Backing a founder's will through near collapse to unicorn

You can't go back and change the past. mean, we had Mike Maples from floodgate in our class recently. He was talking about passing on an opportunity and, ⁓ you know, I related to that experience because you never forget those experience. are like, they are like scars on your, on your forearm that you can look at and remember. But what it does is it tells you to, in this case, Not just assume that when you're investing in an early stage company, that that idea is fully formed. may change and modify itself and evolve and grow and transmute into something completely different. And that, and again, that's what happened with cursor, but you know, there are other companies I've, I've made different mistakes with, in the case of cursor, like I just knew that group over the course of four years. And they never got real big backing here in Boston, but when they went to California, they connected with a lot of people and that's where the company really took off. so it's one, one big learning. And if you, if you get too hung up on the things you didn't do right, you're going to miss what's right in front of you. And what's right in front of you is something new and different. It's like, it's like a meditation that you have to. Acknowledge, learn from, and then come back to your center.

I actually like that. Then how about the sort of engagements you had or investments you had? The outcome was successful, but your reasoning was actually not quite, how we say, spot on, but still, name it intuition, name it gut feeling, and you nevertheless went for it. Do you have anything similar to that scenario?

in terms of successful outcomes and

Yeah, it turned out to be a successful outcome. when you reconsider your reasoning back then, when you did the decision, actually that was not so accurate. But call it that feeling, call it intuition. Something made you commit to it.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, this is a great question also because back around 2015, 2016, I had the pleasure of having my first experience at Harvard Business School. I was just volunteering time at that point. And when my of my Student groups graduated. was Edomar Zur and, Matt Graham and they were two great students and they started a company called VHOP, which was last mile delivery. And, ⁓ along the journey back then, you know, Uber was around and Lyft was around. And, ⁓ my colleague, Randy said, you know, doesn't Uber do last mile delivery and, Edomar who is the CEO of the company said yes. And. He said, but we'll do it better. He's like, he's got a good ego. And then, ⁓ and then, ⁓ and then he said, well, how are you going to proceed and how are you going to compete? And he said, I'm going to, I am going to do a thousand deliveries and learn how this business works. And he's like, and you've got an incredible will. And he actually, that was, that was it. I mean, his idea was. Conceptually good. but it was really a chance to invest in support. And over the course of months, there were one of his co-founder and he moved on. And so itamar was still building and brought on another co-founder and then he left. And then there was a, you know, a period of time where there was a lot of other stuff going on running out of money. you know, the, every single thing, including the kitchen sink was thrown at itamar and Eda.