Mel Tang is the founding operating partner at Matter Venture Partners. Matter just announced a huge 300 million dollar Fund One. Prior to Matter, Mel was the CFO at Ring and the CFO at Demand Media before that. Mel has definitely played a big role in some of the most important LA startups.

Very flattering, but just a small small piece.

Ring and Demand Media are two pretty iconic LA startups.

It's been fun to see this area really develop over the last 15 years. It's awesome.

I want to talk about your background, it is very interesting. I had Sean on the show.

I didn't see that in the library. All right.

It was a little while ago. I mean, I've been doing this for five years now.

Yeah, that's awesome. I love Sean.

What I want to hear about is you were the CFO to his CEO, right?

Yeah. So, there was a turnover at the top and Sean stepped in as interim. I was the CFO already before that and so that whole journey is interesting. I was a banker, prior to that. So when I joined Demand Media, this was back in 2006, I was sort of the first kind of finance in Santa Monica, and then a year later we brought on a seasoned CFO and really kind of grew up underneath him. He showed me the ropes and when we took it public, a year later, he retired and know I was lucky enough to get promoted.

Wow. So then I mean one of your first operating roles, you became a public company CFO.

Yeah, pretty, uh, pretty lucky, no question. And but it was quite a journey. Yes. surprising to be honest with you. I didn't really expect it.

Quite a journey in what, in what way?

Just from the you know, going from transactional, which is banking to operating, it's a totally different grind, right? Operating is a daily sort of like everything changes. It's different. You're solving new problems, you know, on a regular basis. And I think in banking, it's more sort of ebbs and flows, right? You could be just cranking and then you might have a little bit of dead time. And so it's just a different. way of being

So coming back to your question, working with Sean was awesome. It was journey in that it was an amazing business model that we took public and then you have this macro exogenous factor of Google algorithms. And so literally I think three months after we went public, the first of the multiple changes hit.

And so if you can imagine going public on a story that now fundamentally has been impacted by a third party over which you have no control. That was a fun sort of, you know, two and a half years for me to step into the CFO role, trying to explain everything that was going on and the only thing that you really have at the end of the day is credibility with analysts, with investors. And so if I could just communicate as credibly as possible what I knew what we didn't know. That was it right the business is going to go up and down but I think if people believe that you are being transparent and honest with how you're dealing with it, right? They can make their own decisions whether to buy or sell.

I want to talk about your role at Matter, but I think it's interesting because I always talk about like with early stage companies. I'm a seed investor. It is about the people. It's about their ability to story tell, and it's interesting that you just said the exact same thing about public companies.
I think storytelling is such a huge element of startup world, if there's a narrative that people can latch on to, then it becomes that much more compelling. I think of the world sort of from soundbites. They go back to investment committee, or they go back to write the research reports. What are the nuggets that they remember? They're not going to remember all the things that you talked about, but you gotta give them these sound bites for them to incorporate or pitch. Oh, it's a blank, right? You kind of want to basically do their work for them.

But I also feel like uniquely the CFO, the finance side of the house, you know, it's one thing for a CEO to have a vision, but I think the best is when it comes together and there's either projections or data to tell it.

Absolutely, there has to be alignment between what is being told and pitched and the ultimate vision of the company with backing up that, look its happening. The rubber hits the road, numbers don’t lie at the end of the day. Its important for anyone, especially the CFO sitting on that spot is to bring that credibility.

Customer traction or revenue traction or these valid data points, that really demonstrate that this is real and coming from the CFO that generally tends to be more credible. Right, but you got to back it up, right? Ultimately, you're as a CFO, and this will play into sort of we'll talk about my operating partner duties.

But it's about being able to bring that credibility and shape the actions of the to deliver that, right? I can't just make up these numbers, right? They don't just happen.

It needs to be structured in a way where guess what? Like, yeah, certain things are important at the startup level that aren't necessarily as sexy or what have you, but you know, the people process systems, you know, help to deliver some of the growth acceleration.

Okay. so you said people, processes, systems. Do you have frameworks or best practices that you're bringing with you to these companies that you're working with?

I've sort of seen enough to pattern recognize, and I generally don't bring a playbook into whatever company that I happen to be working at or advising on. It's really depends on the culture, depends on the personalities. It depends on, You know, now these days, whether you're remote or in person. And so I think there are some key tenants in that, there needs to be a someone that makes decisions or a, path so that decisions can get made.

Right? At Amazon it was about the doc, the six-page memo, what have you. And in those docs, there was discussion, but there were action plans coming out of those meetings, theoretically at least.

But, I don't bring sort of a playbook in and so from a people perspective , you want folks that will challenge each other. But ultimately you know as amazon likes to sort of say this is like disagree and commit right you've had a discussion you've sort of embarking on a decision. Everyone's fully on board with that Right. And then you have a process to check those assumptions and make adjustments as you need to, but to deliver some of those data points and in feedback loop, you need to have the right systems that are gathering it on a scalable basis, right?

And if you don't have the systems to give you data points as you grow, you don't know if that Nth dollar that you just put out makes sense or if it was effective to spend.

So, you know, you got to have the people in the right room, in the right place, asking for the right things. You need a way to curate the things that are getting presented to the decision makers or what have you. And then you need the systems to scale so from my perspective, when I come in, it's always those three things.

It's like, do we have the right people in the right place? Do we have the right meetings or documents or, dashboards to really sort of say, these are the five, six key things and then do I have a way to get it as a system of record that doesn't change month over month? And all that builds up to being able to deliver to investors, analysts. Look, here's where the company is, right?

What saying though is you have to have the structure. It is sort of a playbook, it's just a pretty high-level playbook.

Very high level.

It's a very high-level playbook though. It's a, our decisions, there are systems there to get the data, to make the right decisions.
Yeah. And it gets harder as you grow because if you don't have these in place earlier, then it just becomes hodgepodge of spreadsheets and people. And maybe you got a homegrown system for this, but it doesn't tie to this one, even though the data should be the same. And it just becomes this tech debt, right? Everyone knows what tech debt is on the coding side. It's the same thing on the infrastructure side.

It’s interesting, we used to call it LMFAO, which is, the decade ago when LMFAO, the band, was big. But it was our local market financial and operating spreadsheet system. But basically, finance was so tied with operations that we couldn't.

So, okay, so you're gonna come, you're gonna work with these startups. Are you gonna come when they need you? Are you gonna be, like, there with their onboarding and talking about these things? How do you think you'll work with them?

Yeah, and that's something I'm personally trying to figure out as well. You know right now and engaging where I think I can add value in a lot of cases right now. It's about Finding non-dilutive capital, right? I've done a lot of debt and debt's not something you typically tie to venture, right? but can be the right form of capital.

For example, we invest a lot in hardware as a service companies. So, these are companies that require Capex to develop a call it a robot that gets deployed and there is an ongoing recurring revenue. So it's almost like paying a robot an ongoing wage. So instead of buying a robot for a hundred thousand dollars. You know, it's a ongoing monthly for 10,000 or something along those lines. right? Whatever that number is.
And so, from a CapEx perspective, it requires CapEx to grow. If I sign a new customer, I need to build X number of robots. But you know, it's tied to a contract, typically multiyear and there is generally, you know, best companies pay back that initial CapEx under a year.

But it's generally between 12 and call it 18 months. Well, how do you finance that? Well, growth equity probably isn't the cheapest form of capital, right? So, it gets interesting because you have these HaaS lines. Hardware as a service lines that some of the banks are providing. The meds lenders are getting into this game.

Uh, there's equipment leasing and so navigating all that and, negotiating those documents. I did a lot of leverage finance while I was a banker, And look, it can be scary, you don't want to debt finance a company and that be the only lifeline you have, right? It can get dangerous because they sit above everybody else, but managed properly and structured properly. It could be a very good way to grow these hardware as a service companies.
Fascinating. So, talk to me, because we kind of skipped over what Matter is doing, where your focus is. Like how much hardware is it. Again $300M Fund 1, doing a lot of hard tech.

So, uh, Matter Venture partners again, for the people that haven't heard about us, we're, we're new, so you probably haven't, was basically spun out of Kleiner, the two Kleiner partners were Wen Hsieh, who was one of the GPs and Haomiao Huang, and they've been investing, in Hard Tech.
One has been at Kleiner for I think 17 years prior to this, he started out as John do's Chief of Staff Haomiao was a founder before he joined Kleiner.
He actually, founded a company called Kuna, which was like a Ring competitor. and, the funny thing there is, I think he actually built the company a better business. We just marketed better at ring. but that's a story for another day. but hard tech for us is the following. It's founded on hardcore science and engineering.

it's hard to do, hard to copy. It is, hardware, but it frequently involves software. and then finally, I think this maybe differentiates us, is that we view hard tech as needing to be venturable. Meaning it can't be decades and billions of dollars before you get commercialization or returns It needs to be venturable within that time frame So we started off with this fund as a differentiator hard tech is hard.
You've heard that a lot, right? It takes a village And it was during Covid that when and how I kind of realized look Capital is necessary, but not sufficient

He likes to use the example, we may have the Harvard endowment as an LP, but they can't get you wafers. and so we sought out to sort of raise, and inform this fund differently in that, you know, a third of our LPs roughly are these strategic supply chain folks.
So the world's largest chip maker, contract manufacturers, industrial, what have you, folks that, we can call on in our strategically aligned to help our portcos scale And then the other piece, which is where I come in, is hardware is hard because prototyping isn't free. Unlike software, you spend some time, you can come up with a new product here.

Hardware generally, you got a prototype. It costs money, cost time. And so that's why you hear that it takes a lot of money and a lot of time to get a hardware product to commercialization. Well, if you can Bbing on operating partners to help with the supply chain, but someone like me to think about gross margins unit economics Can I get that trajectory correct. It's a lot easier to get to sustainable.
Versus going through four iterations of a product you burn two hundred million dollars before you finally hit upon it and so I think capital Operating partners strategic LPs You know, that's how MVP or matter of venture partners likes to think that we're, you know, approaching this problem differently.

So, these LPs, I’m trying to think, I'm kind of blown away by a 300 million fund one.
Yeah, no I think we were one of the largest new funds to be raised. last year. it blew by our expectations. You know, I think we sought out to raise 150, 200 if we were lucky.

But it was time, you know, relatively well. You think about the AI, all the focus on semiconductors, everything that's happening in AI.
And so the part that resonated, you think, was it's sort of AI coming together with the need for Semiconductors ?

Yeah, I think that's right.

If you look back over the decades, innovation generally has been led with hardware, right? So, you think about just the last piece, app development, the Internet, what have you. Those could not have been possible without Internet switches, the semiconductors, the chips, whatever, like computing and Windows OS could not have been possible without t hese chips in the development, Moore's law, all that stuff, electrification, EVs are not possible with battery and electric motors infrastructure, right? And so, I think that plus the geopolitics of China right now, it really impact, right? And so, that was a big thing because part of our, our thesis also is US needs to basically bring back that manufacturing skill. Onshore, friend shore.
But you just said a lot of supply chain, I thought you were going to talk about…

Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Mexico, so all the friend shore, exactly. we don't have any, money from China. It was deliberate, to make sure that ultimately we are crafting the supply chain ecosystem that survives whatever geopolitics. So that was a very important piece for us, to bring the right partners on, with the geopolitics being what they are.

So, where was Ring manufactured? Or what was the Ring supply chain?

Ring was in China, it was through Taiwanese contract manufacturers that had plants in China and elsewhere as well, and then when the tariffs in 2018, 19, something along those lines, The whole world, including us, started to look at other places for, uh, manufacture.

Through the same contract manufacturers, they were building plants in Vietnam, in Malaysia and standing those ecosystems up. So it's always been, even Ring generally through Taiwan.

That is interesting. I mean, I asked about Ring, but I'm right now, like when you're looking at some of these supply chains, is that state of the art going forward, is it contract manufacturers who are based in Taiwan, who are locating plants other places?

It is, uh, I would say maybe more diverse than that. Japan, Korea, Mexico, I mean, all of these countries, and quite frankly, governments, you know, want this type of investment.

If you look at China, it was convenient, but it wasn't necessarily strategic. And by that, I mean, they had the infrastructure to get cheap labor, component parts, etcetera, but a lot of the innovation. was imported in it wasn't necessarily developed there. That's not to say there wasn't innovation coming out there, but a lot of you know allowed China to become a hub for manufacturers more one of convenience. You had all the right pieces in proximity, versus oh, they're coming with the next teo millimeter, you know, two nanometer, um, semifab, for example.

Like that was for the most part, all done outside design work, etcetera. You look at Apple, right? Design in California, like sure. It's manufactured in wherever.

What else do you think interesting on supply chain? I feel like you must have fair amount of exposure, both at MVP, but also with Ring.
I think it becomes sort of a much more global, you know, despite all everything that we're saying. I do think it becomes more global, but the U.S. has outsourced this manufacturing for so long in certain industries that the skilled labor doesn't even exist anymore. You think about chip design. I don't know a single person that has graduated with that, right? and in fact, I heard, I don't know if this is necessarily a hundred percent true or not, but, when TSMC is building the fab in Arizona, they had to import hundreds, thousands of skilled technicians and engineers from Taiwan. Because that doesn't exist currently in the U.S. because we've been so focused on Software. Computer science. Everyone wanted to be a computer science major when I was in college.

Right? And I don't think that's necessarily changed all that much. And so what I think the US really needs to reinvest in is this education pipeline. So that we can develop those skills instead of outsourcing them.

And is it going to be, I mean, there's skills like semiconductor, but clearly a skilled field, and then I feel like I hear a lot of people say we need to invest in robots to work in warehouses and work in manufacturing so that we can be just more automated because we aren't going to be able to compete on labor.

So, that's one of our focus areas. one of our themes is the blue-collar labor shortage is here to stay. There are jobs out there that are just not fit for humans, quite frankly.

And so this blue collar labor shortage does lend itself to, okay, manufacturing, automation and robots that can deliver, task parity. Even humans working at a single workstation are doing multiple things. They're not necessarily just moving one part in exactly the same spot to the next. That might be, a fifth of what they're doing. In the meantime, they're cleaning up or they're, setting up the part or what have you. And I think for robotics to really take over some of these roles and needs to have task parity.
So yeah, you asked the question about sort of robotics and automation. We do think that is, a big piece in the right type of development and use case.

Okay, so robotics.

I’ll tell you what our six sort of themes are.

Yeah, great.

The first, which is somewhat obvious is semiconductors drive everything. They are in everything and everywhere. When there is a shortage the world kind of comes to a stop.

Yeah, but tell me more about sort of where we are right now with the state of the world and semiconductors, and how you guys are thinking about this. Will innovation just continue and we should all be investing in semiconductors?

I'll give you an example. One of the things, and this will go to sort of the next theme, which is, you know, kind of AI right? Generative AI is a huge thing. Generative AI requires a ton of compute a ton of power, right?

And so, for example, one of the companies that we invested in called Ambic develops the lowest power chip at edge, right? That can process AI. And so that's going to be tremendously important, not just at the edge, but power solutions in general, and what I've learned just boggles the mind just in terms of what we're doing today, like what TSMC is doing to build chips. I mean, we're talking about like atomic level size transistors and gates.

It's crazy. how much has been developed and how much is clear that we need to continue developing it because compute needs are not going down, So that's semiconductors. Generative AI for us, we are not betting on LLM models, but the picks and shovels. So network switches. All the hardware and infrastructure around delivering compute is what we look at.

And then, you know, we talked about blue collar labor shortage, electrification of everything. But again, we're picks and shovels, the energy building blocks, infrastructure, motors, controllers.

Does all your stuff have hardware?

Generally, yes.

Okay, keep going, so electrification.

And then we will sort of life sciences, so were not investing in drug discovery but with AI and everything else they need a ton of data in samples, and so there's automation and there's sort of hardware around developing that infrastructure to deliver the data that, you know, these gen AI models need. So that's what we'll look at as well. and then the final piece is we talked about U.S. Manufacturing on shoring, so we'll look at advanced manufacturing, automation, logistics, you

One thing you mentioned was defense tech, which is especially I feel like hot in South Bay right now. things like semiconductors are very strategically important at the global level. how do you guys think about sort of defense tech and dual use companies? That sort of thing?

Defense tech is interesting in that it has primarily one customer, right? And getting that one customer to commit. is not obvious, right? Certainly, look, there are folks that have done it very, very well. but it remains one of these where it's a, it's a big macro that you can't necessarily control. Could be the personality of the senator that's pushing, it could be whatever whims the budget committee, etcetera, etcetera. So, we tread carefully there, we love the tech, but ultimately if, your dual use, right, there needs to be some sort of visibility line of sight to one of those uses,

I, we tend to think it's also just a different expertise.

You almost need, and, this is just me talking here, I mean, I think you really just need people that understand DC. And you're in there, and you're plugged in.

One question, you could ignore this one, but why did they spin out of Kleiner? Like, because Kleiner does, they were doing some of this similar type work, it sounds like, at Kleiner.

I'm probably the wrong person to answer that. I believe sort of Kleiner sort of retrenching a little bit around sort of software consumer. They're kind of going back to the roots a little bit,

Yeah, so what size check? What's the sweet spot for you?

So sweet spot for us is kind of Seed, Series A so large Seeds and Series A so we'll write sort of 5 to 15 up to 20 million dollar checks, but mostly sort of in that called 10 plus or minus range

So lets go back to your background because its so interesting. I was looking up Ring and it was started with crowdfunding, right? it was a crowdfunding called like, um, DoorBot.

Yeah, so at some point you should get Jamie on here cause it's fascinating. But, this was very cliche. He was working on other stuff. He had a detached garage. And kept missing the FedEx person. And so hacked together this wifi camera. And of all the things that he worked on, I think his wife, Aaron was like, this is the one thing I like.

This is so helpful, yeah.

So they shifted to that and yeah I mean it was door bots and if you're able to find on eBay the some of the original door bot of which I Think there's still several thousand out there But it looks very sci fi.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, it lost connection and what have you. but I think his and Jamie's awesome because he thinks so far outside the box.

But one of his big things was look, the sci fi looking thing. It's not something people are going to want to put in front of their house. Right. And door bot, like kind of name is door bot. So he spent a significant portion of the capital that he left in his bank to buy ring.com.
And when I was at demand, we saw that trade hit and we're like, who bought that? It wasn't a jewelry company? Like, this is crazy. Who paid that much? Well, it turned out it was Jamie.

And so the door bot was, you know, what he pitched on Shark Tank. and he had no money in the bank is my understanding he went to that he was running on fumes, and he did get an offer. I can't I think was from Kevin and Jamie just said no the terms don't work for me knowing he didn't have anything in the bank. I mean, that's just sort of who he is.

But that drew media coverage got some investment in. And then it's just been kind of this pretty interesting pace of, okay, we're going to take what we have, launch the next iteration, pray that it works because, you know, in consumer hardware, all of your capital sitting on shelf come Black Friday.
So they would just sit there and hope that it's sold so they could pay their vendors and pay themselves. And Oh, it worked. Right. And by the way, you know, Richard Branson was on Necker Island and one of his guests had a Ring and Richard's like, what is that? And so Richard invested, I mean, it's just kind of these series of very, fortuitous, events.

And then I joined, right after Kleiner invested, and this was a company at that point, I think, run rating just under a hundred million or something,
so it's a hundred million run rate. What does it look like?

And he did it all the ways that, you know, that I, wouldn't have expected, right? Like. lot of advertising on TV and radio, like who does that out of the gate? Right. direct to consumer was less than half of sales, right? Selling through retail, big box. And his thing was like, we need to make this ubiquitous cause there is a network effect.

And so yes, he got it to a hundred pretty amazing, and it's like a multi billion dollar business.

How did you, you know what was sort of the journey. We talked a little bit about Amazon purchasing. How did you go through some of that?

You imagine you have the smartest people, you know, in a company and there's a lot of them and they have unlimited time and resources. So the diligence process, for example, is secretly renting out three ballrooms at the Lowe's Santa Monica.

And I think they sent down 40 people, 50 people, maybe 100 people. And on our side, it was, we had to keep it under wraps. And I think there was like eight of us running between ballrooms, answering diligence questions, presenting. I mean, it was, crazy, crazy. and you know, their diligence request list, I think topped, almost a thousand at a certain point.

I mean, it was, it was a heavy, heavy load. You know, they, they were the right partner. Our values, I think, aligned, you know, they have their leadership principles. We sort of didn't have it as official and formal as that, but a lot of those aligned and Jamie saw Amazon as the one company that would invest in his vision. And they did. and I think it worked out really, really well for them.

But it was, quite a process. We were in the middle of our series E and I had, it was a two part close already closed the first half of it when they sent over the term sheet, and so I personally think they didn't think we were going to close that, and so they were waiting to see if we did or not, but we closed the first, tranche. this was the week before Christmas of 2017, I think.

And, yeah, they gave us a term sheet and then it was just full on sprint from there, but I had another tranche closing, and if, diligence didn't work out, that tranche was gonna walk.

So, we first had to negotiate a backstop to do that. So that was sort of my Christmas and New Years. and then once we got that done, then it was full blown diligence on the acquisition, and that lasted, I think, three months until we closed in April.

Wow

Yeah. It was quite an experience.

I love hearing these stories though, because I think that from the outside it's such like a iconic successful close for over a billion dollars. But sounds like a lot of nail bitey.

Oh, very nail bitey.

But then post that you know, Amazon was very good in that. Look, we, sort of capture lightning in a bottle. So we want you to sort of keep doing the things you're doing.

Except on the finance side and the admin side, it was like, how do you plug into our systems? Right. So there's very much sort of this dichotomy where it was awesome. That marketing product and Jamie, whatever we're, But I spent a lot of time on the back end just trying to fit round pegs in square holes or the other square pegs around holes. Painful. It was painful.

For example, Amazon did not sell through retail, but over half our business was retail. So those systems were unable to account for that fact. And so they basically had to build a whole new sort of module or whatever. And of course it's a big company. So that takes forever to one get approved and two to get done.

So a lot of learnings there. and I had the fortune of, you know, every year there's a OP one, OP two operating plan. And so there's a big doc that goes. And so I took the pen on, that for ring. And so sitting with, you know, Jeff and his leadership team and presenting that that's,
Yeah, that's exciting.

It was interesting. You basically, you spend all this time months preparing this Doc, so you've got it all done and they call you up to Seattle and you have a, I think it was like a, four hour block .

and so , you show up, your team's there, they put you in a waiting room, right? There's a conference room that they all go in and then when you walk in the conference room, you have sort of assigned seats for the company.

Jeff and his sit their seats and then in front of every chair is like the printout with a red pen. you know, this is true for every Amazon, most Amazon meetings with the doc is you spend the first part of the meeting reading. Okay, so you sit down. The presumption is no one pre reads, which is pretty smart.

And then for us, the first hour was watching Jeff and his team read. And I'm trying to sort of see where they're making notes, what page. And it was a very, constructive meeting. I mean, you know, Jeff actually speaks last, right? So he'd go around the room, people have questions, and then Jeff will speak last and he's generally sort of two decades ahead.

He's like, what do you think about this? so it was, awesome. I mean, I didn't know what to expect. I wasn't sure if it was going to be like, You know, Moses coming down from the mountain with tablets with some wisdom, but it was just a very intelligent conversation with very smart people that, you know, it's just kind of like awesome board meeting.

So it was really fun. We did that, for a couple of years and learn as much as I could, but really just had this itch to kind of get out of a big company.

Yeah, but it's good to hear because I think it kind of goes to where we start, which is like people, process, systems like they had something.

Yes. They have a very sort of peculiar, that's their word, for their processes. Right. I think their systems are a mess. Like, but the process has been instilled over whatever it is now, two decades, three decades.

Yeah.

And that learning experience was awesome. I mean, I was ready to quit after sort of six months, but I had someone tell me, look, you have a risk-free way to learn as much as you can in the belly of the beast. Like, why would you do that?

And so it ended up being perfect because COVID hit, right? Then the tariffs hit like, and it was a great place for me to not worry about making payroll and learn as much as I can. The bank of Jeff funds a lot.

Uh huh. I mean, after a couple years of worrying about payroll every Christmas.

Yes. That's great. okay, so let's move on to personal questions. what sort of CFO are you?

I just try and sort of Translate the vision of the company, right? aND always hold that sacred. and how do I accelerate that through people process systems so that the leadership team doesn't have to worry about why is my data wrong or why can't I get this data, right?

So I think that's the first part. And the second part is. For me to make sure that we're making good decisions, and pushing back where, where I have to, you know, Amazon has a saying, we're willing to invest to become a big business, but when it's a big business, it better be a good business,right?

And I think a lot of that starts on the finance side, That makes it more powerful because no one wants to build a bad business, right? Is what I've learned. Everyone's trying to sort of, how do I build a good business? And they may not realize, you know, some of the finances behind what they're doing, but when they do, they're making good decisions.

I was just chatting with my dad and I said, oh, that guy's so smart. And he said, well, what does smart mean? I said, it means he makes good decisions so consistently all the time with the right amount of information.

Okay question. I'd like to ask everyone. What were you like in high school?

Probably not the nicest person, honestly. I was not a nice person somehow, you know, my, my wife actually, she's a year ahead of me. And so we, we actually started dating, when she graduated. so I don't know, God bless her. She saw something in me. but.

You know, I was very driven. I just didn't have patience because I knew that high school is a stepping stone to college was a stepping stone to getting a job. And I was just like, need to get out there and, make money. So anything that wasn't that, I just didn't have time.
So I always ask people how their friends would describe them. Would they say we were driven?

I think so. Yeah. He could be in an a hole as well, like just to be completely frank, because in case they listen, they're like, he's not going to sugarcoat it. you know, I look, I have a great set of friends that I left with, that's for sure. You know, I wasn't sort of, you know, I wasn't a popular kid. We'll put it that way.

Alright, you are in a great spot, and, you know, huge congratulations.

Thank you so much.

You've had a huge influence on the LA ecosystem. Congratulations

Hopefully more. I mean, look, I love, I love this place,

Well I’m so glad the MVP now exists and it's here

Yeah, and we'll keep building our brand down here SoCal as well because there's a lot of interesting stuff here

Thanks for coming on the show

I really appreciate it.