Blake M: If you're always winning and have to have somebody who's losing, you're not gonna last very long.

Lincoln: Welcome to Funds That Won, where we dive into some of the world's most renowned investment funds. We'll interview investment managers across the alternative landscape and learn how they built their million and even billion dollar asset management empires. We'll explore teams, structures, strategies, and best practices in launching and running alternative investment funds. Well, Blake, thanks for being here today. Why don't you start off by giving me the elevator pitch on Pelion.

Blake M: Well, first of all, thanks for having me. The elevator pitch is first been around since 1986. It's got a storied history of always being headquartered in Salt Lake City. And what's been interesting is our founder had this vision that Utah would become this magical entrepreneurial place in 1986. He was right, probably just 20 years too early. So we do a lot of stuff in Utah, but we do in the Bay Area, Southern California. New York and all over, but we focus on software companies at the Series A, so we're early stage investors.

Lincoln: And almost, what, north of $2 billion?

Blake M: Yeah, so a little over $2 billion in AUM. Incredible. It's been a ride. When I joined the firm in 2002, we were right around $70 million in AUM, so it's been an amazing last 20 plus years. Yeah. I don't know if my wife would say that but it's been a lot of fun. So, which fund did you come in on? So, I joined them right when they had closed fund 3. Gotcha. So, I wasn't part of fund 1 and 2. While the firm was doing really fun 1 and 2, I was running Novell's corporate venture fund which was a 300 million dollar fund where we invested into companies directly. So, our biggest win was Red Hat. put a million dollars into Red Hat, 18 months later took out a hundred million dollars and I thought this venture business is easy. It's not. And then we also invested 200 million dollars into GPs as an LP. So I've actually sat on both sides of the table on the LP side and on the GP side.

Lincoln: Excellent. And are these primary like domestic companies, strategies, international? Where do you guys play? What's your sandbox?

Blake M: So 100% domestic. And because of the stage we invest, we really want to be, you know, we'll do stuff in New York, but, you know, 60% of what we do is in the state of Utah. Because we're working really hand in hand with these entrepreneurs, helping them build where they need our help. Many of our companies do have operations overseas, but they're all headquartered here in the US.

Lincoln: Gotcha. And from the LP side of things, are you primarily a U.S. investor base or international investor base?

Blake M: You know, we have a global investor base. We have a lot of great LPs here in the U.S. About a decade ago, one of our LPs here in the U.S., the chief investment officer actually was recruited by ADIA, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which then became an LP in our fund. And now we have a lot of LPs in the Middle East, in that part of the world, in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, that part of the world. And then we have some in Europe, actually some with connections into Asia. But I'd say most of our capital comes from the US.

Lincoln: Gotcha. And now, are you sitting across the company? Are you involved with fundraising side and then deals and everything? Or where do you sit on the company side or in specializing?

Blake M: Well, I'll start off by saying I have an amazing group of people here at Pelleon. The team here is just amazing. And so, it makes my job where I do spend the operations, fundraising, investing, the whole gamut. And it's just part of the nature of the beast of who I am inside this organization. But what I have is an amazing group of people where I'm just more, you know, I'll call it a cheerleader as they complete their, but I have to have an understanding of kind of what goes on across the entire organization. Gotcha.

Lincoln: Or on the topic of governance, I'd love to understand, so how are decisions made at your firm in terms of maybe hiring, use of management fees, all the way to the investment process side of making an investment selection?

Blake M: Yeah, you know, I learned this early on back when I first got into the business in 96. I had the great pleasure of being mentored by the founders of Excel and Sequoia and Benchmark. And my boss at the time, a guy named Eric Schmidt, before he went to Google, he had all these great mentors knowing full well that venture is an apprentice business. And so the way we think about it here internally is our analysts, from an investment decision standpoint, our analysts and our associates, they all are involved in the investment decision. And that's by design, because if they can start to build that muscle a couple years out of college, well, when they become a partner, and by the way, we have several former interns that have become partners here at the firm, they've grown up having a seat at the table as we discuss deals. So that's how decisions are made. It's a process where the entire investment team actually votes should we do it, yes or no. Now, there's people with 20 years of experience and people with two years of experience, and we factor that in as well. And then, you know, the hiring process, we like to involve everybody. You know, it's amazing when you have a lot of people who can, you know, it's gather data, gather information, knowing full well you're going to have disagreements. And then at the end of the day, somebody has to make the decision. And, you know, we have a smaller group of people that'll do that. But we do try to gather as much information around hiring, you know, the use of the management fees is if we're going to spend it on marketing or involvement in something, we gather people's insights. And then, you know, there is a smaller group that make the final decision around that. But the investment decisions are the entire investment team. Love it. And we also love to include our finance team in that. And it just, it brings a really rich input.

Lincoln: So how many people do you have employed here?

Blake M: So we're approaching 30 people here. When I first joined in 2002, there were seven of us. So we've grown. We have about a dozen on the investment team and then finance has a nice group and then we have investor relations and then back office and operations.

Lincoln: Yeah, and you said partners. How many partners do you have?

Blake M: Yeah, so there are six partners. Although our CFO, I treat him like a partner. And so I guess I'd say there's seven of us here. And then we have a whole crew of people that are at the analyst associate, senior associate, and principal level. Everybody on the investment team have the ability to become a partner. That's how we think about it here. So when you're hired, you're on a partner track knowing full well that we can't have a dozen partners. But we have people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. You know, so there's a natural evolution that people will retire and people will grow from within.

Lincoln: So when you're making investment decisions, do you require like unanimous, you know, positive votes to pursue a deal? Or do you have one dissenting vote? Or how do you guys go by super majority? Like, how does that work?

Blake M: Now, we actually require everybody to say yes. And we don't allow somebody to abstain. Because abstaining means a no. And the reason we do that is we think like you can take whatever sports analogy you want. Great teams win championships. Individual stars do not. And so that's why we want the entire organization to say yes. Now there's very rigorous debates. And when we start a process, somebody will find a deal, then we'll staff the deal team. Usually there's three people, maybe four people on the deal team. And we mix those deal teams up. So if one of our associates works with me on a deal with me, well, the next deal that I'm working on I'll get a different associate and that associate will go work with somebody else. And we want that richness of learning from me or Chris or Jeff or Chad or whomever. And we have a couple of venture partners that we treat just like that because they come with really rich operating backgrounds. So that's how we think about it on our side. So yeah, you don't get up, you can say no, absolutely. but you don't get up staying. And that forces all of us to get smart about a deal. And there's been companies, like everybody in this firm knows that I don't like hardware companies. Now, we've done some hardware companies, and so I'm always the biggest critic around hardware companies. And that's, you know, scar tissue from having lost a lot of money on hardware companies. But I also look at my partners, if they really are pounding the table and the metrics, I try not to let my bias or for that matter, anybody else's bias, we know what everybody else's biases are, to your bias can't be impacted. It has to be the fundamental, metrics of the business on where we make a decision.

Lincoln: Gotcha. So do you make those decisions through a structured like investment committee meeting or what does that look like?

Blake M: Yeah. So we have, we have, there's three types of meetings. There's, there's what I call my executive staff, which is just the partners. And we discuss a lot of stuff, but we try not to make any sort of decisions around investing inside of that. Then I have partners meeting, and that includes everybody, finance team, investor relations, operations, everybody sits in there. And I think it's important for everybody to understand what's going on within the portfolio. And then following that, we have just the investment. Everybody on the investment team sticks around. And within that conversation, we've already talked about a lot of those companies, but within that conversation, it is First of all, first and foremost, there's been multiple conversations about that. Everybody on the team has met the company. We've had conversations. And so we do do a formal, okay. I want to invest, here's how much I want to invest, here's the parameters that I want to go negotiate. So, we try to give the investment or the deal team, you know, pre-money, post-money, parameters, deal term parameters. So, they're not having to run back to the team and say, well, it's a dollar over the post-money that we all agreed to. Because that just drives not only the entrepreneur crazy, but the deal team crazy. Right. That's how, once we approve a deal, with parameters and they go off and negotiate term sheets and those. Now, something starts to fall outside of the term sheet. There's structured conversations and then there's unstructured conversations. Like in our lunchroom, we'll sit and talk about deals for a couple hours.

Lincoln: Awesome. Do you guys have a structured LPAC? We do. Tell me about that.

Blake M: So each one of our funds, it's typically the largest investors in that fund become the ALPAC. So right now we have fund 4, 5, 6, 7 that are still active funds and each one of them has an ALPAC member. or an individual LPAC. Now, we've had the good fortune with many of our LPs have been with us for 20 plus years. So, there's individuals that are on the LPAC for 4, 5, 6, 7. So, it's the same person but it's specific for the fund. They're great. We utilize them to help us like what are best practices. These guys are seeing fund dynamics a lot more than we are. So, what are some best practices? How is reporting put together? We use them around, you know, structural things here internally. How should we think strategically about co-investments? So for us, I bet if I'm not interacting with our LPAC at least on a quarterly basis or maybe three times a year, like we have a single meeting once a year in connection with our annual meeting. And then we'll have lots of interaction throughout the year. Sometimes they're in person, sometimes they're through email, sometimes they're just a phone call. That's how we do it.

Lincoln: Love it. So where you've got these multiple funds in the same product vein, do you require that 90% of your funds five is deployed before you can start deploying out of fund six? Or do you have shared assets among the funds? You know, how do you guys think about kind of the details?

Blake M: Yeah, so within our documents, 70% of the fund has to be called or committed before we start raising the next fund. Now, you heard me say the word called or committed. We can commit dollars in a reserve standpoint, but the way we typically think about it is we want to have somewhere between 45 to 55% of the fund. So on average, 50% of the fund invested into new deals. And so as you're tracking along, once you hit that 50% mark or 55% mark, you should be turning on a new fund. So you're back here with, let's say I've committed 40% of the capital. I've reserved another 30%, you hit that 70%, you go to market to raise a new fund. So there's a dynamic around those percentages. But for us, it has to be 70%. And our documents spell that out.

Lincoln: Yeah, right, it's all out. So are there shared assets, though, between?

Blake M: Try not to. We have in the past done some crossovers. It requires LPAC approval by both funds to do it. Because you can imagine the weirdness that gets into that. You have different LPs and conflicts of interest. So, you know, in the 26 years I've been doing this, I think I've done a crossover investment three times. And, you know, when we were doing them, it was because we were hitting concentration levels within our fund. So 10% of our given fund can invest in a single asset. And a company that's doing really well, you hit those concentration levels. Well, you can do one or two things. Either one, get approval to go above it. Two, stop investing. Three, cross it over. So we've done that. We've done the crossover. This company called Cloudflare. And by the way, our LPs were more than happy to get it into, we actually put it into Fund 5 and Fund 6 as well. It was an amazing business. The founders of that company are just like, Unbelievable. You know, they built a $20 billion company. So we don't like to do it. It takes approval on both sides. If I roll forward to today, when we start to get hot concentration levels on a company, we know that company is working, we actually have a pretty robust co-invest program. And that's where we bring that in and we're able to continue to take our pro rata and go above our concentration level. The fund will always stay at our concentration level, but we get more money into the businesses because of what we call SPVs.

Lincoln: Hey, guys. Thanks for listening. As you know, we don't run ads on this channel. So if you could really help me out, if this podcast has added any value to you or your business, please subscribe, rate, and review. I would appreciate that greatly. Thank you. So on that, if you have a great performing asset and it's past your structured, what is, 10-year terms, 10 years on your funds, and it goes past the 10 years, you probably have a few one-year extensions at your discretion, but what about these assets that are just, you know, to take a company to IPO can take decades, right? And so how do you guys think about that? Do you roll it over into continuation vehicles or do you keep it all out of the same hood?

Blake M: So we, and we have that right now. Like our fourth fund has one asset left inside of it. It's a 2007 vintage year fund. Wow. The company in that is a hundred plus million dollars in revenue, doing great. So you hit your 10-year mark. You have two one-year extensions at our discretion. And then beyond that, it takes LP approval. And we've never had any issue getting our LP approval. We're not taking management fees. So we're continuing to manage those assets. and we're wanting to maximize the returns. Now, there's these GP continuations, there's all of those sorts of funds that are becoming pretty popular right now that we continue to explore for some of these older funds. We've not done any of those yet. We may, but for us to continue with an asset or a fund to keep it open, it takes our LP approval and we have to get it every year. Right.

Lincoln: There's so many questions I want to ask you, but I want to take a step back here for a minute and go a little high level. So the name of this podcast is Funds That Won, where we interviewed various investment managers across the industry. So I'd like to ask the question to you, what makes a fund win?

Blake M: So funds fail for a couple of reasons. So I'll start there. That's great. Team dynamics. like the dysfunctionality that can happen inside of an organization and that's usually around how people get compensated, how carriers spread, all of those sorts of things will cause dysfunctionality and that happens. I think the other component is if you've read that book, The Power Law, That's real in the world that we live in. I loved it because when I read it, many of the characters in that book were my mentors. And so, it was fun for me to read. But you know, with early stage venture, sometimes people will get so focused on your batting average. And I learned this from the founders of excel and a bunch of… Batting average doesn't matter. Slugging percentage for you baseball fans out there. Slugging percentage is what matters is in an early stage venture fund, if you cannot find big outsized winners consistently, you just, you can't keep up. So it's team that causes you to fail and to also win. And so for us, that's why philosophically keeping people engaged when they're first walking the door, being part of what they feel like they're building versus, you know, go sit in that cubicle and we'll let you know when we want your opinion. That's what works for us. Others have made it work completely different. So, you know, you got to start with the team, super important. Great entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are crazy, amazing, hard, some of my best friends, all of those sorts of adjectives because these guys are changing, these men or women are changing the world. When you think about, you know, I had one CEO sit in front of me and tell me, I'm going to speed data up faster than the speed of light. Now, if you think about what I just said and what that CEO told me, physically, physics will tell you, you can't do that. That just is not possible. But that was his vision. I had another entrepreneur tell me, we're going to power the internet.

Lincoln: These profound statements.

Blake M: These profound statements. And so, as Pellion, when you think about what you win is, you got to find those types of people. And by the way, failure is just part of it. When we talk about failure internally, it's very rarely is it the entrepreneur. It's product market fit. It's a nice to have. It's a vitamin versus a painkiller. It's all those sorts of things.

Lincoln: I don't know if that gets to the heart of your question. Yeah, I think it's a good starter. I think that's great. How, like, as it plays into this kind of question a little bit, how do you feel the current state of the industry, maybe that can be from a regulatory lens, you know, just the overall market and venture, is it poised to support fund managers? Or is it, you know, how is regulation affecting your business?

Blake M: Well, it's like if you over, so there needs to be regulations for sure. But if you overregulate, you're going to kill innovation. And so I always will worry about overreaching on regulation, underreaching on regulation, finding that balance. And that's a constant push and pull. I think right now, we're in good shape. But there are some things that are on the books that if they happen, it's going to make it super difficult. You know, when you think about a young entrepreneur, you know, they're going to put their heart, their soul, every nickel they have, their mortgage, they're going to sell their home, like all that stuff to build a company. And if you overregulate them, they just won't do it. So I think today we're okay. But I think it's something where, you know, there's the NVCA. I think those guys do a great job in Washington, D.C. to try to stay close to the politicians that are actually proposing some of the regulations. And I know here in the state of Utah, we have an environment which is very business friendly. They don't over-regulate here. But we know that they're there.

Lincoln: Yeah. Well, you keep going back to the entrepreneur, so I'd love to focus on the entrepreneur and how you underwrite them and how you look at them and how you think about allocating with them. So, like, how do you identify, how do you underwrite people? How do you think about that?

Blake M: It's a great question. So, there's kind of three things we look at. And I'm going to get to the entrepreneur because to us, that's the most important. You have to start with how disruptive is the technology? It's my earlier statements. Power the internet. Faster than the speed of light. Like, you can just kind of keep going down that path. Blake Murray with Divi. What he did to expense management. By the way, that expense management is a boring But what he did was like totally turn things on its ear. So there's that. How disruptive? How big is the market? You can have a great idea, but is it a lifestyle company or is this a multi-billion dollar company? And then to your question around the entrepreneur. It's something where, and we talk about this with our younger team member, because they're trying to build that muscle to recognize you know, the entrepreneur that has this vision, and it's an instinctual thing. Like, what is a great, why can a great college quarterback, when he gets to the NFL, fail? Well, it could be that the speed of the game, the reading of defenses, it just doesn't translate. And so, you gotta find that entrepreneur that has the ability to like, And when we underwrite them, we're underwriting that they're going to be wildly successful. And by the way, we fail with great entrepreneurs all day long because it just doesn't work. Today, so my wife sends out about 400 Christmas cards. Bless her heart. And I just look at her sometimes and just like, you're amazing on so many levels. She's still sending Christmas cards to CEOs that I backed in the 90s. Wow. And so, you have to look at this and go, it's a marriage. You know, you're going to get into a relationship with somebody and it's going to be a decade plus why they build this business. And are you willing to do that? Do they like you enough and do you like them enough? And sometimes things go so fast. One of the things that we try to do is go to have dinner with the entrepreneur and their husband or their wife or their partner or their plus one. And I'm actually more interested in learning more about their partner than I am what the entrepreneur is doing. Because that you can actually see a lot. You can tell a lot. Yeah. Because My wife, if she didn't do what she did and the importance to the success of Pellion, we wouldn't be here. And like for us, that's super important. And so, all of those things come into underwriting an entrepreneur.

Lincoln: Yeah. So, really looking at their home lifestyle and if they have the bandwidth and the support. you know, if they're going to be worrying about things at home, they can't be focusing on the business.

Blake M: Right, and then there's times when you need them to go home and go to a soccer game with their kids. And I think as a we have this kind of running joke a little bit is sometimes I wonder if all the finance classes I took should have been psychology classes. Not only for us, but for the individuals building these companies.

Lincoln: Random tangent question here. Do you guys, I mean obviously worst case scenario is that a company doesn't start and you lose all the money invested. Do you ever think about like additional liability that maybe you've invested in you know, this manager is doing something unethical or starts anything disproportional. Have you ever had to deal with that? Like there's like a worse than the worst case scenario?

Blake M: Yeah. Yeah. No, I… Yes. It's… Sometimes you can do all the diligence in the world and then you get into it and you know, something unethical. Look, it's in the news today. FTX. Right. I know the Sequoia guys really well. I'm sure when they put money into that company, along with the rest of the investors, they had no idea what was going to happen. And I'm not sure how you diligence. So that is something that gives, at least me, and I know our firm, a lot of anxiety. Now, it's happened to us a couple of times, so we feel like we're, you know, 99% of the time we get it right, 1% of the time, you know, something unethical happens, but yeah, it's hard.

Lincoln: Yeah, it's hard. It's crazy. I mean, you're starting to see, like, just in the industry, I feel like there's we're seeing more of those scenarios, right? Where there's kind of this group think into, you know, a Theranos example, right? You know, where allocators start pawing on because, you know, X, Y, and Z firm did it, you know? So, I mean, how do you guys mitigate for that in your business? And, you know, how do you think about that part?

Blake M: So I've both read the book, watched the series, watched the movie of Theranos, know many of those investors. And I remember when that was going on, it was a group think. And by the way, they're all really smart people. And so, like I'll hear the conversation, well, XYZ firm is doing it, so we should just do it. And what's great about having the entire organization involved in these conversations, including our finance team, is like, you'll have somebody say, do you remember Theranos? Like we take these nuggets of great lessons that have happened. And we remind ourselves when we get into this groupthink, this herd mentality, this, you know, Had a partner that would call him a lemmings. If we all jump off the cliff, is everybody going off with him? And so it's how we check each other. This is why I think I'll come back to my conversation around great championships are won by great teams. And sometimes you have to have, like, I think about the run of the New England Patriots. Tom Brady can get what he gets, but without, you can go down the laundry list of great players on that team, he'd have just been a great quarterback. But I doubt he would have won six championships. So that's how we check each other, but it's hard. Yeah, it's super hard.

Lincoln: Hey guys, so if you want to learn more about investment funds, how they work, how they're structured, if you want to become a fund manager, how I became a fund manager, visit our YouTube channel for more free value. The link is in the show notes. Thank you. Well, I'd like to chat a little bit about fund economics for a second and how it plays into the velocity of money. So you think about like soft banks, right? They raised a hundred billion dollars and you know, retrospectively, the biggest problem there is that They were forced to write really large checks into companies that weren't worthy of that capital, right? They couldn't support those multiples. And so I feel like across industries, there's this conversation around these rising fund sizes and the ability to effectively deploy that. I'd like to hear your perspective on that and how you think about the fund economics there.

Blake M: Yeah. We talk about it all the time. I mean, our 7th fund was $370 million. So we're kind of staying pretty consistent right in that, you know, 3 or $400 million range. And that's by design because for our strategy, if we were to have a billion dollar fund or 2 billion or whatever, it changes how we think about it because we have to put X number of dollars into a company and that has a ripple through effect. So I think as an LP, you need to stop and say, okay, if what I'm seeking is, I'll call it alpha, well, you can go look at all the data out there. Alpha gets generated by smaller funds because to triple $300 million on a net basis, you only have to generate $10, $20 billion in outcomes. If you have a $3 billion, all of a sudden it becomes $100 billion or $200 billion. So, just it's harder to make the math work when you get those bigger funds. Now, there are different strategies. and it works for them. And so as an LP, I'd look at it and go, okay, I want exposure to that. I know what the returns are going to look like. I want exposure to this, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to allocate some dollars to, you know, the smaller funds, because that you can, you can look across the board. That's where the alpha gets generated because the fund economics are just easier to do that. Like, any single company can return our entire fund. You know, for us to make $300,000, $400,000 on an exit, when I say it's easy, I don't want people to think that it's easy, but you can do that. But if I have a $3 billion fund, to return your entire fund with one company, it just doesn't happen.

Lincoln: So you said that you reserve about 50% for follow-on. Are there scenarios or have there been chances or in your historical funds where like there wasn't a good spot to put that money and so you didn't actually end up calling all that capital or have you deployed 100% of all your funds or how do you think about that?

Blake M: Yeah, so our objective and goal is to invest 100% of committed capital all the time. We have the ability to go up to 120%, but structurally, it's 100% if we spill over that. And yeah, we've been over-reserved, and so we work with our LPAC to help us think strategically, and sometimes that's maybe taking more than 10% into our very best companies. But we will sit and look at the math, and the number of companies. And that's why I say, you know, sometimes we're in that 50 to 55%. And historically, that's what's worked for us. We've had funds where we have not deployed 100% of committed capital. And that has a negative effect on it as well. Because if you triple $100 million, but you've only invested, or $80 million and your fund size is 100, Well, that's 240 versus 300. So, all of those sorts of things. It's something that we discuss all the time and that's why having like our finance team in there as part of these conversations works for us. What's your fee structure? 2%. So, we're 2% through the first 5 years and then we do a step down after that. What's the step down based on? 10%. It says 10% all the way down. And that's a pretty typical. So our law firm, Cooley Godward is a great law firm. What we try to do is we pick what's market, what are the standard terms, and we just overlay into that. And so that's the pretty standard terms out there.

Lincoln: So through your acquisitions period, you're charging higher fees, and then it steps down, so your lift becomes lighter. Right. Are you charging any deal-related fees on top of that, like acquisition fees or anything like that? No.

Blake M: We don't do that. If there's a scenario where the partner who sits on the board receives either shares or compensation, those belong to the fund. So the partner will take them, we give them back to the fund, and then those flow through to our LPs. Gotcha. Yeah. Gotcha. It either flows through the LPs or it reduces the management fee. So there's an offset. We usually will just flow them through because we'll get like if… We don't do it very often because it's rarely, but if the company is doing it and the other investors are taking them, well, then we'll take them, but we'll give them to our LPs. Yeah.

Lincoln: Gotcha. Well, as we wrap up here, I got some more personal related questions here. Thanks for letting me dive into Pelly in a little bit and understand the dynamics there. What advice would you have for somebody that's just starting out, just getting into this?

Blake M: Find great mentors. Find people that are further down the path than you. Learn from their mistakes. This is not a, you know, I think people get into the fund management business with the idea that, you know, next year I'm going to be a multi-billionaire. It doesn't work that way. This is a, you know, I had one of my partners describe it as get rich slow. And I don't want people to focus on the fact that this is all about money and getting rich. I would say figure out what your North Star is. Learn from others. Figure out what abundance mentality means to you. What I love about this organization and these people is not only inside of Pellion, but in the greater ecosystem, sometimes we don't get everything we want when we fund a company. We don't get the ownership, we don't get this. But if you go at it with an abundance mentality, you're gonna be okay. And I learned that from, be it was Eric Schmidt or Jim Schwartz, the founder of Excel. I go down the list of these great investors and operators where, you know, if you're always winning and have to have somebody who's losing, you're not going to last very long. But if your mentality is, how can I help this win? And when I say this, meaning the conversation, the company, your co-investors, And it's coming back to, I had one of our young associates, it's the rising tide. And she actually posted something on LinkedIn and talked about that. And it was comforting to hear that because if your mentality is, I win, to win, somebody else has to lose. I just think you'll be short-lived in this business.

Lincoln: If you think about it from a zero-sum game. Yep. So you don't think venture capital, this isn't a zero-sum game?

Blake M: Not for us. Not for us. And that's intentional. The people who should win in this, the entrepreneurs and the limited partners. That's who should win. And so, if you're making decisions and you don't have those two groups in mind, then what are you doing? You know? I mean, we have pension fund as in pension fund money. And so, if you're a school teacher or a fireman or a police officer, I think about that all the time. You know, my now grandson's first grade teacher is an investor in us through the pension fund here in the city of Utah. And I think you should think about that.

Lincoln: It's a big responsibility. Yeah.

Blake M: You know, I'm very motivated to make sure my grandsons or for that matter, any other grandsons or granddaughters teacher is winning.

Lincoln: Yeah. No, it all goes back to being a just a good steward of capital. Yeah. Right. And I understand what that means. I love I love that you highlighted that. That's great. What habits do you have that have attributed to your success or maybe your firm success? Good habits.

Blake M: You know, as a kid growing up in a small town, you have to play every sport on the planet just to field enough players. So, you know, running and exercise was always a punishment. Well, my wife was a big exerciser. And so early in our marriage, I started exercising and I can tell how I act inside this firm, how I act towards entrepreneurs when I don't have that release valve. So for me, that has been really important because I'm able to go clear my head. I travel a lot and one of the funnest things for me to do is put on a pair of shoes and go for a five or six mile run. First of all, I've seen some amazing… Since you lived in Stockholm at a point in your life, I'd never been to Stockholm. I went there, I went for a run. I got lost, I ended up running nine miles, but it was the most amazing experience I had. It took me about two hours because I was stopping, I was taking pictures and just kind of navigating. So there's one habit that I have. The other habit is never make a decision when you're mad or when you have euphoria. Some of my worst decisions I've made in my life has been when I was upset about something and I make a decision. And then when I calm down, I'm like, oh, that was really dumb. Or I'm so excited about something. I make a decision. I'm like, oh, maybe I would have changed that. So constantly reminding myself. So from a habit standpoint, look, Audible's been great. I read a lot. Well, thanks to Audible, I read a lot. And, you know, I, I, I like to exercise. It keeps my head clear. You listen to Audible while exercising, while running? Actually, I watch movies while I'm running.

Lincoln: Really?

Blake M: That's how I watch Theranos. It was a five-mile run. I watched the whole thing on Theranos. No way. Yeah, so I have my iPad. I get on my treadmill or bike or whatever, kick on a movie. And there you go.

Lincoln: All right. Yeah. Good habits there. Yeah. Awesome. On the flip side of that, do you have any either personal or business pet peeves? You know, things that just drive you crazy that other people do sometimes you're like, come on, what are you doing?

Blake M: You know, I'll put it into the category of no one knows everything and everybody's imperfect. And when somebody comes across as they have an answer for everything, I'm like, come on, slow down, take a breath. We know full well that we live in an imperfect world. Being an entrepreneur, being a venture capitalist, you make tons and tons of mistakes. And so there's that. The other pet peeve I have is, and the team here laughs at me, being late. Like I grew up where being 10 minutes early was being late and that just was my dad. So the running joke is like if I'm traveling with somebody and they beat me to the lobby, they'll take pictures and we have a Pellion text thread and a text will go out, we beat Blake to the lobby. So being late is one of my pet peeves. The other one is follow up. I think that you owe somebody the respect to follow up in a timely fashion. I make that mistake all the time and don't do it, but those are a couple of my things. And I try to share that with the team here where being on time, following up, it doesn't take a lot. You don't have to go to medical school to do those two things. And then, you know, I have a hard time doing it, but you know, Kindness is a good thing. Sometimes hard kindness comes into play, but figure that out too.

Lincoln: Love it. Blake, thank you so much for your time today and sharing these words with emerging managers. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Blake M: Love what you're doing. I think this is amazing and there should be more people trying to fund great entrepreneurs. I love what you're doing. Thank you.

Lincoln: All information shared are the sole thoughts and opinions of the author. Do not take any information as legal or financial advice. You should seek a certified accountant and a professional legal team before taking any further action. We are not selling or soliciting a security in any way, shape or form. This content is for educational purposes only and is not to be construed as financial or legal advice. Clients of FundLaunch or Black Card Capital Partners may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.