Episode #20 – George Hoyem, In-Q-Tel, venture capital arm of the U.S. Intelligence Community

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to fireside with vc my name is andrew romans and i'm excited to have george hoyem whom i've known for many years um on the podcast george is a managing partner of inquitel which is the strategic venture capital arm of the u.s intelligence community i actually first came into contact with inquitel when i was an entrepreneur in washington dc northern virginia in the mid to late 90s and people said it was the cia fund but i believe that this has evolved quite a bit so george welcome to the podcast and thanks for making time thanks andrew i appreciate you inviting me on it's gonna be fun yeah i mean ten and a half years too that flew by awfully fast you've been i didn't realize you've been there for so long it seems like uh it hasn't been that long but you know i'd love it if you could just explain what inquitel is how it came into being and how it's evolved and maybe a bit of of uh what its purpose is sure so inkytel the original idea was pretty simple it was you know back in the 2000 the dot-com era actually the the george tenet who was running the cia and a group of other people had seen innovation previously coming out of places like xerox park and raytheon and systems integrators and then when the dot com era occurred they realized oh there's 18 000 venture capital back startups that's where the innovation's occurring is in the commercial companies markets and we're missing out on all that stuff the last place in the world of startup's going to go is knock on the door of the cia and so they have the insight to say hey let's create an entity or a company that is populated by you know people like myself career venture capitalists and others so that we can reach into the startup community and pick out you know emerging technologies way in advance of when they would be visible to the government and then guide those technologies into problems of national intelligence and so we've evolved from that point to support now uh eight intelligence directorates but the idea was pretty simple and the goal is to guide those technologies and run pilots that scale against real problems and so incutel was formed in 1999 and it's it we're actually a non-profit we're a 501c3 we're a distinct and separate entity we're not part of the government and we have our own board of directors we call them a board of trustees who george tenet now is is actually on our board and we we get our authorities through a contract with our executive sponsor which is the cia so we've evolved way beyond just the cia and we now support these other directorates you know nsa fbi etc and we are doing 50 to 60 investments a year so we're probably one of the most active strategic investors in the world and we service both the intelligence but also the national security infrastructure in the united states and and isn't the pentagon one of the parties that you're supporting is that right well the pentagon is dod and they have these things called the combatant commands which is army navy air force marines so if you think about we don't do a lot of you know like 95 of the companies we back have never done business with the federal government so we're taking commercial startups and showing them a dual use into the government so um you know we don't do as much with the pentagon or the pentagon associated groups as we do with the intelligence agencies but we do have relationships with some of the commands in the pentagon in certain pockets but uh you know you you have to do the intersection of where venture capital investing is occurring where the interests are so if somebody came to us and said hey we want to you go find a better material for stealth bombers well guess what there's no venture capital investing in that area right so it's more uh where vc uh investments overlap with uh with the intelligence and government so mostly it's intelligence and national security right and you guys are a unique form of really corporate venture capital where the classic cbc corporate venture capital group is looking for strategic returns that are gonna you know bring new revenue streams or lower costs or optimize the existing business and evolving business and get external innovation and bring it in internally you guys have some pretty clear um lps you know and i think you call them stakeholders um you know so i'm kind of curious to know do you guys like a lot of cbc's intel capital would typically have this off-site once a year come up with the four major categories of investment themes for the year and then kind of try to be big and present in those categories do you guys have you know a very clear framework or is it just super broad yeah so we are a strategic investor and we invest for mission impact uh we we often back really commercially successful companies because the best impact you can have is investing in killer technology that becomes very successful and uh and drive that into problems of national intelligence so um we start with the workflow of what we do starts not not not dissimilar from a corporate investor or more strategic but uh we start with what we call problem sets so every one of the agencies we serve has a thing called an incutel interface center and this is you know uh 1 to 30 people on the payroll of the agencies we serve think of them almost like p l's inside of a gigantic corporation and these util interface centers form the basis of the connective tissue back into these agencies and they start with problem sets and so they give us problems that say hey in a perfect world if you could find me a company to solve x y or z problem uh that would be great and those problem sets get issued to us once a year and then we map those problem sets into where the venture capital investing is occurring and that gives us you know what i'll call a partial shopping list of where we should go to solve problems we don't do deals until we get someone inside the agencies we serve to commit to piloting capability at scale against a real problem so we have very strong signal from our stakeholders about what problems they're trying or they want us to pursue and then we go off to implement those deals and we also are looking over the horizon a lot of the other things we do are what we call situational awareness activities where we see things breaking in the venture capital community that the intelligence community or our stakeholders have never seen before so we'll go back to them say hey i know you're looking at this problem this way but there's this new capability whether it be you know an accelerated gpu engine or artificial intelligence being applied to a particular problem or et cetera and then we will inform them of these new ideas and do deals that are maybe not on their list because they hadn't anticipated these breakthrough technologies that could help them with their problems or at large so with with some cbc's like we were talking about motorola ventures you know in its oldest oldest form moto to make sure something was strategic you'd actually have to sign a commercial agreement between the startup and motorola before an investment could get green lighted in money wired so they were famously investing in the next round after the one that they were originally looking at because they were slow on the other end of the continuum some cvcs corporate investors um will invest in the company and be fast and then attempt to get a bu business unit to do business and their hit rate is you know maybe below 50 percent um you know so these are kind of the two you know extreme ways you can go with you guys are you requiring like a pilot and you know a green light from some part of your stakeholder community in every single case or are you investing and hoping to get something on yeah so we have two kinds of investments we do the first kind is an equity-only investment we call them seed deals and they're not necessarily seed stage but they're small you know kind of zero to a million dollar kind of investments and they're usually at series c day or b and they're in companies where we want to get a foot in the door maybe it's something that's accelerating very fast or maybe it's in front of our stakeholders ability to fully understand it so we get involved about maybe a third of our deals a year are these equity-only deals and the very high percentage of those turn into the next type that i'll talk about which is what we call a work program deal so the work program deals which is the kind of two-thirds of what we do these are deals where we bake in an adaptation project because if you think about a young startup who's never seen the government or even talked to him and their vcs are probably saying stay away from the government you'll be dead by the time you sell them something so we come in and guide them in like a rifle shot into a specific you know opportunity but they probably don't have the right features needed to run you know software on a classified network or to have you know a language that's needed or access control for a cloud infrastructure so we will help them prioritize their features from their roadmap and to give them nre dollars non-recurring engineering dollars to help them prioritize and fund those activities so the pilot that they run against this real problem has the right feature set and so our deals typically take half of the cash we give them which could be one to three one to four million dollars half shows up as generally nre that funds the pilot and these features they need and all the support to make that happen and the other half shows up as equity and so that you know is done when we get a commitment from the end user to pilot against real problems so 70 of our investments get piloted against real problems in the agencies we serve and about half of them get adopted which means the company and the customer conduct business directly and so that's basically our batting average at this point okay okay excellent and i you know when you talk to a typical ceo of a large corporation with the cbc and you say what's more important your strategic or financial he's all about strategic doesn't care about financial the cfo doesn't care about strategic and only cares about you know financial for you guys i think of you as being strategic but i think you got into palantir very early and volunteer probably wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for for inquitel how early did you invest in valentier um well yeah palantir was a was a seed investment we were in the first round the series a round and we did help them understand the use cases uh you know of our customer base which resulted in you know them becoming a very successful company but they did ask us hey can you introduce us to some real people doing this work we want to understand their use cases and their and how to satisfy their problem but we we do get involved very early but i always say to people nobody does anything strategic unless your company is highly successful because if you invest in a company that's marginal and it goes out of business you're wasting everybody's time yeah so it is the venn diagram we are a strategic investor so we occasionally do things that are commercially viable but not venture backable and so we have to convince ourselves that it's a it's a viable business that's going to thrive and grow so it can satisfy the requirements of our of our partners but we have you know acute success with you know large companies that are successful because we draft their success in the government we're not building anything that's a one-off for the government we want to leverage their commercial success and draft that and put it to a dual use inside government use cases but yeah so we we do things that are you know not commercially viable but are excuse me commercially viable but not venture backable uh but you want to back successful companies either way so you know we have a good reputation of having real low mortality in our portfolio and really backing some layers a great quote that is a spot on this topic is les is the founder of intel capital he was actually a junior co-founder of intel itself so he had you know the power to not get cancelled and he's got a great quote that says there's nothing strategic about investing in a company that goes bankrupt and indeed um you know i mean i mean this is true i mean it's a dead body what it's what's it going to do for anybody you know at that point um not bad to keep not getting canceled um well well great well what are you what um geography do you invest in i mean i mean you kind of answer the question on stage it's a multi-stage fund but um typically how late are you investing um us is a pretty easy place to focus but what's your investment strategy outside the united states yeah so just from stage we're typically seed a and b because you know we write these checks you know zero to four million dollars and in a later stage company that kind of cash and help is not going to you know move the needle it's going to be more of a distraction so we like to get involved early where we can have an impact in the company's roadmap and really make an outsized impact on their ability to succeed in terms of geographies you know we're primarily north american focused we have offices in boston our headquarters is in arlington virginia and then uh the west coast office out here in california is maybe half of our investment team we also recently opened up offices in sydney australia and london in the uk and those offices do international investments in both the asian sector and the european sector and uh we've had a very successful you know launch of that program because the venture capital world today is global it's not about you know silicon valley and it's not about just the us there's innovation happening all over the world and we have a very comprehensive view of that now with those international offices and what is what is the i mean i would imagine whatever your headcount is you've got access to all these experts you know throughout the web of all of your stakeholders that enables you to research and run things up the flagpole domain expertise but what what's total headcount of people that are full fully dedicated in contell you know we're about 170 people right now uh you know there's we have a very deep technical bench of subject matter experts uh you know phd style experts you know whether it be artificial intelligence or batteries or material science et cetera we do some biology stuff too we have a investment teams probably 20 people the investment team has a tendency to be a little bit more generalist and you know some some geographic focus and relationship driven but our special subject matter specialists are really deep in various domains and they uh they affiliate very closely with our customers so not only are we getting domain experts that are on staff that we can rely on but we're also validating ideas and companies against our customer use cases and having them talk to them directly so that's why i think our portfolio is such high quality because by that cross-validation we're really really good at picking winners you know in any category whether it be cyber security or you know there's no sequel or ai things happening today there's probably 5 or 10 or 15 companies in every single little niche trying to attack that problem and the trick is to pick the winner or the top one or two companies and we've got a pretty good batting average of doing that with these resources i think even if you don't pick the winner you get smart on a category and that business intelligence is reaching objectives anyway um obviously there's nothing strategic about investing in the company that doesn't make it or that's the winner but um you know that intelligence brings you know returns returns as well actually actually a good example of that is quantum computing um you know quantum computing there's various techniques whether it be trapped ion or what's called uh annealing or gate models and so in the case of quantum it's a it's an emerging area it's very early but the outsized potential is really large so we've actually invested in virtually every category of quantum computing to pick you know and understand deeply what's happening in those in those areas so that we can be smart about you know when that breaks out yeah but it's a pretty it's it's a big game-changing topic without any question on on international stuff too you're you're on the board of directors you're still on the board of the national venture capital association right right and um you guys have been i believe instrumental in monitoring how cyphious works so if a company wants to even have an export license to places like japan and china i had lunch with um the ceo and chair and that like half the board of um silicon catalyst and they were saying we were talking about licensing things to china and setting up joint ventures and they were saying that one of their portfolio companies was blocked from an export license just to japan um i'm curious to hear even even explain what is happening with cyphus at a licensing level at a customer cell 2 level as well as taking capital into a fund from mainland china or onto the cap table of a startup and and uh you know geopolitics are crazy right now yeah right so um what i can say is you know uh in my nbca role you know we i we we kind of rep i kind of represent the strategic or the corporate venture arm of our industry and so we're trying to represent to the nbca and the activities that they do you know sort of that perspective of the corporate strategic uh part of our industry that being said cyphus and firma which was a legislation passed last year and some things that are happening around you know itar which is related to export restrictions is really changing the landscape of you know foreign ownership and control and it's become you know very complicated so one thing we like to is not only understand what these rules are so that we can help our companies navigate those waters but also try and you know educate uh stakeholders on unintended consequences of of these these legislative items so um you know the companies you know who secure capital from various parts of the world the syphilis regime has now got a more constraining overlay about where capital sourced from and what's being allowed what in what processes the government's running to make sure that the capital is coming from the right places without the right control mech or with the right control mechanisms particularly as relates to strategic technology areas so you know it's it's a complicated canvas and one of the reasons we like to be involved with nbc is to really deeply understand how those legislative items are breaking and then educate our portfolio companies and other investors on how to navigate those and continue to do business with the government and service the intelligence community without being blocked out of it or making mistakes and where they source capital from around the world and if a company say were to sell 10 percent of their share capital to a chinese vc fund that's not necessarily a state-owned enterprise soe would that what would the consequences of that be if any well i don't think they people specify percentage ownerships against particular countries but the treasury department and dod run a process where companies are questioning what the impact of that would be they can do filing with them and get you know them to opine on the implications of their technology against various capital sources so the good news is that the these these agencies they're not trying to they're not trying to get in the way of capital formation startup innovation and you know global being a global competitive you know canvas for us-backed companies they want to you know um be in the flow of unintended consequences from capital sources so i can't really opine on various capital directions and what the government would say but i can say that there are great processes they're pretty quick actually where companies can submit you know and and and ask for clarification around moves that they want to make whether it be sourcing capital or working with various countries and capital sources so the good news is the government's trying to pay attention and stop unintended consequences from happening so that's good and when you say fast you know i i jokingly say that when uh a corporate tells you what month you forgot to ask what year how fast how fast how fast is fast um you know i've seen them respond to requests in you know 30 days or less and they want to be responsive so um you know there are various parts of the treasury in dod that are that have pretty big staff associated with trying to make sure there's you know that we're taking the friction out of the system and they they really don't want startups to come into constraints on raising capital or sourcing capital from around the world and what is firma what is the firmware legislation what is that what is that about firma was a recent uh and i'll google this while we're talking uh so i get the acronym right um firmware was legislation it was part of syphius but it was a newly passed law [Music] that let me see if i can look this up you know i don't have the acronym in front of me but it was it was an enhanced part of syphilis of the syphilis regime so uh in fact the the national venture capital association website has some excellent content that's available to anybody uh on firma and syphilis and what recent laws were passed um you know to to sort of clarify foreign ownership and control items uh for the startup community and so this was a regime that was passed last year and had pretty far-reaching implications for you know where capital is being sourced so it's good thing to pay attention to but the nvca website has excellent resources that can help explain all this stuff and guide them to the right places okay i'll look at i'll look it up right by you and i can put put it in the show notes so people can click to it if they're listening to this or or reviewing this um what's your experience i mean you've been at this for 10 and a half years now 170 people one of the most active investors in the world some i mean if you think of a vietnam protester in the 70s wanting to take money from richard nixon or not some of these founders are these steve jobs steve jobs contrarian alternative people that are not trying to get along with everybody but they're disrupting a lot of stuff i would think that for some startups there's nothing they'd rather say than my god i've got the intelligence community of this country backing what we're doing and we're making a difference and there's going to be other ones that say i would love to have access to you guys and channel us through government and point you know give us non-reoccurring revenue and all that but do you sometimes keep it um top secret that you're investing into the company or is it uh you know it is how does that work yeah so that inqtel doesn't do anything that's top secret so just you know we're open company we do things that are confidential like any strategic or corporate or even vc for that matter um so nothing we do is really top secret uh now we so want to address the like the national defense infrastructure and security and um an intelligence community you know there there are pockets of people who who who you see who who uh resist or are not super excited about you know working with that part of our government but to be honest with you you know we do almost we don't do a lot of consumer facing tech but but the vast majority of companies and venture capitals that we work with are really excited to work with inquitel and our government customers to be honest with the government and the agencies we serve are gigantic customers and uh you know startups want to survive and thrive and be successful and so we find very little uh resistance to working with us surprisingly despite you know some of the press that's out there and we find people being very patriotic about supporting both the government and the us intelligence community and the national security infrastructure that we serve so um you know despite some of the rhetoric that's out there we can get into almost any deal we want if there's a fit because of the value we had in terms of cracking up in these markets um so we don't do you know we do you know i don't know some percentage of our investments are not announced per se i mean they're confidential um but that's not not any different than any corporate or strategic investor or venture capitalists for that matter but it's not like it's a secret and you know working with a company like palantir it's you know very obvious and plain of how you would guide them to different stakeholders how far into the government is your reach i mean the government drives a lot of what's happening in the united states and around the world um like what's an example of reaching outside of the classic stakeholder that we would see um or does that happen um well i mean we're we're really partners with the government we're you know in many cases almost an extension of their organizations and very much a trusted partner and we've earned that trust over 20 years of delivering to them you know great innovation so you know deep is no i mean i would just say we're we're aware to fit we're we're welcomed with open arms we have very frank and candid and open discussions with our government partners to solve their problems and you know it's really all about creating efficiencies and sourcing innovation and making government faster better cheaper and you know the people in the government you know are very very motivated to to do that and we're finding more and more you know commercial solutions versus something built by systems integrator at 10 or 20 or 50 times the cost of something you could get from the startup community but the trick is to guide it in at the right point so you can influence the features to make it to make it work and we have you know many many examples of companies that have satisfied problems um you know for the government you know palantir is one you said which is obvious but other ones like that are public like cloudera which embedded on sql um we invested in a company recently called primer.ai which does sort of like think of as palantir for unstructured text they've done lots of business with the government uh we've invested in you know we did keyhole back in the day which was the basis of google earth uh and dialed that into the government uh in a very broad way it was very successful endeavor so you know you can look at our website and see the companies that we invest in and you know we often deliver you know after we get done with with uh our development project the company can be doing you know seven sometimes eight figure transactions with the government not too long after you know we get done with our part so that's where it works it doesn't always work as i said but um there's a long history of helping them out and the more success we have with helping the government the more they'll bring us in and trust us so it's a it's a bit of a flywheel that's been going and it has you know we've adjusted things along the way but having been at this for 20 years we've invested in over 500 companies in life in the life of our organization so that's a that's a good experience base and you already talked about this a bit but i just want to formally ask um because i find it interesting with every corporate investor or strategic investor how does the ic work how is your investment committee structured is it 100 you guys or do you have folks that are not you know uh you know you know in in contel yeah great question yeah so again we start with these problem sets and like you know where we should go solve a problem and then when we get the first step of that journey is when we get one that we think we want to invest in the partner of ours inside the agency we serve commits to piloting this this capability and they give us a thing we call a value statement which is a description of hey if this works here's the potential impact it will have because in the corporate and strategic area you want to quantify your impact both qualitative and quantitatively so our highest order goal is pilots and adoptions of critical technology and so we cause them to give us this value statement which is a little bit of a dog it's not like a contract but it's a commitment you know like hey if you do this we'll commit to piloting against a real problem and here's the potential impact it will have so that's the first step and then we go to work and do all our classic diligence and you know research that any venture capitalists would do to make sure we're investing in the right companies and then we catalyze that in a document we call a partner's document that we bring forward to a committee of both our executive staff at inquitel and our partners that we invest with so each partner has a certain amount of money they can and want to spend every year and so they get to prioritize what they do but in this partner and by the way we often have deals where one two i'm doing something right now or we may have seven agencies working on the same project and imagine the leverage you get where they're all putting money towards something and sharing in the outcome so we take that forward to this thing called a partner committee and then they approve it so they're in the they're in the room they have a voice they get to pick what we do going forward and then the last step of our approval process is uh you know from our board of trustees or directors is a committee called the investment committee that's a group of our board members and they approve every deal and so that and then we you know of course consummated that's how it works though you know i tell people some i've had some of my own portfolio companies say oh i don't want to talk to that cbc because it'll take forever and i say hey i'd rather send you in there at no cost and the cbc who we know will navigate you through a complete labyrinth maze and run it right to the correct bu and the right person so i think it's great for startups to take these meetings even if they're not expecting a super fast check if they're interested in selling into that organization and getting a partnership so yeah figure out the us government from the outside is pretty intimidating or could you could burn a lot of venture capital dollars and get diluted and lift your liquidation stack or you could you know have somebody meet talk to you right so that's exactly right in fact most vcs will tell their companies as i said earlier don't even bother with the government you'll be dead by the time you sell them something so with us you know we do these deals and we guide them in we have we also have program management staff on our on our payroll and so we programmatically guide them through training design reviews deliveries of pilots and then they don't have to hire any federal people they don't need any clearances they don't even need cleared people until they feel the pull from the other side like if they're seeing the government really leaning in and lighting up over the solution they're delivering and saying yeah we really think this is going to solve our problem then the board and the company can make the decision to invest in a couple of federal people perhaps hire people with clearances and work on you know that part of the equation and then provision a federal channel but only after they feel the pull from the other side and that could be you know a year into the entire transaction so you're right it's a very cost effective way to penetrate the government and then that becomes a lighthouse account or a lighthouse you know success that they can use to amplify and sort of leverage into other parts of the government what is your policy on leading investments and board seats so we always take board observer seats in every deal we do we don't take full formal board seats to so we want to be in the board room we want to be at the table help them guide them understand what's going on problems and opportunities um and so we we always take board observer seats we we can lead deals we have led deals i mean our capital size is you know the earlier we go the perhaps the more influence we have in that but there's no restrictions we have from leading deals but we we don't write as big a checks as uh in some vc's so most of the time we're co-investing with other syndicate partners we've virtually co-invested with everybody in silicon valley at one point or another but we we can leave have lead but we don't need that often and i could probably make some wagering answers to this question but i've always wanted to know and for those of you that are just listening to this the spelling of inquitel is capital i lowercase n dash q dash capital t e l in q tell obviously it's a unique organization but so is the name where in the world did you get that what does it mean well the guy who stood up being could tell you i'm not sure if i know the full lore but it was a fella named gilman louie who was a real character and uh you know in inkytel is sort of a spoof on cue you know the james bond q and if you take intelligence is a word and you put q in the middle of it that's in q tell so that's the story i've heard so it's sort of a school fun on cue the you know the character from the james bond movie which is there is actually uh in the cia there's a science and technology group and there's a person who needs that we we joke that that person is uh is our cue but uh yeah well you know q is sort of the sandbox venture capitalist coming up with the latest magic dart throwing watch pen whatever that's hilarious that's hilarious yeah and you know uh when something works in one place it starts to pop up another do you have counterparts is there an incutail of the uk is there an incutel of in some way half of china is in kutel but you know do you see similar intelligence go yeah oh yeah there's there's a lot of uh so as relates to the united states there are um organizations who are out in silicon valley in places like this attempting to they're a different part of the equation than incutable we're a really unique thing and the fact that we got created at all and the the the legislative rules that made that happen and the people that had the insights to create us with the right authorities is really an amazing uh tribute to creativity and a successful government public private partnership um there's a group called diu defense innovation unit which is sort of rapid procurement for the dod and they're kind of out here and they partner with us on a lot of stuff various other agencies have initiatives but there is nothing like inquitel and and by the way we don't like we don't compensate our people on you know the upside of a win we compensate our people you know like a corporate vc and uh you know we we pay them for pilots and adoptions and the other mission impacts we have so we're not getting rich on the backs of the of the taxpayer payers uh we're paid very well but but we have a great alignment whereas some initiatives that have been attempted beforehand have not had that balance of alignment so we're the only thing of its type that exists in the united states i believe israel has something similar but i'm not aware of any other government that has done an inquite yet it wouldn't surprise me if some people figured out but it's a very i mean we've had really uh outsized impact for our for the amount of money that we spend relative to other things the government does uh you know you get a lot of bang for the buck in fact we say for every dollar we put into an investment we leverage 18 venture capital and we like to remind our legislators that's a pretty good value yeah yeah that makes sense i mean look for for all the same reasons corporate should do this my god if you just look at the military budget and all these other budgets um to not be doing it would even would honestly be tragic um on savings ways to cheat you know goals and all that um one of the questions i had was i don't think you you know wall street guys will walk across the street for one basis point higher salary if they worship gold as their main religious uh thing that attracts them um what drives you i mean uh you know you must feel like a patriot what what what do you wake up in the morning to get done every day yeah and like when i came here chris darby who's our ceo and steve bauscher who's our number two evp talked me into coming here 10 years ago and i never thought i would be here this long to your earlier point but you know when i come in and what i do you know there's very few places in the world where you can make an impact like we have and i've seen acute impact against you know both national security initiatives and you know the the agencies we serve so you know to get up in the morning and be able to actually do something as an individual with a team of people to to make an impact in the world it's a it's hard to find those places so the people that are here again we pay them very well but they're they're not getting rich and there are it there are people who come here for a tour of duty per se and spend three four five years and then go off and join a venture capital firm or maybe get rich at a startup or all that stuff but the people that are here have some affiliation or um you know commitment to the mission that we serve which is to serve the us government the intelligence and our national security infrastructure so when you get inside the umbrella and you see the things that we do it makes you really proud and they get you up in the morning because you really make an impact so people that are here aren't just motivated by money they're motivated by the mission sure well george thank you so much for coming on i think it's a great topic i will put the firma insipious links in in the show notes and um i want to offline talk to you about a few other transactions that i think would be amazing to leverage you guys on and indeed thanks so much have a great week yeah and thank you for allowing us to share part of our story and hope to see you again in the real world very soon all right thank you okay thanks george you