The Sure Shot Entrepreneur

Courageous Entrepreneurs Are Heroes, Not Consensus Seekers

Episode Summary

Dan Kimerling, founder and managing partner at Deciens, talks about key principles that shape his current approaches to startup investments. He explains Deciens' strategy of leading financing deals with a concentrated portfolio, allowing for deep partnerships with entrepreneurs. Dan critiques the average venture capital returns and promotes a bold, non-orthodox strategy to achieve exceptional outcomes. He emphasizes the importance of alignment with entrepreneurs and LPs, advocating for a venture capital model that values courage, commitment, and long-term relationships over diversification and transactional interactions.

Episode Notes

Dan Kimerling, founder and managing partner at Deciens, talks about key principles that shape his current approaches to startup investments. He explains Deciens' strategy of leading financing deals with a concentrated portfolio, allowing for deep partnerships with entrepreneurs. Dan critiques the average venture capital returns and promotes a bold, non-orthodox strategy to achieve exceptional outcomes. He emphasizes the importance of alignment with entrepreneurs and LPs, advocating for a venture capital model that values courage, commitment, and long-term relationships over diversification and transactional interactions.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

[1:48] How growing up in Edison, New Jersey, influenced Dan Kimerling’s personal and professional life.

[4:07] Deciens’ philosophy: Concentrated, bold, partnership-driven investments.

[7:42] Founders seek genuine partnerships with VCs.

[15:54] Achieving greatness requires personal courage, not group consensus.

[18:28] Success in VC means investing in non-consensus deals with a robust framework.

[29:28] Strategies for better alignment among VCs, entrepreneurs, and LPs.

The non-profit organizations that Dan is passionate about: Albuquerque Community Foundation


About Dan Kimerling

Dan Kimerling is the founder and managing partner at Deciens. He is passionate about leading investments in transformative companies at their earliest stages and sits on the board of many Deciens portfolio companies, including Chipper, Therma, and Treasury Prime. He co-founded Standard Treasury, which was acquired by Silicon Valley Bank, where he led API Banking and Global Research. Earlier, he was an analyst at TechCrunch. Dan graduated with honors from the University of Chicago with an A.B. and A.M., studied mathematical finance at Booth, and received several awards. He was named to Forbes’ "30 under 30," is a Kauffman Fellow, and is active in the Young Presidents’ Organization.


About Deciens

Deciens is a venture capital firm dedicated to supporting early-stage founders revolutionizing financial services. The firm identifies visionary entrepreneurs at the inception of their journey, offering extensive support beyond funding to realize their visions. Deciens collaborates strategically with industry leaders such as Chipper Cash, Africa's largest fintech; Treasury Prime, a frontrunner in banking-as-a-service; and Therma, an innovator in industrial energy management. Through these partnerships, Deciens champions entrepreneurs driving the digital transformation of traditional institutions.

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Episode Transcription

Investing in a startup is not like some kind of highly intellectualized, abstracted process. It is a very meaningful, emotional partnership that we are making with entrepreneurs. Because like in a 10 deal fund or 15 deal fund, the opportunity cost is huge.

Gopi Rangan: You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur - a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors, and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision. Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Gopi Rangan. My guest today is Dan Kimerling. He's the founder and managing partner at Deciens Capital. Deciens focuses on seed investing in fintech. There's a significant overlap in many of the topics I focus on. It's related to insurtech as well. Dan doesn't live in Silicon Valley, nor is he on the East Coast. He's in Albuquerque. We're going to find out more about him: his decision making process; what kind of founders he likes to back; why does he build Deciens with such a concentrated portfolio; what are things that people are missing; what can founders learn before they go to meet him? Dan, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. 

Dan Kimerling: Thank you very much, Gopi. I really appreciate being here. 

Gopi Rangan: Let's start with you. You grew up in Edison, New Jersey, but you now live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Walk us through that journey.

Dan Kimerling: Yeah, of course. I grew up in Edison, and Edison is a suburb of New York. It's a commuter town, but I think its most interesting feature is that it is one of the most diverse places in the United States. It has an extremely large South and East Asian community. I'm neither South nor East Asian. You know, I grew up surrounded by kids from all over the world. There was no intention there. That was where my mom moved me. But it was a great place to grow up, especially in so far as I learned how you have to be able to collaborate and partner with everyone. 

Gopi Rangan: Very early in life, you got a taste of how to work with people who look and behave differently than you. 

Dan Kimerling: Yeah, probably as early as elementary or middle school, for sure.

Gopi Rangan: Do you feel like those days really shaped the way you think and it still helps you today? 

Dan Kimerling: It certainly gave me a strong appreciation for South Asian culture. You know, both my business partners are South Asian. I love South Asian culture, food, and music. Uh, sweets, of course, Indian sweets are well known around the world. But I think kind of when you grow up, you don't have an awareness of how unusual it is.

To be in such a diverse place, right? You're in the town where you were like, you have no control. Like I didn't control where I grew up. It wasn't really until I went to college that I had any control more or less, you know, you're just going to go one, whatever school you're in, but it gave me a deep appreciation for being able to get along with everybody, collaborate with everyone, partner with everyone, be appreciative of their cultures and traditions and have them be appreciative of my culture and traditions. And I think that that serves me well, even today 30 ish years later.

Gopi Rangan: I see that you're an honorary South Asian. That open minded attitude still helps you today. You started your career as an analyst at TechCrunch, and a few years later, you started your own company, and you sold the business to Silicon Valley Bank. You got deep into the world of fintech, and eventually, you made your way to venture capital and started Deciens. 

What is Deciens about, and how is Deciens different from other VC firms? 

Dan Kimerling: Well, so Deciens is about partnering with entrepreneurs who want to build the next generation of great financial services businesses. That's really what we're focused on a hundred percent. You know, that leads to a couple unusual practices.

So first, we only lead financings. Of the last 24 investments we've made, we've been the lead financier in 23 of them. And so that's a core part of our practice. We get extremely involved with each and every company. My colleague, Ishan likes the joke that if we do our job right, the founders should consider us their third co founder.

And we're not afraid to do things that nobody else gives a shit about. We've really developed our own path and our own worldview. And that guides us. But, Gopi, as you know, and I think probably many of your listeners know, average venture capital returns are garbage. 50 percent of venture funds do not return 1x capital.

They don't even return the capital their investors gave them. It's not until the 55th percentile do you hit 1x. This is data, all vantages, all sectors dating back to the 70s. So like a very large data set would suggest that like, median venture capital outcomes are terrible. And so if you believe that, then you have to be willing and able to do things which aren't median that defy what we would call defy orthodoxy, that kind of go against the grain rather than with it in the search for greatness, in the search for incredible returns, partnering with entrepreneurs that move the world forward in economically and non economically important fashion, and so on and so forth.

Gopi Rangan: I want to get to some of those topics, but let's clarify, when you say you want to lead investments, what stage do you prefer to lead? Is it pre seed, seed stage, series A stage? What's your sweet spot? 

Dan Kimerling: Yeah, so we call it pre series A. And that can be everything from working with people before they have an idea, which we've done, and taking ideas and finding people for them.

We've done that. All the way to businesses that are doing like a million bucks of revenue and are trying to find that last round before they go raise a Series A. What you would call maybe post seed or seed prime, whatever. There are many different idioms. But just like we want to get involved before the series as the lead financier.

But within that, you know, I personally really liked the incubation work. I get a lot of personal satisfaction out of it. But I've also loved partnering with entrepreneurs that have built real businesses of their early, but there's a locus of greatness. There are nexus of greatness. And so we've had great success doing both and are passionate about both.

Gopi Rangan: You invest in pre A, and that could be as early as at the time of incorporation, as late as seed, seed plus, something like that. I know that you take a very principled approach to venture investing. And I can see that the way you approach the investing in startups and how you build relationships with founders, it's a very deliberate, thoughtful process.

What are some VCs and LPs missing? Why do you take the approach you do? Why are you so concentrated with your investments? 

Dan Kimerling: In portfolios where you have a finite amount of capital, like our second fund was a hundred million dollars, like there's not a hundred and first million dollars. There's just like in what are called finite dollar funds. There's a real trade off that you have to make between three variables.

How many deals do you do? The initial check you write, and then the percentage of dollars that you've reserved for each company. And those are like in tension, right? Like you, you cannot optimize for all three. You have to optimize like between these variables and figure out what is a steady state equilibrium for your system.

And so, you know, our belief is maybe it's a little bit of Charlie Munger, but it's like this idea that I'd rather put all my eggs in one basket and watch that basket like a hawk than you know, kind of like spread my bets around, so to speak. So that's one thing. I think the second thing is entrepreneurs are truly looking for partners.

Being an entrepreneur is an insanely lonely journey and they're looking for investors. That can truly be partners in the most fulsome sense of the word. I don't think most entrepreneurs want transactional financiers. They want relational partners who can help them build their business. I think that's a second component of it.

Third is, and I'm going to quote another venture capitalist, Ho Nam from Altos Ventures. He says that due diligence starts at the closing dinner. And I think that that is just like such an eloquent way to describe this. As an investor, you're on the outside of looking in. Gopi, if you were pitching me, I'd be learning about you and your company.

And we would just always be subject to what are known as principal agent problems and by being on the outside looking in. But once you've invested, once you've had to borrow Ho's phrasing, had the proverbial closing dinner, you're not on the outside looking in, you're on the inside looking around.

And part of it is, once we're on the inside, we can help entrepreneurs avoid landmines and, you know, build better, bigger, better, faster, and we can allocate our scarce fall on capital with great precision. And I think that that is really something that we have worked hard on - what's known as the reinvestment process.

That's another important part of our process. And if you have a hundred companies or 50 companies, you can't spend that much time with each company and therefore being on the inside doesn't actually accrue privileged or specialized knowledge. Whereas if you're with 10 or 11 companies, being on the inside can actually give you a fairly sophisticated set of insights and perspectives.

Gopi Rangan: So as an investor with high conviction and high concentration, because you have fewer eggs in your basket, you watch it like a hawk and you are a true partner to founders and the founders really enjoy and benefit from that partnership because it's such a lonely journey. 

Dan Kimerling: A lonely journey and a long journey.

You know, we expect to be partnered with these entrepreneurs for at least a decade. 

Gopi Rangan: And sometimes when this company doesn't work, you're usually the first choice for them to come back when they start the next company. So it's a, it's a very long relationship. And thirdly, being on the inside, if you're deeply committed and you have such high conviction, you become one of them and you begin to see the world from that perspective and you can actually help them.

Is it fair to say that VCs who have a very diversified portfolio wouldn't enjoy these three. The benefits of the three, which is they don't need to watch their portfolio like a hawk because they have lots of bets. So they can afford to have a few things fail, not a problem. They would not be able to be a better credible, thoughtful, deep partner with the founder because they have too many portfolio companies and they don't have the bandwidth to do that. And because of that, the third is also impossible to achieve because you can't have that view from the inside because you haven't invested the time and the effort to really learn about the business when you have too many companies.

What are they missing? 

Dan Kimerling: If the incentives are such that you should be focused on raising and deploying as much capital as possible and turning a artisanal relational business into an industrial transactional business, that is what the incentives are. The question you asked is would other VCs enjoy the Deciens approach?

I don't know what they would enjoy. I can't speak for them. Of course. But what I know is that the incentives are such that you want to raise as much money as you can and deploy it as quickly as you can so you can raise more money and kind of continue that journey. And you want to be taking only as much risk as is necessary to deliver the returns that are sufficient to raise that next fund.

Right, like, Gopi, I think I've said to you before, I'm happy to say this to your listeners. Deciens is the get rich or die trying venture fund. Right, like, I know, and of course I'm quoting 50 Cent. His well known song, Get Rich or Die Trying. But this is the thing about a very aligned partnership, right? Like investing in a startup is not like some kind of highly intellectualized, abstracted process.

It is a very meaningful, emotional partnership that we are making with entrepreneurs because like in a 10 deal fund or 15 deal fund, the marginal, the opportunity cost of any one deal is extremely high. 10, 7, 8, 10%. And entrepreneurs need to know that when they partner with us, their success matters to us.

It really matters to us and vice versa. And that is also strictly parallel with LPs. When an LP or an investor allocates capital to us, commits capital to our funds, they should know that their success is extremely important to us. Again, it's not abstract. It's not intellectualized. It's very visceral, right?

Like all of our LPs have my cell phone number. All of our LPs can get me phone, text, WhatsApp, call, pretty much from like 6am to midnight, you know, pretty much any day of the week. And it's not Ivory Tower. It's not Sand Hill Road. It's in the trenches. On the streets kind of venture capital. 

Gopi Rangan: The traditional venture capital model was just like how you describe it.

And by the way, for the record, I belong to that philosophy, that school of thought, where concentration and conviction matters more, and I build a concentrated portfolio as well. It's truly delightful and fulfilling to have tight relationships with the founders. It's an honor to even get an opportunity to watch that journey, uh, let alone have an opportunity to invest and perhaps even contribute.

But the venture capital asset class has evolved over the years. And now there are different types of VCs, different types of LPs, and their expectations are also different. So now I feel like we have entered a world where VCs enjoy building a diversified portfolio and not having such tight relationships and they get other benefits.

Now we should talk about those as well at some point. And the LPs want that. They want VCs who can chase and find deals and build fund after funds versus concentrated portfolio and building tight relationships with founders. It's an interesting time now when the asset class is evolving. You and I are still practicing venture capital in the old traditional way.

Dan Kimerling: What I would say is David Ogilvy, the world famous copywriter, probably the best copywriter to ever live, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, he said that in parks around the world, you never see statues to committees, which I thought just like summarized it so eloquently. It's a, I do this, my partners and I do this.

In the search for greatness. And we have to have courage and boldness and fortitude. And I think there are a lot of VCs, a lot of investors who are not doing it from a place of courage. We often talk about this idea of momentum versus value in venture capital. Momentum investing is investing in like whatever is the sexy flavor of the week.

And just like trying to do things to get marked up and, you know, get on the Midas list or whatever it may be. That's one form of venture capital. And clearly that works for many people, but it's not good enough for us. 

Gopi Rangan: Diversification minimizes downside risk, but it also significantly reduces upside.

That's true for LPs. 

Dan Kimerling: Right, Ogilvy had this other quote, ‘In the absence of courage, nothing worthwhile can be achieved.’ 

Gopi Rangan: And that's why we don't see committees or statues at parks. 

Dan Kimerling: That's right, right. 

Gopi Rangan: Yes. 

Dan Kimerling: When we look at our heroes, we don't see committees, you know, we see people who had tremendous courage, tremendous fortitude, and they were willing and able to sacrifice it all for their hopes and dreams.

Those are our heroes. Those are the people I want to partner with, and that's the kind of person I want to be. And I have a team of seven people now, and, you know, we partnered with the 25 teams. I never want to ask more of others than I will ask of myself. If I'm asking entrepreneurs to work nights and work weekends and suffer blood, sweat, and tears for years, and I'm sitting in the ivory tower.

That doesn't feel aligned. 

Gopi Rangan: I want to ask you, why Albuquerque? 

Dan Kimerling: Because I married one of New Mexico's finest daughters, and I really want to stay married to her. 

Gopi Rangan: It's for personal reasons you're in Albuquerque, and I know that you travel quite a bit, quite extensively to be in areas where you need to be, whether it's Silicon Valley or New York or other places in the country.

Let's talk about your startups. Roughly, how many startups do you invest in, in a year? Two to four. And you have a team of seven people. So you have you and another partner and a couple of others who help with the portfolio companies. So that's roughly about one, one ish investment per partner. 

Dan Kimerling: And one to two deals per partner per year is a kind of good pace.

Although we have a model where my partners and I, we have equal carry. So even if I'm on the board, we're all fighting for each other rather than fighting against each other. And so it's more of a team effort. So that's like, in a given year, we'll do four, three, four deals. And like, maybe in a year, I'll do one, and my partner will do three, or we each do two, and it kind of evens out over time.

Gopi Rangan: So it's one thing to start something like this by yourself. You can have that brave, bold view of staying traditional, staying old school, staying contrarian. It's always challenging to find others who align with that philosophy and join you in that journey to build Deciens. And I hear from you that you have equal partnerships, which means that it's an egalitarian partnership. How do you find such like minded people? 

Dan Kimerling: It takes a long time and you're looking for aligned values and aligned ambitions, right? I want Deciens to become one of the best venture capital funds in the world, the best financial services venture capital firm. I want us to be massively successful and I'm willing to put it on the line, as I mentioned, all day every day for years to make that happen. And you're really looking for people who have very similar values and ambitions, but different skills and networks and capabilities. I kind of like joke that a band filled with Dan Kimerling, this would be a pretty uninteresting band, right?

You kind of like want the drummer and the bass player and the guitarist and the singer. And, you need a, a panoply of musicians to create a great band, just as you need incredible people in the front of house and in the back of house in a venture firm to make it work. And you need them to all be really, really committed to the success of the firm.

And, but you want them to be very different in terms of their knowledge, networks, capabilities, just as one example, I've come to see that I'm not as organized as I need to be. I'm very creative, but I'm not the world's most organized person. Stocking as an entrepreneur, I know. And so, you know, like we have like incredible colleagues who are like insanely organized and keep the proverbial trains on the tracks and Gopi, your listeners may not know, but when you run a venture capital firm, the administration is just insane.

Every year we have filings with the sec and taxes and K1s and audits and, you know, everyone like talks about the brilliance of front of house. I think the back of house is as important as the front of house. That's how you find it. By looking for aligned values and aligned ambitions.

Gopi Rangan: I didn't realize it when I started Sure Ventures. Venture business is enormously operational behind the scenes. And you got to have solid partners on the legal side and on the fund admin side and internal operations. You got to produce quarterly reports on a regular basis. Now let's talk about startups.

So you started a firm, built the firm to where it is now with seven people, both on the front end and the back end, and you invest in roughly two to four companies, one deal per partner on average. Can you give an example of a company where you met the founder, what happened in that first meeting, what questions did you ask the founder, what got you excited after the first meeting or the second meeting?

Dan Kimerling: Yeah, I mean, a funny story, you know, in fun too, we invest in this company called SimplyWise which is just a kind of brilliant company run by Sam Abbas and Ali Fuddler. Funny enough, Gopi, to your point. I met Sam a number of years ago. We'd gotten breakfast in New York and he was running a different business at the time.

And I explained over breakfast to Sam, why it wouldn't work. And I basically for an hour told him that. He shouldn't be doing it. And then several years later, apropos of nothing, he called me up and told me I was right, but he was starting a new company and he wanted me to be his partner on the new business because I was the only VC to ever tell him that he was wasting his life.

He knew that if I ever thought that with it SimplyWise, the new business, I would have no issue telling him that. And so it's just like one example to your point of it being a long and iterated game and how if you treat people like the way you would want to be treated, good things come back to you.

Gopi Rangan: Visceral honesty. You said no to the first business, but you invested in the second one. What got you excited about SimplyWise? 

Dan Kimerling: Gopi, let's talk about, actually, the big question of how do venture capitalists choose what to invest in? Because I think it's mysterious, now that I've been doing this for a number of years. What I've come to see is most venture capitals invest in things that other venture capitals want to invest in.

There is a profound, what is what I would call reflexive nature of venture capital. If there's social validation, people will do it. And if there's not social validation, they won't. And this means like deals that get validated, socially validated get all the capital and great deals that can't, for some reason, generate social validation, get no money.

And it becomes like a very feast or famine kind of dynamic where some rounds get massively oversubscribed, but most rounds can't raise the dime. You know, Gopi, that never made sense to me. And it's very simple. The only way to make money in venture capital is to invest in non consensus deals and be correct.

But if you invest using this kind of like FOMO, if you're missing out the social validation contract I just mentioned, you're definitionally only investing in the consensus deals. And so that has led to a multi year journey around building a framework which lets us invest in companies in the absence of social proof.

And we've written about it extensively at deciens.Com. You can read all about our framework for picking what we would call, what does greatness look like? And how can we assess greatness or at least the antecedents of greatness, the necessary, albeit insufficient conditions for greatness.

And that guides us to doing things which are off the run, out of the consensus. 

Gopi Rangan: So over the years, you've invested in 24 companies where you have developed that conviction. You met the founders and you decided to lead investments in 23 of them. At the time of making the investment, it was a contrarian view.

You took a bet that was against the trend. Other people did not believe in it. But as a VC leading that deal, very quickly, You want the next round or the subsequent round. You want other investors to follow. It cannot be permanently contrarian for a long time. It has to stay contrarian for some period of time where you actually believe in something that is different, but very quickly it needs to follow the trend.

And that's a very difficult judgment on the part of you as a VC. How do you find such contrarian things where it is not so contrarian that no one will ever believe in it? But it's just a short period of time, or perhaps a one or two rounds of funding, and then it becomes quite popular and many other VCs will follow, at least a handful of VCs need to follow.

That's what I want to understand, like what questions do you ask founders that gives you that conviction? 

Dan Kimerling: Yeah, so I would say, Gopi, what we've kind of identified is that, respectfully, I'm going to disagree with you. And I'm going to disagree with you because I'm not sure that we love having co investors.

But we do not want to take what we would call existential funding risk. So the way we think about it is if you're building a company and it's going great and you, but you need to raise money or the company will die, you've introduced what we would call existential funding risks. And we have observed that oftentimes companies become financeable or unfinanceable without regard to anything about the company's performance. It's more macro driven or sector driven. And so rather than encouraging companies to take existential funding risks, we actually encourage companies to hedge out existential funding risks by figuring out how to optimizing for growing as quickly as they can without needing to take on that next round of funding.

And so in some ways we encourage companies to avoid the scenario you were just talking about, Gopi, where like we are quote unquote forced to convince other venture capitalists that they should invest in us. We don't want our companies to be in the coercion or forcing game. We want our companies to be just so fucking great every VC around the corner wants to invest in them. And if other VCs don't see what we see, that's okay. You know, we're very long term, very patient capital. And oddly enough, other VCs need our deals because we pick good ones, right? Like this is part of the power dynamic that founders don't understand.

VCs don't have a job if founders don't need their capital, right? And so in some ways, like not needing capital is the ultimate flex. 

Gopi Rangan: You lead deals and you are willing to take a contrarian view, but you're not the only investor on the cap table. You have other co investors who also have similar contrarian views.

And as the company grows, 

Dan Kimerling: we're willing to be the only one. That happens quite infrequently. I think it's only happened in like 10 percent of our deals, something like that. 

Gopi Rangan: I think in my career of, uh, where I've been part of 50 deals, there was one deal where I was the only investor on the cap table in that round.

It can happen, but that's unusual. When potential is unleashed in these companies, when a few more points on the board are added, it becomes easy for the next set of investors to have greater faith, which they may not have had in the earlier stage where you invest. So I see how you're thinking about it.

Venture has evolved over the years, and I want to ask you more of a philosophical question. What's one thing you would like to change about venture capital to make this industry better? 

Dan Kimerling: I would like to make it so that VCs get paid more on performance and less on fees. I think like the biggest funds generate so much fee income that like the performance as an entrepreneur, the performance becomes almost irrelevant.

And so fund managers get paid. They get paid on their fees, whether the fund is great or terrible, and whether they create value for entrepreneurs or their clients or not. There can be a number of different ways in which you could create more performance fees and less management fees. You know, just two of them would be the introduction of a hurdle rate, by which like, you only get paid if you perform above a certain specified rate of return, usually eight to 10%.

That's very common in other private equity asset classes. Alternatively, move back to budget based firms where the clients have to approve the budget every year or every quarter, you know, like maybe half a year, whatever the logistics don't matter, but in exchange, if you profit, there's more profit sharing.

Because I think by focusing more on the carry and less on the fees, you actually get the tighter alignment between entrepreneurs, limited partners, and general partners. 

Gopi Rangan: I see that, uh, that's what you'd like to achieve. Better alignment between founders, VCs, and limited partners. We're coming towards the end of our conversation, and I want to ask you about your community involvement.

Is there a nonprofit organization you are passionate about? Which one? 

Dan Kimerling: And we're very involved with things in metro Albuquerque. For all of your listeners, I would encourage you to come to New Mexico. It's the land of enchantment. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, and I'm very lucky to live here.

But ultimately we are not, it's not a land of tremendous financial resources. So my wife and I are very involved with philanthropic works in and around Metro Albuquerque through the Albuquerque Community Foundation. Community foundations are incredible resources around the country and I'm a strong advocate of community foundations who help support local nonprofit organizations and communities around the country. 

Gopi Rangan: Perfect. Dan, thank you very much for spending time with me. Thanks for sharing contrarian views, unusual views that we don't get to hear in venture capital.

This used to be the traditional old way of doing venture capital. I'm glad to see that you still maintain that fresh perspective while you're still being building a new firm. I look forward to sharing your nuggets of wisdom with the world. 

Dan Kimerling: Gopi. 

Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real-life stories about early believers supporting ambitious entrepreneurs.

Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast. I look forward to catching you at the next episode.