In this episode of Innovators Inside Podcast, Ian Bergman speaks with Dave Lambert, founder and managing director of Right Side Capital Management, about how artificial intelligence is changing startup economics, investment decisions, and the future of venture capital.

Right Side Capital Management has invested in more than 2,000 early-stage companies using a quantitative, data-driven investment model. That gives Lambert a unique view of what is happening at the earliest stages of the technology market.

His central message is clear: AI is not only making software faster and cheaper to build. It is also changing how companies operate, how much capital they need, what investors expect, and what creates a lasting competitive advantage.

Here are the five key takeaways from their conversation:

1. AI Startups Are Building and Growing Faster

The cost of creating the first version of a software product has been falling for decades. AI has accelerated that trend dramatically.

Technical founders can now build sophisticated products in months, or sometimes weeks, without the engineering teams and development budgets that were once required. However, the bigger shift may be happening after the product is launched.

AI tools are helping startups reduce the labor needed for customer service, marketing, sales, support, and internal operations. As a result, young companies can reach meaningful revenue with smaller teams and less capital.

Dave says Right Side Capital is now seeing startups with more revenue, faster growth, and larger customers than would have been possible at the same stage only a few years ago.

For founders, this creates both an opportunity and a challenge. It has never been easier to build, but investors will expect stronger results earlier.

2. AI Products Must Execute, Not Just Assist

One of the clearest changes in Right Side Capital’s investment strategy is a preference for products that perform work rather than simply help humans manage it.

Traditional software often improves an existing workflow. It organizes information, provides recommendations, or helps an employee complete a task more efficiently.

The new generation of AI products can execute the task itself.

An AI system might identify a business problem, recommend an action, request approval, and then complete the work. Over time, customers may trust the system enough to act without asking for permission each time.
This shift from assistance to execution creates significantly more value. Businesses are no longer only buying software. They are buying capabilities, completed work, and measurable outcomes.

For founders building AI products, the important question is no longer just, “Does this make someone more productive?” It is, “What part of the work can this product complete?”

3. Capital Efficiency Is Becoming a Requirement

Startups may need less funding because AI is lowering the cost of product development and operations. At the same time, raising capital could become more difficult.

When more founders can build working products, investors have more companies to choose from. That means the minimum level of traction required for a pre-seed or seed round is likely to rise.

Lambert evaluates capital efficiency by looking at what a company has achieved relative to the money it has raised and spent. Important factors include:

• Current revenue

• Revenue growth

• Monthly burn rate

• Product functionality

• Amount of capital previously raised

• Expected runway after the investment

Right Side Capital generally wants its investment to give a company approximately 12 to 18 months of runway under a reasonable scenario.

The lesson for founders is that progress matters more than activity. Investors want to see how efficiently a team can turn limited resources into a working product, customer adoption, and revenue growth.

4. Not Every Successful Startup Needs Venture Capital

AI may allow more founders to build profitable technology businesses without raising multiple institutional funding rounds.

Traditional venture capital is designed for companies pursuing very large outcomes. Once founders accept professional venture funding, they are often committing to rapid growth and a major exit. Smaller, profitable outcomes may no longer satisfy the expectations of the investors involved.

Lambert believes more founders should understand this tradeoff before raising money.

A company that can reach several million dollars in annual recurring revenue with limited capital may be better served by growing profitably, using debt, or raising only one small equity round.

Right Side Capital expects that a growing number of its initial investments could become the final equity round a company ever needs.

This could create a healthier environment for founders. They may retain more ownership, preserve strategic flexibility, and build companies around sustainable economics rather than fundraising milestones.

5. Brand and Customer Acquisition Will Become More Important

As software becomes easier to build, more companies will be able to create products that work well and deliver real value.

This is likely to make many technology markets more crowded and fragmented. Product functionality alone may not be enough to create a lasting advantage.

Lambert believes brand, marketing, customer acquisition, and distribution will become more important than they have traditionally been in B2B technology.

When buyers have dozens of similar solutions available, they may choose the company they recognize, trust, or find most easily through search and recommendations.

This represents a major change in the skills needed to scale a technology company. In the past, engineering capacity was often the primary bottleneck. In the AI era, operational execution, positioning, customer relationships, and brand may determine who wins.

Final Thoughts

AI is changing more than the products startups create. It is reshaping the entire system around them.

Companies can build faster, operate with fewer employees, and reach revenue with less funding. Investors are becoming more cautious about pure software businesses while showing renewed interest in hardware, marketplaces, and tech-enabled services that may be more defensible against future AI improvements.

At the same time, profitability could become important much earlier in a company’s life. Lambert predicts that technology companies with more than $5 million to $10 million in annual recurring revenue may increasingly be expected to operate profitably and be valued using EBITDA-based metrics.

For founders, the opportunity is significant. But the standards are also rising.

The companies that succeed will not simply use AI. They will use it to deliver complete outcomes, operate efficiently, build customer trust, and create a brand that stands out in an increasingly competitive market.

Watch the full episode of the Innovators Inside Podcast to hear Dave Lambert’s complete perspective on AI investing, capital efficiency, startup funding, and the future of venture capital.

Have a question for a future guest? Email us at innovators@alchemistaccelerator.com to get in touch! 

Timestamps

00:00 🎙️ Introduction
01:31 👋 Meet Dave Lambert
02:25 📊 A Data-Driven Approach to Early-Stage Investing
04:14 📉 Why Building Software Keeps Getting Cheaper
06:47 ⚙️ Scaling Companies With Less Labor and Capital
08:16 🚀 The New Profile of a Fundable AI Startup
11:39 💵 Experiments Versus Repeatable Revenue
13:13 🤖 AI Must Execute Work, Not Just Assist
15:37 🏢 How Businesses Will Adopt AI Agents
20:07 📈 Measuring Real Capital Efficiency
22:40 💰 Will Startups Still Need Venture Capital?
24:20 🔧 Why Hardware and Tech-Enabled Services Are Back
28:19 📣 Brand as a Competitive Advantage
30:12 ⚖️ When Venture Capital Is the Wrong Choice
32:01 📊 Profitability, EBITDA and Startup Valuations
35:17 🎯 How Founders Can Attract Early-Stage Investors
37:39 🧠 The Psychology Behind Investment Decisions
39:16 💻 Lessons From the Early Internet Era
40:45 🔮 Technology Hype and Predicting the Future
47:03 👋 Closing Thoughts

Full Transcript

00:01:31:20 - 00:01:34:01
Ian Bergman
Dave good morning. Welcome to Innovators Inside.

00:01:34:02 - 00:01:35:18
Dave Lambert
And thanks for having me here.

00:01:35:19 - 00:01:59:15
Ian Bergman
Yeah it's super exciting to have you. I can't wait for this conversation. I think we're going to cover a wide range of topics, but centered around your perspective at the front end of kind of the venture capital markets. And boy, I just want to dive in. But for folks who don't know you, I just want to say welcome to Dave Lambert, founder and managing director at Right Side Capital Management.

00:01:59:16 - 00:02:07:13
Ian Bergman
We almost share a block and a neighborhood in San Francisco, but this is how we get to meet on a podcast. So thanks for coming on. I can't wait for the conversation.

00:02:07:14 - 00:02:10:18
Dave Lambert
Yeah, lots of exciting stuff to talk about these days, that's for sure.

00:02:10:19 - 00:02:25:26
Ian Bergman
Let's just start by grounding the audience in a little bit of your background. You have a fascinating background at in early stage investing in data driven decision making. Can you just kind of give us a little bit of what you do and how you came to be sitting here today?

00:02:25:27 - 00:02:51:21
Dave Lambert
Yeah, yeah. So just the 22nd, you know, Dave Lambert background I graduated, I went to school in the Bay area, Stanford graduated in 1992, and for most of the 90s and 2000, I founded and was the CEO of two technology companies. One was a hardware company in the 90s, early 2000. One was a software company in the 2000, and then, along with my two other co-founders, we founded Right Side Capital.

00:02:51:21 - 00:03:18:25
Dave Lambert
We started working on it in 2009, and we went live in 2012, and we would describe ourselves as a quantitative, data driven approach to what we call privacy stage investing. And basically we build, make very quick, yes no decisions. We build ultra diversified portfolios where each of our funds has many hundreds of portfolio companies in it. And the companies that we invest in, our companies that are raising small round sizes.

00:03:18:25 - 00:03:46:24
Dave Lambert
So we're typically investing in anywhere from 150,000 to $500,000 total round sizes. And in today's world, we're usually anywhere from $150,000 to $400,000. Check into those. And we've been doing this since 2012. We have well over 2000 portfolio companies. And so we get this interesting seat at the very front end of sort of the capital efficient frontier of the entrepreneurial tech ecosystem.

00:03:46:24 - 00:03:56:03
Dave Lambert
And then we get to see those grow over time and work with these companies. As you know, lots go to zero and then lots become worth tens of millions, hundreds of millions and billions of dollars along the way.

00:03:56:04 - 00:04:14:20
Ian Bergman
So setting aside everything else, let's just talk about what a fascinating data set that you've got in front of you. And actually two data sets, you've got the data set of more than 2000 companies that you've chosen to invest in. And then obviously the many, many more that you've looked at but haven't been able to get conviction on.

00:04:14:22 - 00:04:36:22
Ian Bergman
We talk a lot, I think, in today's world about just how fast things are changing, about how hard it is to make decisions. We're going to get there in a second. But let's talk about what's not changing to start. Like, what kind of patterns have you seen in the companies that you have chosen to invest in that still hold true today?

00:04:36:24 - 00:04:55:10
Dave Lambert
Well, basically, a lot of what's happening with AI in the last six months to two years is partially an extension of a trend that's just been playing out over multiple decades and was playing out really strongly in the 20 tens, and that is that the cost to build a first version of a software product has just continually gone down in price.

00:04:55:12 - 00:05:19:25
Dave Lambert
You know, that was tens of millions of dollars in the 1980s. It's probably down to $1 million in 2010. And by the time you got to the late 20 tens. If you're a technical team for a lot of business models, even high ticket enterprise SaaS ones, it was close to zero. It was just your labor, right? And I think that's what's happened with the increase in the sophistication and capabilities of AI tools.

00:05:19:25 - 00:05:38:26
Dave Lambert
Is this just turbocharge that even more. And so now you can build incredibly sophisticated products very quickly with relatively low cost. So that trend hasn't changed and it's been an extension of that. One thing that's really interesting, that's been a change that we've never seen before, but we've seen in the last 2 to 3 years is on the operational side.

00:05:38:27 - 00:06:05:10
Dave Lambert
So while you can go back from the 80s to late 20 tens, and it's always gotten cheaper to build the first version of your product, it's never really gotten much cheaper to scale from there on out, like marketing, sales, customer service and support, you know, stayed the same or sometimes gotten more expensive. But the biggest change we've seen with these young companies internally is using AI tools from the very get go.

00:06:05:10 - 00:06:14:20
Dave Lambert
When you're a young company, and the extent to which people can scale with so much less labor in the last few years than it would have taken in the 2000, and that's just incredible.

00:06:14:21 - 00:06:38:29
Ian Bergman
Well, it is really fascinating because, I mean, so I had a conversation with a guest on a previous episode trying to actually ask the question, are there even any AI native companies that exist yet in the world? And I think maybe we'll get there. But you're you're heading that direction. You're basically saying, hey, maybe there's an inflection point where it's not just the product side or the cost of development asymptotically approaching zero, but potentially the cost to scale.

00:06:38:29 - 00:06:47:03
Ian Bergman
And that has implications for all kinds of things, structure, operations. ET cetera. Is that actually something you're seeing in your portfolio?

00:06:47:06 - 00:07:05:01
Dave Lambert
Yeah. Structure operations even how much capital a lot of these companies are going to need to raise over time. So one of the interesting things, if you sort of look forward in time, there are going to be, you know, companies in the AI space that are going to require massive amounts of dollars and go down the large venture capital path and into private equity.

00:07:05:01 - 00:07:33:27
Dave Lambert
But I think there's going to be this large spectrum of the tech entrepreneurial ecosystem, you know, that this huge profile that might be this middle 70 or 80% that in the 20 tens and early 2020s all needed a fair amount of capital to get to point where you're profitable with sustainable growth. And I think the amount of capital that's going to be needed is going to be substantially less potentially coming up, certainly to build the product and for customer service and support.

00:07:34:00 - 00:07:39:02
Dave Lambert
And that's going to have some implications for the venture capital world. In private equity world definitely.

00:07:39:03 - 00:08:11:08
Ian Bergman
Definitely is. Well, we might save that for later in the conversation because they could be existential in some cases. But I am curious. I'm really curious about the patterns that you are starting to see emerge that are maybe new, that you're seeing emerge over the last two years, three years, maybe even six months. And in particular, what are the signals that are starting to emerge that you treat as investment signals that maybe you didn't even see or think about a couple of years ago?

00:08:11:09 - 00:08:16:06
Ian Bergman
Is AI changing something very fundamental from an investment thesis perspective for you?

00:08:16:08 - 00:08:36:09
Dave Lambert
Yeah, at the early end, and again, if you take sort of my initial description of who we are and what we do, and we have this sort of seat and window at this sort of capital efficient, entrepreneurial frontier in the tech ecosystem. What that looks like has changed so dramatically, not just in the last two years, but I think even in the last six months.

00:08:36:09 - 00:08:56:05
Dave Lambert
So the profile, I would say from the beginning of this year, even just say January, February and beyond of what a company looks like that's reaching out to us for funding. And remember, like, we get almost unlimited outreach. So what I'm talking about, what's the cream of the crop look like? It's so substantially different now than it was even just a year ago.

00:08:56:05 - 00:09:20:14
Dave Lambert
And what I mean is that companies have more revenue than we've ever seen for the round sizes that we're deploying at, they have faster growth than we've seen. So like a company, you know, three years ago, if we saw a company and they had 20 KM, like that's great for us. And maybe they've been around for two years to build a product and do that.

00:09:20:14 - 00:09:40:15
Dave Lambert
And now we see companies that have substantially more than that. And maybe they just launched four months ago, right? Five months ago, this was just almost impossible, like even just a year or two ago. And it's not just that, but the some of the price points are higher and some of the speed with which they're able to engage with some large companies.

00:09:40:15 - 00:10:07:15
Dave Lambert
I think there's there is this interesting shift that happened in the mid 20 tens, and I think that a similar shifts happening now, which is that when we started investing at first, most of what we invested was B2C because it was harder to build a sophisticated B2B product with with not much money, but even more so mid to large sized companies wouldn't engage with startups like you'd risk losing your job if you bought a product from a startup and then it didn't work out, you're worried you're going to get fired.

00:10:07:15 - 00:10:37:12
Dave Lambert
And somewhere between, say, that 2013 mindset in 2018, the corporate world became comfortable engaging with startups and buying products and realize that the world doesn't come to an end. And I think that same things happening now, which is that it's amazing for us to see the size of the customers that some of these people are working with. And this company has only been around for 4 or 5 months, and that's because they've built these products that provide so much value and do things that no software could have ever done before.

00:10:37:14 - 00:10:53:08
Dave Lambert
And there's this mind shift in mind change in the corporate world that it's okay to engage with these raw companies. And we almost need to to stay relevant. And and that's something that I don't think we saw a year or two ago, but we're just seeing now in the last few months.

00:10:53:13 - 00:11:22:19
Ian Bergman
Thinking back to like the cloud migration era. Right. To date myself, I don't think we saw customers view the technological technological shift as an existential threat in the way that they seem to be thinking now. But it is interesting because a lot of those early POCs, those early revenue traction engagements with corporations, aren't actually going to lead anywhere, at least in my experience.

00:11:22:19 - 00:11:39:07
Ian Bergman
They're going to lead to, you know, something that's going to fail, get shut down, etc. it's not going to work out. A lot of them are very experimental. Is that what you're seeing or are you actually seeing true, repeatable, defensible RR Mr.. That is scaling quickly.

00:11:39:09 - 00:12:06:00
Dave Lambert
Yeah. So I mean, two questions there. You know, defensible meaning, you know, is it defensible against, you know, foundational AI model improvements over the next three years? That's a harder question and everything. But are there are we seeing ones? Yeah. Some of these companies are engaging and there's some usage based pricing. And they started at this level. And three months later companies are purposefully using it more and paying more.

00:12:06:02 - 00:12:30:16
Dave Lambert
Well, you know, that's very different than all right, I've just paid you $10,000 for a 90 day trial and let's see what happens. And maybe I like it or not. And even if I like it, it might take six months to get to contract after that. You know, some of these products, you know, companies are seeing it and doubling down much more quickly and being willing to grow and become larger customers.

00:12:30:16 - 00:12:49:15
Dave Lambert
And that's that's the part that I know the values there. You know, the maths almost too compelling to ignore sometimes. And I just don't think it was hard for startup to ever have that compelling of an offering, you know, balanced against the risk of working with this raw startup that was always, always weighed heavily..

00:12:49:18 - 00:13:09:08
Ian Bergman
Decision making. How was your decision making shifting? Are you looking more toward the commercial side in your decision making? Because because look, I got to tell you, I mean, at this point, this is almost a trope. But like two years ago, I threw up my hands and said, I have absolutely no idea how to invest in AI. And so I backed off and I looked at some of the fundamentals.

00:13:09:10 - 00:13:13:18
Ian Bergman
How are you making your investment decisions, and how has that been changing over the past 6 to 20?

00:13:13:24 - 00:13:34:14
Dave Lambert
Yeah, it's very hard and it's changing, you know, asking me every three months and it's slightly different what we're looking at and doing in today's world. We will still invest in pure software companies, which some investors won't. But in general we have a bias towards. We don't want to invest in what people traditionally think is software, which is that software helps manage a workflow.

00:13:34:16 - 00:13:57:15
Dave Lambert
You know, that that that allows a human to do that workflow more efficiently. And you know, the new you know, you really have to not just assist in a workflow to be really impactful. You have to execute. You know, you don't just identify or help help a human do something. Your software product has to have the ability to do the full execution.

00:13:57:15 - 00:14:17:06
Dave Lambert
And you can have a human in the loop in the middle. And maybe the software has to say, hey, you know, an ask permission or says, here's what I'm going to do. And the human can say, yes, but it's that that full execution that is the the real opportunity. And that's delivering value beyond anything that software has been able to do before.

00:14:17:06 - 00:14:42:08
Dave Lambert
And part of that is because, you know, these agenda solutions can sometimes execute, you know, across multiple areas of an organization in a way that a human couldn't, or it's just able to do stuff and replace humans. And, you know, you're not selling against another software product that can do that. Right now, we're in the school day locks period, where you're just selling against the human labor as you're as you're what you're selling against, and you just crush that, you know?

00:14:42:09 - 00:14:45:03
Dave Lambert
So it's really interesting.

00:14:45:03 - 00:15:18:25
Ian Bergman
It seems that you're you're making some very clear bets, though, on how the human side of the customer is going to adopt technology. Right? Like, I mean, setting aside, getting into conversations about labor replacement and job displacement and all of that interesting stuff. There is a difference between a set of AI tools that gives the human superpowers. As you said, they help them do their job better, and a system that can work on behalf or instead of humans and do things that humans can't do, those are fundamentally different things.

00:15:18:25 - 00:15:37:24
Ian Bergman
It seems to me that you are betting that organizations, customers, and perhaps society writ large are going to be prepared to accept real intelligence, real automation, real agents work in the coming years.

00:15:37:25 - 00:15:57:07
Dave Lambert
Yeah, I think they are. And I think what happens is that it's there. Once you do a pilot or proof of concept and you see it and see that value, it's hard to not want to keep that in certain situations. So and some of this we see in new things products that are created in companies coming to us.

00:15:57:07 - 00:16:24:21
Dave Lambert
Some of it we see in existing companies and what they've pivoted to, like maybe in an example of an existing company of ours, they were a SaaS product for for independent hotel operators, and it sort of ran the whole operations of a hotel. And then they sort of rebuilt their whole product, AI first. So a lot of stuff going on internally, and then they started making agents available for the hotels.

00:16:24:21 - 00:16:53:10
Dave Lambert
But it's not just things that you might think of, like, all right, customer service. And we can respond to, you know, guess text and all of this. It's all right. Now you have it so that this hotel operator can come in and they can have that agent tell them here in June I see our I don't know what the proper terminology is, but I see that our, our, our booking backlog for October and November is a little lower than it's traditionally been in past years.

00:16:53:13 - 00:17:10:12
Dave Lambert
Do you want me to go out? And my suggestion is that we spend X amount and we do this over this period of time, and that should cover the shortfall. Do you want me to handle handle that for you. And the human can say yes. And then that agent goes out, does all of the marketing buys and does it.

00:17:10:12 - 00:17:15:03
Dave Lambert
And so basically from that customers perspective they're buying a solution.

00:17:15:04 - 00:17:22:02
Ian Bergman
Yeah. Well they're they're buying capabilities. They literally, you know, they may not have had and certainly couldn't have had a quality.

00:17:22:03 - 00:17:41:09
Dave Lambert
They may not have even known how to do it before, you know, and they're ultimately buying they're buying that. And in some ways they're buying an outcome. Like if they're like, hey, I'm buying a more booked up hotel and better unit for my business. Like, that's what some of the when you start getting to like the midsize down to SMB space, I think that's the mindset of the purchaser there.

00:17:41:09 - 00:17:56:20
Dave Lambert
And some of them are going to want the human in the loop where the agent asks first, and some of them, after using it for a bit, are going to say, hey, I trust you. You don't even need to ask me anymore. You can just go identify the problem and spend up to this amount and just let me know after the fact.

00:17:56:21 - 00:18:14:13
Dave Lambert
You know, these are the transitions where we're at and and it's just it's really interesting to see them play out. You know, one of the things that's crazy is that just to humans embrace technological change so much easier than humans think they do. And in human society and race and our race as a whole.

00:18:14:14 - 00:18:34:15
Ian Bergman
Humans go from magic to Sci-Fi to that's cool to mundane unbelievably quick. I mean, all you have to do is look at Waymo, like we have self-driving cars, like we have self-driving cars. And yet, okay, yeah, it's actually kind of depressing to me if we're being honest.

00:18:34:16 - 00:18:53:14
Dave Lambert
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. In San Francisco, it's like, oh yeah, I saw 12 of them on the way into the office today. Like it just it becomes goes from super novel to just accepted amazingly quickly. And I think that's going to happen in in the AI space with agenda AI agents running loose and business models.

00:18:53:14 - 00:19:22:01
Ian Bergman
Yeah. That is an interesting framing. And I you know, I mean, I'm inclined to believe to to believe you and to agree. I do think that there are some very fundamental kind of psychological things we're maybe not thinking about in the adoption of AI, things like where does accountability lie? Things like, how do I derive, sort of my sense of self-worth that may have been developed by leading a team of 40 people in my organization or whatever it is that we have.

00:19:22:03 - 00:19:44:22
Dave Lambert
Yeah, these are all really interesting human questions. And they'll be it's not like this is going to all go super smoothly. There'll be there'll be mistakes made, there'll be security breaches, there'll be all this stuff. But trying to stop the trend is like trying to stop a wall of water that's moving down a canyon. It's just it's going to get to the other side and there's nothing you can do.

00:19:44:25 - 00:19:47:24
Dave Lambert
You know, you're better off getting a spirit board and riding the wave.

00:19:47:27 - 00:20:07:20
Ian Bergman
Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Figure out what shape you're going to be in at the end. Yeah. Well, let's talk about one of these other macro trends that you mentioned. And that's the notion of efficiency. Right. So you talked about the cost of product development for the MVP. Like asymptotically approaching zero here that is playing out in the capital markets.

00:20:07:20 - 00:20:32:20
Ian Bergman
I think I've seen capital efficiency is back in various headlines, despite the multi hundred million dollar mega seed rounds that occasionally show up. But look here's here's my question for you. What signals do you look for that actually indicate to you that a founding team is thinking properly about capital efficiency? Right. Because it's not it's not a check size thing in my mind.

00:20:32:22 - 00:20:34:08
Ian Bergman
It's what is it though?

00:20:34:09 - 00:20:58:04
Dave Lambert
Well, I mean, for us it's pretty simple because it's just what are you actually spending like? It's how much money. Have you raised or has it taken to get to where your product functionality is and where your revenue is in the growth rate that you've had? You know, it's one thing to go to have, you know, you could be at 30 Kammerer and with some decent growth trajectory, and you've raised a million and a half dollars to accomplish that.

00:20:58:04 - 00:21:04:18
Dave Lambert
And it's very different if you're there and you've raised nothing or you've raised, you know, 80,000 from friends and family.

00:21:04:24 - 00:21:11:02
Ian Bergman
You don't look at spend allocation across back office growth ops, engineering. Does any of that play into your thesis?

00:21:11:03 - 00:21:31:28
Dave Lambert
Not that much for us right now. It's more like, all right, what how much capital has it taken to get to where you're at? What's your current monthly burn rate? What's your projected burn over that next year? And for us, what we care about most is not necessarily all right, that you have to be massively capital efficient over the next six years of your life, but we're just participating in a small round.

00:21:32:03 - 00:21:53:02
Dave Lambert
You know, more often than not, we're the only money coming in. We are the whole round and we're not investing in a company. If that check if our 250 is going to only give you five months of runway. We're not investing. We want there to be generally sort of 12 to 18 months of runway from in a not great scenario to get around done.

00:21:53:02 - 00:22:10:03
Dave Lambert
So like that. So we are we sort of have this artificial constraint called runway, you know, and we're not willing to invest in crazy small amounts of runway. So now that doesn't mean that we sometimes don't invest in a company we think has 15 months of runway. And it turns out they end up that was only eight. That's going to happen.

00:22:10:03 - 00:22:31:22
Ian Bergman
But sure. Yeah, we all we all get along sometimes. But I think that is really interesting because you kind of laid out a benchmark, if you will, for for early stage founders to think about which is can I scale but can and can I get into enterprise accounts? If you're a B2B company, can I get into that 30 KM on I mean, you just said 10 to 15 K a month, right?

00:22:31:22 - 00:22:40:18
Ian Bergman
Which is kind of wild by historical norms. Do you, do you do you see this trend continuing? I mean, are we are we approaching the place where VC money isn't needed?

00:22:40:19 - 00:23:02:12
Dave Lambert
Yeah, it's going to be forced on the entrepreneurial world, because the reason why it's going to be forced is that it's so easy to build products. It used to be if you went back four years ago, 14 years ago, you know, there's this magic sort of invisible bar that existed in any given sector, industry, you know, and there are a certain number of companies that had a product that worked well enough that it was over that bar.

00:23:02:13 - 00:23:19:26
Dave Lambert
It had enough value that it added that those companies were in play to sort of win the market or be successful. And the ones that had the best sales and marketing execution above that bar one. And it was hard to get above that bar because engineering was the backlog. We're coming into a world now where engineering is no longer the backlog.

00:23:19:28 - 00:23:44:12
Dave Lambert
You know, it's going to be you can build, you're going to have a lot more competitors are out there with products that work well. It's going to be that operational execution and sort of branding and customer acquisition that are going to dominate. But it also means there's going to be that many more startups and you are not going to be able to, I think, in a year or to get precede and seed rounds done with the level of traction that is required today.

00:23:44:12 - 00:23:59:24
Dave Lambert
It's just going to be higher because there's going to be so many companies for investors to choose from. So you're going to have to figure out how to get to some pretty significant revenue numbers with relatively little raised, or you're not going to get rounds done, you're just going to die because of the cream of the crop will figure it out.

00:23:59:25 - 00:24:20:15
Ian Bergman
Well, okay, everything you're saying makes a ton of sense. Now the question is, how do I connect to the dots between that trend to capital efficiency and software? And I'd say a little bit of a secular shift in seeing in VC toward things that are fundamentally expensive, like hardware. I mean, you grew up in a world of hardware and PCs, right?

00:24:20:16 - 00:24:43:03
Dave Lambert
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so everything that I've been saying is sort of on the pure software side, I think what's happening is that if you look at the larger check writers, if you look at sort of larger midsize VC and above through to private equity, so people are investing in maybe standard series A size rounds and beyond and private equity, you're sort of your business model is built off of companies that take more capital.

00:24:43:03 - 00:25:04:12
Dave Lambert
And, you know, I think that in general, that whole investor world we've seen in the last 4 or 6 months there afraid to invest in anything that's just software, and everyone's afraid of making an investment and looking really stupid. Just 12 to 24 months later, you know, through increases of improvement in foundational AI models or some competitor coming out of the.

00:25:04:12 - 00:25:09:08
Ian Bergman
Woodwork, you don't even get the fun timeline window anymore. You get some generational shift.

00:25:09:13 - 00:25:29:04
Dave Lambert
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had an interesting I had an institutional tell me, you know, that like not too long ago that he was talking to a Jeep, an investor, and the investor said, you know, you used to take like 3 to 4 years to look stupid after making an investment. And now you can measure it in months. And that that's really subconsciously on people's minds.

00:25:29:04 - 00:25:54:08
Dave Lambert
And I think that a lot of business models that had fallen completely out of favor from 2018 to through 2025 are now back in favor. And these are business models such as, you know, businesses that have a hardware component, tech enabled services, marketplaces. These are all things that were viewed as less attractive because they either had lower margins or took larger amounts of capital to get up and get sustainable revenue.

00:25:54:08 - 00:26:17:27
Dave Lambert
And in today's world, suddenly those are really attractive. One is because they do need some capital so investors can put money to work, but more importantly, AI can't do those. AI can't do the end service and the tech enabled service, but it makes the tech enabled part even more efficient. And maybe your margins are better. It can't do the hardware, it can build the software for the marketplace, but the value in the marketplace is the flywheel going on both sides and transactions flowing through.

00:26:17:27 - 00:26:31:08
Dave Lambert
So those are all real defensible business models against continued AI evolution, and they benefit from it. And that's where a lot of the dollars are going right now because it's just safe.

00:26:31:10 - 00:26:45:18
Ian Bergman
You think? Do you think that sort of natural shift to those quote unquote safer, safer, which is a funny word in venture, but those quote unquote safer markets is masking some maybe a more underlying structural weakness. And how we think about venture right now.

00:26:45:19 - 00:27:06:24
Dave Lambert
I think it's a move there really quickly right now because it's a place it's a fear, right? Fear of investing in what you have been investing in. But I do think if we look forward much in the way that I said, like, you know, a genetic software, products that actually they have to actually do the execution, not just sort of help be able to not just help a human do it, are beginning to come the new norm.

00:27:06:24 - 00:27:38:14
Dave Lambert
I think there's going to be a huge boom in tech enabled services, because tech enabled services, you know that that end service can't be delivered by AI usually, and you're going to have business models where to deliver this service at scale. This tech enabled service, you needed X number of people and you had 35% gross margins. Well, maybe now, you know, AI turbochargers, that tech enabled business or service business model because that tech enabled part is so much more powerful.

00:27:38:18 - 00:27:56:18
Dave Lambert
Maybe you can do that same delivery of service with half the people, and maybe you now have a business that has 55 to 60% gross margins instead of 35. And their guy, I think, going to be some enormous tech enabled service businesses that form and grow over the next five years.

00:27:56:18 - 00:28:18:28
Ian Bergman
But are they going to be able to capture the same market share that maybe current models expect? Because I wonder about the fragmentation of that could result from simply more builders having access to the tools that they need to build. And so could you end up in a much more fragmented market for these tech enabled services?

00:28:19:00 - 00:28:42:25
Dave Lambert
Yeah, you definitely can. I think there's potential across the whole technology spectrum. There's going to be more fragmentation, I think, because there's going to be so many more solutions that are above that bar of the, you know, the product works and it provides value. I think an interesting side effect of if I had to guess where we're going is that brand is going to matter so much more in the tech world than it ever has.

00:28:42:26 - 00:29:11:17
Dave Lambert
Like, you know, we in the tech world, you know it. We haven't grown up in a universe where brand mattered that much. You know, that was much more of especially in B2B. You know, that was much more of a consumer issue, product issue. And I think now, you know, if you have a world where, hey, there's 38 other companies that sell a product that's potentially similar to mine or can do some of this stuff, where does the end customer decide where to buy?

00:29:11:18 - 00:29:30:03
Dave Lambert
And a lot of that is just going to be branding. It's going to be who builds a brand, who navigates the AI search world better and having their results come up. Who is great at customer acquisition? I think branding and marketing and customer acquisition is going to matter more than it ever has, because it's going to be harder to differentiate based on product.

00:29:30:06 - 00:29:49:10
Ian Bergman
It is really interesting to look at parallels like, I don't know, for while you're talking, for some reason, music just pops to mind, right? Like there's an almost infinite supply of unbelievably talented musicians right within any slice of dice. But some managed to build the flywheel of brand that drives followership, that drives brand cetera. That actually differentiates them.

00:29:49:10 - 00:29:55:20
Ian Bergman
Yeah, well, that's fascinating to apply that thought to, you know, staid old enterprise sales.

00:29:55:21 - 00:30:12:04
Dave Lambert
Yeah. No, it's really interesting. I think it's going to be there's going to be a multi-year adjustment period as far as like what are the most important skill sets to get from, you know, a millionaire to 20 million, you know, and what's going to matter. And those skill sets are going to be very different than what it took to do that in the 20 tens.

00:30:12:06 - 00:30:38:21
Ian Bergman
I think it's inevitable, but it's obvious to say that this has implications for venture writ large. But one of the conversations I find myself having perhaps more frequently these days than I did in the past is very simple. Is venture right for you at the very earliest stages of companies? Because it used to be able to kind of make a pretty clean delineation between like, how much capital does it actually take to build what you're what you want to build in your vision?

00:30:38:21 - 00:30:53:25
Ian Bergman
And that's harder now. And I'm seeing more and more founders do the math and say, you know what, my cost to 5 million are is pretty low. Why would I give up half my company? How's that playing out for you?

00:30:53:26 - 00:31:11:24
Dave Lambert
I mean, that could be a big positive. I think one of the challenges, you know, that I've seen in just in the entrepreneurial world for the last many decades is entrepreneurs don't really understand what the implications are of taking venture capital, like you're committing to sort of big, big growth or bust. You got to get to huge numbers.

00:31:11:24 - 00:31:41:21
Dave Lambert
You can't. There's no small value, small mid value exit sales that are allowed. And sometimes more often than not, it was just forced because companies needed so much capital to be able to generate revenue that they just had to raise that those amounts. And I think that I hope that there'll be more awareness amongst entrepreneurs. And, you know, as you can build stuff more efficiently and you don't necessarily need all those dollars, and it's sort of more optional that people will start to become more aware of.

00:31:41:21 - 00:31:51:00
Dave Lambert
What are the implications? Like if you want to be able to sell for 50 to $100 million, you should not be raising from professional venture capital firms generally.

00:31:51:01 - 00:32:01:21
Ian Bergman
100% true. Well, actually, on that point though, how is right said capital thinking about not just, you know, you said often were the only check in around what if you're the only round?

00:32:01:22 - 00:32:27:07
Dave Lambert
Yeah, that's fine for us because we don't actually the first checks are only check. So it's not the case that we've got to get this 200 K check in, because we then want to write a $1.5 million check later. So we would actually view that as a big win. So actually when we look forward over the next five years, we think we're going to have a much higher percentage of companies where our rounds the last round than we've had before.

00:32:27:07 - 00:32:42:16
Dave Lambert
I'm not saying that's going to be the dominant solution, that that almost never happened before. And they was usually a small company. But I think we're starting to see some that could potentially be these could be companies with some significant revenue, and they just opt to maybe do debt afterwards or they grow profitably. Or maybe then there's lots of shades of gray.

00:32:42:16 - 00:33:01:20
Dave Lambert
The next one up is like, all right, well, actually these are companies that can get to 10 million plus of of air, and maybe there's around after us, but maybe there's just 1 million and a half dollars round or $2.5 million round, and then that's it. And the company can grow profitably. These just weren't very you know, those were the massive exceptions instead of the norm.

00:33:01:20 - 00:33:29:04
Dave Lambert
And I think we're going to if we look forward in the software space and in a lot of areas over the next many years as this evolves, I think that's going to become more the norm. And I think you're going to have this universe where it's just expected that if you're a technology company, once you get over 5 million RR and almost always over ten, you better be profitable because companies, I think will start to be valued on multiples of EBITDA much more at a much younger stage than they are now.

00:33:29:07 - 00:33:32:27
Ian Bergman
Is really it is really fascinating to sort of think through those implications.

00:33:32:27 - 00:33:52:18
Dave Lambert
And it's scary as an investor to think about that. But on the flip side, if you get to a world where you have companies that are just most tech companies with tens of millions of revenue are based on EBITDA, valuations might go down, but there's going to be such a larger active and liquid exit market because there's almost always buyers.

00:33:52:19 - 00:34:12:02
Ian Bergman
Yeah, they're going to get more predictable. And we might see very different forms of liquidity. Right. We've really been trapped in this kind of segment M&A world for a while. It seems to be changing. Slash trying to go to IPO and like you have all kinds of interesting paths. Liquidity if you actually have a multiple on 10 million revenue.

00:34:12:04 - 00:34:32:09
Dave Lambert
Yeah. So if I had to guess and again guessing the future is always fraught with your most likely going to be wrong. But my guess is looking many years down the road, we end up in a world where valuations are lower. EBITDA multiples are applied to a much wider range of business models and earlier than we're used to in the technology space and software space.

00:34:32:09 - 00:34:52:12
Dave Lambert
And that's going to be a painful adjustment to get used to. But there's going to be such a more active and predictable exit market, and that's going to be better. So much better for entrepreneurs and for investors as well. So I think that's where we ultimately get is my best guess. And I don't know how long it takes to get there.

00:34:52:12 - 00:34:54:10
Dave Lambert
But we shall see.

00:34:54:12 - 00:35:17:03
Ian Bergman
Let's pivot a little bit to think about the founder perspective. Right. So there are a lot of people first, third, fourth time founders and builders that are out there trying to build something new right now. And they are thinking, I need some capital. I have to feed my family while I build. Maybe I just need, you know, that 100,000, 200,000 check what is the best way that they can position themselves to someone like you?

00:35:17:03 - 00:35:39:10
Ian Bergman
That maybe goes a click beneath? Well, you know, go show me. Customer traction. Is there something is there something that you look for in a founder that's raising a 200 K check from you that they can keep in the back of their mind and say, crap, that's my milestone, so that I know I can go pitch Dave in his team.

00:35:39:12 - 00:36:10:25
Dave Lambert
Yeah, I'll give the answer from from the Dave Lambert right side capital perspective. And then I'll answer it briefly to from what I think for like most investors and outside of us what it is. So for us, you know, we're a very quantitative data driven investment selection process. So there's not a lot you can do. It does not matter if you're being referred to me from a good friend, from my cousin, from you, you're just as likely to get a yes or a no from us as if you randomly fill out our form on our website, you know, and the things that we look for are, you know, what's your product?

00:36:10:26 - 00:36:31:15
Dave Lambert
Is it, you know, if it's just this basic wrapper, you know, and it doesn't do any execution and it just helps with a simple workflow. We're probably not we're not investing these days. But you know, it's what's your what's your AR? What's your growth rate. How capital efficient are you. What's your price point. You know, understanding the product and how AI safe it is.

00:36:31:16 - 00:36:59:15
Dave Lambert
Those all go into it. But where I think that if you look at most investors that are writing 200 K checks through their very small funds or their angel investor, it's round with multiple angel investors. It's, you know, the decision to invest is almost always psychology as much as anything else. And so people are investing in you, the founder, as much as they are in your specific business and product, or they're investing in your vision of the future.

00:36:59:20 - 00:37:15:19
Dave Lambert
You know, people are always buying your future as much as they're buying your present. And that's true. You know, both when we invest at seed stage at series A and so, you know, you have to realize that you're, you know, you're selling your future as much as you're present.

00:37:15:19 - 00:37:39:12
Ian Bergman
I feel like we need to be honest with ourselves and realize that you're also selling how you know your future reflects on the people who made a bet on you. Right? Like speaking of psychology. And that's a really I don't know. I don't know what to do with that exactly. But I think that's something that founders often forget when they think, okay, it's a purely algorithmic driven data, you know, data driven decision.

00:37:39:18 - 00:38:00:13
Dave Lambert
Yeah. Yeah, I, I think the hardest part that things founders misunderstand and I did it for someone sort of told me this, you know, I sort of had a moment in the, in the mid 2000 when I was raising for my software company. But, you know, investors don't evaluate softwares, software don't evaluate tech companies in a vacuum like you feel as the founder.

00:38:00:13 - 00:38:18:07
Dave Lambert
I'm talking to this investor and my bar to get them to invest is for them to think I'm a good investment and they're going to make a good return off me, but it's actually not that it's a peer marketplace. At any point in time, that investor is looking at lots of other companies, and you've got to be the cream of the crop, and you've got to be better than anything else that they're looking at.

00:38:18:08 - 00:38:38:15
Dave Lambert
That's at a similar valuation and a similar round size that's also in your sector. All these things that are going on and whether it's conscious or subconscious, you're getting compared to all of these. You're competing against every other software company out there or every other hardware company or other services. Whatever profile your business model is and you don't feel it, you're not aware of this, but that's what's going on.

00:38:38:15 - 00:38:58:15
Dave Lambert
And just realize to get a yes out of an investor, that's a professional investor. The goal is you've got to look better than almost everything else they're thinking about investing in at that point in time. When you get to smaller check sizes and you get to angel investors, family, things like that, they don't have as much of a wide bandwidth and they're not looking at it much.

00:38:58:15 - 00:39:16:04
Dave Lambert
And then it's, you know, then the dynamic isn't just marketplace, you know, it's maybe a little bit of marketplace and a lot more psychology. I mean, staying high level. And I think as a founder, I was didn't think about this and wasn't aware of it, but it's it it helps you critically view yourself better.

00:39:16:09 - 00:39:34:25
Ian Bergman
Pay attention founders, pay attention. This is this is gold. Well, I did for the last little bit here. I want to cast back in time a little bit. I want to go back into the 90s. You were doing, if I understand correctly, IT services and value add reselling and like you were deep in the IT world in the 90s.

00:39:34:26 - 00:39:35:20
Ian Bergman
Is that right?

00:39:35:21 - 00:39:55:19
Dave Lambert
Yeah. So I started out right after college, started a computer hardware company. We basically would have been called like a PC clone maker at the time. It was where we started to selling retail. And then pretty quickly we pivoted and sold mostly corporate. And we built sold a lot of the rackmount servers, high end workstations that a lot of the.

00:39:55:25 - 00:40:13:12
Dave Lambert
Com 1.0 companies used on their way up and sold to a lot of the workforces, the computers on the desks. And then we almost went out of business when our customer base went out of business, or went from 800 employees to 120 in a year, things like that. Yeah, yeah. So that's the world I was in.

00:40:13:13 - 00:40:40:27
Ian Bergman
Okay. Well, I want to I want you to cast yourself back to the beginning of that journey. Right. And I mean, I am from this era. I remember dial up in ISDN, I remember BBSes, I remember a world where, you know, everything we are living today was pure sci fi. So if you put yourself in the Dave Library in the 90s, what would surprise you the most about the world we live in today and what would not?

00:40:40:28 - 00:40:45:08
Ian Bergman
What would you be like? Yep, that was an inevitable outcome of the trajectory that I saw.

00:40:45:09 - 00:41:00:25
Dave Lambert
Oh, that's that's a really interesting question. Because what the one thing I've observed with technology over the years is they're always things that people think, oh, we're just a few years away from this. And then it ends up where like 12 years or 15 years, and then there's things that come out of the blue that's holy cow, this is science fiction.

00:41:00:25 - 00:41:32:03
Dave Lambert
And I didn't see it coming. So like I remember in the early 90s, early to mid 90s, the the amount of venture capital money that went into set top cable boxes, it was just this crazy, insane problem. How are you going to navigate through 500 channels, which was just right around the corner coming. And it turned out solving this problem, having a good UI and the technology for the box to work, everyone assumed that would be solved in two years, and it was like a decade plus that it took to do that.

00:41:32:03 - 00:41:52:03
Dave Lambert
So I would have been shocked that that took so long. I think also there's this massive hype. I remember at that time around what was called pin computing. There's this period where just hundreds of millions of dollars of VC capital was lit on fire. Everyone thought, oh, now that people can write and have these pads that pick up their signature, no one's going to want to use a keyboard because we only use them because we have to.

00:41:52:03 - 00:42:13:13
Dave Lambert
And there are all these visions of everything being written and all that. And the only thing that came out of that was the UPS signature pad, the little, little bar that you signed on, the tablet that the UPS drivers had, and the point of sale thing and every other view of where the world was going to go with that never materialized and just didn't make a difference.

00:42:13:15 - 00:42:33:15
Dave Lambert
So like, there's been so many things like that where I've sort of bought into the hype and shocked how that nothing happened or it took longer. And then other things like, you know, smartphones, you know, just coming out of the blue so, so quickly. And it's not like, you know, it's not like it. They appeared and it took 15 years for them to have this crazy functionality.

00:42:33:16 - 00:42:53:24
Dave Lambert
It was just so quick and so soon. I think even as hard as it's been for for autonomous vehicles, and it's been much harder than anyone thought you'd ask me in the 90s. Boy, I would have thought that's like, you know, that I wasn't just going to be 20 years away from seeing them all around San Francisco being tested out.

00:42:53:28 - 00:43:11:15
Dave Lambert
I think certainly, I mean, everyone who's on this, I think everyone can remember how blown away. I think it's almost sort of like, you know, I remember where I was and what class I was in in high school when the, the space shuttle blew up right where you were like people in the 60s, remember where they were when they found out that Kennedy died, or like when people landed on the moon.

00:43:11:16 - 00:43:34:26
Dave Lambert
The good stuff, too. And I think there's this ingrained period of time, I don't have a date, but like that first month when ChatGPT came out, or that first week when you it was released to the world and you could go into it and you could say, hey, write a story about this, you know, as if you're a troll, you know, and tell it from the perspective of a troll and with the wording that a troll would use.

00:43:34:26 - 00:43:57:24
Dave Lambert
And it just did it perfectly, and it was just so mind blowingly like, Holy cow, how is this even possible? And that's just something that's ingrained in, I think most people psyche that first week there. You know, even I remember as a computer store in 1992, we opened up in July. We didn't have internet, we didn't have email.

00:43:57:26 - 00:44:10:16
Dave Lambert
It was all just phone like. I remember the magic of getting email for the first time and holy cow, this, this instant communication that seemed like science fiction. That seems like Star Trek ish at the time. It's just, yeah.

00:44:10:18 - 00:44:31:18
Ian Bergman
My first business, my quote unquote startup. But like, I haven't told them many people this, but like my first business that actually generated any money. And admittedly, I think I can measure it in three digits. But whatever it was, money was a directory of bulletin boards with 800 numbers so people could for free go on and communicate. And that was a magic experience for people.

00:44:31:18 - 00:44:51:24
Ian Bergman
And I was I actually distributed that directory through bulletin boards and eventually AOL. But like, you know, that was the world we live in. And but what's interesting to me is that is a world that predicted almost all of the things that we are experiencing today and still think will come in the future, but it got the timelines weirdly wrong.

00:44:51:24 - 00:44:53:19
Ian Bergman
I love that actual framing. Like.

00:44:53:20 - 00:45:13:14
Dave Lambert
Yeah, yeah, there is. There is so much right about the first com bubble like that that blew up in everyone's face. Like there is this assumption that all that matters is the amount of eyeballs you get. And eventually people figure out how to monetize them. And that will happen. And there'll be some huge winners there. And people were right, but people thought people would figure out how to monetize it in just a few years.

00:45:13:14 - 00:45:28:12
Dave Lambert
And boy, even if you got to like the late 2000, it was like Facebook and Google and not much more beyond that that were monetizing them all. And eventually everyone learned how. So people were right, but they were just off by a generation, you know, about about how hard it would be.

00:45:28:13 - 00:45:39:26
Ian Bergman
And to your point, a lot of people live a bunch of money on fire doing it. But that's okay, because that investment, you know, pay dividends to Ben Thompson. We'll talk about all the money that put dark fiber in the grounds that now we're using. Yeah.

00:45:39:27 - 00:45:56:06
Dave Lambert
Well, I can tell you from having lived in San Francisco during the first com boom, we could fill up a two hour podcast episode just of crazy stories and like, the insanity of, like, what people thought was a new reality. And just that looks just insane right now. And what was happening. Yeah. So.

00:45:56:07 - 00:46:13:20
Ian Bergman
Well, I got to tell you, you know, to your point on not being able to predict timelines, I think for the last 15 years, because I've worked a bit in hardware myself for the last 15 years, we've been about three years away from rollable displays and foldable OLED and all of that good stuff. And we're still three years away.

00:46:13:20 - 00:46:23:10
Ian Bergman
But at some point I blinked and didn't even notice, and the Turing test wasn't a thing anymore. And so it's wild.

00:46:23:13 - 00:46:47:25
Dave Lambert
Yeah, yeah. It's like it's going to be this novel bookmark in history. We once had this little period of time where we thought we needed this special test that was famous. I mean, just like we're going to look back at some point in history and we're just going to think it's insane that humans were allowed to drive cars, these like, death traps on wheels and like, and and and it'll just seem insane, you know, just like it'll probably seem insane at some point in the future, people are going to look back and laugh.

00:46:47:26 - 00:47:03:16
Dave Lambert
Hey, you know, at one point, software engineer was this really high paying, prestigious position. And there were way understaffed, you know, and it's not going to it's not tears from now we're going to look back. But you know, in 2080 we might look back and people like think, oh, that's a bizarre novel. Time in history.

00:47:03:18 - 00:47:19:21
Ian Bergman
Might be very different. Yeah. Well it's exciting to be living through those times. Thank you so much for coming on. Innovators inside. This has been a super fun conversation. We've covered a lot of ground for people that want to follow your thoughts. Where should they look? Do you post on LinkedIn? Should they head over to right side?

00:47:19:24 - 00:47:45:07
Dave Lambert
Yeah, mostly I'm posting on LinkedIn these days about sort of thoughts and trends that we see. If anyone wants to reach out to me, you can email me at Dave at right. I get, you know, a zillion emails a day, but hopefully I'll see it and can respond. And if you're interested in having a look at your startup, it's really the case that if you go to our website, you can look at what we invest in and the profiles we need to update it to be more AI relevant.

00:47:45:07 - 00:47:51:07
Dave Lambert
We'll probably be doing that in July, but if you fill out our prescreening form, we do respond to everyone that fills that out.

00:47:51:08 - 00:48:04:21
Ian Bergman
Fantastic. Well, Dave Lambert, really appreciate you coming on inside. I'm going to let you get back to the the exciting chaos that is Silicon Valley these days. I look forward to chatting with you next time.

00:48:04:27 - 00:48:08:02
Dave Lambert
Yeah, great. Thanks for having me on. It was a very fun discussion.