The Hot Mic: Should You Start a Venture Fund?

Hey, friends. I hope you're enjoying season fourteen as much as Lisa and I have enjoyed making it. We'll be back with the season fourteen finale next week. But today, I've got something different for you. We're hosting our first listener q and a, where listeners get to ask questions of the VCs on the show. Not just submit questions, they actually got to sit in the chair and ask five VCs their burning question. I'm so excited about this because if you all enjoy this episode and find it valuable, I'd love to host another listener q and a at our next event. So enjoy the conversation that follows, where three listeners get their questions answered by the VCs. Should I start a venture fund? What do you look for in a pitch? And what is the one company you regret passing on the most? Then at the end of the episode, you'll get a chance to submit your question for the next edition of the Hot Mic. The first question is coming up after this. Support for this season of the pitch comes from Adobe, the PDF. It used to be a necessary evil, better than a fax, but not that much better. That changes today. The all new Adobe Acrobat Studio reimagines how you work with PDFs. With AI powered PDF spaces, you can collect files, synthesize what matters, and even chat with an AI assistant to pull out fast insights. It's time to do more with PDFs than you ever thought possible, and you can do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com/dothatwithacrobat. That's adobe.com/dothatwithacrobat. Hot Mikes. Mike is a hot. I always get scared of hot Mikes. Hot. Do you have any hot takes? Do you have any hot takes of hot mics? Takes. I I don't know if they're appropriate for the pitch. Hot takes. Let me bring in the first Oh my. Alright. You are rightfully afraid of the hot mic. Well, most of my stories are just stories about companies doing stupid stuff. Alright. Why don't you introduce yourself real quick and then, ask your question? Alright. My name is Jared Johnson. Basically, if there was one thing that you could kinda hone in on on a pitch that kinda clicks with you and makes you want to invest in them, is there something that you could share that would do that? For me, it's whether they know something that nobody else seems to know. Like, do they have a insight or a moat or some sort of intelligence that they're onto something? For me, you know, I think very heavily about customer acquisition. But if I think about, like, what's the thing that makes me wanna invest, it's usually these moments with the founder. Right? Where it's like, oh, you're 19, but you're the smartest person I've ever heard talk to me about crypto in a very different way. That's unique. Or, oh, you have a growing business that's killing it, …