-enabled company. Canva has used AI to accelerate their business. Um I could mention a few other companies, but I won't. They're just being hit hard by AI. And it's in areas like legal tech and uh call center software, like these areas have just been completely disrupted. And all you have to do is look at public companies, you know, SaaS software indexes just to see how certain companies, from cybersecurity to, you know, to um workflow automation have just been disrupted by Claude. So it's happening and it's gonna affect your portfolio in a major way. 

Aman Verjee

So, as a manager, what can you do in the next 90 days? I would just really understand, you know, first of all, how AI is affecting a portfolio. I would be using it. Myself, I'd be using it every day to get smart about what is happening. Um, you know, one story I'll tell you about new companies we're investing in now, but when I talk to CEOs, one of the questions I'll ask them is, What, how are you using AI in your business? And if you are going to hire someone, you know, how do you know that that person is AI capable? And it's not just are they using LLMs and and looking up searches and using on a daily basis? But right now, the question I tell every CEO to ask is if you're hiring a senior member of your team, especially a CTO or a COO, have you have you used an AI agent in the last, at your last company to change how your business does business, to onboard customers, to improve workflows, to change how you do finance or accounting or whatever else. If that CTO candidate says, I have not used an AI agent in my last company to change the, you know, the nature of the business, I would say that's a real red flag. And as CEO, you probably shouldn't hire that person because you will regret hiring that person like within a year, you will regret their hire. And if you are a CEO and you ask that question and the CTO doesn't give you a really good answer, and you still hire that person who didn't who has not used AI to enable their business, man, I think as a CEO, you just made a huge mistake. As an investor, I probably want my money back. I mean, I probably want my 1X. Give me, I'll take my 1X back right now. You can keep your future upside and your markups, but I don't I I'm very concerned about a CEO who isn't hiring AI superstars in the senior roles right now. So that is the one thing I think I would do for every manager is really think through, you know, part of your hiring, part of your investment criteria, part of your own personal day. How are you using it? What agents are you using, really get smart about it and get ahead of it because it's coming at the speed of light.

Ryan Miller

Brilliant. So before we wrap things up, Aman, is there anything else you'd like to tell our fans around the world, ways they can contact you if they want to learn more? Uh again, mention the podcast, anything at all. Final thoughts.

Aman Verjee

Yeah, I'd love to uh I'd love to uh highlight a couple of things that we're doing. So, one, I mentioned before, my partner and I do a weekly podcast called, Trading Places. Uh it is now, I think, the top-rated secondary VC podcast. You can get it wherever you find your finer podcasts on on um YouTube and Spotify, and you'll see the shorts on LinkedIn and and Facebook and Apple podcasts. Uh every week we just talk about the news, what's happening in venture, specifically what's happening around secondary tender offers, companies that are raising what do we think about valuations or you know, too high, too low. Do we like this company? Do we not like this company? 

Aman Verjee

And then we'll do a valuation corner where we just we'll break down one company every week and we'll go for about eight or ten minutes and just do a deep dive on the company, its financials, what do we know about it, its team, its strategy, their investor base, how they're setting valuations. Do them, do we like them, do we not like them? We  did Cursor last week, which just got acquired by SpaceX. So we kind of broke  down Cursor, the valuation, um, why did SpaceX do it, and all that sort of stuff. So that's uh I think it'd be great if you if your listeners could go and uh check that out. And then I've got a book coming out next month, probably in June. It's called, A Brief History of Financial Bubbles. You can go check it out bigbubbletrouble.com. And it's uh it's a history book, financial history book, but it tells a story of 10 financial bubbles that have happened going back to 1636 in Amsterdam with the tulip bubble. And it kind of ends and goes through the South Sea bubble and the Mississippi bubble and the 1984 Japan bubble and the UK railway mania and the dot-com bubble. And then it kind of wraps up with the uh AI. Are we in a bubble? Are we not in a bubble? Here's how you tell, here's how it compares to prior bubbles, how do you play it as an investor, as a technologist, and what it's going to do to society. So I encourage your, I encourage you to go check that out too.

Ryan Miller

Awesome. I can't wait to dive in, man. So maybe one day I'll get an autographed copy of it and we'll uh we'll we'll exchange war stories. So it has been an absolute pleasure.

Aman Verjee

Next time I'm in Edmonton, if you take this, if you take me to an Edmonton Oiler's game, I will uh quickly hand deliver your autograph right there.

Ryan Miller

All right, sir. All right, we got the Oilers. Uh so we call McDavid uh there's science calling him McJesus and McDonald's. There was one that renamed it to yeah, there you go, McDavid. I love it. So yeah, well, you know, just to summarize everything that Aman and I talked about, look to build relationships with potential buyers from the start. The second one is secondaries can be an absolute stellar way to build a fund if you have the network to justify it. And then third, understand AI, the market, the adoption cycle, and the use cases as it will be impacting valuations in nearly all sectors. You do these things, and you too will be well on your way in your pursuit  of Making Billions.