So for each of you, for investors here in the room who need a good sharp question
to ask when they're vetting somebody or for someone raising capital just to know
that they might get this question, what is the one question you ask up front?
Either you're asking yourself and you're looking for it or you ask the CEO when
you're vetting something like maybe in the first meeting with somebody? What would be
the one question that you would ask first or focus on? There's so many questions.
Do you have debt? That's a good one, because a lot of people do and they don't
want to tell you about it. What was the question? Do you have debt? Do you have
debt? Right. Because that will really blow a deal for us, right? If there's debt on
the books, then we need to know it right up front because we're second in line to
debt as an equity investor, and that's really important. And people don't really
understand that and they'll also put their own owner's equity on the cap table as
debt and we have to dissuade them of that idea and so there's there's a lot
involved right up front on that. I think that's smart because a lot of times you
get deep into diligence before someone reveals there is a massive lawsuit or judgment
or dad and you're like well if I wouldn't own that up front we wouldn't be in
meeting number five maybe or maybe not right? Yeah another good question is are you
your co -founder, are you guys married? A lot of people present as if they're not
married and they're married and it's funny. And you're like, why would you not be
upfront about that? Like you guys have the same last name. It's very curious.
- Right. - My first question is always, do you have a real revenue, not letters of
intent, not purchase orders, not, I mean, but actual checks that have been written
that you've cashed. - Right, right, yeah, the graph always goes straight up, even if
they've done 200K in revenue for five years, right? - To me it's all about execution
and I ask them use of funds where they see themselves in five years and how are
you gonna get there? If they can't thoroughly answer that question, I'm out of the
room. - Yeah, for us, it's always who is your toughest competitor and how are you
going to beat them. Again, we're going for the utterly asymmetric. So in a recent
deal, how many of you have ever heard of a company called Figure AI? Yeah,
Humanoid Robotics. Think of the movie with Will Smith and the robots taking over.
Well, they're a number one competitor, of course, is Elon Musk. So we had to have
a conversation about how is what you're doing actually going to compete with that.
Got it. Yeah, it makes sense.