Venture capital looks simple from the outside.
Build something interesting. Pitch investors. Get funded. Grow fast.
But anyone who has actually raised money knows the process is rarely that clean. Great companies get passed on. Mediocre companies get funded. Investors give conflicting feedback. One VC says the market is too small. Another says it is too crowded. One says come back with revenue. Another says the revenue is the wrong kind.
For founders, the whole thing can feel arbitrary.
Charlie O’Donnell wants founders to understand something uncomfortable but useful: venture capital is not a fairness machine. It is a financial product with a very specific job.
Charlie has seen that machine from almost every angle. He started on the institutional LP side at the General Motors Pension Fund, evaluating venture funds after the dot-com crash. He later became the first analyst at Union Square Ventures, helped First Round Capital open its New York office, and eventually launched Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, the first VC fund based in Brooklyn. Across his career, he wrote first checks into more than 100 companies and built a reputation as one of New York’s most accessible early-stage investors.
Now, after stepping away from active fund investing, Charlie is helping founders understand what VCs often do not say directly. His book, Founder Unfriendly: What Investors Won’t Tell You About Getting Funded, is written for the founders who are not already famous, not already backed by elite networks, and not already surrounded by five venture-backed friends who can review every pitch deck, co-founder decision, and investor intro. In other words, most founders.
Venture Capital Is Not the Same as Business Validation
One of the biggest mistakes founders make is assuming that a VC pass means the business is bad.
That is wrong.
A business can be excellent and still be a terrible fit for venture capital. Charlie points out that a company generating $5 million in free cash flow every year might be a phenomenal business for the founder. But if it cannot become large enough to return a major venture fund, it may not fit the VC model.
This is where founders often misunderstand the investor’s job.
VCs are not simply asking, “Is this a good business?”
They are asking, “Can this become big enough to return our fund?”
That distinction matters. A profitable, durable, founder-owned company may be far more attractive than a venture-backed company forced onto an unnatural growth path. But if a founder walks into a VC pitch without understanding the risk-return model of venture, they can mistake rejection for judgment.
It is not always judgment. Sometimes it is just fund math.
The Best Founders Do Not Pitch Small
Charlie’s strongest fundraising advice is also one of the most counterintuitive: founders often lose investor interest because they pitch what they can confidently promise, not what the company could become.
That instinct is understandable. Many founders do not want to overstate. They do not want to look naïve. They do not want to project $200 million in revenue and then fall short. This is especially true for founders who feel they are under more scrutiny because of their background, gender, race, or lack of insider status.
But according to Charlie, that caution can backfire.
VCs are not looking for a conservative promise. They are looking for fund-returning potential.
That does not mean founders should lie or inflate numbers. It means they need to clearly explain what happens if the company works. What does more capital unlock? What would it mean to double the sales team, expand into more cities, launch faster, or capture the market before competitors do?
Charlie frames it simply: fundraising is not a promise conversation. It is a potential conversation.
Founders who only pitch the safe version of the company often make the opportunity sound too small. The investor may never see the upside case because the founder never actually says it.
Control the Meeting or the Meeting Controls You
Another mistake founders make is letting investors take over the pitch.
VCs will ask questions. Some will be useful. Some will be distracting. Some will pull the conversation into downside risk before the founder has even explained the upside. If the founder simply follows every question wherever it goes, the meeting can become fragmented and defensive.
Charlie argues that founders need to bring structure.
That does not mean being obnoxious or overbearing. It means setting the frame.
A founder might start by saying: here are the three things that get people excited about this company. If I convince you of these three things, would this be worth spending more time on?
That structure changes the meeting. It gives the founder a clear agenda. It lets the investor opt into the logic. And at the end, the founder can bring the conversation back to the original case: did I convince you of the things that matter?
This is not just presentation polish. It is a signal.
Investors are not only evaluating the business. They are asking whether this founder can recruit great executives, close impossible customers, handle skeptical partners, and keep control of high-stakes rooms.
A founder who cannot control a VC meeting may struggle to convince the investor they can control much harder rooms later.
Networks Are an Unfair Advantage
Charlie is blunt about one of the least fair parts of fundraising: networks matter enormously.
A founder with five venture-backed friends has a major advantage. Those friends can review the deck, make warm intros, explain how firms think, help evaluate a VP of Sales candidate, and translate confusing investor feedback.
That knowledge is not evenly distributed.
Founders outside those circles often have to work much harder to get the same information. They may be just as capable, but they are operating without the same insider map.
This is one of the reasons fundraising can look meritocratic while quietly favoring people who already know the rules.
Charlie’s advice is not to complain about the unfairness. It is to recognize it and deliberately build the network anyway. The best founders are often better not because they were born with perfect judgment, but because they have better access to people who sharpen that judgment.
That is not fair. But ignoring it is worse.
The AI Era Has Raised the Bar
One of Charlie’s clearest reversals is around product.
Years ago, he was willing to back founders before they had a product. In some cases, that made sense. If the team was exceptional and the idea was complex, getting in before the product existed could create a pricing advantage.
But that logic has changed.
In the AI era, the bar for building something has dropped. For many software startups, showing up with no product is no longer a sign of being early. It can be a sign of adverse selection.
If the tools to build are faster, cheaper, and more accessible, then investors expect more. A founder pitching a software company without even a basic product now faces a harder question: why not?
For founders, the implication is direct. The old “idea-stage” pitch is weaker than it used to be. Unless the company is in deep tech, hard science, or another category with real technical barriers, investors increasingly expect proof that the founder can turn insight into something tangible.
Fundraising Is Winnable, But It Is Not Fair
The central lesson from Charlie’s career is not that VCs are villains or founders are naïve. It is that both sides are operating inside a system with incentives that are often misunderstood.
VCs need outlier outcomes. Founders need to understand the type of outcome they are pitching. Investors are pattern matching. Founders need to know which patterns help them and which ones hurt them. The process is biased toward networks, confidence, and clarity. Founders who lack those advantages need to build them intentionally.
The danger is pretending the process is fairer, more rational, or more transparent than it really is.
Charlie’s message to founders is not comforting. It is more useful than that.
A VC pass does not mean your company is bad. A fundraise is not a referendum on your worth. A good business is not always a venture-backable business. And if you are pitching investors, your job is not to present the smallest thing you can safely defend.
Your job is to make the upside impossible to miss.
Because venture capital does not fund what is merely sensible.
It funds what could become enormous.
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Chapters:
03:55 — Surviving the Dot-Com Crash and Negative Returns
06:29 — What LPs Don’t See About Venture Capital
09:39 — Why VCs Are Still Middlemen in the Startup Ecosystem
11:33 — Lessons from Being the First Analyst at Union Square Ventures
14:02 — Building a Network Without Money or an Ivy League Background
17:10 — Creating Access Through Community and Events
19:57 — Joining First Round Capital After a Failed Startup
20:31 — Pitching During the 2008 Financial Crisis
21:01 — Helping Spark the Foursquare Funding Race
22:28 — Why New York Needed a Different VC Playbook
24:26 — GroupMe, SinglePlatform, and Early Wins at First Round
25:33 — Price Sensitivity vs. Price Takers in Early-Stage VC
28:05 — Why One Lucky Deal Is Not an Investment Strategy
32:15 — Leaving First Round to Launch Brooklyn Bridge Ventures
34:21 — Why Charlie Walked Away From Active Fund Investing
37:09 — Writing Founder Unfriendly for the 99% of Founders
39:20 — Why Good Businesses Still Get Rejected by VCs
41:00 — Pitching Potential Instead of Conservative Promises
45:35 — Why Fundraising Is a Potential Conversation
46:10 — What Founders Can Learn From Parenting a Small Child
47:30 — Why Every Slide Needs to Scream Fund-Returning Outcome
48:30 — Team, Market, and Traction as the Core Pitch Narrative
50:48 — How Founders Can Redirect Bad Investor Questions
53:28 — Controlling the VC Meeting Without Being Obnoxious
55:47 — Why Founders Should Read Founder Unfriendly
56:41 — The One Deal Charlie Wishes Hadn’t Fallen Through
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01:23): Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today we have Charlie O'Donnell on the mic. He spent 20 years inside rooms where funding decisions actually get made. First analyst at Union Square Ventures, then helping First Round open its New York office, where he sourced GroupMe, Single Platform Moat, Backupify, In 2012, he founded Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, the first VC fund based in Brooklyn, and wrote first checks in over 100 companies, including Hungry Root, Petal, Bridget, Gotenna, and The Wing, and others, building a reputation as the most I'm looking forward to that conversation and running the next NYC community. This spring, he just published Founder Unfriendly, What Investors Won't Tell You About Getting Funded, which hit number one in the new release in the VC category and carries a cover blurb from Brad Feld. Very cool. Thanks for coming on, Charlie.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:02:22): Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Brian Bell (00:02:23): Yeah, so I'd love to get your origin story. It's so fun to kind of hear VC stories because they're so different. But like, you know, what is your background?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:02:31): So actually, my first job in venture capital was on the institutional limited partner side. So if you're out there pitching VCs, and it's frustrating, keep in mind that they also have to pitch to raise their funds. They don't necessarily I have to do it as often as you do, but we were the big pool of money behind a lot of the top tier names that you've heard of. GM had been investing in venture as an asset class since the 70s. So Union Square Ventures, when they raised their first fund, came to pitch to me back in 2004. So that was my entree into venture is funding funds and then eventually joining a fund.
Brian Bell (00:03:13): That's amazing. How did that, I mean, was that just right off the college campus? Like how do you land a job like that? That's pretty amazing.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:03:20): It was kind of funny. It was actually a high school internship. So my high school, which is pretty smart, actually, after we had applied to our colleges, they basically kicked us out because, you know, you've you've applied to your schools. you're just kind of hanging around campus like not really paying attention sort of the senioritis thing and so they're like okay we got to get you guys out of here because all you have to do is pass and so you're just kind of mailing it in so you had a choice of either doing a community service project I'm what luck that's super glamorous keep in mind the timing in 2001 I saw 10 negative quarters of performance before I ever saw a positive one I mean this was just the period of shutting down dot-com and depending on when you had raised your last round, you either had like two years of money left or two months of money left, but you definitely weren't a viable business. So the VCs would sort of come in and every quarter they'd be like, okay, we did a triage and we think like A third of this portfolio is going to make it and return your money and a third is kind of on the fence and a third is just, you know, garbage. And then the next time we met them, we're like, okay, well, you know, actually it's a third, a third, a third. And after three or four rounds of that, they're like, I don't think our 99 vintage fund is going to return capital. Let's look towards the future. And so it was a really tough space at the time.
Brian Bell (00:05:05): what a tough conversation right yeah yeah for sure and I think there's some really famous examples of I think like it was like benchmark around that time just decided like we're not going to take management fees for two years and we're going to deploy that and save the fund basically there's a lot of famous examples of that but what a tough conversation with your with your LP is hey you know that money you gave me I'm not going to be able to return it well the thing that helps with some
Charlie O’Donnell (00:05:25): of them though is you think about a fund like Excel I think there's like their 1995 fund or 1994 was like a 25x returning fund. So if you return 25x and then even like a really terrible fund.
Brian Bell (00:05:39): You have a 1x fund or whatever. Right. Like even if it's less than 1x. You're still averaging 12x.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:05:44): You're still way ahead, right? Yeah. So you can take a mulligan on one fund, maybe not two.
Brian Bell (00:05:51): Yeah, you got caught by the market there.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:05:53): Right. But also the timing makes it really interesting. So what wound up happening is normally in any given year, maybe like a quarter or a third of your portfolio would come back to market. but everyone stopped investing at exactly the same time which meant everyone came to market again roughly around the same time so in 2004 something like plus or minus you know 18 months around 2004 like 85% of our portfolio came back to market so we had the unique opportunity to either say we want out of venture like literally we're just not doing any new deals and I think Tia Kreff actually completely pulled out of the asset class We want to double down, right? Like we could actually pull into these funds as other people are pulling out or we're still into venture but we don't like these managers and we're going to switch out our managers and so there are a lot of emerging funds like Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Emergence. They were all sort of born around this time period of, you know, and several of those firms had people who came from other firms. Todd Degris came from Spark and there was a whole reshuffling of the asset clients. that resulted in a lot of new funds around that time. So it was actually really quite interesting to be an analyst at a institutional fund looking at the whole space and trying to figure out like, is this still viable? What names do we want to go into?
Brian Bell (00:07:18): So working at a pension fund, what did watching this flow of institutional LP capital inside teach you most of that CGPs never see?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:07:28): So I have to admit, I'm a little skeptical when people say, well, the returns haven't been great. Will LPs pull out? Because the one thing when you're looking across asset classes is if you think somebody is potentially a little skeptical about venture, you have to ask yourself, where else are they going to put the money? Right? Because if you're a manager... Right, exactly, right? And so, you know, you look at valuations and public equities, right? You're not going there, right?
Brian Bell (00:08:01): Late stage, even late stage private markets now, the valuations are pretty crazy. For sure, right? Like they were in 21.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:08:08): You look at interest rates and real estate, like there's just not a lot of places where you could actually tell yourself a story that if you have good managers to back, that you can make this outsized return. And so, you know, this is where the venture train keeps on running and why some of the bigger funds continue to return capital to continue to raise capital. is because they have big funds, they have prior outperformance. And so if you have an allocation into the union squares and lightspeeds and, you know, and reasons and benchmarks and wherever, you're probably not going to give that up, actually, because you don't have another opportunity that you can tell yourself that you're going to get like these kinds of returns out of. So that's one. I think the second thing And when I moved from the General Motors Pension Fund to Union Square Ventures and got to talk to founders about who they wanted to raise their A and what they thought of different funds, I realized maybe today it's a little bit different because there's more transparency in the market through social media and newsletters and LinkedIn and all this other stuff. We were so disconnected from that Next great entrepreneur who's choosing where to go pitch their fund and you know our perceptions of the market were years like like almost a generation behind actually because LPs don't have relationships with with founders and not just the successful founders, right? Like that next founder, the VP of engineering from Plaid who discovers some infrastructure thing and trying to implement AI across like fintech backends or whatever, like That's the decision maker you need to tap into The Massachusetts State Pension Fund
Brian Bell (00:09:57): They're not talking to that person They also just don't have the infrastructure To screen thousands and not over 10,000 deals Like GPs do I'm actually going through and revamping some of my slides And kind of telling that story of the funnel The deal slow funnel Because we're a very high volume investor Investing in a hundred a year across funds two and three. And, you know, it's very much an education process of like, how are you seeing, you know, 10, 15,000 deals a year, right? How are you like physically able to do that, right? And telling that story and that infrastructure in place. And it's an interesting, like you could almost like say like VCs are kind of like middlemen a little bit. A little bit. Yeah, yeah. It's like you kind of sit in the middle, like maybe if the LPs had all the same infrastructure, if they just took all my systems and like hired an analyst, maybe they can do the investing themselves. But I think there's like also this like persistence of returns in VC because the deal flow and your network gets better over time, right?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:10:55): Well yeah right it's it's sort of like when you get a chance to see what greatness looks like you're part of a rocket ship outcome then you surround yourself with people who also have that experience you may not have been the founder What did you learn at being the very first analyst at Union Square?
Brian Bell (00:11:13): I mean, you're coming in pretty green from the LP side. Like, what did you What did you have to unlearn and what were some surprising lessons in that role?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:11:44): I think the biggest thing is how much of the knowledge was sort of locked up in people. So I came from a world where at the Bloomberg terminal on my desk, I could call up any, you know, trade desk and get the, you know, sell side analyst report.
Brian Bell (00:12:01): Give me your bid ask on this and yeah.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:12:03): Yeah, and the sell side analyst report on, you know, whatever security sector and all this sort of stuff. When I went to USV, I was like, these are sectors that barely even exist yet. And they're being created as we speak. And like, who knows I am a And so that's one of the reasons why I became more public on social, started running events. I had to create the community in New York in 2004 and 2005 that was necessary for me to learn, actually. actually and so I've always been sort of a a community creator and and people connector because it was by necessity right like I need to surround myself with the people I need to learn from so that I can be good at my job it's not the kind of job you can do from behind a desk I mean now post-pandemic AI screening harmonic
Brian Bell (00:13:18): sit in my pajamas all day and take zoom calls basically but yeah right right but at
Charlie O’Donnell (00:13:22): the time you couldn't do it though
Brian Bell (00:13:23): yeah yeah yeah not 20 years ago that's around the same time I lived in New York as well had dreams of you know working on Wall Street and all that stuff and yeah I wish I would have gotten to VC then you know I have my notes you said you carried the privileges of being a white guy but didn't grow up with money or an ivy network you know how did you you talked a little bit about creating that network what do you what do you think it takes today to to kind of build that network from scratch
Charlie O’Donnell (00:13:45): so first of all it takes it takes confidence it you have to first First convince yourself that anybody wants to meet with you. So I think confidence is a big thing. I think you have to act as if and be willing to reach out to people and assume that you can create value for them if you don't have the background.
Brian Bell (00:14:02): Confidence will take you all the way to the presidency is what I like to say.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:14:07): Apparently. Whether it's founded or you've all founded or not.
Brian Bell (00:14:11): Yeah, misplaced confidence. I know the best people. I'm the best. I'm the best at everything.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:14:15): Exactly. You know. I think one confidence hack is that when you create the opportunity for conversation from people, you're actually doing somebody a favor. And so it's not, why does this person want to talk to me? But am I going to create a space for this person to share their ideas? Because, you know, everybody's got to feed the beast every day now, right? Like the prior professional Rolodex that we had in LinkedIn is now, you know, a social network where you need to like look smart every day. And sometimes you wake up and you've got nothing, right? But if somebody comes along and says, hey, I'd like to interview you and I'm going to share these clips and You know we're going to spotlight what you're thinking you're going to have an opportunity to put something out there or an in-person event right like you might get asked a question at an in-person event that like really inspires your thinking changes direction who knows who you might so creating those opportunities for someone is actually a really valuable offer it's not an ask and so I think that is really incredibly important but you know not everybody feels that way right not everybody lives in a kind of abundance world where something good could happen when I take time for you right that's a very like white collar kind of you know up into the right sort of approach right Versus like, hey, if I waste your time, you could have been out on a plumbing job fixing something. And there's like the only upside when you're a plumber is to get paid for your time. And time is money and that's it. And everything's sort of a very limited kind of upside world. So I think that is, you know, the number one approach and the willingness to just ask a lot of people. Like I do this pre-Series A offsite, this one day conference where I get But 14 or 15 check writing series A VCs, partners, select principals, and we literally kidnap them. They're supposed to be there the whole day. They can't walk off after their talk the way typical panelists might might be and so it's a it's a big ask but when we make that ask and we get those people when we get partners from NEA and GV and USB and Lightspeed and all these other folks then founders really want to come to it actually because these folks are going to be here all day right so to get 15 yeah we need to ask about 70 or 80 VCs and does the timing work and are they going to be in New York and can they spare the day and are they convinced this is going to be valuable for them and so like I don't mind getting 50 no's for this event because I know that I'm going to get people and it's going to work out. And we've now done that event 10 times. I'm sort of used to it. But, you know, when you're reaching out for two or three weeks and you're just like, oh, my God, I just I've won for a minute.
Brian Bell (00:17:13): get this thing put together yeah I know yeah it's funny you mentioned you mentioned something there which I want to tug on which is the you know sometimes you wake up and you got nothing you know and there's days as a VC where I wake up I'm like man I really don't want to go to work today I just want to you know cancel everything and just go back to bed but then I meet like some amazing founder you know just working on the coolest thing and I'm like this is my job this is what I literally get to do and and I you know it's kind of like going to a party sometimes you don't want to go to a party And you're just like, I'd rather just stay home, watch Netflix, you know, just want to like just veg out. And then you always go and you kind of meet somebody cool and you're like, I'm glad I went. You always come home from a party like glad you went. And I think like being a VC is like going to a party every day. You're like, sometimes you don't want to go to the party. You just want to introvert. I just don't want to like talk to anybody. My wife's always making fun of me because she's like, why don't you like know like our kids' friends, you know, parents' names. I'm like, this is like my job is to meet people all day long, you know, so I just want to introvert. But I'm always glad I went, you know, to work.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:18:14): Yeah, no, I agree. I agree.
Brian Bell (00:18:16): So tell us the story of First Round. So you opened up the first office there.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:18:20): So yeah, I got hired by First Round. It's pretty random, actually, because there wasn't really a job opening. I had started a company after I left Union Square. and I wasn't particularly good at being an entrepreneur and I kind of muddled through it and we were down to our last negative $30,000 in capital. I maxed out on my credit cards when I landed at first round.
Brian Bell (00:18:45): What was happening financially?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:18:47): so yeah I had started a company and it didn't really I started a company in 2007 worked on it for a couple years didn't really work out tried to pitch in October of 2008 I'm like literally I was in SF yeah I'm literally in SF and there's a VC sitting across the table from me just staring at their screen going like it's like full of red numbers they said uh are you watching the market it's a bloodbath out there I was like no because I don't actually have any money so it's really unfortunate that your 20 million dollar nest egg is now 16 I guess that's that's really rough for you and they're like yeah you know why don't you come back after the inauguration and see if the world is still here and I was like I literally have no idea how I'm going to make it the next five or six months right so after right around the time we realized we had to put this thing to bed I was helping a friend Dennis Crowley work on the pitch deck for Foursquare back in 2009 and it it came down to first round capital and Union Square Ventures and I had sort of unintentionally touched off a whole VC race to fund this company. I wound up blogging about it. And then Fred Wilson, who I previously had worked for, picked up on what I had wrote, and then he wrote something about it. And then M.G. Siegler, who who was then writing at TechCrunch saw my post and then saw Fred's post and then two dots make a line. So Foursquare must be the hottest company trending out of New York so far. And then all the VCs start swarming like, hey, New York is still here after 2008. That's cool. What's this mobile social app that's the next big thing? So everyone is like really excited about this company. And when the dust settles, USV wound up funding it. And first round had reached out to me and they said, hey, We add a lot of value to our companies. We have some really smart people here, but we feel like we're not as plugged into the New York scene as we kind of need to be. Like, how do we do that? And I was like, you need a person on the ground here. And New York's kind of a funny ecosystem. It's not like the Bay Area. You can't just like swing by Y Combinator Demo Day and meet 80% of the people you need to meet. There's no sort of inner circle in New York. For as much as you think you're part of an inner circle, Maybe you're in the inner circle of prop tech, but you're not in the inner circle of ad tech. And then you're not in the Cornell runway postdoc program or the network surrounding Betaworks or what have you, right? The New York tech scene is very much embedded in various sectors. There isn't sort of a center of the community. And so you just need to kind of go house to house here. And in those conversations, they were like, okay, sounds good. Do you want to come and hang out for a year or two? We don't really have an opening, but we could use somebody doing the footwork. And so I was like, great, because I'm going to max out on my next stage. credit card bill and uh I need a full-time paying balance transfer so this sounds good yeah yeah I'm tapped out and so uh so it worked out the timing worked out I was there for a couple years I did eight or nine deals while I was there in that period of just two years two of them exited so GroupMe sold after a year and single platform sold after two had a bunch of workups like felt like I was shooting fish in a barrel I mean I felt really smart
Brian Bell (00:22:12): based on those financial crisis is almost like the best time to be an early stage investor right I mean I experienced this because I kind of got into the industry in 2020-21 so I saw the big run-up and then I I closed my first fund in 22 so I'm as I'm deploying all of a sudden it's a great time to be an early stage investor you
Charlie O’Donnell (00:22:29): know what that first round of group me was done at 2.83 2.2 2 on 2.8 No, it was $865,000 on a 2.8 pre. That's crazy.
Brian Bell (00:22:43): Priced, right?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:22:45): Were they no good price? I don't remember, actually. Yeah, I don't remember. I have to go back and... 2.8 pre, yeah. 2.8 pre. So at an outcome of like 70... It's actually a pretty decent return. I mean, small dollars and it wasn't WhatsApp.
Brian Bell (00:23:01): What do you think of price sensitivity versus insensitivity in early stage? I mean, this is like a really good example. Like I meet some early stage VCs, they're very price sensitive. I don't go above five caps, which kind of shuts out a lot of the high quality market. And my stance has always been, I'm just a price taker I'm a small check break you just tell me the price whatever and I'll you know maybe get an MFN or something like that and but yeah where do you
Charlie O’Donnell (00:23:28): come down on the sensitivity argument I could there's so many examples where like when I was at Union Square we had a whole conversation about whether or not Indeed was too expensive and Indeed was like say it was like like the founders wanted four on 12 and we had not planned on going above 10 or something like you know like that and and splitting hairs I mean you're just splitting hairs over 20 you know yeah but you know what though like you didn't really imagine at that time that you could sort of guarantee the billion dollar
Brian Bell (00:24:03): outcome and so they were much rarer back then
Charlie O’Donnell (00:24:07): They were much rarer and, you know, so you have to draw the line somewhere and, you know, and that was a company that did not raise after that round. So when it was a billion dollar outcome, it was actually a really phenomenal outcome because there wasn't in between, you know, that outcome. So the problem is, is that you imagine missing out. It's the positive skew of the big outcomes, right? Like if you were an anthropic investor, almost at any price that first round, you would be generationally wealthy by being in that first round.
Brian Bell (00:24:41): Yeah, you'd 100x your fund, right? That's what I like to say. But it put a 25k check in anthropics worth a trillion dollars today. worth billions of dollars after dilution I mean it's an insane return
Charlie O’Donnell (00:24:53): Yeah, but then does that mean you should just go pay $100 million pre for every pre-seed or seed stage deal you do? Like that's not right.
Brian Bell (00:25:02): Well, they have a C in front of their title and they leave one of the AI labs maybe, right? Yeah. Maybe it's a billion. Maybe you're investing at a billion pre, you know? I think of it this way.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:25:13): If someone were to pitch you a fund based around this decision, would you invest in it? And so I go back to like, you know, the Instagram round the Josh Kushner Thrive Capital 2x in 4 days or whatever it was the $500 million valuation that flipped 4 days later for a billion dollars which got him a whole lot of press and, you know, hey, two X in four days is, you know, that's loan shark returns, right? So that turned out pretty well. But if I turn around and I said, I'm pitching a fund and this fund only invests in companies with no revenue at $500 million valuations that have only one logical acquirer and we're going to do that 30 times across the fund. Do you think that would be a good fund to invest in? like probably not you have to be very lucky yeah right like that's not a decision that you could do 30 times and so that's kind of where I think the way I look at this is can you defend that decision over and over again like if if you're like no then your default should probably be no and you you probably shouldn't be in the market now that doesn't mean you can't stray from it but if you have a decision that you can't necessarily replicate To go back to that example of if you were a C-level person at a company that's probably going to IPO at a trillion dollars, well, you're just not going to get 30 opportunities to back somebody like that, right?
Brian Bell (00:26:50): If you're lucky, maybe one in the fund is like that, right?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:26:55): Right and also by the way you're in preferred so that changes the nature too so we're we're quibbling about price but that's a fully diluted price you are also the first money out right so you have a floor downsides kind of protect it a little bit
Brian Bell (00:27:10): this is Here's something that I want to tease that out that a lot of people don't understand that I've noticed I've made 300 and almost 50 investments now over like a seven eight year period is even even when startups they wind down they shut down and they sell for assets basically you normally kind of get your money back you know maybe 50 cents on the dollar maybe maybe a dollar on the dollar but because you're preferred you're kind of first in line unless they have a bunch of venture debt which I won't get into but right
Charlie O’Donnell (00:27:36): It depends, especially early. Before they raise something big, there's aqua hires and maybe they build something useful that they flip to somebody. I mean, I had a company actually reach out to me that was sort of about to go under and then somebody randomly at Staples reached out to me and they're like oh hey this is like a cool app for you know creating some interesting cards and you know it was sort of a little bit of like an it was it was a version of Canva before Canva and Staples reached out and we were basically on a like last few weeks of money and I responded back I was like listen Like this team is going to this opportunity is going to disappear like you guys need to get on your horse and and they came back and they wound up paying 3 million bucks for the assets of the company and the team and everybody made their money back and the founder put a little money in their their pocket and they closed the whole deal in like less than 30 days.
Brian Bell (00:28:34): There you go. Yeah. Magic can happen. So what happened after first run?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:28:38): So there was no real room at the firm, right? These firms don't grow. Some of them don't grow firm forever. Don't grow forever.
Brian Bell (00:28:46): Yeah. I'm like on fun three and I haven't grown. You know, it's really hard to grow at venture. Right.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:28:51): So if you picked up someone, if you had some junior person working with you, there's probably no partnership opportunity. And if you're not a partner, you basically don't have a career in venture. And so... You know, I had a decent track record and I poked around for some other people's funds. I was like, I don't love the idea of going to work for somebody else again and, you know, where my upside is basically capped. Like, you go and work for somebody whose name is literally on the door. It's never going to be your fund. And so... I had a network I reached out and I was like I think I'm gonna do this on my own set up a small fund reached out to a ton of folks and opened up Brooklyn Bridge Ventures the premise being that you know I was gonna do a bunch of super early deals in the New York market where I was like exceptionally plugged in and that is a solo GP I can move faster and go earlier and because it was a small fund I didn't have to sharp elbow anybody out. You give me 30 shots at running into one of the interesting companies and coming out of New York and I have an opportunity to get them. Successfully raised a first fund. I actually raised three funds. Did 105 investments from 2012 to 2023 or four. What was my last deal? About two years ago. Now I'm just working on liquidating that portfolio. It was a fun ride and it was lots of really interesting portfolio companies. It was a very different time period. I think about now what's going on. It feels like a completely different time period to invest than what people are doing right
Brian Bell (00:30:22): Yeah, yeah, especially it sounds like you were deploying Fund 3 during kind of like this run up and run down, right? Is Fund 4 still maybe out there for you? Or you're sort of happy to say, hey, I did my three funds. I've done the run. You know, three funds is a lot of work. Like, you know, hats off.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:30:39): And I'm going to be in this Fund 3 for a long time.
Brian Bell (00:30:42): and that's what people don't realize is like you know I'm still managing stuff I made investments I made five years ago and it really runs 10-15 years right so for
Charlie O’Donnell (00:30:52): sure for sure the big difference especially being a first check investor is now that I'm not screening new deals I have a very different relationship with work and so you know if I were actively screening stuff you might catch me poking around this browser window and Dr. Justin Marchegiani I want to be focused on her. I want my attention to be there. And I think the reality is it's much more competitive now. Everybody's got a little sidecar fund and is a scout and doing all of this sort of stuff. and hyper focused and you know now you have to compete against the 27 year old that you used to be trying to be Johnny on the spot all the time going to five or 10 events a week and being in all the whatsapps and the discords and you know all of And most people who are 46 and do this they either do one of two things they either build a team and they go you know hire the person to do running around or they go a little later right they they narrow the aperture and they say well you know if you don't have a million dollars in revenue or you don't have working product or whatever. I'm only going to look at a certain narrower portion of the window. And that's just not what I wanted to do, actually. I like being the first check, being the first thing to stuff. And I don't love being on a team, to be honest. I don't love having to get approvals and collaborate. I like going at my own pace. And so I was like, okay, I won't enjoy the way I would need to do this now. So I'm just going to go find something else to
Brian Bell (00:32:38): I love that and so that is you know becoming an author and coaching so maybe you
Charlie O’Donnell (00:32:42): can tell us about that yeah sure so one of the things I realized is that the job of a VC for every hundred people in a room is to go find the one or two people you should spend all of your time with I don't love forgetting about the under 98 people you know they they're struggling to raise and a lot of them Some are smart and hustling and have a kernel of something but don't know how to pitch it and aren't familiar with how venture funds work because why would anyone be familiar with how venture funds work if they come out of an industry or they come out of a university and a lab or what have you and I felt like I had something to offer them and so that's what founder unfriendly is. This is basically written for the 99% of people who didn't just exit a company for $500 million and have VCs lining up for them who just pitched or they're about to pitch a bunch of VCs and they're getting, that's really interesting. And then nothing, trying to figure out like, am I, are they actually interested or not? Or, you know, why are they not getting back to me? Or what does this mean? Or I pitched 10 VCs, I got 10 different pieces of feedback and they're all conflicting against each other, like how to make sense of this.
Brian Bell (00:33:54): Yeah.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:33:54): Right.
Brian Bell (00:33:55): And so- Too big of a market, too small of a market. Right. Exactly. Too much traction, too little traction. You know, like literally, you know, too much founder market fit, too little founder market fit, you know.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:34:05): Come back with revenues. Oh, these revenues are service revenues. These are the wrong revenues. Like that sort of thing.
Brian Bell (00:34:10): Yeah. And, you know, it's like... If you've met a VC, you've met a VC, right? If you've met a single VC, you've met a single VC. And so every VC has a different lens that they look at markets. But what's the core claim in the book? One of the core claims is great companies get passed while mediocre ones get funded. So it's not that VCs are dumb, but what's happening there? Some of the good companies are getting passed and some of the bad companies are getting funded.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:34:35): Well, so there's a few things I want to jump into about that is that there are really great business ideas that are not a fit for venture, right? A company that throws off $5 million of free cash flow a year and grows moderately is not going to return NEA's fund. And so especially if it's Dr. Justin Marchegiani if I were a founder, right? So there are some concepts that just do not fit venture as a financial product. And so there's a whole bunch of folks who look at the turndown of VCs and they think that VCs are saying like, this is not a good business idea when it is, in fact, a very solid business idea that is worth owning and worth continuing, but does not have the risk return profile for this kind of financial platform.
Brian Bell (00:35:32): Yeah, it's kind of like if it works, it's not going to be a $10 billion company. If it works, it's going to be a $50 million company. And if I'm getting into the company at a 5 or 10 cap valuation, it just does not pencil with my model.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:35:45): Right, exactly. But if you're an individual angel investor or if you're putting your own capital in, that might be a really nice outcome for you. And so that's one set of companies. There's another where the underlying idea is quite good, but you have just not successfully indicated to VCs that it is your intention to grow a big company or that that possibility exists. And so so many founders kind of come to VCs and they say, I have this. What do you think? Is this good? And that's essentially what their pitch sounds like Versus saying, my intention is to drive to a company that is going to do $500 million in revenue Because if you come up to a VC and you're like, I have this, is this good? And then there's somebody else who says, I am staring at an opportunity to drive a company to $500 million of revenue in eight years That could actually be across some aspects A worse idea, but you have just indicated to the VC that like, here is my intention, I'm quite capable. A VC is not going to assume that is your intention to drive something to a $500 million idea, especially because doing that at that trajectory also increases the downside. It increases the chance of a zero. So some founders unintentionally signal that they don't want to take those risks. So for example, I had a fairly diverse portfolio of founders. And one thing I see for founders that don't look like me, whether it's female founders, founders of color, is that thank you society, but we are sort of programmed to imagine that anybody who doesn't look like me is less aggressive, is less ambitious, right? And so if you go in and you're a female founder and you present a roadmap that like A, either only has the next two years of financials because that's the round you're raising now and that's where you feel confident about where you're going to spend the money and all of this sort of stuff and like literally leaves the rest of it open or has the forward trajectory but it is quite conservative because your perception is I'm under a lot more scrutiny than my male counterparts so I don't want to screw this up right I don't want to say that I'm going to get to 200 million dollars revenue and then have it only come in at 150 and then you know I lose my job as CEO I placed or all this sort of stuff Okay, I get it. Except that you are literally walking right into the existing bias that they have, right? They assume you're not as aggressive. And then when you're projecting something that you believe you can promise versus what the potential is. So I always used to flip the conversation and I would go back to the founder and be like, I see you're raising a million dollars. Would you really not know what you would do with $2 million? And I'd have those founders come back and she would say, of course I know what I would do two million dollars I would double down on product here I'd hire twice as many salespeople I'd open up in three cities instead of one well and what do you think that would do to your revenue oh that would really open revenue up like we would easily get to twice the revenue in half the time or whatever cool that pitch is way better than what you just gave me Why didn't you pitch that? Well, I can't promise that. Right. Nobody can promise anything. I can't promise that I'm not going to walk out of my apartment and a piano is going to fall from the sky. Like I can't promise that. Right. But this is not a promise conversation. This is a potential conversation because you're sitting across the table from a VC who knows that only one or two of the 30 deals they do in this fund are going to return the fund. They don't know which ones, but they need to make sure that they all have that potential. And if I don't hear it from you, then I'm not going to assume it, right? Because I don't know that that's your intention to drive it. I don't know that's what kind of trajectory. I don't know that's how much you're going to put your foot on the gas. And so... There are ways in which founders sandbag the pitch unintentionally, and they need to understand what's going on in that room, what's being asked of you. What's being asked of you is to have an exercise that identifies the potential of this thing, not to promise what you know will happen.
Brian Bell (00:39:56): So it sounds like what founders are doing unintentionally is thinking small, right? They're thinking small.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:40:03): They might be thinking big, but they're afraid to say it.
Brian Bell (00:40:05): Yeah, and VCs need to hear a big vision and a big plan, right? And this dial of money does different things to the outcome of the company. So that's really good advice. Tidbits and stories can you draw out of the book for the audience?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:40:21): I feel like you learn a lot about pitching when you're the parent of a small child who has the attention span of a gnat, right? Because it's like, go in your room and put your pants on. And then all of a sudden you hear, you know, the Yodo player going or whatever. It's like, pants, pants, just focus on just the pants, right? Like, think of pants as fund returning outcome, right? Every slide needs to scream pants because we'll just kind of get lost, right? VCs have no attention span. There's not an IQ licensure. Just because they're good at collecting money from institutional investors or whatever doesn't necessarily mean they're the smartest people in the room. It's usually the founders. And so from the beginning of the deck, the outcome needs to scream potential fund returning outcomes. And I think there's a couple of reasons why that happens, right? Certain groups of founders feel they need to justify their presence in the room. Let me tell you how I got here. I was hired by this person. That's impressive. I went to this school. That's impressive. Here's how I even got into knowing about this because you might question how I'm an expert in this even though my background doesn't show up. Five slides in, I don't know if you've made any money I don't know if this thing's even live I have no idea how many signups like you're busy telling me your backstory and it feels like you know back in Sicily in 1922 kind of you know a story right so revenue Traction whatever it is the other thing and I just you know jumped into showing revenue and immediately people listening are like what if I don't have revenue yet right there's too many templates too many shortcuts people are not good at figuring out the interestingness of their own story and here's the way I think of it You basically have team, market, and traction. I'm not going to say product because VCs are actually really bad at figuring out product, right? So they'll tell you like, oh, I have this thing and it's a box and it's blue. And it's like, I guess that I'm not, I don't need boxes. So I don't know whether or not that's the right kind of box for this customer. But traction is a proxy for product. I wouldn't have used that, but I guess people are buying that, right? I guess people are engaging. you have 10 design partners that's crazy like why are people even engaging with you on this at this stage this must be a real problem right usually at the sort of pre-seed and even the seed stage you kind of have two out of the three like you're very rarely going to have all three and so your particular narrative might be team and market like we've assembled this incredibly Like experienced group of people and we're going after this space that you definitely want to be a part of. Now we haven't actually done anything yet, but don't worry about that because this is the bet. You're going to want to make a bet on us in this space. Or we're awesome and this is a train leaving the station. Forget about what you've heard about this space and everything that everybody's told you that this space sucks. The lead of this conversation is the two out of the three, team and market. Or This is an amazing market and the train's leaving the station. Yeah, we're a bunch of nobodies, but that doesn't matter, right? Because we've got this two out of the three, the lead. And so you need to craft your narrative so that the most impressive, the most important stuff is up front.
Brian Bell (00:43:47): And everything else is kind of played down and you keep that energy level,
Charlie O’Donnell (00:43:50): you keep that excitement. And you need to spend most of that money talking and most of that meeting talking about the upside. And this is where a lot of people get tripped up because you may have seen the Harvard Business Review study that women get different questions. They get the downside focus questions. We've all seen that, right? And they say, well, how do I even get around that if they're asking me bad questions? Have you ever seen a politician speak in an interview? Do they ever answer the question that they were asked? They have their talking points. I'm so glad you asked me about jobs and the economy because what it really comes down to is making sure that That's why my crime bill is what the fuck just happened? We were trying to make it an economic conversation. We immediately pivoted to putting more cops on the street, right? Because if you can't get to work, if you get mugged on the way to work, then you're not going to be able, the economy is not going to be able to function, right? So you need to make sure that you spend the bulk of the time in the meeting on the upside case, on the things that you wanted to talk about, on your message, regardless of what questions are happening in the meeting. Too often I see founders just let go of the reins and just let VCs control the meeting. And that doesn't work out.
Brian Bell (00:45:00): Yeah, I love that. And it's actually a really good example of kind of being in the room with a founder that is just a force where you're like, okay, this person has that executive presence. And I think part of being a good VC is being able to kind of flesh that out a little bit, right? Where you're like, okay, this person is going to, you know, climb mountains and tear down walls and cross rivers and they're going to get people to follow them, right? And that's a little bit of the, you know, the art of this business, I think, right? Because you can look at traction objectively, you can look at, you know, metrics and even the product, right? I'm a product guy, but a lot of products, I look at the product and, but really, it's kind of like, do you see this executive presence that's going to get, you know, operators and execs from other companies where they make, you know, two to three X what they'd make at the startup, at least in the short term, to join them and risk their livelihoods and careers to work on this crazy idea, right? So it's a little bit of that, you know, you might call that Steve Jobs kind of factor, right? Reality distortion field or
Charlie O’Donnell (00:45:57): All of those things, right? Because you're signaling, somebody's sitting there imagining like there's a killer CMO that we need to hire and we have no business hiring them. Can this person convince them to come and work for them, right? We need the New York Times to go use our payment platform and nobody there wants to switch anything out there, you know.
Brian Bell (00:46:19): Even though they're maybe the most cutting-edge digital media company,
Charlie O’Donnell (00:46:23): they're still a 200-year-old media company. How are you going to do that? And if you come in and you let VCs run the meeting, then they're not going to imagine that you're going to do those kind of impossible things that it takes to get two people up to an IT.
Brian Bell (00:46:40): So take control of the meeting. Be that annoying executive that just commands the room, basically.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:46:46): I think there's ways to do it without being obnoxious I think there's one of the things I talk about in the book is some structure right just a very polite useful structure hey I'm gonna spend the first five minutes just making sure we're fit and I'll tell you a little bit about the company and you tell me whether or not this is a good sweet spot for you or whether or not we're just gonna like stay in touch or whatever and then you go in you say well there's the people who've gotten excited about us Get excited about these three things, right? And it's A, B, and C. If I convinced you of those three things, do you think you'd be going back to your team and championing the team spending more time with us, right? Or is there something else? Like is there, you know, have you looked at this space and you think it's not three things, it's these three other things? You let me know what you're looking for in this space. cool and then at the end of the meeting you circle back hey I tried to convince you of these three things this is what we spent our time doing you opted into it in the beginning of the meeting right this meeting had some structure do you think I did a good job here right like so it doesn't have to be a rudeness or overbearing it could just be a structured like you've bought into a certain dynamic of an exchange here and so I created spaces for you to ask certain questions about what I was trying to convince you of and guided the nature of the conversation it was a polite back and forth exchange and I think you can listen anybody who has a sales training background these conversations are Structure, they're intended to get information back from each person, right? And done well, it feels like I'm along for the ride, but I'm not handcuffed, right? Like I'm not, I've been kidnapped into this. I've been gently guided into an exchange that makes sense and feels productive. That's great.
Brian Bell (00:48:38): Well, for any founders listening, you should definitely go read that book. And, you know, I always, you know, know it's a great conversation when we can't even get through the outline. Like there's just so many questions. I tend to be a little I'm like there's just no way we're gonna run out of time so why don't we we'll probably have to have you back on at some point and we'll we'll talk more because has been really informative I think especially for founders listening it's just there's just so much you know in 20 years in the industry that you have all I appreciate that, thank you Let's wrap up with some rapid fire questions If you had to build your fund one company from the last decade that you passed on with your own money today, who and what did you miss and what would you wish you had invested in?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:49:30): So wait, sorry, if I had to redo my fun one with perfect knowledge, I mean, that's an easy one. I did a really good job generating top of funnel and I wish I would have had AI help me process the funnel and identify the higher potential stuff because email is just really tough to manage. And so I have an email from the founders at Plaid that is Hey, we really love your newsletter. We'd love to come and talk to you. And I responded back to them. I used to have this like meeting request tool. So you could like, you know, sort of like before Calendly. So they requested a meeting like tomorrow, but I didn't get it until like right after the meeting. I was like sorry to miss this actually I'm doing an entrepreneur gathering for lunch this Friday like you should join me right and like they didn't catch that response and I didn't follow up and that was it and so like who knows if I would have invested in Plaid or whatever but like the funnel did its job like I got an inbound from Zach that was like love reading your stuff would love to share and then it just kind of fell through the cracks
Brian Bell (00:50:42): I think the network side of it, the fact that if you have five venture-backed friends, you are at a huge advantage. Take a look at my deck, how do I not screw up this co-founder hire?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:51:07): What am I looking for in a VP of sales? The experiential knowledge of being successful on the startup side is not evenly distributed. There are some founders who are not in the center of those networks that will have to spend 10x the amount of time building those relationships versus other people who just lucked into them or privileged into them or schooled into them or whatever. but those people are just better founders because they have that on tap and it's not fair but VCs are just trying to find the best founders and the best founders are the folks that have these networks frankly and so you know you need to double down on making sure you're connected to everybody you need to be connected to yeah
Brian Bell (00:51:51): that's smart so Steelman the founder friendly era you partly wrote against what did Brad Feld and his generation get right that your book undersells
Charlie O’Donnell (00:51:59): what did brad felt and his generation get right that the book undersells i never really thought about it that way i mean when i think of what brad got right is i think what brad gets right is just being a good person in in venture she's like brad's just a really good guy right yeah And there are a lot of people in venture that I would say are not good people. And I would like to believe that success disproportionately rewards good people. I do not think that is the case. However, I think happiness does reward good people. I think it's really hard to be an extractor of value, to be somebody who is dismissive of people not like them, to be constantly on the attack, to be constantly in negative conversations with people people in, you know, a reductionist of people and to ultimately be happy and maintain real friendships and, you know, all of that sort of stuff. So you can be rich and unhappy or you could be rich and happy if you're a good person. So I think I'd rather be slightly less wealthy or not wealthy at all and be happy and a good person.
Brian Bell (00:53:22): Yeah. And it's not always a black and white decision either. You can be rich and happy.
Charlie O’Donnell (00:53:27): I always say that when I think of levels of wealth the way I look at it is one level of wealth is living exactly where I want to live in the kind of apartment that I want to live in and we're like we could use an extra room but that's about it like we're pretty close right and then the level that counts for me above that is majority ownership in a major league baseball team and like I'm not going to get there I don't know what's in between there to be honest I suppose I could buy art but like that's if I yeah if I can't buy the meds from Steve Cohen then I'm fine with
Brian Bell (00:54:02): the amount of money I'm fine flying first class I don't need to fly private you know right that's like my level of wealth is just that's fine that's good for as a poor boy from Seattle that's that's good enough for me there you go what's a sentence or a message you'd love to send to your 2012 version of yourself just launching Brooklyn Bridge BC knowing how it ends now what message would you send back to yourself
Charlie O’Donnell (00:54:23): Don't be dismissive of what you had at first round and because when I was at first round capital and I went to go pitch the number one LP question was that like your track record is this just Josh Koppelman's leftovers or like can you still get good deals not being at first round and I very much think Yeah, yeah and I should have internalized some of the things that I had and say, well, you know, obviously this is different, but, you know, here's the way I am leveraging my own version of what I had before. And so I think like since that time and generally speaking, I try not to be dismissive of constructive criticism.
Brian Bell (00:55:24): Yeah. What's a belief about VC that you held dearly but have now reversed or changed your mind on or vice versa, something that you didn't believe but you now believe?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:55:35): this is an easy one actually about 50% of the companies that I backed did not have product when I first wrote the check and I used to think and it was actually true that there was a price arbitrage that was worth it at the time where there were some complex things where you could get in on the cheap for a good team that you had absolutely certain absolute certainty would get to product right now whether it would scale or whether people want to buy it would be a whole other thing but just like having product I think people disproportionately paid for it in a pre-AI era. I don't think that's not the case anymore. The bar for product is so much lower that somebody who has nothing is now adverse selection in the way that they were not five or ten years.
Brian Bell (00:56:20): Unless it's like deep tech or something like that. But yeah, if this is a software product, you should have something. Yeah, before you're pitching VCs for sure. Well, I really enjoyed the conversation. I could have talked to you for another hour at least. Where could folks find you online and find your book and stuff?
Charlie O’Donnell (00:56:33): So the book is wherever books are sold in whatever format people buy them although we don't have an audiobook yet and I am actively trying to get my publisher Are you
Brian Bell (00:56:42): going to read it yourself or are you going to hire...
Charlie O’Donnell (00:56:44): I would very much like to and we are going to trial some professional readers and I'm sure they're very good but I would very much like to do it myself so we'll see and all of my I continue to write I mean I've been writing my newsletter slash blog since February of 2004 at thisisgoingtobig.com and so I will continue to do that it's actually very hard for me to just send a version of the book out where I can't change it right somebody's a regular newsletter writer that's very uncomfortable yeah so I subscribe to me there I may contradict things that are in the book and I'd be totally fine with doing that because the world keeps changing but that's a good place to find me and my writing and what I'm well thanks so much Charlie really
Brian Bell (00:57:29): Enjoyed it thank you
