Building a Venture Firm From Zero to One, and AI-driven VC Thesis Research
Smart Friends Episode 90: Arkady Kulik #2
My 2nd pod w/ Arkady Kulik!
Hello Friends!
Today, we’re back with Arkady Kulik to learn from his experience building a venture capital firm from the ground up.
Arkady is a deeptech venture capitalist at Arkane Capital and a previous guest on episode 76 of this podcast.
We talk about his pilot fund, what he learned, and using AI to uncover some of the most overlooked and important problems in the world.
Arkady approaches investing with a mix of structure, speed, and values I find admirable, and I'm grateful he's an ally in our work to progress humanity.
Links to Platforms:
We discuss:
How speaking the language of scientists helps Arkady build real trust with founders.
The AI tournament model he uses to identify 300 hidden human needs.
Focusing on problems first, then funding an index of possible solutions.
What he looks for in both founders and LPs.
Why honesty beats hype every time.
Why DPI is the only VC metric that actually matters.
If you're interested in how thoughtful venture investing really works at the earliest stages, you'll learn a lot very quickly.
Quotes from Arkady:
“You don’t prove your worth as a VC until you return capital to your LPs. DPI is the only metric that matters.”
“The VC game is full of false positives—in evaluating companies and in how LPs evaluate VCs.”
“The best thing an investor can do is give a quick yes; the next best is a quick no. Lingering maybes are the worst.”
“Our technical unlock was agentic AI—it lets us evaluate hundreds of emerging needs for humanity in days, not years.”
“We want to be the first check because what matters most is building deep trust with the founder, not just valuation.”
“If you sold LPs on a strategy and you quietly abandon it, that’s a breach of trust—it's like cheating in a marriage.”
“A lot of people go into VC for ego or fast money. They won’t survive. This is a long, emotionally volatile game.”
“Stop wasting your life and start making a difference. If you’re a founder, build what only you can build.”
“There’s nothing wrong with saying no—it’s how you say it that matters.”
“The founder's mistake is assuming your investors will make money just because you do.”
“Great founders don't oversell—they're clear, calm, and self-aware.”
Want to invest your money into early-stage utopian startups like Ideem?
When new technologies meet the market, the world changes for the better. That's why we invest our money into obsessive geniuses building utopian technologies.
We write small checks to 15-20 very different startups each year. Previous investments include Aalo Atomics, Atom Limbs, Ouros Energy, Stell Engineering, Airship, Terraform Industries, Longshot, Dirac, Occam, Atomic Industries and more.
Our Website has background on the fund, our past deals, and more.
*Pre-rich is cheeky fun and not a guarantee of being future rich. Startup investing is risky, illiquid, and not for the faint-of-heart. Be warned.
Accredited Investors: reply to this email, I'll send you our deck, and we'll get you into our deals starting this quarter.
Learn more about Arkady Kulik:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
The Alliance of Entrepreneurs and Scientists with Arkady Kulik of RPV
Toby Rush: $100M Exits, Splitting Companies, Timing Startups, and Ideem Killing 2FA
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Arkady, thank you for coming back, despite your experience here the first time around.
Arkady Kulik: Maybe because of my experience the first time around.
Eric Jorgenson: Maybe because. No, it's been really very cool to see all of the growth of you and rpv and the transformation of your firm over the last couple of years as we've sort of stayed in touch as you've emerged as, I think, at least in my view, one of the more exciting and underrated new entrants to the deep tech VC kind of world here. And I think your approach has been super interesting. So, I'm very excited to just like share with the world your kind of zero to one experience. I think the zero to one of a VC firm is something that's not talked about nearly as often as about startups, and you've had a really unique and thoughtful approach. I'm excited to dig into it and tell that story here.
Arkady Kulik: Sure. I'm happy to share. What would you like to know, Eric? What are the most important aspects that you would like me to cover?
Eric Jorgenson: Let's start with the decision to enter this space in the first place. Did you enter it with an intention to do it for decades? Or was it a, like, let me try this out and see if my thesis works? Like, how sort of... Yeah, how did you approach this space from the very beginning?
Arkady Kulik: I would say both. The intention to do it for decades, two or three decades, the intention for this to be my last job, if you wish, or my last company, if you wish, has been there from the first day. The pragmatic approach, whether it's going to work or not, is a whole different thing, and it's a whole different question. So we are constantly testing things. We're constantly trying to understand something else, trying to go through new attempts to source a company, to evaluate a company. The famous phrase about IT startups and software startups is that one of the best predictors of success is how many experiments are being run on the platform simultaneously. You know that Facebook has been running tens of thousands experiments simultaneously, Google and many other big, big consumer companies are doing that. And in my opinion, in the world of venture capital, it's even more important. Because the feedback cycle is so long. You will not know if you're successful as a VC until you return your money to LPs. I mean, TVPIs, MOICs, and all of the other noise is just that, noise. Marketing numbers people use to lure in LPs who care about that. Let me put it this way. I don't want to berate anyone. In my opinion, you as a VC only prove your worth when you've got DPI.
Eric Jorgenson: Do you think that the TVPI and MOIC, are those useful waypoints toward DPI? Or are they totally unrelated, actually?
Arkady Kulik: Totally unrelated to DPI. The weight that people put on, actually I think that's a cool first lesson learned we can talk about, that the VC game is full of false positives. False positives in how VCs evaluate companies, false positives in how LPs evaluate VCs. This is a game full of noise. The famous quote that there are no adults in the room, that's very, very true. People think they know, people assume it works, people try to transition certain frameworks from private equity or hedge funds into VC or from investing in public domain into private domain, and very few things actually transition well, very, very few. Humans and understanding what kind of a human being is in front of you is an important thing, but it works like so in anything in life, relationships, your family, your friends, anything of that nature, it's all driven by humans. But to wrap up the point of your first question, what has driven me into that, I always wanted to do something in the world of science and technology. When I moved to the US five years ago, I wanted to do something in this domain. I didn't know it was going to be a VC firm. And the VC firm was because I have seen a very clear niche of misunderstanding between scientists who launch their companies and investors who back their companies and people who do not understand each other, do not hear each other, have different values, different language. And I was naturally the perfect fit for that in my own opinion. I've got theoretical physics background, entrepreneurial background, I understand how money works, I understand how people work. So, cool, let's try and do something in this domain. Whether it's going to run or not, I had no clue. I wanted to try. And thanks God, thank you to all of the LPs of my first fund who believed in me. It's showing great results. We're in the top quartile according to Cartier and all of that stuff. The point is I call it a pilot fund for a reason. I think there have been some faulty assumptions in our approach. I think that there have been some things that we put too much weight on them and some things that we didn't put enough weight on. So that's why it's a pilot fund. That's why we have updated. And I would call this an evolution of our strategy.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, that feels like really the heart of the conversation. So, let's figure out like what... were the theories that you came into the pilot fund with? Maybe which was most strongly disproven and which was most strongly upheld?
Arkady Kulik: The most strongly disproven was the importance of scientific due diligence, the notion of the fact that if we understand the tech and science better than the next guy, then it would give us some enormous edge when it comes to due diligence itself. It has given us an edge in a very different way. It has given us an edge because we talk to the founders in the language that they understand. We talk to the founders about the things they care about. And that gives us a discount. Every time we go into a deal, we get 25, 30%, sometimes 50% discount on the valuation of the company just because they feel that we understand each other. I don't want to say kindred souls, but we are of their flock. So the quality of due diligence, whether it's scientific, business due diligence, or technical due diligence, the pre-seed and seed valuation, while it is important not to invest in complete duds, the quality of scientific and technical due diligence is not as huge of a deal as we thought it's going to be. It had a special effect, which was different, and it is very useful to us, and we ramp it up. The thing that upheld the most, in my opinion, is the structured approach to investment. Going back to the previous point about long feedback cycles, if you can derive information from immediate activities, like for example, you have had a set of assumptions, which basically are the questions that you ask during your process of the founder's evaluation, and then you see which of those companies actually make it, which of those risks actually materialize, and which of those risks do not exist. So for example, the thing that is a noise in VC is other investors in your round. When you invest at pre-seed stage, relying on other people's due diligence is very, very overvalued. Let's put it this way. Other VC firms have their own strategies, their own understanding why they would invest in this or that. And it's just, it doesn't mean that you are going to be successful in the same investment because they might have a very different approach to that. I know VCs who invest in cool stuff to impress their LPs. And to me, it's a big, big red flag, big, big no-no. I'm not investing in companies that look cool or look fancy so that other VCs are like, oh, other LPs go, oh, you've invested in this company, they do, I don't know, tissue regrowth or some kind of fancy other stuff. Again, I don't want to put any specific companies in front of me because I don't think that there is anything wrong with them. I just think that what's wrong is trying to impress your LPs because you're doing cool stuff. Putting weight on other people's opinion is really a bad idea at the pre-seed stage. You should have your own opinion. And this is one of the things that we have downgraded to oblivion. We don't even ask this question anymore. Crowdsourcing, the success in crowdsourcing and crowdfunding is also one of those signals that many, many VCs will tell, oh yeah, it's a good thing that they had it, doesn't mean jack shit. The spike in sales, the singular spike in sales does not prove an ability of the team to drive sales continuously. And yeah, if you have a very clear and rubricated approach like we do, it allows you to learn faster. And in the industry where everybody learns so slow, everybody's evolution of their understanding of this game is measured in years. If you can do it measured in quarters, better yet; if you can do it measured in months, perfect. You're ahead of your competition in a couple of years. You're better than anyone else who started with you at the same time.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. So, you... The process of measuring and assessing the risks when you're making the investment decision, you carry all of those through and watch which ones materialize at which points in the company and use that to drive your feedback loop. Is there a sense... Do you run into a problem where only one risk actually kills the company and there's other sort of buried risks under that? Or like the risk existed but the upside was something positive outweighed the presence of that risk? Like, it seems like a tough thing to track.
Arkady Kulik: I don't think it's possible to invest in pre-seed and seed startups, whatever you do, deep tech, software, crypto, name it, it's not possible to invest in those companies without having any risk attached to that. People who tell you that they've derisked this investment, they're delusional. They either lie to you or they lie to themselves, one of the two things. So yes, we always- every time I go into a deal, I have a very clear understanding of what risks can materialize and what risks will most likely not materialize in that specific company. It does hurt emotionally when you know that this was the risk, you've done your due diligence, you're like, hmm, that's okay, that should be fine, we understand it's a risk, but these particular founders are not going to have a falling out. And then they have it. And you're like, shit. And you've done all of your due diligence, you were really, really sure that this is not a risk that's going to materialize. It is bad because you get no new information out of that because you've done all of your due diligence. If you knew, you would not have done anything differently. You have accepted that risk as a part of the deal, and it's still materialized. When something happens that is not necessarily identified early on, when it's a net new risk, one of our portfolio companies that I think is not going to perform well, the founders are amazing founders, they just don't have the VC scale mindset. So they're going to make millions for them and their own families and all of that stuff, but it's never going to be a unicorn. I'm not even sure they're ever going to be a hundred million bucks company. It's going to be a really cool lifestyle business for the founder, his close team and their families. It's going to be great. This was not the risk that I was aware of when we invested. That was a complete blind spot for me. I was like, oh, shit. Now, I'm deliberately asking people, how do you define success? What happens here? What happens there? I was recently talking to a founder, and we've been talking about his specific goals, and he explained to me the ideal acquisition scenario for him and what happens to his life after that acquisition scenario. And I'm like, great. Pass... So, these kind of risks are great because you learn something new. You can update your process. So that's how I look at that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that's a very funny bucket. And it's a weird thing to explain to founders as like, I hope you take this as a compliment. I think you are going to make a lot of money. I don't actually think your investors will. But that's great for you. I just don't want to be one of the investors who doesn't make very much money at your company. I'm sorry. I wish you well. I'll be rooting for you. Good luck.
Arkady Kulik: I don't even know if I would have given that kind of feedback, because for many, many reasons, usually those founders are not ready to hear that. I always give feedback to founders as I can, as much as I can, as honest as I can. I have been in a situation or two when you come into this conversation from a good place with an open heart and you try to help them. And what you see in response is just complete blank stares and stonewalling. They're like, yeah, you're an idiot. I'm like, okay, cool, go ahead, do whatever you have to do. I'm happy to be wrong here. And then half a year later, a year later, they come back and be like, oh, this was such useful advice. We should have listened to you a year ago. I'm like, your choice.
Eric Jorgenson: It is a tricky... The least fun part of the job is saying no, which you do a lot. And there's no good way to say no. People can reasonably criticize venture capitalists for not giving good feedback and good answers, and also reasonably criticize them for giving low context feedback, which sometimes they've spent 20 minutes or even two hours on the deck, but that's still an order of magnitude less than founders. And so sometimes they feel like there's no valuable input that VCs can have. And I think a lot of VCs maybe don't necessarily have super, super thoughtful feedback, but it's never a good policy to burn a bridge over one conversation when this is a long-term game, these are long-term relationships. It's a small ecosystem.
Arkady Kulik: I think there is a way to give feedback that is useful for founders. I don't think that... Another thing that really played well for me is, I think along the same lines of having a rubricated set of questions, is having a very clear process. The best thing an investor can do is give you a quick yes. The next best thing an investor can do is give you a quick no. The absolute worst is this lingering maybe. Whether you're an LP or you're a VC, the absolute worst thing you can do to a potential investment target is keep asking questions, keep getting closer to commitment and then never committing. So, I don't want to be this guy, and I want to respect my founders and my founders' time. So my whole process is designed in such a way that if there is nothing to be done together, we're not going to even take the first call. We're not even going to create an illusion of interest within the founder. And then if we do have a first call, the first call is designed in such a way that I disqualify my firm as soon as I can from the deal, not because there is something wrong with the founder, but because there is no fit between my strategy and their strategy. And if this is the case, and it's not their problem, it's not my problem either, it's not a problem, I would say, it's just a mismatch of alignment. And it's like dating; you have your own preferences on how a person looks, on how a person behaves, on cultural background and things of that nature. And there is nothing wrong with them or you if there is no match. So my whole process is built in such a way that I can get to know very, very, very quickly. And I have been in situations a couple of times, which was very surprising to me. I would be in some random networking event here in San Francisco, and a founder would approach me on whom I passed in the first 10 minutes of a conversation, 15 minutes of a conversation. And he's like, Arkady, thank you very much. I'm like, what for? I didn't invest. He's like, you were one of the few VCs who had a clear, transparent, and efficient process. You passed on me in the first 10 minutes, you didn't waste my time, and you actually introduced me to somebody else who can be a better fit for me, and we closed on them. Thank you. I'm like, wow. And that works. That works every single time. And I help my LPs in my second fund. I help them because I run the same process with them. My first conversation with an LP is, are we a good fit? What is your process? How does it look like? What are you looking for in a manager? What are your check sizes? What are your caveats? Can you do this? Can you do that? Are you interested in deep tech? All of those questions. So that the LP can very clearly understand very quickly if there is a deep conversation that should be had or if there is nothing to talk about.
Eric Jorgenson: What are those signals that show you that an LP might be a good fit for you and vice versa?
Arkady Kulik: Value alignment, first and foremost. There are several LPs with whom we're talking who see the world in exactly the same way that I do, and we understand that there are certain things that VC is uniquely positioned to solve, unlike for example a hedge fund. One of the biggest bones to pick for me in this whole industry is that a lot of VC managers are running for AUM, and to them AUM is everything, everything, everything, just AUM, management fees, AUM, management fees. And I'm like, why are you not building a hedge fund? Much more money, much better management fees, much faster path to liquidity, like what's going on? And it's this notion of VC being fashionable and cool, all the cool kids do VC and all of that stuff. At the end of the day, you only, at least in my realm and how I understand it, the value of a venture capital firm that you're creating is going to be defined by the DPI and by the amount of positive impact that the companies that you've backed brought to this world. So, to me, value system is very important. The things that can disqualify and have disqualified LPs in the past is when our fund is too small for them, for example. Or when they are looking for a check that is above 20% of ownership in my firm. That's when I say no, because I don't want anyone to have more than 20% ownership in my firm, or at least in my fund. But the point is, it's a rubricated question, the question list again, what's your process, what do you expect from the manager, what are the check sizes, how big or how small the fund should be, do you back us for one fund, for three funds, etc., all of those things. Those are the questions that I ask.
Eric Jorgenson: How do you go about finding that values alignment?
Arkady Kulik: You talk to people. You ask them why they do what they do. I specifically ask them questions, two questions. If they're interested in deep tech, why deep tech? Is it because they think it's the biggest outcome in terms of cash? Is it because... whatever it could be. And another question that I always ask, especially when we talk to people that are not in family offices but more like endowments and foundations and funds of funds, is why are you in this particular firm? Because people open up when they talk about their own value systems, and you will hear why they joined that fund of funds or this foundation. It's going to be very clear to you what drives them.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. Let's return to the root of the conversation at the pilot fund, and maybe just tell the story of the pilot fund. I mean, raising your very first thing, what thesis you sort of came into that with, and then how it changed as you deployed it.
Arkady Kulik: The thesis was very simple... back scientifically validated breakthroughs at pre-seed stage. The idea was, again, as I said, the translational layer between scientific founders and less than scientific investors. Again, not just VCs, NGOs included, CVCs, anyone. Back in 2022 when this idea came to me, or 2021 actually, when I started talking to people in 2022, I started doing something on that front, the deep tech was still in its nascency, people were still not really clear about specific things, how to do them. So it was, let's talk to scientists in their language and talk to funders in their language and connect those two realms. That was very straightforward. That was the idea of the fund. It took me a while to raise it. It took me 18 months to get to 7 million. Yeah, traditional 18 months of fund one. And the whole fund one was 7 million. The first close of Arkane is already larger than the first total fund of pilot fund, than the whole pilot fund. And I think the evolution is in two rounds. One, instead of just being a pre-seed investor, we want to be the first check investor. It sounds like a nuance, but it's an important nuance when it comes to building a relationship with the founders. And it came naturally to us. It wasn't like a revolution. It was an evolution of our vision because, as I said before, if you rely on other people's due diligence, pre-seed and seed investment, then probably something is off with your approach, just in general. The second part is that, this is the entrepreneur in me, and this is just the general context of the world around us today, is that instead of investing in broad deep tech, we're investing in areas that we call hidden needs. So, we try to identify the needs that humanity has that not many people understand yet and not many people are paying attention to yet, but they will become really, really important as we move forward, as we advance our civilization, our humanity. And there are many, many reasons behind that. I'm happy to walk you through them. The broad reasons are the following. The holy grail of investment is timing. And it's impossible to time a specific solution. I mean, if somebody can time when a specific solution is going to win, I think those people should launch a hedge fund again. They're going to make so much more money than in VC, so much quicker as well. And solutions are difficult or impossible while understanding when problems are emerging, what problems are the most prominent right now are much more clear. The second part of that is the pure entrepreneur in me because everybody's telling entrepreneurs start with the need, start with a problem, and then go and apply your technology or business to fixing this problem. And to me, it's kind of funky because all VCs are saying that to their founders, and yet all the same VCs, when they go back to their LPs, they say, oh, we invest in fintech and deeptech and neurotech and something tech. They don't invest in fixing problems, majority, they invest in solutions, just broad solutions. And to me that never sat well with me, and I finally understood why, and I was like, okay, I'm going back to my entrepreneurial roots and figuring out what needs and problems are the most important for humanity, and we invest in the index of solutions of those needs. And the beauty of that is that when you invest in an index of solutions, you don't really care which solution is going to win. If you have identified the need properly, you're going to make money in any case. Whether it's a vaccine, a new modulation device, an invasive therapy, whatever it is, somebody's going to win, somebody's going to fix that problem and crack it open. So that's the idea of the index of solutions. And I think that's a big hedge against everything else that is done in the VC world. The last couple of cents are, when you are so niche, when you're so focused, the power law starts playing in your favor rather than against you because you don't invest in broad, deep tech where everybody else is looking as well. You're going under specific assumptions for specific companies, for specific teams in the labs, and you identify them early on, and you get their attention, you become prominent. It's much easier to become a, say, non-invasive neuromodulation VC that everybody in non-invasive neuromodulation in the world knows than become a deep tech VC which every deep tech founder knows. It's a completely different level of effort and years and years. Again, coming back to this question of quick feedback loops, you can build it much quicker than you can build a reputation like [Hostler?] or A16z.
Eric Jorgenson: So do you find that... I think the approach of studying the problem is super, super interesting because it's objective. As you point out, the problem definitely exists. And I think you have a really novel way of sort of selecting for those problems that, as you put, are hidden needs. Like high need, low generalized awareness, maybe, but like methodically becoming that kind of contrary and correct view that I think is probably worth talking through if you are open for it.
Arkady Kulik: Yes, and this is the technical unlock that I would want to say that made all of that possible. The technical unlock is the agentic AI. Because for you to go and do what we do today with manual labor, you would have to hire hundreds of lawyers, hundreds of PhDs in different realms of life, biologists, physicists, chemists, all of the different people, and you would ask them to read all the patents, to read the papers, create some kind of comprehensive analysis of that stuff and give it back to you. Or you would have to go to some folks like McKinsey or somebody else and pay them 10,000 bucks per need to be evaluated, and we have 300 needs after we filter them down. So initially we've parsed 1600 needs. We've filtered out everything that's not solvable by technology, loss of civility in political discourse, for example. We filtered out everything that is obvious, like food security and home security, and that is not even a VC scale industry, it's a mature industry. And we end up with 300 hidden needs, things like non-invasive neuromodulation, or exoskeletons, or asteroid mining, all of this stuff that is... Some of them are more interesting, some of them are less interesting, but in any case, so assume you have 300 needs, and you have to pay $5,000 at the very minimum to some McKinsey folks. That's...
Eric Jorgenson: $15 million?
Arkady Kulik: $15 million, yeah. $1.5? It's 1.5 million that you just paid to get the research done. And then the question comes, which we literally discussed today on the call with my AI team, I was like, would we trust a McKinsey report more than we trust our own agentic AI-generated report, or not? Is it the power of the brand? Or is it our misconception that LLMs are hallucinating? So, for us right now, building a deep report, which simplified is like think about six deep researchers stitched together. But we call it deep report, it's not exactly deep researchers; we feed it our own proprietary data and all that stuff, and we guide it every step. It's a family of agents, 10 agents to be precise, that go and parse information about political, environmental, societal, technological, and all other aspects of that specific need. So that costs me around 12 bucks right now. So the whole 300 needs is something like 5,000 bucks. So think like one report by McKinsey, basically. And the idea is that you create this deep report, and then you pit those needs against each other. So there is another family of agents that's called the judge family. They go and evaluate all of those needs according to the metrics that humans set. One of my venture partners has set a tournament according to the following model. He's like, give me the best case scenario and the worst case scenario on the 3, 5, and 10 years horizon, and rank all the needs according to, first of all, probability of the scenarios, and second of all, the magnitude of those scenarios. So the judge goes and builds the scenario analysis for each of those needs. Again, if you had to do it with humans, it would have been impossible. For example, I am being me. I have built a matrix of impact, matrix of scale, and all of that kind of very numerical approach, and like just rank every single need according to the blended weights. Another venture partner of ours has built a set of tournaments that is not looking for presence of information, but is looking for absence of information. He's like, what are the blind spots in the information that we have identified for that specific need and how those blind spots can evolve and how they will affect it. The idea is the following. You have a set of different tournaments. These tournaments are being run simultaneously, and we have six people in my strategic council, we have six people who each provide their own tournament rules. And then, once we see the results, we go and update our tournament rules and run another tournament. By the end of the year, we're going to have 50 or 60, maybe closer to 100, depending on how quickly we're going to iterate, tournaments that we have run through all 300 needs. And at the end of the year, we can go into the meta-analysis of which needs are consistently on top of those tournaments. And this allows us to input our own opinions and our own view of the world into the tournament. We don't have to build a Frankenstein monster of a tournament that kind of caters to all the people and their own different opinions. And it also allows us to remove bias at the end of the day, weirdly enough, because by doing that analysis, you make it very, very objective. So we simplified the life of our team, and we don't have to go and agree on all the rules of tournaments. Everybody just submits their own rules and we see how it flies. So, I had a conversation with an LP yesterday, a shameless plug-in for Court Lorenzini, who is very, very smart. And he said, do you think it's going to converge? I'm like, yeah, I'm sure it's going to converge. He's like, I'm very interested to see if it's going to converge or not. And I was like, yeah, if it's not going to converge, it's going to tell us very, very interesting things about needs of humanity. And I think it's going to be even more interesting if those tournaments do not converge at the end of the day.
Eric Jorgenson: Converge into one sort of set ranking? Or do you mean like sort of a multimodal...?
Arkady Kulik: By converging, I mean, for example, you have tournament number one that gives you 50 needs at the top, and tournament number two gives you 50 entirely different needs at the top, and tournament three gives you entirely different 50 needs at the top. Those are not converging. But if, say, out of those 50 needs, tournament number one gives you 30 needs that you can see in the same tournament number two and in tournament number three, you say, okay, we consistently see certain needs appear on the very top. And that's what I mean by converging. And non-converging is when they just are all over the place and there is no match between different types of tournament. So, I think that's going to converge, and I'm very interested to see how exactly it's going to fly.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's interesting. I would expect it to converge to some extent, too. And then, so that gives you sort of the problems that you want to go after, and you try to index the solutions for each of those problems and go find... I mean, then this translates into kind of like you're looking for those scientific breakthroughs. Do those primarily, you find those in academia, in labs?
Arkady Kulik: Yes, mostly we find it by parsing patents, grants, or scientific papers, mostly scientific papers.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. And then you approach those academics and you say like, are you interested in starting a company? Are you interested in commercializing this technology? Are you... we'd like to be your first check?
Arkady Kulik: We plan to do that. I don't want to say that we already do that, but we plan to approach them. Yes.
Eric Jorgenson: I imagine part of the appeal of being the first check strategy is you get dramatically different economics there. I mean, the valuations for true first checks seem to be very, very different than even a broader pre-seed round.
Arkady Kulik: The main appeal for me is beyond the valuation, because I think valuation is important, sure, but it's not the whole appeal. The main appeal to me is your ability to build a very, very trustworthy relationship with the founder. At the end of the day, if you invested at 3 million or 5 million or 7 million in a specific company, does it matter for your DPI? Yes. But if you don't have a good relationship with the founder, can you realize that DPI? What if you want to sell something on secondaries? What if you want to get some better conditions after IPO? What if you want to get some preferential treatment? So the exit opportunity hinges on your relationship with the founder more than anything else. The transparency, the informational honesty, intellectual honesty hinges on your relationship with the founder. So, while yes, we do expect to get discounts on the checks, it's not the main driver for being the first check. The main driver is having a great and thriving relationship with the founder. That's the most important part.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. The other piece of it that I'm sure is part of your thinking goes back to your kind of core values and the unique proposition that venture capital as an industry has, which is of all of the different sub sectors of the financial industry, this is one of the only ones where the capital isn't fungible, and the first check is the least fungible part of the entire venture capital industry, at least in my view. First conviction-
Arkady Kulik: What do you mean by that? Can you expand this a little bit?
Eric Jorgenson: Well, so, this is... my view that pre-seed and in particular first check is like an extremely morally important place for humanity as a whole to like put capital is because especially if you are actually approaching scientists and academics who have created a breakthrough but do not have a path to commercialization, might never raise money, don't know that this is available to them, and you approach them and sort of a company now exists where one might have never existed before that can then go improve the human condition or alleviate suffering or improve... And I think we talked about this a little bit before, in our first episode, like the alliance between entrepreneurs and scientists is where technology gets not just discovered, but like commercialized and extrapolated and expanded and the total impact of that technology then gets realized and that zero to one moment where you approach somebody who might have never started a company and you create a company and help others build conviction, join the team, pile on additional capital, that is not a replaceable thing. If you didn't do that, it might have never gotten done. In a world of people running hedge funds in public markets where nobody knows or cares who the money is from, like this is a very unique place to be. And it's why I love venture capital. And I feel like you and your strategy embody this well, which is why I always love chatting with you and love shining a light on your strategy and your approach and your values here.
Arkady Kulik: Yeah, I agree with you. I think another person for a shameless plug-in is Seth Bannon that I want to call out here because he's also the guy who has been with the Fifty Years firm. For the last 10 years, he's been focused on doing something more than just cutting a check, more than just making money. I think it's very important to understand why you do venture capital. I think it's very, very important to be honest with yourself about why you do anything in life, to be honest, like philosophically, why you do anything in life. But when it comes to doing something with such a long feedback cycle, doing something that is honestly one of the most manic depressive industries in the world because you're constantly on this seesaw of emotions like, oh yes, we got this new commitment, oh, this guy didn't go through, oh yes, one of our portfolio companies is showing some great results, oh these guys are failing. Like you're in this constant swing of this is amazing, life is fantastic, and oh my god, this just sucks. And it's not just me. I wish I was the only guy who is not capable of handling my emotions well. That's not just me. A lot of people are like that in this industry. A lot of people are... It's very hard to be detached, unless maybe you you spent like 20 years in that stuff and you've seen hundreds and hundreds of companies. It's very hard for an emerging manager, let me be very specific, it's very hard for an emerging manager to be detached from the success of their fundraising or success of their underlying portfolio companies. So whenever you are doing something that is so emotionally charged with such a long feedback cycle, which is honestly not the best paying industry either, again, back to all of these conversations about management fees and whatnot, you probably want to be driven by something more than just greed. That's my take.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think there's a constant churn of people entering venture capital thinking it's some sort of get-rich-quick scheme and then realizing that it's very much not. I like Bryce Roberts' take on this.
Arkady Kulik: I'll tell you a story. My very first company when I was 18, we'd been doing event management and artist management agency. That was my very first business. And we started just me and my co-founder 50-50, which I strongly advise never to do to anyone. Have 51-49, 49-49 and have a deal breaker person, not the deal breaker, the blocker breaker person for 2% or 1% of ownership. In any case, not the point. The point is, we started together, it was all fine, we grew it up, and then we started hiring people. And then you hire people into the artist and event management industry and they have a notion that it's all going to be like parties and traveling and crazy stories and women that throw panties at the scene and all of that stuff. And they end up answering a hundred emails about stupid requests from some random club in the middle of nowhere for a DJ that is a no-no name. And they're like, that's not what I expected to do. Then they have to do an Excel and they have to run a budget, and they have to go and negotiate with five different vendors for half a percentage of acquiring fee for tickets to the event. It's like, we thought it's going to be so much more fun. Like, yeah, occasionally, once a week, you go to some kind of event, but boo-hoo, big surprise, Eric, getting blackout drunk drummer from their hotel room when they're going to miss their flight if you don't get them from this hotel room is no fun. Maybe getting drunk with him would have been fun, but after you do it for a while, you cannot stand the smell of booze anymore. You cannot stand the smell of airports and hotels anymore. You're like, oh my god. And this is not just me, that's common knowledge in this industry. Same is true for venture capital. You think that it's going to be all exciting and all of those companies and you're going to meet so many talented people, when in reality, you talk to a hundred folks, out of which five or six are exceptional. And maybe 30 or 40 should not be doing the business in the first place. Like at all. And the others can build a lifestyle business, and that's good for them, but it's not a VC-scale industry. A lot of empty conversations. In my Rolodex for fundraising for fund two, I've started with like 530 people or so. And because again, the process is to disqualify people very quickly, I've already disqualified like 127, I checked yesterday, or something like that. Some of them, thanks to them, I disqualified by email, not even having a first call. I'm like, hey man, are you looking for an LP check this year? They're like, no. I'm like, cool, I'm going to reach out to you in January 2026. Because the problem with this industry is that a lot of people, one of the many problems is a lot of people just go pitch mode. Whether you're a VC talking to an LP, you join the conversation and without any attempt to understand what's going on in another person's life, they're like, this is my fund, I do this and that and I'm amazing, please give me money. And then many, many founders do the same stuff. So, it is not a sexy industry, it is not as fun as people would think. I think it is important, and it is important for me, I have this book... So, every year on my birthday, I send a gift to my LPs and my founders. And this year, it's this book called Moral Ambition, which says, stop wasting your life and start making a difference. To me, it is very, very important to be clear on what is the main driving force behind whatever you do in life. And a lot of people go into VC for very, very wrong reasons. Get rich fast is one of them. Hang out with cool kids is another one of them. I've seen people get into this game for the, which I disrespect the most, for the feel of raw power. They're like... They join the call and they're like, okay, Eric, tell me what you're doing. I'm going to listen. I'm going to pass a judgment on that. And when I see people behave in such manner, for me, if an LP starts talking to me like so, I just am like, thank you very much. You're not a fit. Bye-bye.
Eric Jorgenson: You can always tell those people in VC because they're the ones that don't raise their own funds.
Arkady Kulik: No, not necessarily. For some people, it's actually, it aggravates them even further. They're like, if I had to go through all of this rite of passage, if I had to be and to grind and I had to raise, they actually put themselves on a pedestal, they're like, okay, I'm amazing, now you prove to me that you're worthy of my time. What the fuck, man? Like, why? What's the point here? Like, if you were to- if you're going into VC for the sake of ego or for the sake of quick cash, then that's not a good idea at all. Those people will not survive. Those people will maybe raise one fund, maybe two, rarely two, and they will peel out very fast.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, like Bryce Roberts has a good line about this. It's like, if you don't get rich on carry, you won't be around long enough to get rich on management fees.
Arkady Kulik: Exactly my point. And getting rich on carry only works if you're serious about how you invest. And a lot of people that I see in this industry are serious about how they raise, but not how they invest.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And there's a lot of things that sort of seem to meet the- seem muddled in the cultural conversation of venture capital that aren't truly sort of the roots of venture capital in the way that you practice it and Steve Jervison and Seth Bannon and the original sort of venture capitalists that were truly like pulling technological innovations out of labs or discovery parks, research centers and commercializing things that wouldn't have otherwise been commercialized. That's where the impact and the returns come from. Very interesting. So, I'm curious, this sort of gets back to some of the tactics, once you've aligned on, and you can pick anyone that might be a leader or not in terms of your problems that you're trying to index solutions for, and what's the approach to actually creating that index? That seems like a very interesting puzzle to me.
Arkady Kulik: Again, data-driven, agentic AI-driven, you get all the information you can. You go and find all the papers, all the patents, all the grants. They usually have names of human beings attached to them. You go and build the database of solutions, existing solutions, whether it's a public company or a startup, and emerging solutions, usually in the labs. And then you go and find everybody who is involved. You ask a person who understands that need particularly well to go and verify that those solutions are real and they make sense to that person. And then, based on those solutions, you build the database of people, and then agentic AI goes out and sends thousands of emails to people and starts nagging them, hey, let's talk, what do you do, what are your plans, what do you plan to do, how is it going to… You just start the outreach campaign, and you start finding those people. You go to conferences when they are keynotes and all of that stuff. So that process is actually pretty boring and straightforward. Unlike identifying needs, you just parse the web for all... You need to figure out what kind of information sources to use, what kind of data to use, but once you figured out that part, once you figured out access to all the papers and grants and patents, everything else is just agentic AI. We call those kind of agents primitive agents. When a single agent can cover the whole function, it's a primitive agent. When you need a multi-agent family, then that's a more complex version of that, yeah. But yeah, this is very straightforward. Find everybody who does something and try to talk to every single person. I mean, I divide things into complex and simple, and sometimes it's hard or easy, and those are different metrics. So people usually blend it into difficult or not. So for me, there are complex items when it's unclear what to do. Do you do rock climbing? Have you tried? So, there are certain rules when you just don't know how to get through it. Like you don't understand where to put your hand, how to put your feet on the wall. Like, how do you get through that specific crux? This would be complex. And then there are some that are just long and pumpy. This would be hard. And both of them can be difficult in a very different way. So I would say that the problem of identifying needs and identifying which are the most promising is a complex problem. This is where you can make mistakes. This is where your assumptions can really drive you off the proper route. When it comes to hard problems, like reaching out to a thousand scientists, it's just a matter of applied effort and applied time. That's it. It's not complex. You're not going to make any mistakes. It's just going to take you a while. That's it.
Eric Jorgenson: You're not concerned that you will miss... I mean, the nature of problem and solution are, it's not necessarily obvious that you're going to have a completely comprehensive set of index of solutions necessarily to the problem. Is it? Like, the problem could arise from outside of the like specific domain that's studying solutions?
Arkady Kulik: That's why one of the tournament rules is about absence and not presence of information. That exact conversation is how that person came up with these rules. Yes. You can also say that it's impossible to find every single founder who does something if they're not, for example, a scientist, or they're not a founder, or they're not public about it, and maybe you can build an argument that talented, exited founders who could build a software company and now building something in deep tech, they might not necessarily be public about something until they see that it works. Sure. But then again, you would not have been able to find the same people even if you had a different strategy, even if you're sourcing for broad deep tech. So I don't see the strength in that argument. You can always find some kind of weird edge case, like you will not find these types of founders. Sure, okay, fine. But if you combine a very, very broad outreach, very thorough outreach with a very precise farming strategy, by farming I mean content marketing, networking and everything, go to conferences when those people can show up. Write content on LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever medium, other platforms that you want to use that those people might be interested in reading. One of our best portfolio companies in the pilot fund has been the company that found me because I wrote a content on specifically what they do, on 3D printing of metals. And they saw it, they reached out to me, and it is so far one of the best deals we have in the portfolio.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. Yeah, and in this way, it's actually, deep tech and academic breakthroughs are a little easier to sort of trace the trajectory of than the past history of software investing. Like, it was a lot more of a, not a lottery, but like an unknown 20 year old with no prior track record or 25 year old or 30 year old could like suddenly code an app that goes viral that finds a niche that like hit some social trigger that hasn't been hit before and become this breakout success in a way that is probably much more rare. So, this feels like a way to cast a much thicker net, and you're going to capture a lot of the value that gets created from these.
Arkady Kulik: I don’t know if I’ve heard a lot of stories of some random dudes just out of blue without any help going and building some life-changing apps. I am not sure that I've known of any who have built something really magnificent on their own. Even if you take the biggest success stories of Facebook and other people, there has been a lot of... I don't think that if Sean Parker was not involved in Facebook in the early stages, then this company would have made it anywhere, and so on and so forth. There were Friendster and Myspace and multiple other social platforms at the same time. Very often the unlock didn't come from the app itself, like in the case of Uber. It was just Travis's complete disregard to rules and his approach, like I'm going to do my shit and then I'm going to figure out the consequences. So it's not even about the coding thing there. I just don't see the coding as a block, I don't see it as a threshold, if you wish. But in the case of deep tech, the ability to understand science really, really well is important, and the ability to understand the technology super well is important. I have seen many companies, when it'd be some kind of random guy who read some kind of random paper and like, oh, yes, I'm going to do it. And then you start talking to those people and try to understand how they're going to continuously succeed at that, how they're going to create more and more layers of technology, how they're going to move towards evolution of that, and you see no answers at all. And I don't think they will succeed. I think they will maybe launch a product, maybe they will get some initial traction, but then it's going to die. Because they don't have any kind of scientific and technological engine behind it. However, I do see a lot of founders who have that kind of engine, who are capable of doing that, and these people are the ones that have a moat, really. And that moat is not patents, that moat is not publications, that moat is their brain and how they think about that. So, I would argue that the barriers to entry in software versus deep tech are different, and deep tech requires a little bit more proficiency in specific domains.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that's... I think the point I was trying to make, perhaps I didn't make it very clearly, but I think your approach is likely to have a higher success rate than like, by analogy, Y Combinator, where they're trying to just like find smart people, high agentic, even if the idea isn't necessarily baked, even if they have some indication of like prior interesting success in their life. But the examples I was thinking of are like Dropbox or Airbnb, like a lot of people would technically be capable of that feet. And it's not necessarily obvious that Drew Houston or Brian Chesky were going to be like the breakout founders from that particular cohort at YC because they didn't have five or ten years of history studying that particular problem when YC made that investment. Where in this deep tech, technological breakthrough process, you've got a lot of breadcrumbs that you can follow to see who sort of approaches this problem with a unique background of, not just published papers, but maybe execution of technical milestones. And so, you can see who really has that iterative innovation sauce, which is really, as you point out, is the engine of long-term success as a founder.
Arkady Kulik: I guess we'll see. I can see how this argument is going to cut both ways, and you can say that you'll find some talented young guy or girl who are capable of doing something of a breakthrough on their own. I just think that in deep tech, again, the barriers are a little bit higher, on the education, on the understanding, on the technology. Especially today, with all the Corsors and Copilots, building an app or building a software tool is such a simple task. And building an energy storage solution or a neuromodulation device is not exactly- AI is not going to help you with that. So, I think it's going to be, we're going back to the era when entrepreneurship, real, real big exits are actually coming from hardware and doing something in the physical realm rather than digital.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I agree entirely. Do you think we're entering... do you think the scale of market that is like addressable by VC is going up? Like, do you think we will see more and bigger outcomes that are funded by VC over the next 20 years than we had in the last 20 years?
Arkady Kulik: I don't know. I'm not... One of the rules of my life is I'm not trying to be an expert in areas that I don't understand or never spent enough time in. I did not put a head of microbiologist in 2020. I did not put a head on of military experts in 2022. Neither I'm going to tell you what I think about the Middle East conflict that just started yesterday. I have no clue how it's going to go. I genuinely don't have any interest in understanding how it's going to go, because that's so far from me, both geographically, physically and mentally. And that has been... I'm going to give you the same answer about the market and trends of VC. Never thought about this question. Don't care. I think that we're talking about, what, VC is a trillion USD under management overall right now? Is it? Something like... the whole VC industry is like a trillion bucks.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, yeah, a handful of the biggest ones are in the, yeah, hundreds of billions. So pencils out.
Arkady Kulik: So, oh no, I'm sorry. So, the global venture capital assets under management is 3.1 trillion as of Q1 2024. Okay, so the US is 1.1, Asia Pacific is 1.6, and Europe is 200 billion. So yeah, if we're talking about the whole VC is several trillion dollars asset class, for my pre-seed stage, I think it's maybe tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions tops. So I don't think that affects me a lot. I wish more people were into science. I wish more people were into entrepreneurship. It's just not something I can affect, I can in any way change from where I am right now, maybe later on when I have a budget for media. I actually think that Big Bang Theory, the TV series, did a lot for science. A lot. They made geeks sexy, they made it interesting, they've proven that you can be successful in this domain of theoretical physics and still get attention of girls and friends and everything else. So this is not my problem to figure out. My problem is to find founders who are capable of building generational companies, big, big things that will stay here for decades, if not hundreds of years, and be the first person to seed them. Maybe when I have 50 billion under management, I will be thinking about the global VC trends and things of that nature. Right now, it is a little bit too much for me. I'm swimming in my own pond and I don't know how the Pacific Ocean is going to turn this day or another day, and honestly it doesn't affect me at all. I'm more concerned about the US as the country than I'm concerned about specifics of venture capital.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I'm really glad, along the same lines of just kind of like the media and mainstream, I'm very glad that the richest person on earth is now a technology entrepreneur and an engineer and no longer a financier. I think that bodes well for the kind of number of people that get interested in science and engineering and technology and pushing the frontiers, starting companies rather than just buying them.
Arkady Kulik: Yeah, I'm with you 100%.
Eric Jorgenson: Awesome. What are the things that a founder can do to increase the odds of being funded by you and Arkane?
Arkady Kulik: Be intellectually honest with yourself first and with people around you second. Understand why you do what you do, be self-aware, be mature, and don't lie. Those are the major, major things. And we will back entrepreneurs, because we're still deploying from pilot fund, we will back entrepreneurs outside of any specific need, we will back entrepreneurs that are talented. When we started the pilot fund, one of the other things that I think didn't play out as expected were like only physics enabled stuff. But we have found two exceptional biotech entrepreneurs or rather tech bio entrepreneurs and we back both of them. And I'm absolutely sure that we're going to continue backing people that might not necessarily be squarely within the thesis, but when they're exceptional entrepreneurs, we're going to back them for sure. And in order to understand if they're exceptional, you need to cut through the noise. And I think that the best thing a founder can do, me included, is to remove that noise proactively. Don't try to oversell anything. Don't try to push anyone. Just be yourself. And be honest about why you do what you do. It's one of the biggest mistakes people can make. And have you seen Friends and Neighbors on Apple TV? It's not necessarily a TV series that you want to watch the whole thing. But the premise is the guy is a successful hedge fund manager, and he gets laid off. And I've seen this story so many times, a 45-, 48-, 55-year-old dude who was sure that he's safe in his corporate career, loses his job, he's 10 years away from retirement, he starts eating into his savings, and the whole last decade of professional career becomes stressful for them. This is because they were under faulty assumptions in the first place, that they have job security and stuff of that nature. Do what you love to do, stop wasting your life and go and make a difference. And this is the most important thing. If you believe that you can be a talented founder, if you have an idea that is going to be scalable, go and build it. If you think you're better off licensing this technology that you built as a scientist, go and license it off and build the next technology, and then the next technology. Go and release hundreds, thousands of patents over the course of your lifetime and generate cash flow like so. You don't have to build another NVIDIA, you don't have to build another Tesla. There is no necessity to build a company if it's not who you are genuinely. One of my friends asked me why you do entrepreneurship. I'm like, because nothing else feels right for me. Nothing else works right for me, it just doesn't sit well in my chest. So yeah, that's why I do entrepreneurship.
Eric Jorgenson: And I love the entrepreneurial, not every venture capitalist is entrepreneurial. And you bring a lot of really unique... like operating speed and perspective and leverage to the craft of venture itself and to building a firm. And it's been really exciting to watch it all come together. Did you get enough feedback from DPI from the pilot fund in order to use that to raise fund one or is still too early to see...?
Arkady Kulik: There was no DPI in fund one, no. Again, I think that coming back to this topic, which seems to be a recurring topic of false signals in this industry, the real thing that LPs, in my opinion, should pay attention to when they back the merging manager from fund one to fund two and from fund two to fund three is does that manager do what they promised they're going to do? Because at the end of the day, you sell on a specific strategy. If you can execute on that strategy, great, let's execute on that strategy, and then people buy into that strategy of yours. They do not... They buy into you and into your strategy. And I've seen this before. Somebody would go and say, we're going to invest in pre-seed neuro tech. Half a year later, they go and run around with a series ESPV for open AI. What? Why? And that happens way more often than you think, Eric. So, in my opinion, it's very simple. You have sold the promise of delivering a certain strategy to your LPs. Go and deliver that strategy. If you fail, then it's a common mistake of both you and your LPs. You all thought that that strategy makes sense. You have delivered on that. You have executed well on that, and you show them whether this strategy has worked or not. I'm sure that many, many LPs who will see that you delivered what you promised, but it didn't play out financially or in some other way, will still back you in the future because they can trust you. If it played out well, of course, then you won, and everybody's happy, blah, blah, blah. But if you go ahead as an emerging manager, you sell people on a certain strategy, and then the strategy doesn't play out, and you don't go explicitly back to those people. And actually, I think, let's even scrub that part. If you go for a certain strategy, and you at some point start shifting away, drifting away from the strategy to other stages, to other industries, to other stuff, then you essentially lied to your LPs. You lied with your actions, not with what you said, but with your actions. You did not deliver on what you had promised. It's like getting into a marriage and saying that I will never cheat on you and then demanding an open relationship or telling your spouse that you are already in the open relationship. It's the breach of trust that cannot be tolerated. That's at least my take on that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I'm sure LPs have many horror stories about, yeah, thinking they were betting on one thing and finding out that they had bought something entirely different. And from the GP's point of view, maybe they're just too opportunistic or flexible in their strategy. If they thought that that would work and they wanted to do right by their LPs, they convinced themselves that they had a fiduciary duty to do the thing that they thought would make the most money. And the LP is saying like, that's not the playbook that we agreed to. You were supposed to run this playbook. I got this other guy running this other playbook. And I'm trying to build, the LP is really trying to build like a thoughtful, cohesive whole from all the people that are supposed to be doing their jobs and running their routes. And if you say you're investing in crypto and you run off and invest in biotech, they may already have a biotech guy, biotech guy or girl, biotech fund. And now they have zero crypto and all biotech and they're unhappy with you. And they're not going on to fund two or three or anything else.
Arkady Kulik: The one thing that I will give as an advice that was given to me, third shameless plug today is Julian Shapiro. I think Julian is amazing. And he suggested that I should start talking to institutional LPs as early as possible, and that's what I'm doing for fund two, because yes, there was a pretty dramatic churn in LPs from fund one to fund two, not because people don't want to back it, but because the minimum check has increased so much, and because I was so loyal with my friends on the minimum checks for fund one, if somebody has invested say 15,000 bucks or 20,000 bucks in fund one, and my new minimum check is 500k, this gap is never going to be breached. It's impossible. So, I didn't even go to a bunch of my LPs. I'm like, cool guys, I don't want to waste your time because you're not going to be interested in that. And I cannot be as loyal as I was with all the minimum checks because I have certain numbers of LPs to hit with certain numbers of targets. So, I need a minimum check that is much higher than I think it was 170 in my first fund, something like that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's an interesting dynamic too that I remember talking with you about before. It's painful. It's hard. I think seeing that you can do a great job for your LPs in fund one, and they want to invest, but it still just doesn't fit the dynamic of the fund, and you have to graduate and start these new relationships and find new LPs to fit the fund size and check strategy that works, which is, yeah, a little unfortunate. But also, thank you for shouting out Julian. He's also- you and he, I think, are really unique among the GP friends and relationships that I have as being like truly generous, open books, and like allies to other GPs in a true like building business together sense, not just a like, yeah, let me share deals when I'm trying to fill a round, but in a like, no, let me share my LPs and my strategy and my approaches and my tactics and like we're all in this together and we all have the same sort of collective values and we all want to see the same outcomes for humanity and understand venture's role in doing it and the responsibility that we have to take good care of LPs and founders and move the whole ecosystem forward. Yeah, Julian is really, really excellent about that. All right, Arkady, thank you so much for taking the time and being an open book and so generously sharing everything. Where would you direct people to follow you, learn more? LinkedIn? All right. We'll link to that in the show notes. Keep an eye on Arkady, people. He's going to be funding very interesting things. His LinkedIn is, there is a bunch of really, really interesting stuff on there, really like unique alpha from stuff that he's studying and the papers that he's finding. And thank you, thank you, thank you for doing what you do and sharing it with all of us.
Arkady Kulik: Thank you for the invitation. I deeply appreciate you.