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00:00:00
00:00:01
Ari Fine Glantz
71 Plays7 days ago
Thanks for listening to our episode with Ari Fine Glantz.
To keep up with or connect with Ari:
✨ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariglantz/
✨ Website: https://newenglandvc.org/
To stay in touch with Meredith and Medbury:
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
Follow Medbury on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/medbury_agency/
Subscribe to the Medbury newsletter: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Email Meredith: Meredith@MedburyAgency.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm excited to have you here. so I always feel like with friends, I have to especially preface it, but everybody Ari is my friend. Thank you, Ari. Which is nothing to say about Meredith's powers of persuasion, just my powers of being shy. I'm super excited to have this chat with you. i have a lot of questions prepped, but you're also just like one of the most fun folks I know to have a conversation with. So I'm like, where's this bad boy going go? It's being the conversation, not you. Just to be quick.
00:00:27
Speaker
For folks who don't know you can you just say who you are and what you do? Sure. ah my My official name, Ari. I'm the executive director of the New England Venture Capital Association, which is not a venture capital firm.
00:00:42
Speaker
It is a representative body interested in the collective health of the VC ecosystem and by proxy, the innovation economy at large. I remember when we first met, i think you came to the beach with us and we're sitting and I was trying to understand.
00:01:03
Speaker
it was like our first conversation ever. And I was like, wait, what? And like really trying to get you to baby step me through it. And I think after how many years of being friends, I finally get it now. And what you do is really cool.
00:01:14
Speaker
And I'm excited for folks to hear about it. i I think I remember that that was almost six, seven years ago. I can assure you, i have grown to understand what it is I do a little bit more and definitely have gotten better at explaining it.
Path to Venture Capital and Hiring Philosophy
00:01:29
Speaker
So how did you get into this VC world? Was that always your plan or did you take like more of a meandering path? Always surprised at what I do. I would say how I got here.
00:01:40
Speaker
The word that comes to mind is circuitously. The NAVCA, we are all about regional health, regional development. And i grew up in Cambridge.
00:01:51
Speaker
not as a participant in the innovation ecosystem, just as a local kid. And so that's where the story starts. I went to college in New York, wound up on the co-founding team of a startup, moved out to San Francisco very briefly to try and raise money.
00:02:12
Speaker
That's where I got the first taste of what a startup ecosystem looks like. And That company failed very quickly and somewhat spectacularly, but learned a lot along the way.
00:02:26
Speaker
Spent the next couple of years in Europe playing baseball, coaching baseball, working on a demolition construction team. buying and selling camper vans and a few other non-venture capital related activities.
00:02:44
Speaker
And then when I came back to Massachusetts after essentially seven years away, I was struck by how much the innovation economy had imprinted itself on the place I grew up.
00:03:03
Speaker
So I did what anyone in that situation does. i went to work in social work for two and a half years. And then I made the pivot that everyone else makes out of social work into venture capital.
00:03:17
Speaker
bla That old pipeline. Yes. um God, it is funny. I wonder what the year was where it flipped in Cambridge and it went from being it went into such that what I think of is like tech VC bros of the blue button up shirt, the zip up branded vest. It was suddenly ubiquitous and definitely like a part of the culture. It's such an untraditional path you took.
00:03:40
Speaker
And I think Maybe I'm wrong, but my perception would be unusually non-traditional for your particular space. I think that anytime you tell an origin story that contains buying and selling camper vans, au pairing in Paris and playing nominally professional baseball in Australia, it's going to be non-traditional, most likely for wherever you wind up.
00:04:04
Speaker
and I would say one of the interesting things that comes up for me a lot is yeah we're a nonprofit. We are. are a nonprofit that exists to represent the interests of and extremely for-profit industry.
00:04:21
Speaker
And that in and of itself is non-traditional for the space. And so part of nuance and part of the excitement of my job is navigating being someone with a very different set of priorities and a very different origin story than the people with whom I'm interacting on a daily basis.
00:04:41
Speaker
I want to get next into what your job is like in the day to day, but I'm curious. I'm always interested when people, as you say, have a circuitous path. When you're like looking at folks to hire, for example, do you look for that or is that a plus for you? Yeah, I think.
00:04:59
Speaker
And we'll talk about a little bit more of what we actually do. What we do is there's not really a degree that prepares you for it, so to speak. We're also a very small and mighty team.
00:05:12
Speaker
And so for me, non-traditional background paired with a really compelling story about why you want to work on the things we work on and is it a huge selling point.
00:05:24
Speaker
The person, for example, the person i with whom I work most closely right now, my right-hand woman, Rachel Lee Gross, We talk about it all the time. One of the things that attracted me to her as a candidate immediately was that she graduated from Brown, but she transferred into Brown from a small community college in Florida.
00:05:48
Speaker
And when you're looking at a bunch of resumes, When you're in venture capital or the name of your organization is in venture capital, you get a lot of Ivy League resumes naturally. And then you don't get a lot of them that transfer in from a community college. And so that jumped off the page and made me really excited to have the next conversation with her.
00:06:10
Speaker
And then she sold her vision and and the rest is history. But yeah that's an example. I like it. think it's interesting. I feel like I look for that too. And when I think back on folks I've hired over the years, feel like some of the best were super non-traditional, but don't think I've ever really thought about it as, it was like maybe intuitively something I looked for, but i never really thought.
00:06:32
Speaker
articulated it. I think probably after this I'll be more mindful of that. I think you're right. i just feel like when I think back to who I was and what I was like when I was At the point in my life where I was deciding what to major in and where to go, I was so underdeveloped and so less than fully formed that it's almost a red flag for me when I see somebody who has just been like completely laser focused on one thing forever, because I'm like,
00:07:04
Speaker
What if you were really meant to do something else? What have you been missing? What are these other parts of yourself that you might not have been nurturing while you were just spending all your time focused in this one direction?
00:07:16
Speaker
But I also have raging AD and that's just me.
00:07:20
Speaker
No, it is true. I think about that sometimes. I'm like, God, we're 18. We're making potentially one the biggest financial decisions of our lives. And so far as student loan, I don't know, maybe it's even cliche to say it, but that we expect a 17 or 18 year old to be like, yes, I know what I shall study and pursue and what I shall do with that incredibly expensive degree.
00:07:40
Speaker
um i don't know. What a world. Yeah. Then there's Europe where they're tracking even earlier, 14, 15 into their industry and career.
NEVCA's Mission and Community Initiatives
00:07:53
Speaker
Okay. But finally, tell me what you do all day. It really varies. We, as an organization, we have main practice areas. I'm happy to go into a little bit more about the org itself, but we break our work into venture community, public policy, regional brand, and workforce development.
00:08:13
Speaker
And all of those are really through the lens of what does a vc ecosystem need to be successful? One of the perspectives that we've always taken is venture capitalists all have kind of three full-time jobs each.
00:08:29
Speaker
They're sourcing new companies, stewarding their existing portfolio and fundraising new LP capital. We like to think of ourselves as existing to take care of and address all the other things that they agree generally would be better.
00:08:49
Speaker
If these things existed, if these opportunities were curated, that aren't the three full-time jobs that they're paying attention to on a day-to-day. So that's where community policy brand and workforce come in.
00:09:04
Speaker
And on the community side, we've got about 25 events per year that we really make a bunch of excuses to bring people together, facilitate connections, heavy focus on investor to investor networking, because there's lots of opportunities for them to meet founders in their day job, fewer opportunities for them to build relationships amongst themselves and co-investing is so critical to success.
00:09:31
Speaker
Public policy, that's probably our second most active area. We're a registered lobby here in Massachusetts, and we look at innovation-friendly legislation really across the country.
00:09:44
Speaker
That's really interesting and exciting things that affect the health and vitality of the ecosystem in general. On the one hand, we might be looking at short term capital gains rate reductions.
00:09:57
Speaker
But we might also be looking at transportation infrastructure investment or expansion of liquor licenses non-compete reform so that talent can move freely between jobs without being litigated by their former employer.
00:10:14
Speaker
So that's public policy and there's lots of different branches there. The other two, little bit more amorphous, regional brand. You know, what can we do to elevate New England's reputation as a destination for LP capital, for founders, for talent, and then workforce development?
00:10:35
Speaker
is how can we play a part in helping New England maximize its greatest resource? We train and educate the best and brightest in the world disproportionately on a per capita basis, but we don't do quite as good a job retaining that talent.
00:10:53
Speaker
the And so over my 10 years here, we've built a number of different programs that have tried to tackle different elements of that equation, whether it's undergraduate internships with startup companies to try and siphon them away from consulting and banking and get them hooked into our local startups.
00:11:15
Speaker
or gender diversity in the bench sciences or community college to software engineering pipelines to try and help open up a new layers of the data.
00:11:28
Speaker
what is it What's a normal month like for you? How are you figuring out what to prioritize, what to work on, where you guys should be spending time, resource? What's it like? I'd say there's no good answer. a normal month is is highly abnormal.
00:11:44
Speaker
I would hope that we set our strategy in such a way that we know generally where our attention should be focused in terms of larger projects a year or so in advance.
00:11:56
Speaker
Policy doesn't generally behave that way and it doesn't cooperate. So there's definitely ah portion of any given month that is reserved for paying attention to the fire drill of the moment.
00:12:11
Speaker
A lot of what we do is talking. We talk to our members, the venture capital firms, the accelerators. We talk to the academic institutions, make sure that we're staying apprised of what they're interested in and helping figure out where connections can be made and people can be put together to drive whatever it is they're doing forward.
00:12:32
Speaker
We spend a fair amount of time planning and executing engaging events. Although i happily, for everyone's sake, spend less time doing that these days because we have some great people on the team who were excellent at that.
00:12:47
Speaker
Can you talk about the Nevis? And from a personal perspective, when you first started dating my friend Brianna, the first thing she told me about was like a Star Wars themed Nevi event. I think you planned or something to that effect.
00:13:01
Speaker
Yeah, actually, believe it or not, I was just cleaning out an old desk and Right over there on the other side of the room is a bag that has three Star Wars figurines in it from the very Nevis, as well as the posters that line the staircase. This year is their 13th year and they're comprehensive awards show celebrating the big wins in the venture and entrepreneurial ecosystem in New England.
00:13:29
Speaker
So we give out nominations and awards for... Seed stage companies, hottest scale ups, public exits, rising star entrepreneurs, rising star venture capitalists.
00:13:41
Speaker
But I think the most notable aspect of it is what you alluded to, the anti-awards show from an on-site experience. So we do a theme every year. Last year it was Survivor.
00:13:53
Speaker
the year before that it was Peace Love. and So we're dressing up. I used to say it's the the only place where you can see The GPs at Boston's largest venture funds dressed up like a comic book character or a cowboy.
00:14:08
Speaker
It's an environment where people let down some of the pomp and circumstance and lean into their kind of more silly and creative side. But all at the same time, we're highlighting incredible companies and we're really trying our best to drive national media exposure for these amazing entrepreneurs that are building here locally.
00:14:30
Speaker
think it's like such a cool and clever way to do that. The themes are always interesting. i feel like you guys have done such a good job of distinguishing it as a more like fun and human style event than what I think of a lot of bc award things. You're coming this year, right?
00:14:47
Speaker
Yes. but okay we're What happened? I was supposed to go last year. I'm definitely coming. Do you have a theme yet? Yeah, check bagtothenevvies.com in a couple of weeks and the theme will be ah out there and tickets will probably be on sale.
00:15:01
Speaker
More importantly, nominations will be open for all the startups that any of your listeners may be aware of or working on. ah Let us know. We want to highlight the best ones.
00:15:12
Speaker
right. I want to talk a little bit now over you've been Nevca for a really long time. Like, smart is it 10 years exactly?
Economic Challenges in VC Industry
00:15:20
Speaker
10 plus. 10 plus years.
00:15:22
Speaker
So you have seen a lot of economic cycles and or just VC and investing cycles. Where do you think we are right now? And what do you think LPs or GPs are most nervous about?
00:15:39
Speaker
Great complex ah question with, I think many answers. So I think one of the things that I like to make clear at the beginning of an answer to a question like that is that New England has a very unique venture ecosystem.
00:16:00
Speaker
And so far as we're highly diversified in terms of the types of funds and PCs that are at work here. You go to other ecosystems, they're more disproportionately weighted toward a single industry and have lower representation in others.
00:16:16
Speaker
Here, we're lucky that we have really vibrant ecosystem and in life science and biotech, traditional tech, B2B SaaS, healthcare IT, and a growing movement in tough tech and frontier technology, climate, materials, et cetera.
00:16:34
Speaker
And so... Grain of salt, some of these answers where, you know, where one of those industries are cycle wise might be a little bit different than one of the others. But overall, would say venture as an industry right now is in a point, a period of recalibration.
00:16:54
Speaker
When I started 10 years ago, it was probably the earlier days, not the beginning, but the earlier days of the post-financial collapse boom time. So you had a period of suppressed interest rates, which means kind of capital flowing and growth, both on the new fund creation side, as well as the company creation side. And that was the era 2013, 14, 15, 16 apps and the mobile ship to mobile was in full swing. yeah had Snapchat, you had Facebook going mobile, Instagram, et cetera.
00:17:33
Speaker
But cycle wise, it was the beginning of a fairly unprecedented climb upward. That climb culminated forre both tech and life sciences with COVID.
00:17:47
Speaker
And I say with COVID, not before COVID because COVID didn't end it. COVID really threw fuel on the fire for venture capital and the industry at large. Maybe a little counterintuitive, but...
00:17:59
Speaker
From a company development, technology development, and capital availability standpoint, interest rates went to zero and there was a massive need for work from home, mobile adoption. Internet companies really benefited from that environment.
00:18:16
Speaker
Tons of new venture funds were able to raise new funds. And so there was a massive year over year, fundraising records were broken. 2020, 2021, 2022 when the music started to stop.
00:18:31
Speaker
And then that zero interest rate environment created a inflationary environment. And we've been dealing with the downside of that cycle for now the past really three years.
00:18:45
Speaker
And from broad strokes, mechanics lesson on that, venture capital funds raise money, the GPs raise money from LPs, limited partners. Those limited partners are typically large endowments and super high net worth individuals who have a lot of capital that they need to put to work.
00:19:06
Speaker
Venture high risk, high reward. And so you gamble. When you put your money venture, you know that you might lose it, but you might get a really outsized return.
00:19:19
Speaker
When your regular bank account or a CD is not returning a ton of interest, and there's more reason to go look for venture because you're not getting returns elsewhere.
00:19:32
Speaker
But when the interest rates rise and you can put money in a bank and get... you know, four, five, six, 7% return sometimes, the risk reward profile of putting that capital into venture funds flips.
00:19:48
Speaker
So it becomes a lot harder to raise money if you're a venture capitalist. And you layer on top of that, the stock market being less friendly to IPOs, the regulatory environment at a federal level being less conducive for mergers and acquisitions.
00:20:07
Speaker
All of a sudden, the pathways for exit, which is the mechanism by which venture capital funds return money to their investors, that starts to close down, which just creates a much less advantageous environment, both to raise money as a venture capitalist and to raise money as a founder or entrepreneur from venture capitalists.
00:20:31
Speaker
And so where we are right now is We're seeing where the chips fall, but the spike in activity that followed COVID has completely gone the other direction.
00:20:45
Speaker
But if you look back seven years instead of three years, we're not too far off the trajectory of where things were. So it's easy to...
00:20:58
Speaker
get blue. If you look back only a couple of years and say, oh, two three years ago, there were hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars raised and anyone who wanted to get funding could.
00:21:09
Speaker
But that's not really how things should be. Things should be moving a little bit more incrementally. So do you feel like
00:21:21
Speaker
Among the the folks that you're encountering, do you feel like there's a basic calmness around that? Like they're like, yep, we've been in this before. We understand what happened, how we got here, the type of things that get us out of it.
00:21:36
Speaker
Or do you feel like there's a, don't know, like a freak out? It's interesting. I think the human nature and the behavioral economics side of this come into play because if you asked anybody paying attention, if you ask them to give 50,000 foot view on cycles, it would probably give you the more calm, rational answer akin to what I gave you ah about Zeb and Flow and venture often looks like a sawtooth. There's a hockey stick curve up and then
00:22:10
Speaker
ah A precipitous fall and then a slower accelerating ramp up and then precipitous fall. However, that's at a macro level. On a micro level, every individual, whether a founder or an investor,
00:22:25
Speaker
They're all now operating in a more heightened, more urgent environment personally, because those macro trends, but while easy to say that they'll equalize and even out over time, the mechanism by which they even out has costs for individuals within the system.
00:22:43
Speaker
totally like when you're talking about it i'm thinking too about like the the trickle down effects like we have a bunch of clients who are in the sass space and certainly like you can sense when they're freaking out a little bit they're not getting the funding they thought they were gonna get or even just ah the industry they target laid off 25 of its folks so there are fewer users using the product And then we also have some like agency owners that we work with. And a lot of them work with the SaaS space too. yeah Everybody. And then everyone's like, freaks the fuck out. And it's it is hard. I hear you because it's we can understand, we can zoom out and understand the ebbs and flows. But when people are like, shit, am I going to lose my job?
00:23:27
Speaker
It's more stressful. Do you think that the industry tends to overcorrect in any areas or overestimate or underestimate risk?
00:23:39
Speaker
and Those are two different. Sorry to ground that. Yes, ah do you think when we're in a moment like this, does the industry overcorrect in either direction in your opinion? I think that the issue is, what's the right way to?
00:23:51
Speaker
You took a moment to gather your words a minute ago, so I'm going do the same. Yeah. I think that the industry... yeah We talk about FOMO in venture a lot, and there are certainly trends that develop simply because of the downside of game theory of somebody's going to do it.
00:24:11
Speaker
I got to do it first. yeah We saw that, for example, with SVB and the collapse of SVB, which was the biggest venture bank on the planet served 70 something percent of the venture community.
00:24:24
Speaker
Everybody loved that bank. Everybody knew that there were some risky things going on, but everybody knew that if nobody did anything, their money would be fine.
00:24:37
Speaker
But then they also knew that if somebody did something, then their money wouldn't be fine. So they had to do it first. And then you had a bank run. And then all of a sudden overnight, SBB collapses when the fundamentals underneath the hood didn't say that the bank was going to become insolvent.
00:24:57
Speaker
needed some changes sure but so i think that's the kind of thing that certainly happens and can happen when it comes in venture when it comes to technological trends we joked a few years ago in the era before ah before the large language model ah gen ai movement that's characterized the last two years four years ago used to joke that everybody was putting with AI at the end of their pitch deck, because ah couple of great companies had done that.
00:25:29
Speaker
And it seemed like the thing you needed to do. And now we've come onto the other side of the spectrum where You don't put AI in your pitch deck because if you're not using AI, what are you doing?
00:25:40
Speaker
Just assume now. What are folks nervous about? Where do we overcorrect? like Is there like a particular narrative right now that you just feel like with all the VC folks that you talk to that they're like,
00:25:55
Speaker
this is what we expect. This is what we're doing. No, I think that's the, certainly that's a place where the Massachusetts, New England ecosystems, diversity of thesis he comes into play.
00:26:07
Speaker
Nobody is doing the same thing from my perspective. So yeah, i would say no to that one. I want to talk about some of the maxims of DC when I think of it.
00:26:20
Speaker
Things like founder market fit. Is there one particular belief or phrase that kind of drives you crazy because you're like, everyone says this is a stupid buzzword and it doesn't materialize into anything.
00:26:33
Speaker
I grizzle it at founder first or founder friendly you as a branding note for venture capitalists because the phrase or maxim that people don't ah understand it enough is fiduciary responsibility.
00:26:50
Speaker
And in and my experience, the general public doesn't understand the extent to which VCs are asset managers and asset allocators of someone else's asset.
VC Industry Misconceptions and Advice to Founders
00:27:07
Speaker
And so they are not just, think the common image is that VCs are just rich people who are anointing the next millionaires because they like them or they think that they deserve it.
00:27:23
Speaker
When really VCs are managing money that is gonna fund the pensions of and firefighters and teachers and cab drivers, bus drivers.
00:27:35
Speaker
Right. And so there is a ton of pressure on these firms to make the right decision. And so to bring it back to the maximum of the buzzword,
00:27:50
Speaker
that I bristle at founder friendly founder first. Like at the end of the day, everybody is LP first and everyone should understand that.
00:28:02
Speaker
And so i think yeah as individuals, any investor can carry themselves with transparency and honesty and humility about how and what decisions are going to be made and how they're going to be made.
00:28:13
Speaker
But at the end of the day, no one on on the asset management side is going to make a decision that goes against the best interest of their LPs.
00:28:28
Speaker
And when you do like for folks who don't know, like founder friendly or founder first, can you just explain that a little bit? Because I have to say, i feel like I should have known that a long time ago, but it wasn't until two years ago when we got our first VC client that I really started to understand the space a little bit better.
00:28:44
Speaker
Yeah, VCs get, I think, bad rap sometimes for being misaligned with founders. And I think that The fiduciary responsibility of venture capitalist should be completely transparent and understood by anyone who takes venture capital money.
00:29:02
Speaker
Venture capital is gasoline, and it's only appropriate if you want to start a really huge buyer and are okay with maybe that fire out rather spectacularly.
00:29:17
Speaker
And so it's not the type of capital you take if you want to build a nice little business that makes a good profit and leads to a comfortable lifestyle. There are certainly ways of managing capital and controlling capital intake and being capital efficient that results in ah better outcome for founders.
00:29:41
Speaker
But the difference between a founder-friendly VC and a not founder-friendly VC, in my experience, is it's not all that much. It's really more a question of and are you dealing with an asshole or are you dealing with a good upstanding person?
00:29:57
Speaker
and how they carry themselves versus the decision that they're necessarily going to make. Interesting. That makes lot of sense to me. when e To go back to founders, like when they're trying to find the right investor, from all that you've seen over the years, do you have any like potentially unexpected advice or moments where you've been like, ah, there's something funny that tends to happen here?
00:30:20
Speaker
where I would say it's about doing a lot more research than maybe you think is necessary, especially, we want to talk about trends a little bit. I would say there's definitely a trend toward firm specialization.
00:30:35
Speaker
So in the earlier days of venture capital, far before my time in this space, you had generalist firms that would invest in great ideas of many different persuasions.
00:30:50
Speaker
And then you gradually saw a shift toward firms hiring subject matter experts to lead individual practices within a firm focused on particular industries.
00:31:04
Speaker
And I'd say more recently, We've seen the next iteration of that, which is those subject matter experts spinning out and creating their own firms. The entire firm thesis is focused around much more niche elements of any particular industry, and especially because a lot of entrepreneurs come from within a specific technological background, or they have a specific idea and they don't come from a place of broad understanding about venture capital.
00:31:36
Speaker
ah given VC may think you have a great idea. and may think you're an incredible entrepreneur, but if the company you're building and the way that you're building it doesn't mesh with the specific thesis that fund has been built on, they're not going to invest in you because they have pitched their limited partners on, hey, give us your endowment money because we're experts in this particular field and we believe that
00:32:07
Speaker
a portfolio constructed around this type of industry is our kind of cutting edge dominant advantage. And so they can actually go off script, even if they think you're a wonderful entrepreneur with a great idea.
00:32:23
Speaker
And so learning about the investor and the firm that you're pitching is probably the most important place to start. Do you feel like the hyper focus on particular industries and areas is a good one? If you were advising a founder who's looking for VC funding, would you be like, go as niche as you possibly can because they're going to have the info guidance and support system you need?
00:32:49
Speaker
Or do you feel like it's not always perfect because they're really going to force you into their particular thesis? I would say probably the former. I think generally The more shared knowledge and understanding and alignment you have around the table, the better the outcome will be.
00:33:10
Speaker
I think the type of situation where you can get into a decidedly non-founder friendly type of engagement. is when you have a mismatch between the firm expertise and the founder focus.
00:33:29
Speaker
And so if you don't have a lot of shared understanding, then you might find yourself confused or disappointed when the chips fall. Yeah. All right. I know I appreciate you answering all these questions and I feel like maybe I skewed slightly negative just because I'm curious about. as we wrap up, is there anything that you're like excited about or energized by in the VC ecosystem
Future of VC and Tough Tech
00:33:52
Speaker
right now? You don't think people are like talking about it enough or celebrating?
00:33:56
Speaker
I think tough tech in general is probably where I find myself most energized and most excited. And we at the NAVCA, we define tough tech as hard, academically driven science that requires a lot of infrastructure.
00:34:14
Speaker
and expertise that is not biotech and life science focused. So Tuftech can capture anything from fusion energy to quantum computing, semiconductors and chip cooling technology, synthetic materials and robotic arms that operate autonomously.
00:34:37
Speaker
And I think Massachusetts in general is disproportionately well positioned to continue building a huge, meaningful ecosystem in that space.
00:34:48
Speaker
That's super interesting. I feel like I want to talk to you more about that at some point. That's really cool. And honestly, I'm glad you said that because I was going to make a note when you mentioned the different industries earlier, I was like, I don't know if I know what tough tech is. it is Am I just missing that or is that like a newer emerging term?
00:35:05
Speaker
It's definitely a newer emerging term. Tough tech underneath tough tech are many different disparate industries and focus. But if you drill down and segment everything these days, you'll just get a million different terms that each apply to one or two companies.
00:35:23
Speaker
So you got a bucket in some ways. All right. Thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate it so much. For folks who are interested, we'll make sure they can click in to see what the Nevis theme is in the show notes. they I'll throw your LinkedIn in there so folks could follow you if they'd like anywhere else that you'd want me to direct them.
00:35:39
Speaker
Newenglandvc.org is the homepage for us. And yeah, I think our LinkedIn is where we think about what we're doing the most.
00:35:52
Speaker
And that's where you can learn more about what we're doing. All right, we'll send them over there. Ari, thank you so much. Thank you, Mayor.