00:09:53 · Brian Neider, CJ Gustafson
[00:09:53] S0: Something along those lines. And, you know, it's like, well, okay, over what time period is this gonna happen? And why did he not denote that this was kind of like the future state? Why is this showing as 2026 revenues? [00:10:04] S1: Well, I think it begs the question, is is there a difference between selling your company well and being intellectually dishonest? Where where exactly is the line there?
00:10:13 · Brian Neider
[00:10:13] S0: It's a hard one. I mean, you wanna sell your vision. You wanna be bullish, but holding back material data is something that we... Like, for us, we we have a hard time about. It's a lot in kind of how the market is receiving you. So if there's investors that are super bullish in your space and you could get deals closed, like, without sharing too much data, that's just the market speaking, and don't hate the player, hate the game. There's a lot of situations where companies might say, look. Like, this is the data pack that we're sharing. There's a tremendous amount of demand for what we're doing, and you could take it or leave it. That's a a difficult game to play, but a lot of investment firms are willing to play it. And that's one aspect. I don't look at that as being intellectually dishonest. I just sort of look at that as the companies are sharing what is necessary to actually get the deal done, and there's actually just so much demand that they don't need to be doing anything other than what they're doing. There's other situations that I think are a little bit more acute where maybe there's not that demand for the company. Maybe it's not one of these situations where, you know, a company says, okay, we're raising and they give a small data pack to 10 different investors and have a billion dollars of demand by the weekend. Maybe it's like more of an ordinary course type situation where companies willing to share data, investment firm gives them a diligence request list, says, hey. Look. These are the 10 things that we need or 20 things that we need. Could you share? A lot of times what we see is that there's management teams that are consciously not sharing certain aspects of that data. So they'll say, look, we gave... You asked for 10 things, we gave you eight of them. None of them were the single most important thing. And usually the one or two things that they didn't give you oftentimes can be the single most important thing. And there's usually something hiding behind that. And when that happens, you start... You know, you need to question it. And I look at that more as oftentimes more dishonesty rather than, you know, the market's super hot and we're just gonna be getting something done. We only need to share what we're we're gonna share.
00:12:13 · Brian Neider
Sort of like selectively sharing in a situation where there should be a little bit more trust, and that's where we have a difficult time.
00:12:20 · CJ Gustafson
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00:14:28 · CJ Gustafson, Brian Neider
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00:15:50 · Brian Neider
[00:15:50] S0: I think that you're right insofar as that there are ways in which to ask questions that are more acute or more specific so that you get to the answer that you're looking for. But I think that it's more of a philosophical approach that's not necessarily as much about asking a specific question or not. It's just really having the confidence to say, I don't understand, and then have somebody go back to the beginning or continually kind of asking the question why over and over again until you get to the core. Oftentimes, people don't actually have the building blocks that they need to understand things. And I've been on boards with people who are far more successful than than me, who have had illustrious careers, and they sort of assume that they're supposed to know everything. And so a CEO is rattling off metrics about their business, and they're nodding their head. And I know that if I ask that person, hey, you know, x amount of bookings or y gross retention or whatever it might be, can you explain it to me? That that person wouldn't exactly be able to explain it. And a lot of that is because when they first started learning about those metrics or contextualizing them, they didn't really ask why, how does this work, what is this, explain it to me like I'm a grade schooler, and get the basics down. And then all of a sudden, it's like you're so far past when you're supposed to know the basics that it's almost impossible to get back to the, you know, one zero one level class. You're already at the eight zero one level class, and you've got a problem. So I actually think in many ways, the LLMs, ChatGPT or Claude or any of these things are helpful to people like that because they really wanna learn. They actually have sort of a place to ask the right questions and not be embarrassed. Now as it relates to dealing with diligence and asking questions to management teams, a lot of that really just has to do with, let's go back to the beginning, explain it to me again, having that confidence, almost restating it to them. So oftentimes what I'll do is I'll ask the questions, and then as we're going along, each step of the way, I'm gonna recite back to the entrepreneur or to the management team, okay. Here's what I'm hearing. Do I understand this correct? Great. Let's move on.