The cold email and MFN SAFE that won Beyond Reach Labs

who first pointed them out to us. was somebody in our network pointed out that this company existed and that they were going to be going into Y Combinator. I remember I started to become aware of it around around the time that they were just entering Y Combinator. I don't remember who it was. Maybe Dan Chapman would be the better person to answer that question because he fielded the initial Intel there. But once we were aware of them, it was just from a tip, I guess.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

The first thing we did is we looked at their materials. We looked at their Y Combinator launch page. I remember seeing, okay, here's their background. And ⁓ it took all of... 30 minutes of discussion internally to agree that we wanted to underwrite these guys, as long as they checked out as people, you know, like when we talked to them. So we had a small, yeah, you have to still talk to people. can't get over that part of it. There's human factors, right? We had a small discussion internally. Yeah, that's one of the core factors. We reached out to them cold. Dan Chapman just sent them an email cold being like, you don't know me. I certainly wanna invest in you.

I was just gonna say, yeah, yeah. Core factor. Yeah.

Here's the reason why, like the little blurb about all that stuff I just talked about, about, we think you're great for X, Y, and Z reasons.

Hahaha! It's like, or when diagrams are intersecting with each other over these years and what you're doing.

Yeah, exactly. You got it. You got it. He reached out to them cold and he was like, I know you're not supposed to take investment right now because it's the early days of Y Combinator and that's part of the program as everybody knows. But we just want to cut a check into, we don't care about the deal terms. We don't care about valuation. We'll do it most favored nations safe. Just take our money basically. And they sent us back a note, they sent us back a note, and I remember seeing it where they were like, we don't want to talk price with anybody. There's tons of VCs coming after us. We don't need your money. But if you're really serious about willing to do it on an uncapped safe, of course we'll take your money.

But what a great way to show that you have your conviction. How else are you gonna also signal that, right?

That's exactly it. That's exactly we've done that with other plays as well. So Aero Volta, which is one I can talk about in a bit. We did the exact same thing there with Marguerite. She's one of the best founders in the world. She's like just an insane person. And I knew from like five minutes after meeting her that we wanted to give her a check. So was just like, listen, you just take our money. We don't care about valuation. We know you're going to win. And again, when you when you do that, if you have reasons to know that you're right beyond just like

Hmm. Mm.