How Amias Gerety Wins in Venture When Others Chase Hype

In this episode, Alex Rawlings speaks with Amias Gerety, Partner at QED Investors, a leading fintech-focused VC firm managing nearly $1B in assets. Amias shares insights on venture capital strategy, staying disciplined during market hype, sourcing deals, and how lessons from his time at the U.S. Treasury shape his investment decisions today.

⏱ Episode Highlights:

00:00 – Intro & QED Overview
QED’s structure, fintech focus, and global reach.

01:20 – VC Mistakes & Market Hype
The danger of "paying ahead of growth," especially in AI.

03:12 – Staying Disciplined
Simple metrics and historical heuristics that guide better investment decisions.

04:39 – Deal Dynamics in VC vs PE
Why proprietary deal flow in VC means getting in early — before companies start raising.

07:26 – Hunting vs. Gathering
How QED targets specific companies instead of waiting for inbound deals.

08:51 – Building Relationships
Top-heavy structure means founders speak directly with partners on the first call.

14:43 – Using Senior Talent Early
Deploying high-value advisors like Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris from the start.

16:09 – Biggest Mistake in Venture
Ignoring founder misalignment — “If it’s a maybe, it’s a no.”

18:25 – CEO Ownership in Startups
Why QED avoids deals where founders don’t have control — unlike PE’s model.

20:43 – Operating Partners in VC
VC success comes from entrepreneurial operators who aim to join portfolio companies.

24:31 – Honest Career Advice
Be clear about whether you want to be an operator or an investor — ambiguity causes misalignment.

25:59 – Treasury Lessons
Decision-making under pressure during the financial crisis informs his bold, data-light approach in VC.

30:12 – What He Reads
Only old books — for timeless thinking and unexpected insights.

31:46 – Connect with Amias
Reach out via LinkedIn.

Amias offers a rare perspective bridging government, fintech, and venture capital — a must-listen for anyone navigating today’s competitive investing landscape.

Raw Selection partners with Private Equity firms and their portfolio companies to secure exceptional executive talent. We focus on de-risking executive recruitment through meticulous search and selection processes, ensuring top-tier performance and long-term success.

🔗 Connect with Alex Rawlings on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexrawlings/
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Transcript

00:00
Welcome back to the Royal Selection Private Equity Podcast. Joining us today is Amias Gerrity, partner at QED Investors, a US-based investment firm  focused  on the FinTech sector.  Amias, if you can give us a brief insight into you,  All right, Alex. Well, glad to be here. So my name is Amias Gerrity. I'm a partner at QED Investors. I run our US.

00:29
early stage team. based in Washington DC and QED is a large global fintech focused venture firm. So we have almost a billion dollars in our current fund.  About two thirds of that is focused on the early stage, call it seed to series B. And then about a third of that focused on the later stage series C plus.  you know, we're one of a tiny group of,

00:53
in venture investors who actually are this large, this global and focused on fintech. Perfect. Thank you very much. What mistakes do you see either venture capital or portfolio companies making and what would you suggest to correct them? All right. Well, so  the what mistakes people are making is so market determined. And I would say right now, Alex, we're  heading back into a market where there's a lot of FOMO.

01:20
And a lot of assumption that anything that has happened for two or three months in a row will happen indefinitely. So,  you know, look, it's  tears and beers, right? For me to say, I wish all my peers were more disciplined and didn't bid  up the great companies that I liked that I could bid on them uniquely. But I do think that, you know, in AI in particular, we've seen such fantastic growth and it's totally makes sense for me. m

01:49
as a venture investor to pay up for growth,  right? If you can see a company go from zero to 50 million in a year, well, that's something you might wanna be willing to pay for.  But I think what we're seeing right now in the market is paying ahead of growth. Oh, because it's AI, it might grow. So let's pay as if it has already achieved this. And I think that's one  big mistake that we see. It's a really hard market to stay disciplined in.

02:15
especially because  those of us in venture, and I'm certainly no exception, we believe that AI is gonna change everything.  So that for sure uh means that we should be excited, we should be aggressive, but boy, you can get on the wrong side of that pretty quick. I'm  old enough to  have been a graduating college right after .com. I lived through the financial crisis at the treasury department.  I went through the COVID boom and bust. So we've sort of seen this movie play out before.

02:44
So that's a big thing that we're spending a lot of time thinking about and worrying about internally. Now, whether we're making mistakes by holding back sometimes or others are making mistakes by being too aggressive, only time will tell. Absolutely. So how do you stay disciplined then to keep you away from  the shiny lights? Well, one thing that we often do  is we try to use some very simple heuristics on top of...

03:12
you know, what we call like hard thresholds, like, hey, wait a minute, has this company actually tripled in the last six months? Sometimes a company will come in, they'll say, hey, we've just hit an inflection point, we're  about to explode. But actually, if you look at their trajectory, especially in venture in the early stages, you spend a lot of time wandering. as they call it a series A investor,  we like to say, well, wait a minute, like, I know that your model says you're tripling, but have you tripled?

03:43
Right, so sometimes we just like to take a big step back or another way to do that is, oh my gosh, we're growing so fast. Okay, fine, but what is your CAC payback time? Right, you might be your customer acquisition cost and how quickly  you can get that cost back in your business model.  And you know, if it's not less than six months, you're actually pretty inefficient no matter how fast you're Now some companies,

04:09
You know, it can be one month CAC payback. Okay, great. Well, now we know we can put money to work. So a lot of what we do is just try to uh borrow heuristics from other market cycles and just always take a big step back whenever we're underwriting a company. Okay, of course you're excited about the team. Of course you're excited about the space. course you're excited about where they can go,  but let's just apply some very simple rules and make sure that we're not getting over our skis because of the incredible narrative.

04:39
the incredible narrative that's coming along with the company. So, obviously more of a failure in private equity than I am personally in VC, but  typically we're seeing a lot of this jumping over, as you put it, ahead of your skis, interest in portfolio companies, especially with the slow deal market and deals that hard to come by. You're either sat on capital, you can't shift, or you can't get the capital in the first place.  Is that similar to VC? Is this because of the huge competitive nature of

05:08
of deal cycles and trying to get the  golden goose of propriety versus classic auction type model. Yeah, I think that's right. uh So  talking about  where people are on proprietary versus auctions, mean,  it is certainly true  that in venture, basically no deal gets banked in the way that in private equity deals get banked. So the classic auction doesn't have quite the same  framework.

05:36
But there is definitely a sense in venture that you've got to be in,  meaning understanding a company before they really start raising. And so I think in that sense, that's the right analogy for that proprietary versus auction.  market dynamics change so fast, right? In 22 and 23, we  would talk to companies that, oh yeah, call me when you're raising. Right? Because we had confidence that the market wouldn't move so fast.

06:05
that if someone called us when they were raising, we of course wanted to build the relationship ahead of time, but we thought time was on our side. In 2024, that started to shift a little bit, largely because of AI, in 2025 that has shifted for buzzy companies, for hot companies, and this is very much a hot or not market, meaning the hot companies get super hot, companies that don't get hot just stay super cold. It's a very unusual market, even with sometimes

06:33
the not hot companies have  good metrics. So  there's an interesting dynamic there that I think every venture investor is struggling to navigate.  But the market dynamics change a lot. We are seeing right now that the only way to have proprietary deal flow  is uh to be so aggressive as to really understand which companies you want to invest in before those companies.

07:00
want to take your money. And again, unlike PE, venture companies, the best companies will raise money every 12 to 18 months. So you do have a relatively predictable cycle where you can say, well, if someone,  can tell who raised a seed round. I know they're probably going to raise an A. And so that creates my coverage universe. And what we try to do is  make a distinction between what we call hunting versus gathering.

07:26
And I think in venture, a lot of people talk about that networking, that aggressive talking about who's doing what, know, who have you heard that's hot? They think of that as hunting, right? They're out there hunting in the market. And what we've tied to our team is that's not hunting, that's gathering. That's planting a lot of little seeds and hoping to get a little yield from each one, a little bit of conversation there. Hunting is when you say,  I know there is one company I want to invest in the next six months, I'm not gonna pull out all the stops to try and invest in that company.

07:56
And I think that's sometimes a mindset shift between the FOMO induced, who's hot this week, how can I chase that deal? And a slightly more aggressive form of this is the one company that I think it is going to be the one that makes FinTech in 2025, the one that makes, that's gonna IPO in 2031 and I wanna get in today. That's the kind of aggressive hunting mindset, which is a little different than what people often think of.

08:24
when they're just out there being aggressive networkers. Makes sense. So your process then, how you mentioned you identified those businesses that you want to invest in and you then go out trying to build that relationship. How do you begin that connection? What's your kind of playbook to  get connected with them and then build that relationship with them? Yeah, so we have a... We do have a...

08:51
privileged position in fintech. We've been around for 17 years. We've had, you know,  a couple dozen,  uh, unicorns. We've had  many IPOs. So we are a big name. People will come to us, but at the same time in this  competitive environment, environment, mean, when we started, no one was investing in fintech right now. All the big generalists have dedicated fintech partners and they've done great fintech investments and they really know fintech. You know, our companies and our partners have taught the whole market.

09:21
about what FinTech is and what the possibility is. And we've certainly learned from others along the way. So I think the secret's out on FinTech. So it's gotten a lot more complicated. But what we do is, you know, it's a classic mix of art and science, Alex. So we do have a very disciplined coverage universe. We have about 150 venture funds that we respect. And so we're constantly tracking, okay, if one of these 150 funds does a deal,

09:50
we should take a look. And then we're tracking that through and look, that's a lot of companies. Now on order of magnitude, there are about 150, 200 FinTech deals a year in the early stage. So it's not an impossible universe to cover. And then we do a lot to keep ourselves accountable, right? So we have a watch list. So if I'm interested in a company, it goes onto the watch list. If I haven't talked to a company on my watch list, that's, you know,

10:20
Internally, I'm held accountable for that. You know, we have Monday meetings and we go through the watch list, no connect list. Hey, Amais, you say you're interested in this company, what have you done to get in touch with them? We also have a watch list reconnect. Hey, Amais, you say you're interested in this company, but you haven't talked to them for six months. Are you actually interested? Because if you're not, someone else is chasing them.  Or if you are, someone else is chasing them. And if you're not, take it off your list. It's okay to not be interested in a company.

10:48
And then, so that's kind of on the science part where we just try to be really disciplined. What is our coverage universe? Have we talked to everyone? Have we made a selection? And then the art part of it is we have to trust ourselves, right? If someone on my team has said, hey, I spent half an hour or I talked to another investor or I learned more about what their business and I don't think that's a big company, great, move it to the side. We don't have to talk to everyone. We don't have to chase everyone. And then similarly on the art side, we like to just...

11:17
Maybe about once a month, we just take a big step back and we say, hey, you know, stop analyzing just in your gut, which of the companies that we're talking about that other people are talking about, do you think are going to define FinTech for the year 2025? Right? Just like, just kind of let your gut speak. And so we do this mix Alex of science, which is try to be really disciplined and art, is, you know, create space for the team.

11:46
to enunciate what is their gut thinking. And we think that that balance helps us sort of listen to each other and say, hey, Alex, I actually think you love this company. Let's go chase that one. As opposed to, well, I don't know. Like I looked at their metrics and the LTV to CAC isn't exactly where I want it to be, you know, the lifetime value. You know, if you really have passion, sometimes it is important to look to your gut. So that's how we like to mix the art and the science. And then  once you've identified these businesses, you mentioned the connection points.

12:15
what are you doing there? Because I can guarantee they're just ringing them up and saying, let us know when you're ready to do your next round. We'll be involved. And then next week, hey, we're still here. How's that round doing? Six months, I'll be waiting. Call you next week. Yeah, exactly. Look, I think we like to say that deals are won and lost in the first call. at QED, we actually have a pretty top heavy structure. We do not hire

12:43
associates or analysts. We only have partners and principles. Interesting.  And part of that is that our brand value is the best advice you can get in fintech. And so a lot of what we do is we try to be disarming and we try to demonstrate that founder friendliness, but not by saying we'll pay the biggest price or we'll be the easiest on governance, but saying, Hey, let's just have a conversation in which you pretend I'm already your investor.  And I just try to give you advice. And if you like that advice,

13:14
You should definitely be, and if you don't, then totally, like leave us alone, judge us. um So  we try to be very top heavy,  kind of uh partners in first calls, principle,  we're not trying to have sorcerers um call a CEO, spend a half an hour getting their metrics, putting a deal sheet together. We're actually trying to get on the phone with CEOs and create an authentic connection from moment  one.

13:44
I don't know whether it works or doesn't work,  but I think our track record is pretty good and that's how we think about it. The other thing that we like to do is to say, you know, if we like a company, like I just did a company, uh just, you know, talked to a company at the Series A, they had a very small allocation, it was too small for us relative to where the company was and I said, hey, we really like you, you clearly like us because you're asking us, you know, if we want to come in on this round. So let's do this, let's just set up a meeting after this round is closed.

14:14
and let's do 45 minutes to talk about what your plan is from series A to B. Just pretend we're already an investor, right? Let's talk about company building. Let's talk about if I were on your board, what's the advice I would be giving you? And that's kind of what we try to do in The Connection. The other thing that we try to do, look, our founder, Nigel Morris, was a co-founder of Capital One, right? He's like  lived a pretty awesome story. He's lived an awesome life. People like talking to Nigel. um

14:43
You know, he's well, she's got a great British accent, like he's a very charming guy.  And I think sometimes in our firm, we made the mistake of using Nigel in the last call instead of using Nigel as part of our outreach. You know, hey, like you're building this company.  You know, we're not even considering investing in you right now, but I think it would be great for you to talk to Nigel. I think you'd learn a lot by talking to him. So that's some of the things that we've been working on over the years to make sure that we don't

15:13
you know, hey, Nigel sits on high and you he's part of the final decision, of course.  So of course any CEO we invest in is going to talk to Nigel, but how do we put him earlier in the process? How do we use other assets that we have? My partner who knows, you know, capital markets, my partner who knows consumer marketing, my partner who knows, you know,  the Indian market versus the Nigerian market or whatever it is. And how do we bring all those resources to bear earlier in the process so that people feel

15:40
that brand promise of the best advice you can get in FinTech. um Again, it's a very competitive market, so I wouldn't say this is one plus one equals two, but it's something like one plus one plus one gives us a shot. And that's all you can ask for in venture these days. Makes sense. What did you learn from the biggest mistake that you've made in venture so far? um I think, so gosh, there's so many mistakes. um

16:09
I think that one of the ways for me that  I've  made mistakes is I get enamored with the theory of the company relative to the founders and the founders capabilities. Right? So the biggest mistake  I've made was two founders who really didn't get along.  And uh one of them was kind of the operating founder.

16:39
And one of them was kind of the chairman.  And I love the theory of the company, but the fact that they actually weren't on the same page, it just destroyed the company. couldn't, and you know, I was on the board and I was constantly navigating between them and the company couldn't operate and it made really bad decisions because of that. And I think that was one of these examples where I was like,  oh, well, like this could work.

17:07
I remember we even had a separate conversation. We're right about to make the investment decision. I was like,  I don't like, this is really crazy. Like I can tell that these two guys are not on the same page, but I think the theory of this company is so good. can overcome that.  And, you know, in hiring there's this, this line, if there's a doubt, there's no doubt. Right. Meaning if, if there's a doubt, it's a no.

17:36
And I think that was an example where I let  the theory and the uniqueness of the strategy blind me to the reality that even  truly unique ideas um will just falter uh if the team isn't aligned and if the team isn't geared towards the ultimate goal. Yeah, we have a  saying, it's in our top three hiring.

18:05
like mantras and it's a, if it's a maybe it's a no. If it's a maybe it's a no. What a great line. Yeah. Yeah. And look, I think there's another thing which is even more particularly, even more simply in venture, if the CEO doesn't control the company, don't make the investment.

18:25
Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. That's obviously  very different than PE where obviously the whole point of PE is PE controls the company. Yeah. But if there's an early money person or an early advisor or a person who owns IP or whatever it is,  and the CEO doesn't control the company, in our experience, you just have to stay away. These early stage companies, they win because their founders win  and you have to back the founder. So there's a lot of great companies, a lot of great ideas that don't fit that structure.

18:54
But that's one of the unique things about venture. It seems to be true, even though uh in a dozen other modalities, it works for CEOs to not control the company. In the early stage, if the CEO doesn't control the company, stay away. Makes sense. think with a private equity lens on that, it's all about the good management team and a strong management team. And private equity do hire those management teams in, which obviously a little bit different from a venture cycle. You will eventually replace the founder at some point, usually. uh

19:23
You know, certainly in low-emitter market, first-time private equity investment, if you invest in the wrong people, excuse me, if you invest in the wrong people, it doesn't matter. A business is still likely to fail, even if it's fantastic, but it comes down to people, which obviously I would argue, given my role in executive search. And I will say for us, you know, as FinTech specialists, we love unit economics. We love data. We love analysis.

19:51
And it is certainly true that relative to some of our peers who just, know, the old phrase in venture is team and TAM. So total addressable market and the team. And you know, or you'll hear some great investors out in Silicon Valley say, oh, you know, just, the way I could tell from the moment the CEO walked in the door that she was a winner. And like we at QED, we feel very uncomfortable with that, but it is true that

20:20
the greatest companies are built by the greatest CEOs. And so that's a  tension that we struggle with in our business.  Interesting.  So something I'm seeing from a professionalization of private equity at the moment is the operating partner, the value creation, the portfolio uh work, depending on what you call them,  depending where you're listening in the...

20:43
in the world,  portfolio value creation, SRG, all sorts of different things referred to, but we'll just refer to as Operating Partner for Cleaners. So talk to us about the Operating Partner role  from differentiation from venture capital to private equity. Yeah, I think this is a place where  a thousand flowers are blooming in venture.  Certainly there are some  very big platforms like, know, Andreessen Horowitz has sort of elevated this to be huge, right? We've got

21:12
100 people or something like that, you know, on the platform team. What we have found is that, you know, every, if you're talking about a small company, you know, that company might have 10, 15, 20 employees. Even someone who can add a lot of value in theory is taking up so much time that unless they're fit with the CEO is perfect, they can't actually add value.

21:41
Right, the CEO's time is so precious that um no matter how great the person is, they can't deliver  value relative to the CEO's time unless there's a really great fit between the CEO and the operating partner. So at QED, uh we've done a bunch of experiments. We're pretty light on that model. um Instead, what we have...

22:08
we actually have a kind of a semi-affiliated uh recruiting and consulting firm, which is a lot of sort of where we stash uh or use kind of operating partner models.  I think that that,  TBD, whether it works, it's called Lingua Franca Partners, uh but that is a place for us to allow people to come in, be a little bit more independent, a little bit more entrepreneurial. we're not,  they're not dedicated to our fun, they're individual professionals out.

22:37
know, helping companies.  And  what we see in venture  is the  operating partner model works best when the goal of the operating partner is to land inside a portfolio company within 18 months.  Okay. Now in PE, I think you would say oftentimes that's similar, or maybe you have sort of two different models in PE. You have the sort of the retired CEO model, which is like,

23:04
you know, your advisor or maybe board director, and then you've got your real operating partner and they're gonna drop in next time we have a deal that needs a go-to-market lead or something like that. I think in venture, because it's more fit-based and because these companies are so early, we find that the operating partners who succeed are very entrepreneurial and flexible, and they're really saying, hey, look, I wanna help the portfolio, but really, I'm finding...

23:33
I'm gonna do the try before you buy thing, right? The CEO's gonna try my services, I'm gonna try my cultural fit,  and so I'm gonna try and help three, four, five portfolio companies. I might try to help two or three companies outside of the portfolio at the same time, and then over the course of a year or 18 months, my goal is to be the COO, the head of strategy, the head of sales, whatever it is,  inside of that company. And that's the model that we think works most, uh

24:01
that kind of works at best. I think one of the things that people can make a mistake on, and I often, um know,  there are lots of exceptions to what I'm about to say, but if someone is becoming an operating partner with the hope of becoming an investor, that often creates real sort of clash because at the start of the relationship, the operating partner person, you know, wants to pretend that they are  open to lots of different things.

24:31
and the venture firm wants to pretend that, of course, there's opportunity here because both people want  the relationship to work.  But then pretty quickly, six to 12 months in, if the operating person  partner  really doesn't want to be an operator, they want to be an investor,  investing partnerships are so small, they expand um very slowly  and very infrequently.  And so it's quite rare for that switch to happen.

25:01
And I think that's where I sometimes see this, where people get, you know, six, 12 months in, they're pretty disappointed because they thought they were gonna, you know, end up an investing partner. And the investing partnership is like, no, no, no, I just wanted you to hang out for a little bit before I could stick you in a new company. And I think that's a tension that we sometimes see. whenever I think, especially for operating partners, or people who are interested in that, that's the number one piece of advice I'm giving them is  make sure that if you wanna be an investor,

25:30
You're hyper explicit about that. And therefore you only go to hang out with firms that are actually open to that. As opposed to saying,  oh, you know, I'm open to anything. And then you end up in a world that ends up with, know, it's kind of a be honest with yourself, be honest with the other. It's a classic hiring problem.  But we think it's particularly acute when you have operating partner, because it's such an ambiguous role that you need real incentive alignment to make it work.

25:59
You referenced earlier your time in the treasury and during the financial crisis. What did you learn working  for the treasury in that time?  mean,  so much Alex, but you know, think  the,  it was, it was a wild roller coaster, right? Like, you know,  the,  often say, we talked about this at the start of COVID. Like, you know, crises happen because people become  unsure.

26:29
of their fundamental assumptions, right?  And, you know, even at the start of COVID, it really felt like something that everyone was confident we were going to get through.  And so,  you know, I remember having a conversation internally at the start of COVID where I said, look, like, think whenever we get through this, maybe it's two months from now, maybe it's six months from now, maybe it's 12 months from now, I don't think anybody's fundamental assumptions about how the economy works are gonna change.

26:58
So I think we're gonna get through this pretty clear, cleanly or quickly. I think during the financial crisis and whether this was true or not true, you had real doubts about whether housing had any value at all. Now, again, I think looking back on it, say, well, that was kind of wacky. Like people who bought housing did really well. But whether 150 year old banks would fail next week.

27:24
That's a very meaningful set of uncertainty about how our economy works, what is safe and what is not.  And so the number one thing, and I think there's a lot of talk now,  whether it's crypto, whether it's stable coins, whether it's other forms of  AI or monetization, in the financial services sector,  ask, how does this,  could this disrupt,  could this cause a financial crisis? And one of the things that probably the number one thing that I learned about financial crises that I think people still miss.

27:54
is that financial crises are very, very different than recessions or other kinds of economic downturn. And financial crises happen when safe assets become unsafe. And that's  going back to that assumption, right? When a safe asset becomes unsafe,  it undermines everything and that's when you have a sudden stop. Whereas what happens in a recession is like,

28:19
oh, well, I thought I was growing at 5 % and now I'm growing at 0 % or I thought I was growing at 2 % and now I'm shrinking by 2%. That's kind of, that's not a sudden stop. And so I think that's one of the big lessons I learned. In terms of the applicability to venture, I think that for me, the number one thing is about making decisions given uncertainty, right? If you are in...

28:45
You know, if you're lucky enough to sit in a policy making seat when policy really needs to be made, you just, you have two things that are true. One, you don't have time to figure out all the answers. And, uh and two, you cannot test and test your way in. Right? Like you can, you can do a lot. You can try a lot of different things. You can be open-minded about  things working, not working. That was certainly something that we did in the financial crisis. We tried.

29:15
18 different tools and only three of them really made a difference. But  what you cannot do is say, oh, I'm gonna do a small test. And then if that works, I'm gonna do more of it, which is how you do in business. And I think that's true for venture investing as well. The entire venture ecosystem, whether it's the time we take in diligence, whether it's the speed at which our CEOs need to move, it is about making  very decisive and kind of almost irrevocable decisions.

29:43
on very little information. And I think that's one of the things that, you people say, well, how could being a bureaucrat at the treasury department be like venture investing? But in that way, it's actually very similar, which is we didn't have an opportunity to get more information  and going small was not an option. Everything we had to do, it's like, if you're writing the law, you're only gonna get to do this once ever 10 or 20 years. So you gotta just write it down the best way you can.  And sure, there were mistakes in that,  but.

30:12
the fundamental decision-making of here I stand, I've got the information I'm going to have, I've got to make a decision, or I've got to make a recommendation, ultimately, know, Congress and the president ultimately make those decisions. But that's  very similar, very similar to investing. Interesting. What do you read, watch, listen to, that you recommend that others should check out? All right, so I read  only old books.  So like  one of my...

30:42
uh favorite books is actually Frederick Douglass  wrote three different autobiographies.  They're amazing. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin is an amazing book. Charles Darwin is actually a surprisingly good writer.  And then lastly, right now I'm actually, know, Journey to the Center of the Earth, the old Jules Verne.  It's a really funny book because, you know, we didn't, we sort of...

31:10
He was so into the science and sort of like, exploring and creating sci-fi  in an area that is now, we just understand the center of the earth so well. So it's very kind of,  from their perspective of 125, 30 years later, it's kind of a silly book. He like goes down a volcano in Iceland and like, then there's like a sea and  dinosaurs underneath. Anyway, but uh anyway, so I really recommend, I love reading old books because

31:39
They've sort of stood the test of time and you can learn a lot because old books, people usually have one or two ideas from those old books. And when you read them, they're always crazier and wackier than you would have thought. They're more different than you would have thought. Interesting. And if anybody wishes to reach out to you, post this podcast, how best they get in touch, please. Yeah, LinkedIn is my primary social media, so ping me there. Perfect. Well, thank you very much for coming on to the podcast, sharing your insights into venture, data origination.

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The Treasury, which isn't something we discussed on  the podcast prior. So thank you very much for coming on. Thanks, Alex. And thank you very much, as always, to all of our listeners tuning in yet again to the Private Equity Podcast. Till the next time, keep smashing it.