Making the perfect backpack. Craft in the age of AI.
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If you haven't solved the fundamental thing, then you're not there yet. You need to care about the craft still, right? If we were trying to recreate 1930s Paris for the AI maker, what are the conditions? Every single time I use it, I'm like, I want to hug the person who invented this thing. Creativity is contagious in that environment. I love American capitalism. Yeah.

That's got to be the opening. You only get slightly better dish soap that solves all your problems through the wonders of Market Forces.

Bad segue. But you know, when we originally started this podcast, the idea was that we were going to try and talk about products every week or month or however, however often we do this thing. And we haven't talked about that many products. I have a product I played with last night in AI that I think we should talk about the next time. But I'm going to leave that as like a cliffhanger because I want to spend more time with it and actually think about it. And then we'll talk about it more the next time. But I have to tell you that I don't know if you are you like a total bag person? How many backpacks do you own?

I found the perfect backpack, Fraser. That's what I'm trying to tell you. I see. Finally. Of course, I care about the backpack. And then my backpack was stolen. Somebody snatched and grabbed it out of the back of our car in San Francisco. And I made the...

Anyway, I'm very interested because I made the mistake of buying a replacement backpack right in that moment and I haven't swapped it and I'm, I'm so, so, so maybe there's three waves of backpacks. I'm going to call this wave three because we often name things. Cause that's what we do. There's all backpacks up until the beginning of Kickstarter.

And then there was this Kickstarter wave of how do I get people interested? And this is like the peak design backpacks and things like that of like about whatever it was like eight years ago, nine years ago. And I certainly owned a peak backpack and like every other backpack in that era. They all have one thing wrong with them or two things wrong with them that drive you crazy. And that's what's so interesting about this as a product category is that you're talking about a horizontal use case. Everybody has slightly different uses and there's like

It's so Red Ocean. Like we're so in that like what kind of, what does a zipper feel like? Like this is not moonshot. This is like fine craft at the edge of utility, daily utility, but also design and I'm wearing it. It's like, I love the category for intellectual. Anyway, the backpack is the Boundary Errant Pro. All right, let me look this up. Boundary Errant Pro. Yes, Boundary Errant Pro. Okay, okay, I see it.

And let me just tell you why this is the best backpack ever. So first of all, shout out to SAR, who's a general partner at CRV that I've known for a long time, who tuned me into Boundary, the brand, although not this particular backpack.

What's great about this backpack is that I can't... We're in so late-stage backpack design land that there's no one thing I can say that will help you understand this because it is a million tiny little decisions that go into making this right. But I'll show you a couple. Our intrepid listeners will not be able to see it. It has a front pocket, top pocket, easy zip for your laptop bag. Right? Then inside of the laptop bag, just as importantly, there is a laptop...

I think it's called something like the home working sleeve or something like that, which is like, I work from home today. So you just pull out the sleeve and the sleeve has just the laptop and your basic pens and little bits of things inside of it.

there's a little clip on the back of that sleeve so that when you slide it into the backpack, it hooks onto the inside of the backpack so it doesn't drop too far down into the backpack. And that thing I just said right there, there are 30 of those. That little tiny love is everywhere in the backpack. When you

When you go to open up the zipper in the front, your hand instantly moves to the bottom of the backpack because you want to hold it while you're holding the zipper on the other side. And when your hand moves down there, there's a little tiny handle for your thumb while you pull the zipper up.

Love it. It is crazy. I had it for two weeks and I was still finding tiny little things that are like, oh, now I understand why they put that there and so on and so forth. This is the end game of a backpack that has clearly been designed by Reddit. Clearly this team was sitting in Reddit Slack backpacks for like

a year and a half just combing through every little comment that every single person had about a backpack and then found a way to like sculpt it into like the perfect form. So this is the last backpack. It's amazing. It fits in also more importantly for me, it fits in a DSLR camera. So there's a little side pocket on the right-hand side. That's a quick open pocket for me to stuff a camera in when you're on the road. But that whole pocket slides out. So I don't have to have it in there every day with the weight. Anyway, it is everything you want.

The thing that made me excited was obviously like I finally have a backpack that at least for a month I'm gonna be super satisfied with until I find something else. And then I just think about all the time and work and energy it probably went into combing Reddit for two years.

to get all of this information, to internalize all of the needs of all these customers. And I'm a one-track mind, so my brain went to like, wow, how much easier is that to do with AI? Like, how much better are all of our kind of late-stage craft polish tools

you know, products. If a person loves enough and cares enough to look into them, like how much easier is it going to be to make truly excellent products where like every little edge case has been thought through when we can gather those edge cases like in mass? Yeah. Yeah. Amazingly. So I think the one thing that you said at the end there that really resonated is,

you need to care about the craft still, right? So yeah, it's another case where you can't outsource it to the AI, but you're going to have somebody who cares deeply is going to have an entirely new tool sitting shotgun with them as they think about what did you call it? Like the little, the thumb pedestal for when you're zipping up the bag is just, it's just there. And

Yeah, it's beautiful. There's every article from maybe like a week and a half ago from this guy named Michael Taylor on every called AI focus groups. And

He's the founder of a company called Rally, which does like synthetic focus groups. There's companies like Listen Labs that do this not as virtual customer research, but actually as like real customer research where they go out and call a bunch of people, get them on video, get their inputs on a product, and then kind of like use AI to aggregate the responses back and so on and so forth. And all those feel like crazy superpowered tools in this new era.

But again, like the loop, the end of the loop is not, I think when Michael was talking about it, his end of the loop was like, you know, we're going to use all this stuff because eventually we go through these, you know, these three step processes where we're going to be able to role play real customers, crowdsource instance virtual reality surveys, get synthetic focus groups together. And then like at the end, it's going to be like self-improving ads and,

And I think that's probably will exist. It's fine. The more interesting thing for me is using all that corpus of data and then applying human judgment at the end to figure out how to fit that all together into some new and better product that hasn't existed before. One of the interesting things is that like we talk about marketing as like this singular thing.

And I think the Every article was talking about a lot about like marketing communications, like does this slogan resonate? Does this thing resonate? And the example that you had, which by the way, like Reddit is an amazing resource. If you're not using it and you love products and you like want to find the thumb pedestal equivalent for any product you're using, it is remarkable. But that is like product marketing, right?

Yeah. Right. That's like figuring out what to build and how to build it. Who's customer research? Customer research. And that's like an important distinction to carve out. This is totally an aside, but I went down a deep rabbit hole of insane respect for the consumer packaged good companies and their product marketing prowess. Why is that? Oh, like the story of the...

Mr. Clean magic eraser is wild. You know, I actually think that I think that that skill is the most important thing for anybody building early stage product is like the ability to like actually look at your users and actually read qualitative feedback, see how they're using it and infer like, oh, you're trying to do this, but you need like that little thumb thing below the zipper.

I just had a vision of Frazier. If Frazier was a think fluencer, then we would get the, you know, what founders can learn from Mr. Clean. 10 tips. Oh, no. You know, I've got to tell you one of my new favorite consumer packaged good products. And I want to find the guy because...

In my imaginary world, there's like a LinkedIn version for people who work at like P&G and Unilever. And they're like, I invented this piece or I invented that piece. And I want to find the person who came up with the down power wash dish spray. Have you ever used this? What are you talking about? Oh, my goodness. You...

I'm going to order you one on Amazon. It is going to change your life at your kitchen sink. And we will do another episode on it. It is like the best product that I've experienced. And again, it's somebody who watched how people interact with soap at their kitchen sink.

and came up with a product that is like so delightful. Every single time I use it, I'm like, I want to hug the person who invented this thing. It is so great. But that is a skill, right? These consumer packaged good companies are famous for doing consumer research where they get people in and they're like, they're so good at understanding. I don't know. We should do a whole show on this because the story of the Swiffer is also equally amazing.

It's like what people, what little annoyance and paper cut do they have in their lives and how can we improve that is such, it's like at the heart of CPG. And what you talked about with your bag is really that. It's product research. It's like how do I find the little touches that people need and can simplify their life with this product. Do you know the kitchen tools OXO?

- Yeah. - The Oxo Kitchen Tools Company? - Of course. - Yeah, so everything at Oxo in the initial 15 years of their run, I don't know what it is now, was designed by a guy named Sam Farber at Smart Design in New York. And actually when I was in college, my senior year, we took a big trip there and did like a day session where we were learning basically about how Smart Design went through this process. And it was a lot of this, okay, what do I actually do with a measuring cup?

I'm going to watch people with a measuring cup. They pour it into a bowl and then they like hunch down and try and look sideways at the measuring cup to figure out whether it's hit one liter or not. That's dumb. Like, can we fix that? Why do they have to hunch down? And it's kind of like it's the thing that founders really have to do, which is just

We are, as humans, we quickly habituate to the environment around us. And a lot about being a founder and really good at product is just like upping your irritation threshold. Like, is it really that bad to kneel down to look at whether it's hit one liter or not? It's not that bad, but it'd be better if you fixed it.

And so like let yourself be annoyed by that for a second. And so I think the internalization of that is that, of course, you still have to watch human behavior in order to pick up on those things. And I remember that day really strongly. It was really interesting going by. They had all these fake kitchens set up and they had a bunch of people trying to make things and then they had people watching those, so on and so forth. But the gathering of that data was very bespoke and it was very discerning.

slow and very manual. The discovery process, the design process is still there, but the gathering of that data is still very, very slow. And that's a situation where I think it'd be very, very interesting. And you can imagine even a bunch of people making stuff in kitchens, cameras looking at them, computer vision against that, and then asking like, when did people slow down? When did people hunch? Like we can now use those tools in order to derive information out of that to make good product decisions.

This is why I, well, other than my like deep, deep love for the Dawn Power Wash, like go buy one. Other than that, like the reason that I took us down this rabbit hole is I actually think that teasing apart what has to happen in that type of marketing for the insights that lead to your bag is likely a real AI problem.

But it's, it's, I would be shocked. Like it's not, it's not like synthetic audience groups. It's not, it's not any of these other things because I've been in the bowels of Reddit, like reading about, you know, running shorts and you're like, oh yeah, like that is a nuisance. I don't want to have, yeah. And like, I think the, one of the amazing things about LLMs is like, you can, you can easily get the, the P50 answer on anything.

Right. And you can like kind of bump it out of there. But the nice thing about Reddit is like you filter down with a lot of taste and intuition as like the person who is either building or consuming or like researching, I guess is maybe the way to say it, is like you're like, no, that's not relevant to me. That's not relevant to me. That's not relevant to me. Oh, this person's comment right here is gold.

Yep. And I think that LLMs can help with that, but I think it's not like the, I think it's the unobvious answer. Like, I don't think the answer is to go and get like a panel of people from any of those panel companies and ask them 16 questions or even try to like validate them. I'd be shocked.

Yeah, you're just saying there's still product taste needed at the end of that cycle. There's things that help the front of that cycle, which would be gathering things from Reddit. It'd be hard to imagine that the standard ChachiPT or Cloud answer is going to get you to that.

Yeah. But I think like, well, listen, this is not, I'm not, I'm not profound ever, but certainly not in this case. Like the qualities of the product are going to matter significantly here in terms of what it actually can get you. And I like, we we've seen a bunch where it goes and it qualifies the panelists that it then goes and ask the survey questions from, or like the research that it grabs it from. That might be good for certain use cases. It's certainly not going to be useful for your backpack. You're going to end up with like, I don't know,

On one day, you're going to be a Jan sport. The memory of spending time in smart design during that time period reminds me of actually something I've been trying to think about for AI a lot right now, which is what is the ecosystem by which these decisions are made? You're trying to get into founder mode, which is really this highly sensitive, almost irritated mode. And another way of putting it is like,

the kind of lyrical poetic version of putting it as like, how do you cultivate a garden of creativity? Like, how do you get an environment in which you are going to be

thinking about these kinds of things. And a lot of it involves a lot of other people, you know, who are trying to get you into that mental state. I think about an artist has, is, you know, the myth of the artist is that the artist is like going off into the French countryside and painting for two weeks and then bringing back their masterpiece. The reality of most really great product work and really great art and really great creativity is that, you know, it's a little bit like the

I don't know if you read Creativity Incorporated, but it's a little bit like the Pixar brain trust thing, right? It is the fact that you're at Smart Design in the late 90s, early 2000s, and there's a bunch of other designers around you that you are trying to like, that know enough to know the problem you're trying to solve and are trying to hold you to account to do great work. You know, it is Paris in the 1930s with Picasso and Matisse who are like egging each other on. It is that kind of thing. And...

And it's interesting. I guess there's a world where that's the idea of what an incubator is as well in this current environment. Except that I think the idea of most incubators today, that output is not, did you make good product this week? It's like, what did you do to grow this week? Do you have your 10% week over week growth? Right. Right.

And it strikes me not just that AI can help on the front end of that creative cycle saying, you know, input metrics, hey, gather me more customer data, make me feel about that. But like, you know, what is an AI wrapper, but simply saying that the problem you're going to solve

is going to be because of your own intuition, not because you built a better model, not because you have some technical... That's what an AI rapper is really trying to say. No. I mean, that's why it's pretty bad at writing great copy for... If you want to write tight, tight marketing copy, it's not very good at that. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think would be... This is a very human answer question, not a very AI question, but if we could design an environment for...

the proverbial brain trust of AI product makers. If we were trying to recreate 1930s Paris for the AI maker, what are the conditions of... I think about that environment. I think about there are these little moments in history and time where the stars align and you get incredible outputs. I think about

The 70s with independent film with Martin Scorsese and that whole crew, I think about not that far from there, the rise of rock and roll in the U.S. And again, it's not that they were suddenly like, again, like the myth, the myth, the individual genius. It's also not that they were left on their own. Like they're still in that world.

of taxi driver era and all that stuff, like there's still a studio is distribution. It's commercial. It's not non-commercial. I think about the very early, you know, Apple computer computing days, the kind of rise of the homebrew computer club and that kind of area in the Valley is a similar feeling.

If we were trying to nudge, outside of Spark, if we're trying to nudge this environment to feel more like that, our whole startup ecosystem we have to live in every single day, what are the conditions you think we're trying to strive for? Unfair question off the top of my head, but I'm curious. I feel like it's related to things that we've talked about a bunch over the past couple of years.

In the sense of like the industrialization of like, here's your growth metrics, like all of that stuff, you need to hit this by date X and this by date Y rings out all of the creativity. Yeah. And so then like, I think it's the inverse of that is like the easy answer. I don't know. The most creative people that I've worked with have been individuals who have

over-indexed on caring about understanding the problem, right? So that's the next place where my mind goes is like, what's an environment that helps you, helps give leverage to people to like have empathy in a really deep way for the problems that they're trying to work on and try to solve. And like, sorry, I'm also just thinking about like how lovely your comment was where all of the computer vision today and stuff, if you just...

have individuals using their product and somebody has to bend in a weird way. That's such a great signal and AI is going to get that all of the time. Let's talk about, let's do a screen record and where does the person pause? Where are they confused? Where do they take more time? That's a great input into trying to figure things out. Yeah, I think those inputs to help solve problems helps.

You have to care about the problem. I think about this a lot when a bunch of, there was a funny comment on Twitter this week from somebody, I'm sorry, I don't remember who, who

who was saying, you know, all these VCs get really excited about these PE roll-ups of like long tail service industries and just wait until they like, do you want to spend 10 years worrying about some weird niche boring corner of the economy? And if you do awesome, but like, you can't just do it casually. It's not like lather AI sauce on some service thing and you're done. No, you're going to have to get, get really, really into it.

If I think about those brain trust scenarios in my life, I think they've always involved, they've always been fleeting. I've had them rarely. I think peer feedback is really important. You know, I think I have a quote, it's in my head forever, which is Brock, when he was talking about working with Picasso, like had a quote that was like, we were like two mountaineers roped together. It's just this like, you know, and they're very different styles. They're not exactly copying each other. It's just this like,

You know, if you fall, I fall. And so it's not to say that you don't put pressure on the situation. You need pressure on the situation. It's just pressure for greatness, not short term, like what did you do today kind of thing. It's like, did you do your best work? I think there's a lot about partial oversight as well. Like if I were to really analyze it, it's like peer feedback. But you have the final call is probably the last bit, a measure of autonomy.

Right. You know, in that Pixar brain trust situation, like it's a bunch of pure directors that every week are looking at your dailies and are kind of giving you feedback. You still got the, you know, the call, like people will pour their soul into something when they feel like they have true ownership over it. So you can't as soon as you flip that away from true ownership, then you're then you're you're you're you're done. Yeah. Like, listen, the things that you were dancing around there is like exceptionally high trust. Yeah.

deep, deep, deep respect. This is a big one. This is why it's hard as things scale is aligned incentives. And I think then there's all of those things that contribute to environments where there's real intellectual honesty. There's all of the other secondary effects that need to be present for pushing through to something that's great.

It's the good thing about when that works is it's kind of that the thing that's so great about it is it's creativity is contagious in that environment. Like if you put in enough passionate, quirky, brilliant people together under strong lights of performance that they kind of like –

you know, they work off of each other and you get something better out of the backside of it. And I'm sure that there are startups where that's happening inside of executive teams. Like I've certainly had that inside of executive teams, but you're not really cross-pollinating across the industry very well right now in a time period where that probably happens. I'm sure there might be a hacker house that's probably going to tweet and say, this is what we're trying to build. And maybe there are, and I should go spend more time there. I think the other thing is like,

at the core of all of these things are exceptionally talented leaders and exceptional humans on the axes that matter. Like the Pixar founders go over to Disney Animation when that had been struggling for like a generation and they fixed it, right? And Pixar continues to- That's the opposite example, right? The great example there was like,

We will always loop back to it's the founder, it's team, team, team, team, team. And what Ed was trying to prove when he took over Disney Animation was like, here are a bunch of people that you thought were middling. And it was not that they were middling. It's that the conditions of the environment in which they were working was wrong.

And I can change the same thing. I can change the conditions of the environment. And, and you will not think these people are amazing. And all I did was move some chairs around, change the way we structure meetings, change feedback cycles, change who's accountable for whom. And then suddenly like great things come out of the other side.

That proves it, right? Like an exceptional leader who then creates the culture for these people. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I think they call it the blip or something like that, when Sam and Greg were gone for like the weekend, there were people who during that moment were like, Greg's, I don't know, he was difficult to work with and all these anonymous people like... Good riddance kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, right? And it's so hilarious because the most, like, first of all, great people, but also, like, the most technically talented people who just created the most profound things all wanted to work with Greg. And when you talk to them now, like, the reason that they're still there is because he's still there and, like, the culture that he creates. And so...

I believe that the Ed moving over is like, I don't know. That means that this can actually be created. What you want, you just have to find the right dynamic and the right person. Yeah. I have a question for you. I have a venture. I'm getting my feet under me. New venture question about the world and the industry.

It is going to be hard for me to say much these two startup opportunities were like in the bullseye zone for you and for Spark overall. Over the last couple of weeks, yeah. Over the past couple of weeks, there's been two things and I've been...

reflecting on it and trying to like make sense of it and just like respect it at the same time for you. And I want to lay out the situation and then just like you, you tell me, you tell me why that's the outcome and, and what, what I can learn from it. Two teams come in,

You have long history, I think, with one, maybe shorter history with the other. Yeah. They're early stage companies. I would describe firmly both founders as being Nabil type founders. They're clearly high taste, high product founders who are quirky and weird in the best possible way. Early stats look great. Yeah. Yeah.

The founders are even like honest with where the blemishes are and they talk about the plan for how they want to fix it. And you listen to it and you're like, oh, there's like, that's, that's the 1% answer. Like there's, it would be hard to even have a better answer than that. Yeah. Right. And.

You passed on both. And we passed on both. Yeah, Spark did. Yeah. But it was it was deep soul searching, excruciatingly hard moments. And I was with my kids. I was sleepless at night. I was. Yeah, it was. It was stressful. Why? Like, why is that the outcome? Why is that the outcome?

And what's the lesson for me and others who are early in their careers at this game? First of all, I'd say that it depends on how you want to invest. And I think of venture as an experience in self-actualization more than anything else. The best version of venture is one where the partner is allowed to be themselves.

Because let's be honest, like, you know, giving people money is a commodity business and nobody really knows what's going to work or not work for five to seven years. And so...

you know, you the best version of you having a feeling of taste of the market is going to be if you're kind of listening to yourself and your teammates and kind of working together on finding that thing. I say all that to say, I think there's plenty of other investors that are successful investors that are peers of mine that I like that maybe would have done both deals. Like there's just different ways of doing things. Our and our star has always been product.

And I think that's probably how I would try to answer this question. There's another firm where the North Star is just people and they probably would have liked both of these people and they probably would have done both of these deals.

There's another North Star where it's market, and these were both markets you kind of liked, and so with some momentum, and so you do both of these deals. I think even each of those being first priority will lead you to just like wildly different portfolios, wildly different sets of companies you're working with, all with pluses and minuses. It's not that there's one way. For me, this current age...

If there's a defining trait, it's the fog of war of not knowing what exactly the right answer is because the answer is constantly changing. Even if you think you have the right hook –

The question is, what's going to happen next with the models? What's going to happen next with competition? What's going to happen next with your market? And if you navigate that through the arc of a founder, then you just try and find a founder you trust who seems good and you do good work. And you just like bet on them and you see if they're going to figure it out. I think that's viable. I can't do that. One, I think that would lead you in this current environment to

to do deals that are only people you've known for incredibly long periods of time. And I love betting on new people. Or it would lead you to bet on only people with the strong, like, resume, like, let's go get the, you know, third time founder exited for a billion dollars is doing the new thing and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I don't want to do that either.

I don't think actually those people, in many ways, those people have liabilities in this current environment. I think it's very hard to have fresh thinking in a new environment if you've been at Google for 20 years or whatever, pick your other like thing. So I think for me, these were really close because they're people that had some amount of product traction and they're really great founders that I wanted to work with, but they hadn't found actually the thing. Like the product in both cases was,

You kind of narrowed in on a bunch of problems that startups have, but that's fine. Every startup has risks. But in this situation, in both those situations, you kind of, we kind of like, as you navigated the product, you figured out what would need to be true about this product to really scale and be wonderful and durable. And that thing hadn't been solved yet. So it solved lots of other things, which had gotten them a little bit of traction and a lot of love and so on and so forth. But like,

the thing that was actually the thing you would have solved if you were starting on a whiteboard in the beginning and saying, "Hey, we're trying to create XYZ thing in this category. What's the core thing we really need to solve to have a hit here?" And in both cases, the product had not solved that thing yet. And by the way, the founders didn't disagree. In both cases, they were transparent about it to their own credit. We had conversations about it. Might solve it in three months.

You know, maybe then let me like maybe push past that. So I agree with everything that you said. And it's it's I just need to reinforce for for everyone that I think on all of the criteria that that matter, we certainly don't have like a matrix. We're like, how did they do on this and how do they do on that? But on all the criteria that matter, I would say that both both were good to excellent on everything. Yeah. Good to excellent on everything. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. And I've certainly sat through conversations where we're like, hey, listen, they don't have the thing, but we're going to make the investment for these reasons. This was good to exceptional on every single criteria. I would be surprised if they're not good to great companies. I think the...

You just made a face. So like what, I think the question is still like, are they exceptional companies? I just think about the, think about the advice that, that, that we would give to a founder going out to raise their next round. So forget me evaluating for a second. The advice that commonly give to a founder going out to raise it next round is

is that founders navigate through fundraising, especially when they get lots of feedback from different VCs that are like, I'm passing because of X and I'm passing because of Y. And they go into this kind of like risk mitigation mode where they're trying to make sure there's no blemishes on their deck and in their company. They're trying to make sure it's all green marks all the way down. It's completely, I could say, understandable behavior. I've certainly fallen into that behavior as a founder. It's completely the wrong behavior when you're going to raise, especially early stage founders.

What you need is not a company without any risks. You need a company that has identified the main and core risk to a durable business and has a big, massive green check mark there. And ideally, the other way of wording this, the parlance way of wording this is you're not trying to find a way for them to have no reason to say no. You're trying to find the reason why they have to say yes.

And both of these companies, you know, in the navigation of the product, you identified what was the one thing that would be the reason you have to say yes. And in both cases, those companies had not solved that one thing. To their own credit, they agreed. And there are other situations. This is partially because of the environment that we're in. This is true. I don't think this is true across all companies. There's a lot of like B2B, SaaS companies

enterprise startups that are pure execution plays that are about green check marks all the way down. Ashim from Greylock famously says he's never lost money in an investment. And as you well know, that would be hell for me. I would hate that because it would be a sign that it was operating in markets that were just math and it would also be a sign that

I personally wasn't investing in creative risk enough with the founders that we were working with without, you're not taking moonshots, like you're not taking real creative risk. So similarly, if you're in an environment where you don't fully know what the answer is and you're operating at the far edge of creative risk, then the real question is whether it's an enterprise company or a consumer company or a frontier tech company, whatever it is, then the just question is like, have you actually gotten to the root of like, what is the thing they really have to solve? And then have they solved it?

So that doesn't mean they didn't have revenue. Doesn't mean some customers aren't interested in intrigue. Didn't mean you found some go-to-market formula that got you the edge against somebody else for a couple of months. But if you haven't solved the fundamental thing, then you're not there yet. And look, I have been kind of wrong about that. Like,

Of course. Yeah, look, I've been wrong about this before. I've got my FOMO genes that sometimes crop up. I've got my anti-portfolio list of things that were missed. You can't be doing venture for a long time without doing that. And I'm not saying that those companies won't come back around. Cruise and Discord were companies that

I met those founders and I felt like the thing wasn't quite there yet, knew them quite well. And then it started to exhibit itself later and I had to scrape and claw and run back at them and pay a higher price. And it's okay. It's okay.

I mean, that last part just reiterates how much of this role is about humanity, right? Like you deal with those conversations when you don't think they have the thing with like the gravity that it deserves and the humanity that it deserves and you set yourself up well for that.

That's set yourself up. That's such a bad term because that makes it sound quite transactional. Like I've heard your stories like you kept having, I think, like weekly walks with one of those founders. And then you like came back famously to the partnership and you're like, I think now they actually have got it. Like I've followed this arc over the past three months and I think they've got it. Yep. Yeah. But there's enough times where I've just seen an amazing and wonderful group of people come together to solve the problem.

And the problem just doesn't get solved. Like, it's, you know, sometimes it's a petri dish of humans and their intellect and creativity and the talent to come together. And like, just, that's why I ask these questions about

you know, this brain trustee, you know, what's the creative environment we want people to be in? That's why I'm asking all of these questions, because I think it's the right lens with which to look at our ecosystem, which is like, what are the environments we're creating for people? How are we helping nudge the environment we're going to be spending the rest of our careers in to be healthy environments where these things are going to have breakthroughs? Not because the breakthroughs will always happen, but because this is the kind of soil in which most breakthroughs do get a chance to happen. Right.

It's also the fun part. It is. It is. I'm now talking myself into starting some kind of hacker house or incubator or something as we're on this call. I had something happen to me yesterday that happens maybe once every three months. And I need to ask you, is there anything worse in the world of venture when you think that this company looks amazing?

And the founder on the other side says, I'll send over the invite. And in comes an invite from Microsoft Teams. Did it come from a Yahoo email address? No, no, no, no, no, no. Like there was better taste than that. But I'm like 0 for 6 where like you get on the call. As soon as that comes in, I should just politely decline. Like this is not going to work out. Let's save each other the 40 minutes. Yeah.

My gosh, that is just unbelievably pretentious of you, Fraser. What are you talking about? Pretentious. You're just noticing a pattern. You're saying you're not saying it's causation. You're saying there's a strong correlation between inbound Microsoft Teams invite and the meeting not going well.

Well, like... What do you have to believe? What do you... Honestly, I didn't intend to go down this hole, but like, what do you have to believe for that not to be an exceptionally bad signal about the founder that you're just about to get on a call with? Oh, no. Let's ask it differently. What market would the founder need to be playing in that that is a positive sign? And you're like, yep, that's good founder market fit. Oh, interesting. Because I... Well...

I had a founder who, this most recent one, I'm going to have plausible deniability. On another one, I made a comment that I'm like, oh, Microsoft Teams, here we go. And his argument was that he deals with customers where that's the requirement. Yeah. I'm not prepared to give him a pass because I think if you really have empathy for the sale, that's great. Bring in Teams when you're dealing with that company, but why are you bringing Teams into your- Why is that your default elsewhere?

But I think your question is actually more interesting because there is a founder who thinks that there's nothing wrong with team. And that's fine because of what they're doing. And is the perfect founder for that market.

I'm going to go out on a limb, and that is not an Nabil deal. So I don't even... I don't know what that market is. I'm sure some other VC is doing a great job investing in that market. Okay, last thing about the Boundary Backpack. Another small, little, wonderful thing is they sell... So you know, you shouldn't have your car keys in your pocket. You end up trying to toss it into your bag, and now you're digging in and trying to find your fingers hitting the bottom, and now it's...

So they sell a keychain. The keychain has a little magnet at the edge of it. And then you just... When you drop in your keys into the top, it just goes... And you know exactly where they are when you open it back up again. It's like...

That's so great. That's so great. I love it. I love it. And you know that there's some guy, you were just talking to this ago, there's some guy who probably mentioned that and read it like three years ago and then like helped design this backpack three years later. Nice. Nice. Okay. That is a great spot to close. I think we should be done.