(87) How Top VCs Pick Startups In 2026 | Cassie Young, General Partner @ Primary Venture Partners - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPU6PFij5vI

Transcript: (00:00) Cassie Young is a partner at Primary Ventures where they just raised a $625 million fund built on a contrarian playbook. >> The 625 million is huge for Seed, which we think is very unique. The conventional wisdom at Seed is to stay small. We fundamentally disagree with that. >> In today's episode, Cassie warns us how the current hyperrowth around AI is masking a massive underlying problem that's coming for the market, the gross retention apocalypse. (00:29) I still very much live in fear of this. It might not be next month. It might not be next year, but it's ultimately going to come. >> We also dive into why the classic competitive advantages are evaporating overnight and why relying on a highlyworked founder is no longer a guarantee of survival. >> The zero tax CEO who's not supplemented by amazing technologists, it's just not enough. (00:48) Like it may get you in the door, but it's not going to ensure that you keep the share that you get out of the gate. >> So, what is the formula for successful companies? Today, Cassie shares the one question her firm always asks before writing a check. >> My partner Ben has this great line where he talks about when we're at the finish line with a deal. (01:06) That's a fundamental question that we're asking ourselves. >> Welcome to Topline. Hey everybody, it's Sam Jacobs. I'm the CEO of Pavilion. You're listening to Topline. I'm joined by my good friends and co-hosts AJ Bruno, the CEO of Quapathid Zaman, the CEO sales talent agency. We've got friend of the pod and friend of Topline. That would be fo t uh friend of topline. (01:27) Just fo t fought. Our favorite fought Cassie Young, partner at Primary Ventures, uh who's here to talk about the $625 million raise for their new fund that they just announced. She's here to talk about gross retention. She's our favorite operator turned investor in the entire world. Cassie, welcome to Topline. (01:49) We're excited that you're >> Well, thank you for the very generous introduction, Sam. And uh yes, longtime listener, first- time caller, but appreciate you guys having me on today. And as we were just saying, I think this is going to be a really fun conversation. So, thanks again for including me. >> This is the first time you've been on the show. (02:04) >> That's right. >> That's all Sam's fault, by the way. >> That's crazy. And I'm the >> I like to think I I like to think I'm ubiquitous elsewhere in the topline content and pavilion market. That is for sure. >> Well, shame on us and shame on me, but welcome to the show. Aset and AJ, how are the both of you? >> I spent the whole entire weekend claude coding. (02:29) Like literally like every I woke up at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday and turn on cloud code. >> What is with claude code? Then >> I'm plugged into the matrix right now. >> Like this was Lmin was talking about this as well. Like it makes him want to wake up earlier and just get on it. It's like so when I was a kid, I got Legend of Zelda: Ocriana of Time for Christmas and I spent like the next week spending every waking moment and I think Claude Code has the same like addictive >> dreaming type of thing to >> gaming. (02:57) It's like a video game piece to it >> and it's just it's just anything you can dream up in your head you can put to paper and it's just it's just a fun experience. >> Well, it's funny you say that AJ because my husband was away at a bachelor party this weekend and he said to me, "What are you going to do without me here?" Now, my first answer was March Madness because I'm a huge basketball fan. (03:12) I'm like clut I was like I was going to get deep in it. >> And same thing Friday night. >> Yeah. So, you had you had more freedom. >> I just was all Yeah, it was a beautiful day in Philadelphia. So, I played basketball with my daughter. Her her tournament was canceled, but yeah, I I was I was deep into it, but yes, March Madness was over the weekend, too. (03:32) >> We did have some people at primary build their brackets with Claude. Now, they are not at the top of the leaderboard, but um reading some of their prompts was uh entertainment in and of itself. >> I had Virginia beating Duke in the national championship, and that sadly is not a thing that will happen in 2026. (03:49) So, >> next fun little fact about So, Pablo Dominguez puts together a big big big bracket. He has like 300 people in it and you can put four brackets into it. I only do one and I'm like in the middle of the pack, whatever. Uh, one of my colleagues, Graham Collins, puts together, I think, four. (04:08) He's currently leading this bracket, which is a lot of money. There's a caveat, though. There's a catch. If you finish last place, you forfeit all of your dollars in a different bracket. And so, right now, Graham is in first place and second to last place right now. >> How many people do you think listening know what brackets are? Because I'm like, I wonder what they're talking about. But I'm really curious. (04:29) You guys are so like aligned. Is this a thing? >> Everyone knows. >> We'll get We'll get you involved next year. >> All right, Austin, kick us off. Let's talk to Cassie. >> Cassie, I think we should start with the fund raise. Um 625 million um which is a massive fund. Well, not the like there these billion billion dollar funds like multi-billion dollar funds as well, but 625 is massive. (04:54) And in this the thing that's really interesting is you have a go to market thesis and go to market's been an interesting place to build for the last couple of years AJ will tell you um you know we definitely SAS you can't think SAS without thinking Salesforce right they kind of brought us into the SAS era but after Salesforce the number of gotom market tech companies that would be considered big winners that list is fairly small from that previous era What's what why why are you excited about that category now? What's different? >> The 625 million is huge for seed, right? (05:31) Which we think is very unique like a lot of these big multi-billion dollar platforms are with the multi-stage sort of aircraft carrier firms. And so the conventional wisdom at seed is to stay small. We fundamentally disagree with that. We can come back to that later. But let's let's drill into the go to market stuff first. (05:46) And if we want to talk more about the fund raise, we we can come back to that. When you say small just so the audience has audience it's like 100 200 million is that what you're referencing? >> Yeah in general I mean and the general reason why people like to see these funds stay smaller is academically speaking the bigger the funds the worse the returns right and that's what you'll hear from people who object against that and if you actually fact check that against the data for the most part that is correct but if you peel back the (06:13) layers of the onion around why that actually happens usually one of two things are at fault. you raise more capital which means that every partner now has to deploy more capital right so they're doing more deals right instead of doing two to three deals a year maybe they're doing like six deals a year and things just get a little bit messy the second thing that can go a little sideways is you start to get strategy creep as a firm right so we are classical seed investment in seed investors we do seed and preede we (06:39) follow on in our existing portfolio companies but our entry point is seed and preede oftentimes when funds raise really large vehicles They'll say, "Well, now opportunistically maybe we're going to do some series A's, right?" And they start to get scope creep on what that was. And so our pitch to our LPs was we talk a lot about what we call the atomic unit of a check writer, right? And our belief is that we can scale our fund size by scaling the number of check writers we have at the firm such that any one person isn't doing more deals (07:08) per fund. Now the reality of today's market is that the quantum of capital required to win a seed deal now visav where it was 18 months ago is 20 to 25% higher and I'm not even talking about these crazy mega seed rounds right I'm just talking about sort of your your down the lane competitive deals so our you know point of conviction is whether that's through growing our own bench like in fund five uh my colleague Tobias was a principal at primary and now is a partner exclusively leading cyber security deals we can grow talent that (07:38) way we bring talent from the outside which we did in fund four with Emily man but the idea is that any one partner isn't being stretched in unconventional ways and the belief is that we invest in our resources and platforming in a way that can make a check writer more successful at primary than they would be somewhere else and that's kind of the pitch right that we give to RLPs around how we continue to grow and our ambitions are to keep doing that right to defy the logic that you can't have a scaled seed fund that's the vision for (08:08) what we want to build. >> This feels like it's a it's almost an acid problem. If you want more check writers, then you need a framework for evaluating who can write good checks and who can be good. Do you feel like that's a trainable skill? Do you feel like that's something you you put them through the primary boot camp or you have enough data points and and that's a and I guess related to that, do you feel like there's a are we seeing a proportional increase in the number of great companies or is it that your check writers need to be able (08:39) to win deals from other more from a more competitive set because the number of great companies isn't increasing uh materially perhaps like tell me Fred Wilson always said the number of great companies is pretty much fixed. So all of the competition in VC is going to just tax away returns for mid-level managers that don't get into the best deals. (08:59) What's your take? >> So in no particular order response to some of those questions. So on the talent side, I would say that our belief is there's something intrinsic right in all of the check writers that are successful at the firm. Like primary is not the reason they're a great check writer. (09:15) But what we enable them to do is to take what they're already super capable of and make them that much better because we give them we call it unreasonable resourcing to help their portfolio companies. Right? We've got 55 people on staff. Twothirds of them are not investors, right? They're there to help the existing portfolio companies. But the way I sort of describe what the fund looks like in terms of check writers is it almost looks like a mini fund of funds because each check writer has a square specialization lane where they spend time. So I may spend time in (09:42) the go to market category but my colleague spends time in infrastructure and another one spends time in healthcare. And we really provide a high degree of autonomy within each one of those lanes to say to the check writer we trust you. You're here for a reason. Like we want you to go and drive a multiple on your book. (09:59) But there's a lot of different ways for how you can go and do that. You might do that by doing one deal that's a little more expensive than we would like but you're crazy highly convicted in it. You might do that by doing a bunch of incubations, which is a huge part of our strategy and gives us a higher ownership clip. (10:14) So, we give people flexibility, but then our portfolio team, which we call impact, really comes in and just helps supercharge what any of those portfolio companies can do on the other side. And and what we always say is we back founders who are they're visionaries. They're category creators. Like, they're going to go create the unicorn companies, but there's only so many hours in the day. (10:33) So, if we can help them accelerate that escape velocity, that serves everybody well. And so those resources help not only support portfolio companies, but going to your second question, Sam, they help us win deals, right? Because increasingly we're pulling those resources into companies before the term sheet is even signed to give them a taste of what they would get with working with primary on the other side. (10:55) Now, to your point, yeah, I mean, we talk a lot about the seed to unicorn creation ratio, right? So, historically, 2 and a half to 3% of all deals that have been institutionally backed at seed will ultimately become unicorn companies. And so it's actually a little bit of a TAM assessment here, right, around like how much room do you have to hunt and then you have to go find those great deals. (11:15) Now to your point, there tends to be a lot of consensus, right, that happens around some of these great deals. For us, that means how do we get to people earlier and earlier, right? So I said we do seed increasingly. We care a lot about preede. incubation is really interesting to us, but you know, our belief is some of the best founders out there are still sitting in their current operating roles and we have to get on their radar, you know, six months before they even think about quitting, right? So that you're in there and that you (11:40) build this relationship that's going to give you some degree of edge, you know, when you're going and competing invariably against what will be a really compelling set of competitors. You know how if you were to look back there's a you can find some math saying every year there's x amount of companies that are born um and this translates in y amount of winners of different sorts in a certain amount of time right kind of the Fred Wilson thing yeah >> but in this moment in time you have this new thing which is like a form of (12:12) intelligence like software that is intelligence right and if you look at when cloud was just coming up the cloud companies now the hyperscalers do more revenue than the entire revenue of the technology ecosystem when those companies were born and so markets change right and so how do you think about the future like do you think it'll just incrementally keep becoming a larger and larger ecosystem and companies will become incrementally larger in terms of outcome sizes and success ratios and things like that or (12:43) do you think some of this stuff might dramatically change like maybe the largest companies will be dramatically larger than the biggest companies we see today. Like where do you think the big differences are going to be? >> So first I'll agree with a couple things that you said. I mean we actually just had our annual meeting for RLPs a few weeks ago and one of the things we shared there was this perspective that flavors of this have happened before. (13:09) So you mentioned cloud computing, we talked about open source, we talked about some of the high level language changes with the Javas and Pythons of the world, right? is creating more and more market opportunity. So I think we are very much bulls on that reality today. And you know everyone's talking about the labor pools right that you can now go after. (13:29) You know the white collar labor pool is $6 trillion. That's 20 times what's been spent on enterprise software and it so even if the 20x isn't realized the magnitude of what will be realized even if it exists somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum is pretty material. And that has us incredibly excited because we think about a world where you know legal tech tends to be a topic duour. (13:53) So let's pick on that one for a moment. Um you end up in a world where people who couldn't have lawyers are going to have lawyers right so you just open up these use cases and I know Sam in past topline post you've talked about uh like the Jevans paradox idea here etc. I think we are huge subscribers um to that being the reality where it's just going to unlock really really exciting new use cases. (14:15) Now, of course, we are also wrestling with like the SAS apocalypse talk of the hour, right? And really, who's going to be threatened and who's not, and we can certainly talk about that, but I think in general, our belief is this is going to be really, really big. And if you think about it, software is actually relatively small in the grand scheme of things. (14:34) I mean, we had pulled some numbers for the annual meeting at that time a couple weeks ago. It was 8 and a half% of the S&P, 1% of GDP, right? So, you just have so much room to grow outside of that that I think people lose sight of when they're just in sort of the SAS bubble week in and week out. >> The I imagine that in all of this with LPs, I know some of the big LPS and there's a lot of like downside case uh development that they do, right? Like what's the worst thing that could happen? What's the bare case? Yeah. (15:06) when there's so much money being raised across this ecosystem, there seems to be this like convergence of belief that this is going to be huge. There will be massive winners. We this this is going to be all the things that I think the four of us believe in as well. Like we're all bulls here, but there's a lot of uh there's a lot of alignment amongst the market that this is what's going to happen. (15:32) There's a world in which it doesn't play out, right? And so is that what does what is that scenario like? What does that scenario look like to an LP? Like what risk have they decided? We think this is the the risk side of this, the downside scenario, and we're willing to live with it. Is it that intelligence goes into the market, we all use it, makes our lives better. (15:53) It just doesn't have the ability to have the economic benefit that we all think it's going to have. It's more like Excel than it is, you know, what we think it's going to be. where Excel did make life much easier but didn't get the pricing power. >> So, I'm going to take a step back on that and I think there's actually like a first principles question that we're glossing over a little bit with LPS where at the end of the day the creation the sort of value creation that is coming from the asset class comes back to the founders. And so in any (16:25) environment, but I think particularly in this environment and we can drill further into this is like you are making a bet on the people and that they are going to figure it out, right? Because there are businesses, right, that were born even 12 to 18 months ago that fundamentally look completely different today. (16:41) Never mind I feel like intercom's the the talk of you know the month right in terms of them very deliberately cannibalizing the software revenue to go all in on which I think is an amazing story. I think Intercom's probably going to be the exception, not the rule. But it's absolutely um amazing to see what they >> And by the way, their story is not written yet. (16:59) So like they're talking about there's a long >> They'll be fine. If you keep writing them nine figure checks, they'll be >> I was eight figure checks. I also Cassie, if you didn't hear it, I I told uh I told and Sam that we were writing an eight figure check to intercom that they're >> they build it so much. I just wrote an eight figure check. Excuse me. (17:17) I had four people say it was their favorite all-time topline moment uh that reached out to me because 50% of intercom revenue today >> from path >> amazing amazing amazing but I think like at the end of the day LPs when they're picking managers right they're they want to assume that they're getting access to the best deals right so I don't want to gloss over that point right particularly like at seed we think a lot about that it's like the alpha that you're going to have with finding the best founders and the best opportunity at seed it's 10 (17:46) year journey, right? So, you just don't know what you don't know as you go and embark on that. There's a lot of chatter right now about this like kingmaking dynamic that is happening in Silicon Valley, right? Where you have the upstarts that have early commercial traction. Everybody's preempting the subsequent rounds, right? And everyone's just kind of shoving more money in their direction and it becomes this question of like, well, does that give them such a first mover advantage on the customer base and the reinforcement learning that (18:11) it just boxes out other opportunities. I I think and this is a very category specific answer. I'm optimistic that because of your access to the labor pools and the total budget envelopes etc. that you're going to have markets where it's not winner takes all dynamics anymore. And I'll give you an example. We're in the process of closing an investment in an AI native CRM company, right? There are a handful of players that are kind of emerging in that set. (18:37) It's a knife fight. Let's be honest, right? They're all going after like the Y combinator C to series B companies you know with the but but our belief is if you really do AI native CRM correctly which means it is full stack everything that touches the customer total top of funnel all the way through to CS and you're eating into the labor pools and the other software spend like that's a big opportunity right it might not just need to be this world where it's only Salesforce and HubSpot >> like tell us your investment thesis like (19:06) because it's such an interesting Everybody hates the old school CRM, but they kind of like get the job done and it's Salesforce is massive and it's got all these like built-in advantages around integrations and the ecos all of this. We all know that. And then there's this idea of like in the world of AI like what if somebody took a blank piece of paper and said let's create a CRM using all of this new stuff that we've got that's purpose-built for the moment. (19:33) Let's meet the moment with a blank piece of paper. And you can imagine this beautiful thing gets built. We still haven't seen that in market yet, right? Like we see like early signs of these new players, but they aren't they aren't there yet. Obviously, we're all early days. >> How do you pick in a market where there's two, three, four of these companies, they all kind of look similar. (19:56) Um, and then what's your thesis on this in the future? Because obviously for one of them to win, you have to carve out market share from Salesforce. What does that look like? I think for us at the end of the day like product wins, right? And so we've been talking about this concept of the JDCE, the jaw-dropping customer experience for a while such that this is part of >> by the way because we saw each other in uh in Mexico. (20:18) We were talking about this at Gold. I I use that in my memos all the time now. I love it. >> I Yeah, the jaw-dropping customer experience. >> I'm glad you guys use it. I think it is really powerful for operators, investors, and everywhere in between where it's the jawdropping customer experience. It's not even just the killer app. (20:36) It's like the whole product experience that the customer has in terms of how they're treated, right? From onboarding to support, but like the killer app is really important. And I would say in the CRM category, the product, the best product is going to win, right? Because people have such frustration, right, around what the historical bit looks like. (20:54) So the challenge with AI native CRM I would say is in general we make that in go to market. There's one of like two strategies that the company is building against. They're doing like a classical wedge play where they've got a very very big platform vision but there's a clear wedge that they're taking down and we have to believe that they're going to have the right to win in adjacent categories and and win wallet share. (21:14) And then there's like the compound startup approach. A native CRM like you kind of have to go at it from the compound startup approach if you're really going to take share. There are other companies that you know are doing like sales coaching, right? And then they're saying we're going to build an invisible CRM on the back of that. (21:30) That may happen, right? We will see. I think that's just a harder path as my personal conviction to navigate to get there. And so for us in any compound startup environment, irrespective of CRM or something else, there's a few things we're looking for. One is we actually lean in intensely at seed and do what do your design and dis um you know design partners look like, right? How are you managing those? How are you learning? What is your pace? And then what is just the velocity of the engineering roadmap, right? Because you (21:57) have to be able to show that you're learning from the customers moving quickly and launching things that have quite a bit of breath and the appropriate depth to do it. And so for this particular company, you know, these the the founders are technologists by background. It's a a set of serial entrepreneurs and we really got excited around their product vision and we talked with customers. (22:17) What we heard was hey like we gave these guys feedback of it's not enough that we have the top offunnel information like we need this information about our customers in there today and they figured out you know they're not going to be able to build the boil the ocean approach to customer success but they figured out the one or two use cases that are hair on fire and how do you bring those into the product and so those are some of the things that we're looking for again a lot of it comes back to the founding team for us in the early days of building and my (22:43) partner Ben has this great line that I I think about frequently where he talks about, you know, would you bet against this person? And at the end of the day, like when we're at the finish line with a deal, that's a fundamental question that we're asking ourselves as a as a reflection exercise of would we bet against this person? And the JDCE also AJ works into our memos and and you know what that ultimately is going to look like. So, let me pause there. (23:05) I think that's like on the CRM side, you know, how we've thought about it. What I would tell you in terms of like the Salesforce replacements is listen, it's hard, right? When you look at these scaled companies that have all of the interoperable workflows built on the back of their existing CRM, which is why I think you see a lot of these AI native CRM going with really early stage startups and the bet, right, is that they can grow up with them over time. (23:29) And that's the go to market strategy. You have other companies, right, that I think could kind of wind up in the AI native CRM world who are taking different approaches, right? So, we've got several portfolio companies who are customers of attention.com, right? I think they're doing a great job at a different part of the market, right, of saying, "Hey, we're going to replicate the CRM. (23:49) We're going to help enable you guys to go and do that." And I'll be very curious to see where that play goes as well. But I think what's going to be missionritical for these businesses that are planting a flag and saying we are AI native CRM is they have to figure out how to go up market quickly. And when I was doing diligence on this category and I spent a lot of time debating, do I want to make a bet here? Yes or no? What I heard was like all of the upstarts are so native that like they haven't nailed this mid-market to up market yet. And so (24:14) the got to believe is that someone's going to figure out how to do it. And so I think that's where these companies are going to have to place their attention, right? Is to go and do the unscalable things to make it happen. >> I've got a great suggestion for how to move up market. They should use this company Delve. (24:29) >> And with Delve, you can get instant Too Sam, too soon. Too soon. >> Sam was talking his book. >> Too soon. >> Uh AJ, you are the up market customer. >> Well, I this is this is super interesting as I listen to Cassie because there's two thing with specifically with CRM and I've been talking about this for a little while as we think about it. (24:48) We talked about it with Kyle last week's episode. The CRM has two real big modes, data and distribution. And no no upstarts or seeds have have those. I the product is completely commoditized. Uh and I wrestle with this idea of if Salesforce is can figure this out and figure out how to build product and how to do it with a you know a humanentric approach but that you're governing AI. (25:17) There's a there's there's a little bit of a I don't know there's a scariness in the factor of like them being able to figure that out and doing it. The challenge is they've they've they've locked down their data. Last year we saw all the Matthew McCcon uh commercials there that is what is actually going to be monetized in the future world and you know the distribution aspect of it for these startups that's also the challenge that's the opportunity as I see it and moving from the SMB to mid-market because it's taken us honestly three (25:48) years to move from SMB where 70% was of our revenue now today 70% is in the midmarket and I don't know how AI I really accelerates that. >> What would you need to see AJ? Like let's say I am founder of said AI CRM company. I knock on your door. Like you're using what do you use? HubSpot Salesforce? >> Salesforce, >> right? Good grief, AJ. (26:12) You want to be an AI native company. You're on Salesforce. Like look at my stuff. It's cool. Trust me. Let's do a demo. And you're like great. I'm in. What do you need to see there for you to be like, oh yeah, I'm going to move. Like what? >> This is the problem. I don't use I don't log into Salesforce at all. I get all of the data. I use MCP connectors. (26:30) It all goes into >> like how do you know the data is good then? >> I trust I have trusty. That's my >> But that's the thing that and I'm Cassie I'm curious on it is like I don't need an AI native CRM. I just need the database and everything else plugs into it and I as a CEO get what I need. We have momentum. We have Dust. (26:50) we have all of these things that are plugging in and getting the the data from it that way. >> I think it comes back to fundamentally what do we mean when we say CRM because I think the definition of CRM is completely changing historically. I'd actually joke for a while it's hilarious to me that they call it customer relationship management because if you actually look at how most CEOs are using it, it's before they're a customer, right? So it's more like the PRM right of what happens up until that point and then a little bit through onboarding and (27:16) then yes you know some people who are fully uh you know embedded in in Salesforce and and service cloud and all that stuff uh maybe more fully embedded >> to me where the opportunity is and and this comes back to your question of why do you or don't you need it is it becomes sort of this end to end map for everything that touches the customer in some compelling way and I think like there are certainly you know use cases where you can do the DIY bit and I feel The DIY bit has been a huge part of like the SAS apocalypse bit. Fundamentally, I (27:46) tend to lean out from that a little bit at the platform level because I do think at the end of the day, buyers like having a throat to choke, right? There's security, there's governance, particularly the more and more stuff that you put in it. But to your point, I think where the the um exciting opportunity lives in AI native CRM is half the companies you just rattled off, you don't need anymore because you have this endto-end platform that's doing the work that they may do. (28:09) So I think where the opportunity is and this has actually been a really challenging adjustment for me as an investor is like in these full platform plays versus things that even looked like partial platform plays now feel more like features. And I'll give you this example. I met this company a couple weeks ago where candidly eight months ago I probably would have done this deal. Like I love these founders. (28:31) I love the problem statement with where they were building. I always say like one of my best signals is just the the market feedback where if I reach out to six to 10 great leaders how quickly did they get back to me and their willingness to take a demo sort of tells us the nature of the the hair on fire level of the problem. (28:48) I was like seven for seven on people taking demos. And as the feedback came back in I'm like this is an example where they're going to buy it for year one and they will go build this because it's such a smaller part of an overall solution. AI native CRM won't be that exciting unless you know what I mean it's able to go and do this complete endtoend play and that's just what we haven't I think seen materialize yet has me very excited to see see what that'll ultimately look like. (29:15) >> It's really interesting because it was sort of where my question was going. You said eight months ago I might have written the check today. I'm not going to. >> Yeah. >> And you also wrote about the coming gross retention apocalypse. Perhaps the most famous essay on go to market of the last 20 years written by you. (29:31) >> Your bar is low. >> It is Jeff Bezos's shareholders letters. >> We got to get Sam some more hobbies. >> Yeah. I um my question is are you seeing that play out because I feel there are companies and I think it's a really interesting time because there are companies that even a year ago might have been touted as the fastest growing companies and these are companies maybe that were also claiming massive uh revenue trajectories and like super and you know they're going to go from 1 to 50 this year and I just but those (30:06) companies and I'm thinking of one in particular where where I think of that company I'm like that really feels actually like that is one that is like now very present in Gmail. It's very present in every email interface. It feels like it was a little early and I'm just wondering what are you seeing in the market maybe from the portfolio and come are you seeing this evolution? Are you seeing the gross retention apocalypse? Are you seeing you know the prince of Q1 and what they're saying about about AI adoption? (30:36) >> Yeah. So I'll answer kind of like macro and then like micro with some specific examples. So macro when I wrote that piece I was hoping I would have hard data to back it up. So I was like who can I call that's going to have the hard data on this? So I called Kyle Puyer who told me I don't have hard data on it yet but this is on my mind and I'm you know working with a few other folks. (30:54) I'm going to come back with something. And he he has since published a piece. I think it was closer to the end of Q4. or he and I actually went on the Gainsite podcast together to talk a little bit about this and his data validated my hypothesis which is that the AI native businesses had lower gross retention than the legacy SAS counterparts if you will his data set focused on companies that were earlier in their journeys you know I mean in terms of an ARR perspective etc so it was interesting to see that data I think it'll be very (31:24) interesting to see how it plays out over time because if I were a betting woman I suspect that for companies where that happens It'll be a reckoning in year one or two and then the good companies will they'll wise up about it. Do you know what I mean? And they'll say, "Okay, we have to get better at this. (31:38) We have to improve it." And so, if you look at it on a cohorted basis, you'll probably see it improve if the companies are doing that correctly. I drive all of our portfolio company founders crazy with that with that story. So, I'm on the soap box all the time of like, is it AR, is it errone? Um, and so I think they're they're very eyes wide open to it. (31:56) what we've tried to help them think about is knowing that it's going to take you a year to get a renewal in an enterprise environment like what are the other leading indicators that you can look to and so one of the things that we talk about is just the time to expansion so whether that's time to commercial expansion or time to use case expansion you know when I wrote that article I talked about this like coming renaissance of the customer success function which I still very much stand by I do think people are thinking more (32:21) and more about that reality and actually Amanda from one mind is a great example where she she had this whole thing she wrote on LinkedIn a couple months ago where she said when she started six cents she was obsessed with revenue and she would talk about revenue over and over and over again and with one mind she's obsessed with customer count right and like that customer how do you make them happy right how do you grow them and I think that's an important you know like a mentality shift as people are leaning into it but I I do worry about (32:45) it Sam still and I also think that buyers still don't know how to buy right so I've talked with a few enterprise buyers to say I had this um hypothesis that has not proven true where I thought you know coming into 2026 everyone had just been experimenting where the individual contributors the managers could just budget expense whatever they wanted to to experiment and my thought was as we came into 2026 there was going to be a reckoning with the CIO who would come in and say we're not going to have this tool sprawl we're really going to (33:14) consolidate under a handful of vendors and that was going to be like a crazy clearing house for gross retention I do still think that's going to happen it hasn't happened as quickly as I would have thought because a few of the larger enterprises that I've spoken with, they've said, "Listen, we're just so hungry for our employees to be using AI that that's like not on our minds yet. (33:32) " And that's not a blanket statement, but I've been surprised as I've had that conversation. So, I still very much live in fear of this. I think it's maybe, you know, it may take a little bit longer to see it. I think I even said in that article like it might not be next month, it might not be next year, but it's ultimately going to come. (33:48) What I could not have predicted when I wrote that in the fall was if you look at a lot of the logic behind the SAS apocalypse proponents, right? Fundamentally, they're saying, you know, the reason they don't believe the SAS valuations is because they don't know how to wrangle terminal value anymore. And I'm like, that actually is the gross retention problem in a slightly different, you know what I mean, interpretation of really, can we count on this stuff in perpetuity? So, that I didn't see coming from a mile away. I was thinking about (34:17) it more from you know these startups and what is it going to mean for the ecosystem and now I think it's really interesting to think about at scale. >> The other point around that Cassie is just that what Amanda said around customer count I think is the other side of that which is expansion there terminal value of expansion versus terminal uh value of like the the GRR aspect and seeing that play out a little bit. (34:40) It is possible that with some of these startups as they move through the first few years of existence, they might have really fast revenue acceleration and then over time, you know, in year 2, year three, they become a little bit sharper about their true ICP and they're like, "This is what we really need to be doing. (35:00) " And so they might have a gross retention problem, but they might have an RR that's fine as a result. And so you might not see it the same way which is people are going to report the good number and kind of hide the bad number, right? But there might be a good reason for it which is we we went wide. We did what OpenAI in a way is doing, right? We went wide. (35:19) We ran a bunch of experiments and we're now narrowing our focus right now. >> Yeah. The other thing that I'm noticing, I had this really interesting conversation with a founder on Friday and he's collapsed his engineering product and design team into one and he's like the way I envision my company right now is and they they had I think about 30 million NR. (35:41) He's like I see this as I have the product team that is lean. You have people that are doing all of those three things. It's built into one unit and this team has to work very closely with go to market where they have to be handinand and the reason the thesis is that there are no product advantages that are longlasting anymore I'll build something cool my competitor will build it tomorrow right so if everyone can catch up in minutes and days to your fancy new thing then a lot of the game is building an organization that can stay one step ahead and one (36:17) step ahead is about understanding the market which your go to market team is in market so they're learning they're listening they're getting signals and I need to make it so that this team is feeding my product team my product team's leaner and meaner and can quickly build and ship and that's how we stay one step ahead of the competition it's a little bit of a different sort of mindset that I'm noticing now which is like comfort with the idea that the whole game is just to be one step ahead >> so much gold in what you just said there (36:45) maybe to kind of break it into the ICP and then just kind of staying ahead in the product side. So I completely agree with you on the ICP side and I think it's not uncommon and I think we were actually talking about this in Mexico a couple months ago where in series B plus board meetings you see the numbers for both GRR and NR broken out by current ICP customers versus legacy ICP customers, right? So I think it's of course when you're in the early days of building you have to cast a wire net because you don't know you know I mean (37:10) where you're really going to strike in terms of that great resonance of of the solution that you've built. Um, I think what you want to be mindful of is that you're not losing the customers, right? That that should be in that ICP. But I think some healthy churn early on is actually a very, you know, normal and and solid thing, but it's, you know, being intellectually honest about the reporting of who's our ICP today and who are we losing that's in that or or outside of that. (37:33) To your point on staying ahead on the product, yeah, I mean, I'll tell you like one tough learning I had, do you know what I mean as an investor, which was, you know, we kick around this term at primary called the zero CAC CEO, right? Right. And you can imagine what that means, but it basically is like this is a CEO who's very wellletorked in the category. (37:49) They've got like a clear right to win. They're going to use that to their advantage. And I think for a while I may have overrotated in a few instances. You know what I mean? For saying, okay, like we love these zero cack CEOs. It's not enough on its own for all of the reasons that you just described where the zeroax CEO who's not supplemented by amazing technologists who can do exactly the things that you just described, right, of being they have the vision, they're a step ahead of where they're going, etc. (38:16) It doesn't matter. It's just not enough. Like it may get you in the door, but to your point, it's not going to ensure that you kind of keep, you know, the share that you get out of the gate. So for us when we're assessing founding teams and I'm not even just talking about go to market I'm talking about any category of primary you know if we say it's a zerocack CEO the next question is well who's the technical co-founder you know what I mean what are they going to do to help this business as well >> when I hear being one step ahead that (38:39) does not I hate to bring it back to business school parlance but you know we're all talking about it like that doesn't sound like a moat you know like that doesn't sound like any kind of sustainable competitive advantage and the thing that the my mind goes as it typically does to like a bunch of weird places, but one of them is that yeah, if there's no terminal value to these companies because everything is just like I was one step ahead for a little while in the same way that like Barry Diller was one step ahead at Paramount, (39:07) you know, or Michael Eisner was one step ahead at Disney. It's like well almost feels like maybe they shouldn't even be public companies because it because sort of the nature of of public company for me is like the durability of the cash flow. It's like yes, the thing's going to be around there's switching costs. (39:23) There's there's brand, there's network effects, there's data that they can leverage. If everything's like, >> well, you know, my guy works really really or gal, my person works really really hard. It's like, okay, well, that person works really, really hard, too. They're going to have a moment in the sun and then the sun will set. (39:38) >> That's a lot of comfort with the past, though, right? Because yes, the way that we did this in the past was different. But the games change every couple of decades. The games change and this new game might be exactly that. You see it in many domains where it's about staying a step ahead for a very long period of time. Like I watch a lot of football. (39:57) Football is that like every season you got to stay a step ahead and that every game you got to be a step ahead of your competitors and then you do it over enough games in a season you win and then you come back and you have to do it again and do it again and do it again. And if you stop doing it, your value as a football team goes down. (40:15) Um and so Real Madrid is the most valuable team in the world because they can stay one step ahead for a very very long time. You see this in many other domains as well and that might just be the new game in town now. It's a very uncomfortable game, right? Like it's way more >> I don't think you do see it in a bunch of other domains. (40:35) Oxid sees it in his business. >> You see pharma is all about can you come up with the next thing and like you know you get >> farmer is about intellectual property. farmers about like you're securing rights that sustain for an ongoing period of time like you're going through these development cycles like 10 year investment cycles to come up with that thing to stay for ahead for the next 10 years. (40:58) So you get this period of time where you have IP infra there's guardrails that protect the IP like if if there wasn't a patent on uh on Lipur like Fiser would have a much lower incentive to invest in it. If the minute that you bring Lipur to market every single person can copy the molecule and like then then yeah then like then Fizer probably shouldn't be >> but you have to do it with FDA approval. (41:21) >> Primary is not a public company. That's my point. like these these are that this is why there are traditional businesses because staying one step ahead isn't something you can really like count on for three decades. >> You you could stay one step ahead on product at all times and still have a losing business, right? So what's the difference between the people who do and don't say it comes back to the customers, right? Because if we actually pick on, you know, some of the examples that you just rattled off around like (41:46) pharmaceutical and IP, the businesses that do this really well, they stay a couple steps ahead in a manner that wants customers to expand the use cases faster and more deeply than they will anywhere else. And the more and more of that customer information that gets on their platform begets more and more reinforcement learning that that vendor then owns that makes the switching cost that much higher. (42:08) And so I think that's actually the logic behind a lot of this kingmaking, right? is if we can help people get all these customers on there and really get in there, then that starts to look a little bit stickier around what that looks like and there is sort of a degree of IP. So that has to be how we think about it. But it it again has to be like the proof is in the pudding. (42:24) It's not just that you had this perspective on where the market's going is that the customers are following you and you see that very clearly and that you consistently earn this right for them to want to do more and more with you and spend more and more with you. And I think if you don't see that materializing, that's where like my my Spidey sense would be up about, you know, smoke in the house. (42:44) >> Data Break, Snowflake, and Amazon have built agents that are spec purpose built to help a customer migrate over. And I found that really interesting because they've taken the cost of migration down and the timeline of migrating and the headaches of migrating down quite dramatically. (43:04) And one of the friction points when you're moving from one vendor to another, if you're a large business, let's say you're moving from Snowflake to data bras is like it's cost me so much time. It's going to be the project of the year. >> But if it's the project of the month and it doesn't cost me that much, maybe I will move like I like your new feature. (43:21) >> What are your thoughts around the future of switching cross? Like what is it going to come down to? Um and what do we have to be prepared for? Like is it going to be Yeah. We all just want to have agents that are going to help us move around and so you can very easily move from one to the other and only the firms that lock you up from a data perspective where you have to start from scratch on a data side. (43:42) That's the switching cost. It's like an annoying one but it's there. >> My hope is that that is one day the world that we live in. I'll I'll put out an aspirational thought for you guys. I said to someone in a primary recently, I long to live in the world where no one ever files a support ticket ever again. Right? because if that actually happened, it's if you think about it like most support tickets outside of like reset your password or whatever come from like flawed implementation or your configuration is out of date or (44:06) something around that. So I I long to live in the world where someone has figured out how to make it easier just to get set up and get set up correctly. Like when I was running revenue teams, what I would always say to our team is like phase two never happens, right? So if you let them out without that, it will just never ultimately materialize. (44:24) I think today there's work being done on that and I would love to find a company to back by the way that is uh building in this category. So if anyone listening has ideas please please get in touch on that. Um but I do think you see this investment in forward deployed right now right as as a stop gap to go and do that. (44:41) The best organizations are saying if we have that forward deployed motion what are we learning from a product perspective that we're putting in practice immediately to productize the implementation. So, one interesting organizational change I've noticed in portfolio companies is that implementation in many places is being moved out of the chief customer officer lane or the postale lane and into product edge, right? Because they're viewing it as a product opportunity in terms of how to get these customers up and running, which I think is pretty (45:06) interesting. >> Now, change how we calculate that >> totally depends on like exactly how those resources are being used. But actually to piggyback on that question, I was chatting with um the CFO of Invisible Technologies, Barca, who said this story where like they've got very meaty multi-year enterprise deals and they made a very deliberate choice in the office of the CFO to invest aggressively in FTEEs because they already have the data in terms of how that is translating from an LTV perspective. And even if you want to say (45:37) like LTB has to be taken with a grain of salt right now, they know it translates into enough revenue in the first couple of years and it more than pays for itself. So your question is the right one, right? But the reality is many people are saying throw the unit economics out right now because I just need to learn as quickly as possible. (45:54) So I'm going to do some of the things that look unscalable and then I'm going to send it over to the product org to figure out how we engineer some of these things out. But aspirationally I I want to go to the world that you're describing right where we have figured out you know how to use agents and to do that very effectively. (46:08) >> I think what you just said by the way is the distinction between FTE is done right and wrong. The whole FTE concept was it was going to help Palunteer figure out what to build and that feedback loop is what was so special about the whole model like one of the defining features. And so you see a lot of AI companies that have FTEES, but there's there's no SC there's no um plumbing to be able to connect these two things and create a feedback loop. (46:36) It's really just implementation. And so the ones that are doing it this way, that is the true FTE model. >> We we've spent a lot of time internally talking about the Palunteer model and they did exactly that, right? Everybody said, "Oh, fuel services." No, they built product off of it. You know, it is a long game, but they that's precisely what they did. (46:53) It does feel like a I mean 80% of the AI innovation is going into pre-sales. What we're talking about is a post sales motion. So Cassie when you say no any companies out there that are doing this like what specifically to the FTE or specifically in terms of technology and what they're doing is what you're looking for. >> Where businesses get stuck I think is where they end up in like one feature specific lane or like a partial platform. (47:17) And so when I think about what's going to be really exciting and the I always like hesitate with post sales because I tend to you know my friend Sangita always says like the van post sales as terminology right so the customer success side of it it's something that can can really touch the customer journey end to end. And so what I mean by that is that example I gave on implementation. (47:38) Implementation is one part of a way bigger problem which is that you know customers fall out of sync with configuration um requirements all the time because they replatform someone replatform something breaks multiple times per year then you're doing these implementation health checks for people who've been customers for four years only to issue them an so for $20,000 to get up to speed. (47:59) And so for me where I have energy is it's what what's the play that can actually eradicate all of that. Right? So you're kind of living in the world where the way I describe it is you know customer success has promised to be proactive versus reactive since the dawn of software. It's not happening right and I think it only really happens when there is an agentic play that's in there that kind of spots these challenges with customers before they even come up. (48:24) And and I would say like there's always the value equation and the ROI story, but a lot of it comes down to the technical configuration. So I would say my enthusiasm comes from how do you solve some of those technical configuration roadblocks in the customer experience that just makes the value selling and the ROI story that much uh of an easier tale to tell. (48:45) And I'll say the same thing. I mean the the the outcomes in the customer success category have not been fantastic historically, right? Look, we talked about the onset around go to market more broadly even specifically within that but same deal if you say you can go after these labor pools you know what I mean because suddenly the shape of that organization looks completely differently right because we've now moved it to agents who can do this that again you know paves the way for larger potential >> and that part of the bow tie or that (49:12) part of the funnel looks closer to support than it does than the sales side does you see that side like really benefit information you you're looking at go to market founders is and so many of the bets that you make at the seed round are less about the specific idea. It's going to evolve. So much of it is just down to the person, right? >> Yeah. (49:34) >> What does a a good grow to market founder look like to you? Like what are you Yeah. What type of people are you looking to bet on? What stands out to you? What are you looking for? You know, at the end of the day for any founder we back like we want them to take us to the mountaintop, right? So their ability to sell the vision for the company is hugely important because it's going to be indicative of their ability to sell customers to sell employees on taking a risk to come to work there and then selling stock right to downstream (50:04) investors to come on board. And so one of the things is like I I very frequently know within 10 minutes of a first meeting of like is this a person where I'm like, man, I shouldn't be an investor anymore. I should quit and go and work for them. um that's a pretty sort of of e read and so and and every investor has like their personality flavor but for me in particular I think that's like particularly important in go to market where you have to like paint a vision of where the world is going to go and bring people along on that ride is (50:30) usually important. I do think in go to market specifically like at the end of the day obsession with the customer is like I always say if you do everything in your power to make your customer successful with your product you have to catastrophically screw something up not to succeed as a business that is true in every category there is like no room for error with that within go to market because you are selling into people who know you know and they can smell the so I think that's one where you know we I love within go to market like (50:56) joining sales calls listening to how they pitch listening to how they objection handle Like that's a huge just kind of telltale sign for major I mean around is this a person that I want to be excited about. The third we talked about earlier which is the technical counterpart right and sometimes the founder themselves will be technical but if they're not if they have more of a commercial bent which you often see in the go to market world that's starting to change I think with younger founders >> coming up for sure is you know how are (51:22) they going to be able to keep pace as we said before and just ship product at an an unheard of velocity and in fact if we go back to like some of those risks around the SAS apocalypse we talked about like the DIY risks which we're not you know overly concerned about the enterprise There's the horizontal model risk which is like moderate. (51:39) To me the biggest risk is the new entrance and how quickly they can move right and so we just want to make sure that we're seeing that but similarly if you have a pure play technical founder the question becomes what's their right do you I mean because you guys get it like these are these the go to market buyers they are a very viral close-knit set and so if you are the sort of lonewolf technologist who can ship product like what else is going to be true you know what I mean that's going to get you in the room with the likes of you guys right around how (52:09) you going to get you know excited about the product and sort of get that viral coefficient built into it. We of course have other like frames at primary in terms of this what we look for in founders around like are they learning machines right like what have we seen from their past life right where where they've shown evidence of that what have they been great at right we always say if someone has never been great at anything in their life regardless of whether that was school or the rowing team like how are they going to be great (52:36) at this you know so that's like the so these are like the types of questions right that we ask at a more general level >> and Venode Kla has this like say I don't know if it's a saying but he likes to say that the biggest innovations in any industry come from founders from outside of those industries because they look at something with a fresh perspective. (52:56) So he's like I want to bet on people that can make 100x impact from what where we are today and I I believe that that happens when somebody's coming from the outside. Do you think that the next big winner in go to market is going to be somebody who came out of go to market and built for it or came from outside of go to market and builds in it? >> I honestly I think it could be either like I would not turn my back you know what I mean on someone who I thought was compelling in other ways who did not grow up classically in the go to market (53:26) organization because I think the one thing that's particularly interesting about go to market is that it's the tip of the spear for every company on the planet. So even if you didn't come from the go to market world you have an appreciation I mean for the importance of what that means for the overall business health and so I might have a different lens on that in another category but within go to market I absolutely would talk with the person who was a brilliant product leader in a very different industry who maybe you (53:53) know in the monthly all hands kind of heard about just like these insane challenges and what was ultimately going on with voice of the customer whatever it may be so I'm not closed off to it but there is a question of like how do you get distribution and how do you get distribution quickly. So we that's a place where we really want to test those commercial instincts around like how are they you know going to get in market and and get share quickly and this is a place where like we have a team that can help with that but as I said earlier (54:18) that's not our job like our job isn't to find product market fit for the companies it's to accelerate that like the the founders we back are are perfectly capable of doing that on their own. Do you think that the next big winner in go to market tech is going to come from somebody who's coming out of go to market and building for it or somebody who's coming from the outside and building for it? I think it's going to be someone who was a consumer of it in a major way whether they were in go to market or outside meaning I've met a (54:45) number of like great technologists who have been a they've been stakeholders and taking on annoying projects do you know what I mean to help go to market but I think it's going to be someone who was a consumer of the problem statements irrespective of what function they may have been in >> I think it's fascinating right now how you know you used to hear this this this thing of like you you go to an enterprise customer, they want you to build something custom, you don't do that, you have to stick to the road map. (55:14) And now we know that you could possibly potentially build product that is um that contemplates a separate unique instance for every enterprise customer using, you know, cloud code and AI and and things like that. And and so then I think what I've noticed in in people that have experienced the GTM problem so to speak, the people that is that they to your point, Cassie, they narrowly define the problem space. (55:39) They they're like, well, this was a particular, you know, they when they when the when the prospect called when the salesperson called me, they didn't do a mutual action plan. So I've built software that's just about designing mutual action. It's got to be right now given the capability your your vision has to be worldchanging or it's just too small. (55:57) You're going to get blown out of the water. >> It reminds me of the company. It was probably 10 years ago that just did signatures, email signatures. >> Oh my god. Really? >> And I was like, is this really They were acquired successfully at one time. >> Are you thinking about exclaimer? Exclaimer? >> No, it's like signature leak. (56:15) It was one of those ly companies. >> Of course, it was an LY company. the definitely in no why company but also Cassie this reminds me also 10 years ago when I was pitching quotath I was at first round's uh partner meeting and I'm sitting there and pitching it and the last question was AJ you're you're like a go to market leader like tell me why I should believe that you can build the right product or vision and I don't remember my answer but I remember the call 30 minutes after the meeting with Josh Coppelman saying you didn't get (56:44) that answer you definitely did not nail that answer I am not a for a strong company today because of that. >> But Cassie, my point that you made uh my question, >> it worked out just fine. AJ, >> it worked out okay. I think we did okay. But I I put a chip on my shoulder and I was like, "All right, I'm going to show you. (57:01) I'm going to be a productled growth company." >> A collecting chips like in life like anytime on my shoulder for anything, I have them all memorized. But you said earlier, I think this is a really great point around the product. The best products win. And then now we're talking about go to market and go to market leaders. (57:18) As you look for your portfolio and how many uh founders have you backed at primary personally? >> So in total our well our total portfolio is about 100 companies right now. For me I've got about eight in my book right now. >> And I'm sure you've looked at like just the backgrounds and personas of all of them. (57:33) What like is could you give us some details on this percentage came from go to market background versus product versus technical for for you? You know, as I said before, I'll look at any type of founder. My style tends to do really well with um serial entrepreneurs, and I just like know that about me. And I think it's just I think that's less about primary. (57:51) >> I'm updating my resume right now for you, Cassie, for the next time around. >> Excellent. I look forward to that. But I do, if you look at if you actually scan through the companies that I've backed, there's a lot of repeat entrepreneurs in there. And I the way I think about that is they have real unfinished business. (58:06) And I just love working with those people. Do you know what I mean? Where they just come and they've got this like chips on their shoulders and they're a little frustrated >> chips say chips on shoulders but chips and pockets right so we we love that but I would tell you like I've absolutely made bets on you know I backed a young founder in a company who was the type where you know he was getting cease and desist at 16 for the types of companies he was building and I'm like this guy's fascinating you know what I mean where (58:30) he's like a classical technologist he's got to learn the go to market side but like I probably wouldn't bet against him right like he he he built software while he was a summer intern at a company and the CFO of this like pretty well-known large company said drop out of school and come work here and he's like I will drop out of school but I'm going to go start this company right when I go and do it. (58:51) So I I very much have an open mind around it, but I'm also sensitive like at seed it's a marriage, not a date. And I mean AJ, you you know it. It's like there are highs, lows, sideways turns, everything in between of like the best companies in the world have that. And it has to be a partnership I think between the investor, the board member, and the founder. (59:11) And so a lot of it for me is just like the personal fit. And as I said before, it's the way it's kind of shook out is that I I I tend to do well with the serial entrepreneurs, but I will absolutely back the first- timers as well, too. And I I've you know I I lost a deal last year that I was kind of still very upset about and still tracking where it was a it was a a pure play engineering co-founding team and I just fell in love with them because I I think they had like amazing customer centricity for two engineers and you know they had come come in my direction (59:40) in a totally different way and I'm so I'm the the you know short version the short answer to the very long-winded version is I'm I'm very open-minded. I've done a little bit of everything. Cassie, it's been amazing to have you on Topline. I can't believe this is uh the first time, but there will be many others. (59:56) >> Okay. I'm glad I can get the the return. Yeah. >> We might even want you to be like a a co-host for a period of time. Uh if you'd be over there. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> We'll see. >> Well, I feel like with you gentlemen, I easily could just hang out here and and just shoot the for five hours. So, I'm proud of us conversation somewhat today. (1:00:16) We were meaning like for years before like why don't we actually start recording these conversations and here we are. >> We basically wanted our weeks to feel less miserable and we're like this is fun let's just do this and this will be a nice little balance. >> Cassie if uh there's founders or operators listening they want to be incubated by primary they don't want to get that form template response from you. (1:00:38) What's the best way to to match the criteria so that they can be a primary company? What do you think? >> Yeah absolutely. So, um, first off, the best way to get in touch with me is just via email at cassie primary.vc. But what Sam's alluding to is I was, uh, joking as the show is getting started here that at this point there's no excuses in the world for not doing homework and research before engaging somebody. (1:00:56) And so, nothing drives me more bananas than when I get these inbound emails for businesses that have nothing to do with anything where primary is focused or different stage. So, if you go to our website, very clear what our specialization areas are. I have a public thesis that I have written around what we want to do in B2B go to market. (1:01:12) I will not do a deal that is not in that thesis area because I only do one to two new deals a year. And the gracious gentleman at topline also allowed me to write my most recent editorial which also reads uh focuses on that thesis. So please read the thesis and if there is a fit get in touch and if you know someone building in any of the other categories please feel free to reach out to me as well too and I'm happy to get them in touch with the right partner on our end. (1:01:34) >> Do the work. >> Do the work. >> Katie, thanks so much for being our guest. We'll talk to you soon. >> Thanks again for having me.