S3E46 Jay Levy A VCs Perspective on Building a Business in 2023

S3E46 – Jay Levy – A VCs Perspective on Building a Business in 2023
Jay Levy – A VCs Perspective on Building a Business in 2023. My next guest began his tech career back in the 1990’s (high school years) when he built a web design company. In college, he continued using those skills and even built a website for a publicly traded company. After graduating, he worked for a startup, then built and sold a consulting firm, and then eventually started a boutique venture capital firm that currently invests in B2B SaaS companies. In this episode, we talk about what type of founders they look for, how much they invest, and the state of the market in 2023. Please welcome Jay Levy.

Payback Time Podcast

A Podcast on Financial Independence. Hosted by Sean Tepper. If you want to learn how to escape the rat race, create passive income, or achieve financial freedom, you came to the right place.

Key Timecodes

  • (00:52) – Show intro and background history
  • (03:45) – Deeper into his background history and the company he built and sold
  • (05:32) – A bit about the numbers of that transaction
  • (06:41) – What type of B2B SaaS businesses he look for
  • (08:19) – A few more examples of companies under his radar
  • (12:14) – How many employees does his company have
  • (13:17) – Deeper into his business model and strategies
  • (15:19) – His thoughts about the market at this moment
  • (18:56) – How founders can be prepared to the rising funds challenging moment
  • (22:48) – How difficult is to a startup raise funds with venture capitalists
  • (25:54) – A key takeaway from the guest
  • (29:04) – What is the worst advice he ever received
  • (29:26) – What is the best advice he ever received
  • (30:46) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:04.480] – Intro
Hey, this is Sean Tepper, the host of Payback Time, an approachable and transparent podcast on financial independence. I’d like to bring on guests to hear authentic stories while giving you actionable takeaways you can use today. Let’s go. My next guest began his career back in the 1990s, the high school years, when he built a wed design company. In college, he continued using those skills and even built a website for a publicly traded company. After graduating, he worked for a startup, then built and sold a consulting firm, and then eventually started a boutique venture capital firm that currently invests in B2B SaaS companies. In this episode, we talk about what type of founders they look for, how much they invest, and the state of the market in 2023. Please welcome Jay Levy.
[00:00:52.510] – Sean
Jay, welcome to the show.
[00:00:53.920] – Jay
Thanks for having me, Sean.
[00:00:55.020] – Sean
Good to have you here. So why don’t you kick us off and tell us about your background?
[00:00:59.420] – Jay
I’m the managing partner of Zilcoa Ventures, or an early-stage fund focused on B2B SaaS. But going back a little further, grew up in South Florida. While in college, assuming high school, I really got into technology. I started a website design company back in, this would probably be 1997, 1998 time, after not wanting to wake up at six o’clock in the morning to work in the bagel shop, which was the alternative. And this was in the days of Front Page Pro, where you could use that to do with the Wixy-Wigy others or paint shop pro, and ultimately wound up actually making websites for some publicly traded companies that led me to start what we call now is a blog. That term didn’t exist back then for the city I lived in, the city of Carl Springs, which was a way to connect the city with the local high school, middle school audiences. From there, I went to Ruckers. I was the second person to join a startup called U-Connections. U-connections was launched in 1999, and this was a portal for college students. So you could do everything from ordering food online, download coupons, fraternity and sorority happenings, events, calendars, local connections for college students, things of that nature.
[00:02:15.960] – Jay
We raised about $12 million and then we failed. We got to about 500 employees. So I like to say I got to see the birth, life, and death of the startup from my dorm room and then went back to college and completed my junior or senior year where I worked at Morgan Stanley, actually. Graduated in 2003, stayed on at Morgan Stanley for about eight, nine months. We were in not the greatest economic times at that point. It was post-September 11th in New York, and I decided to quit Morgan Stanley. I thought I was in a dead-end position there within operations. It was great just to have a job graduating at that point, especially graduating from Rucker’s great school, but not the Harvards and Yales and whatnot facilities. And to be able to get into Morgan Stanley was a win. But I was in operations, so something wasn’t really too exciting for me. So I actually joined the same two guys that started YouConnections to be one of the early employees of the financial service consulting company that we grew from 2003 to 2006, and that had a better outcome. We sold that and then took some time off and actually got into venture and launched Zelcova with my business partner, Larry, in right around 2007, 2008.
[00:03:29.500] – Jay
So again, in probably 2008 was, I want to say, probably the worst economic time since the Great Depression. So it wasn’t a great time to be starting a company, but in hindsight, it was a great time, similar to what we’re seeing today. So that’s a little bit of my background.
[00:03:45.520] – Sean
Love the background. Thank you for the context here. Jumping to the company that you built and sold, was that a venture capital firm or what company was that?
[00:03:56.640] – Jay
So that was in the financial service consulting world. So we did technology consulting for large banks. It was primarily focused on disaster recovery and technology solutions for some of the largest banks. So competing with Accenture is the world of some of the other large consultants. And the model that we had was, instead of having one or two senior people and a heck of a lot of junior people, and the model was to have much more of what I’d say a diamond shape versus a pyramid. So you had a lot of mid-level talent and some junior and some senior. So that’s why it really worked out better for our clients.
[00:04:35.850] – Sean
Got you. How many employees?
[00:04:37.740] – Jay
At the peak, we got to about 100 employees.
[00:04:40.020] – Sean
Wow. Okay. A decent-sized consulting firm. And when you sold it, you know what? Might think about selling consulting businesses because it’s a service. It’s not like selling… We’re going to jump into B2B SaaS here in a moment. But selling that, were you selling a database of clients.
[00:04:56.050] – Jay
Book of business? You know that it was a services firm. So the multiples on services firms versus the multiples on SaaS companies are completely different. So there was revenues, there was clients, but it wasn’t what you see in the scalability and the multiples in the SaaS world. And that’s one of the things that really led me to have an aha moment to say, okay, if you’re in the service business, you can do well, but it’s a multiple of hours times day times rate, whether that be accounting, whether that be consulting, whether it be legal. Whereas you get into the technology world, you’re highly scalable. And that’s very much what we’re focused on at Zelcovin now.
[00:05:33.090] – Sean
Sure. I have to ask this question because I’ve asked this of other consultants in the past. What multiple were you able to sell for? It was like 2X, 3X, EBITDA, or Revenue?
[00:05:43.970] – Jay
That is the range, and that’s a good range.
[00:05:46.630] – Sean
All right.
[00:05:47.150] – Jay
We’ll leave it at that. Whereas in the SAS world, if you’re not north of 5X, we’re upset, right? Yes. Everyone’s shooting for the 10X. But the reality in the SaaS world is most companies you’ll see count in that 5-7x. Sure. And even in the SaaS world, we have companies that will have services. And when they get acquired, you’ll see the buyers will give a different multiple to the service revenue than they will to the SaaS revenue. So sometimes you’ll see a 1-2x multiple on your services, whereas a 5-8X multiple on your SaaS revenue. Sorry to really jump ahead here.
[00:06:23.590] – Sean
I know this is exactly where we’re going. The reason is, and my customers know this, is when we’re investing in businesses, we look for those highly scalable B2B SaaS businesses, also B2C. But when you can get those big multiples, that’s a big deal, especially when you’re looking to sell business or even when you go public. But let’s dive in. We’ve got a few questions teed up and we’re going to talk about the market a little bit. Is a good time to raise funds? Is a good time to even start a business? But first things first, what type of B2B businesses do you look for? Are you sector specific?
[00:06:58.300] – Jay
We’re not. So we look for what I call horizontal companies. So these are companies that can help multiple industries. So something that’s super important to me is entrepreneurism and helping business do business better. I grew up around it. It’s near and dear to my heart. So we look for companies that can help other companies succeed. So whether that be companies in the marketing space or the finance space or the customer service space, those are our areas that we’re super excited about. A recent company we did is helping companies, company called Respondology, a public that we made the investment. And what they do is they help organizations, sporting teams, athletes, celebrities manage their online social presence in a better way. So hate speech is a really big challenge right now in social media. So we work with brands to how do you better manage hate speech within comments on social media. So what this does is this ultimately helps companies have a better experience for their clients when they’re interacting with them on social media. At the end of the day, it has a good return on investment, better conversion rates and things of that nature.
[00:08:08.560] – Jay
So it’s really tools that help business make money, save money, do things more efficiently, or provide better service is where we focus. And that is typically industry-agnostic.
[00:08:19.780] – Sean
We love examples. So thank you for sharing this on responseology is the? Respondology. Respondology. Got it. That’s one. Can you give us maybe two other good examples of companies you’re working with?
[00:08:33.930] – Jay
Yeah. So I’m just listing the ones that we’ve recently invested in, and I’ll list some other ones. One of the questions I’m always asked is which is your favorite company? And the answer is I’m not going to answer that because if I tell you that, I’m going to get 50 angry emails from other founders. But another one, give me an example, MyPocketCFO. This is a platform for Shopify sellers. So companies that are selling products on Shopify to outsource and manage their accounting needs and their CFO needs and their finance needs, all in an automated platform with human oversight at the same time. So if you’re a Shopify store and you’re doing a million, two million, three million in revenue, you connect directly into our platform. We pull in all the data, and we do all of your bookkeeping, accounting, but leveraging technology in a very automated fashion to do it. On top of that, we help with doing predictive analytics around demand, inventory needs, things of that nature. So again, another business that helps business do business. Another one that not as new but super excited about always is Podia. So that is for creators.
[00:09:45.200] – Jay
So we are a platform. If you are a creator and you have a course maybe you’re giving online or seminar or other type of educational platform, we provide you the entire platform to be able to help create, share and build a community and monetize your education, your knowledge, and your content. So again, helping solo entrepreneurs, small teams build big businesses. And we’ve seen that. And that company has been incredibly successful and very rewarding because we’re very much helping others build business and financial freedom through it.
[00:10:20.290] – Sean
Yeah. I actually have personal experience with Podia, and I really like the CEO and some of the content he puts out. But for context here, Tykr has Tykr EDU, which is courses. And I almost went with Podia, I did go with Teachable, but Podi is still a very good product.
[00:10:37.390] – Jay
Awesome. And that’s something that we look… We are not investors in winner take all markets. So we have investments in the CRM space. One would argue, why build a CRM when you’ve got Salesforce and HubSpot out there? But there was a point where you didn’t have HubSpot, you just had Salesforce. Any of us would have been thrilled to be a seed investor in HubSpot given the success there. Yes. So one of the beautiful parts about SaaS Industries and SaaS businesses, unlike a lot of times, consumer, is it’s not win-take-all. On the consumer side, I think Instagram, which is obviously now owned by Meta. But when Instagram was launching, there were hundreds of photo sharing sites. That’s names we can’t remember, companies that don’t exist today. Whereas there’s dozens, hundreds of successful CRM companies, dozens and hundreds of customer service companies that succeed. So the nice part about SaaS and why we’re interested in it is if done right, it can be super capital-efficient, and you can dollar for dollars, which you can’t do in consumer. Consumer is about bottling lightning, getting the PR train to follow you and the excitement. Where SaaS is like rolling up your sleeves, providing a product, listening to your customers, innovating on that product based on feedback and really sticking with it.
[00:11:55.370] – Jay
And you can ultimately succeed even if it’s in a competitive space. Maybe you won’t be the Salesforce, but there’s plenty of successful companies that raise two, three, five million dollars if that, and have built incredible SaaS platforms. Right. And some that have even been bootstrap to hundreds of millions of dollars, too.
[00:12:14.150] – Sean
Ofone more question here on team size. How many employees are in your company?
[00:12:18.490] – Jay
We’re four people.
[00:12:19.450] – Sean
Oh, wow. You’re very boutique.
[00:12:21.020] – Jay
Okay. We’re seed funds. One of the things that we’ve realized is founders want to deal with the partners. And ultimately, so much of what we do is investing at the early stage and it’s backing a jockey. It’s backing the founders. It’s 97 % founders, two % product, and one % market. And obviously, that’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but we’re really getting behind the teams. And to be able to make an investment decision, we got to get to know the teams, and it’s got to be us doing it. So we don’t have a bunch of analysts running around researching industries or running through spreadsheets. I meet, multiple times, even through COVID, with every founder, I really want to get to know them. We’re big believers in in-person. Controversially, we’re pushing as many companies as we can to go back in person or at least hybrid. We think that’s so important for startups. And yes, we keep it small and lean.
[00:13:17.730] – Sean
Got you. Yeah. Good to know there. And I was going to ask you, and I think you just answered at what stage you focus on the seed round. Is that correct?
[00:13:24.910] – Jay
So it’s getting a little messy out there and all the nomenclature. Typically, so I like to describe it as the amount of capital companies are raising. So typically when we invest, companies are raising between a million and three million, whether that be pre-seed, seed. It all depends on the founder and what they want to term it. Our strategy is to invest early and follow on heavily. So we’ll initially invest anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000 alongside other investors. So we like to do syndicates. We like to work with others. We think the more people at the table, the better at this stage, assuming you get good people at the table. And then we’ll reserve about 2-3 times after follow-on. So our strategy is to be about 750 to a million. And we do follow on. The most we’ve ever followed on is six times in one company.
[00:14:15.460] – Sean
Got you. Revenue, did you just say 752 million is where you like to see?
[00:14:20.210] – Jay
Oh, no. So 750 to a million is where we want to target our investment. Revenue is… So we will go pre-revenue, and we have plenty of pre-revenue. Typically, the profile of a company coming to us is they typically raised a few hundred thousand dollars, whether that be from friends and family, pre-seed money. They go through an incubator like Techstars, were a big fan of companies going through incubator programs. So typically they’ll come to us at that time, post Techstars or another incubator. They’ll be looking to raise a million and a half, two million dollars. They’ll have some signs of life, as I call it. 10, 20,000 in MRR, but they’re still trying to figure out product market fit, and they don’t yet know how to scale. Founder-led sales still haven’t really built out their sales process, but they need a year to two years worth of capital to really figure it out. And that’s where we’ll go in super early.
[00:15:16.490] – Sean
Got you. I love all the details there. Thank you. Let’s transition to your thoughts on the current state of the market.
[00:15:24.700] – Jay
Well, it’s slow on all angles. M&a activity is super slow funding is super slow. A little bit stage-specific seed is still staying at decent numbers. The Series A, Series B has gotten much more difficult, mainly because the goalpost is has moved as there is a slowdown. Unfortunately, what used to be a Series A at a millionaire is no longer just a Slam dunk. So now with that said, I think it’s a great time to start a company. And if you look at historically some of the best vintages in venture capital has been during downturns. Why now? Do I think it’s a good time to start a company? It’s talent’s out there. It’s much more readily available. We’ve seen significant layoffs from some of the large tech firms. It’s less expensive. You can hire it. Before competing with the likes of Google and Meta was nearly impossible. Now it’s completely possible. You’ve got to be more scrappy. Investors are going to write smaller checks. You’re going to have a tough for time raising. You got to be much more buttoned up. Your pitch has got to be better. So you got to do your homework and do your research.
[00:16:37.380] – Jay
There’s going to be less competition because of everything I just said. People are going to be like, I’m not starting a company now because it’s a bad time to start a company. But reality, what you’re doing is you’re starting a company in a market that’s forcing you to be a lean, mean, killing machine. And so we’re a big fan of now. We think now as investors, it’s the time to be writing checks, but you’ve got to go a little bit against the tide. And it’s easier to justify writing checks in the heydays than it is in the downturn. But ultimately, it’s like scuba diving. So the companies we invest in are really down towards the bottom. What’s happening at the surface doesn’t affect them. The storms that are happening, as you get further and further along, those storms affect you. So if you’re a Series C, Series D, a company ready to go public, yeah, the macro economy really impacts you. If you’re a startup that’s trying to get your first 100,000 in MRR, you might have to call more customers, you might have to have a little bit more elbow grease, but you’re going to get there.
[00:17:40.450] – Jay
And the macro economy is not going to have nearly the impact you are as if you need to go public next year or this year, I should say.
[00:17:47.540] – Sean
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[00:18:52.090] – Sean
Again, tikr. Com. All right, back to the show. There’s a lot of investors, or I should say investors, more on entrepreneurs I’m talking to that they immediately dive into their business idea and then their very next step is raising funds. And I try to tell them that, guys, you want to build something or create some momentum or make some money in some way, shape or form to be prepared for those conversations with venture capitalists and other investors. Would you agree with that? You want to get the ball moving a little bit.
[00:19:23.950] – Jay
Absolutely. And I think there’s a great book on this subject, if you don’t mind me throwing it out there, and I’m not involved in it at all, but Eric Rees’s Lean Startup talks all about how to see some signs of life, how to do things quickly, efficiently to get to each next milestone. The more data you can bring to an investor, not only does it give them good data, it shows them how you think, how you approach problems, how you solve problems. So I think absolutely founders want to run, and some will. And that’s one of the challenges. The key is getting the right investors in at the right time. And we see this all too often. A founder will go out and say we’re going to raise a million and a half dollars on a safe or convertible note, both very standard instruments at the early stage to use. And they’ll call up some friends of friends and some neighbors and their uncle, and they’ll raise 300,000 on that and cobble together and they’ll price it at a 10 million dollar post money cap or whatever the number was higher, 15. And then they’ll show up to early-stage VCs that this is what we do for a living and we know what the market looks like and we know valuations.
[00:20:39.800] – Jay
And we’re like, Great, but we’re never getting to a 10 or a 12 or 15. So you now have what we call hair on the deal. So now what? So don’t rush. I always joke, ask for advice, get money. Ask for money, get advice. It’s okay to start conversations, but you can take the slow road and spend six months getting to know founders. Investors, excuse me. I tell founders all the time, you need to meet your investors in person. You are one of 40 or 50 in our portfolio or 100, 150, whatever it might be, your company is. But for you, your company is one of one. You don’t need a bad apple on the cap table. A bad investor can cause you a real headache, whether they’ve got a million shares or one share. So really get to know. And this is a long-term relationship. And I get it. It could be hard to say no when someone’s offering you money, especially in a tough market like this. But you don’t want to regret it three, four, five years down the road. And then you look back and like, wow, I never should have done that.
[00:21:45.180] – Jay
And I should have been more patient. So patience is key.
[00:21:48.230] – Sean
Yes. Good advice. Do you have a really good, bootstrap example? Maybe a startup founder you were talking with, you asked them, hey, what do your revenues look like and how did you get there? Something that really stood out and impressed you.
[00:22:03.910] – Jay
Yeah. I’m trying to think from even our portfolio or somewhere else. How about we come back to this in a minute or two? Let me get to it. Since you caught me on and I want to give it a good response, we’re going to come back to this. We will get it before the end of the conversation.
[00:22:20.260] – Sean
Sometimes these hairbrains out of the left field questions hit my mind. I’m like, oh, I got to ask this one. So I figured I would have dumped you there for a moment. But this is good to know because I’ll go to networking events or talk to people online. And these entrepreneurs, they’re so focused. It’s like 80-90 % focus on raising funds as opposed to 80-90 % of their efforts on generating revenue or providing value for customers. So I tell them, try to emphasize your efforts on how do you provide value because raising funds is hard, isn’t it? It’s like 1 % to actually raise capital?
[00:22:59.770] – Jay
Yeah, it’s one % of companies raise capital. And it’s not that every company shouldn’t raise venture capital. It’s not for every company. And that doesn’t mean you have a bad idea, a bad company. It just means it’s not fit for the venture model. And I think it’s important for founders to really understand the economics of what the venture model looks like. So they understand when a fund comes to them, says, Well, I need to make 10X or 100X our money. It’s not because we’re so greedy. It’s because ultimately, in order to deliver returns, if you’re going to be the successful one, you got to pay for all the failures and make up for all the failures. One of the questions I get all the time from friends is like, Hey, I’ll tell them about a deal. I’ll tell them about Respondology or another company we recently invested in. Hey, sounds awesome. How come you don’t let me invest? And I said, because they all sound awesome when we invest. That’s why we invest. If I could tell you what the winners are going to be, I’d have no losers. Hey, like that’s how this business would work.
[00:24:01.860] – Jay
I always also say for a seed fund, when you see a big name in the fund, it’s a little bit more of maybe they got a little bit lucky, maybe they’re good at spotting. But remember, all those big names were not big names when they started. Whereas you go to a late stage fund and you see the Ubers of the world and the other companies like that, it becomes a different way they compete to get into those deals. And those winners have already been identified at the Series C and Series D. To get back to your question, though, the thought of it, a company that what I’d say was incredibly patient in their fundraising and product and customer development was vitally. Jamie, the CEO there, went through Techstars. We did invest, small check, and he spent several years just banging on product and knocking on the doors of customers. And he built what I call the most beautiful products I’ve ever seen in doing this for 15 years. But he was super patient. He would not go to market with a product that in his mind wasn’t incredible. And when he did, he was able to win customers.
[00:25:13.040] – Jay
And then once he was winning customers, the VCs took note and he was able to raise around. But he was very patient and very steadfast in his mission, and ultimately it’s paying off. So I think that’s a really good example of a company and a founder that was patient.
[00:25:29.880] – Sean
Yeah, wise advice there. Great case study. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll jump onto websites as we go. So customers, if they’re sitting at the computer at work, they can jump on to. Is this vitally? Design. Com?
[00:25:44.060] – Jay
No, it’s vitally. Io, V-I-T-A-L-L-Y. Io. Got it. It’s a customer success platform for primarily SaaS companies.
[00:25:53.150] – Sean
Got it. Found it. Nice. Very nice. Great example. Okay, cool. All right. Well, before we jump into the Rapid Fire round, are there any key takeaways or maybe one major key takeaway you’d like to give to our entrepreneur or listeners?
[00:26:10.370] – Jay
Yeah, keep building, listen to customer feedback, iterate, but try to keep focus at the same time. So one of the challenges of being an entrepreneur and one of the opportunities is a whiteboard, and there’s a lot of shiny objects to chase. And founders are incredibly creative typically and have great ideas. And so keeping that focus is incredibly important, but not tuning out what customer is saying, what the world is saying, but filtering through it in a way that’s helpful, I think, is incredibly important.
[00:26:40.970] – Sean
Right. Right. Great advice. All right, let’s jump into the rapid-fire round. This is the part of the episode where we get to find out who Jay really is. If you can try to answer each question in 15 seconds or less. You ready?
[00:26:53.950] – Jay
Let’s do it.
[00:26:54.700] – Sean
All right. What is your favorite podcast?
[00:26:57.500] – Jay
I hope that’s not a trick question, but I’m really into the all-in podcast right now and also ritual. So a combination of business and health I tend to listen to on the podcast side.
[00:27:06.430] – Sean
Nice. Right on. Whenever somebody answers with payback time, I always think you’re a liar because you never listen. You haven’t listened to this podcast. Now, the reason is, and we’re going to take more than 15 seconds here, the reason I asked that is that’s literally how you find out about new podcast. It’s like through a friend or acquaintance because you don’t see commercials, you don’t see advertisements on YouTube, right?
[00:27:29.220] – Jay
It’s so true. Depending on the friend, I get the health podcast from my friend Kristen. I get the business podcast from my friend Eric. And it’s like different friends send me different podcasts. So I love it. And these are podcasts. And I’m a pretty avid podcast listener. We were early investors in Simplecast, one of the top podcasting hosting platforms. But there’s so many great ones out there and it’s about discoverability.
[00:27:55.730] – Sean
Yeah. I know you’re heading to the golf course after this, and I enjoy playing golf as well. And it’s there where I can’t tell you how many different podcasts I’ve discovered because somebody’s about to tee off and be like, oh, Sean, have you listened to this podcast? I’m like, I’ve never heard of it. And there you go. All right, next up here. What is a recent book you read and would recommend?
[00:28:17.700] – Jay
Currently in the middle of Essentialism by Greg McCowen. Super interesting. I’m not done yet, to be honest. But it’s all about how to manage our time better. And I think that’s the one asset that we can’t create more of, but we can figure out how to be more efficient and get more out of every day. I also, on an annual basis, read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And I give that book out to so many people, and I highly recommend Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
[00:28:44.700] – Sean
Two good ones. All right, movie question. What is your favorite movie?
[00:28:50.930] – Jay
That’s probably a toss-up between Wall Street and Barbera. You can see a theme there.
[00:28:57.230] – Sean
Oh, we got a finance pro here. I’m just kidding. I had to give you that job.
[00:29:03.500] – Jay
That’s fair.
[00:29:04.270] – Sean
All right. We got a few business questions here. First off, what is the worst advice you ever received?
[00:29:11.570] – Jay
And I won’t say who gave it, but in 2003, 2004, not to quit Morgan Stanley and take risk and join my friends and start in the consulting company. That was the worst risk.
[00:29:25.220] – Sean
All right, flip the equation here. What is the best advice you ever received?
[00:29:30.090] – Jay
Probably from my grandfather. Partners are easy to get and hard to get rid of. And I think that is so appropriate for founders because we see so much partner strife and the data is out there. But if there’s four co-founders, it’s like nearly 100 % probability, a year later there will be three. And two years later, there will be two. And that’s directionally right. It’s not the exact data, but partners are easy to get and hard to get rid of.
[00:29:55.540] – Sean
I would agree with that. Yeah. All right. And we’ve got a time-machine question here. You could go back in time to give your younger self advice. What age would you visit? What would you say?
[00:30:06.670] – Jay
I would probably go back to my mid-20s. And I actually tell myself this advice all the time, and it’s take more risk. And I still tell myself that. And I don’t think any of us think we take enough risk, even if we take a lot of risk. So I have friends that don’t understand what I do, they’re like, You take so much risk. And so for me, it’s all about continuously taking smart risk, calculated bets and going in to bets with not just a sense of risk, but also going in deep and concentrated. So I’d say concentrated bets and concentrated risk.
[00:30:44.610] – Sean
Nice. Great advice. All right. And where can the audience reach you?
[00:30:48.960] – Jay
Best rates reach me is on Twitter @Zelkovavc. Z-e-l-k-o-v-a-v-c. And it’s also zelkovavc. Com.
[00:30:59.170] – Sean
Awesome. We’ll make sure we’re adding that to the show notes. But Jay, thank you so much for your time.
[00:31:04.250] – Jay
Thank you, Sean. I had a ton of fun and hopefully we meet again soon.
[00:31:08.580] – Sean
Sounds good. We’ll see you.
[00:31:09.740] – Jay
Have a good one. Thank you.
[00:31:12.360] – Sean
Hey, I’d like to say thank you for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. Also, if you have a moment, could you please head over to Apple Podcast and leave a review? The more reviews we get, the more Apple will share this podcast with the world. So thanks for doing that. And last thing, if you do hear any stocks mentioned on this podcast, please keep in mind this podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Please do not make a buy or sell decision based solely on what you hear. All right, thanks for your time. Talk to you later. See you.