Jed Ng: Oil & Gas to Angel School, Syndicate Conflict vs. Trust & Scaling Investing - E225

Jed is the Founder of AngelSchool.vc: the only program helping Angel investors build & grow syndicates. He is an active angel investor who has backed 2 seed stage startups to unicorn status. His syndicate is backed by 1000 LPs. As an operator, he built & ran the world's largest API Marketplace with a16z backed RapidAPI.

Jeremy Au: (00:29)
Hello, Jed, really excited to have you on the show. You are someone who is leading angels and syndicate formation across Southeast Asia, and the world. So I'm really interested to hear your story. Could you introduce yourself real quickly?
 
Jed: (00:46)
Thanks for having me on, Jeremy. So quick background. I'm basically an operator. The last venture I built was an API marketplace, it turned out to be the world's largest API marketplace, through a deal I did with a startup called Rapid API back around 2016. They're an A16z backed company and a unicorn today. I'm also an angel investor. And I built my own syndicate over the last couple of years. Today on backed by 1000 LPs, we're actually crossing that four figure mark at the end of this year. And I focused my time today also on Angel school.vc, which is a program that I develop and teach to other angels to help them build and scale syndicates, so that they can deploy capital and invest at scale.
 
Jeremy Au: (01:34)
Amazing. So let's start from the beginning. You started out in Southeast Asia oil and gas before you became an operator, an investor. So how did that happen?
 
Jed: (01:40)
So long story short, I split half of my life in Singapore, and the other half of it studying and working around the world, after undergrad I did oil and gas, around Singapore and Malaysia, operating around Asia, and basically was desperately bored. That's the reality. I realized as a young 20, I really wasn't like learning anything, wasn't really being challenged. And that felt extremely uncomfortable to me. And also, I had this longer term view that, you know, in our lifetimes, at least, oil and gas or, fossil fuels is going to be a declining sector. It's a sunset sector, and it didn't make sense to stay there for the next 30, 40 years, whatever. And so, I took it upon myself to make a change. And that change initially involve, I want to go into tech and the pathway there for me was, go back to grad school and go figure that out. So I went back to do my MBA at INSEAD. And after that, basically made a series of hops into tech, which led me to investing and building my syndicate and etc.
 
Jeremy Au: (02:48)
And how did you transition from oil and gas to tech, because that's also a jump in itself?
 
Jed: (02:53)
With great difficulty is the answer. The more nuanced answer is that it happens in a series of steps. For me, going back to grad school, getting my MBA, a reputable school like INSEAD, I guess it opens up pathways, creates opportunities. That's not to say, you get a handout, and you can just pick and choose any opportunity in the world. But it gives you a fighting chance to find a new role in a new sector, a new country, a new function. And that's basically what I did. So I started doing corporate strategy with large global MNCs, and then fell into corporate entrepreneurship, basically helping Ericsson build a new business line, after that got a job, doing effectively the same thing in a more tech based company, and that basically was doing corporate entrepreneurship in tech. And then after that, that was a much more natural, like segue to understand tech and then get into angel investing.
 
Jeremy Au: (03:51)
So what was that transition between oil and gas to tech? What were some things that you had to unlearn in order to get there?
 
Jed: (03:59)
I don't know that there was a lot to unlearn as much as there was to completely reinvent everything that you know. Just relearn something else. I was trying to do a lot of ambitious things at the same time, basically making three changes at the same time. And so there was a lot, putting yourself out there and getting a lot of rejections, which is extremely difficult. And I think you're definitely like questioning yourself and start thinking well, is this the right step? Will it work out? What happens if you run out of money, all that sort of thing, but persevered and eventually it worked itself out? In the end, it was about focusing and keeping some things constant and then minimizing the number of changes. So for me, it was like, I can spin a story around, strategy. And then it was a matter of navigating, a new industry and like geography.
 
Jeremy Au: (05:02)
It is crazy to see how you move from drilling holes around. Trying to find that lucky goldmine. I think that obviously you're an operator as well, like you change geography, you change role and you change industry as well. And then eventually you went on to explore investing or Angel investing, could you share more about how that happened?
 
Jed: (05:28)
I was in a place where things were stable for me. I was putting aside liquidity, debts were paid off. I had the interest, I had the passion, the risk appetite for investing in startups, it was always something I was very interested in, and I was willing to put my capital at risk. It's as simple as that. And from there, you plow on like a journeyman, like most of us do. You think about the path of most angels, who don't have the opportunity to work professionally in VC or investing role, everyone's figuring it out. So I fundamentally believe it's a solvable problem. It's about building networks, learning from the wisdom of other people who have come before you. And when you think about it, we're super fortunate. We're living in a time where knowledge, information, the infrastructure, and ecosystems are so much better than what it was 20 years ago. And so we're basically benefiting from whatever everybody else has done before. And like the generosity and wisdom of other people in the ecosystem, which has been fantastic.
 
Jeremy Au: (06:36)
So what mistakes did you make as an angel investor, because everybody does, its such a weird skill set, it is such a weird role. And it's such a weird time to be an angel investor. So you got to have made some mistakes in the early days. What were they?
 
Jed: (06:50)
Probably like getting too excited about the idea. I think, that's always like the sexy headline, a big attention grabber. And you see somebody come up with this great idea. And it sounds so crazy, interesting. And you fall in love with that. And you put on the blinders or I did put on the blinders. And then I look past things that now say like, this is why I have a checklist for this. I should do that. I should look for this. The simple mistakes. My answer would be falling in love with the vision or like a really charismatic founder. Because those things can work for you and against you.
 
Jeremy Au: (07:25)
So what should you look for instead? So it's not the sexy idea. Is that the founder? Or is it a team? You starting to hint that the things that you shouldn't do, so say what that is?
 
Jed: (07:43)
So I don't want to give a canned answer. But the simple answer to solving this is to look holistically at every deal that comes across our desk. So what does that mean? Actually, we force ourselves to look at a company in a different aspects of it. All the way from the business, to the economics, to the market, to the team, valuation, all of these things. So we've got like written frameworks, this investment discipline that we put ourselves through when we're evaluating the deal. The other thing that I found has been really helpful is that I forced myself to articulate why I think this is an interesting company in a very simple like two pager document, just bullet points. Why this makes sense in terms of business, why believe in the founders, etc. And then I basically shared with other investors in my network. People who work with me and say, here's my thing, read that, park all the signals. Don't meet the founder, don't get charm. Just look at this. And tell me am I like crazy or not? Or does this sound interesting to you? And I think tapping into the collective wisdom of other investors who don't have a vested interest in, don't just like poke holes is a great way to keep yourself honest.
 
Jeremy Au: (08:56)
What's the most biting feedback you've ever got?
 
Jed: (09:00)
It's a good question. I don't know. I haven't got hit with anything that was like so stark, that left a mark on me. I do know that. My bias is like, when I get into a deal, I get super excited. I want to convince myself that's like the bias I have. So most often the feedback that hits is when somebody's like, Well, I'm not as excited about it. And I tell you why. And that's always good. Because it's a good check and balance against your own internal mental models.
 
Jeremy Au: (09:39)
What's interesting, of course, is that you're learning as an angel investor, and then you're learning about what to do, what not to do. And then now you want to help other angels do syndicates. I feel like you're ascending the hierarchy in that sense, from Malaysia oil and gas to tech through helping other angels. So what's going on there? What did you see was going right, going wrong with other angels? They said, I want to build.
 
Jed: (10:09)
So all of this has been an evolution, i am not an impulsive person by nature, I like to be quite deliberate about how I operate. And I need to believe in this myself. Otherwise, I can't sell the idea. I'm just not one of those people. So when I started out angel investing in 2016, 17, I was investing into seed stage companies in the US, it was b2b software, it's just what I knew, planted a few checks. And I did okay, 2018, I got my first exit. I invested early on in a company called tearing.com. And that company has done very well, they're a unicorn and in the position that I'm in probably is going to be 100 or 200 multiplier. And there were these data points that suggested, I'm not saying that it says I'm a great investor, they suggested that I'm not completely garbage, which gave me the confidence to take the next step, which for me was, okay, go build a syndicate because you can scale up on capital, you can get into better deal flow, you do better diligence. And of course, you want to charge carry and capture some of the upside, worked on this and figure it out for a couple of years. Two and a half years, and somehow cracked this puzzle. Just through my own methodology, my own way of working, the indicator for me was like, okay, I managed to convince literally 1000 people to be part of my mailing list. And when I send out my deal newsletter, I get a 65% open rate and a 6% click rate even today. And as we grew the network, the cheque sizes that we wrote, just grew, there's a direct relationship, not necessarily directly proportional, but there is a correlation. Immediately, I was able to write six figure checks, it grew that over time to what we write today, maybe between half a million and a million dollars. And most of this, it was a side hustle, I was writing quarter million dollar cheaques on the weekend, in this company that I thought was interesting, and that other angel investors saw and they were willing to back, again, that's a pretty good set of data points that this methodology, how I was approaching, this was working. And the real insight on this, Jeremy is that if you think about syndicates as a source of capital, they sit in this vital function between independent angels, friend and family, capital, and VC rounds, because he talking about six figure cheque sizes, that provide meaningful capital and hopefully get these companies to a VC round. My best estimate, they move 10s of billions of dollars a year, at least $10 billion a year in the US alone, let alone around the world. And yet, in the education space, there is no framework thinking around doing this, which is absurd to me. So think about it, every single Angel out there with a syndicate, every single one of them has had to go out and reinvent the wheel. So logically speaking, if you accept that argument, it means that this market is artificially constrained. Because of this underlying infrastructure of how to do this the right way, actually it doesn't really exist. And that was the impetus for Angel school. We create this methodology based on my own experience, I teach it to other angels, because I want angels around the world to be successful in moving capital to startups in a more efficient way. So that well, as a startup founder, you're not hunting around for five or 10k cheques. Work with a few groups, who can write you six figure cheques and make your life easier. It's a way of moving that capital to the right place. It's also a way of these different angels, fulfilling whatever investment thesis that they have. Because I invest in my little corner of the world, which means there's a lot of different companies that I can't help but it doesn't mean that somebody else couldn't, because I say there's a lot. I don't think the problem in venture today is a lack of capital, there's plenty of capital, what we need is actually market makers to get over like these frictions.
 
Jeremy Au: (14:16)
So what is wrong with Angel investing today?
 
Jed: (14:21)
I don't think there's anything wrong with Angel investing today. I think that it is an extremely inefficient process, or it takes a lot of time and effort to do angel investing well. Very often, much more time and effort than most people have. Because people who are angel investors, they have labor income, they have some capital, they're willing to risk and they want to do this, but the hard part is, go find all these companies, and then screen all of them and then go make your picks. And you do all of this to deploy a 10 or 20k cheque, whatever that number is. Not to scalable, so in the same way I see that syndicates also do a service to independent angels in making that market. You get curated deal flow, presumably, if the syndicate lead knows what they're doing, they have these economies of scale on deal sourcing, they have better quality diligence and curation. And they package up all this information to the right way. So you can look at it in a much more efficient manner and just decide, if you want to pull the trigger. In exchange, you pay some amount of carry or fees or whatever. But they've got to decide if that's worth it, I generally think it's worth it. I personally, would pay 20% care if somebody got me into a really hot deal that, I couldn't get access to. I think it's a fair trade.
 
Jeremy Au: (15:47)
There's always that debate. So what is the function of the syndicate leader, the angel that brings all the other angels? So does that inherent tension about what you just said, which is angels write down chequss by that time compressed, syndicate leaders can bring them deals, but then you have to pay them something? So there’s that tension all the time. So how do you see the healthy way of showing this or the optimal approach?
 
Jed: (16:10)
Tension actually goes more beyond that. It's more than the trade off of the economics, because if you think about different groups that are aggregating, deal flow in providing that, I think the level of engagement is drastically different. Which, honestly, is a hot mess on AngelList, for example, or even a lot of the equity crowdfunding platforms, it's very much, here's a pitch deck, here's a minimum cheque, you're in or you're out. And then the natural inclination for the syndicate lead is to bombard them with deals. Because your goal is to make the market, just move as much capital, you're basically buying options with other people's liquidity, which, philosophically, I'm against. My view, maybe it's not very scalable. But I guess from a first principles basis, I fundamentally believe in this, if you are going to be a syndicate and you're going to charge, you need to step up your game and really deliver value. And for me value is a few things. One is, you should be seeing deal flow at scale, you should be performing a higher level of diligence than individual angels could do themselves, you should be packaging up all this information into a format that makes it easy for individual angels to decide. The other level of addressing that tension, is alignment with the individual angels, or LPs, the model that we operate on, it's minimal fees, 20% carry, why? The fees are pretty much a cost pass through and it helps me keeps the lights on. But I play for 20% Carry, because it aligns me with my investors. So I want to find deals, and be very purposeful about hopefully finding winners that return them a profit, because then I get a share of it. So that's my way. One is the actual standards of work that you do. And the other part of it is structural alignment, in terms of incentives.
 
Jeremy Au: (18:17)
Anyway, you said it was really interesting, which is that there's a fundamental conflict of interest to some extent, where the syndicate leaders obviously have to provide additional value otherwise, angels don't under them. Yet they are also incentivized to do multiple deals, because it creates more options. So what's the optimal approach? How do we break past that paradigm? Because even with management fees, obviously, that's an issue for VCs right now, they get a scale to get make more money from management fees than actual carry, in many ways. But how do you see that? How do you solve it?
 
Jed: (18:50)
A lot of the lens that we look at running or Syndicate is, I fundamentally believe that the currency we operate in as running a syndicate is in the trust with investors. If you have the trust with investors, capital follows right, that part I'm not worried about. Trust for me means I sent out a deal newsletter, I have a high probability that somebody is actually going to read my email and pay attention to a deal and not send it to the spam folder, they will see my deal flow and they will give it the time of day and consideration and decide if they would actually be part of the deal or not. That's what matters to me. And so if you think about things from that lens, trust as a currency, it disincentivizes me from bombarding them with deal flow, because it then seems like I'm throwing paint against the wall and seeing what sticks. And so, it pushes me towards doing fewer deals, but of course, not so few that I seem inactive. What The optimal number? I really can say our target run rate is 6 to 10 deals a year, roughly so relatively low volume.
 
Jeremy Au: (20:10)
What would you say are some myths or misconceptions about angels who want to become syndicate leaders?
 
Jed: (20:16)
The misconception is that most angels who want to get to that level, they look at three things. They have three questions that they're looking to address. One is where do I find LPs, like, how do i find the source of capital? Second, how do I find deal flow? And then the third one is, how do I move capital? And those are important questions, you need to have answers for those. But really, there are a lot of non obvious things that people don't even realize. And I didn't even realize this when I started. I've just learned a lot about this vehicle over the last two years. They don't realize it exists. And so they get into a setup where it's not viable. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One is, I meet somebody, he's an angel, pretty far in his journey. He's done one or two syndicates of his own, with friends and family and great, awesome, it shows that you have the ability to access a network and compel capital. And that's something and I talk about, what we do at Angel school? And they'll go like, well, I'm too far along, and they might certainly be. But in that situation, one of the mistakes I've seen is that the angels, these early syndicators, they think they have access to capital and they stop there. But if you keep working with the same pool of capital, you're going to like dry out the well. Obviously, that's a problem because you run out of capital, then you can’t invest. The other one is, the other scenario is that you're really successful at this, you're hell of a Salesman, you're a hell of a networker, you can just grow this, then the consequent challenge is you get stuck in OPS, and managing the LP network, because you don't have a very sophisticated, scalable way of doing things. So it's like, Okay, as you grow, there's this big giant distraction of managing LPs, and doing things like sharing deal flow and WhatsApp, Telegram or Slack channels, instead of having like proper data rooms, or to compel a capital, you need to talk to LPS one by one, which at scale just doesn't work. It's both the fundamental layer, thinking below the surface, and then also thinking long term, so how do you manage at scale and still stay investing. Which is what we should be focused on?
 
Jeremy Au: (22:36)
So is the fate of every angel syndicate to become a fund?
 
Jed: (22:40)
That's an interesting question. I think the common wisdom is definitely in the VC space, or in venture space, we will say, well, there's this glamour around being a fund manager and like, GP, versus having a syndicate and I get it, there are advantages to having a ready pool of dry powder. But there are also advantages, specifically economic advantages of the syndicate model. So my point is, it's the advantages and disadvantages of both sides. It's about understanding the nuances and just playing where it suits you, put this in context, a lot of emerging fund managers, which is a nice way of saying, first time fund managers, you go out, raise a fund, $5 million, $10 million. It sounds like a lot of money. But really, at that scale, you are subsidizing the model. You're absorbing risk, you're writing relatively small cheques, 100, 200k cheques, maybe, whereas with my Syndicate, I can punch way beyond that. But at the same time, this is an interesting point, I don't know if this is the right forum to discuss it. I think that there are some interesting hybrid strategies or investment strategies that only work when you've got a syndicate and a fun operating in parallel. I'm organizing that in my head these days and thinking about it. Like, how do you find alpha if you have both of these in vehicles? Because for most people, it's a year one path or the other? Very rarely both. So if you do that, and, what is the asymmetric advantage you have here?
 
Jeremy Au: (24:16)
I'm all ears for the word hybrid. And you're figuring it out, and I'm sure someone else is listening in. You got to spill, I don't think you've been answered. But what is it that you're puzzling out? Because you're seeing the economic advantages of the syndicate leader versus the fund manager, or doing both with a symmetrical approach. So how do you see that playing out?
 
Jed: (24:44)
So I'll give some stuff by giving some context. I'll say that everything that I structure and design through, what I do is about super scaling, the investing die do. I have no ambitions to be a teacher. I teach Angel school to share the knowledge to help other angel as investors. But it also helps me because it helps me super scale my network, access, reach all of these things. As an example, when I teach the angel school program, it's eight weeks, two hours live sessions, I teach it myself. And the other part of the proposition is that after you graduate, we invite all the angels to come sit on my investment committee. The idea for them is, you've learned the academics with me, now I provide this IC Forum, which becomes this live sandbox for you to work on real deal flow, build your track record with me in a safe space, you get a say in which deals that I ultimately syndicate and invest in. And I even share carried interest with the team. So it's almost like an on ramp for them learn to program, get hands on and then go build your syndicate when you're ready. And when you think another way of thinking about the IC structure is that this is a way for me to build a super network. Because I'm not operating like a vanilla syndicate. Some guy side hustle doing this on the weekend or whatever, I basically have an extended team of literally 10 people on a weekly basis, same playbook, same song sheet, helping me screen deals, find the right founders in work on diligence, and we all benefit from this together. So it becomes a scaling lever for me. So the next phase of this is when I think about having a fund vehicle on top. Why would it make sense? I think there is investment strategies that work. Because about venture what we do, you got pre-seed ABC, that every fund or investor chooses where to play, and you can add most span to the three stages. And, that's it. This is where your capital is, where you can like swing your bat. Now, when you have both vehicles, what if we can benefit where both structures can benefit, as an example, you think about hustle funds model, $10 million dollar fund, they swing 50k cheque on the early pre seed, basically, under indexing on those early risky bets, you have a longer relationship with the portfolio companies. And then you choose to double down, later on. But what if that period of prolonging that relationship and picking our time to play is we can fulfill that using the Syndicate. The syndicate might do pre seed/early seed bets. And then depending on how the startup evolves, like if they do okay, maybe we just follow on and then they reach an A or B round, they do really well. Now, fun goes in with like dry powder, and doubles down on the position. Because in a typical VC fund, the math tells us as a broad average, not everybody, but the broad average 50% of capital returns goes into a portfolio that returns less than 1x. Basically, you're losing money on that. But what if you could, like de-risked and reduce that amount that typically goes into companies that don't work out and save that capital and actually put it into the companies that do work out. And I might be able to do this because I have a syndicate and I have a prior relationship and pipeline in positions, which the fund can take advantage of later. That's one idea.
 
Jeremy Au: (28:27)
I think that makes a lot of sense. Because what you're saying is that, syndicate obviously just still performs the way they would normally do. And then it doesn't conflict the fund, because the fund is one stage down the road. So it doesn't conflict, there's no conflict of interest.
 
Jed: (28:41)
The advantage can work the other way around as well. Because we also do an investment strategy where it's fun does super small, earlier stage cheques, the 50 to 200k, let's call it 75k average, something that's way lower than the average, let's say $50 million funding for a first ticket that buys the option. And then if the company does well, fun can go in, but then you can double down with the syndicate as well, in which case, the fund has created the option for syndicate LPs, my point is like, the whole structure isn't about your use of the syndicate to benefit the fund BS, you can work vice versa as well.
 
Jeremy Au: (29:18)
Really interesting dynamics. And what's interesting here is thinking through what the right relationships are, because I can imagine that strategy. It goes bad when it's not clearly articulated, what expectations and the targets are. But the more clearly is articulated, it's fair for everybody.
 
Jed: (29:37)
100%, the investment strategies need to be articulated because doing something, I don't know why maybe it's just in my DNA to like, try hard part of language, try hardship that no BS is like doing and see if it flies, but it's also a differentiator. If it works, it's like, okay, this is pretty cool.
 
Jeremy Au: (29:57)
And what's interesting is that, you mentioned this earlier, which is you keep doing deals, but as some levels, the way you implied is that angels don't scale. So they don't scale with the back end work they have to do. And as a data room, they don't scale with the LP management for network. And I guess they wouldn't scale for Portco success or even investment. And that's a problem not just for angels. But same problem for syndicates, and even for funds. So how do you think about that fundamental reality?
 
Jed: (30:29)
The venture scaling issue is really an issue. You think about $100 million fund, sounds like a lot. But really, how many FTE is there, three, four headcount. It's actually not a lot. So going back to like what we discussed earlier, that investment committee construct is basically our scaling lever. It's one way of me not having to feel every first founder call and have an extended network working around me. It's a solution to the problem. I don't know if it's the right one or the best one, but it's our solution. And so far, it works. Because we teach the angel school program, its pipeline to the IC. Not everyone chooses to be part of the IC, the Investment Committee on a regular basis, but the ones who do, we have a super high sticky rate. We're talking about 70, 80%, attendance rate from people who opt in very regular. We're building a team of people who really love this. They're passionate about this, and they just want to do it. And by the way, we made it on Singapore time, on a Saturday morning. So it's like a real test, the attendees either are in North America, in which case is the Friday evening, or in Asia, which is Saturday morning, I assume that they show up on these calls, because for a reason other than they just want to hang out
 
Jeremy Au: (31:55)
And when you think about that, obviously, there's some parts where you've had good times and bad times. Could you share with us a time that you personally have been brave?
 
Jed: (32:05)
So the most relevant and pertinent thing I can think of in my response to this question is basically what we're doing now with Angel school, the mission of Angel school is to help angels build and scale syndicates and invest that six figure scale into their thesis. But what it takes to do all that, we're basically a startup. And not only that, we're basically a bootstrap startup. I've chosen deliberately not to accept venture funding, I believe I can raise money, but I chose not to. Because I don't want to be an education edge. I have no desire to be like On Deck, just have more programs, and then bigger cohorts. Those are your levers. I want to stay investing. That's my goal. And in terms of syndicate building, I know for a fact we are the only ones that focuses on this as a discipline. I know all the SPV admins, all the main SPV admins in the world at the C level, and they're all like, yes, we need this. We need something to help our BD pipeline become viable syndicate lead. So we know for a fact, no BS else does content like we do. At the same time. We're inventing a category, which you're paving a trail, it's extremely difficult. I don't know if it will work, is the market there, is the timing right? There's all of these things that are unknown. And also, in the grand scheme of the world of venture, like, who am I I'm nobody. I'm not Calacanis. I'm not Brad Feld, I've done okay, as an angel. So it's very vulnerable to take thinking and turn that into content articulated and put yourself out there and go down this path. But it's something that I'm choosing to go ahead with, because I feel there's something there that we're onto something. But let's see. So this is we're early innings of the journey.
 
Jeremy Au: (34:00)
You said something about putting yourself out there, and you're not these people. You're not Brad Feld, you're not Jason Calacanis. What does it mean to put yourself out there? What's so scary? And what's so brave about it?
 
Jed: (34:10)
Sure. I guess I don't come from a position that if I say something, people will want to, listen and pay attention to it. I work and articulate the thinking and the frameworks and all of this thing, and then literally teach it. There's no real feedback mechanism. There's very little validation, the only real test is you put it in front of other people who are also angel investors and hope not to get laughed out of the room. It hasn't happened yet. But it's extremely vulnerable, especially when you're doing it for the first time. Like, I remember when I first started my first cohorts for Angel school. I got a group of angels together, some of them like, emailing and these guys, and we just started doing this and it was like, let's see if they show up next week. They did. And we're still going.
 
Jeremy Au: (35:04)
Amazing. One thing that you share about Angel school, what's one thing you think that you teach or you share that keeps everybody coming back?
 
Jed: (35:14)
Honestly, not to pat myself on the back, but the content is really good. We're always like getting better at this, always testing ourselves, always developing new things. So it isn't really one single thing. But as you alluded too, when we were chatting offline, people like real stories. So the greatest value that people get with working with us is actually working on real deal flow. Like learning the economics and being part of the program that's baseline. That's just to get everybody on the same OS. But the proof of the pudding and what gets people really excited is like, you bring on this founder. And then we work through diligence together, we form deal teams, we write deal memos. And people love that process of digging in. And basically, trying to like solve that puzzle. That's the one thing. That's the sexy fun stuff. It's where we get to apply all the knowledge.
 
Jeremy Au: (36:14)
Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. So I'd love to recap the three big themes that I got from this conversation. The first is thank you so much for sharing your own professional journey, I really enjoyed how you moved from drilling for oil and gas in Malaysia, and Singapore to mining for tech in America and now to obviously investing in founders as an angel and as a leader of Interscope. So really interesting professional journey and transitions. And these are good reflections, along the way of what you had to learn and unlearn. The second, of course, was a really interesting conversation about the roles and responsibilities of an angel but also the syndicate leader. We talked about a bunch of interesting things, for example, trust is the currency that keeps the syndicate going. And yet there's also a conflict of interest, where syndicate leaders can perhaps be over incentivized to push optionality, checks that benefit the syndicate leader more than they were to individual angels. Lastly, about how you envision scaling, investing, we talked about how it's difficult for angels and for funds to scale their various operations from data rooms to LP networks and management, to pot costs access, to just investing, and some interesting conversations about how you're brainstorming different investment strategies and approaches and scaling it. But also choosing to found Angel school to help your peers figure out how to scale and build infrastructure to make it happen. So thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing.
 
Jed: (37:48)
I appreciate you having me on, Jeremy. Thanks for the invite.