The , conducted at the end of May with early-stage founders (451 respondents) and VCs (141 respondents), shows that founders are a little less worried about the effects of the pandemic compared to how they felt at the end of March.听

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Overall, both founders and VCs have extended the time frame for the recovery, with the majority projecting recovery beyond April 2021. In the previous survey, VC drying up and sales were the top concerns for founders. Despite the projection of a longer recovery, the majority of founders (70 percent) reported that they see no change or growth in revenue, which is higher than expected going into the crisis.

On valuations

In the survey results, 60 percent of VCs report that early-stage valuations have dropped by 20 percent to 30 percent, and predict a further decline in valuations to an average of 40 percent in total.听

In 附近上门鈥檚 data, we have not seen a decline in round size (which is a proxy for valuation) for the first five months of the year compared to previous years. That information is influenced by the fact that rounds added to 附近上门 in a timely manner tend to be larger. For now, reported rounds are holding up. As more data is added, however, average and median round sizes will come down.听

On remote work

Leading tech companies have announced plans to allow team members to shift to remote work permanently, including , , and . This will be a major shift for Silicon Valley, doing more than any other trend to move tech away from the valley. Many startups also are changing their attitude about remote work.听

VC sentiment from the survey, however, is that remote work teams are less attractive for investment.听

This reaction is surprising as many companies report productivity has not been negatively impacted by remote work. Added to that, access to talent will expand, the cost of engineering talent will come down, and the major cost of office space will be reduced, which will allow startups to stretch investment dollars further.听

VC concern might have to do with acquisitions being less attractive if the acquirer values a team in one place. There are also concerns around the network effects of in-person relationships and spontaneous conversation, which can increase innovation.听

According to , founder of NFX, 鈥淭he more distributed a team is, and for longer periods of time, the more a startup needs to reimagine the social and serendipitous attributes of work that office settings traditionally provided.”听

On revenue

A high percentage of founders have not experienced a material impact to revenue growth.听

• For 23.5 percent of responding founders, revenue has increased.听
• Around 46 percent of founders see no change in revenue.听
• For 30 percent of founders, revenue has decreased.听

Travel, energy, recruiting, construction and ad tech startups–in that order–are the most impacted, according to the survey.听

On hiring

Despite revenue not being materially impacted for 70 percent of startups, hiring is nonetheless slowing down for many of them. A hiring freeze has been instituted at 40 percent of startups, and 32 percent are hiring more slowly.听

Only 10 percent of startups are hiring aggressively. For those that are hiring, 50 percent of founders report that salaries have come down.听

On funding

VC drying up was the top concern for founders from the earlier survey,听 ahead of sales and layoffs.听

There鈥檚 good news, however, we are not yet experiencing a significant contraction in venture funding.听

• Funding in the U.S. is down slightly, by 14 percent for January-May 2020, compared to the same time period for 2019.听
• 2020 funding dollars already exceed 2018鈥檚 amount by $700 million for the same time frame. It鈥檚 worth noting that due to data lags, 2020 funding will increase relative to prior years.

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To quickly recap, we talked with Accel, #Angels, BBG Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, The Engine, Floodgate, Homebrew, Lerer Hippeau, NFX, UnCork Capital and UpWest.听Here is the customized 附近上门 Pro list of organized by last equity funding amount from smallest to largest.听

Vas Natarajan: Partner, Accel

Natarajan pointed to , a site reliability engineering platform that addresses those instances when a company鈥檚 site goes down, potentially costing millions of dollars in lost revenue.

led the seed in 2018. Blameless raised a in March 2019 led by Accel and .

鈥淲hat Blameless is building is a command and control for engineers, DevOps leaders, product leaders to be able to collaborate by Slack, pull in all the relevant metrics that they’re seeing from different infrastructure monitoring problems, and then push fixes as quickly as possible.鈥澨� said Natarajan.

Secondly is , a data privacy technology company that raised a in April 2019 from Accel.

Every technology company needs to know where their users are logging in from around the globe, and the laws of that country. 鈥淭hat is a whole set of infrastructure solutions, and front end consumer facing tools that Transcend will build and sell for any company,鈥� said Natarajan. 鈥淚f you go to privacy.trulia.com or privacy.hoteltonight.com, I as an end user can see your privacy policy, I can log in and see what data you’ve collected on me and then I can hit delete. Transcend powers all that.鈥�

Jana Messerschmidt and Katie Stanton: Founding Team #Angels

The #Angels founders have their eyes on , a marketplace that matches celebrities with consumers for personalized video shoutouts. Cameo raised a $50 million Series B in June 2019 led by .

鈥淭he consumer will script what they want the celebrity to say. So it could be a happy birthday message. It could be an engagement message. It could be congratulations on your job promotion. Whatever you want it to be. And then the celebrity decides whether they want to fulfill it. The celebrity also sets their price. You have everything from cameos for $25 all the way up to slots charging a few thousand dollars,鈥� said Stanton.

Next is that helps women track their fertility at a fraction of the cost. Modern Fertility raised ain June 2019 led by of . 鈥淭hey’ve helped demystify fertility, and giving you more power towards understanding how fertile am I right now?鈥� said Stanton.

Susan Lyne: Co-founder, BBG Ventures

鈥� is a marketplace for very large farms to sell the 30 percent of produce that gets ploughed under, because it doesn’t meet cosmetic standards for grocery,鈥� said Lyne who invested in its seed round. Full Harvest connects large farms to food businesses. led its in August 2018.

Then there is .

鈥淕oTenna allows you to send a text message and your location when there is no wireless coverage, no cell coverage, nothing. It was really developed initially for rock and roll concerts, and off-grid sports,鈥� said Lyne. Since its early days it has been adapted for more critical use. 鈥淚t’s just a great communications protocol that allows anyone to communicate in a disaster.鈥�

Lyne invested in GoTenna鈥檚 seed round back in 2013. Most recently it has raised a in June 2019 led by .

Ted Wang: Partner, Cowboy Ventures

is an AI platform for accounting firms to automate routine tasks.

鈥淲hat you鈥檙e really stopping humans from doing is reading and typing. This makes people more effective in their jobs. I can’t imagine anyone is going to be unhappy about not having to do that,鈥� said Wang.

Vic.ai raised an in September 2019 led by .

鈥� is a company that currently has a product that looks at your job postings, and is able to analyze the text of the job postings and help you to write them in a way that they’ll be more effective,鈥� said Wang. 鈥淵ou can send a posting through the Textio system, and it will send you an augmented version of the same text with suggested changes or highlights.鈥�

Textio raised a in June 2017 led by .

Katie Rae: CEO, The Engine

鈥� is miniaturising a fusion plant with an invention that allows them to get to net positive energy,鈥� said Rae of this fusion energy company built on top of decades of research. 鈥淲e believe what they’ve invented will allow you to get there. If that’s true, you basically have endless clean energy. This is a team that has already proven out a bunch of the most significant milestones, and will continue to do that over the next two to three years.鈥�

Commonwealth Fusion raised a in June 2019 led by , with , , and along with other investors.

Next up is , a company that develops technologies to engineer human primary cells and iPSC’s for both discovery and clinical manufacturing of advanced therapies. According to Rae, 鈥淭hey looked at the biotech industry and asked, 鈥榃hy are there PhDs basically injecting things into cells?鈥� Would there be a way to speed this up in the biotech industry by ten thousand X?鈥�

Kytopen raised a in May 2019 led by and .

Iris Choi: Partner, FloodGate

has built software for simulation testing of autonomous vehicles. Applied Intuition raised its Series B of $40 million led by in September 2019.

鈥淚nstead of physically having to run autonomous vehicles in Arizona in a quarantined off area, you can do billions of test runs, in various scenarios, using software. There is a benefit to having a mutual third party, instead of everyone building it in-house whether you are an OEM or a rideshare provider. This is only going to become increasingly necessary in the future,鈥� said Choi.

Another company worth watching is , which offers business owners a simple procurement app for their daily supplies, reducing time spent on managing their inventory, and helping lower waste. Cheetah last raised its in October 2018 led by and .

Satya Patel and Hunter Walk: Homebrew Founders

鈥溙� was started by two brothers, one who was a Navy Seal and the other who was an engineer at MIT. And the brother who was a Navy Seal came back for his tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he came to the realization that none of his colleagues, fellow soldiers died in battle,鈥� said Patel.

鈥淭hey died when they were doing reconnaissance into areas where there was no information about the building or the terrain that they were going into. And it seemed crazy to him that that can鈥檛 be solved in some different way. And so he got together with his brother, and they decided to build a company called Shield AI, which is developing fully autonomous drones for the public sector. These drones can by themselves navigate into buildings and caves. Collect intelligence about what’s going on inside through thermal cameras, regular cameras and then communicate that back to people who can do analysis on it,鈥� said Patel.

鈥淪hield AI is a company that has such a powerful mission around ensuring the safety of civilian and military lives.鈥�

Shield AI raised a $25 million Series B in August 2019 led by .

Also on his radar is , which听 creates software infrastructure for any software company to become a payments company. Finix raised a in July 2019 led by .

鈥淲e think of it as democratizing access to a financial services infrastructure, helping a whole generation of software companies create more value for themselves and their employees and their customers,鈥� said Patel.

Eric Hippeau: Co-founder, Lerer Hippeau

is an AI powered app for personalized health information

鈥淭hey can answer pretty precisely all your health questions. If you use the app then you have the choice of very quickly getting on in a telemedicine way talking to an experienced doctor,鈥� said Hippeau.

鈥淚t’s also a B2B business where you’ll see it appear at the front end to a number of different kinds of service providers, who would rather have something like this, as the first point of contact. It might be a hospital or it might be a clinic so that they can better direct the patient to the right service,鈥� said Hippeau.

K Health last raised ain December 2018 led by , and .

Also up is , which automates retirement plans for small to medium sized companies. 鈥淭hey basically offer a very easy, low cost for SMBs. It’s really low cost,鈥� said Hippeau. 鈥淭hey do all this hard work for about $8 per employee per month. And so they now originate a huge percentage of all new 401K plans in the United States.鈥�

Guideline raised their in December 2018 led by .

James Currier: Co-founder, NFX

New York-based centers on financial products in the real estate sector.

鈥淭hey allow people to buy residential houses for cash,鈥� said Currier. 鈥淩ibbon gives the cash for two to eight weeks for the transition to take place and then the home buyer gets a mortgage. It really helps when you want to buy a home before you sell your other one.鈥�

Ribbon raised a led by 听 in October 2019.

is the largest repository of in the world, for disease detection. 鈥淭hey’ve created a platform play, and then they’re working with pharma and agricultural companies to develop diagnostics and therapies to edit change in a responsible way,鈥� said Currier.

Mammoth Biosciences raised its in June 2018 led by the .

Jeff Clavier: Founder, Uncork Capital

鈥� is a hardware company that makes air purification technology for allergy, asthma or respiratory disease,鈥� said Clavier. 鈥淚t has a huge potential market. When you think about pollution in India and China this is a big market.鈥�

Molekule raised their in November 2018 led by .

Another on the watchlist is , a chat inbox for teams. 鈥淐ompanies can aggregate a bunch of email, text accounts and any communication into one single chat inbox where teams can collaborate and have way more efficient customer support,鈥� said Clavier.听 Front raised a led by in 2018.

Shuly Galili: Co-Founder, UpWest

is a company automating accounts payable to decrease time spent chasing invoice approval. Stampli raised a in October 2019 led by .

鈥淭hey’re dealing with customers who have thousands and thousands of invoices, are inundated with paperwork, with a paper trail, with not knowing where the invoice started, and when is it going to be paid,鈥� said Galili. Customers include retailers through to companies that have many outsourced vendors.

Also up is , a cybersecurity startup that addresses the risks in a company鈥檚 IT systems. CyCognito recently raised an funding in Nov 2019 led by .

鈥淭he attack surface has changed because it’s no longer just the technology that is on your laptop. There are many ways that servers, mobile technologies, customer lists and credit cards are being exposed today,鈥� said Galili. CyCognito monitors these shadow risks an IT team might not be aware of to minimize exposure to attack.

Pro Tip. 附近上门 Pro subscribers can save this to their account to track changes over time, and get alerts.听

To Note: Some of the investors mentioned in this article are 听

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骋别苍茅: Welcome James Currier founder, angel investor turned into a fund manager with the founding of NFX fund in 2015. Why NFX?

James: We said let’s try to build a venture firm with network effects. We believe that the most interesting, most impactful things have big network effects. Originally we started with an accelerator. We dropped that two years ago. We were doing 15 companies per class. We either need to scale up to 80 per class, to get the random effect, to make that model work. Or we needed to scale down and increase the percentage ownership. In the end we decided to scale down and increase the percentage ownership and be a straight fund.

骋别苍茅: Why the name NFX?

James: It stands for network effects. What we realized in about 2010, is that all the companies we had invested in as angels, that we were really excited about, all had network effects. They were growing. They were defensible. Mostly about defensibility.

骋别苍茅: Given that we’re in the Internet era and everything’s connected, does almost every company have a network effect?

James: About 20 percent of the business plans have network effects in them, and 80 percent don鈥檛. So if you’re a medical device, a synthetic biology company, SaaS software, enterprise software, or direct to consumer products, these things do not have network effects. These things have scale effects. They could have embedding effects, or they could have brand effects as their defensibility. But in the digital age, there are very few defensibilities left.

骋别苍茅: And why don’t they have network effects?

James: So the basic definition of a network effect is that every new user or new customer makes the product more valuable for every other customer. The first time we saw network effects was with telephones.

骋别苍茅: Which companies have stood out with a huge network effect?

James: Just look at the most valuable companies in the world. Microsoft is still one of the top market cap companies in the world, and they’ve been working on that two sided platform network effect since 1976. And then you’ve got Facebook, you’ve got Google, and you’ve got PayPal.

There’s like five or six of us who just spend so much time looking at this, at Harvard Business School, from Intuit, and a few others. There’s actually some interesting what we call 鈥渟ocial network effects,鈥� but not social network. One of them is naming. So 鈥渓et’s grab an Uber鈥� is a real problem for Lyft right. 鈥淕oogle that鈥� is a real problem for Bing, Once Google became a verb, that’s an incredible social lock. It’s just awkward for me to use Bing if you tell me to Google something. That鈥檚 right on the edge of brand. Brand is different or the bandwagon effect.

骋别苍茅: What other companies have a network effect?

James: Think of the big valuable companies, Uber, Lyft, and Slack. The more people in your company that use Slack the more valuable Slack becomes for you. Dropbox. Once my designer said, 鈥淗ey, I’m going to be sending you the mocks of the website on Dropbox鈥�, and suddenly 76 people signed up in the next 48 hours because we had to get his mocks, all the engineers did and all product managers. Airbnb, the more properties, the more buyers. The more buyers the more properties. eBay,听 Amazon Marketplace. More than 50 percent of all transactions on Amazon are now going to the marketplace. They鈥檝e basically taken over what eBay was 15 years ago. It鈥檚 a two sided marketplace network effect. IOS. If you look at Apple’s market cap. It was $42 billion. And then they added iMusic for sharing music. And then they added iOS. Those were their first two network effect products. And then their market cap went up by 10 or 15 times. Before that they were selling hardware and software.

Since 1994, since the Internet connected everything, we looked at the 336 companies which have become worth over a billion. We looked at each of their business models and said, 鈥淒id they have a network effect at the core?鈥� And if they did we looked at the market cap. 70 percent of the market cap came from companies with network effects, 30 percent did not. Yet only 20 percent of the businesses had network effects in the business plans, and 80 percent did not. So that seemed like a huge imbalance. So that’s why we decided to do NFX in 2010 but we didn’t get around to it because I was still running .

骋别苍茅: What else are you trying to fix in venture?

James: We鈥檙e trying to help seed stage founders figure out how to navigate to their best investor. And that’s why we built to find the best investor for you. We don’t take salaries. We use the management fee to hire engineers and staff to support the company. We are building a platform to help the ecosystem.

We build our own CRM, and data analysis. And we’ve got an internal group which helps with pitch development, which helps with PR, culture building, hiring. Within a few weeks we’ll just answer so many questions, so that the founders can get back to product and iterating.

骋别苍茅: Your most recent fund is $275 million, a pretty large seed fund, which you raised in April 2019?

James: We are a seed and pre-seed fund. Instead of investing over two years we’re going to invest over three years. We’re still going to be investing one to three million and lead seeds. In this fund we will make 35 investments. Four of them will be at a valuation which we would all consider to be a Series A, which is over $20 million. But we’ve also done probably 10 pre-seeds where we put in $250K, and help the company figure out what they want to do.

骋别苍茅: What are the valuations for pre-seed and seed rounds?

James: Valuations for pre-seeds are typically one million dollars pre-money. For a seed round I guess the average would be about eight or nine million dollars pre-money. Our sweet spot for seed is investing is about $1.5 million in a round.

骋别苍茅: How many companies do you meet in a year as a team?

James: We evaluate 3,000 companies a year, and then we’ll probably meet with 400. And invest in 15 companies in year.

骋别苍茅: You invest in the Bay Area and Israel. How do you help startups build a network effect?

James: We’ve published this about the 13 different network effects. Starting with听 the physical, which is the telephone or Comcast in the middle. And then you go into weaker and weaker network effects as you go out.

Once you understand each of these, you can start to imagine how to add these network effects to the various businesses. Whoever adds a network effect first wins. Because it adds more value without you doing anything. Someone signs up and pays you money, and suddenly your product is more valuable for everyone else. We’ve written long articles about and their defensibility. They’re not going anywhere.

骋别苍茅: Facebook from what I understand worked hard to get each user 10 to 20 friends. Once you have that network you were never going to leave.

James: 10 for Facebook, 16 for Twitter, and 6 for Path. We call that network density

骋别苍茅: Path however was not successful?

James: They weren’t because they were too late and the other platforms were largely serving the needs of people. Facebook messenger is a personal utility, which is actually stronger than Facebook. I can make payments, my wife wants me to pick the kids up at school. I can’t leave. Whereas Facebook, I can turn off.

Interestingly enough, the reason I exited the companies that I have is because they didn’t have network effects…Because if you really want to make听 an impact in the world, the best way to do it is to run a network effects business like Nextdoor, or LinkedIn, or Tencent.

Stan, who’s a minor partner at an NFX, is now running Facebook Messenger. He and I have been talking about building the global currency since 2004 when I bought Blue.com with the intention of either building a spiritual group, or building a global currency.

I never got to do it, but he’s doing it as a part of Facebook. So once you get in a platform like that you have the opportunity to actually do these important things for the planet. Had I had a network effect business, I would not be a VC, I would be running that.

骋别苍茅: Given that you’re investing in such an early stage, how do you perceive growth focus in our industry.

James: So let me be clear. Network effects is about defensibility and retention. Viral effects are about growth. Network effects are not about growth. It is about retention. It is about keeping people in. Network effects reduce churn.

We also want companies to grow very quickly, because fast growing companies attract the best people. Fast growing companies have more opportunities to do more creative stuff. Fast growing companies means that they’ve hit on something important to somebody. That is different from the sugar-coated viral growth of 2004, that people think of as growth hacking. We were very good at that, at that time. We did a bunch of that between 1999 and 2007. We invented a lot of A/B testing methodologies, and a lot of the viral loops. But since Facebook shut down Facebook Platform, virality has gone to near zero across the digital world.

骋别苍茅: What is virality?

James: Virality is when a user of yours gets you another user for free.That was a 1998 to 2012 thing. It had a good 14 year period, and then it was over. But a very interesting period, with a lot of math, a lot of iteration.The culture of Silicon Valley, that we think of as Silicon Valley came from that age of rapid iteration, and changing all the time, and never sleeping. It was very exciting. It’s like running a 24 hour news program because things were changing so fast.

骋别苍茅: Viral still seems to be here for users recommending brands?

James: Yes, there are still incentivised as viral programs. If you get someone to try Lyft, I’ll give you 20 bucks. Those are very popular. But that’s not for free. And in fact, for most of those companies their cost of user acquisition to the channel is higher than just buying ads on Facebook. But they don’t want to stop it, because it makes so much sense. And it gets the users to attach their own brand to the brand of the company.

So what we talk about is more fundamental growth. And that has to do with the name of the company, what is this thing for people, how valuable is it compared to the alternative, how do you lower the barriers to friction for people to use it. These are fundamental growth issues as opposed to growth hacking.

骋别苍茅: So would you throw growth hacking out?

James: We do throw out growth hacking, except for the iterative culture that growth hacking bequeathed us. Because there was no A/B testing until about 1999. You can鈥檛 A/B test a shoe, or a computer, or a car. You put it out there. It works or it doesn’t. The mentality of A/B testing, the mentality of iteration, and letting go of what doesn’t work and trying something until it does, that we want to keep.

But the idea of creating very slick viral flows across the Facebook platform. Those days are gone. Even Upworthy, which was viral with their positive psychology stuff, which I loved, that’s dead now. is dead.

There are fundamental growth principles that are very deep. Which means you gotta get the founders to change the name of the company. The old name, no-one can remember it. No-one can spell it. Every ad you put out there, you鈥檙e going to lose 40 percent of value, because no-one can remember the name.

We need a stronger voice in this community about the creative product culture that brought us here, originally, as the waves of money culture flow over us. And figuring out how to create a protected area for entrepreneurs and founders who care more about the product and customer than they do about money. It is just a switch. Money can be second. You need fuel to grow, to attract talent to build the product. But that’s not the goal. And if it’s money first and creative to get the money, that’s really different. It’s really sour.

骋别苍茅: Do you think Silicon Valley has gone that way?

James: If you’re writing a blog post and or tweet and you want someone to pay attention to it, you gotta put the numbers in. For instance, a lot of journalists say unless you have a financing they can’t really write about you. I think it’s because it’s the path of least resistance to aggregate confidence in something.

骋别苍茅: This whole ecosystem is becoming global. Do you think that’s a protection against this money first culture, or do you think that just travels from Silicon Valley.

James: I think it travels, because people perceive Silicon Valley through the eyes of the bloggers and journalists. And the people tweeting out. And what they are听 blogging about is the money, and who made what. Because that’s what people click on and read. So people outside understand if I go to Silicon Valley, I can make money. Silicon Valley is a product. People are incepting that I get money if I go there.

骋别苍茅: So how do you change that?

James: I don’t think we can stop that. But I think we can create a pocket of people, and language, and writing, and events like the lobby. And the stronger the community who wants to keep it about creativity, and about product; and the more of Silicon Valley we influence; the more the products will be influenced; the more of the rest of the world we influence to really go after the creative future, rather than 鈥業 made a lot more money than you and therefore I have more worth.鈥�

骋别苍茅: What wave of technology are you riding?

James: We are riding synthetic biology. We are finding two-sided platform network effect businesses in the synthetic biology area where there’s three technologies which are all three on Moore’s Law sort of curves.

What is synthetic biology?

James: It’s essentially applying computation to the measurement and design of biology. You can do a lot more now, than you could because you have robotics, which are getting much cheaper, and are able to do 600,000 tests in an hour, versus six tests in five years. Machine learning, machine vision, and AI is getting better and better at processing and speed. Then the actual editing, the sequencing cost is coming down. Which is opening up vast new capabilities people haven’t even thought of. We are now waiting for the founders. There’s this gap between what the tech can do today, and what the founders are even thinking of doing, which is exactly where you want to invest.

骋别苍茅: This is for disease prevention?

James: For disease, agriculture, oil and gas, replacing palm oil, and impossible foods. It touches almost every industry. It is incredible.

The other thing we see happening right now is that there has been enough fintech infrastructures built on top of the old rails, so that it’s becoming easier and easier to build faster and faster fintech related companies, or fintech enabled marketplaces, fintech enabled brokerages. The ease of developing in the fintech area, through regulation is much easier than it was three or four years ago.

骋别苍茅: Is this due to platform players in the fintech?

Companies like that make it easier to get an API, or . So that’s another technology wave that we’re going with.

I feel as if the waves of tech change are slowing down compared to where they were in 1994 to 2012, because of TCP/IP and then because of mobile devices, opened up a huge Pandora’s box of potential. We haven’t had one of those big tectonic shifts since 2008. These are micro changes but the markets are so much bigger. Then the access is so much bigger. So the cost of acquisition is so much lower than it was in 1994 to 1998, because so many more people are on these networks and are easily addressable. So I think that’s making up for the fact that it’s not necessarily a tech wave. It’s a scale wave.

骋别苍茅: What are the two companies that you are excited by and why?

James: based in New York is doing financial products in the real estate sector. They allow people to buy residential houses for cash. It’s a product that the agent can give to their buyer and then get the other agent to use the other side. So the network effect to new agents using Ribbon lowers the cost of house acquisition, and increases the amount of cash transactions.

So I go from saying I offer you $100k for your home and I’ll get a mortgage to saying I’m going to give you cash but I’ll give you $95k right now. And you say deal, done. And so Ribbon takes 2 percent. I as the buyer save 3 percent. You get the cash you want. The agent gets the transaction done. They each make their commission. Ribbon gives the cash for two to eight weeks for the transition to take place. And then the home buyer gets a mortgage. It really helps when you want to buy a home before you sell your other one. I can’t afford to buy a new home, until I sell my old home.

Another one would be , which is the largest repository of CRISPR IP in the world, which is gene editing. , a co-founder is a discoverer of CRISPR. They’ve created a platform play, and then they’re working with pharma and agricultural companies to develop diagnostics and therapies to edit change in a responsible way. The more people use the platform, the fewer experiments everyone needs to do because things have already been checked off. And there’s just more data available.

骋别苍茅: Anything we did not cover?

James: We as founders have built 10 companies prior to starting NFX. Despite the money culture, we have exited for $10 billion. No other group has done that. It is about 2x any other new venture firm. As a venture firm of founders we’ve really been in the trenches for a while. I’ve made so many mistakes and have so much scar tissue. Let’s build a venture firm which is about building companies from the operators perspective who have been in their shoes. And that brings ethos, and respect, and authenticity to the conversation. That’s one thing that I think is important to us. We don’t dislike VCs who haven’t been operators. There are a lot of great VCs. But if I’m a founder, I want a founder.

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