https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidhornik
This great interview is with venture capitalist David Hornik. David is a general partner at August Capital located in Menlo Park. He’s also creator and Executive Producer of The Lobby Conference, which is a premier gathering that brings together leaders in the tech industry. David has made some great investments including Splunk, evite, bill.com and RedSwoosh.
Splunk is a fascinating story. He found that investment when the founders just had an idea. David believed in that vision and now Splunk is a public company worth $6.2 billion. I bet they did OK with that investment. We also talk about the following:
-How he helps his portfolio companies?
-What are his main focus areas?
-What type of companies he’s looking for, and the number of investments he makes per year?
-What David worries about the most?
-Does he invest outside of Silicon Valley area? What’s his criteria?
-What makes a sweet startup team?
Transcript
Dave Kruse: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Flyover Labs. Thanks for joining us. Today, we are quite lucky, we are talking with Venture Capitalist, David Hornik who is a General Partner in August Capital, which is located in Menlo Park, California. He’s also a Creator & Executive Producer of the Lobby Conference, which is a premier gathering that brings together leaders in the tech industry; looks like it’s also usually in Hawaii, so I guess the attendance. . .
David Hornik: Yeah, we had a couple of years in Mexico, but you know, pretty much Hawaii.
Dave Kruse: That sounds nice. So, I bet you get a few more people showing up than if it was in Omaha, Nebraska, nothing against Omaha but… So, over David’s career, he’s made some great investments and I could go through the entire list, but that would take up most of the interview, so to get a feel, David has invested in companies like Splunk, evite, Bill.com and Red Swoosh and we can talk about other . . .
David Hornik: Yeah! You know it’s funny, people probably have no idea what Red Swoosh is, but it turns out that Red Swoosh is the first, actually not the first but the second company that Travis Kalanick started. He had a company called Scour when he was still in college. Out of college, he started this company Red Swoosh and then most of you probably have heard of his latest company Uber, so I probably should have funded Uber as well as Red Swoosh, but you know you can’t win them all.
Dave Kruse: That’s right, that’s right. Yes! I have heard of Red Swoosh because of that, that’s the only reason why I’ve heard about it.
David Hornik: Yup, yup.
Dave Kruse: Yes, so David thanks for joining us today at the….
David Hornik: Yeah, ____1:41____.
Dave Kruse: So, let’s get going and I’ll start asking questions and excited to chat more. So, how’d you become a VC? I know you have a legal background and what attracted you to the VC industry back in 2000, I think it’s when you started?
David Hornik: Yeah, I mean it’s funny, people say so why did you become a VC and the answer to why did I become a VC is because some let me, that’s the short answer to why did I become a VC, which isn’t to say that I was unhappy with the things I was doing. I was actually an attorney in Silicon Valley representing start-ups. I found it completely engaging, I was working with some amazing clients and from 1997 to 2000 which was that very first internet bubble, there were lots of really big interesting companies getting built, there were, you know, I helped those companies grow and one of those companies was this company Evite and I was Evite’s lawyer, was helping them in their process of raising money and drafting contracts and doing all sorts of things and I was sort of a loud mouth; those who know me wouldn’t find that as an unreasonable description. I would say to the team like oh! You should do this, you should do that, I was at board meetings giving my advice whether it was solicited or not and I got lucky and it turns out that there were two of the four partners at the time at my now firm August Capital, who were sitting on that board and they got to know me over the period of a year or two and ultimately got to see that I wasn’t just acting like a lawyer, I was introducing the company to potential employees, I was helping them create partnerships, I was doing all sorts of things along those lines and so after a while getting to know me the partners at August said hey! Have you ever thought about the venture business and I had obviously thought about the venture business because in Silicon Valley, you know, when you sit and look venture capitalists are… it’s a pretty coveted job, it turns out that it sort of take money from some great investors, in our instance universities and foundations alike and find amazing companies to invest in and if they are successful then everybody does very well and so I kind of looked and I said wow! Here’s an opportunity to do that and I spent a bunch of time with the partners at August before they said okay fine, we’ll you join us. So you know, four months of conversations and they said hey! David you know lawyers suck at this and you will likely fail, but on the other hand we like you very much and so if you are interested in taking a risk then we’d be happy to have you join us and my answer to that was Yes! Thank you very much, I’m very happy to take a risk and I’ve been at August for the last, going on 16 years, so it turned out to be a pretty good deal.
Dave Kruse: Yeah, I guess so. So, I mean how was it going from the legal industry to the VC world, because you had to establish a network, you know, how were those first few years trying to bring deals in? Your main role, I imagine was bringing new deals in?
David Hornik: Yeah, exactly. I mean, the venture business is kind of an interesting thing, but in the end basically what you do is you look for interesting companies and if you think it’s interesting enough you propose investing in a company and then you hope that they will let you invest and then you work with that company for some number of years until either it’s successful or unsuccessful, it gets sold, it goes public, whatever, but step one of that which is where you start when you’re a brand new VC is, you better go and find deals and so what does that take and truthfully I mean, I don’t think I quite appreciated that when I got to August, I arrived and was sort of like, here’s a desk and here’s a chair and now go be a VC and that’s an interesting conundrum, like okay, now what do you do? But it turns out that, I was lucky in the sense because I had gone to Stanford as an undergrad and knew a bunch of people who were building interesting businesses and as an attorney I had got to know quite a few people and was working with a lot of companies and so I had this core group of people with whom I had worked and who knew me to be someone that was maybe, you know, slightly broader than just your typical lawyer and so it’s just off to the races, basically send an email to hundreds of people saying hey! Just wanted to let you know I’m a VC now, so if you got something that’s great, let me know because I’ve got money, you know, and it turns out…
Dave Kruse: And people like that.
David Hornik: Yeah, if you just say that enough. Yeah, you might bump into companies and you know, look the reality is that a lot of what we do, a lot of the venture business is about relationships and so the very first company I funded actually came through my partner John. John had been one of the earliest investors in Intuit and there was a team of people coming out of Intuit to build an online payroll business. There hadn’t been no online payroll business before this and they reached out to John saying hey you, you know, in the Intuit world, this should be of interest to you and John said you know, hey David, I’m not sure that payroll is terribly of interest to me, but why don’t you take a look because it’s probably a good team and I spent a bunch of time with that team and decided that they were great and that this was an interesting idea and funded them. There was a CEO named René Lacerte and the lawyer for that company, was a guy named Mike Patrick at Fenwick & West, got to know me well and then he introduced me sometime later to three guys who he thought I would find interesting. I spent time with those three guys, I ultimately funded them and they were the founders of this company Splunk, which turned out to be, you know, a very successful business. We sold PayCycle and then René started a new business called Bill.com and I funded that one and so it sort of, you know, there was a little bit of a snowball effect, but you need the momentum, you need to get that first thing going.
Dave Kruse: Gotcha. Yeah and how did you feel funding that first company? Were you nervous, confident, all of the above? I mean…
David Hornik: No, no, you end up really not confident. I mean, I have to say to this day, I am not confident. You spend a bunch of time, you look at amazing companies and look at these great entrepreneurs and it’s a big weaning process right. I mean, I look at, you know, call it a thousand plans of some sort over the course of the year and I fund one or two of them and so you’ve seen a lot of stuff that you said no to, you’ve seen stuff that you think it’s interesting, but haven’t gotten there for one reason or the other, you get down to the end and you say okay, this is the one I am going to fund, you know that’s an exciting time, but it’s also, you know, you’re only going to do a couple of those in any given year and so then you get to, you know, the Venture Capitalists talk about that first meeting as the “oh shit meeting” it’s the meeting where you have invested, you’re excited about the company and then they tell you all the things that are going poorly, you know.
Dave Kruse: Yup.
David Hornik: And you know, that’s just sort of par for the course, so yeah, I was super nervous about it and frankly, you know, I had not sat on boards before, I had just been the lawyer and suddenly here I am, a board member, but you know, I was talking with René, this guy René Lacerte the CEO of Bill.com at the Bill.com board meeting and I said hey! René, you know you and I, I think we just passed our 15th anniversary together, which is true, in November. As of this past November, René and I have been working together for 15 years. I’ve been married to my wife for 22, and I have been with René for 15, so that’s a pretty long-term relationship. In honour of that, if anyone listening needs to automate their accounts payable and receivable and do electronic bill pay for small and medium businesses, Bill.com.
Dave Kruse: I like it.
David Hornik: A little infomercial.
Dave Kruse: Yeah, you also have to be ____10:25____, that’s key. But you make such a good point about how the inside and outside perspective of a firm is so different. When you read about a company in the paper, and like oh, you know, they are perfect, everything is going well, but that doesn’t seem to generally be the case, there’s always a …
David Hornik: If you look at this company Splunk that I was talking about, before I funded it, it was, you know, 3 guys and an idea, the idea was to essentially build a search engine on top of log files, before there was any talk of Big-Data, before people really focused on machine data, and you know, it’s now a seven-ish billion dollar public company, there are over 2000 employees, it’s just an amazing company, but you know, there was a point in time in which we fired a bunch of people because it just had gotten ahead of itself, and it wasn’t that it wasn’t a great company; it was a great company, it was just that we didn’t want to have to go out to prematurely raise a bunch of money and so we let some people go to make sure that the burn was consistent with the business that we had, and then it grew and it worked, and you know, I mean it’s just an amazing thing to me to watch a company that is an idea, just you know, a good idea for some folks turned into them selling a couple hundred million dollars worth of software in a quarter, you know, which is the quarter we just announced. You know, the fact that that ever happened is just astonishing; it’s why the venture business and the start up world as so amazing.
Dave Kruse: And in a fairly short period of time, you know, we are not talking of a 50-year-old company.
David Hornik: Yeah, 11 years. I’ve been on the board from the inception and I still am on the board, this is my 11th year.
Dave Kruse: So, is Splunk your best investment that you…
David Hornik: I have had 2 multi-billion dollar or bigger outcome, Splunk and a company called Ebates, which is a fantastic kind of online shopping experience that was bought by Rakuten, an amazing Japanese company, so you know, they were the first two, the first 2 billion plus outcomes.
Dave Kruse: That’s brilliant.
David Hornik: But stay tuned.
Dave Kruse: Stay tuned…
David Hornik: It’s a good first 15 years.
Dave Kruse: And I was curious, you can use either one as an example, but kind of walk me through, king of like the whole, I mean, you know, this could be the whole interview in itself, I guess, but you know, with Splunk or Ebates, when you came on board with Splunk, I guess it was very early, you know, how much you funded it with and what were the follow-on rounds, when did, at least with Splunk IPO, just curious to kind of walk through for the audience how typical VC, well nothing is typical, but how these worked…
David Hornik: I was going to say, yeah, I mean I could tell you about Splunk, it’s not typical. I met the founder who is a great friend of mine in the venture business named Nick Sturiale, and I funded the first round. We both put in $4 million into the company. We raised 2 more rounds of capital over time for a total of, I think under $40 million, and in total I invested $9 million in the company. Over the course of that time, the company, like I say raised 40 or less as I recall, and then got cash positive and basically was growing the business, was making money, didn’t need to raise more money, had multiple M&A offers over time and said no to them, and we took it public and I guess, I forget, yeah I should know, 4 years ago, so 2012, and it’s been an interesting run, so you know, but my typical investment is kind of a series A investment where I’m an early investor, I will put in $5 to 10 million, I’ll help the company to make some progress. If all goes well, then I’ll raise a series B, that series B is usually you know, call it $12 to $20 million and if things continue to grow interestingly; I know this great company called Fastly and Fastly is a CDN business, competitor to Akamai that is built on a much better, both hardware and software platform, which makes it a lot more flexible, and I led the series A of that company and then I led the series B of the company. The A we put in, I don’t know, you know, call it ten-ish million, the B we put in twenty-ish million, and then we just had a series C in which, you know, I’ll call it $50 to $75 million went into the company, and that’s the past when the company is doing well. When it’s continuing to make progress, people are excited about the business and so it’s possible to raise money, continue to raise larger amounts, continue to raise money in the up round, so we hope that they all look like that.
Dave Kruse: Yeah, makes sense, but unfortunately they don’t always.
David Hornik: No.
Dave Kruse: Have you had some investments where you really thought it should have been a large home run, but ended up failing and, you know, what do you think went wrong? I mean, I guess it’s always, you know, it’s probably timing and team execution.
David Hornik: Yeah, you know, sometimes I’ve have had companies that have not done well because the team, you know, imploded for various reasons and so it really just never had a shot at working. I’ve had companies where, you know, to give a great example is a company I funded called Six Apart. Six Apart was the leader in the blogging space or at least a leader depending on how you look at it. In the early days of blogging there was, first there was Blogger which Ed Williams, Founder of Twitter had created and he sold it to Google, very early and then there were really 2 platforms that were built, WordPress and Six Apart, and they were both doing well, they are both interesting businesses. Six Apart focused on building kind of an enterprise solution and it was great software, it was a great company, but the market sort of never materialized and, you know, WordPress has managed to continue to be a big business or be a big company, but I don’t know inside WordPress, but it looks like it hasn’t turned into a giant business either, even though it’s been at it for, you know, a decade and a half or more, it just turns out that the market for what we were doing didn’t exist its scale, and so it would have been great to see it become, you know, the big interesting business we thought it would be, but in that instance it just didn’t materialize.
Dave Kruse: Interesting. I want to go back to one more question on the successful companies like Fastly that, you know, ones that are going well. Generally if things are going well the follow-on rounds keep getting larger, and so you know, at what point do you keep funding them before you say, hey, you really need to break even at this point or I mean is it just based on opportunity, if they put this much more money into marketing and sales are going to get this much, you know, more cash potential revenue. How do you kind of look at that to make a company eventually make money?
David Hornik: Yeah, I mean, I think you got to ride it, just depends on the opportunity right, I mean, I think that there are lots of businesses being built right now and so now it feels like there’s lots of opportunity and so people are willing to lose a bunch of money on a ____19:07_____ lose a bunch of money, you know, there are all these delivery companies that are growing quickly, but in part they are growing quickly because the venture capital dollars have subsidized the delivery of your, you know, of your food, and if you look at Uber, when it enters the market, Uber subsidizes that market, it pays drivers to drive around and pick you up, it charges less than the market would necessarily bear in order to make sure that you discover how amazing Uber is, etc., so there are instances where people make the decision to, you know, to drive the market dramatically and rather than focus on profitability. I will say that I, as an investor I am much more inclined to say, hey look, let’s build a rational business. If the economics of the business allow us to grow more quickly, you know, without spending an irrational amount of money then great, but otherwise lets assume that our goal is to figure out what’s the profitable version of this business, and I always say to all of my companies, you know, step one in successful company building is get to cash positive because then you control your destiny, it’s not, you know it doesn’t require someone to give you more money, etc., and then step 2 is build a gigantic business, but step one is pretty crucial and you know those companies that I’ve built that have been the most successful have gotten to step one actually relatively early.
Dave Kruse: Do you remember how quick Splunk got there?
Dave Hornik: Yeah, I don’t know for certain, although, yeah, I mean one of the challenges with Splunk is it’s big interesting hard software and so it took many years to build it right, but after you built it, then the question is how long does it take to go to market to build a profitable infrastructure for the, you know, selling piece, and they did a very good job with that.
Dave Kruse: Do you remember how long it took for them, by the time you invested before they had any revenues?
Dave Hornik: Yeah, it was probably 2-1/2 or 3 years of product building before they had a revenue generated product of any sort, right. So you know, it’s a little easier in the web world to build something quickly and early, it is less easy in the enterprise world where you actually have to put together a bunch of hard ____21:42____ to get it started.
Dave Kruse: Yeah, create a lot of adapters, everything, yeah… makes sense. Alright, so now, I’m curious more around kind of your investment philosophy and how you look at it, so what’s your criteria for investing in companies outside of the Valley? Do you invest much outside the Valley?
Dave Hornik: Yeah, I’d say the answer is no, I don’t invest much outside of the valley, but that is really a by-product more of the opportunities I’m seeing than it is a by-product of my desire not to fund companies elsewhere. You know, I have a great company called Second Spectrum down in LA doing this interesting intelligence around sports teams and they are starting out in the NBA, so pretty fun, interesting stuff, and that one’s easy because I can hop on a plane and fly down and help them, I know lots of people in LA and so the criteria for that one was quite similar to investing in a bay area start up, which is essentially, is there a great team and is there a big market opportunity, and am I excited to wake up in the morning and help these people change the planet? But that’s the basics, so now if there was a company in Atlanta or in Chicago, or in Paris, or whatever, you know, pretty similar criteria, the only difference is that it’s a higher bar right, I mean.
Dave Kruse: Yeah.
David Hornik: The cost just in sheer terms of the amount of time spent, getting back and forth, and frankly the overhead of trying to actually be helpful and be present, there is some real value to the ability to just drop in and say, hey! How are things going? That’s pretty easy in San Francisco for me, it’s pretty hard in Paris right, and so, I’ll still do those deals and in fact had an exciting company I came very close to funding that had headquarters in Paris, but it’s just a higher bar right, you have to really love that company.
Dave Kruse: Especially from California.
David Hornik: Yup, Yup.
Dave: And do you typically invest pre-revenue or is it just depends upon…
David Hornik: No! I do, I mean I think it’s broad, I’ve invested at all sorts of stages, but I’m very happy to invest pre-revenue, in fact, I in many respects prefer that, because I just think the fun part is building a team and building a product, building a culture, and I much rather be involved from the front end of that process than, you know, come in when most of that stuff is established and basically I’m a financial investor. I think the fun part is being, you know, is the team part, it’s the building part, it’s all those things, and if that’s already done, you know, then I would have missed out on a bunch ____25:02_____.
Dave Kruse: That’s cool. You seem like you’d be a good VC Partner because you like the early stages.
David Hornik: I hope so, I mean, yeah, yeah, you know, I mean there are VCs who think that; there are lots of different kinds of VCs. There are VCs who think that it’s their job to tell you how to run your business and I’m not that. There are VCs who think that they are just picking stocks and getting out of the way, and I’m not that either right, I’m something in between which is I think that my job is to help you as an entrepreneur be successful, I don’t think in the vast majority instances that that’s me, you know, coming into your office and telling you what to do. I think it’s me sitting and having a conversation and making recommendations and helping you find the right people and the right, you know, the right feedback and all that stuff, and so it sort of sits in between this, you know, command and control and complete abdication, I’m somewhere in the middle there.
Dave Kruse: That’s a good way to describe it, and so do you see kind of a team building as one of your primary ways that you help out, I mean, you’ve seen so many companies, the good and the bad, so I imagine you provide lots of advice beyond that, but yeah, what are kind of your key focus areas how you help companies or does it just depend on each company?
David Hornik: Yeah, I think that venture investor, the first thing they do is they invest and that’s obviously of primary importance when your raising money that you actually get money, and it turns out that there is sort of a bigger point to that which is, the initial money is one thing right, okay I’m going to invest $10 million in your company, it turns out that how you continue to participate in the company is at least as important right. How do you think about following on in your investments and continuing to give financial support to the company in ups and in downs, all that stuff, so the part of it is that, you know, I’m not only an initial investor who puts money into companies and can put, you know, $5 million in or $25 million in, but I’m a predictable long-term, you know, venture investor who thinks that it’s his job to help you be successful through, you know, sort of thick and thin and so that’s one thing. I, for sure spend a lot of time helping with team building, I do a lot of helping to recruit great people into the companies I’ve invested in and introduce them to great people and those sorts of things. I’m involved because I have a very broad perspective just by virtue of my job, my job is to hear lots and lots of new technologies all the time, sit at board meetings and hear how different people are thinking about company building, etc., I have the advantage of this very broad perspective that I can help bring to bear, you know, put forward to entrepreneurs that I’m working with and that turns out to be useful in the whole bunch of capacities. I help my companies raise money from other people, I help them get PR, I help them with introduction of interesting customers, those are the sorts of things, I speak at lots and lots of company meetings to just share my enthusiasm for the companies, which turns out that’s a pretty typical thing that people like to have their venture investor do, you know, those sort of things.
Dave Kruse: Interesting, and how do you balance all that? It’s probably fairly time consuming, how do you balance that versus finding new investments?
David Hornik: Yeah, it’s a really tricky business. I used to say, when I just, as you said hey! You’ve just become a VC and what do you do during those first 3 years or whatever, I used to say that my job was kind of a third, a third, a third; a third looking at new deals, a third working with old deals and you know with the existing deals, and a third spending time, you know, trying to see new deals like just a bunch of other things like doing a podcast or whatever, and that was a pretty reasonable thing, and you know, that added up in year 1 to a job that was an 80-hour a week kind of job or something, you know, in year 15, it kind of adds up, it’s not clear what those ratios are any more, although it’s kind of irrelevant because each one would kind of add up to 80% of a normal reasonable job and so, you know, no matter how you slice it, you know, it’s a 100+ hour a week job yeah, it’s just ugly, but the good news is I really like it because I think it would be an awfully hard job if you didn’t like it, if you had to do all of that, and you had to try and weigh these things, and you weren’t getting a ton of sleep, and you didn’t like it, that’s pretty bad.
Dave: That’s a problem.
David Hornik: It turns out that those earlier things are certainly true, but I really like it, I mean, I was talking to a friend recently about our respective hobbies and the answer to what are our hobbies was, you know, working. That was our hobby right, that’s what we do for fun. So it’s an interesting balancing act and it is literally different every week and that’s part of the fun of it.
Dave Kruse: Definitely and through that, what do you…. you know, you spend a lot of time thinking about your portfolio companies, new companies; what’s typically on your mind? What do you worry about, and how do you deal with that?
David Hornik: Yeah, I mean every week is different. I’ll tell you the thing that you ……… if it’s an issue, is the thing you are worried about the most, no matter what it is, if one of your companies is running out of money because it turns out that that’s the only thing that’s fatal, you know, to start-ups is running out of money. Everything else you can fix, I can help you get a new VP of engineering, I can help you do x, y, and z, but if you run out of money, you can’t pay people and whatever else, then you are out of luck.
Dave Kruse: That makes sense.
David Hornik: That’s definitely the one that, you know, you kind of wake up and go oh man!
Dave Kruse: The end of the road kind of…
David Hornik: We’ve got to solve that. The second biggest is, you know, team challenges where there is someone or a group of people who are having a tough time executing on the business or they are fighting with each other or whatever those things are, those you definitely want to resolve quickly and so, you know, I do a lot of that, but every day is a new day, a whole new day of worries.
Dave Kruse: Welcome to the new day.
David Hornik: Yup.
Dave Kruse: And so I know we are running short of time. I have a couple of questions, one on board meetings, other one on, you know, what companies are you looking for? So the first one, you probably have been on a few board meetings and you know how do you like to see board meetings run, like what would be a good structure and what type of like pre-work would you like to see sent out to investors, you know, the CEO putting together, the financials, or questions, or yeah, how do you like the process to go?
David Hornik: Yeah, I mean I think that’s fair. I do go to lots of board meetings ____33:03____ as much as I see, probably go to over 100 board meetings a year and that may well be true.
Dave Kruse: Wow, that’s 2 a week.
David Hornik: Something approaching that right, so that’s a lot of board meetings, and you know, look, you always want to have the basic information sent to you early so that you can kind of look and see how the company is doing and I don’t have any particular set of things I’m looking for, what I’m looking for is for the company to report on the things that they think are relevant to the management of their own business, they say these are things we track, these are the things we care about, great that’s what I want to hear about, and then the best board meetings ultimately are a little bit of review about here’s how we are doing, here’s what we’ve done, etc., and then most of the conversation is about the tough decisions that need to be made, you know, over the course of that time, so here’s where we are and we have this interesting potential to do a strategic partnership, do we want to do that, and then you have a conversation about the plus and minuses, here are two potential operating plans and one burns $7 million and the other burns $15 million, which do we want to do right, those, you know, then a 2-hour conversation ensues. The best board meetings feel like that as opposed to, here we are going to tell you what’s been going on in the company over the last month and then say thank you for coming in today.
Dave Kruse: Yeah.
David Hornik: You know, I can read that, and it does not add a lot of value to the entrepreneurs whereas having a conversation about the strategic issues and then trying to help them through them by, Oh! You should talk to so and so or here’s a great resource or whatever, that’s much more valuable.
Dave Kruse: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s the questions with no easy answers, that why you guys are there for with all your experience to shed some light on potential production I guess.
David Hornik: Yes.
Dave Kruse: And so the last question I have is, just more on ___35:03_____, what companies are you looking for now? I know you have invested in enterprise and consumer facing companies, is that still the case?
David Hornik: I’m a tricky one because in the end, I have a very broad view of what’s interesting and I’ve always investing in both consumer and enterprise, I’ve invested in fast businesses like Bill.com, the accounts payable and receivable platform for the future.
Dave Kruse: Nice.
David Hornik: And I’ve been an investor in pure enterprise software like Splunk which helps, you know, just figure out what’s happened with your machine data, and then I’ve been in the consumer space where I have invested in, you know, companies like evite and like StumbleUpon and others where it’s a very clear consumer value proposition, and I have also invested in a number of payments companies; companies that are dealing with, you know, moving dollars, etc., a company called WePay and another called PayNearMe, these are companies that are building payments infrastructure platforms to allow for online transactions, etc., so I am very proud of it and, you know, in most of those companies I’ve invested, I am kind of the first big investor in the company, sometimes that was at ___36:22____, sometimes that was a kind of series A, but there are instances where I put $10, $15, $25 million into a single company in the first instance because I’m excited about the business, it’s later stage, etc., you know, I guess the answer is if you or people who are listening have some great team of people who are working on exciting opportunities, then I’d love to hear about it, and I’m not terribly agnostic about what the market space is, etc.
Dave Kruse: Alright, I like it, that’s a good way. That makes sense. So, we should probably wrap it up now and I definitely appreciate you coming on. Yeah, I mean, I can just tell the passion and energy, you know, like you said, you work 100+ hours, but I can just tell you love it.
David Hornik: Yup.
Dave Kruse: And so we really appreciate you coming on, sharing your story and teaching people a little bit more about the VC world and yeah, it’s been great.
David Hornik: Alright, thanks so much. I enjoyed it.
Dave Kruse: Alright, thanks David.