VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised

So I made my first angel investment probably about twenty years ago. And I think, you know, through the years of building Wise and still working at Skype, was like, I met other people who were building businesses. I was excited about what they were doing. I wanted to be part of the journey and wrote this more angel ticket. I went into overdrive once I stopped running Wise doing thirty, forty, 50 deals a year. That was fun, you know, but I think it was it started feeling to me a little bit Wall Street esque high speed deployment.

I think it’s been it was a great portfolio strategy. I think the portfolio has done really well, but it felt it wasn’t it wasn’t very kind of mission aligned. I thought there is something more that can be done. And that’s kind of was the beginning of thinking, hey, we should start Plural. We should really think about getting founders who have scar tissue from building companies to become investors. What was

So one of the things I missed out on investing in Bolt’s seed round, but then a couple of years later, was really impressed with Marc Andreessen, and I spent a bunch of time and I spent a lot of my limited liquidity buying up secondaries in in Bolt in, like, 2017.

I think a lot of that rings a bell, but I think we need to unpack that a little bit more. I think, you know, it’s very different if you’re talking about deploying big checks in mid or late stage. It’s very different if you’re doing high speed investing in early stage, kind of what I did as an angel. It’s very different to what we do at Plural, which is backing the most ambitious founders. And sometimes there’s no one else who wants to back them. I think we need to unpack this into different parts of venture ecosystem and different parts, I think, are going through different journeys.

What I meant by this is that if you are looking at a mid stage SaaS company, consumer company, where all you need to do is stack up the cohort curves, take away the CAC, multiply by LTV, pay a very high price to win the deal, that is not very exciting to me. And that’s what I mean by spreadsheet monkeys. But if you’re talking about early stage, when you’re really looking looking at the founder deep inside, trying to figure out why is he doing it? What is his unfair advantage to build a generational business?

I think that’s very different. And some things that I’ve said many times is that if we look at the European landscape, the vast majority of the European GPs have not spent a single day working in a real company. They’ve worked in consulting firms, but they haven’t worked in a real operating company. And I think the scar tissue you have from working in an operating company or even more the scar tissue you have from building, being the founder, being the CEO is very different.

There is a lot more unpredictability, but I think there is still, you know, companies that are on a growth trajectory. I think they will look somewhat similar and, you know, more spreadsheet like. They need capital and people need to give some capital. There’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s, you know, maybe even more similar to what public market investing used to look like a long time ago. But I think if you’re talking about trying to spot the next trillion dollar company, I think that’s a lot harder, maybe even harder now than it was back in the days because competition is bigger in some sense.

There are more people trying.

It’s about ability to assess the founders and think about what could this look like once we get to product market fit. When you have product market fit, when you have metrics to look at, I think everything becomes a lot easier. The challenge is really before that. A big part of it is also we’re five partners at Plural. We’ve all built companies before. We’ve all raised money. We’ve either raised money or tried to raise money from pretty much everybody who was around ten years ago. The best of the best and the worst of the worst.

Every time we had the most insightful conversations with the people who had built their own companies. In the seed round, we got Max Levchin when we were raising money for TransferWise, as it was called before. Then we raised money from Ben Horowitz. And same same for my partners. We had the most insightful conversations with people who had been on operating journeys. And that’s why we were always looking for people who were a couple years ahead of us. And we feel also now, like even now when we speak to founders, they really appreciate the fact that we’ve been in their shoes.

Does it make us a better investor? Frankly, I don’t know. Time will tell. It makes us better partners for the people we invest in.

Frankly, I think venture is a brand game. So if you are a new fund, a brand is a brand of GPs.

We are looking to back some most ambitious entrepreneurs, whatever they’re building. So we’re looking at Proxima Fusion. That’s maybe what you would call Departure. Then we look on the other side, we have Teton, which is using CCTV cameras to monitor patients. It’s not that complicated maybe. It’s a full spectrum. But I think it’s a character of the entrepreneur which is maybe the most important. Half of the founders we back are repeat entrepreneurs. We look at Thorsten, who built a gaming company, then he went into building a defense company, and he started Helsink in 2020 or 2021.

You need to have something which makes you tick differently to go building a defense company four or five years ago, before this became a hot topic.

We love repeat founders. When we look at the people we’ve backed and the ones we haven’t backed, what stands out to us is that the repeat founders, they typically go for a much bigger goal. Torsten did a gaming company, then he went into defense. We can talk about Danny Alecke. The first company was ecommerce, and then he took on a massive challenge of building Spotify. So we love the fact that these people, they go for a massively bigger goal next time. And, again, I don’t know if they have a bigger likelihood of success, but even if the likelihood of success is the same, the outcome is so much bigger.

They’ve learned a fair few things on the journey. I don’t think I would be that excited to back a founder who built fintech company one and then goes on to build fintech company two.

For me personally, it’s pretty hard to get excited about the good old SaaS company.

What I would ask about is, are they investing other people’s money or their own money as well? I think there is one thing if you’re a rich investor and you play with only other people’s money. There’s a different thing if you’re a rich investor and you’re investing your own money. It’s a question of alignment, and hopefully we’ll talk more about this. But like we’ve thought deeply about alignment in venture and how to make sure that we are better aligned with both our LPs and our founders.

And I think that to me is a core thing of like, look at what a person does with their own money. And think I that’s kind of the most important.

I don’t think it is in general. Fundamentally, the idea of collecting two, two and a half percent management fee does not really make sense. It does not align us with outcomes. At Plural, we charge about half the management fee and we think we are much better aligned. And also what it enabled us to do is make a few more investments per fund. So in Fund I, we probably made two more investments because of this. Fund II, we think we’ll make four more investments as a result.

That’s four more shots on goal. That is pretty damn important. And still, we have a fantastic team. We have five GPs. Everyone is being paid well, but not ridiculously.

Earn your right to do it. You know, when hiring people for a startup, you want to hire the people who are dying to work to build this company. You don’t want to hire the people who are coming here for the biggest salary. Yes. You wanna make sure they are compensated ridiculously well if things go well. I am very proud of the fact that when we built Wise, everybody had stock options, including every customer support agent. Because the customer support agents who joined in the beginning, they all made a million dollars when Wise went public.

I’m super proud of this. Similarly in venture, the team and GPs, once we have this magic DPI, they should make lots of money. But I don’t think people in venture should make a lot of money just because they are deploying capital.

It’s a game. Don’t blame the player. Blame the game. It goes both ways. As the industry evolves, maybe things will change. And, you know, we’re hopefully doing our part to to make this a better game for everyone.

I do do worry. We need to come up with better solutions for some of the long liquidity problems. Some of these companies may need billions. But I think at the same time, if the companies are well capitalized, milestones, then you have liquidity. You know, the best example of all is maybe SpaceX today. It’s a private company has had zero liquidity issues. There is a secondary market always open. So journey in the beginning was very hard, but being able to attract the capital to get to a place where you hit your milestone and make progress.

So especially in in the what you call crazy companies that we back, it is definitely harder. But I think, you know, we need to make sure these companies are hitting milestones, creating value, even if revenues take longer. And I think then there will be opportunities.

I mean, ten years is short. I mean, if I look at, you know, maybe looking back now, Wise now looks like a simple fintech company. Everyone is doing fintech companies. You know, it took us we started working on it with Kristo in 2010. We launched beginning of twenty eleven. We went public in 2021. That was a ten year journey. But also, to be honest, the last three years were probably pretty liquid even we were private. Let’s call it seven years. And maybe for deep tech companies, it’s ten to twelve.

You know, if you hit the bad patch in the markets, it becomes fifteen. I think we need to recognize this. But I think also maybe at some point people just need to be more disciplined in returning some capital early. You know, there are some investors out there who are very vocal, you know. I think Fred Wilson has spoken a lot about taking some money off the table. We

Skin in the game, fees. I mean, think there are some other kind of When you

I don’t think venture should be a rich people’s area only. Going back to what we spoke about before, look at for someone to invest their own money. We are the biggest investor in the fund ourselves. And additionally, every deal we do, the lead partner of the deal writes a personal check. So we are- Can I be blunt? How much of the fund are you? Collectively, we are the biggest investor in the fund. I don’t think we’re not going to start talking about numbers, but you know, you’ve been in you’re in the business, you know how much the biggest LP in a fund could be as a percent.

So you can make the most

Yeah. That is unusual. We don’t like the idea of playing with playing with the house money is something that we’re not so keen on. It’s a personal check. The size of it depends depends on the individual’s position. So for some people it’s smaller, for some it’s bigger. But we want it to be something which is meaningful. So you think about like I’m investing my own money in addition to the fund where I’m already an investor. And I think there may be a ritual part as well of wiring from your own account the same time as we wire from the fund account.

Maybe the other thing to mention, like there are other weird things in venture, like where does the idea come from that you should pay your investors legal fees? Well, we pay our own legal fees. Vast majority of venture deals as in the term sheets, that you pay your investors’ legal fees. What is this about? It comes from the money you give the company, the company pays their legal fees.

Why does it make sense? I think it’s just the way

And so we should continue.

No. We pay our own legal fees. Okay. And usually, the company pays the investor’s legal fees. Just, you know, we can I’ll show you where it is in the term sheet after the after the discussion.

Timeline misalignment. Investors wanting their money back before the founder, which is a kind of a hard one. Like, you know, in a way, if the founder is in it for the next two decades, it’s a question of liquidity.

I think maybe the biggest thing which strikes me is fund composition part. We really don’t think we have much control over fund composition. What do you mean, sir, when you say fund composition? Like, do you like how many SaaS companies, how many carbon companies. You don’t want to have the same risk everywhere. You know, companies outside are like, fuck, we have too many deep tech companies. We need a SaaS company. Like we’re kind of Okay, mostly with the fact that we follow the most ambitious entrepreneurs, whatever they’re building.

But I can start sympathizing with the people who are saying, hey, like, you know, you have this great carbon capture company. I love you, but we have three already in the fund. We can’t add a fourth one because it starts skewing the fund composition. You start learning new ones like that, which, you know, on a deal by deal basis isn’t relevant. But, you know, if the whole fund is subject to the carbon markets, for example, somebody should think about it then.

On a per fund basis, I think Fund I, probably had a model of 25 to 30. We ended up with 31. So we do pay attention to having diversity in the portfolio. Yeah. Do you do reserves? We do reserves as well. What’s the ratio there? Reserve ratio, Fund I, we had limited reserves, was less than a third. Fund two, we drew the line roughly in the middle. I think probably we end up with slightly less than half for reserves. And the reserves is still something that we’re iterating and learning about the best way of doing it.

I haven’t found anyone who says they’ve nailed it.

Fundamentally, I agree with the idea that just doing a pro rata is a cop out.

You either want to do nothing or triple down. However, I think the real world is slightly more complex. A round happens a year later. The company has done well. There is this weird signaling thing. Some days I think signaling risk is real, some days I think it’s not real. You want to make sure you have some kind of a more uniform way of doing it through the fund. And we’re working on that.

I think this is really hard. We try to be honest, but we’re also czar for the founders and we kind of promise we’re not going to give up before you. But it doesn’t mean we’re going to write bad money after good money. We’ve told our founders we’re here to have GDP level impact. If your company is not doing it, I’m sorry. We should not continue funding it. You may keep on working on it and we’ll do our best to help you, but it doesn’t guarantee the next checks.

It is super simple and we have it’s very, actually very formal like. There’s a couple of things. Every investor can only do a limited number of deals per year. It looks at two to three deals per year is the right pacing. If you come saying I’m doing deal number six, we’re gonna be like, hey, Taavet, what’s going on? Limited number of shots on goal. Skin in the game, so you’re willing to commit your personal money. Third one, you write a memo about the deal. The memo starts with, why is this company important to me?

Every deal we do, we’re testing like, would you be willing to be a co founder of the company? All the 49 deals we’ve invested in so far, we feel about all of them that the partner who did the deal felt like, bloody hell, this is so important, so exciting. I would love to be a co founder of this company. The memo starts with why is this important to you? Let’s talk about the founder. Why is it important for the founder? How can it be 100x from here?

If we can’t see that, we should not be entertaining it. 100x? If we can’t imagine a 100 x, we should not be entertaining this idea of this deal. There are many great investments which are five x guaranteed. There are many great investors who should do this. It’s not plural. Once we have that memo, we have an investment committee. And given that we don’t vote on deals, the committee discussions are very honest, very brutal. Pause there. When’s the memo sent? We typically start talking about the company way before the memo.

Then the lead investor says, I’m writing a memo. We’re gonna have an investment committee. We have a brutal discussion at the investment committee about the company. And then the ball goes back to the lead investor.

Most likely, we’ve spoken about the company a few times before over the past weeks, during our pipeline meeting, etcetera. There are a lot of companies where more than one partner meets with a team. Does

No, absolutely not. And I think there is probably no company where all the partners met the founders before the deal. It’s typically one or few partners that meets a company. But we give a lot of trust to the individual GPs. The bar for being a GP is super high. So we give them a lot of trust, and we kind of felt that it doesn’t make sense to hire someone brilliant and tell them, you have to come on Mondays to ask permission to do a deal. Going back, we have the IC.

And after the IC, the lead partner goes back and thinks about the feedback. We have many cases where after hearing feedback, the lead partner is like, hey, guys, you know, Ian, you raise great points. Karina, what you said about your experience in the market is very true, and I’m not gonna do the deal. Many cases where this happens.

It’s probably more like seventythirty, 70% gets done, 30 doesn’t get done. But, you know, we’re not really we’re not quite like I’m not sure measuring is is the right thing and start setting maybe wrong incentives. And by the way, sometimes also there is a time factor. We look at a deal, doesn’t make sense. The lead investor comes back like, Hey, I’m not doing it now. Six months goes by and like, Hey, guys, I’m going to have a new IC. The company has, you know, done what they promised or something has changed and I want to lean in now.

So let’s have a discussion again.

I don’t think it’s happened to us.

I mean, I completely respect the fact that we need to communicate to the founders how long something is going to take. And if we tell them that, hey, you know, we’re going to have an ICE on Tuesday and we’ll tell you on Wednesday, it makes sense. We can get things done very quickly. We probably got some things done within a number of days. And if something is super competitive, we need to move. We need to decide soon. We believe that we tell the founder what our process looks like.

Try to make it compatible. 2020, 2021, there was a lot of deals done, under the gun, basically. I did some myself personally, big losses. Even may have done some together. But you know, it’s They were

Definitely. So I don’t see the crazy companies moving so quickly. That’s the momentum spreadsheet investing which starts moving way quicker.

Not really. We talk about it. We share our feedback very, very kind of directly. You think

We keep we keep notes directionally because I think it does help calibrate. I think in an ideal world, we wanna come back to it a year later and say, Hey, let’s recall that IC and what do we learn from it?

So reserve, like, follow on checks Mhmm. We flips we flip it around. On the reserve decisions, like, follow on checks as we call it. Lead investor writes a memo, comes back with a proposal, but this needs a majority vote. It’s the idea of marking up your own homework. Kind of the idea of the fund is we write whatever 25, thirty first checks. Everyone does four, five, six, seven, like doesn’t matter who does more or less, really. But when we talk about the reserve, that’s a finite allocation, a finite asset we need to divide up.

And you cannot do that unless you take collective feedback, collective input. We think these ones are done best collectively. We’re trying to balance, you know, how could we keep a bunch of reserves for the best companies? But you don’t know the best companies. Next round, you might not know it’s a round after next either. How do we do our share to help the companies forward in the next fundraise, which oftentimes means doing the pro rata, which I think is a cop out, But doing that and then, you know, balancing that with can we keep larger reserves for deploying checks in companies where we are actually, you know, at that time, maybe not confident of 100x because we’ve seen 10x already.

But if that if at that point you see the momentum and you feel, you know, maybe it’s 50x left, 30x left, you wanna deploy deploy more capital.

I don’t think it makes that much sense. We are here for unlimited upside, 1x downside. The difference is purely marginal. We spoke about this when we were starting to play around this idea for Plural and thinking like, what are the structural misalignments in the industry we wanna fix? Think this is one of the next things we should work on. We haven’t ultimately haven’t felt it important enough. I also, to be honest, as a founder, feels shit. But also as a founder, it doesn’t matter. As a founder, you’re also in here for the long term upside.

Let me rewind. What we need to think about in the industry is how much capital gets deployed for a size of an outcome. Founders too often think fundraising and large fundraisers is ultimate measure of success, you know, which I think is BS. Something that hasn’t been spoken widely, even so Wise supposedly raised a shit ton of money. We probably raised a billion or more. Wise only raised 160,000,000 primary capital, and we only burned through about a 100,000,000 of primary capital. 100,000,000 primary capital to build in excess of 10,000,000,000 of value.

If you look at companies outside where you’ve raised 2,500,000,000 to create 10,000,000,000 of value. And then if you deploy if you if your company raises 1,000,000,000 at 5,000,000,000 with a possibility of getting to $8.09, 10, maybe the leak pref is different. But early stage leak pref, I don’t know. It doesn’t really make sense. But

We do not love boards. I think it’s a fair starting point. The things that I don’t like about boards, they oftentimes become way too big, way too quickly. Your c round investor takes a board seat. Your a round investor takes a board seat. Your b round investor takes a your c and d. So you end up with five VCs on the board and two founders. I don’t think these boardrooms are any good. The other thing you

Because you have five people with a relatively similar mindset, similar view of the world. You know, they will be looking at maybe the guy with the biggest fund or the guy who wants to be the smartest guy in the room. They will dominate too much of the discussion. The right boards are slightly more balanced. I’m very much in favor of the idea that founders who are building companies, at some point it might be good for them to be on one board of another person building a business.

I think it’s good for both.

We are commoditized product, Harry. VCs are a commodity. You can press them down. Someone told me early on, the only person to to fight for your ownership is yourself. No VC will ever fight for the founder’s ownership. You need to fight for it. So there’s a lot of truth in it. You know, the founders say need to fight for their ownership. Absolutely. The other side of it is and still is. If you’re a good fundraiser, you’re building something which is deemed to be hot. You’re building an AI SaaS company.

It’s easy to put a party around together, dilute 10%, and nobody gives a shit about the business. So I think you need to think about, do you have people involved who will help you through the good times and the bad times? In the good times, you don’t care about their advice. You don’t need their help, but you want someone to pick up their phone when it’s the bad times. There are plenty of stores out there of respectable VCs not picking up their phone when it’s the bad times.

Do not be that asshole. So but I think it also goes back to founders of, like, actually creating a round where people have enough skin in the game to feel interested, to feel the company is important.

Fundamentally, I agree with this, but I think, you know, we have the ability to be very deeply involved if you need us and get out of the way rest of the time.

I don’t think this game will last. I think the best founders will realize that getting a check on good terms from a multistage firm is by no means a guarantee of raising money from them in the future. I think they will I think the game will change. The industry will change. The game will change over time. More capital coming in. The question is, are we gonna have more founder? Like, how do you keep it in balance? If you have more capitals, then founders are getting better terms.

If you have more founders and it slips.

Yes, in certain sectors which are deemed hot. You know, 2021, if you were an x y’s employee, everybody would write a check to you without even meeting you. Does that make any sense? No. Same happened to Google employees maybe five years before. I do think that you need to separate kind of the early pre product market investing from a later stage. But but I guess I think all at the same time, it’s safe to believe that the returns will be coming down over time as asset class matures, becomes bigger.

So best investors will continue generating best returns, but I think median is probably gonna come down over time.

Europe did not have enough ambitious entrepreneurs. It’s them, not us.

Even zooming out when we were starting to think about Plural in 2021, that we raised our first one in 2022. So thinking of creating Plural, we had two things which were really important, European sovereignty and GDP level impact. That was true four years ago, and it’s even more true now. Two things which have happened in between, one is the Ukraine war, which, you know, before that, investing in defense felt strange. After the Ukraine war, it feels like we need to do this in Europe.

And I think the other thing second thing which has changed is, I think, really, what happened in the White House in February, where Zelensky was taken for a grilling and the ways that US cannot be trusted anymore to be the protector of Europe. This kind of results in a world where we need to rebuild a lot of things on our own. We need to build our defense sector. We need to build our space sector. We need an independent energy sector. We need security, intelligence, a lot of sectors where I think we’re gonna be living in a tripolar world.

So there’s gonna be an American version. Let’s call it Andoril. There is a European version, Helsink, a Chinese version, defense, space, energy, security, intelligence, everything, all of the critical services. And these critical services, they make up a vast portion of GDP.

I think it has.

We probably were living in a naive world before this. We saw human nature has changed, and, you know, we’re now post Cold War in in a different world. And maybe history could have worked out differently, but I think now the world is pretty similar and the idea that we overly rely on The US probably was already wrong back then. I think we all need to punch our weight. I believe we are better collectively. Estonia is better part of Europe. UK is better being part of Europe.

Europe is better together with The US. But I think we all need to collectively put in the effort. And maybe maybe we were relying slightly too much on The US before. Today- And when you

That’s very kind of clear. But I think also what we’re seeing now with The US saying, you know, we’ll sell you a 10% worse fighter jet. Who ever going to buy US defense equipment? I mentioned Teton before doing monitoring patients. Do we want a US patient monitoring solution in our hospitals? Do we want we have a company which is making So why

if they turn this off when they don’t feel good about Europe anymore? Do we want US robots roaming around our streets collecting intelligence information? I think it’s pretty clear we don’t want Chinese ones.

We are going into a world of decoupling decoupling for for a a while. While. I’m kind of hopeful that Western world will come closer together after going through a rough patch. These are complex topics.

What if The US says, we’re gonna disable Andrild in Europe? You need independence. If we can’t guarantee that the Android solution works regardless of what people do in The US, we cannot trust it. And I think if you’re thinking about anything else which has access to vast amount of information, If we talk about anything that gets visual audio information, robots, cameras, we probably want to control who has access to the information we gather and who has access to a kill switch.

Do you remember how much capital Germany allocated to this the last couple of weeks of February? I think it was between 1.5 and 2,000,000,000,000 that Germany allocated just after the Zelensky White House meetings. These discussions are happening everywhere in Europe today. And so reality is we probably cannot use 2,000,000,000,000 today. We need a trillion this year, two next year over time. So I’m feeling Is that the right approach? Germany saying here’s a trillion. What does that mean? We need to work together in Europe, but we need to work together in ways which are slightly more slightly faster than the way we’ve done it before.

Like, if you think about some of the defense collaborations that have happened in Europe, they’re very painful. Italy says, we will take part in this project, but this widget has to be produced in Italy. And that makes things very slow. Like, if you look at how the how war has happened in Ukraine, you need to be building it trading constantly. I think we need to be a little bit more modern about the way collaboration happens, but we do need to collaborate around Europe. And I think there’s the capital everyone is realizing that defense contributions, you know, we were not at 2% in Europe before.

Estonia was ahead, but and and Poland was ahead. But, you know, we need to get to three, four, 5% everywhere, and same in other critical industries.

I think it’s a very serious, very real concern. We should be living under the assumption that whatever happened in Ukraine now, Russia will try in another country over the next years, and we need to be ready for this.

If we go back to the question around defense and timeline of a couple years, I think if these budgets are unlocked soon, we can actually still get a lot done. The urgency is higher now than it’s ever been. Politician at the highest levels are thinking about it in the same ways today. So I’m hopeful that they will come up with the right answers, but it’s by far not guaranteed.

I think it’s it’s a correct thing to worry about, but I think also we need to be more entrepreneurial and find ways to build things quicker. And I think it’s doable.

A lot of this comes down to sufficient early stage capital for deep tech companies. It’s a crazy investment that we like to do in Plural. You know, if we’re looking at, for example, Proxima Fusion building a fusion power plant, the most advanced fusion company in Europe. So new German government has said, say, want to first not one, but two fusion power plants to be built in Germany. So we’re seeing there’s a political will to act now as well.

Harry, we don’t brag about it as Americans do. That’s the difference between European and Americans. We’re too humble. And I think, you know, we need to learn to become better marketeers. Absolutely. Maybe we need to hire American marketeers.

No entrepreneur ever has not started a company because of regulation. The best entrepreneurs, they go through walls made out of titanium to make it happen. It’s an excuse. But on the other hand, we need even more to make Europe a more unified market. Labor, capital. Why do we need to have a stock exchange in Amsterdam? Great companies listed, sir. London, Estonia. I would I would love her to be As an Estonian stock exchange? Unfortunately, yes. I would love her to be a single global stock exchange.

Maybe we could build it on the single blockchain.

I don’t regret going public in London. I think Wise is an example of a company that is well known amongst investor universe that can go public anywhere. Adyen went public in Amsterdam. Whoever knew they have a stock exchange, they’ve done very well. Wise has done very well in The UK. Do you think it’s been a passive up and down, but that’s something which I think would have happened similarly in The US.

I don’t believe Wise would have a pricing premium in The US. We spent a lot of time agonizing this over the years before the IPO. So I think it for Wise, it has worked out well. However, structurally, we have a lot of issues here. We don’t have enough retail participation in The UK. We don’t have enough institutional participation from the pension funds. Do think UK stock market is subprime in that sense. If you’re a retail product, you want your consumers to buy you, so makes sense to go public in The US.

But I also think in some sense, maybe some of this is a bit of a wrong thing to spend so much energy on. Wise would have gone public in The US? Result would be the same. We would not be paying more tax in The US. We would still be headquartered here. So sometimes it feels to me people love to talk about this, but I’m not sure how big is actual difference for certain companies. Do you think Nick

I don’t know the I don’t know what duty Nick feels. I’m So not I can’t answer on this. Here’s what I would tell Nick. If he wants to build a big business in The US, then he should go public in The US.

Frankly, I think it has not changed. Like, I I have generated liquidity through the years from Wise. I mean, not until we were valued at billions. I didn’t sell a single single share of second secondary. But after that, they’ve done it in a, I would say, systematic way. I was also lucky to make money from being the first employee at Skype from stock options. So in that sense, I’ve been financially independent since two thousand two three.

I’m all interested in the upside, and I’m interested in what are the good things I can do with with the returns. I don’t need to go to work for the monthly paycheck. I think that is an incredibly powerful moment for everyone.

More capital for deep tech investment. Look at encouraging entrepreneurship, reducing the regulatory burden. And I think the way we do government purchasing decisions, whether it’s in defense or other areas, the government should be the biggest customer for European startups.

Estonia is a fantastic country. We have the biggest number of unicorns per capita, and nobody knows us. Why do you think that is?

We had great education during Soviet times. We had an early start, thanks to Skype. So ecosystem acceleration from an early success story is humongous.

There seems to be a lot of companies coming from Revolut today, which is pretty pretty cool to see. I don’t know how many of them are doing exciting things compared to do trying to do fintech widgets, but maybe today I’d say Revolut. I mean, Wise has a fair share of startups. Monzo has been great. Spotify, I don’t know off top of my head.

have never bought a public stock. That’s really hard. For ten years. Yeah. I mean, actually, maybe I would go very classic Berkshire Hathaway for ten years. That is gonna compound in a much more predictable way if it’s the only thing I’m allowed to hold.

Lots of private stocks.

I’ve become a whole lot more optimistic on Europe. I think, frankly, everything that has happened in relation to US, have become so much more bullish on Europe. We will rebuild the critical industries.

Maybe Synthesia. I made a pretty big angel investment early on when it was two crazy guys. AI was I don’t think abbreviation AI was used. They were doing video generation using smart engineers. They’ve done an amazing job and still early in the journey.

Trillion dollar European companies. In ten

We will see.

Me too. Thank you, Harry.