Episode 74: Part-2: Building Chamaeleon, Investing in Start-ups, Decision Making Strategies, Analysing Decisions w/Nuno Goncalves
About Nuno Goncalves Pedro:
In the realm of innovation and strategy, few individuals embody the true spirit of transformation, possessing a unique blend of strategic prowess, unwavering determination, and a passion for creating lasting impact. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, the co-founder of Chamaeleon and Strive Capital, epitomises this rare breed of visionary leaders.
Welcome to the second part of our captivating series with the remarkable Nuno. In The One Percent Project episode, we continue our deep dive with him about carving a unique path in the venture capital landscape. In this second episode of the two-part series, he shares his insights and perspectives on building a venture capital fund, investing in start-ups, shedding light on his decision-making strategies and the meticulous analysis behind his investment decisions.
As we delve further into this conversation, Nuno reveals his favourite books, productivity tools, and the mechanisms he employs to analyse his decisions—part one with Nuno.
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Key takeaways:
While many resources and efforts are focused on post-investment value creation, the true value of venture capital lies in the initial stages of identifying and choosing the right companies, teams, and markets. Using technology can provide significant value-add and unique advantages in deal sourcing, due diligence, and portfolio management that could drive innovation and value creation in the asset class.
ChatGPT is a game-changer in bringing AI to the end consumer in a more natural and accessible way. It has made AI more consumer-grade. However, many more AI advancements are in the pipeline that could bring a broader AI revolution.
With demographic shifts, evolving consumer preferences, and advancements in AI, there is significant potential for investment and growth in consumer tech.
Understanding the market landscape, competitive dynamics, and potential for growth is crucial for making informed investment decisions. Even if entrepreneurs can succeed against challenging markets through pivoting, betting on such pivots is not a reliable strategy for investors. Market assessment, including understanding the total investment market and serviceable addressable market, is a fundamental aspect of due diligence and analysis that should be given more attention in the VC industry.
The way decisions are made and the structure of the discussions can significantly impact the quality of investment decisions. It is important to carefully consider factors such as decision-making processes, voting mechanisms, biases, and the inclusion of diverse perspectives within the decision-making forums.
It is okay to be imperfect. Imperfections can be distinctive and even appreciated by others. It reminds us to prioritise personal growth, cultivate humility and build meaningful relationships to sail through life.
Nuno’s productivity tools:
Superhuman
Google Calendar
Book Recommendations:
Non-fiction:
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't by Jim Collins.
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries.
The Hard Thing about Hard Thing: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz.
Fiction:
Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
In this conversation, he talks about:
00:00 Intro
01:32 Building Chamaeleon and decision framework of investing in start-ups.
07:18 Investing in consumer tech and the impact of AI.
11:13 What is his due diligence framework, and how do they analyse their decisions?
20:27 Three productivity tools
21:10 Three books
23:03 Advice to the younger self.
Transcript:
Pritish: Now, let's talk about Chamaeleon. It is a unique fund. You've obviously put a lot of your experience behind it, but at the same time, venture capital as an industry, specifically in Silicon Valley, is a very hard business to build a brand on and obviously get to the right deals at the right time. So, let's take a step back and tell us how you think about Chamaeleon and what are the unique value propositions of the investments that you make.
Nuno: So, let's start with a little bit more macro venture capital as an asset class. I've seen much innovation over the years in terms of branding, in terms of it was an industry that was very opaque, very stealthy. Brands were known by those that knew, but there wasn't much marketing. Then you started getting much marketing. So that was a big shift in the playbook, and I'm not even going back to pro-public-private partnerships, post-war, where the term carried interest actually comes from, which is from “carried interest.” So, ships and the owners of ships and those that were on ships that took a part of profits with, right? So, there were things that they were carrying they would take. So that's where the carried interest comes from. The big shift in terms of brand building that guy like Andre Noritz or firms like Andre Noritz upfront, most Marks sister and a few others have done, are clear changes in ships in the playbook. We've seen many ships in Playbook as many of these firms started building many assets under management in terms of shared services, value proposition, and help that they can give to their portfolio companies in a very institutionalised manner. Some firms have over a hundred people that are mostly doing shared services, that are doing market development, talent acquisition, and helping companies do a variety of things like selling, hiring, etc. But if you think about it, venture capital, really the value creation part of the equation, is around the picking. It's around the point of deal sourcing, due diligence, and deal-making, getting in the deal. I don't think many people would argue that most of the value is created there because the difference between a 0x and a 1x or 100x is very clearly there. It's about choosing the right company, the right team in the right market, and just writing it effectively. You can vouch for the company when it’s really right. I cannot be convinced that most of the value is created after investment. A VC firm can create a couple of points of value for the company: helping them with an exit, facilitating an exit, creating an opportunity for the company to go into the next route, helping the company restructure itself, and giving the company capital to restructure itself. Going times might be the difference between a 1x and a 3x or a 2x and a 5x, but it's not going to be a difference between 1x and a 100x. Just to be clear, I know some VCs have done some incubation in-house and done whatever, but VCs, strictly speaking, will not create that value post-investment. But that's where all the resources are going. And there's actually been very little innovation in picking. If you think about it, most of us, 95%, 99% probably even, invest in technology, yet we rarely use technology. We'll say we have these data sources, and we have CRMs and all this stuff. Don't do any technology in-house. And the reason for that, in my opinion, is that most VC firms have very few people. In the Bay Area, this is an old static; it’s probably higher now. 95% of obvious firms in the Bay Area had less than 10 people. This was a 2018 number. I would suspect it's higher because there are more micro funds now. So, we have very limited people, and therefore we don't have technology. We have deal teams, and we do the same stuff. We hustled, we did podcasts, we did thought leadership, we spoke at the universities, we went into our networks, we got scouts, we got advice. We do all this stuff, but why don't we use technology? Because it's difficult to use technology in early-stage venture capital generally and in venture capital overall because the date is very noisy. But because it's difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. Because it's difficult doesn't mean that it doesn't create much value added. So that's what we do at Chameleon. We have a quantum tech team, quantum quantitative, not quantum, and a technology team in-house that is larger than our deal team. And I'm very lucky and blessed to actually product manage them. And the product manages what we do. So, to be really the bridge between the deal team and the quantum tech team to make sure that we have a bunch of stuff around deal sourcing, due diligence, and portfolio management that not only makes us more fact-based but also makes our networks truly proprietary, the companies we're reaching out to is truly proprietary network more than any other proprietary network could see, make us be as unbiased as we can and makes us be fast and productive. That gains us great unique advantages over the market for obvious reasons, timing, reasons, etc. We have automation as well, which we use, so we use technology to the point where now people are like, maybe you should actually use part of your technology and spin it off at some point and do SaaS play out. Yeah, it is cool. We'll get there at some point. In the first instance, we use technology to make our lives easier and more productive to have really generally proprietary data. And then when we have all of this, with specific views on that, obviously not raw data, but specific views on this, we can anonymize data, we can share it with our portfolio companies, we can share it with our LPs. We can then share it with something else which we think is very unique about us, which is something we call ash-tech-in, which is our people augmentation layer. So, quantum tech augmentation, people augmentation, and augmentation are a network of incredible people, scouts, advisors, operators, and ex-CEOs of anything you can imagine. We really spend time with ourselves, spend time with our portfolio company, spend time with our LPs, and in that sense, we really see ourselves as ecosystem builders. We're really not gatekeepers. We're just the guys who facilitate an ecosystem that builds around us. Because, at the end of the day, our job is to create value for our investors. That's what we do as a venture capital firm, and the more we make this ecosystem bloom, our review is, the better the value that we're creating through our fund. That's as simple as that. So that's the part on the people's augmentation side. So, these two things are very contrarian. I have had arguments with VCs that I expect are exceptional, totally agree with me, or at least used to. Some of them are now starting to shift their minds a little bit, but this is the future. We're just ahead of it. This has to happen. This asset class needs to use more technologies. There's no other way.
Pritish: You focus on consumer tech. Do you see there is enough space, or is there, or has consumer tech potentially hit a glass ceiling, and a revolutionary technology or some evolution, maybe like ChatGPT, has to happen?
Nuno: Oh, there's so much space to invest in. There are two key things that are very obvious to us. At a very macro level, we are seeing two fundamental shifts in demographics. One is Gen Z, very different from millennials, and that by itself will create the need for services that clearly are not there yet or don't exist in some cases. And that will shift the taxonomy of things like social ups for grabs, part of gaming ups for grabs. We're talking about massive industries that are up for grabs or at least some level of disruption. I'm not saying Facebook's going to die, or Instagram's going to die, or whatever, but there are many differences, we saw it with TikTok. TikTok went from nowhere to being a social thing. Honestly, Gen Z, it wasn't millennial, it was not really, it wasn't Gen Xers for sure. So clearly, a taxonomic shift that we're going to observe with Gen Zers. Pulling the strings and understanding those blatant demand use cases and how they might be better served and best served is a whole thing that we're spending quite a lot of time on right now as a firm. We are also very interested in the other demographic shift that is really interesting to us, which is that of seniors we're having digitally, a very digitally educated senior, a demographic that is emergent or 65 and older, which is new in most countries for sure. And that changes the whole paradigm of how you serve seniors. Because it always used to be that the customer, the person who paid for the service, who set it up, maybe, wasn't the user. So, the elderly person was the user, but their children more, in many cases, the customer or whatever this is, this doesn't work, people didn't want to use certain services, whatever. It's going to disappear. It will also create the need for services that don't necessarily exist. So, I'm very bullish on consumers. So that's the macro-vision. The micro-vision is much simpler. There's always major innovation in consumers. It's like, when was the last time that we didn't see a big shift in consumers over periods of three or four years? Never. Since I was alive just watching it. I remember when we were talking about Fortnite, it was like, oh my God, an epic, and where did these guys come from? Obviously, they had been around for a while, but so where did they come from? We were talking about Snapchat and Snapchat that conquered the world, and then maybe it's not just Snapchat. There were other things happening, and then it was TikTok and Musically. And so, we are always seeing this shift because people do want to use different tools. And to your point, AI in the consumer realm is something we've been talking about for at least a decade and a half, and it's now coming to fruition. Not just ChatGPT, but you start using a lot more AI in anything you do, and at a certain point in time, it will be an underpinning. It's just there. There's stuff done in the backend, either machine learning or deep learning or something else, that really creates value for consumers.
Pritish: AI has been around for some time, but ChatGPT has made AI consumer-grade. It is actually coming to the end consumer in a much more natural and obvious way, rather than AI working in the background and people just making memes out of them.
Nuno: I mean, I agree. It's a game shifter. We're still to see a lot cooler stuff coming out, and there's going to be a real AI war, which is cool as well, and there will be much value to all of us consumers, not just consumers. So yeah, it's a fundamental shift. I don't disagree, but there's a lot more stuff happening. All this stuff now saying Google and Google's done, I'm like, yeah, not really, because if you are hard-pressed to say who has some of the best talents in the world, in all areas of artificial intelligence, you would say Google. And so, I can't really believe that they are out of the game and everyone else is in the game. There is a war happening clearly. The war's been panning out for the last decade or so. ChatGPT is amazing. It's very cool, but there are many things that are still to happen. I feel we're just at the beginning of that, of taking that first layer of the onions; we’re not there yet. We don't even understand what's going to happen, and we don't understand the implications either, which is a bit scary. Someone was posting about these conversations that they were having with Bing search and whatever, not on the big engine, falling in love with them and saying better than your wife type thing. So maybe we'll have ‘Her,’ the movie, sooner rather than later in real life. But anyway, we'll see.
Pritish: As you mentioned. Venture capital has much noise, but you need to do much research as well, and you have to make a number of key decisions. So, two aspects of that. One, how do you arrange facts? Because you're probably, do you read it in a much more structured manner when you're researching a company, or do you read anything that comes in that domain and then arrange those facts? And second, is, how do you look on, or how do you study your own decisions? Where do you analyse them? Do you understand them? What is the mechanism of analysing your decision framework?
Nuno: So, the first question, there's always been two extreme schools of thought in venture capital. One was probably best edified by Excel in the good old days. Excel is doing very well right now, just to be clear, meaning a couple of decades ago, which was a prepared mind logic of the world: market scanning top-down assessments of markets, what are the areas that don't quite work? And how should we invest in that? Right? What sort of place would we invest in if we saw them? So very prepared mind, top down. And then there was the other view of the world, which many would say is the benchmark view of the world, which is that startups are complex systems. They obviously act within markets that need to be assessed and evaluated, but they're very complex systems. And therefore, because they're a very complex system, they should be best assessed bottom up, and the decision should be made solely bottom up on the company. I would say we, as Chamaeleon, are probably a little bit closer to the benchmark school thought, but we don't get away with not doing the market scans and the market assessments and the top-down thing. So, we do both. And so, we come to our realization on a specific sub-industry in two ways. One is the top-down way, and the top-down way might be a market scan, might be late in-demand research, ethnographic studies, or something that we do in partnership with someone else. Comes from our engine because we have a lot of data that comes from our engine that is top-down assessment and that educates us on that space or in that subspace. The bottom-up analysis also informs us that when we look at a startup, we don't only look at a startup; we look at their industry, we look at their competitors. Again, we have a lot of quantum tech data on the company and its competitors. Again, we have a lot of very specific microdata on them. Retention, engagement data, if it's a SaaS company, anything on their core metrics. So, we look a lot at that, and in some cases, these worlds collide, which is okay. We start doing a bottom-up assessment on a company, and something magic, by the way, happens, I don't know. I don't think it's our engine for sure, but something magic happens, and it's happened to me in venture capital for the last 12 years. I've been doing this for 12 years, so almost 13 now, which is when you're talking to a company in a specific space, the odds that you're going to talk to two or three more companies in that specific space within a space of a couple of weeks is very high. It's like magic. It's like you're talking to one company, and all of a sudden, you're seeing two or three in the same space or around the same space or adjacencies. And so, that allows you to actually, at some point, say, you know what? We should understand this market better. So, we're doing bottom-up assessments, three or four companies, but we should look at the market top-down and let's do that exercise. And sometimes we make those decisions. Sometimes it's because we are interested in a specific space, and we go and do it. Top-down sometimes, it's because we saw companies in that space. Even when we want to do a top-down as well, any case in the decision will be made by the company, but we will spend much time on the market assessment. Just one last note. This is a pet peeve. I'm a relatively positive person, but there's one pet peeve that I have with early-stage VC in general. There's this systemic message being passed to the market that in the early stage, we invest based on the team and the people and whatever. Of course, we do and spent much time looking at the team. Actually, we spend much time looking at the team, and we go beyond that. We do background checks, and we do much referencing. We work with the team on the ground sometimes, and we do a variety of other things that are interesting that I won't go into detail on, but that shouldn't be it. And it's very obvious if you think about it. But most people, for some reason, either don't do it or they don't talk about doing it. In many cases, the former, rather than the latter, is, for example, market assessment. If you're talking to a company, say, pre-seed or even a seed, and it is pre-launched, okay, they might have a beta trial. Why wouldn't you look at their beta trial information? Oh, but it's not representative. Why isn't it representative? The retention engagement numbers could be actually interesting to look at. Even if they don't have much traction, it's private, it's fine. Why wouldn't you look at the market? This is my biggest pet peeve: the market. Oh, no, that's not worthwhile. Not worthwhile. Why? Do you know entrepreneurs that even if great entrepreneurs win against crappy markets, I don't, I know great entrepreneurs that go against crappy markets that pivot like hell and end up with amazing companies? I know a few, I don't know any great entrepreneurs that go against bad markets and win. That I don't know. You bet on a pivot. If you make an investment decision, you can't bet on that. So, honestly, market assessment is a basic thing. If you don't understand a market, if you don't have an understanding of the competitive landscape beyond just the entrepreneur and the company you're talking to, if this is a really large market, like basic stuff, tam some, right? So total investment market, serviceable, addressable market, the share of the market. If you don't have a clue of those numbers at all, directionally, and this is directional, you will never know the exact numbers or be able to estimate them, but if you as a VC firm don't have that, how can you invest? You don't have a clue if that's a good market or not. You know, we've seen this over and over again because then VCs become lemmings. Everyone goes into that space. Okay, there's someone investing in that space. We are all going to invest in that space. And at some point, someone's like, why did everyone invest in that space? Oh, because that other guy had started it. And if you go back to the origin sometimes of the decision, it sometimes had nothing to do with the market or with a trend. It had to do with the fact that they love the company, then they invest in that company. That was cool. And then all the other people that came, oh, there's a market trend maybe there. Really? So again, market assessment is my pet peeve. I don't know why people don't do it. Seriously. We feel there should be a lot more of it done, even with limited resources. And it's that little part of going the extra mile on due diligence, going the extra mile on analysis.
Pritish: What about decision-making?
Nuno: Decision-making is one of the single most important things in venture capital. How do you make decisions? And it is probably the most nuanced piece of our venture capital that people don't really understand. Everyone thinks about VCs as, oh, they have knowledge, or they have experience and expertise, or they can bring value to the table, or all of that stuff. But if the VC firm for a specific fund can't make good decisions in a good way, that is just problematic. So, there are a couple of angles to it. There's the actual investment committee, the structure under which the decision on a specific investment is made. How does that work? Is it majority-led? Is it by unanimity? Do you allow any partner to make an investment at a certain level? How do you structure that? And there has to be much thinking around that. And that thinking needs to include the partners in the sense that you need to understand the different partners you have at the table and how they interact with that. That can create or destroy much value because the key decisions around investing and liquidation of the company are all there. They're all in the investment case. So how that operates, how the dynamics of that group operates? Do they meet every week? Do they meet every month? Does that flow through from the partner meeting? How the partner meetings then operate is the second thing. Partner meetings that normally weekly depend on the firm. How do you run them? How do you listen to your associates? How do you make decisions to move a deal forward or not? Simple things you're like, oh, that's simple. No, not simple at all. What's your skew? Is your skew towards negativity? You kill all the deals. Is there a louder voice in the room? Is there a partner, a managing partner that has a louder voice than everyone else, that kills everything and only proves the stuff that he or she likes? How to un-bias is really critical. And then, to your point in your question, how do you evaluate those decisions through time? Do you go back to them? Do you go back to, okay, we missed that one. We shouldn't invest in them, or we should invest in this company, and it was crap. Why did we invest in them? What were the mistakes that we made or invested in this company? They were great. I actually find this last case is actually some of the most telling cases and probably where there's the least insight. The insight is actually very deep. Like people are, of course, we invested in that company. Well, we invested in Airbnb because of so and so reasons. And if you go back and really go deep dive into a post-mortem or the analysis of how that decision was made in the firm, you would uncover much more interesting and salient points of how the decision was made. And the salient points were around dynamics, for example, dynamics between partners, what one partner was pushing or an associate was, and how they pushed it. So, we spent a lot of time with that. We describe everything. We log everything. Our investment memos are very thorough not only in terms of analysis but also in terms of decisions and who's voting for what, and the assessment of each of the partners on specific areas of the deal, not just the deal itself. We revisit them over time. Obviously, this last fund is relatively unfunded, so our revisiting process is still evolving, but we've done it in previous funds, and that revisiting piece is a piece that is complex. So okay, we bring it to the table, and who facilitates the process? Who has the discussion on postmortem? Who comes back, and it's all about not being personal? It's all about, okay, this is what happened. This is how we processed it; what are the nuggets here? What we would've done differently. And these feedback loops that we hit on are, should be regular. They should be part of our instinctive ability to look at it. And in some ways, we revert them back to our quantitative and technology engine. That then becomes a requirement. That then becomes like, okay, we saw biases on this stuff, or we looked at this deal, we had the first call with this company, it was crap, and these are the reasons why they were crap. And then we go back and, like, why was the company then had a relatively high score on this when we think they were crap on it? Was the engine wrong? Were we wrong? Was the engine seeing something different than we're seeing? And that is something that we do on a weekly basis. So that's like even more systemic than anything on decision-making. You have to reevaluate your process to be good at this thing all the time. And there can be no ego. We all have egos. Unfortunately, I have a very big ego. My partners do have hopefully smaller egos than me, but we have to take our ego and leave it there and go and have the discussion. And I would finalise with something Kate Mitchell said, and I'm probably paraphrasing here, but hopefully not totally incorrect. Kate Mitchell was the founder of Scale Venture Partners, Bank of America before that, the corporate VC there, and then it spun off. She was the first woman who was the chairperson for NVCA, the National Venture Capital Association in the U.S., And she was saying she met Arthur Rock very early in her career in venture capital. And she asked them something to sort of, when did you know that you had made it or that you were a good VC? Arthur Rock had invested in Apple and other stuff. So, one of the first big guides, well-known guides, and he said something to the sort of, “It took me 25 years,” and she was like, “Wow, 25 years is a long time.” I forget to know that you're good at something. And she was like, how did you know? And it's, I don't, 25 years next year. I'm 24 years doing this. And that's the epitome of venture capital. We're always learning; our life cycle and our cycles of feedback are decades in the making. And then we deal with stuff every day. Entrepreneurs that have problems and need to fire someone, or they're not very competent, or they're doing whatever, and you have to deal with stuff all the time where a market almost died because Apple just launched that feature. But our cycles of renewal are normally 10 years plus one because they're funding. So, it's really tough. You're only as good as your last fund. You're only as good as your last investment. Some say I'm, that's probably an exaggeration, but that is, that's it. That's why this profession, to your point, is extremely competitive. It is a difficult profession, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Pritish: Three productivity tools that you use.
Nuno: Oh, three productivity tools that I use. I use our engine all the time, so that's one of ours. Some are actually competitive things. So, all our engines, and we have a front-end overlay and all that stuff. I use it all the time. So that's clearly my number one productivity tool. Going to stuff that people can get out of the market, I would say Superhuman. I was against it for a long time. I didn't see the point in it for a long time. It's still overpriced. I hope the founder listens to this still. It's overpriced, and it's only on iOS on mobile, which pisses me off. But I use it, and it changed the way I do emails, and I was very disciplined at emailing, but it just changed the way I do emails. And email still, for me, is a huge piece of what I do—a third productivity tool. I actually had an episode where we talked, Berger and I talked about productivity tools on Tech Decipher. The people should look and listen to that to have a better answer or a more prepared answer than that. I'm a ridiculous calendarer, so I put everything on my calendar. And I use Gmail, all the calendars, we have Google apps for all this stuff. So, I can use Gmail with all my calendars, and I manage it from there. This feels like a Gen X, or I'm actually a Genennial. I'm between Gen X and Millennial. This feels like a Gen Xer telling you a productivity code nobody's ever found, but I use it in a process way, process-wise, so I don't have, for example, a to-do list. Everything is on my calendar, so I'm very aggressive at managing it, and I get a lot out of it.
Pritish:Three books that you would recommend to anyone and everyone.
Nuno: I would say ‘From Good to Great' was a book that changed me a lot. It's more of a big corporation game book, but it really distils well through analysis, a relatively serious analysis from what we can tell that Jim did on what makes good companies over time become great, which is very difficult, particularly for larger companies. So, the elephants are made to dance, in effect. I've made it sure in my career. I'm very lucky. But that book is exceptional. The chapter on leadership alone, you should just read it. Maybe the second book, I would say ‘The Lean Startup’, is a must-read book. I don't agree with everything that Eric writes. I've met him a couple of times. The book is a very good way of describing what makes a startup a startup in today's world, where the cost base comes down, where you need to be more iterative, where you need to try hitting different product market share, etc. So pretty classic. It's not a very obscure book to recommend at this stage. ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things,’ Ben Horowitz, again, I don't agree with Ben on everything, but certainly, it's a wonderful book about entrepreneurship where you get the pain of being an entrepreneur. We've had a fad in entrepreneurship where there are many tourist entrepreneurs now, people that maybe are doing it for the wrong reasons because they think it's cool and they can be in magazines and stuff. I know it's probably a very small portion of entrepreneurship, but it still exists, and that book explains really well why that's not at all the case. On the fictional side, I have a bunch of things I really love that have marked me quite a lot. One that keeps coming back to my mind, and I need to reread it, is Ben Okri’s ‘Astonishing the Gods,’ which won the Booker Prize many moons back. And it's a book that I love. ‘The God of Small Things,’ by Arundhati Roy. There are a couple of books in fiction. In some ways, I like nonfiction stuff, but there's much stuff that I've read over the years that changed my life or how I looked at things. From ‘Cloud to Code’ was an old book I read in college that changed my view on engineering and how engineering teams should work. So, there's a lot of really cool stuff out there. I'm a contrarian, though, so I read books, and then I'm like, I just read these three things. And actually, I don't know if that's the right thing for someone else, but when I ask someone on the team, like, why are you saying that? They say I read it. I was like, cool, but why? So, there was a little bit of that. There's a little bit of, okay, cool. You read someone who's an amazing writer and has thought deeply about this, but what's the insight? What's the next level? That's what I normally take with books.
Pritish: What advice will you give your younger self?
Nuno: I would say two or three things. One, to enjoy life more. In some ways, I've always been very driven, and I've had my ups and downs with my religion and spirituality, which I now feel is getting better with age. I probably would've done more of that, so that would be my second lesson learned. Spend more time with, in, in my case, as I said, I'm Catholic, so I'll put in the, I'll put in the pitch, spend more time with God and praying. Thirdly, don't sweat the small stuff; let stuff go. I've gotten much better with age. But don't sweat the small stuff. I would fight many battles when I was younger. That didn’t make a huge difference. And in some ways, they were driven by pride. They're driven by, okay, I'm, I need to be the smartest guy in the room. The final thing I would say is that almost anyone that goes into some business wants to be the smartest guy or gal in the room. At some point, we want to be the intelligent person that everyone comes to or the expert. It doesn't really matter what I've learned over the years. It's the ability to influence people, to work with people, to make people better, for example, that matters a ton more than being right about everything and being the smartest guy in the room. With age, I'm more and more in rooms where I'm definitely not the smartest guy in the room, and I'm there to listen, which I'm still working on. I'm, as anyone on the team can tell you, I'm not. The absolute best listener around for sure of the partnership. So, I'm working on it, and that would be the last thing I would tell my younger self. You'll always be learning and improving. You'll always be flawed. It's fine. You'll never be perfect. It's fine. We have to, in some ways, at some point, share some of our imperfections as well. I've learned over the years that some of my imperfections have become things that are very distinctive about me, that people actually like about my imperfections.
Pritish: Brilliant, Nuno! That is a great place to close this conversation. Thanks for being on the show.
Nuno: Thank you.
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