Ali Partovi - Startup Investor School Day 3

Ali is the founder and CEO of neo, which he can explain what that is. It's a very cool new organization, but he's also an entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur whom I admire a ton for the things he's done. We met, like I said, too many years ago when he and his brother founded Link Exchange. He's also the founder of I Like and, again with his brother, co.org. In fact, the quote I'd like to pass on from Ali is that both of us are engineers and coders. I really resonate with this idea that coding is a privilege, but that privilege is not available to most Americans. He and his brother are doing more than any other people in the country to bring that privilege to as many people as possible. I'm extremely grateful for you guys for doing that, and I think it's going to make a big difference in our country in the future.

Ali's done a ton of angel investing, and the reason I really asked him to come up here is because he's extraordinarily good at it. He has made as many great bets as anyone, and what we should try to tease out here for me is how the hell he does that. But I'd like to start off maybe talking a little bit about his experience as an entrepreneur. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that start in the beginning, I guess with Link Exchange. How old were you, and what was on your mind there?

"Well, hi everybody. I'm really very happy to be here. So, yeah, my career started. I had studied computer science in college, and I was working in a software company here, but I really knew I wanted to start my own company. I had been evaluating different business ideas every week, exchanging emails with friends, considering what I was going to start. Then I heard that a couple of my friends from college had already started this company and were looking for someone to join them. Essentially, I think what was really the key to my success in terms of that company was that I was so ready to do it. I learned about it on Sunday; I met them at 10:00 p.m., and I had basically agreed to join them by 2:00 a.m. that night. At 8:00 a.m., the next morning, I told the other company that I was no longer working there, and I immediately began working on Link Exchange with Tony and Sanjay.

Link Exchange—this was back in August 1996—was the first advertising network on the Internet. A lot of things that maybe I’m not the most proud of saying: I helped write the first ad server on the Internet, so banner ads, a lot of those early concepts in Internet advertising were invented by that team. Thank you so much!

But really, I'd say the most important thing I learned from being in a startup was the importance of people. In fact, after we sold the company, I was 26 years old when we sold the company to Microsoft, and I went from being financially insecure to suddenly being financially independent. My twin brother Hadi at that point was preparing to start his own startup, and he emailed me and said, 'Hey, listen, I'm collecting advice from different people. Could you tell me what are the three most important things, three most important pieces of advice, that you would give me as a new founder?' I said, 'That's easy. Number one: hire great people. Number two: hire great people. Number three: hire great people.'

You know, this had been something I feel very lucky to have learned when I was in my early 20s, and then through a series of, I would say, humbling mistakes, I started also learning that it applies to investing as well, and that was kind of a little bit further down the line.

So when you started investing, you didn't necessarily apply that same advice you would give him, did you? We talked about one of the great characteristics of a great founder being that they are a talent magnet, but that didn't sort of connect right away?

"Yeah, so I should start by saying I didn't think of it as 'Oh, my new occupation shall be angel investing.' It was more like I had just come into wealth. I'd never experienced having more than a small amount of savings before in my life, and I was a little kind of scared of what to do with it. What if I mess it up? I suddenly had to learn what one does with wealth. While normal people might just put it in, I don't know, funds or hire investment helpers, an obvious thing for me to do was that some of the smart people in my own network were starting companies. It seemed like it made sense for me to support some of them.

But I would say I had a lot of hubris in that I was 26; I was clearly the best because I had just sold my company, and so I thought that I had this great business judgment. When some of the smartest people I knew were starting companies, I was applying my enormous business judgment to decide whether it was a good idea or not, and in hindsight, I might have done better to just focus on the fact that somebody brilliant that I know is starting a company, and I should just invest based on the person rather than the idea.

To put it in context, there was this amazing software engineer who worked for us at Link Exchange. He was actually a contractor; he had his own contract programming company of one person, or he had one employee. But this guy was legendary. He was 22 years old; his name was Max Lefton. When he started PayPal, the original idea was crap. It was an app for your Palm Pilot device to send money to someone else's Palm Pilot device. No one even knew what a Palm Pilot device was at the time; needless to say, PayPal was an excellent investment opportunity even if that original idea didn't make sense. It's largely because Max is so smart.

And around the same time, one of my smartest friends from college, a guy named Craig Silverstein, basically, Craig, my brother Hadi, and I were always competing for who was the best computer programmer, and he was an amazingly smart guy. After graduation, he had gone on to do academia, pursue graduate school. I clearly had become the best because I was running my own company and sold it successfully.

So when Craig emailed us saying, 'Hey, everybody. I'm finally doing the Silicon Valley thing, joining up with my PhD friends Larry and Sergey, and I'm going to start a new search engine, and I'm going to be the CTO and first employee of Google,' I remember thinking, 'Poor Craig! Did no one tell these guys that there are already ten other search engines?' I kind of deleted it; I don't remember if I responded or not—a terrible mistake obviously. But again, the same thing applies where it wasn't a great idea. If I told you today that I was starting a new search engine, you probably would not think it's a good idea either.

It wasn't very different; Yahoo dominated search queries, and there were several other companies. The point is that when a genius starts a company, it's probably a good idea to invest in it even if you don't necessarily believe in the idea. We've heard a lot about that over the last three days. You'll see a lot about this in your careers as investors: that the right ideas to invest in are the bad ones that are really good. Sometimes brilliant people have lousy ideas. Drew Houston's first idea was test prep; it was a lousy idea. We didn't get into Y Combinator with that idea.

How do you know when it's truly a bad idea that's going to crash and burn no matter how brilliant they are, and when it's just you sort of, you know, hold tight, write the check, and go with the brilliance of the founder?

"Well, you know, I think each person has different things that they're comfortable evaluating or investing in. But for me, I probably don't think of it as a bad idea or a good idea; I think of it more in terms of a big idea or a small idea. If someone is pursuing something that could be enormously huge but has an extremely small chance of success, many people would say that's a bad idea. It'll never make it because 99% chance it'll fail. That might still be a good investment, not because it's necessarily a good idea but because it's a big idea.

Whereas if something seems like, 'Oh yeah, this is a sure thing,' but it's a very small potential space, like an incremental improvement for a specific field that only a small number of people are in the market for, I wouldn't say it's a bad idea, but that's not going to generate enormous returns. Therefore, it might be a great investment for some people; I just—it's not a great investment for me, and it generally doesn't fit the model for VC investing.

So I guess I would say for me, at least, I care more about whether something feels like a really big idea. To put it in context, Airbnb—most people when they first heard about it, myself included, thought this will never make it. I mean, it was just—it was crazy that ordinary people would open their homes and let some random person show up. Never! It'll never work. But on the off chance that it would make it, it was an enormous concept. It's better to bet on extremely audacious, enormous concepts rather than something that seems like a higher chance of success but that would be small.

So I'll coin something here: look for the three B's. When you're investing, you want a brilliant founder with a big idea that seems bad, and you'll be all set. Did you have any angel investors in Link Exchange?

"Uh, it's so long ago—this was more than 20 years ago, but we weren't counting. Yeah, I would say we were truly friends and families. You know, like there were distant members of my family and my co-founder Tony Hsieh, who’s now at Zappos, had one or two family members who invested, but I wouldn’t have called them angel investors because they weren't people from—they were the original angels; they were friends. This didn't exist. Banks did not exist barely. So, Y Combinator obviously didn’t exist. We got Ariel Poehler as a board member, and I think he put in a little bit of cash as well, so I guess he was an angel investor. But really, our first real money was Draper Richards, which was a VC run by—not by Tim Draper, but by the sort of granddaddy of venture capital. They put in a small bridge round towards our Series A; I think they put in 300 grand, and our Series A was three million dollars, and that was the only money we ever raised.

I know it's a long time ago, but were there any lessons you learned from those early investors in Link Exchange, either immediately or that later looking back helped you as you entered your investing life?

"Yeah, I think I would say I learned a lot from Mike Moritz. Mike Moritz led the Series A investment in us, and he actually loved our company so much that he would come by the office multiple times a week, which was insane. You know, no VC does that anymore these days. But we were—in terms of the investment side, I was impressed by the speed and decisiveness of the investment decision. Granted, he had a little bit of extra information because he knew that Yahoo had just tried to acquire us, and he was on the board of Yahoo, right?

He had visited us to evaluate us on behalf of Yahoo. I think the things he was most impressed by were subtle clues, not the actual business. So for example, he arrived to meet with us at, I think, 8 a.m., and myself and one of the other co-founders were sleeping under our desks when he arrived. I remember someone shaking me and me opening my eyes, and they were like, 'Someone's here to see you.' It was Mike Moritz. I think that was probably the single most important factor in the whole thing. He was like, 'Okay, these guys are legit.’

But then after we declined the Yahoo acquisition, we got a one-liner email from Mike Moritz because you met him—we got a one-liner email from Mike Moritz saying, 'Let’s talk.' I mean, it was two words. So we went and visited him at Sequoia, and it was a very short meeting, and he just said, 'We are going to invest in you.' It was something very confident: 'We've decided we’re going to invest in you. What we value more than anything is speed. Every minute, every hour, every day that you put distance between you and your competition counts, and so we’re going to evaluate you by how quickly you’re going to be able to accept our investment.’

This, by the way, is what Y Combinator—we call a ninja technique. There are ninja founders who can do this to investors, and there are ninja investors who can do this to founders. Not necessarily recommended unless you’re very sure you’re a ninja. If you have questions about whether you’re a ninja, you’re not; it’s probably fair. So at the time, we had met with five or six other VCs. I think we actually had an offer from another VC that was not one that we were planning on taking, but we left the conference—or yeah, we left the meeting room, we walked down the stairs, we huddled outside the office, and then went right back up and said, 'Okay, we're doing it. Yes, please, Mr. Moritz, may we take your money?'

You’ve heard that you are starting to hear themes here. There’s a fair amount of repetition, and I consider this to be a very positive thing because these are things to pay attention to in speed, right? How quickly do things happen? How quickly do they learn? How quickly do founders absorb? How quickly do they take action? How quickly do they build things? Hiring the right people, those are sorts of things to pay attention to. Some of them are subtle; do they sleep under their desks? Some of them aren’t—investing hard, right? It’s not for the indecisive.

You know, I’d say the common thread between several of these different little anecdotes is occurring to me is my decision to join Link Exchange was within hours. I changed my career to join the startup. It wasn’t because I'm an impulsive person; it was because I had spent a year of preparation evaluating business ideas. When I saw this one, I knew it was it. It wasn’t the first time I had thought about starting a startup or joining a startup.

Presumably, the same thing for Moritz—you know, he didn’t need to spend a lot of time evaluating us. He, on a very intuitive level, thought, 'These are the right people to back.' And likewise for us, by the time we met him, we had had maybe three or four other VC meetings. When you have a strong intuitive feeling, you should basically go with it. This industry is not very sympathetic to people who hem and haw and take a long time to make decisions.

So you will find, and you’ve heard this—there's a nugget of incredibly important truths in this conversation we just had, and it’s tied to what other people have said. When you begin angel investing, I know many of you have already done angel investments; everything will seem good, and it will be really hard to make your decisions. But if you can’t make decisions quickly, your chance of being a very successful angel investor is pretty small. So you need to do enough of it so that you start to be able to—you heard Paul say it: do or do not.

Oddly, so this is the task in front of you: is to get to the point where you can be comfortable like you're playing poker with shoving all in when you know there’s a pretty good chance that they’re holding the nuts, or in this case, they’re holding nothing at all. And when you shove all in, it goes away. But you have to create the ability to be decisive.

You invest a lot with your brother. How does that work? You know, most angels end up being on their own; sometimes people team up. Andrea has teamed up with Pietro. How does it work with Hadi? How do you guys make your decisions?

"Well, yeah, so I have a twin brother, Hadi, and we have very similar backgrounds. So besides being genetically identical, we both studied computer science; we both went to the same university. After college, he joined Microsoft; I joined Oracle. I had my own startup, and I sold it to Microsoft. He then had his own startup; he sold his startup also to Microsoft. So our careers are intertwined.

When it started coming to angel investing, I think we have some minute differences. I would probably say I'm a little bit more risk-taking, and he’s a little bit more guarded and thoughtful. But I would generally say what's applicable to everyone is that angel investing is better when you have someone else to essentially double-check you or to keep you honest because I'd say it's a lot like falling in love. When you fall in love with a person, you see only their positive traits.

Your brain, I think, is literally designed to ignore negatives about something that you've fallen in love with. Sometimes if you have a friend who's in love with the wrong person, you have to like tell them there's real problems with this person that you can't see, but trust me, I see them.

I think that also applies when investing in a company: that if you fall in love with a company, you sometimes are unable to see obvious negative signals. And if the second person, who is not in love, sees them and you trust them as a, you know, as an equal and as an advisor, then you're more likely to make smart decisions.

Does it slow you guys down where you have to check each other instead of being able to say, 'I’m in,' or can you do both independently?

"Sometimes there's been occasions where I’ve committed on behalf of both of us without even asking him, but those are rare. Even those are ones where I mean usually they have to do with a person that we had already agreed that we would give a blank check to. So there are entrepreneurs in the past where we've literally said anything that this person starts, we would back. If the person says, "I'm starting something and I'll take a meeting," I say, 'Okay, we're in,' without having to call Hadi.

But I would say that's, you know, that's not the situation I was just describing. I think in general it is good to decide quickly, but I think having to do that basic checking with your partner is not—that's not a big enough slowdown as long as the discussion can be fast.

So you don't usually have to decide on the spot, and we shouldn’t—it shouldn’t be interpreted that we're making that claim. You need to be decisive, and you need to decide with alacrity. That will often mean, you know, within days. But weeks is too long; weeks means you're going to miss out on the deal.

So what I interpret this as—and Ali can correct me if I’ve got it wrong—is they talk that night, have to meet with a company, and decide the next day—not 'Well, let's sit on it for a little while and see how it percolates,' because that's not right. I mean, the thing I'd say is if you're taking weeks to decide, that basically means you've said no but in a kind of douchey way where you haven't told them no, and all you're doing is hurting your reputation because you'll get a reputation for someone who kind of, instead of rejecting people, just kind of ghosted them.

So you know, I think you should do diligence. It's just a question of if you see something you're excited about, get on top of it quickly. You know, the type of things—when I say the word diligence, it usually means reference checks on the people because I’m personally fiercely intensely focused on the caliber of people.

So I'll email Hadi—not that night, usually like that hour—and say, 'Hey, I just saw this company; I’m really excited about it. Blah, blah, blah, here are the reasons I’m excited to hear the things about the people; here are the negatives.' Sometimes he'll say, 'This is terrible,' and, you know, you might essentially kill the interest. But sometimes he'll say, 'Yeah, it is great. Who do we know who can do a reference check?'

I know somebody from this place that would know this person. Reference checks are usually more effective if they're done sort of stealthily, meaning find someone you know who knows them. The reference checks that somebody provides are obviously going to be positive; no one, you know, they’re going to be their friends or they’re their best relationships. They’re not going to give you any real signal, but finding someone who was a previous manager, that's a—I’d say that's the sort of worthwhile time to spend before making a decision.

Great! So I want to give the people who've managed to hang out in our great lateness here the chance to ask some questions and if we have some from online, but before then, I have a combined question. You’ve made a whole bunch of incredible investments in incredible companies, and I'd like that maybe you can sort of give a little color on that and especially tie that to your new venture with neo, because I think you're thinking about—Neil is almost a result of the process of figuring out how you made all these great investments. That's the way I interpreted it, anyway. So maybe you can just speak briefly to those two things.

"Sure. Yeah, I’d say the hallmark or the sort of common theme in my investing together with my brother has been a strong connection with young engineers; you know, as young as university and a very strong focus on evaluating engineers. Most people don't realize that the most successful companies in America were all founded by computer scientists. Not just the tech companies, but also companies like Netflix, which is really an entertainment company and started out mailing DVDs.

Casey started a company—look it up—called Pure Software, which was an incredible company, and it was a software idea that he had. Yeah, brilliant! And Jeff Bezos is a computer scientist, and obviously, Bill Gates and so on.

So we really began focusing on people in evaluating companies, as well as then after investing in the company, helping them with recruiting people. So our four most successful investments are two early stage and two later stage. I’d say the hallmark of the later stage ones is helping them with recruiting more so than discovering them. But basically, they’re Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Uber.

That’s a good four!

"Yeah, it’s a good four. But the early Facebook— I clearly remember Hadi coming back from this meeting saying, 'I just met this company. They're working in a house, and this young guy reminds me more of Bill Gates than anyone I've ever met in my life.' He had this intensity and ambition to him but with a level of belief and confidence that he was actually going to accomplish these things.

It was a very chaotic company at the time; it was like nine people. But we decided to get involved, and then we started pushing them to hire younger people than themselves, which is not what anyone else was telling them. Their average age was 21 or something, and we convinced them to bring on a 19-year-old intern.

I remember interviewing Stanford students for Facebook and helping refer people to join early Facebook, and that process of interviewing students led us to discover Dropbox. There was an MIT student named Mac, and my brother interviewed him and sent him to Facebook but also asked him, 'Who are the smartest kids in your class at MIT?' That’s how he met Arash Ferdowsi, who was still enrolled at MIT and was developing Dropbox.

We then had Drew and Arash fly out to the West Coast, and part of our due diligence process at that point was to actually give coding tests to founders. So we gave Drew and Arash technical interviews to see how well they could program, and based on Mac's referral and the technical interview, we decided these two guys are the right guys to back.

It was a crowded space; Dropbox was not the first with its idea. It actually had several other companies that were earlier than it. For the next several years after that, we helped Dropbox recruit people; we still help Dropbox recruit people. And this is ten years ago.

So helping companies recruit is the biggest way I've added value as an angel, and what ties it all together is a focus on really on young, great engineers. Some of my new company is a community for awesome young engineers; it's focused on finding the top 10 or 20 most promising undergraduate computer science students.

So we identify awesome young engineers, include them in a diverse community of tech veterans—which includes this guy—and then we invest in startups that they start or that they join.

Yeah, watch this space because I think some really interesting kind of things are likely to come out of Neo.

So questions for Ali?

"The question was, how do you think about follow-ons, especially like if you get in a great company like Airbnb or Uber?

"Yeah, if you want the honest answer, it's really—I still am trying to figure out how to do follow-ons well. It's a mindfuck because you have put in money at an early stage, maybe a small amount, and now that investment is worth a thousand times more. You're wanting to celebrate it, but you also have the option to put in an enormous amount more money to, you know, to get a tiny little bit more. It's—I think it's psychologically very difficult for humans to believe that something that has already grown a lot can still grow a lot more.

I’ve only made maybe two or three follow-on investments. One was Dropbox. I mean, this was—I can't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like I had invested with my brother 50 grand, and now to protect, you know, just for the follow-on, I think it was several million dollars just to maintain the stake. It was just very difficult to evaluate this: would I rather be selling or buying?

But Dropbox is a very unique company, so we did do that one, and I think there’s one or two others, but on the whole, I’ve generally not done follow-ons. I probably would have been better to do it, but I’ve generally been sort of afraid because of the psychological weakness that I mentioned.

So any more questions?

"Yeah, back there.

"So the question is to put it succinctly: aren’t you guys taking all of our potential deal flow by vacuuming up all the good startups, good founders, good ideas?

"So I don’t actually know enough about the teal fellows to comment on that one, but my impression is that YC generally thrives from having a very symbiotic relationship with angels and having great relationships with angels. Neo is brand new, but my aspiration is to have something similar to have this cooperative and collaborative relationship for Neo.

A few things are different. First of all, what I said earlier about follow-on investing is easier when you have a fund, you know, and it's, you know, set aside a certain amount for follow-on. I'm approaching it that way. It's different when it's all your own money, and you may not have enough to do the follow-on or so on.

But the approach I’m taking with Neo is aiming to take something between two to three, two to four percent ownership in companies. On almost every different round, whether it's a seed stage or an A stage or so on, there's usually more to go around.

So in the seed stage rounds, there's very often companies that want to have multiple investors; they want to have different angels who bring different values to the company. So I, in the ecosystem, think there’s still plenty of room for individual angels.

Yeah, thanks for that question. Actually, precisely the opposite is true, if you think about it. What both Neo and Y Combinator does is create opportunities for angels to make scads of money and to have very successful portfolios. We only invest at YC a hundred and twenty thousand dollars at seed stage; that leaves lots of opportunity for other Angels to invest.

So we’re creating the—we're helping create the companies that you all should invest in; that’s why we're doing this, by the way. As I said, I think it's great for the overall ecosystem. YC or not, some Neo companies may well be YC, and some not. If there are more great angel investors, it's great for them, but it's self-serving too because we want you guys to invest in Y Combinator companies; we want you guys to be massively successful because that means those Y Combinator companies are massively successful.

So I don't think there's any such thing as vacuuming up innovation; we're hopefully—that’s our goal—to incent more innovation.

Yes, can I just say, as someone who's been an angel investor now for twenty years, there are way more companies being started thanks largely to YC than there were before. So even if there was any vacuuming out going on, it's out of a much larger base, plus having a place to know where to find those companies.

So even if there were 150 companies, if they were all spread around in different places and you didn’t know who was doing what, just having the opportunities in a way that everyone can see them creates a lot of value.

Awesome! Yep.

"Yeah, so the question is, do you have any opinion or experience on secondary markets?

I think what you mean is secondary sales where an early employee or former founder is selling some of their individual shares. I do have some experience with this. Probably wouldn’t say that I have a lot of experience with it. I've experienced selling my own shares as an early investor, you know, at various points in companies that I've invested in. I've sold some or, you know, held some, and so on.

I don't think that I've—I’m trying to remember if I've ever bought shares from someone other than the company directly. If I have, it's failing my memory, but it's certainly not frequent enough to be a practice for me. That being said, I think it is probably a good investing opportunity. I have been thinking about, you know, the dynamics that make sense for that because there are frequently early-stage employees who have left or are about to leave, and they want to cash in some of their stock. There’s an opportunity for them to get money and for an investor to get that stock, so I’d say it is a good opportunity. I just don’t have that much experience in it.

I think there's a burgeoning number of those opportunities, and then a bunch of companies clamped down to control how much of their stock was, you know, because companies want to control who owns their stock, and they lose control, and that happens. But I do think that is still an opportunity.

Okay, a couple more questions.

"Yeah. So the question was what are some of the tactics you've used to sort of expand the pool of talent as you help companies recruit to expand the pool of talent available to those companies?

You know, this has been an evolving and growing practice that has defined my career, frankly, of being in touch with and building a network of great engineers. I think everybody has the ability to cultivate a network simply by being diligent about staying in touch with people that they’ve encountered at various points.

For me, you know, I mentioned Mac: that’s a guy who was a senior at MIT in 2006. I’m still in touch with him even though, you know, after he left Facebook, four years later, he joined a different company that I was an investor in, and after he left that company, he joined a different company that I was an investor in. That’s because my brother and I stayed in touch with him.

So simply keeping track of who are the exceptional people that you’ve encountered in your life and maintaining connections with them and also asking them for introductions. So, you know, Mac is the one who introduced us to Drew.

How do you start that process?

"That’s a little trickier, and frankly, you know, when I started Neo, part of the conceit was to try to find top engineers in universities across the country. I was very insecure about how the heck I would get started with that because I might have had a few connections at a few universities, but, you know, it's a big country, and there are a lot of places where there are great people, and I wasn’t sure how to start.

You know, it's something I've—I think I've done a great job with so far, but there’s still a lot to do. The main advice I'd say is not to be intimidated and just, you know, at least start trying somehow. The tactic I used for Neo was I actually surveyed all the startups that I had relationships with, and I asked them to tell me who the best engineers that they had in their internship programs were.

So, you know, that was not at the top of my funnel, and I started from that, okay?

If there’s one more question?

"Okay, way back there. Thanks!

"I'm sorry; I didn't get that.

"Strategy about exits?

"Ah, the question is about strategy around exits. Have you formed a strategy around exiting your positions? I think it would be probably inflating it to say that it's a well-formed strategy. I think that everything is on a case-by-case basis. You know, generally speaking, there’s not a lot of liquidity.

So let’s say if you make an investment, and then you realize that it was a terrible investment, it’s very hard to sell it in the private market because you have to find a friend willing to buy it from you, and you have to not tell them that you think it’s a bad investment.

You know, some friend, right? Exactly! And if you do that too often, you know, you won’t have a lot of friends anyways. You can ask the company to help it happen, but they don’t want that.

They don’t want to have a reputation out there that all these other early investors are trying to sell their stock at any price or whatever. So on the flip side is when there's a company that’s doing well, which is a little bit, there’s more of a market, and there are a lot of people who want to buy your shares.

Again, I think it’s like a classic psychological challenge of is it better to sell or to hold? In my personal experience, usually, I’ve generally made the wrong decision—every time I sold, I should have held, and every time I've held, I should have sold.

So I'm not really one to give advice on this; the selling side is my Achilles' heel, I think. So I'm just going to leave you now with the thought that first, we shouldn’t feel too bad about the fact that we sold too soon, and in fact, that has been a line that's been attributed to various fantastic investors throughout history: that you know what's the secret of your success? I always sold too soon!

So, sell too soon! And thank you all very much for staying so much later than we intended. How about a hand, a round of applause for Ali, and thank you so much for coming!"

[Applause]