First and foremost, ultimately it was just two things, one intellectual curiosity, just this capacity to see things that were unendingly interesting across a range of things and then to say, Oh, well, maybe I should pursue that. So for example, I got to college, I thought that I was going to be a lawyer and pursue criminal law yet I had been a musician for a lot of years, and Stanford had this program called CCARMA the Center for Computer Research and Music and Acoustics and it was the world's leading center for computer music. I was fascinated and spent a huge amount of time up there and ultimately I ended up creating my own major in computer music because it was the thing that was capturing my attention. I ended up going and studying in England because I hadn't gotten the opportunity to study abroad so end up doing a Masters's degree but in this instance in criminology because I was still quite curious about the criminal system, etcetera. Then I found myself in law school thinking I would be a public defender but after spending some time as a public defender, deciding that wasn't a good fit for me. I ended up clerking for a judge because it seemed like, when else will you get an opportunity to see the federal system this way? So I clerked for this judge in New York on the Second Circuit, which was an amazing opportunity to kind of see the judicial system in all its glory and that was interesting but made clear to me that I was not likely going to be an academic, I wasn't likely going to pursue that path and that landed me in litigations. I became a litigator in New York City, working for a big litigation firm representing amazing companies, big, interesting and important companies where they had hired this firm because they needed to win and we brought all the resources to bear that one could and that was sort of an amazing experience to be able to pursue a case with that much rigor and with that many resources and it had the predictable outcome which we want a lot. We went in with teams of people and brought a bunch of resources to bear and we had incredible success and yet it turned out that wasn't a great fit for me either. I found my way out to Silicon Valley back towards where I had started in college because friends of mine from my freshman dorm had started Yahoo and I had grown up in a house that believed in tech and technology, and my dad had been an early computer scientist and suddenly there was the startup world where people were building amazing stuff. I started out as a lawyer helping these little companies get started and I realized how amazing that was like, O my God, a few people and a great idea and you can turn it into something big and interesting and I became completely addicted to this idea, How to help people create great companies from nothing. I did that as an attorney for a period of time until kind of amazing venture capitalist named Dave Marquart said to me after a board meeting once, "Have you ever thought about the venture business?" And of course, by then I had thought about the venture business because it seemed to me what an opportunity to try and give resources to these little companies to help them be successful. Dave Marquart had been the only private investor at Microsoft and funded the first investor in Sun and Sea Gate, and he had been very successful at this and he said, "Yeah, we like you, maybe you'll be good at this." So they interviewed me for a bunch of months, four months of grilling me and finally, they decided they couldn't come up with a good reason not to hire me on. They offered to have me join the firm, and so that was actually 20 years ago, I joined August Capital start investing technology startups knowing nothing about technology startups other than having been a lawyer who would help them get financed, etcetera. Then it was the perfect job, completely intoxicating and I said it was two things I first said intellectual curiosity, the second thing is the people. I always have been driven by relationships and people and how do you help the people you think are great humans and how do you help them to be successful? And in turn, everybody does really well and so there was a job that was all about the people and intellectual curiosity so I feel incredibly lucky that I just landed by happenstance on a job that was the perfect job for me 20 years ago and I've been now at August capital for 20 years, and I've been an investor in some amazing companies, little company that at the time was called transaction engines, which was three people and an idea which changed its name to Splunk and is now a many billion-dollar public company, it's just its sort of an amazing thing to watch that happen. So that's the shortish version of the characteristics and the luck that have resulted in me sitting where I sit today.

That's a good lead in my descriptor how I got here, is a good lead into then what happened once I became a VC? Because I got to the venture business and the answer was, I didn't know anything and my partner was like, well, it's not like you're an expert in networking or microprocessor network expert whatever so you should just look at things that you find compelling and we'll assess them accordingly so I got very lucky in that regard and I'm an early-stage investor, I'm a typical kind of Series A investor. So I'm putting that first in $1,000,000, $10 million into a company, once they find product-market fit to help drive to getting bigger and more established. At the beginning of my venture career just turned out that my first 4 investments were a consumer marketplace, a fintech company, the very first online payroll company, an enterprise application company, and an enterprise infrastructure company and that resulted in me being able to say, Hey, I look at all of these things and I invest across all of them and so over the last 20 years, I have invested in the infrastructure space, I've invested in Splunk and then I invested in this company, Fastly, that recently went public, which is a kind of next-gen content distribution system. I invested in this company PayCycle, in the Fintech space, I invested in WePay, bill.com, which is doing SMB payments, which also recently went public and then in the consumer world, I met the people at August because I was the lawyer to Evite and they had invested ended up on the board of Evite and then we funded Ebates, which is this marketplace for shopping, where you get money back and investor and company like Shop Runner so I just got very lucky, and I have had the opportunity to fund great people doing all of these things. If you look at what the two characteristics of these companies are, one, it's amazing people who are just absolutely driven to build great and exciting businesses and two, they're chasing big, interesting markets. I used to say that my investment thesis was people, people, people, it is now people, people, markets people, it's still about the people, but they have to be pursuing something big and exciting.

I mean, the first Email, you have to think about the fundraising process a little bit like dating. I like to joke that people think, Oh, I'm going to have this big meeting. I'm going to convince you to fund my company and when I went on the first date with my wife the objective was not to get her to be engaged to me at the end of that first date, it was to get her to have a second date, that was all. It's like this first day is amazing, I hope you'll go out with me again. In many ways, that's the venture process, so this email is really all about getting people excited enough to spend time with you so ultimately, it's great to have an executive summary, maybe it's a short PowerPoint Deck, but mostly I just want to understand what it is your business does, and I want to understand what you'll do with the money that you're raising and who you are? If you can get those things across in the text of an email, great if that's a very quick and executive summary, fantastic. I just want to look through and go, "Oh, that's super interesting, let's have a meeting and let me learn more about this thing" Every time the question is, let me learn more and as long as you've got me wanting to learn more, you're pushing me down the path and soon enough you may get a term sheet.