Tim Schigel: Refinery Ventures

In this episode, Joel Palathinkal chats with Tim Schigel of Refinery Ventures about his leadership insights and tech background. Tim discusses the importance of STEM education, his Apple experiences, and his venture capital journey. They explore his successes like founding Syntrifuse and the future of venture capital. Tim talks about the entrepreneurial experience gap, introduces the X-15 network, and explains search funds. They contrast traditional businesses with venture capital and discuss the challenges of founding ventures. Tim shares strategies for venture fund portfolio construction and the importance of growth and adversity quotients, concluding with career highlights and the power of valuing people and building relationships.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Well, those I love those people.

(00:01):
I mean, I call them the boomerangs.
Those people have so much to offer because ofwhat they learned in that experience.
Matter of fact,
they don't even understand how much they haveto offer.
Sure.
They may even take it for granted.
But that, to my point, that leadership and andgrowth experience is very rare.
So we're creating a a program and a fund that'sfocused on sourcing that talent and then we

(00:24):
call that x 15.
Welcome to The Investor, a podcast where I,Joel Palafinkel, your host, dives deep into the
minds of the world's most influentialinstitutional investors.
In each episode, we sit down with an investorto hear about their journeys and how global
markets are driving capital allocation.

(00:47):
So join us on this journey as we explore theseinsights.
Okay, so really excited today.
I am live with Tim Scheigle, who's a managingpartner at Refinery Ventures.
They invest in tech companies with demonstratedproduct market fit.
And he's also launched and managed Centrifuge,which is one of the best performing fund funds

(01:11):
in the country.
They've invested in the 15 top tier early stagefunds across The US.
Tim grew up in Cleveland as a son of a steelworker and a Vietnam veteran.
He received his BS in electrical engineering,just like me from Case Western Reserve
University.
And he's a member of YPO and a global networkof chief executives.

(01:36):
So YPO is a great organization.
But Tim, excited to have you on the show.
It's been great community building with you.
You've been to my dinner.
I've been to your dinners.
So glad to get you on the pod and learn moreabout Tim.
Awesome, Joel.
Thanks for having me.
So why don't we kick this off?
Tell me a little more about who Tim is.

(01:58):
I know that you're as a son of a steelworker,but tell me a little more that was going on in
your mind when you were a child and, you know,throughout your formative years and then
starting your career.
What did you think you would do?
And, how do you think that's kind of pivoted asof now?
Yeah.
No.
That's good.
I I love it.
When I'm asked to sometimes speak at, you know,some colleges or whatnot, they wanna know,

(02:21):
like, your career path.
I'm like, are you kidding me?
Like, how do how
do you do that?
What's a That's probably true for most people.
They get an adventure.
So I have a large family.
So had 36 cousins on my mom's side, mostly bootcollar or entrepreneurs, couple of uncles that
had their own businesses.
I was one of the few that went to college.

(02:45):
I was either gonna go to Case Western CarnegieMellon or Stanford.
We didn't have much, Case was there locally,it's a great school.
My dad was actually an electrician, never wentto college, but was very good.
So he could build and fix TVs and radios, youname it.
So I was already always around technology andto play guitar.
So I was into all the music gadgets andamplifiers and processors and all that stuff.

(03:11):
But basically all I knew, because you don'tknow anything when you're like high school kid,
right?
And I could have gone into anything.
I just knew that the future was gonna beheavily based on technology.
Yep.
Right?
And electrical engineering is a great platform,a a great foundation that you can really do

(03:31):
anything.
Was your favorite class in engineering?
Like, when you were in college, what was thefavorite course that you took?
Well, my favorite one that just beats yourbutt.
And that's probably why it's my I I never tookclasses because I could ace them.
Took classes if I was gonna learn something.
Sure.
So I didn't always have the greatest grades,but satellites and antenna radio wave

(03:56):
propagation or something like that.
By a guy who like built the satellite array atMIT, he wrote the book.
It was all Maxwell's equations and all thisstuff and it was just like, you know, you're
dealing with math that includes no numbers.
So it was just fascinating.
And it's like operating in a dimension orsomething like that.

(04:19):
Not that I apply any of it directly anyway, butI do think it helped a lot.
And then my job in school, well, my job was Iwas a bartender at like a big Italian
restaurant bar.
And one of the professors would come thereoften, doctor Crottybe.
Sure.
And he took me under his wing and was myadvisor for my senior project.

(04:41):
So from a senior project, I actually created adigital signal processor for music.
So I built the hardware, built the software inThinkSee on a Mac, built the whole thing.
That was my favorite class because I brought itall together into something.
That guy, Doctor.
Farooq Khatibi went on to Qualcomm where he wasbasically the kind of founder of CDMA and cell

(05:06):
phone networks as we know it today.
Sure.
Pretty darn cool.
But I also blended, I was one of the studentsin a curriculum between the Cleveland Institute
of Music Engineering School.
So I was doing and learned how to do digitalmusic production in the eighties, which was

(05:28):
also very fun, but I was the only one that wasengineering student, wasn't a music student.
I had to go across campus and the only way toget lab time at the studio was to get to the
studio at like four in the morning.
Studio four in the morning and then I couldhave all the toys at my disposal.
And that's what led to my job.

(05:50):
But like I said, I think engineering STEMdegrees, I always tell young folks, students,
my kids, just get a good degree, of all.
Don't worry about what you're gonna do.
I didn't know what I was gonna do, right?
I had no idea.
Don't put that much pressure on yourself.
Yeah.
You'll figure it out later.
My my kids all got to go through co op programsevery other semester they get That's a great

(06:11):
way to figure out what you don't wanna do.
Right?
Because you're only committed for three monthsand you figure it out.
Luckily for me, I was interviewing one of thesebig companies, the IBMs and GMs and all these
big companies, but it was a small company inCincinnati that reached out to me because of
the music connection.
And the co founder of this small fund went toStanford.

(06:32):
And a lot of his friends were at Apple and he'sa musician, so he really liked the fact that I
did this stuff with Apple, you know, with Maxand was doing recording.
And I worked with him and his brother, Rick,Mark and Rick, Only to find out later, several
months later that it was Neil Armstrong's sons.
Wow.
And then so I got to know Neil and got to workwith Neil and my kids got to grow up knowing

(06:55):
Neil, which was unbelievable.
That's pretty amazing.
But through that company, that started mySilicon Valley connection.
Mhmm.
So we were doing we were one of two softwaredevelopment firms that did custom, basically,
level software development for Apple's biggestcorporate customers.

(07:16):
Sure.
And one of the biggest ones was here inCincinnati, Procter and Gamble.
So I I literally helped build Procter andGamble's computer network and put in their
email and all those sorts of things.
Mhmm.
So it's amazing where it led, all all from justhaving that engineering electrical engineering
base.
Sure.

(07:40):
And then tell me what happened after that.
So tell me a little more about Yeah.
Your time in Silicon Valley.
Yeah.
So I was doing a lot of work for Apple.
I also I I basically became a
Did you meet Steve Jobs?
I never met Steve Jobs.
Met Wozniak, met Mhmm.
Ershan Sidhu, the founder of AppleTalk, folksfolks like that.

(08:05):
I John Scully.
We were actually we did we did one of theapplications kind of a use case for the Newton,
if you remember the Newton.
I remember the Newton.
Yeah.
Those who don't know, the Newton was thepersonal digital PDA handheld device kinda
precursor to phones.
Did that have the the the the Stylus.

(08:26):
The pen?
The stylus, or was that Palm?
Palm had one too.
Yeah.
So did the Newton.
Newton had a flip top cover.
It was bigger.
And the was at so so Apple asked us to build anapplication for Monsanto.
Okay.
We wanted to show precision farming and howthey could scout fields Sure.

(08:46):
Field with this handheld device.
And, we demoed it at the Newton launch Mhmm.
With which was which was really cool.
So we did a lot of fascinating projects becauseApple at the time was not big into enterprise.
Right?
So, anyway, that I worked with somebody at thetime when I was at that small company that

(09:12):
basically taught me about customer drivenproduct design.
Sure.
Kind of as it was developed from Japan and thencarried over here to places like market.
So things house of quality, if you've heardthat term, house of quality, QFD, which is
Mhmm.
Quality function deployment.
There are all these techniques for drawing outwhat customers really need and want Sure.

(09:38):
And applying it to strategy and products.
So I kinda became a guru on that, and thatended up I did some independent consulting
through a couple other firms and did work forHitachi and the high speed laser printers in
Japan, did work for Samsung and Daiwoo inKorea.
So I was traveling all the time.

(10:00):
And ultimately, particularly because of theApple work, and I had an office at Apple, but
we were having kids relatively early.
Kids at 25, have three kids.
So we're setting down roots here in Cincinnati.
So I was happy to travel, but we never had tomove.
Some people think I lived out in SiliconValley.

(10:21):
I've had a rental house there for a number ofyears, but never lived there permanently.
But very kind of at home there as well as inNew York.
But I really wanted to get into venture capitaland just thought, just was into ideas, right?
Ideas, technology and I thought, well, the bestway to get into venture capital either go to

(10:47):
like Harvard Business School.
I felt like I was a little too late for that.
You had kids, making good money, didn't feellike that was right or be a founder of a
company and develop relationship with venturefirms and end up there one day.
And so I did, I started up an internet companyin the 90s that ended up failing, but it got me

(11:09):
noticed by a venture firm who asked me to jointhem.
So I joined a firm in '98.
We had four funds, 600,000,000 undermanagement.
And, literally, the deal I worked on
It's a large fund, I mean, today.
Right?
But I mean, in '96
So so the yeah.
The fund was $2.30.
So the total was
Total.
Yeah.
Even today, you know, it's Cincinnati based.

(11:30):
Yeah.
I mean, even even today, 200 is a lot.
You know?
I mean, for venture.
Right?
Hedge funds, an emerging manager for a hedgefund is 400,000,000.
Right?
So.
Yeah.
No.
It was it definitely was.
The founder of that firm did a great job.
Got, all the big like a a number of big pensionfunds in.
That's kinda what did it.
Had some good success, with the fund.

(11:51):
I came in at the tail end of the fund.
Mhmm.
And literally the night at work, was still inthe office, it's like seven, 07:30 at night,
and he asked me to do a phone call with one ofthe CEOs that they previously backed who came
from like telecom and media industries.
And he pitched me on this idea.

(12:13):
This is my day as a junior venture capitalist.
Sure.
And he described this idea of taking enterprisesoftware and instead of buying it and, you
know, buying the software and installing it oncomputers and servers at your company, he would
host it at a data center and you could rent thesoftware.

(12:35):
Wow.
I was like, what?
Mhmm.
And I wrote down, you know, ESP, enterpriseservice provider.
Well, that became known as ASP, applicationservice provider.
And the company was called US CenterNetworking, and it was really the one that what
led to today the cloud.
And that company, we basically did a and thisis crazy to think about.

(12:59):
So this is '98.
We did a seed round.
It our firm Blue Chip, it's called Grow Techand Venrock, Ray Rothrock from Venrock.
We did a $33,000,000 seed round.
'98.
Wow.
Now part of that's because everybody knew thisguy, the operator, the CEO and founder of Chris

(13:23):
McCurry.
The round came less than a year later of62,000,000.
So it was like one of the largest public techcompanies that went public that was worth 3 to
4,000,000,000.
Sure.
And we were limited to how much we could sell,but we did sell enough to still have a great
return.
And the company was kind of a high flyer for amoment until the.com came and everything

(13:48):
changed.
Right?
So it was a heck of a experience getting intoventure capital.
The interesting thing is that Ray Rothrock fromVenrock who I met, like I said, in my deal, is
now a co investor with us in a deal in SiliconValley.
He's retired from And so we're working togetheragain, whatever it is, twenty some years later.

(14:14):
Sure.
So that I was in that firm for nine years,nine, ten years.
Company that I believe, by the way, I believein venture capital, it takes ten years to learn
venture capital, and you need to kinda gothrough that economic cycle like I did for the

(14:37):
.com bubble and burst.
But I led an investment in what became our mostsuccessful company just from an operating
metric standpoint, which was advertising.com.
And advertising.com was acquired by AOL in02/2004.
Sure.
And they went from zero to like 135,000,000 infive years, something like that.

(15:01):
So it was a big success.
We we became known because of that and a numberof other deals like Nielsen Buzzmetrics and App
Plan and Buddy Media not Buddy Media.
I'm sorry.
Tom Burgess, one of the mobile advertisingcompanies in Boston, third screen media.

(15:24):
We kinda had really good deal flow in the adtech space.
And I felt like there was something new thatwas emerging that was going to be kind of a new
era in how we navigate information.
And I had this theory of creating I'm a biglike complexity theory fan, so the Institute

(15:44):
and all that kind of stuff, right?
I used to read all those books and meet some ofthose people.
And so I had this concept that I cold call theguy, Doctor.
David Goldberg, who's a professor at Universityof Illinois, and he's kind of considered the
father of genetic algorithms, which is one ofthe early machine learning techniques.

(16:05):
Sure.
Doctor.
John Holland was really the founder of it.
David Goldberg was a PhD student at Michigan.
Mhmm.
So John Holland is the one who imagined it.
Dave Goldberg put it into practice.
Sure.
And I didn't know this guy, but I reached outto him and I had this thesis for building what

(16:27):
I call the consumer chromosome, which is likethe ultimate cookie, you know, the ultimate way
to understand people's preferences online.
And we incubated this company and did someresearch and discovered that most people did
not find information from Google search.

(16:47):
Everybody thinks they find information thatthey know they're looking for in Google search.
Sure.
But information that they weren't expecting tofind, they get from links people share with
them.
Mhmm.
And that became very clear, so I createdsomething called share this.
So I'll get a little card here.
So whenever you share something on the InternetI don't know if I got the right direction.

(17:09):
You see that little symbol?
I created that.
Mhmm.
Oh, nice.
Okay.
And it became the stand it is the standard.
I mean, it's
For sharing.
It's the it's a share icon.
It's the it's the I guess it's a string of codethat enables the sharing capability.
Right?
It enables the sharing.
It also enables the tracking that that thepublisher can use for advertising.

(17:30):
And so it was one of the early companies insocial media and social media marketing and
advertising.
Mhmm.
So I left the venture firm, became CEO,ultimately hit set up headquarters in Palo
Alto.
Draper Fisher led a series a.
I went from zero to 50,000,000 in revenue inless than four years.

(17:53):
Wow.
Yeah, it was fast.
So we had office in Palo Alto, LA, Chicago, NewYork, now London.
So it was an amazing experience.
Ultimately, the investors wanted the CEO tolive on the West Coast.
I didn't want to move my family at the time.

(18:16):
Kids were like high school.
And so I became chairman and wasn't involved inday to day.
Soon after that happened, in Cincinnati, theCEO of Procter and Gamble and the other CEOs of
big companies here said, we want more ventureactivity in Cincinnati.

(18:38):
And they asked me to help start somethingcalled Syntrifuse Yep.
I n t r I f u s e, and create a fund of funds.
And I'm like Why
and and let me ask you this.
So why did they prefer to have a fund to fundstructure Right.
Versus just investing directly into intoportfolio companies?

(19:00):
And when I think about it, I think it's verystrategic because if you're at the top of the
food chain and you're the fund to fund, youattract all the other funds too.
Right?
Because they're trying to they're trying toraise.
But I feel like the the capital will follow.
But that's my thought.
Again, I'm not trying to, like, complete yoursentence here, but
No.
You're just curious.
No, that makes sense.
It wasn't it wasn't necessarily a no brainerbecause it's not it's it is counterintuitive.

(19:24):
They they actually borrowed from a model calledRenaissance Fund in Michigan.
That might Oh, yeah.
I know them.
They're they're yeah.
They're a pretty big fund to fund as well.
Yep.
It's Chris Reisic, and I knew Chris.
I called him up.
Not not Renaissance Technologies.
That's Jim Snyder's.
Right?
Yeah.
They're in the whole state of Michigan.
Syntrafuse was just the region.
So there's a little difference So

(19:45):
they were trying to learn from so what did theylearn from their playbook?
That they basically were able to attract otherventure firms from around the country to
Michigan.
Yep.
You know, the you know, and it's being able toleverage the venture experience of other
managers, other GPs, right?

(20:07):
And not expect that all the best investors aregonna be in Cincinnati, right?
So that's the good news.
You build this great network.
For I did that for four years.
For a good three years of it, I bet we hadaveraged, I think, two or three venture firms
per week visiting Cincinnati.
Mhmm.

(20:28):
Right?
Because it was one of fund to fund, so they'rethey're fundraising, of course.
But two, it was from strategic investors likeProcter and Gamble and
others.
Mhmm.
And so it was a great, I call it honeypot, ifyou will, to get people And we invested in
Techstars and part of that deal was that theywould host the FounderCon here, which was a

(20:48):
huge success.
And so Cincinnati was really rocking and othercities all wanted to know how we did it.
The the negative to it, as I said, is kind ofcounterintuitive.
There's no guarantee that those funds are gonnainvest here.
We wanted to invest in regional venture funds.

(21:08):
There's just not a whole lot of them.
And we had When I was being hired, theyspecifically wanted somebody who was, as they
said, had a strong backbone because they knewthat the requirements had to be performance and
regional engagement.
Sure.
Because attempts by other economic developmentgroups flip that, right?

(21:32):
If you make a token investment in the region,then they'll invest in your fund, It doesn't
mean you're a good fund.
Sure.
So they said, we're gonna reverse that, which Iliked.
We had 120,000,000 under management.
We did not have any state money for the fund.
So we were free to do whatever we thought wasbest, and we would do we would do follow on

(21:55):
later It
was just from Cincinnati.
It wasn't from Ohio is what you're saying.
Right?
That's Cincinnati.
Right.
Got it.
Most corporate.
Mhmm.
We could do some directs.
We only did a handful of directs for localcompanies usually to if we were adding on to a
larger, you know, $10,000,000 round or so.
Right?
Sure.
But we did not want to one of the other keyguiding principles was we were not competing

(22:18):
with the local venture ecosystem.
Yeah.
We were trying to be additive, helpful.
Absolutely.
I would do portfolio reviews with all the localfirms every quarter and say, okay, what do we
got?
Who are the best companies?
Who can we show off to coastal investors,etcetera, etcetera.
And so there's definitely things from that thatwork really well.

(22:42):
There's also some things I would tweak and thegroup that runs it now, JB Propp's currently
the CEO, he actually worked for me atShareThis.
He's allocating more to local, including torefinery.
So he's changing the mix and trying to learnand adapt, which is good, smart thing to do.

(23:07):
But through that time, I learned, I wasn'tsure, people would ask me, what are you going
to do?
What do you want to do next?
When I took that job, I did not want to do itforever.
It's sort of quasi economic development.
I wanted to help out.
I'm more of an operator.
I always say, I identify as a tech entrepreneurat the end of the day regardless of what hat

(23:33):
I'm wearing.
Sure.
And
And I mean, look.
I mean, launching a fund is a is a business.
Right?
You got a website.
You're
you're Oh, no.
Got you've five different types of customers.
Right?
So, you know, it's the entrepreneurship ofcapital creation, right?
And capital deployment.
But I hear you.

(23:53):
Yeah, I mean, look, I work for the you know, wetalked about this in dinner.
I worked for the DOD for four years, you know,so I get my hand.
You get your wrist slapped and you have to kindof follow a certain protocol and like a
process, which, you know, a serial entrepreneurmay sometimes have problems with.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.

(24:15):
I was people would say, well, do you wanna do aventure wanna do a venture again or do you
wanna do a startup?
And my honest answer was, I don't know.
Yeah.
And, you know, career tip.
I felt guilty saying, don't know for a while,then I embraced it and said, no, I'm in I'm in
a I'm in a discovery period.
I'm in a exploration period.
I'm just gonna network and help people where Ican and see where that Sure.

(24:36):
And where that went through that experiencewith centrifuge was my next big moment.
Like share this was my big moment when I cameup with something that nobody had ever done on
the internet.
Right?
Nobody thought to capture shared links before.

(24:57):
This was my big moment is I met with hundredsof entrepreneurs throughout the Midwest in this
time and I didn't have a fund, I couldn'tinvest directly, could introduce them, I
couldn't invest.
They come to me and let's say they had half amillion or a million in revenue.
Sure.
Alright.
I'd start asking this one question over andover again, which is what has to be true to do

(25:19):
10,000,000 next year?
And they looked at me like I was asking them togo tomorrow.
Like they had, you could tell they neverthought of the question.
Well, though, you know, here here's a uniquethought you know, everyone's probably heard
this before but Elon Musk said, look, if yougive yourself thirty days to clean your room,

(25:39):
you give it thirty day you give it you'll do itin thirty days.
Alright.
Right.
You give yourself three hours to do it, you'lldo it in three hours.
Right?
That's so one of my I know one of my I knowsomebody that works directly for Elon.
I met Elon years ago, but I know somebody whoworks in finance for for Elon.
We talk about this.
Sure.
And what he calls it is right to left thinking.

(26:00):
Mhmm.
Not left to right.
Like get yourself out of the spreadsheet.
Don't say, oh, assuming 20% month over monthgrowth.
No, no, no, no.
What's the number need to be at the end of theyear?
When does the rocket need to launch?
And what do you have to do to make it launch inthat window?
Sure.
Period.
And so after asking this question 100 differenttimes, I realized that the entrepreneurs aren't

(26:24):
asking that question and neither are their seedstage investors, by the
way.
And
so why aren't they asking that question?
They're smart people, went to great schools,They have good ideas.
Why aren't they asking that question?
I reflected on my own experience.
And when I was building Share This, I tookpages out of the playbook from advertising.com

(26:47):
where I was in all the board meetings.
I I had all my notes from all the boardmeetings.
Mhmm.
And I looked and I said, if they here's whatthey did from q one to q two, and here's what
they did from q two to q three.
And it's just like if you were trying to trainfor a marathon.
Right?
You go to talk to who's run a marathon and say,how do you train?

(27:07):
What do I need to do?
And what kind of pacing do I need?
And blah, blah, blah.
That's what I did.
And that gave me a framework that helped sharethis grow as fast as it did.
It also takes luck and timing, by the way,right?
If you're in a bad market, there's nothing youcan do about it.
So the time was right.

(27:28):
But what dawned on me was that outside of thebig tech hubs like Silicon Valley, the big gap
is an experiential gap that entrepreneurs have.
They don't have a knowledge gap, have anexperiential gap, which is hyper growth.
They don't know what it looks like.
Think about it.

(27:50):
Most people in the country work for companiesthat never hypergrowth, right?
They may never work in a company that hastriple digit percentage growth year over year,
that goes from one to 10 or 10 to 100,000,000or 100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000.
I've got a thesis, growth is growth, Andventure requires it, right?

(28:14):
Because venture is unlike private equity,venture is all about growth and becoming a
market leader or being at least perceived as amarket leader.
That's how you get a big valuation, right?
Because you've taken business from theincumbents, you've created a new market
opportunity, ride sharing with Uber or Airbnbor what have you.

(28:37):
So it requires that kind of growth, which isbasically just an indication that you're opened
up a new market.
And that's what you need in venture.
And you know that if you're on the West Coast,if you're in the Midwest, you don't necessarily
always understand that.
You don't have people around you showing youthat or telling you how it's done, right?

(28:58):
So there's not a lot of talent there.
So what I The moment for me is what if Icreated a venture fund here in Cincinnati where
I live, where I prefer to live, knowing thatI've worked in New York and Silicon Valley and
I understand how those worlds work.
And I focus on recruiting leadership talentthat has those attributes that have been

(29:23):
through hyper growth.
But maybe they grew up in Ohio and went to OhioState or they went to Carnegie Mellon or they
went to Michigan.
And they go to the coast and they get thatexperience and they come back.
Usually I get a phone call and the phone callsare always the same.
Hey, I went to University of Michigan, I wentoff to the West Coast, I worked for Twitter,

(29:46):
blah, blah, blah.
I got married last year.
And then the next thing is, and I'm about tohave a kid and we're thinking of moving back to
the Midwest.
Sure.
Well, I love those people.
I mean, I call them the boomer.
Those people have so much to offer because ofwhat they learned in that experience.
Matter of
fact, they don't even understand how much theyhave to offer.

(30:06):
Sure.
They they may even take it for granted.
But that to my point, that leadership andgrowth experience is very rare.
So we're creating a program and a fund that'sfocused on sourcing that talent
and then
we call that x fifteen.
Okay.
It's a network of hyper growth leaders.

(30:26):
They're not necessarily, by the way, foundersor they haven't been a founder, but they're not
yet.
Mhmm.
And, you know, quick quiz.
Do you know what a x fifteen is?
I don't.
Is your DOD guy?
No.
I don't, actually.
Sounds, sounds important.
The X 15 is a rocket jet.
It was locked in and Neil Armstrong flew itbefore the Apollo mission.

(30:50):
Got it.
Okay.
It was his hyper growth experience.
So that's what we call our network and we'vebeen building this network of talent.
Nobody's ever done it.
And it's really, I don't know, are you familiarwith what a search fund is?

(31:10):
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
So search funds usually associate with privateequity.
Right?
It's a way I
mean, it's what people in Harvard do.
Right?
They graduate from Harvard and they they theyjoin a they start a search fund or they they
become a searcher, right?
They find a company and then they Right.
They they pretty much give themselves a job,right?
They operate the company.

(31:30):
Yeah.
They're trying to they they basically it's likea it's like a micro PE fund.
Yeah.
To some degree, they they're fresh MBAs.
They go up and find Mhmm.
Sponsors who pledge to put up whatever it is,$10,000,000 or $20,000,000 for them to buy a
business.
Yep.
They have a thesis like, hey.
I wanna go I wanna acquire a printing companyor I wanna acquire a you know, it's typically

(31:53):
conventional businesses.
Right?
What I got a question for you.
What would you buy if you were coming out ofcollege?
What would be the ideal business that you'dfind and get people to pledge for this day and
age.
Just if I were to go back in time?
Yeah.
Or even right now.
It's like, look, you know, you you you youmaybe run a little search strategy on the side.

(32:16):
What what type of business would that looklike?
Like car washes or something, right?
I literally am looking at a couple of carwashes right now.
I would look at businesses that are completelyautomated.
So I would buy them coming in, maybe it's anelderly couple that has just had it for a long

(32:42):
time.
I would love to just buy one that is justcompletely robotic.
And then that gives you some value creationthat you can add on top of that.
But it's just it's crazy how you read my mind.
Yeah.
No.
It's people are spending money on that stuffevery day.
And
Even during a recession, people gotta peoplegotta clean their cars.
Well, you know, you mentioned in the intro,like, I'm a member of YPO.

(33:05):
Mhmm.
And I'm I've been chairman of the local chapterin international.
And most of the people in YPO run regularbusinesses, you know, not necessarily tech
businesses.
Yeah.
And maybe multi generation or whatever.
And they make a lot of money.
A lot of my friends have those kinds ofbusinesses and make a ton of money.

(33:26):
So when an entrepreneur comes to me and wantsto raise venture, I challenge them a bit.
Because I'm like, look, if you wanna raisemoney, go go buy a car wash, right?
Yeah.
Go start a, you know, commercial landscapingcompany or something.
Mhmm.
I mean, you're you you told me your father wasan electrician, right?
I mean, there was there was a whole thoughtprocess around people being plumbers and

(33:48):
electricians.
Those people like multimillionaires in in NewYork, especially, right?
I mean, these services are going to get moreand more expensive every year.
If you own a car wash, that real estate isgonna appreciate.
There's depreciation that you can take, andthen you can write off all your expenses.
You can't do the same with with with venture, Imean, in that same way.

(34:10):
So Well, no.
Adventure is not that's that's back to ventureis not the get rich quick model.
Sure.
Adventure is really for opening up a new marketMhmm.
Or redefining a category and kind of reallymaking a dent in the universe.
And if somehow you're able to survive as thefounder to continue to be the CEO, which I'm a
fan of, but not everybody does, then you canmake a lot of money.

(34:34):
Right?
But it's a very small percentage of people thatcan actually pull that off.
So it's anyway, it's an interesting
No.
It's a it's a good it's a barbell, though, fora lot of your YPO people.
Right?
Because they've got those, you know,traditional businesses that generate cash flow,
but you're not going to get a 5,000 X like youwould if you went early stage, right?

(34:56):
So that's the strategic outsized returns thatyou that I think is really great.
I think with a lot of emerging managers, we'regoing to talk about this because I know you
probably supported a lot of managers and had alot of advice for them.
I met one of them right over dinner and got toknow her pretty well.
But like, I would say, you know, as you'reeducating LPs on like what the benefit is,

(35:17):
right?
Especially these YPO graduates, Why whyventure?
Right?
Like, how are you educating these fund managersto help help share the value of of early stage
venture and even growth equity?
Right?
There's there's even different vehicles andproducts that you can offer within venture.
But how are you mentoring these managers andhow has that changed since from when you were

(35:41):
at Centrifuge?
Well, of all, if you're gonna be in a venturefirm, you'd be a venture firm, don't try to be
something else.
So the firm I came out of, the firm I was partof, they tried to their strategy, they called
it the balanced strategy.
So they were like part private equity, partventure.
No.
Yeah.
If an allocator from a pension fund or anendowment wants venture, they want venture.

(36:03):
If they want private equity, they'll do privateequity.
Right?
And private equity is all about getting two orthree times your money by, you know, bringing
out operating efficiencies and usually, youknow, multiple arbitrage.
Venture is very different.
Venture is all about power laws, right?
There's one in 10 that returns everything.
And so you have to embrace that and understandit.

(36:25):
And for people that have been in privateequity, they can be scared of or turned off by
the loss rates, right?
Venture took me at 20 to 40% loss rate.
Yeah.
And the venture firms, when I was doing thefund of funds that we liked, they didn't shy
away from that.

(36:45):
If a manager was pitching us and was taking toomuch time defending the losses, we knew that
was a problem.
And I learned that in the venture fund I waspart of.
Tried to save too many deals.
That's a waste of time.
You can't always save them.
And you save it and you get one times yourmoney.

(37:06):
So what?
Whereas the big one, you're gonna get a 100times your money.
Sure.
Right?
And so you have to be comfortable with that.
And many funds and especially if it's a managerthat hasn't been in venture before, so a new
emerging manager or what have you.
They may not understand that yet.
They may not grok that yet, right?
Because it's a bit of a psychology mental hack,right?

(37:32):
When you make an investment in a company, youend up taking personal pride in it, right?
You wanna defend it, you wanna help it, youdon't want it to go poorly.
And you need others to help you save yourself.
It's like there's only so much you can do andI'd rather make another bet and try to get

(37:53):
another 20 or 100x or 1000x instead of suckingup all my time.
So that's a very hard lesson that not everybodygets to learn.
So that's a big one.
I think the loss rate in venture versus laterstage, whether you're an LP or a GP is
something that people need to understand.
Yeah.

(38:14):
You know, the other thing is for GPs, for earlystage funds, the next important thing and we
would say this because we had an investmentcommittee that included a retired former
Cambridge Associates managing director, right,who created benchmarks, basically.
If the general partners said the phraseportfolio construction, it was probably gonna

(38:37):
be a good meeting.
Yeah.
Just because they understood that.
Too many funds would come to us and they'd havenice logos and say, how much do you own?
Mhmm.
Have enough ownership for it to even if it wasworth a billion dollars, wouldn't return the
fund.
Yeah.
So on average, you have to have enoughownership in each company that if you had a

(38:58):
moderate exit, you could return your fund.
It requires Facebook size exits, you'll neverget there.
Right?
No.
I totally agree.
I get lightning in a bottle, but not so that'sjust a math problem.
Right?
And so for years like us, we can understandthat, but not everybody it's amazing how many

(39:19):
people don't think through that.
What are the biggest questions that managershave asked you in the last maybe six months?
Are you getting a lot of questions aroundportfolio construction?
What are some of the hot topics that you'rehearing right now for managers?
Oh, the biggest Beyond Beyond, how do you meetLPs?

(39:40):
Well, Well, the biggest topic is fundraisingand liquidity, right?
Yeah.
So venture in the last couple of years, you'vehad the magnificent seven, you know, wealth
managers, other investors just say buy NVIDIA,that's all you have to do.
Mhmm.
And they're not getting liquidity from venture.
Matter fact, venture and private equity, themost important stat I would say to look at if

(40:03):
you can see it or find it is distributions as apercent of NAV.
So you look at total net asset value of all ofventure and what percentage of that is
distributed every year.
And historically, it's in the 15 to 20% range.
What's it now?
The last few years it's been under 5% and it'sbeen staying there for quite a while.

(40:25):
Yep.
So that I would say that's probably why some ofthese mega funds are offering so many products.
Right?
I mean, they're like, hey, know what?
I know you're locked up for, ten years.
So here's and we just launched a
secondary think and I also yeah.
So I hear I get emails from secondary fundsevery day.

(40:46):
Right?
One of the big questions is, is that going tobe a permanent fixture layer in the capital
stack?
Because not just because of today'senvironment, but because companies don't go
public anymore, right?
And like they when I started in this business,you can go public with 30,000,000 in revenue.
Sure.
Look at Canva and companies like this that havetens of billions of revenue.

(41:10):
So is there a more permanent stratification ofthat capital so that the early stage venture
can get out sooner?
Yeah, I'm still a believer, early stage ventureseed and series a is where the all the money's
been.
That's that's always been historically the thethe group and the the stage that's made the

(41:32):
most money.
Right?
The thing is different now is where do you getthat liquidity from?
Sure.
I think more funds may have more policies thatsay, hey, if we get, you know, if we do follow
on rounds in a company series b or c, and we'reat a 10 x or 20x, we have a policy to sell in

(41:55):
each of those rounds or something like that,just to generate more liquidity.
I think we're likely to see more of that.
So that's a challenge the funds have.
But then you have like Andreessen and othersbecoming RIAs.
Yeah.
I mean, I mentioned this on our previousdiscussion.
So we've got many more mega funds creating RIAsand then now we're seeing and this kind of

(42:21):
relates to the venture studio model of peoplebuilding, you know.
So Tribe Capital launched a roll off strategy.
So they're essentially, you know, puttingtogether roll ups and they're, you know,
building alongside investing.
So I feel that's going to be more and moreprevalent and there's just going be a blurred

(42:42):
line between late stage growth equity tobuyout, and some of that's just gonna flow into
each other as a funnel.
But, yeah, on top of the RIA, I'm I'm seeing,you know, company incubation, company creation,
and then having that flow into a strategic rollup.
Right?
So you you you've got the car wash, now you gotsoftware to take credit cards, software, you

(43:08):
know, on the website to do subscriptions, andthen that integrates in with Turo, you know,
because Turo drivers also need to wash theircars.
Right?
And Right.
You know?
So Yeah.
The other interesting thing is happening nowthat's just from a you know, obviously, the AI
trend Mhmm.
Is real.
It it is, I think, as big as kind of just eventhe introduction of the Internet in terms of

(43:32):
everything it's opening up, different ideas,different capabilities.
And, what I've heard is venture firms lookingat their current portfolio and saying Mhmm.
If you started pre AI and you're not at nativeAI
Mhmm.
You may not get an exit.

(43:53):
You may you may be you may be a zero.
Sure.
Right?
Because you're gonna get leapfrogged by newcompanies or native AI that are just gonna run
right past you.
Mhmm.
So that's a very interesting dilemma, you know,for a lot of firms, for for both companies and
and the funds.

(44:14):
Sure.
So, yeah, a lot of lot of changes happening.
And you mentioned the studio and studio modelsand our friend Sarah with Vault Fund.
Sarah was my hire at Centrifuge.
She's got a very interesting niche that she'sfocused on with the studios.

(44:41):
You typically associate studios with ventureand that's just, hey, we're incubating and
building companies.
Yeah.
What what I'm trying to do with Refinery issimilar but different.
I think it's more like the search fund privateequity search fund but for early stage tech.
Sure.
Our our searchers are either gonna start acompany or they're gonna join an existing

(45:03):
startup and we'll invest.
Yeah.
And I don't know that anybody's really doingthat Mhmm.
In that way.
Right?
I totally agree.
There's a guy, he was on my podcast, Joe JohnStanberg.
He's a he's one of the only fund of funds thatI know for search funds.

(45:24):
So really interesting guy.
I mean, grew up in he owned a he owned avineyard for a long time.
Yeah.
And, you know, has built a platform around justinvesting in search funds essentially.
And we've had a few search funds in our fundaccelerator as well.
So it's just very unique model.

(45:45):
Search funds have done better than outperformventure.
Yeah.
Oh, totally.
It sense because the investors put up a littlebit of money.
Mhmm.
11% or less to just fund the circle while theylook for a business to buy.
Mhmm.
That that all that's pretty much pretty muchalmost like a management fee, pretty much.
Right?
I mean, the the equivalent of whatever themanagement fee is.

(46:06):
It's it's less actually because it's lessbecause it's 1% where management fees too.
Right?
Right.
It's less.
And if the searcher comes up empty becausethey're Mhmm.
You're not out much money.
You don't Sure.
You're not blowing it.
And if they do get a deal on the term sheet,it's a in the in the case of search funds, it's

(46:27):
a you at least have an asset of some sort.
Right?
Absolutely.
It's not not just an idea.
Mhmm.
So everybody I know that's done the search fundmodel has done very well.
Mhmm.
And so, basically, I'm I'm trying to do thatmodel, for early stage tech.
Like, the search funds are typically existingkinda non innovation driven businesses.

(46:47):
Mhmm.
Absolutely.
No offense to those who are, of course, becauseI'm sure there are some, but it's really, like
I said, kind of a micro model, but we'reapplying it to venture.
I think that there are well, of all, if you'veever if you ever run anything, you know that

(47:08):
it's all about the people.
Right?
It's all about Absolutely.
When you get into venture capital, well, it'sone of the things I remember learning was ideas
are a dime a dozen.
Mhmm.
It's execution that matters at the end of theday, right?
It's a good idea, the problem is So there's nobetter place to invest your time and energy

(47:29):
than into talented people.
And that's the model that's the benefit offirms like Sequoia have over the years is
through their investments and successes overthe years.
They've got the best talent network bar none.
And at least out there.

(47:50):
So I'm gonna I'm gonna build one that's isgood, but it's not in Silicon Valley.
Absolutely.
What would you look for when you're looking tohire talent?
What are some of the Good question.
Hard skills, the soft skills as you're lookingto expand your team?
And just over the years, right, you'vedeveloped a lot of talent, you know, growing

(48:14):
centrifuge and, you know, trying to figure outwhat the DNA is for being a good asset manager
as a whole.
Doesn't have to be venture, doesn't have to besearch.
But what are the traits of just a good assetmanager?
People that are deploying capital, you hit youhit on one of them, which is just kinda having
good values and and doing right by people.

(48:34):
But, you know, maybe you can break it down thethe hard skills and the soft skills.
Well, the way we look at it is, of all, the thethe key is the growth piece.
Mhmm.
We look at people that have gone through the,you know, one to 10,000,000, 10 to a 100, and
really wanna understand what role they played
Mhmm.
In that, that we contributed to it.
They saw what it's like.

(48:55):
It's like experiencing gravity or experiencinglack of gravity.
Right?
I could train you to be an astronaut and youcan understand it, but until you've experienced
that, I have no idea how you're gonna handleit, right?
So that's a key criteria that sounds logical,but people don't necessarily look for that.
They sometimes get distracted by the exit.

(49:17):
Right?
So you talk to somebody and maybe they had anexit and they sold the company, which is also
very valuable.
Right?
Sure.
It's easy to start companies.
It's hard to finish them, you know, or exit.
But you say, oh, great.
Yeah.
You sold for $50,000,000.
How how big was the company?
Oh, well, yeah, we grew to 2,000,000 or3,000,000 or something like that.
Sure.
That doesn't really qualify as the hypergrowth.

(49:40):
Absolutely.
You build something very interesting.
I'm not saying you're a dummy by any stretch orthat next one can't be successful, but there
are I'm a fan of a lot of stuff that NicholasTaleb, Nassim Taleb has written.
Anti fragile and skin in the game and thosebooks.
And one of the books I read of his by accidentwas called Fooled by Randomness.

(50:05):
It was like a quant, New York quant.
And fooled by randomness, one of the things hetalks about is a lot of entrepreneurs that have
successful exits, they had those successfulexits because they're that good.
And truth is they might have just been lucky.
Mhmm.
Oftentimes, it's just being lucky.
And so I I I use the metaphor of a surfer in awave.

(50:27):
It's not like the jockey in the hole, it's asurfer in a wave.
I can have the best, most aerodynamic, waxedsurfboard.
Mhmm.
And put you on that surfboard and standing in apuddle, and it will do nothing.
Right?
Yeah.
Or I can put you on a two by four in the middleof a big swell, and you're gonna you know,
you're gonna do great.

(50:48):
So Sure.
The market timing and the market conditionshave more to do with that success than anything
else.
Mhmm.
And so you have to be careful to to yeah.
How you attribute that success.
But back to the people we look for, we we lookfor the growth piece.
Then there are four things that I've kind ofaccumulated over the years that are kind of

(51:09):
proprietary, some less more than the other, butthere are four of them.
So the one is EQ, right?
Emotional intelligence.
Yep.
Do they have empathy for their customers andempathy for their employees?
Sure.
Right?
That's a key that comes from a lot of mycustomer driven product design experience.

(51:30):
If you're gonna you're gonna unlock a newmarket opportunity and you intuitively sense
it, it means because you're intuitiveintuitively been to what people actually want
and need.
Sure.
So that's the one.
The next one is I call them the quotient.
So it's it was EQ, then it's GQ,
Mhmm.
Which is not Not the magazine.
Not Joel.
Not Joel.

(51:50):
It's mister GQ.
It's I wish.
It's growth quotient.
So it's your growth Are you a lifelong learner?
Do you you know, are you constantly trying tolearn and challenge yourself?
So there's a book, I think I mentioned it overthe dinner.
I think it's The Magic of Thinking Big.
And there's actually research around a sampleset of people that had the same education, had

(52:13):
the same skills, and just by default, theperson that thought bigger did well.
Then you and I went on this tangent because Ithink it's really interesting.
We don't have to specifically name people.
But one thing that I remembered you sharing atthat dinner was you did a personality test.
And there's some people that are visionariesand then there's people that are more tactical

(52:36):
and you know, it doesn't mean that anyone, youknow, whether you're a visionary or tactical
that you would do better but I think there'sinteresting outcomes that can come out of that
and different Yeah.
A lot of the people in our x fifteen network,these leaders, they're not necessarily all
visionaries or want to be founders.
Mhmm.
Sure.
They'd love to find one and partner with themand help them achieve their There's a lot more

(52:58):
of those, and that's fine.
The the area, I'm thinking big definitely Mhmm.
Came out in, like, 1959.
It's it's it's awesome.
Mhmm.
But what he relates to in that, what he talksabout in that book relates to this area, which
I call AQ, which is adversity quotient.

(53:20):
Mhmm.
For that one, I'd refer you to this book,Leadership in the Art of Struggle.
Mhmm.
And the great quote in here is all leaders faceadversity, exceptional leaders thrive in it.
So and this is what in thinking big he talksabout.
Right?
Mhmm.
The people that end up having the most successare the people that when they face a struggle,

(53:42):
they get knocked down.
They go, what can I learn from that?
Sure.
What can I take it's not just somebody else'sfault?
You know?
It's it's it's okay.
Well, it might have been mostly somebody else'sfault, but I probably could have avoided that
person or, you know, I could have learnedsomething from that situation to protect myself
or what have you.
Absolutely.
And that's the important thing that kinda goesback to growth mindset and learning.

(54:04):
But it's through struggle that our character isbuilt and our reputation as a leader is built.
And that's actually where the name for the funcomes from, Refinery Ventures.
From my own experience as a leader, some of themost painful experiences I had as a leader were
also the most valuable.

(54:26):
Absolutely.
Wouldn't replace them, but they sucked at thetime.
Yeah.
And so
Pain is the best instructor.
I always say I got all the scar tissue on theback, right?
Which causes me to avoid those things again.
Well, when you talk about refining, again, notto just quote another person's quote, but there
was a story by Steve Jobs.

(54:47):
Think it was in one of his interviews and hetalked about him going next door and one of his
neighbors had this like, I guess it's like arock smoothener.
I guess you throw a bunch of rocks in it andyou spin it.
And then over time, the rocks just become likepearls, you know.
And he was just saying that's kind of how Applewas.
Right?

(55:07):
I mean, there's just a lot of bumps.
But then over time, as you learn, as you makethose tweaks, as you pivot, the rocks become
very smooth.
Right?
And when I think about refinery, I think ofjust refining the process and just kinda
improve you know, constantly iterativelyimproving.
That's right.
That's I I call that experimentation is likebuilding a muscle in terms of your corporate

(55:28):
culture.
Mhmm.
It's learning how to do that and do it as fast.
So you're learning quickly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I I I took the word refinery came to meactually from a biblical reference.
Isaiah forty eight ten is behold, I've refinedyou, but not as silver, but through the furnace
of affliction.
Mhmm.
That's how we get disciplined.
That's how we learn.

(55:49):
Sure.
Or learn.
Mhmm.
And then the last area that you don't hear muchabout is PQ or paradoxical leadership.
Mhmm.
So particularly in a startup, managingparadoxes is like what you do all day long.
I didn't know what that was called, but as aCEO, I called it healthy tension.

(56:11):
Like when you're in a meeting in your room andthere's do we go this way or that way?
And everybody's arguing about it.
I wanted everybody's best ideas.
I didn't want anybody to be a wallflower.
You had to speak up.
And a lot of times, there's a lot of unspokenassumptions.
And when they come out, learn stuff.
Right?
It's kind of the iron sharpening iron.
It's like, I believe this and you believe that.

(56:31):
And like, how can we be that far off?
And once you start clashing, you start toexpose all those unspoken assumptions and you
go, oh, now I know why you don't like this.
It's because you got burned on that in the pastor because it may cost you more margin than you
thought or whatever it might And it turns out,and there's an F.

(56:53):
Scott Fitzgerald famous quote that says, a signof a brilliant mind is somebody who could hold
two opposing thoughts in their mind at the sametime.
There's actually I found out by chance that thedean of the business school at University of
Cincinnati has studied this for twenty fiveyears and co authored a book called Both Hand.

(57:17):
I don't that handy, but they studied this.
Yeah.
Where have you heard business folks andbusiness leadership talk about paradoxes?
Sure.
Here's a, you know, a good startup paradoxexample.
You have to go fast.

(57:37):
But the only way to go fast is fail.
Absolutely.
It's not linear at all.
It's like, I want you to do things that arewrong.
I want you to come up with 999 ways that youcan't make a light bulb.
Right?
You can also make a light bulb.

(57:58):
That's a paradox.
Mhmm.
So, Tim, final question for you.
So you've been in Silicon Valley, you've workedat one of the most iconic companies of all
time, all humanity, Apple.
Wish you had a couple Steve Jobs stories, butyou've got so many other ones.

(58:19):
You pretty much have been through the beginningof the Internet.
You've successfully been a serial entrepreneur.
You co founded one of the incremental fund tofund strategies in Cincinnati.
So all I have is just one more question foryou.
Give me one piece of advice from a mentor, afamily member, or just a work experience that

(58:42):
you want us to take away.
Good question.
There's a bunch of things there.
At the end of the day, as a leader, as youknow, we're I always say my bookshelves when I

(59:03):
was younger, all my bookshelves were filledwith books about technology.
Now they're all psychology.
Right?
Sure.
I value people.
I view you know, everybody is created in theimage of god.
Mhmm.
Everybody has value.
Sure.
They don't have to agree with me or even thatif they don't want to.

(59:25):
It doesn't matter.
I'm gonna treat them with the same same respectwhen I'm firing them, when I'm coaching them.
But I believe in people and the potential forpeople.
And great leaders have shown that they believein their people before their people believe in
themselves.

(59:47):
So my suggestion is to look at people you workwith, look at your partner, your customers
through that lens, put yourself in their shoes,understand where they are and be full of grace
and seasoned with salt, right?
You don't have to hit people over the head withthe truth.

(01:00:09):
You can understand that we all come fromdifferent backgrounds.
But at the end of the day, if we can't figureout how to work together and work effectively,
then we've got nothing.
Sure.
I totally agree.
Relationships are everything and I might havementioned this.
I mean, no matter who you meet, or who you, youknow, treat with respect, you never know if

(01:00:29):
they could be your boss one day or if they knowsomeone that, is a decision maker.
But I think you should just try to help peoplewhen you can without expecting anything, and
the the universe works itself out somehow.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Who who did the book?
Adam Grant did a book.
He talked about Dave Hornick from August andjust taking taking meetings with people and not

(01:00:50):
expecting to get anything back from it.
That that made me feel so much better becausesome people would say I was wasting my time.
But to your point, it could come back yearslater.
Mhmm.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Say yes to everything.
And and so so one of my recent podcasts therewas a saying, and I think I posted this as a
quote, but Rob Belandian, who runs CambridgeWilkinson, they're pretty large investment

(01:01:14):
bank.
One of his quotes was say yes to everything.
That means, you know, maybe take every meeting,but if you've scaled your leadership, you don't
you know, you could still take every meeting,but it could be one of your team members that's
kind of representing you and representing thefirm to be able to get the most coverage.
Right?
To be able to get the most access, to thoserelationships because you can't take every

(01:01:35):
meeting.
Some of the most successful people I know andpeople in YPO always find a way to make time.
Sure.
If the person that never has time
Mhmm.
Just a little bit, you know, too full
of themselves.
I mean, I get jealous of like, I have the fewpeople that are mentoring.
I mean, these people are like in their 20s andthey're not married.
They don't have kids.
They go to events like eight times a week andI'm like, man, I'm like, I can barely go.

(01:02:00):
You know, I went to your dinner.
I kind of had to move things around and I waslike really glad that I got to your dinner, but
like I can't go to every single one because Igot two kids and there's childcare
responsibility.
Like if you're that one person that goes toevery single event and meets every single
person, there's a lot of people that can't dothat.
That in itself gives you an edge.
So and I know you you sure as hell can't go toevery meeting either.

(01:02:22):
So, you know, you you try to scale yourself andand replace yourself with other people to to
get that scale.
So well, anyway, Tim, I know you gotta run, butthank you for the time, A lot of wisdom and
really enjoyed.
Every time I meet you, I feel like I getexcited to get to know you better.
And thanks for sharing all of these learningswith the community.
So I really appreciate it.

(01:02:43):
Thanks for having me, Joel.
See you in July.
Alright.
Bye.
Alright.
Take care.
Bye.