E9: Future trends and challenges in venture capital with Satya Patel of Homebrew

In this podcast episode, Alex Levin, co-founder and CEO of Regal.io, interviews Satya Patel, co-founder of Homebrew, discussing their investment philosophy, the evolution of AI in business, and the future of venture capital. They explore the significance of AI as an enabling technology, the potential of virtual agents in contact centers, and the importance of patience and self-advocacy in one's career journey. The conversation delves into the changing landscape of venture capital, emphasizing the need for focus and expertise in a rapidly evolving market.

Main Topics Covered:

1. Investment philosophy of Homebrew
2. Evolution and impact of AI in business
3. Significance of virtual agents in contact centers
4. Personal and career insights, including the importance of patience and self-advocacy
5. Future trends and challenges in venture capital

To learn more about everything Outbound Contact Center, read more posts at regal.io/blog or email us at hello@regal.io.

Transcript

Alex Levin: 0:00

Hi, this is Alex Levin. I'm a Co-founder and CEO at Regal and I have here with me Satya Patel from Homebrew and we're very lucky to have him as one of our investors.

Satya Patel: 0:11

Thanks for having me Alex. Excited to be here to chat with you.

Alex Levin: 0:14

So if I think back to how we first met it's sort of funny, you know, we were raising a seed round you know, it was basically done and somebody said to us, you have to meet Satya, you have to meet Satya, he's fantastic. And like, luckily we took the call and we're just, you know, wowed by, I think your breadth of experience, you know, across both being an operator, you know, and being in sort of in MarTech or ad tech, you know, and obviously going on to be, being an investor. So, I mean, maybe to start, can you tell us a bit about, you know, your background, you know, where you got started and how you ended up being an investor?

Satya Patel: 0:46

Yeah. Like most things, there was no plan to get to where I am today, but I've had the good fortune of being able to hop back and forth between the investing world and the operating world. So really started my career more on the investing side as a junior member of a venture capital firm during the. com boom, like in the mid nineties and then moved to the operating side and was at double click in the early days and. That was my first exposure to the AdTech, MarTech world left DoubleClick to join Google and was there to help build the AdSense business over a number of years and kind of deepened my experience in AdTech, MarTech and then went back to the venture side by being a partner at a firm called Battery Ventures. And spent a number of years there and then all of our ex Google colleagues were off doing interesting things and a few of them have gotten, had gotten Twitter off the ground and so went over to Twitter to be a VP of product and that business also had obviously an AdTech, MarTech component to it. In terms of the revenue model. And then finally almost 12 years ago now got together with one of my former Google colleagues to start homebrew as we were both looking for opportunities to work together again. And so that's a very quick summary of the career and hopping back and forth. I've always tried to optimize for just two things when I make career decisions, kind of. The problem and the people I find like, it's really easy to try to like, especially for analytical people to create your spreadsheet of the 30 criteria and their rankings and wings and all that. And I found like, if you are able to work on something you care about with people who you trust and who you can learn from. It frees you up to do your best work. And so all my career decisions have been oriented around that rather than like some grand master plan of what I was going to be doing down the road. I, I never expected to be a venture capitalist towards the end of my career, but here we are.

Alex Levin: 2:42

So I've spoken with, you know over the years, a number of people who've worked with you and everybody, you know, thinks very highly of you. So, you know, you had a lot of options in those days. How did you pick, you know, both DoubleClick, which ended up being bought by Google and Google. Like, what was it to your point? Like, as you were looking at companies, like that stuck out, that stood out, like, why'd you pick those?

Satya Patel: 3:02

Yeah. So, I mean, double click during the dot com boom was kind of the original kind of internet advertising company. And so I saw a couple of things there. One, I was a big believer, you know that the internet was going to be here for a long time and have a meaningful impact on the world and that it was going to change business models. And DoubleClick was kind of at the forefront of that. And I was living in New York at the time and DoubleClick was like the preeminent New York technology company that was kind of emerging. And So from a problem perspective it seemed like kind of the most interesting ecosystem to be playing in. If you cared about what the internet was going to become. And then from a people perspective it was this unique place that had this mix of sales because advertising is sales but technology as well, because it was an internet company and building kind of real advertising infrastructure from a technology standpoint. And so as I met the people there, I was struck by kind of this combination of skills, which I really appreciated because having worked on the venture side, I saw a lot of businesses at that time that had only one set of skills necessary to needed to build a business. And I really found a team of people who kind of had a balanced skillset necessary to scale and build a business at DoubleClick. And so, I had the good fortune of becoming a product manager there. And one of the things I got to work on over the course of time was helping to launch double clicks. Entry into the search advertising business. And so as the PM, I was also kind of the lead BD person and talking to all the search engines in the world at the time, which included Google, but also find what and ask Jeeves and Canoodle and like all these different groups. And as I met the Google folks they first said, like, if you want to work on search, you should come work here. And two, as I started talking to folks there It was clear like they were the smartest people I'd ever met and that I was just going to learn a ton working with them. And so well before the acquisition by Google, I left double click to join Google and And then, you know, everything comes full circle always. And, you know, four years later Google ended up buying DoubleClick. And

Alex Levin: 5:09

know what I'm saying? People forget that in those days it was DoubleClick who was the leader in what we now consider like normal Google search. Like when you go to Google and like those things come up, that wasn't Google's ad business at the time. They had a very different ad business. It was. I mean, copying is too strong a word, but they, you know, it's DoubleClick who did it first and they bought DoubleClick for that business.

Satya Patel: 5:28

well, the real thing is like Overture launched the pay-per

Alex Levin: 5:32

was originally

Satya Patel: 5:33

which, you know, well, I guess it was go to before his overture. And then it was part of Yahoo. So that's really where the pay-per click business came from. DoubleClick was the original like banner advertising business. And, and more importantly, from Google's perspective, it was the creator of kind of ad serving technology. And that's really why ultimately Google bought DoubleClick was for the ad serving technology, which helped it expand its business into both graphical advertising and text advertising as well as, as well as expand the ad network itself.

Alex Levin: 6:03

yeah. So now it's all Google, but in those days there was a lot of variation.

Satya Patel: 6:07

Yeah. And then just to finish answering your question, the reason I ended up going to Twitter was similar, like. I was an early Twitter user. I was fascinated by the power of the platform in terms of the way it helped kind of echo voices or amplify voices that weren't often heard. And really kind of be this platform to help level the playing field between the head of the tail and the long tail in the same way that I thought that Google did in many ways. And and there were a bunch of ex Google folks who I knew and respected who were over there and they said. You know, come over here and help us turn this from a project into a business. And you know, you always try to make decisions, as I said based on people and problem. And it was definitely one of those where if I didn't take that opportunity, I was not going to sleep for a few years, probably wondering what if, and so ended up doing that.

Alex Levin: 6:54

when you look at Reddit today, like people are drawing all these parallels and saying the average revenue per user on Reddit is so low because they haven't been able to monetize. Or if you're a skeptic, you'd say, well, it's a different kind of user. They're not, you know, it's not really like Twitter where, you know, it's a different kind of communication, but do you look at Reddit and see the parallels and think they will be able to build the same kind of ad engine or do you think it's a very different mechanic there?

Satya Patel: 7:18

I think building an ad business at scale is super challenging from a lot of standpoints, but I think there are probably more challenges for Reddit than even for, for Twitter. Just given the, the nature of the communications and the audience really well limited Twitter at the end of the day was audience growth. More than monetization. I think that if they had continued to grow, there would have been lots of opportunities to continue to build revenue per user in lots of different ways. But the fact that growth stalled was the big problem for Twitter. And I, you know, Reddit may end up having a similar problem.

Alex Levin: 7:53

Yeah. Yeah, if I'm really honest, I'm not active on Reddit at all and like Twitter, like barely. So like,

Satya Patel: 8:01

I'm the same way at this point for both of those

Alex Levin: 8:03

yeah, you know, I remember at the beginning using them and I basically at this point don't at all. So it's a shame. So, you know, eventually you know, you'd been a VC before Hunter, I don't think had ever been a VC.

Satya Patel: 8:16

he'd be an, he'd been an angel investor, but he had never been to VC before.

Alex Levin: 8:20

So how did you guys, you know, first of all, you guys are not polar opposites, but like spending time with you. It's fun. Because you guys have such a different style, like, how'd you guys decide you were the right team and like, you wanted to be in venture capital.

Satya Patel: 8:32

Yeah. I, I think you appreciate this'cause you started Regal with Rebecca, but like anytime you have a job, you probably leave with like the four or five people you hope to work with again. Right. In some meaningful way. And when I left Google it was around the same time that Hunter was moving from Google over to YouTube to run product for YouTube. And he was just one of those people that I knew that I wanted to try to find ways to work with again and. I actually tried to recruit him to be an EIR when I was at Battery Ventures. And we talked about him potentially coming to run a consumer product at Twitter as part of my team. But ultimately he stayed at YouTube and then but we had become family friends. We'd done some angel investing together. And we were both thinking about leaving our respective jobs and got together with, for one of our frequent breakfasts, and it was just a moment in If we didn't take advantage of the opportunity to work together, then it was probably never going to happen because we'd be tied up doing the next thing for 10 plus years. And so really what we decided first and foremost was that we were going to work together again. We had no idea what we were going to do, but we said, let's spend the next however long it takes to figure out what it is that gives us the opportunity to work together, but really spend our time and energy on the things that will be really satisfying in both the short term and long term and the outgrowth of all that was homebrew.

Alex Levin: 9:49

So you guys, you know, got off to a quick start with some, what was your first one where you like put the money in? And like, you knew that that was like, you don't have to like, you know, say it's your favorite child, but like, what was the first one where you knew would be big?

Satya Patel: 10:02

I mean, every time you write a check, you think, you know, it's going to be big. Right. But I, yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, our second investment ever was a company called Plaid. Plaid is now kind of this really well recognized, but also really important company in the FinTech ecosystem, right. It kind of powers. Data access to everyone's bank accounts. So if you sign up in some random app to give that app access to your bank account, it's probably powered by Plaid. And so, you know, our fourth investment ever, I think was Chime. So I don't know that I can say like, there was one company where we were like from day one, like, this is going to be the one because you want that to be every company you invest in. But I think that we've always tried to invest with the idea that. Every investment has the opportunity to be a super important company, but maybe even more importantly, that every team we support has the opportunity to be a team that we want to back again and again, regardless of whether this specific company works or not. And so in both those instances, that was the thing we were more sure of is like, these are people we're going to want to work with for the next 30 years. Hopefully the companies work in the way we think they're going to work, but the people was the

Alex Levin: 11:17

if you think about your, and this is asking you to be self reflective which, which I know you are, but if you think about your time, like, do you sort of enjoy more of the original sort of investment or was like the exit, you've had some big exits now, was that more rewarding where then everyone sort of saw the fruition of what happened with these entrepreneurs?

Satya Patel: 11:39

I will tell you honestly, like, We've never celebrated an exit. Like we've never like done more than maybe say, Hey, like high five on that day, but we've never like done a dinner to celebrate it. We never bought ourselves anything. For us, we know like at the end of the day, we don't play that big a role in the exit, right? Like it's the founders who do all the hard work and hopefully we're able to contribute along the way in some ways. So for us, it's the journey. It's much more meaningful. And the things that we celebrate are much more about like, Oh, we did this particular thing, which the founders are grateful for. Those are the things we celebrate more than like an exit an exit is a monetary outcome that hopefully is the outgrowth of the type of relationship that we build with founders. But we don't look at that as the thing to celebrate.

Alex Levin: 12:27

Yeah, I mean, I believe I remember talking to some of the folks you had invested in before us. Literally, they'd be like showing me their phone. Like, Oh, I text with Satya every day. Like you were effectively their co founder which has its pros and cons I'm sure. But but, you know, I think they really valued the relationship that they built with you over the years. And still like, we love going to these dinners, you know, what do you have every year with all the other founders? So we can see what everyone is doing. So, you know to skip, I guess, forward a little bit ahead, you know, when we were raising seed, you know, Rebecca and I, if I put myself back in those days, like we had run big outbound phone teams in home services, knew the technology that we were using was not great. You know, had a pretty clear idea on what the technology could be, you know, basically the idea was to bring more marketing automation concepts into the contact center to allow. You know, individualized, personalized, you know, phone outreach in the same way you did in in marketing world and email didn't really know if this would go, you know, we knew home services was a good category didn't know how many other categories would fit or not. Like, that's sort of when I think we met you. So when you saw that, like, you know, what was it that then sort of got you interested, you know, I think when we first had the conversation, you said something to the effect of, oh, you know, we had a prepared mind like we understood this quickly because we were sort of ready for this.

Satya Patel: 13:51

I mean, I, I had the good fortune of having a little bit of a cheat code and understanding what you guys were doing, because one, I'd worked in the ad tech Martech land for so long and understood kind of what categories worked really well with like direct paid advertising versus what worked well in brand and brand advertising. And what was led to immediate conversion versus conversion over a long period of time. Secondly, as you'll recall, like when I was a battery of ventures, we invested in Angie's list and I worked very closely with that team and saw how that business was built. And again, like the types of challenges that existed in home services. And so I think the moment that you and Rebecca pitched us. The thing that resonated was that high consideration purchases are just different in terms of what kinds of information that consumers need and businesses need to make those decisions. And we have lived that problem and seen it. And so the idea that voice and kind of the human touch would be important in those types of, Decisions resonated really strongly, and then it was also clear that there was a lot of white space like nobody had thought about bringing the data and automation that existed in other parts of the marketing landscape to voice and to this part of the conversion funnel, so to speak. And so. I think it's the, the experience that led to kind of the resonance of the idea and then, you know, obviously you and Rebecca are a killer team with complimentary skill sets and have lived the problem firsthand as well. So it was one of the easier decisions we've ever had.

Alex Levin: 15:36

Kind of you to say, well, it's easy for us to like include you once we, you know, met you. I think like, if I think back to those days, there are two things particularly that I look back on one, which we kind of realized at the time, but, you know, maybe not even as much one. You, it was so like, contrary to the common narrative, like. You know, you'd go to, even today I go talk to people and say, Hey, like we have a business where like our customers are intentionally calling their end user and they go, what? Like, do people answer the phone? Like, is that a thing? Like, I'm like, Oh, the youth, the youth doesn't answer the phone. Like they're on the Tik TOK and the, you know, whatever. Like I, you know, I might, and people literally would go, my kids don't answer the phone when I call them. Like, how could your business work? And they're shocked when they find out that, you know you know, if email answer rates in a specific situation are 3%. Ours are 30 percent in exactly the same situation and blows people's mind. So I think one, like we didn't even realize how contrarian it was, but I think like looking back, it's one of the gifts that keeps giving because there's not 10 people on TechCrunch saying they're doing exactly the same thing as us. Cause it's not, it doesn't make sense to most people if they haven't lived

Satya Patel: 16:44

Yeah. I mean, you, you guys had an earned secret, right? As like people talk about and. It's not one that everyone has access to, or even understands when you talk to them about it. And I think that's given you and the company are a real advantage.

Alex Levin: 16:58

Yeah. So that is, I think one and the other one, which again, we kind of understood, but there's just so much room for software. It's actually having a difference. Make a difference in this. You know, we had been in consumer businesses before the inferior software businesses, but so much of our job was operations. If I think about it, so much of it was building software to like. You know, do a scheduling thing, like a very tactical thing. Whereas now, like part of what's amazing about this is we can say our North star is how do we help our companies, you know, drive the sort of best lifetime relationship with the customer. So they drive the most revenue with that customer. If that's our top line goal, how do we use software to get to that, that aim? And. It's so different being sort of on this side where we can, you know, do all these amazing things now, particularly sort of AI is coming into it much faster than we expected, but I think those two have been very helpful. And like, I reflect on it and I go, of course, like, it's obvious, you know, if you're going to have a VC backed business, you want one where you can invest enormous amounts of R and D and software, and then eventually like have a very low variable cost.

Satya Patel: 18:01

Yeah, I I

Alex Levin: 18:03

thought about it as much clarity at the beginning.

Satya Patel: 18:05

Yeah, well, I think you guys talked a lot about that at the beginning and certainly the opportunity that we saw as I referred to earlier is that you could bring the same level of automation and importantly intelligence to voice that had historically been brought to, you know, paid search and web conversions, right? Like that optimized. And there's no reason given where technology isn't even, as you said, more importantly now with AI and LLMs, like to introduce the same level of automation and intelligence to the voice interaction to optimize that not just for the business, but also for the customer, right? To make it a more efficient process and more information rich process for them. So I think it's really powerful for the business, obviously, because they'll hopefully get a higher conversion rate or a higher order value, but better for the customer too, because they get the information that they need to make the best decision for themselves.

Alex Levin: 19:02

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of to us, this like, Difficult thing now, we're, you know, we're out there proselytizing saying, God, it's like, you know, you should treat every customer like, you know, one in a million. So our line is treat millions of customers, one in a million, and use data and technology to be able to do that. And then we see friction, right? You know, pushback. And the pushback is, well, I have lots of agents in a current contact center. I just spent two years implementing all this thing. I, you know, my CIO is worried about whether like, you know, my data is going to be safe. And so I don't want to change anything. And so it's interesting that, you know, the pushback has nothing to do with, you know, no, we don't think that's good for the customer. That's not where it comes from. The pushback comes from, you know I, it's, you know, it's. I don't want to do the work to change. And so as a customer, I guess, as an end consumer, like end user, I'm disappointed by that because I think the technology exists today to give a much better customer experience. And it's not some AI far off, like whatever, like if brands today switch their data and technology strategy within their contact center, They could treat each customer like an individual and know that you, Satya, like, you know, have kids and have a certain car and have a certain life. And so they should show you certain products and not others instead of treating you the same way they treat me on the phone and deflecting the interaction or sending it to something that, you know, Is not actually what you're looking for. So it's, it's sort of like this interesting moment where the technology has been proven in marketing world, to your point, but there's a lot of friction and resistance in this specific industry, in the contact center

Satya Patel: 20:39

I mean, this is why we're such long term believers in what you're doing, because history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes and those are the same objections that people had to pay the search back in the day.

Alex Levin: 20:50

Yeah.

Satya Patel: 20:51

Everyone was spending on banner advertising and billboards and radio and TV, and it really had nothing to do with the ad, the search format. It all had to do with like inertia and I have teams of people who allocate money this way and we work with these agencies and all this kind of stuff. Right. And over time the efficiency of the channel kind of won the day.

Alex Levin: 21:14

Yeah, for me, it's, you know, I, I think about like, when we were in the consumer business, part of my job as a marketer was constantly looking for new marketing channels. And it was like subway ads in New York were a new thing. We were the first thought, you know, direct mail in shared mailers was a new thing. We had like five or six of these and, you know, they're very effective because you're the first to it. And to some extent, you know, the same thing is happening in contact centers. Now the contact centers were from the very top, they shift the incentives and they say, you're no longer. only tasked with reducing cost. I'm going to also task with you as a contact center of increasing the LTV of a customer. That's the first step. You know, sometimes you see it as like a chief customer officer gets appointed and that they're in charge of marketing and contact center, which is a good start, but so, you know, Hey, now you have a revenue target and to your point, what's the next step? Will they start going, shoot, how am I going to do this? Like, and in a contact center today, you don't have AB testing. You don't have data on revenue. Like they don't, they have data on what was the average handle time. They don't know, Hey, the longer call actually resulted in a higher customer LTV because they don't even have that data in their reporting. So I think. You know, it's your point. It's exciting to be able to like, be there as it's happening as an entrepreneur. The nerve wracking part is, you know, what, you know, what, how fast is this going to happen? Like we have wind at our back, strong wind or a weak wind. And that's always nerve wracking.

Satya Patel: 22:35

it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when, but hopefully the wind is sooner rather than later.

Alex Levin: 22:39

That's what you hope as an entrepreneur and it's going to, you know, so, so you're always trying to create that, that movement and, you know, I think. One of the hard parts about creating this movement is it's so contrary to the narrative. So you have, you know, you find people that get it and they're, you know, they proselytize. But you know, if you're outside of that, people go, well, no, like phone seems like a difficult channel. But so anyway, to, to one of the interesting things I think happening now in our business is. When we first met three, four years ago, if you had asked us like, is AI going to transform this business? I think our answer would have been sure. Eventually, like you'll replace humans for, you know, virtual agents, but it's far away and, you know, don't worry about it even six months ago, honestly, that would have been my answer. In the last six months playing with the, you know, different capabilities around voice agents, you know, how it handles interruptions, how it handles complicated you know, if you know, things that humans do naturally, how fast it responds. Like it is shocking how much better. Virtual agents in voice have gotten in six months. Like I'm at a point now with, with Rebecca, where we're wondering like for certain customers, should we tell them, you know, don't even think about using our, our software switch directly to, to these virtual agents now it's only for very specific use cases where it's good. So for like rescheduling calls or very simple qualification, but it, you know, that's a very difficult position for us because on one side, we're building a software product for agents in contact centers. To be able to handle it better on the other side. There's now this AI technology that doesn't need any agent interface doesn't need any of the stuff we're building. So we have to decide, like, how much do we push 1 versus the other? And so I think, like, you know, the example I always give is the Kenyan 1 where you go to Kenyan. There's no phone lines overhead. Like people want straight to cell phones. Like we're at one of those moments where some companies that listen to us about turning their contact center into a revenue driver won't do it by using all of our, you know, new fancy technology built over four years. They're going to go straight past what was in marketing straight to this, you know virtual agent technology that's now existing that marketing really never got an advantage of. So I think like some brands are going to, you know, leapfrog basically into this new way of doing it. Yeah.

Satya Patel: 24:52

Yeah. I don't know if there's a leapfrog in the same way though. I would, I would argue that. The agent capability is one that like, obviously generates the voice and, and can deal with a individual interaction, but the overall interaction, the customer journey is going to still need optimization. And so I look at it as saying, like, yes a enterprise may say, Hey, we don't actually need live agents. We can use these AI agents. But part of what you guys build is still going to be useful for them in terms of optimizing the journey that is enacted by the AI agents, because

Alex Levin: 25:25

To be fair, I hope that's the case. So it's like, it's funny. I'm hoping that AI is smart enough to be able to handle the interaction with the customer, but not so smart that it replaces the marketing automation software that we're building. So like, you know, it's, and I think probably at least for, for a while, that's going to be the case that, you know, There's going to be two quite two different systems. They'll be the rails that it runs on, and they'll be separately, whether you put the agent on or not. And, you know, I don't know how long it'll take for the AI to get so smart that it doesn't even need the marketing automation.

Satya Patel: 25:56

yeah. I think we're probably a long ways away from that, but who knows? Everything's moving at such a fast pace, right? Like you said, the, the improvements in AI voice quality and responsiveness and have probably been 100 X in the last six months. And the good news is there are, you know, 30 companies working on making it better and better every day. So who knows what's gonna be possible?

Alex Levin: 26:19

So when you, when you guys are investing now, like I talked to some friends, you know, who are investors, They've like shifted majority of their investing to AI. Like, do you take that lens and say the majority of our investing should be AI, or you take that sort of more considered approach to it? Let's say

Satya Patel: 26:37

I mean, we really don't think of AI as a vertical, right? We think of AI as an enabling technology. And so regardless of what kind of company you are, you should have an AI strategy or an understanding of how AI can benefit your business in the same way, like, There was a period of time where you had to have an understanding of how the cloud could benefit your business or how mobile could benefit your business. Right. So there are obviously AI companies that are kind of core AI infrastructure, like LLM companies or even data labeling companies or vector database companies. Like there's infrastructure that's going to be AI specific, but in terms of how we think about investing, when we're thinking about kind of end user and end business applications. We really look at AI as an enabling technology. So we're not all of a sudden AI investors. But if your business doesn't have an understanding of how to leverage AI, you're probably not likely to attract capital from us or anyone else for that. And you know, we've always been investing in businesses that leverage data and that used to, you know, at some point that was called big data and then it was called machine learning. And now it's called AI. Which is kind of the natural evolution of things. So, yeah, it's a, it's a little odd to us that there are, you know, investors who are now AI investors or funds that are AI funds, but you

Alex Levin: 27:55

sovereign wealth funds that are now 40 billion AI funds.

Satya Patel: 27:58

right, right. Yeah.

Alex Levin: 28:00

So as you think now, you know about, the successful career you've had, I guess, like if you went back to the beginning, like, would you do it all over again? Or like, what would you tell yourself like back at the beginning?

Satya Patel: 28:12

Yeah, I would certainly do it all over again because I feel very fortunate and I know Hunter does too. And our families do too, to be doing what we're doing and have the opportunity to continue to work people with people who inspire us every day and who teach us every day. And we get to spend our time trying to support them in whatever ways we can and there's nothing kind of more gratifying than that. So. Certainly wouldn't like say do anything differently, but my, my advice to myself would be probably have more patience in making decisions about what to work on and who to work with. Like, I think it's when you use the, that framework, it's easy to like be reactive to like the next best thing. And I'd say like potentially have more patience. And the second thing is you have to be your own best advocate, right? Like no matter who you have as a manager or as a boss or like people who. You know, help you out at the end of the day, no, one's going to advocate for you better than yourself. And I think there was a period of time where I like waited to be recognized for my work or like wasn't as aggressive in asking for the next big opportunity or project. Right. And I probably would have taken more initiative myself in some of those areas.

Alex Levin: 29:32

Yeah, that's good advice. And so, you know, now without giving away the secret sauce as like, you know, when you and Hunter go on your, I don't know, I'm imagining your annual offsite doing something

Satya Patel: 29:42

Quarterly, quarterly offsites.

Alex Levin: 29:43

quarterly offsite, when you're going out, you know, and doing something fun. You know, what themes are you thinking about going forward or like, you know, what's something maybe you believe is going to happen a year from now that other people don't see yet.

Satya Patel: 29:54

It's probably not contrarian, but we think there's going to be far fewer venture capitalists in the next half decade than there are today. And that the industry is continuing to barbell where. You either have to be a very, very large fund that's multistage, or you've got to be a very small fund and be able to really focus on whatever is, you know, stage or sector you're focused on and anybody in the middle is going to get eaten alive by either end of the market. The second thing I'd say is that like a lot of the hype cycles, we are in an AI hype cycle and that there's going to be. Over the long term, incredible successes, but in the short term, a lot of pain for both founders, employees and investors who've kind of rushed into AI almost indiscriminately in terms of dollars allocated valuations paid and, um, understanding of an ecosystem that is moving very, very quickly. And then, you know, from a, what's truly contrarian, I think we've always believed that it's not just the team or just the market, right? It's not the jockey or the horse. It's like the jockey, the horse and the track for us, meaning the team, the market opportunity and the product vision. And I think there are lots of people who have taken the approach of, you know, only need, you know, the team or just the market and we're big believers. That all three of those things need to be in place for success. And we think that's going to be even more true in the next decade of company building that it has been in the past decades. So we probably think about it a lot differently than a lot of investors do.

Alex Levin: 31:30

Yeah. Well, thank you for, for joining. If, if people are interested in you know, getting investment or reaching out, you know, how should people engage with, with homebrew or with you?

Satya Patel: 31:40

Yeah, we're easy to access our website. Our emails are on the website, satya@homebrew.co. You can find me on X though. Rarely now or Twitter. I still can't call it X really. Twitter at@satyap and@homebrew. So we're easy to get ahold of, but we, we don't require our warm references warm referrals. Like people are welcome to reach out to us. Warm referral never hurts certainly, but. We try to be as open as we can be. And we try to respond to every email that we get in one way, shape or form.

Alex Levin: 32:10

Well, thank you very much for joining me today.

Satya Patel: 32:12

Thanks for having me, Alex. Good chat.