Romeo and Juliet Baz Luhrmanns film interpretation Essay Example

Romeo and Juliet Baz Luhrmanns film understanding Paper The preamble makes family strain by depicting the savagery and detest filled from the earliest starting point. It acquaints the fight with the crowd and features how it will assume a significant job all through the creation. ‘From old resentment break to new mutiny’ this shows the confliction and competition between the two family units. The introduction is utilized toward the start of the play to illuminate the crowd regarding the story line, and it is done to make tenderness for the crowd to help bring out feeling. It is introduced as a poem; with three quatrains and a rhyming couplet toward the end, this accentuates the significance of the introduction. ‘From stronghold the deadly lion of these two enemies, a couple of star-cross’d darling take their life’ this illuminates you regarding the key subjects; passing stamped love and destiny. Stars were regularly identified with fate consequently inferring that Romeo and Juliet are bound to pass on. Baz Luhrmann further builds up the family strain by introducing the preamble on a TV news communicate; this increases the pressure as it shows the significance of the fight between the Montagues and Capulet’s. We will compose a custom article test on Romeo and Juliet Baz Luhrmanns film translation explicitly for you for just $16.38 $13.9/page Request now We will compose a custom paper test on Romeo and Juliet Baz Luhrmanns film understanding explicitly for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Recruit Writer We will compose a custom paper test on Romeo and Juliet Baz Luhrmanns film understanding explicitly for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Recruit Writer By utilizing a dark female columnist it shows the general mindfulness, demonstrating the significance to be appeared on national TV. Utilizing media likewise makes it look significantly increasingly reasonable and modernized. Luhrmann has utilized fire as a theme, to show the solid, scorn this is likewise utilized in act 1 scene 1. Luhrmann has anticipated the two household’s names on indistinguishable high rises. They are in differentiating hues to stress. Besides the high rises likewise pass on their high status in the public eye; they are both rich and amazing families. At long last helicopters have been utilized to summon a feeling of impression of a combat area. They are utilized to delineate how the viciousness has died down. Act 1 scene 5 makes further family pressure, this is apparent from â€Å"by his voice, this ought to be a Montague. Bring me my cutlass, kid. † This burdens the quarrel between the two family unit. â€Å"Rapier† is a long, slim blade usually utilized in the sixteenth century for pushing assaults. This subsequently recommends Tybalt is going to hurt Romeo, hinting his demise. Tybalt is introduced as a rival all through the creation. He is offended that a Montague is available at the gathering, anyway Capulet criticizes him. â€Å"He will be endur’d† the word â€Å"shall† is an order, Tybalt isn’t given the alternative. This depicts Lord Capulet’s authority and chain of importance through the decision of lexis. Pressure is apparent between Lord Capulet and Tybalt through â€Å"I’ll make you quiet† this is a roundabout danger, construing that in the event that he doesn’t ease off he will get vicious. Luhrmann further epitomizes the character through his selection of outfits. Tybalt is introduced as the foe all through the creation. Luhrmann intentionally dresses him as a demon, on the grounds that in many religions the fallen angel is identified with unnatural wickedness. The red outfit can likewise be deciphered as undertone, to underline his displeasure. Be that as it may, the sparkle on the outfit decreases the seriousness and terrorizing of his character. Capulet is dressed as an imperial sovereign. He is transcendently in tyrian purple which would have just been reasonable to the elites, so it is ordinarily connected with sovereignty and honorability. This further represents his chain of command and how amazing he his character is. Luhrmann deciphers the scene including extraordinary savagery; Capulet strongly slaps Tybalt cause inward family strain. This is then appeared differently in relation to In Act 3 scene 1, Mercutio further makes strain between the two houses by howling a revile on both the Capulet’s and the Montage’s . Their fight has murdered him. â€Å"A plague on both your houses† The accentuation in this section is extremely rough. Changing the cadence accentuates and depicts his indignation. Mercutio rehashes the expression multiple times during the scene to heighten the feeling and move the crowd. This revile would have influenced the crowd them as their dedicated Christian conviction made them offbeat. This features one of the key topics; destiny. Baz Luhrmann further builds up this by utilizing despicable false notion of thunder this is utilized to reverberate the state of mind of dread and add pressure to the air. When Mercutio roars this he is raised above every other person, making the revile all the more impressive and extreme as though he is lecturing. He utilizes a nearby shot to show the belly, Mercutio is wearing a white shirt this makes the belly look increasingly horrendous and serve. Luhrmann likewise embeds another clasp into Act 3 scene 2 of Juliet in her room; he utilizes a speech to show her feelings and internal considerations. The extreme love showed in the clasp appears differently in relation to the indignation of Romeo before he executes Tybalt makes emotion for the crowd. At start of act 3 scene 5, Juliet pledges to her mom â€Å"I won't wed at this point; and, when I do, I swear, It will be Romeo† Shakespeare has utilized sensational incongruity to add anticipation and funniness to the scene; as Juliet is as of now wedded to Romeo. This makes family pressure because of the deserted dependability she has shown towards her family. Juliet states she won’t look profoundly into Paris’s eyes. Not any more profound will I endart mine eye†. In that period they accepted that adoration entered through the eyes, she is hence precluding to cherish Paris. This appears differently in relation to when she met Romeo just because. They looked into each other’s eyes falling profoundly enamored. Baz Luhrmann further deciphered it as their eyes met investigating a fish tank. The fish tank speaks to the quietness, while all the tumult is occurring around them. Juliet has been depicted as a delicate and quiet character all through the creation, anyway in this scene she defies her dad and won't wed Paris. Capulet is offended; this is clear from â€Å"my fingers itch† proposing allurement for physical savagery. â€Å"We have a revile in having her† recommending having Juliet as a youngster was their mishap; this underscores his disgrace and scorn. The word â€Å"curse† would have strongly affected the crowd as they were incredibly odd. Capulet is so irritated he takes steps to repudiate her in the event that she won't wed â€Å"Or never after look me in the face†. This resembled a capital punishment to ladies as they couldn't acquire cash due in the male centric culture they lived in. An Elizabethan crowd would have discovered this moving. It likewise features one of the key topics of the creation; respect! Baz Luhrmann further grows family strain in Act 3 scene 5 through the stage headings of the mother. Woman Capulet’s dread of conversing with Juliet without the Nurse present builds up her as an inadequate mother. Pressure is made because of the absence of mother and girl relationship which is evident all through the creation. He likewise incorporates severe assault and viciousness against Juliet this features the internal family pressure. this by utilizing various points with the camera. He utilizes a nearby shot of Capulet, focusing all over. This features the declaration of outrage. Capulet’s solid manner of speaking depicts his annoyance and feeling. He utilizes quick music to make disposition and environment. Baz Luhrmann has effectively modernized Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for a contemporary crowd. Luhrmann utilizes visual methods of lighting, shading and camera points to pass on air of pressure and related feelings.

buy custom Grainger Company essay

purchase custom Grainger Company article Grainger Company has been known to be the main merchant of MRO types of gear, instruments, materials and Industrial supplies. The provisions can be requested on the web. Having been built up in 1927 in Chicago, Illinois, it has been fulfilling the clients with their item giving a positive criticism. It turned into an open organization in 1967. Since its foundation, it has made a great deal of advancements in the business by ensuring all clients needs are satisfied. At present the organization has been under enormous extension. This includes redesigning the current areas, and attempting to wander in the Chinese market. It has likewise been extending in the items advertised. More than 900,000 items can be bought from Grainger.com. The organization utilizes Technical Product Support that deals with preparing experts. This makes the Grainger Company novel than different organizations. 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Different sources can be business paper deals advertisement bank borrowings under credit extensions. By improving its productivity, more prominent benefit is earned. The capital consumptions of the organization is likewise used to put resources into it strategic system and data frameworks. Grainger Company looks at other venture so as to meet or surpass the necessary capital. With the innovation, of the little tasks the organization hopes to expand the measure of capital expected to keep up the organization. (Birgham, 324) The companys appropriation requires a great deal of transportation of merchandise. The merchandise can either be shipped by water or different methods for transport. The moving requires enormous utilization of fuel. As indicated by this, enormous capital must be earned to cover for the transportation. They at that point apply this fuel cost to the clients. They buy the items at a significant expense to take care of the fuel expense. The development pace of the organization in 2011 seemed, by all accounts, to be more slow than in 2010. As per the insights, the start of this current year has demonstrated that the rate may be most elevated this present year. The organization expects to improve the rate later on. Experts of the organization expect the budgetary development rate will be at a yearly pace of 13.4. This year the experts foresee a budgetary development pace of 2.5. The development pace of the organization appears to influence the monetary development rate. As the organization grows, the benefit earned likewise increments separately (Birgham 291) In the course of the most recent eighty years, the organization has opened numerous branches on the planet. A few nations incorporate Canada, US, Mexico, India, China and Panama. It has organizations in around 157 nations. These can be supposed to be the benefits of the organization. The numerous branches can additionally be dissected and named the fixed resources of the organization. With these benefits, the organization keeps on developing in the two parts of size and benefit. Throughout the years, the organization has beeen over ward in the United States. It, along these lines, gets defenseless against the financial downturns of the United States. At the point when the organization is influenced by the economy, the clients additionally get the impact. In the year 2009, the organization put resources into different nations. These were in India and Japan, and, in this manner; it decreased its reliance on the United States. The fundamental monetary qualities of the Grainger Company can be supposed to be its low obligations and solid incomes. This makes the organization ready to finance its drives and improve its tasks. The organization additionally manages profits and repurchases which, they later come back to investors. 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At the point when they update, the clients can now totally rely upon the organization for their organizations. This has been supposed to be one of the objectives of the organization. To expand the quantity of clients and fulfill then with the items they need. At the point when this gaol is cultivated, the companys income improve as well. Yours Sincerely, Ruoyi Wang Purchase custom Grainger Company paper

TrueVentures

TrueVentures INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi. Today we are in Palo Alto in the True Ventures office. Hi, Jon. Who are you and what do you do?Jon: So my name is Jon Callaghan and I’m one of the founders of True Ventures. We started our firm in 2005, so we are celebrating our 10th year anniversary right now. But before starting True, I was an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist. So I’ve started three different companies as a founder myself, the first of which I started in 1987 as I was 18. And then I’ve started two other companies since then and True as a venture firm. I started my venture capital career formally in 1991 at Summit Partners and I’ve had a lot of very traditional venture capital experience before starting this firm.Martin: What type of companies have you been investing before the Internet era, so to speak?Jon: Yes. So I started my venture capital career and, frankly, entrepreneurship, my first company was a bike company.Martin: A bike?Jon: Yes. Mountain bike store and all sorts of o ther things at a couple of locations in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That’s where I grew up, and it was a mountain bike only company. And the story is interesting because there’s an entrepreneurial insight that kicked off my entire career. But I was working very hard. I was on my way to college, working very hard for the summer with various summer jobs to save up enough money to go to college and for spending money, I wanted to buy a mountain bike. And the problem was mountain bikes weren’t that well-known at that point in time. So again, 1987 they were just starting, and I went to the local store in Wyoming with my checkbook and I had $700 to spend. I knew exactly the bike I wanted, specialized Stump jumper Sport, orange. It was great. I walked into the shop and the owner of the bike shop threw me out, and he said, “Mountain bikes, they’re never going to be popular. It’s all about road bikes. Get out of my store. Mountain bikes have no future.”And so I thought he was wrong because I saw the big opportunity for mountain biking. Anyway, it’s a new market is the analogy. The insight I had was, “Hey, wait. There’s this new market happening in the cycling world. So if they don’t see it, if the existing market and the existing vendors don’t see it, then I will start my own.” So I literally started my own mountain bike only business. I owned it and ran it for eight years and learned how to be an entrepreneur literally through the hard work that it takes to start something from scratch, sweep the floors, manage cash, all sort of thing.Other than that retail sporting goods, I’ve been predominantly in software and the Internet. And so I started my software investing career in 1991 again at Summit and did a lot of the early enterprise software and, frankly, a lot of the early online services before it was the Internet. I was investing in and around it.Martin: Jon, what made you switch from being an entrepreneur to becoming an investor?Jon: I’ve s tayed an entrepreneur throughout. So I’ve been lucky enough to be around lots of great companies and been a part of starting lots of great companies. And, frankly, in my view as an early stage venture capitalist, that’s the part you’ve just got to love. You’ve got to love the entrepreneur, you’ve got to love the team challenge and the people part of the vision of the entrepreneur. You’ve got to love that it’s someone who sees a better world and you’re just finding a way to get on that path and build something truly remarkable.So what I do today as a venture capitalist is extraordinarily entrepreneurial. And in fact, we have 140 different investments at True. We have 250 founders that we work with pretty much on a regular basis to help their companies grow. And so one of the things I love about this business is that I’m immersed in entrepreneurship every day.So I wouldn’t say I really switched. And then quite frankly, my team and I, we started True as a startup, n ot as a venture capital firm. We thought the existing venture capital market was completely upside down, frankly. We thought that entrepreneurs were really the creative power in our economy and we should build a firm that supported them. The entrepreneurs are at the top of the pyramid, not the venture capitalists. We’re at the bottom providing capital, services, resources, anything we can possibly do to help that entrepreneur achieve his or her dreams. And so we really turn the whole market upside down. Even True is a startup. It’s been very entrepreneurial to build a better product, to test that product with customers, to build services around that product. We have our customer support organization. We have all of the things that a normal company has. We just do it in this weird, funny little market called venture capital.ABOUT TRUE VENTURESMartin: So this sounds to be more like closer to an accelerator or incubator. Is this true, or is it even something between an accelerator and a typically classical VC?Jon: I love all of those words. They do great things. Accelerators really work. Incubators, it depends on certain ones, and they do better than others. Incubators really work. For me, it’s just about again magnifying the power of the creative entrepreneur. We do it a little differently than most. We have tremendous capital resources, so we manage about a billion dollars in capital. Our funds are roughly $250 to $300 million in size. So we’re way bigger from a capital-based standpoint than any Accelerator or anything like that. But we enter at the same time.So our ideal investment is meeting one or two founders Day 1 when they’re just at the formative phase and providing the first check. Usually, our first investment is between $1 and $3 million, and it’s very small from a fund stand point. It’s literally less than a percent of the fund kind of thing, sometimes less than a half of 1%. So the fund is designed to take enormous risk on products and markets, so we get to do wild and crazy things like Fitbit before anyone saw a Fitbit, or 3D robotics, drones. We’re doing an awful lot right now in digital biology, in digital therapeutics. Neuroscience is a big thing for us. So really weird and wild places, and the reason we can do that is that our model is set up to provide enough capital Day 1 for that really creative founder. So again, between $1 to $3 million is not awful lot to get started and exploring market, but the best part about our model is we have tremendous muscle. So when it works, we can double, triple, quadruple. We can write a $10 million check behind something that an entrepreneur chooses to pursue.And so one of the things we say to our investors is our view on the world is that venture capital needs to be more about venture and less about capital. So we literally talk about maximizing risk. We don’t want to take a safe bet. So when people come to us and say, “Well, it’s the fourth SaaS company in the c ategory, and there’s a small advantage,” it’s just not interesting to us. If you can already see the category, it’s too late. So we really like to be in these markets that are potentially large and they’re five, six, seven years out because it takes a long time to build a great company and so we want as much time on the founder side and the market side to evolve.So again, what’s really exciting to us is that phenomenal team. We say we have five criteria, and they’re very strict. And they are.The first three are the same. It’s people. People, people, people. And that sounds like shorthand but it’s really true. All we really care about is working with obviously super great, creative and talented people, bold people. We want to see big ideas, people that have the ability to attract and retain amazing talent around them throughout their whole career. We want to be in business with givers, with people that are missionaries. Even if it’s in a technology-based market, w e want to be able to help people that want to make the world better. It doesn’t all need to be altruism. It can be capitalism, too. We’re capitalists. But we really want to see a founding team that wants to do more for the world. And so that leads us into some really exciting teams. Imagine, if you have that as a criteria. We want to be with the dreamers and the missionaries and the givers of the world and the really dynamic personalities that create things. We’re designed for those entrepreneurs.One of the things I always say when we make a first investment, I usually sit down with the founder and I say, “Please don’t be safe with our capital. I don’t want you to save it. Your job is to explore.” Think about yourself as an explorer. You’ve got a bunch of capital, you’ve got a bunch of connections, you’ve got a great team, but let’s go see what’s out there. And if we see something out there… By the way, it doesn’t necessarily need to be on a straight path either. It could be anywhere in your peripheral vision. Then we’d run like crazy at the target. But it’s not always clear early on.If you looked at Fitbit in 2008, the summer of ’08 when we met them, and you thought it was a pedometer, you’d be really, really wrong. The pedometer market that was tiny and there was no wearable market. People couldn’t even conceive that we could do this in a miniaturized fashion at scale with connectivity to smartphones, all that sort of thing. BLE wasn’t even a thing. There was no BLE. But now, of course, we understand that these markets are significantly larger. They’re much more horizontal than we ever thought and they’re also deeper.For the first time in history, the vast majority of our startups have customer numbers that are in the millions, sometimes billions. First time in history. We used to have a software company that would say, “Well, the target market is these 900 companies.” And maybe there’s another 2000. Or even with consumers, they’d say, “We’d have to do a national TV.” Who would do that? Only in the bubble. That’s not like that anymore. Now we have these incredibly powerful horizontal platforms that allow company startups, entrepreneurs to reach all corners of the world. So it’s super exciting.Martin: Awesome. Jon, when you started to do ventures roughly 10 years ago, what was it like in the beginning when you didn’t have a big number of LPs putting money into your funds and meaning you didn’t have a super awesome deal flow, pipeline, whatsoever? What was it like?Jon: Well, so it was very different. So we are entrepreneurs and we were entrepreneurs. And the thing people don’t understand or seem to forget, I should say, is that in 2005, the early stage was dead. Literally dead. Ron Conway was doing angel investments. Josh Kopelman had his tiny little $10 and $20 million annual funds. And both of those people are phenomenal and wonderful pioneers and successful practition ers. But the early stage market was dead. First of all, venture capital was biggering, meaning raising larger and larger funds. And when you have a larger fund traditionally (this is not the case with True), when you have a bigger checkbook, you write bigger checks. So typically, the larger the fund, the later stage in the cycle a venture capitalist moved.So there are several popular phrases back then. First of all, it was: “Early stage is dead.” The other one was: “You don’t get paid for early stage risk.” These are all on quotes. These are not my sayings, to be clear. And the other one was: “The world doesn’t need another venture capital firm.” So this is what we were up against. And fortunately, my co-founder, Phil Black, and I and other entrepreneurs and partners who were helping us put all this together and my other founders as well who were involved back then, we had very successful entrepreneurial track records. So my founders and I had successful entrepreneur ial track records, successful venture capital track records, but still there was this perception that the world didn’t need an early stage venture capital firm.The other important trend to talk about… So venture capital was going through two changes that moved it away from seed and series A. The first of which was it was biggering. Larger fund sizes meant larger checks. The second of which was what I call it was getting distracted. Through the early 2000’s, venture capital was getting distracted. You had China funds, India funds. You had clean techs. There was a group that did a pandemic fund. All these specialty funds that were in anything other than core early stage technology. I used to say that if you wanted to see the vast majority of Sand Hill Road venture capitalists, they were on their way back and forth to China and India. And those regions were really, really exciting and hot, but what it meant was the vast majority of practicing venture capital partners weren’t he re in the valley, spending time in early stage. It was very desolate.Martin: There’s the opportunity.Jon: That’s what we saw. So we saw, “Wait a second. Venture capital is moving away from its core. The Valley is still very innovative.” And oh, guess what. Because we were entrepreneurs and close to the ecosystem, my partner Tony Schneider started a company called Oddpost and he sold it to Yahoo. It was one of the first DHTML apps built. So we saw Ajax, DHTML started to come out, and we also saw that the API structures were being broken apart, so Yahoo in those years offered their APIs to people. Google offered APIs to people. Amazon was starting.All of a sudden you could dechunk big parts of technology and reassemble them, and in those years, a term don’t use anymore, they were called mashups. So all of a sudden it wasn’t just the venture capitalists who were moving away. It was also that all of this entrepreneurial activity was happening, and Phil Black and I were at ot her firms and funding it. We were doing these small deals, and so we were on the ground seeing it. So when we came together, we said, “Wait a minute. Not only has venture capital moved away, but there’s this tremendous dynamic activity and it’s very capital efficient.”And so our idea, our big aha was what if you could build an incredibly powerful firm to do these super early stage seed deals. Not an angel firm. Nothing wrong with angel firms. They’re great. But actually a professionally funded venture capital firm that put the entrepreneur first that could assemble a portfolio of 20 to 30 companies where all the entrepreneurs could help each other out, could build a network.You build a lot of different networking groups over time, so you understand the power of collaboration and the power of really this intense help that when a group of people can help each other, their group can do a lot more than the individual. And so we just believed that and we’ve been successful ac ross our careers because of this network.So one of the most interesting things about starting True was we had a phenomenal deal flow. All these entrepreneurs that we had worked with over time and had a great collaborative philosophy rooted for us to get into business. They started companies themselves. Matt Mullenweg at WordPress or Seth at Meebo. I worked with Seth at Plaxo, Tod Sacerdoti at BrightRoll. I had worked with Tod at Plaxo. Again in the networking field, which is what your company does, these networks of relationships put us into business. And LPs said, “Wait a minute. There’s something contrarian about what these two people are talking about. And gosh, they have all this entrepreneurial support, and maybe there is this what we call gap ventures are moving away, entrepreneurs doing things that required less capital.” So entrepreneurs becoming more capital efficient. So this gap really became super clear.And like any great founder who sees a market, once we saw it, we couldn’t let go of it. And it didn’t matter if anyone else saw it. A lot of people laughed at us. I remember this great meeting. Big fancy firm. We were telling our friend what it was all about. We got this all the time, and they said, “How in the world are you going to start a firm? You don’t have any business card. There’s no big name of your big firm behind you. It’s never going to work.” And this other friend of ours would say something really great. And this was just a conventional wisdom. This is what every entrepreneur faces when he or she starts something new and bold. It’s the doubt.Another friend said to me. It was hilarious. He said: “Oh, that’s so cute. You’re building your nice little micro fund.” That firm is almost out of business, the one that he was at. Just thinking about the disruption that happens, the change that’s happened in the venture capital market. But it’s the same with every industry. Entrepreneurs come in and build new th ings, and sometimes they work and sometimes the incumbents fall. I had another friend. He’s a big fun guy and he was at a barbecue in my house, and he turned to me and he said, “You left a job to start a new…” He just said, “That’s crazy. No one can start a fund. The world doesn’t need another fund.”And so all of these doubts. And of course it’s very scary to start a company. So I would say that we are truly entrepreneurial and we have enormous empathy for every new founder we meet with because it’s still very fresh. Ten years later, it’s not that long ago. A week ago, we had a nice dinner. That was the 10th year to the day of when we signed the incorporation documents, when Phil and I signed them at a local restaurant here on a five-minute meeting. “We got to get this thing signed.” Very scrappy. But the other night I pulled out our founding documents, our first executive summary that was written roughly 10 years ago, the fall of ’05.The words we used ar e interesting. We talked about freedom for the entrepreneur. We talked about empowering creativity with small bits of money and enormous degrees of freedom. So this whole idea of exploring a market together because we have a lot of capital behind us if you find something but not constraining the possibilities they want, literally liberating the possibilities they want. We talked about building a firm that prioritizes relationships and values, just exceptional integrity around values, and working with people with whom we share those values.And we talked about the word platform, which it took us five years later to name our founder community, our founder platform. But in our founding documents, we say we want to be a platform for entrepreneurs, where they can come and collaborate and not feel like they’re going to their investor, actually feel like they’re going somewhere safe, where they can collaborate and talk about their problems and share best practices. And so we do that. We have this amazing founder camp, True University. We have an internship program, a fellowship program. We do YPO style forums for entrepreneurs. We just have all these amazing entrepreneurial resources that are fully designed to build more muscle and make the entrepreneur more successful over the entire arc of their career.It’s the other thing, too. So we had this very long term view, and we still do. Our goal is to build a 50-year firm, not a 10-year firm. And the only way you can do that is if you look at every entrepreneur and say, “What’s the arc or trajectory of this entrepreneur’s career?” and fund the ones that we want to follow their entire trajectory. So once we meet an entrepreneur that we fund, our objective isn’t just that one company. We want to fund everything he or she does for their whole career.Martin: This is very different from my perception from other VCs.Jon: Very different.Martin: So what have been your emotions when you had so many people at your h ome having barbecue and everybody was doubting and said, “Jon, forget it. Really, you are a nice guy, but forget it. Early stage is dead. Venture capital is dead. Don’t do it?” What type of emotions did you feel then, and how did you manage them, to put them in the right direction?Jon: It’s really hard and it’s really scary. We were turned down by tons of LPs saying No to us. We were turned down by tens, twenties, hundreds of LPs in the early days that didn’t see this. We were told by friends that it wouldn’t happen. We were told by the market that… All that kind of stuff. The emotions of being a founder are really, really difficult. I say that starting a company (this is one of the things that I talk with our founders about) is it’s this intensely personal thing. It’s not work. It requires all of you. And so that was hard. It was really hard. On the other hand, the more doubts that I saw in others, the more strongly convinced I became that we were onto something .Martin: Because if everybody else is saying, “No, no, no,” if there’s an opportunity and you the say yes, then you get all of them after.Jon: The way I phrase it to my founders, which I’ve lived, by the way, in every startup I’ve been successful in most of the investments, is “When people are laughing at you, you’re probably onto something.” I mean really, there are a lot of reasons why people are critical or laugh. Sometimes it’s because you’re off the mark. Normally it’s because they have a lot invested in their success and they can’t see another path or their fear. There’s a lot of reasons why conventional wisdom takes hold and then becomes conventional wisdom. And so therefore I’ve always been a contrarian my whole career, and I just love seeing something that others don’t.And by the way, I’m not always right. That’s fine. One of the biggest aha’s in my career, and it’s important too, is that at True we do not think about being right. That puts your brain into all these really very difficult judgmental places where creativity dies. Creativity flourishes when you have freedom of expression, freedom of degrees, and you can think about the possibilities. So there are requirements to being massively creative. The first of which is the stakes are sort of low from a dollar standpoint. What I mean by that is when all my friends and all the people were saying it’s never going to work, I thought, “Well, if I fail, there’s always something else.”We’re very fortunate in this day and age to have all sorts of options, all kinds of options that don’t necessarily need to be in Silicon Valley. There’s lots of ways I could find something to do and be constructive. But what if I didn’t try? I couldn’t sleep at night thinking that I wouldn’t try. That was the part that if there was one thing that completely freaked me out as a founder, it was not trying this. Literally, people say, “What keeps you up at night?” W ell, first of all, everything keeps you up at night. Everything. But the one thing that was literally terrifying was if I ended up later in my career and I never gave it a shot. That I couldn’t live with.And most of the founders I work with, that’s what it’s all about. They have this burning sensation to start this thing or build this thing or make the impact they see so clearly. And yes, you’ve got to persevere and you’ve got to really commit. You’ve got to work your tail off harder and longer than anyone in terms of the hours you put and all that kind of stuff. But there’s also this realization that if this doesn’t work, there are other things out there. There’s this global picture which is to say the world is a very exciting place right now and a very needy place for solutions. It’s like, “There’s an awful lot we could do here together.”So I think liberating your mind, if you get locked into “I have to,” “I can’t,” all these, then you start los ing the bigger picture. So we tend to continue even today. We don’t focus on being right on an initial investment. That’s not even relevant. We focus on the proper ingredients. Is the entrepreneur committed? Is there this crazy potential for market? Is there some technology? That kind of thing. And it’s very rigorous analysis. I’m not suggesting that it’s easy. It’s not easy but it’s different. It’s not judging. It’s more exploring. There’s a subtlety there.Martin: You touched very briefly one some of the criteria that you are using for the investment. One of them was doing some really crazy stuff. When an entrepreneur comes to you, how do you identify or evaluate that something is really awesome crazy?Jon: So I get in trouble with this all the time because I say there’s nothing too crazy for us and then sure enough I’ll see something and I’ll say, “Okay, that’s a crazy one.” But I think directionally we’re doing an awful lot in neuroscience right n ow. It’s a great example, where big data and frankly sometimes mobile technology and other types of horizontal platforms is meeting that absolute frontier of how we understand the brain and the power of the brain, both for output and input sensory and other. It’s a remarkably exciting field, and so we’re very excited about it. It’s in one way this great next frontier of scientific understanding, but there are also enormous markets that fall out of that research and of success there, and likewise digital therapeutics. So on the one hand, where big data meets healing, you might say that’s a computer science problem. It absolutely is, but it’s also a real health care problem. And health care and pharmaceuticals in the country and the world are really broken in some fundamental ways. And could we fix that? Yes. It’s absolutely crazy to think so but it’s working and it’s happening. And so we’re very much at the forefront there.We love robotics, and so when I met the f ounders of Open ROV, they make underwater submarines and drones and very low cost, very high performance, we got super excited. It was very hard to see. That was another one. Some of my closest friends and fellow entrepreneurs laughed at me. They called it my passion project, and I was like, “No, you just don’t see it. There are enormous applications that come out of building underwater robotics. And of course, right now that’s all starting to happen for the company.So you have to be able to see it through the eyes of the founder, most typically, because we’re not necessarily at a whiteboard saying, “This market. That market.” We really need the protagonist of a great founding team to come to us and say, “These are the three things that if they connect, it could be huge.”And so same thing. We’re really open. We’re super open to the big ideas. And we’re also… I was going to say patient but it’s more than that. We accept timing risk. So one of the things abou t when you say you want to maximize product risk, there’s no product we invest almost always. We want to maximize market risk. If we’re doing it right, there’s no market for what we’re building with the team. And we want to maximize timing risk, and this is one of the most highly controversial aspect of this discussion because a lot of investors will say timing risk will kill you. And it absolutely can kill you. It can also make you. If you’re early in a big market and you’re one of the first participants in a big market, you have the opportunity to get outstanding share. You have the opportunity to lead. It doesn’t mean you’ll always get it. Someone else will come from behind and beat you, but that risk is worth it to us. And of course, you can be too early, you can be too late. There are all sorts of things that happen. But we really embrace this notion that good things take time.I was with a team very recently, and they showed me a plan, and it was “Hit the mark et within six months and 18.” It was a very exciting man and woman founding team. And I said, “It’s a marathon. Don’t sprint. Building a company and tapping into a market, and they brought these incredible résumés and incredible experiences, very seasoned. We all know this is a marathon. So I’m not interested in 18 months. What’s five years? Tell me seven years. How? So again, timing risk is super important to success. And giving yourself all sorts of degrees of freedom is the other thing timing does.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM JON CALLAGHAN In Palo Alto (CA), we meet Partner at True Ventures, Jon Callaghan. Jon talks about how he became a venture capitalist and what his major learnings for entrepreneurs are.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi. Today we are in Palo Alto in the True Ventures office. Hi, Jon. Who are you and what do you do?Jon: So my name is Jon Callaghan and I’m one of the founders of True Ventures. We started our firm in 2005, so we are celebrating our 10th year anniversary right now. But before starting True, I was an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist. So I’ve started three different companies as a founder myself, the first of which I started in 1987 as I was 18. And then I’ve started two other companies since then and True as a venture firm. I started my venture capital career formally in 1991 at Summit Partners and I’ve had a lot of very traditional venture capital experience before starting this firm.Martin: What type of companies have you been investing before the Internet era, so to speak?Jon: Yes. So I started my venture capital career and, frankly, entrepreneurship, my first company was a bike company.Martin: A bike?Jon: Yes. Mountain bike store and all sorts of other things at a couple of locations in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That’s where I grew up, and it was a mountain bike only company. And the story is interesting because there’s an entrepreneurial insight that kicked off my entire career. But I was working very hard. I was on my way to college, working very hard for the summer with various summer jobs to save up enough money to go to college and for spending money, I wanted to buy a mountain bike. And the problem was mountain bikes weren’t that well-known at that point in time. So again, 1987 they were just starting, and I went to the local store in Wyoming with my checkbook and I had $700 to spend. I knew exactly the bike I wanted, specialized Stump jumper Sport, orange. It was great. I walked into the shop and the owner of the bike shop threw me out, and he said, “Mountain bikes, they’re never going to be popular. It’s all about road bikes. Get out of my store. Mountain bikes have no future.”And so I thought he was wrong because I saw the big opportunity for mountain biking. Anyway, it’s a new market is the analogy. The insight I had was, “Hey, wait. There’s this new market happening in the cycling world. So if they don’t see it, if the existing market and the existing vendors don’t see it, then I will start my own.” So I literally started my own mountain bike only business. I owned it and ran it for eight years and learned how to be an entrepreneur literally through the hard work that it takes to start something from scratch, sweep the floors, manage cash, all sort of thing.Other than that retail sporting goods, I’ve been predominantly in software and the Internet. And so I started my software investing career in 1991 again at Summit and did a lot of the early enterprise software and, frankly, a lot of the early onlin e services before it was the Internet. I was investing in and around it.Martin: Jon, what made you switch from being an entrepreneur to becoming an investor?Jon: I’ve stayed an entrepreneur throughout. So I’ve been lucky enough to be around lots of great companies and been a part of starting lots of great companies. And, frankly, in my view as an early stage venture capitalist, that’s the part you’ve just got to love. You’ve got to love the entrepreneur, you’ve got to love the team challenge and the people part of the vision of the entrepreneur. You’ve got to love that it’s someone who sees a better world and you’re just finding a way to get on that path and build something truly remarkable.So what I do today as a venture capitalist is extraordinarily entrepreneurial. And in fact, we have 140 different investments at True. We have 250 founders that we work with pretty much on a regular basis to help their companies grow. And so one of the things I love about this b usiness is that I’m immersed in entrepreneurship every day.So I wouldn’t say I really switched. And then quite frankly, my team and I, we started True as a startup, not as a venture capital firm. We thought the existing venture capital market was completely upside down, frankly. We thought that entrepreneurs were really the creative power in our economy and we should build a firm that supported them. The entrepreneurs are at the top of the pyramid, not the venture capitalists. We’re at the bottom providing capital, services, resources, anything we can possibly do to help that entrepreneur achieve his or her dreams. And so we really turn the whole market upside down. Even True is a startup. It’s been very entrepreneurial to build a better product, to test that product with customers, to build services around that product. We have our customer support organization. We have all of the things that a normal company has. We just do it in this weird, funny little market called vent ure capital.ABOUT TRUE VENTURESMartin: So this sounds to be more like closer to an accelerator or incubator. Is this true, or is it even something between an accelerator and a typically classical VC?Jon: I love all of those words. They do great things. Accelerators really work. Incubators, it depends on certain ones, and they do better than others. Incubators really work. For me, it’s just about again magnifying the power of the creative entrepreneur. We do it a little differently than most. We have tremendous capital resources, so we manage about a billion dollars in capital. Our funds are roughly $250 to $300 million in size. So we’re way bigger from a capital-based standpoint than any Accelerator or anything like that. But we enter at the same time.So our ideal investment is meeting one or two founders Day 1 when they’re just at the formative phase and providing the first check. Usually, our first investment is between $1 and $3 million, and it’s very small from a fund st and point. It’s literally less than a percent of the fund kind of thing, sometimes less than a half of 1%. So the fund is designed to take enormous risk on products and markets, so we get to do wild and crazy things like Fitbit before anyone saw a Fitbit, or 3D robotics, drones. We’re doing an awful lot right now in digital biology, in digital therapeutics. Neuroscience is a big thing for us. So really weird and wild places, and the reason we can do that is that our model is set up to provide enough capital Day 1 for that really creative founder. So again, between $1 to $3 million is not awful lot to get started and exploring market, but the best part about our model is we have tremendous muscle. So when it works, we can double, triple, quadruple. We can write a $10 million check behind something that an entrepreneur chooses to pursue.And so one of the things we say to our investors is our view on the world is that venture capital needs to be more about venture and less about ca pital. So we literally talk about maximizing risk. We don’t want to take a safe bet. So when people come to us and say, “Well, it’s the fourth SaaS company in the category, and there’s a small advantage,” it’s just not interesting to us. If you can already see the category, it’s too late. So we really like to be in these markets that are potentially large and they’re five, six, seven years out because it takes a long time to build a great company and so we want as much time on the founder side and the market side to evolve.So again, what’s really exciting to us is that phenomenal team. We say we have five criteria, and they’re very strict. And they are.The first three are the same. It’s people. People, people, people. And that sounds like shorthand but it’s really true. All we really care about is working with obviously super great, creative and talented people, bold people. We want to see big ideas, people that have the ability to attract and retain amazing talent around them throughout their whole career. We want to be in business with givers, with people that are missionaries. Even if it’s in a technology-based market, we want to be able to help people that want to make the world better. It doesn’t all need to be altruism. It can be capitalism, too. We’re capitalists. But we really want to see a founding team that wants to do more for the world. And so that leads us into some really exciting teams. Imagine, if you have that as a criteria. We want to be with the dreamers and the missionaries and the givers of the world and the really dynamic personalities that create things. We’re designed for those entrepreneurs.One of the things I always say when we make a first investment, I usually sit down with the founder and I say, “Please don’t be safe with our capital. I don’t want you to save it. Your job is to explore.” Think about yourself as an explorer. You’ve got a bunch of capital, you’ve got a bunch of connections, you’ve got a great team, but let’s go see what’s out there. And if we see something out there… By the way, it doesn’t necessarily need to be on a straight path either. It could be anywhere in your peripheral vision. Then we’d run like crazy at the target. But it’s not always clear early on.If you looked at Fitbit in 2008, the summer of ’08 when we met them, and you thought it was a pedometer, you’d be really, really wrong. The pedometer market that was tiny and there was no wearable market. People couldn’t even conceive that we could do this in a miniaturized fashion at scale with connectivity to smartphones, all that sort of thing. BLE wasn’t even a thing. There was no BLE. But now, of course, we understand that these markets are significantly larger. They’re much more horizontal than we ever thought and they’re also deeper.For the first time in history, the vast majority of our startups have customer numbers that are in the millions, sometimes billions. First time in history. We used to have a software company that would say, “Well, the target market is these 900 companies.” And maybe there’s another 2000. Or even with consumers, they’d say, “We’d have to do a national TV.” Who would do that? Only in the bubble. That’s not like that anymore. Now we have these incredibly powerful horizontal platforms that allow company startups, entrepreneurs to reach all corners of the world. So it’s super exciting.Martin: Awesome. Jon, when you started to do ventures roughly 10 years ago, what was it like in the beginning when you didn’t have a big number of LPs putting money into your funds and meaning you didn’t have a super awesome deal flow, pipeline, whatsoever? What was it like?Jon: Well, so it was very different. So we are entrepreneurs and we were entrepreneurs. And the thing people don’t understand or seem to forget, I should say, is that in 2005, the early stage was dead. Literally dead. Ron Conway was doing angel investments. Josh Kopelman had his tiny little $10 and $20 million annual funds. And both of those people are phenomenal and wonderful pioneers and successful practitioners. But the early stage market was dead. First of all, venture capital was biggering, meaning raising larger and larger funds. And when you have a larger fund traditionally (this is not the case with True), when you have a bigger checkbook, you write bigger checks. So typically, the larger the fund, the later stage in the cycle a venture capitalist moved.So there are several popular phrases back then. First of all, it was: “Early stage is dead.” The other one was: “You don’t get paid for early stage risk.” These are all on quotes. These are not my sayings, to be clear. And the other one was: “The world doesn’t need another venture capital firm.” So this is what we were up against. And fortunately, my co-founder, Phil Black, and I and other entrepreneurs and partners who were helping us put all this together and my other founders as well who were involved back then, we had very successful entrepreneurial track records. So my founders and I had successful entrepreneurial track records, successful venture capital track records, but still there was this perception that the world didn’t need an early stage venture capital firm.The other important trend to talk about… So venture capital was going through two changes that moved it away from seed and series A. The first of which was it was biggering. Larger fund sizes meant larger checks. The second of which was what I call it was getting distracted. Through the early 2000’s, venture capital was getting distracted. You had China funds, India funds. You had clean techs. There was a group that did a pandemic fund. All these specialty funds that were in anything other than core early stage technology. I used to say that if you wanted to see the vast majority of Sand Hill Road venture capitalists, they were on their way back and for th to China and India. And those regions were really, really exciting and hot, but what it meant was the vast majority of practicing venture capital partners weren’t here in the valley, spending time in early stage. It was very desolate.Martin: There’s the opportunity.Jon: That’s what we saw. So we saw, “Wait a second. Venture capital is moving away from its core. The Valley is still very innovative.” And oh, guess what. Because we were entrepreneurs and close to the ecosystem, my partner Tony Schneider started a company called Oddpost and he sold it to Yahoo. It was one of the first DHTML apps built. So we saw Ajax, DHTML started to come out, and we also saw that the API structures were being broken apart, so Yahoo in those years offered their APIs to people. Google offered APIs to people. Amazon was starting.All of a sudden you could dechunk big parts of technology and reassemble them, and in those years, a term don’t use anymore, they were called mashups. So all of a sudden it wasn’t just the venture capitalists who were moving away. It was also that all of this entrepreneurial activity was happening, and Phil Black and I were at other firms and funding it. We were doing these small deals, and so we were on the ground seeing it. So when we came together, we said, “Wait a minute. Not only has venture capital moved away, but there’s this tremendous dynamic activity and it’s very capital efficient.”And so our idea, our big aha was what if you could build an incredibly powerful firm to do these super early stage seed deals. Not an angel firm. Nothing wrong with angel firms. They’re great. But actually a professionally funded venture capital firm that put the entrepreneur first that could assemble a portfolio of 20 to 30 companies where all the entrepreneurs could help each other out, could build a network.You build a lot of different networking groups over time, so you understand the power of collaboration and the power of really this in tense help that when a group of people can help each other, their group can do a lot more than the individual. And so we just believed that and we’ve been successful across our careers because of this network.So one of the most interesting things about starting True was we had a phenomenal deal flow. All these entrepreneurs that we had worked with over time and had a great collaborative philosophy rooted for us to get into business. They started companies themselves. Matt Mullenweg at WordPress or Seth at Meebo. I worked with Seth at Plaxo, Tod Sacerdoti at BrightRoll. I had worked with Tod at Plaxo. Again in the networking field, which is what your company does, these networks of relationships put us into business. And LPs said, “Wait a minute. There’s something contrarian about what these two people are talking about. And gosh, they have all this entrepreneurial support, and maybe there is this what we call gap ventures are moving away, entrepreneurs doing things that requi red less capital.” So entrepreneurs becoming more capital efficient. So this gap really became super clear.And like any great founder who sees a market, once we saw it, we couldn’t let go of it. And it didn’t matter if anyone else saw it. A lot of people laughed at us. I remember this great meeting. Big fancy firm. We were telling our friend what it was all about. We got this all the time, and they said, “How in the world are you going to start a firm? You don’t have any business card. There’s no big name of your big firm behind you. It’s never going to work.” And this other friend of ours would say something really great. And this was just a conventional wisdom. This is what every entrepreneur faces when he or she starts something new and bold. It’s the doubt.Another friend said to me. It was hilarious. He said: “Oh, that’s so cute. You’re building your nice little micro fund.” That firm is almost out of business, the one that he was at. Just thinking abou t the disruption that happens, the change that’s happened in the venture capital market. But it’s the same with every industry. Entrepreneurs come in and build new things, and sometimes they work and sometimes the incumbents fall. I had another friend. He’s a big fun guy and he was at a barbecue in my house, and he turned to me and he said, “You left a job to start a new…” He just said, “That’s crazy. No one can start a fund. The world doesn’t need another fund.”And so all of these doubts. And of course it’s very scary to start a company. So I would say that we are truly entrepreneurial and we have enormous empathy for every new founder we meet with because it’s still very fresh. Ten years later, it’s not that long ago. A week ago, we had a nice dinner. That was the 10th year to the day of when we signed the incorporation documents, when Phil and I signed them at a local restaurant here on a five-minute meeting. “We got to get this thing signed.” Very s crappy. But the other night I pulled out our founding documents, our first executive summary that was written roughly 10 years ago, the fall of ’05.The words we used are interesting. We talked about freedom for the entrepreneur. We talked about empowering creativity with small bits of money and enormous degrees of freedom. So this whole idea of exploring a market together because we have a lot of capital behind us if you find something but not constraining the possibilities they want, literally liberating the possibilities they want. We talked about building a firm that prioritizes relationships and values, just exceptional integrity around values, and working with people with whom we share those values.And we talked about the word platform, which it took us five years later to name our founder community, our founder platform. But in our founding documents, we say we want to be a platform for entrepreneurs, where they can come and collaborate and not feel like they’re going to t heir investor, actually feel like they’re going somewhere safe, where they can collaborate and talk about their problems and share best practices. And so we do that. We have this amazing founder camp, True University. We have an internship program, a fellowship program. We do YPO style forums for entrepreneurs. We just have all these amazing entrepreneurial resources that are fully designed to build more muscle and make the entrepreneur more successful over the entire arc of their career.It’s the other thing, too. So we had this very long term view, and we still do. Our goal is to build a 50-year firm, not a 10-year firm. And the only way you can do that is if you look at every entrepreneur and say, “What’s the arc or trajectory of this entrepreneur’s career?” and fund the ones that we want to follow their entire trajectory. So once we meet an entrepreneur that we fund, our objective isn’t just that one company. We want to fund everything he or she does for their whole career.Martin: This is very different from my perception from other VCs.Jon: Very different.Martin: So what have been your emotions when you had so many people at your home having barbecue and everybody was doubting and said, “Jon, forget it. Really, you are a nice guy, but forget it. Early stage is dead. Venture capital is dead. Don’t do it?” What type of emotions did you feel then, and how did you manage them, to put them in the right direction?Jon: It’s really hard and it’s really scary. We were turned down by tons of LPs saying No to us. We were turned down by tens, twenties, hundreds of LPs in the early days that didn’t see this. We were told by friends that it wouldn’t happen. We were told by the market that… All that kind of stuff. The emotions of being a founder are really, really difficult. I say that starting a company (this is one of the things that I talk with our founders about) is it’s this intensely personal thing. It’s not work. It requires all o f you. And so that was hard. It was really hard. On the other hand, the more doubts that I saw in others, the more strongly convinced I became that we were onto something.Martin: Because if everybody else is saying, “No, no, no,” if there’s an opportunity and you the say yes, then you get all of them after.Jon: The way I phrase it to my founders, which I’ve lived, by the way, in every startup I’ve been successful in most of the investments, is “When people are laughing at you, you’re probably onto something.” I mean really, there are a lot of reasons why people are critical or laugh. Sometimes it’s because you’re off the mark. Normally it’s because they have a lot invested in their success and they can’t see another path or their fear. There’s a lot of reasons why conventional wisdom takes hold and then becomes conventional wisdom. And so therefore I’ve always been a contrarian my whole career, and I just love seeing something that others don’t.And by t he way, I’m not always right. That’s fine. One of the biggest aha’s in my career, and it’s important too, is that at True we do not think about being right. That puts your brain into all these really very difficult judgmental places where creativity dies. Creativity flourishes when you have freedom of expression, freedom of degrees, and you can think about the possibilities. So there are requirements to being massively creative. The first of which is the stakes are sort of low from a dollar standpoint. What I mean by that is when all my friends and all the people were saying it’s never going to work, I thought, “Well, if I fail, there’s always something else.”We’re very fortunate in this day and age to have all sorts of options, all kinds of options that don’t necessarily need to be in Silicon Valley. There’s lots of ways I could find something to do and be constructive. But what if I didn’t try? I couldn’t sleep at night thinking that I wouldn’t try. Tha t was the part that if there was one thing that completely freaked me out as a founder, it was not trying this. Literally, people say, “What keeps you up at night?” Well, first of all, everything keeps you up at night. Everything. But the one thing that was literally terrifying was if I ended up later in my career and I never gave it a shot. That I couldn’t live with.And most of the founders I work with, that’s what it’s all about. They have this burning sensation to start this thing or build this thing or make the impact they see so clearly. And yes, you’ve got to persevere and you’ve got to really commit. You’ve got to work your tail off harder and longer than anyone in terms of the hours you put and all that kind of stuff. But there’s also this realization that if this doesn’t work, there are other things out there. There’s this global picture which is to say the world is a very exciting place right now and a very needy place for solutions. It’s like, “T here’s an awful lot we could do here together.”So I think liberating your mind, if you get locked into “I have to,” “I can’t,” all these, then you start losing the bigger picture. So we tend to continue even today. We don’t focus on being right on an initial investment. That’s not even relevant. We focus on the proper ingredients. Is the entrepreneur committed? Is there this crazy potential for market? Is there some technology? That kind of thing. And it’s very rigorous analysis. I’m not suggesting that it’s easy. It’s not easy but it’s different. It’s not judging. It’s more exploring. There’s a subtlety there.Martin: You touched very briefly one some of the criteria that you are using for the investment. One of them was doing some really crazy stuff. When an entrepreneur comes to you, how do you identify or evaluate that something is really awesome crazy?Jon: So I get in trouble with this all the time because I say there’s nothing too crazy for u s and then sure enough I’ll see something and I’ll say, “Okay, that’s a crazy one.” But I think directionally we’re doing an awful lot in neuroscience right now. It’s a great example, where big data and frankly sometimes mobile technology and other types of horizontal platforms is meeting that absolute frontier of how we understand the brain and the power of the brain, both for output and input sensory and other. It’s a remarkably exciting field, and so we’re very excited about it. It’s in one way this great next frontier of scientific understanding, but there are also enormous markets that fall out of that research and of success there, and likewise digital therapeutics. So on the one hand, where big data meets healing, you might say that’s a computer science problem. It absolutely is, but it’s also a real health care problem. And health care and pharmaceuticals in the country and the world are really broken in some fundamental ways. And could we fix that? Y es. It’s absolutely crazy to think so but it’s working and it’s happening. And so we’re very much at the forefront there.We love robotics, and so when I met the founders of Open ROV, they make underwater submarines and drones and very low cost, very high performance, we got super excited. It was very hard to see. That was another one. Some of my closest friends and fellow entrepreneurs laughed at me. They called it my passion project, and I was like, “No, you just don’t see it. There are enormous applications that come out of building underwater robotics. And of course, right now that’s all starting to happen for the company.So you have to be able to see it through the eyes of the founder, most typically, because we’re not necessarily at a whiteboard saying, “This market. That market.” We really need the protagonist of a great founding team to come to us and say, “These are the three things that if they connect, it could be huge.”And so same thing. We’re re ally open. We’re super open to the big ideas. And we’re also… I was going to say patient but it’s more than that. We accept timing risk. So one of the things about when you say you want to maximize product risk, there’s no product we invest almost always. We want to maximize market risk. If we’re doing it right, there’s no market for what we’re building with the team. And we want to maximize timing risk, and this is one of the most highly controversial aspect of this discussion because a lot of investors will say timing risk will kill you. And it absolutely can kill you. It can also make you. If you’re early in a big market and you’re one of the first participants in a big market, you have the opportunity to get outstanding share. You have the opportunity to lead. It doesn’t mean you’ll always get it. Someone else will come from behind and beat you, but that risk is worth it to us. And of course, you can be too early, you can be too late. There are all sorts of things that happen. But we really embrace this notion that good things take time.I was with a team very recently, and they showed me a plan, and it was “Hit the market within six months and 18.” It was a very exciting man and woman founding team. And I said, “It’s a marathon. Don’t sprint. Building a company and tapping into a market, and they brought these incredible résumés and incredible experiences, very seasoned. We all know this is a marathon. So I’m not interested in 18 months. What’s five years? Tell me seven years. How? So again, timing risk is super important to success. And giving yourself all sorts of degrees of freedom is the other thing timing does.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM JON CALLAGHANMartin: Jon, you have so much entrepreneurial experience and experience as an investor. What have been the major learnings that you’ve seen over the years which you can share with first time entrepreneurs?Jon: Yes. It is all about the people. There’s nothing mo re. And I would say another angle, another perspective on that, it’s all about values. First of all, it’s completely overwhelming to be a first time entrepreneur, and the truth of the matter is that no one has the answers. None of us know what to do. So a lot of times, an entrepreneur, when they start they’d be like, “I don’t know what to do, but somebody else must,” and that kind of thing. And so there are a few absolutes that I would think about. The first is people and values. Don’t waste time with people that don’t share your values, and prioritize the relationships around you.And what do I mean by that? So a lot of interesting things come out of that. So for example, if you value collaboration, which we do, and you value transparency and you value the human element and being very honest and present about how hard it is, you get lots of support. And the support comes in interesting ways. Of course, it’s like someone there to talk to about what’s upsetting you or what’s your challenge or what’s the biggest thing you’re worried about or whatever, but it’s also ideas. When you talk to people about the challenge you have and you have this group around you that understands your quest and what you’re on, people will help. And if you’ll help others, people will help.And so it’s more than just “It’s all about the people.” It’s more than just “I’ll get the résumé out of this company or that company or the Google engineer and this.” That’s important. You have to have the right skills around you, but there are a lot of great skills. There are people with all kinds of incredible skills. Much more important is to prioritize people that share your same values. And that can be a performance edge. That can be a communication style. That can be design. There’s lots of manifestations of values, but put that first. Absolutely put that first.The other is again this notion we talked about too, about time. I think people who think about their quest as a missionary quest tend to understand that it’s a really long road and there are millions of decisions you need to make properly in order to get through this path, or there are a million decisions you need to make to succeed. So the missionaries have this longer view. People who are more mercenary like, “I just want to manipulate this little edge,” tend to think in very short term decision making windows and tend to get in trouble. So we would encourage, I always encourage boldness. I encourage really long term thinking. If you don’t see a five-year, ten-year market here, don’t bother. It’s way too hard to hit a teeny little window of a couple of years. You need to be planning on very, very large trends and very, very long timeframes. And set yourself up properly for that kind of success. Give yourself a chance. And it’s not just the dollars. It’s about expectation. It’s about the team you build. So for example, where the rubber meets th e road on this one is it’s all about a great engineering team. Well, don’t put the great engineering team where you think one or two of them are going to turn out a year because they tell you that. “I’m only in it for a quick…” Things like that have really long term ramifications.I think the other thing that we talk to our founders about is you just have to operate with incredible speed and clarity. Optimization is not really important in these early things. And it’s true. I keep coming back to value. If your value is driven in relationships during the decision, you’re pretty easy. What’s the right thing for the customer? Okay, let’s do that. Are there risks to it? Probably there are risks to it. How can we minimize this risk? There are probably a few ways we could minimize this risk. Do we violate something with the customer? Yes. Okay, don’t do that. You can follow these decision trees. Hiring. Everything.I always say, “Put your team first, customer second. ” First, the values have to come from your team and your people around the table, and then they will properly radiate to the customers. And I think that’s really important. Even in remarkably successful companies where the sky is the limit, the sky is the limit because every single day your 500 employees know what you stand for and every single day they’re out with customers standing for that same thing. It magnifies your potential impact and customers feel authenticity. You feel it when you buy coffee or when you fly in Virgin. The choices we make typically associate with authentic brands, the brands that mean something, that resonates with you. Apple for design. That’s interesting. But I think every startup has that opportunity. It’s this really important common core of values, of vision, of long term time horizon.Martin: Cool. Jon, thank you so much for sharing with us.Jon: Yes. Absolutely. Great to see you. Thank you.Martin: And next time, if you are building a company , focus really on the values. So if you are just hiring your starting team, don’t only look at their résumé but really whether they are resonating with your values and the values of the company because in the end there are millions of decisions you need to do, and if you are value-driven, then it’s easier. Thanks so much. Great.Jon: Thank you, Martin.