0:00:00 - (Ashok Kamal): I think the best deals have become more competitive than ever to get allocations. Days of sitting back and going through a multi month process of review and selection and then, you know, due diligence. Those days are fading. If you want to get into the best and the most fast moving deals, it's relationships, it's process and it's money.

0:00:22 - (Andrew Kazlow): Welcome to the Diligent observer where we help angel investors see what most miss. I'm your host, Andrew, and every week we explore what works, what doesn't and why through conversations with experienced startup investors and operators. My guest today is Ashok Kamal, Executive director and co fund manager of New Fund venture Group, a 300 plus member investor community now running its ninth annual fund.

0:00:45 - (Andrew Kazlow): In this episode we take a hard look at the classic angel group model and how NewFund is innovating on that. Walk through their process for putting AI analysis to work on every single deal and break down how a group with no GPS still manages to move so fast. I hope you enjoy learning from Ashok as much as I did. Ashok, thank you for being with me today.

0:01:14 - (Ashok Kamal): Good to be here, Andrew.

0:01:16 - (Andrew Kazlow): Well, I would love to start with my classic first question which is what are you excited about?

0:01:21 - (Ashok Kamal): Right now I'm excited about the evolution of venture investing. If you think about the story arc going back to VCs in Silicon Valley and then the emergence of angel groups that sort of populated themselves in every city as clusters in this constellation of startup investors. And then when I kind of got into the business both as a founder and then gradually as an angel investor, the emergence of online investing through syndicates and accelerators that became global and now how things are both contracting and converging into new models. And entrepreneurship is all about new models. We often think about the disruptive entrepreneurs and startups, but the reality is the venture investing landscape is being disrupted and reconfigured like never before.

0:02:11 - (Ashok Kamal): And it's wonderful to be in the middle of it.

0:02:15 - (Andrew Kazlow): Well, you are obviously very much in the middle of it and New Fund has been everything I can tell, actively rethinking what, what the investor community of tomorrow looks like. I wonder if you could just walk me through a bit of your journey with New Fund and how you all are contributing to the evolution that you see in the venture ecosystem.

0:02:36 - (Ashok Kamal): Yeah, well, I'll walk you through a little bit. My journey, which shaped my perspective within New Fund and then coalesced with others perspective in the group has led to the New fund model that we are continuing to build and refine today. But my backgr as an Entrepreneur spans sort of the classic strategies from bootstrapping in a services business to raising money from an angel group and venture capitalists in, you know, multiple high growth technology startups, three of which did not do well, one of which did well and then eventually led me into doing some angel investing on my own, just trying to pay it forward and also put my experience and talent and a little bit of money since I'm not a big time angel investor myself. But, you know, over time I've done enough deals that I kind of know where the bodies are buried and I, you know, have some perspective. But my experience personally as an entrepreneur, you know, raising capital and, you know, building startups in a variety of of industries, then led me into a more organized discipline of investing. And then that was a group in San Diego when I moved here, where I am today, from the east coast back in 2016, and started both investing with this group in startups in San Diego, which was my complete focus at the time.

0:04:03 - (Ashok Kamal): And in this new model and paradigm and environment, where an angel group that had been around for 10 plus years was starting to feel the cracks both within the walls and in the ground, you know, happening just environmentally. And fortunately, the leadership at the group, which at the time was called Techos Angels San Diego, was prescient enough and motivated enough to say, let's look at the opportunities that are around us, not just be victimized by the challenges.

0:04:32 - (Ashok Kamal): And we reimagined what a investor could look like, an early stage investor, including the classic angel group model. And that led to the venture group model that we are building today.

0:04:47 - (Andrew Kazlow): So before we get into more of what that means, give me one click deeper on what those cracks were in the quote unquote classic angel group model. Like, what were the problems that you all did this reimagining to solve?

0:05:00 - (Ashok Kamal): I think if you talk to any entrepreneur that has been on the fundraising circuit, one of their frustrations with an angel group is that can be a long road that leads to nowhere. A long road might mean 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 months, and then at the end of that journey, a lack of clarity on what the outcome is. So that could mean that there's two checks for $10,000. It could mean that there's no checks. It's a very high variability, variability scenario as a founder. And if there's one thing I think that's important as an investor in how you approach founders, it's just appreciating how difficult their job is, how their life is on the line, you know, figuratively at least. Often with the company.

0:05:49 - (Ashok Kamal): And if you can at least be transparent, responsive, and predictable in your process, then one, you're just going to be doing things the right way, and two, you're going to attract better founders. Because, of course, as an investor, this business is about investing in the best companies, not investing in companies. Right. So. So that long road and bridge to often nowhere is one of the structural challenges in, you know, the classic angel group, where the group managers are just trying to herd cats.

0:06:20 - (Andrew Kazlow): So what was the main decision that you all had to make? Like what. What were you trying to change specifically about the process that led to this reimagining, which I want to hear more about?

0:06:32 - (Ashok Kamal): Yeah, well, I think changing process creates changes in culture, and then it becomes a virtuous cycle. If you can, you know, change both dialectically. The first thing we realized we needed to change was our financing mechanism. And again, this is in 2017 when we started, you know, doing this. So over 10 years ago or 10 years ago now, something that seems maybe more obvious, we decided we needed to pool our money into a single fund in the group instead of, you know, getting to that undetermined period of time and chasing checks.

0:07:09 - (Ashok Kamal): And what we did was create an annual fund. So instead of investing through individual checks and having to chase people down for $10,000, sometimes $25,000, whatever the amount of money was at the end of a due diligence process, we, one, looked at the diligence process and said, we're going to complete this in 30 days, and that's a pledge that we're going to make to entrepreneurs.

0:07:30 - (Andrew Kazlow): And.

0:07:30 - (Ashok Kamal): And two, when we get to the end of the diligence process, we're going to make a decision through a formula. It's a voting system. And three, we're going to have that money in the bank. So if we decide to vote, the founder knows it's going to be a check size of $250,000, $350,000, whatever the formula dictates, and then we're going to sign the docs and wire the money.

0:07:50 - (Andrew Kazlow): Love it. Okay, so this happened 10 years ago. There's been some rebranding that's happened over the course of the group's existence since then. Keep going. What. What happened as part of this major process shift?

0:08:03 - (Ashok Kamal): The rebranding was more a acknowledgement and highlighting the aspects of not just angel groups, but also venture capitalists that we wanted to draw from that inspired us in creating what we call the venture group. And this is how we define the venture group. But, you know, they're could be other ways that others define it. But from new fund's perspective, we're talking about new fund Venture Group. There's a couple of key components from the angel group's perspective because, you know, we talked about some of the weaknesses of an angel group, but their strengths as well.

0:08:37 - (Ashok Kamal): First and foremost, the people assuming that these are people that want to give back, that have some experience that can, you know, lend positive value to the startup that, you know, are able to put in not just time, but you know, effort and energy and inspiration as well. A lot of angel investors fit that bill, right? So angel groups can have a lot of value in the network. At the same time, the processes are very decentralized and very unpredictable. And that's where, you know, the gaps often fall within an angel group.

0:09:15 - (Ashok Kamal): On a typical VC side, the processes may be very rigid and clear and. But the firm often falls on the spectrum of being either highly impersonal, meaning just pure financial, you know, venture capital, or sometimes too personal. If you listen to someone like Travis Kalanick and he'll say most VCs are bad now, who am I to tell him what's right or wrong? That's not my personal experience with most VCs, let's say. But certainly we all know the stories of when VC goes bad.

0:09:49 - (Ashok Kamal): So sometimes the arm is just too strong. Right? So what we wanted to do was blend that power of a network and a helpful network with predictable, clear and fair processes. And that's what we did with the venture group, namely making a fund where the money is available and distributed through a voting mechanism among the members. And then we're also able to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty and hopefully be helpful to the company when they need us. And the when they need us is obviously important.

0:10:20 - (Andrew Kazlow): This is a really interesting evolution because in my experience, most investor communities aren't seeking to be poor partners. Right? Like most investor communities want to do good work, they want to run a good process, they want to be responsive to these founders. It's just the structural design tier point tends to lend itself to slower, more extended processes in comparison to a typical VC process, for example, where it's a clear system and decision making framework.

0:10:52 - (Andrew Kazlow): Would you agree with that assessment? Do you think that groups intentionally have bad process or that it is really attributable to the way it's structured?

0:11:05 - (Ashok Kamal): I don't believe anyone really has intentionally bad process or meaning, including VCs by the way, most of the time. But I think it's just the legacy of Structural debt. If you look at the origin you know of, you know, many groups, they were hyper localized, they weren't necessarily run by entrepreneurs and people didn't know what they didn't know. There also weren't a lot of options around. So, you know, founders, if you're in know Louisville, Kentucky might only have one place to go to and they could run the program any way that they wanted. That all changed. You know, whether you want to say it was 15 years ago, 10 years ago, it continues to change. You know, there's lots of options for the best founders to raise money.

0:11:50 - (Ashok Kamal): And if you aren't competing as an investor for the best founders, and by competing, you have to be competitive in your process, then you're going to end up with a suboptimal portfolio. If your goal is just to have fun and have dinner and watch entrepreneurs, which, you know, is how I would characterize a lot of angel groups, then you're doing your job and you don't need to change anything. That wasn't the goal at newfound.

0:12:14 - (Andrew Kazlow): So as you've made this shift, obviously you've continued to stand by this model. So tell me more about what you guys have learned over the last few years and how this is going in

0:12:28 - (Ashok Kamal): terms of how it's going. So we're in our ninth annual fund right now. So the way it works is every year it's at the end of the prior fund's life, we start a new fund. So just imagine we're investing, call it $5 million out of the fund. We invest in SPVs and sometimes directly as well. But let's just say from the annual fund, which is our big innovation at new fund, we're investing about $5 million over a 10 to 12 month period.

0:12:54 - (Ashok Kamal): But we're looking at deals, you know, hundreds of deals per month. Like most investors, some get to the finish line, let's call it, you know, one a month, you know, on average, so 12 to 15, you know, a year deploying that $5 million. We're doing that and then we're doing it again. So we're in the ninth cycle of that annual fund family and the funds are performing competitively. So another, I think, good thing about venture capital is there's a lot more transparency in the data.

0:13:20 - (Ashok Kamal): Thank you, Carta and others that, you know, publish benchmark, you know, benchmark data for many, many years going back. We're competitive in the top, call it quartile, of all of the vintages that we've run at new funds, sometimes better than top quartile so the funds are doing well. That's translated into more than $5 million returned to investors. And if we want to talk about, you know, DPI and not just say tvpi, so the funds are doing relatively well. Obviously things can go up and down quickly and things can go down and up quickly. That's the nature of the business. But as far as the data we have today in the benchmarking in the industry, you know, we're, we're happy with the results and we're trying to get better. So what are we doing now to get better? Based on the changes we're noticing? I think the best deals have become more competitive than ever to get allocations. You know, so the days of sitting back and going through a multi month process of review and selection and then, you know, due diligence, those days are fading. If you want to get into the best and the most fast moving deals, that doesn't mean that the fastest moving deals are necessarily going to be the best.

0:14:34 - (Ashok Kamal): And it also doesn't mean that we're going to know ultimately up front. You know, up goes without saying. But I think the reality is the power law continues to reveal itself. You know, if you just look at, you know, the, you know, couple years back of, you know, data and the companies that are, you know, doing the best today, and we're just trying to evolve our processes to be able to get into some of the companies that maybe we wouldn't have even seen, you know, five years ago.

0:15:02 - (Ashok Kamal): And you know, where, how to get access to those very competitive deals. So you know, what, how do you get access? It's relationships, it's process and it's money. So you have to have relationships with the communities where the best founders are going. You know, that might be in your backyard, it might be in across the country, you know, right. It and it's probably in both is the answer. And I'd say that's the case for, for new fund, which is all over the country, but you know, headquartered in San Diego where we were started, you also have to have a process that is responsive to the cadence of that deal.

0:15:39 - (Ashok Kamal): So that means some deals might happen in nine days, some deals might happen in 90 days. But if you only are built to do deals that take 90 days, then you're not going to necessarily get a good one that takes nine days. So how do you adjust your process? I think there's no single formula that works, but I think agility, you know, kind of is the mentality that you need to have to be able to get into those deals and then you have to be able to write checks.

0:16:04 - (Andrew Kazlow): A quick note before we continue the conversation. Alongside the Diligent observer podcast and newsletter, I also run an outsourced operations service specifically built to serve Angel Networks. My team handles things like initial screening, social media, newsletter prep, platform management, and a whole lot more. The kinds of things that either aren't getting done or shouldn't be done by busy community leaders.

0:16:26 - (Andrew Kazlow): If that sounds interesting to you, send me a note. Now back to it. So give, give me a layer deeper on this because one of the things I find really interesting about the structure you guys have built, it's like hybrid investor group and VC models that you, as I understand it, don't have gps. Is that right? How do you stay agile, nimble, without, like, clear decision makers making the calls?

0:16:52 - (Ashok Kamal): Yeah, we don't have gps. We have members who are sort of like a GPLP hybrid in that, you know, they're putting in money like LPs and, you know, GPS as well. But they're also making decisions like GPS, which many LPs funds are not, you know, so it's a combination. So how do you do it? I think you create communities within the community. So let me give you example of some deals kind of on both ends of the spectrum. So six months ago we did a deal.

0:17:21 - (Ashok Kamal): I won't name the company just because they may not have announced the financing yet, but it's a company based in Miami, Florida, very competitive round, led by two top VCs. One of them was Harpoon Ventures. They've announced the investment, so that's fine. I was reading a newsletter from Harpoon. People read your newsletters, Andrew. So careful what you put in there, right? I was reading a newsletter. This wasn't even circulating the deal. It was a funding announcement. We all get those all the time, right?

0:17:50 - (Ashok Kamal): I reached out to one of the partners I know at the fund and said, hey, this looks like something that our Qualcomm mafia, we call it in San Diego, which is, you know, these folks that been working on, you know, chips and, you know, wireless and sensors for, you know, decades sometimes, and some of them right now writing AI algorithms in Qualcomm. I think our Qualcomm mafia and I think some of our defense tech folks here in San Diego, which has a defense tech kind of history, and Harpoon is itself a defense tech oriented fund, would be interested in this deal. I noticed that it already closed.

0:18:22 - (Ashok Kamal): Let me know if they start fundraising again. I got a call back from the partner, you know, that Day hours later, saying, I spoke to the CEO, they'd be open to an opportunistic round. Here's what they're thinking in terms of the structure. Do you think this would work? So of course you can't go back to 300 plus people, which is the total size of, you know, new fund, and say, hey, you know, will this work for you all?

0:18:44 - (Ashok Kamal): What I did was go back to a handful of people that I thought would understand the company and could have a qualified conversation with the management team. And, and we did that and they liked the deal and we invested in the company within two weeks. It wasn't a round that was advertised, it was a, you know, emergent round. Another investor ended up matching our investment. So it ended up being a close to a million dollar total round.

0:19:11 - (Ashok Kamal): And that's not a deal that would have come to us. So that's an example of how being proactive sometimes can get you access to deals that might not necessarily land on your doorstep. Now we'll see if and, and, and

0:19:29 - (Andrew Kazlow): members are comfortable that. So as I'm understanding it, the whole membership that's a part of that annual vintage, essentially participate then in that deal and everybody's okay with this because it's essentially a joint commitment that hey, I'm trusting this process, I'm trusting these other people around me. And the fact that you're involving the, whatever, six people that know something about that category, that's enough of a process structure to commit or the whole fund to participating.

0:19:56 - (Ashok Kamal): Right? Because it's, you know, ideally and theoretically the right people at the right time doing the right deal. So it's people who understand that deal making the recommendation. Now the rest of the members still get to vote their shares. So it's not a unequivocal, totally centralized process that has pros and cons. But I'm talking about how our annual fund runs today where a micro crowd within a wisdom of a broader crowd is able to make a recommendation that generally people, you know, the balance of the members are willing to trust.

0:20:31 - (Ashok Kamal): Now they still have to the group that's recommending the deal, the deal team still, you know, produces a memo that everybody else has access to. So it's, you know, democratic in that sense. And at the end of the day, the deal needs to get voted by our fund through a super majority to invest. But if the right people are recommending the deal, if the oncology, you know, pharma folks and cancer doctors are saying this looks like an interesting therapeutic that could change the paradigm of cancer care, are saying we think we should invest, then usually the person who is a vertical SaaS, you know, guy at Google is willing to take that risk.

0:21:11 - (Ashok Kamal): And it's worked out well for us. You know, again, if you look at the historical data, so it's, it's not just anecdotal.

0:21:16 - (Andrew Kazlow): Do you think this model is the right answer for most groups looking at evolving into the next generation or is this just a. This happened to be the right fit structurally for a new font given the kind of background you had being a part of tca. Like, I guess what I'm getting at is like I'm listening to this. I'm like, this is awesome. How do I do this with my group? Right. I feel those problems. I understand.

0:21:41 - (Andrew Kazlow): I want my group to get better. Like would you recommend this approach for just about any group or is this a special. Only worked here because of the sauce that we have here.

0:21:53 - (Ashok Kamal): I'll tell you why it's worked for new fund and then it's up to every group to decide whether it could work for them. Right. But I think it also dovetails into the ACA put out a data report recently finding that in their words, hybrid groups, meaning groups that have direct investing and a fund were performing better than non hybrid groups or classic groups. And they also pronounce that scale matters in groups.

0:22:23 - (Ashok Kamal): I would say our hybrid structure, the, you know, synthesis of angel and VC and our scale of 300 plus people around the country are what enabled our ability to one raise and run, you know, nine funds. So $50 million AUM basically and invest in deals and run operations in a way where the trains stay on the track. If you have the scale, you know, the number of people that are able to work on deals, you know. Right. Because Taylor, your prior question, Andrew, you need experts in multiple buckets if you're going to rely on cohorts of experts to make decisions basically on behalf of the group.

0:23:10 - (Ashok Kamal): We need to have scale and diversity in terms of your domain experience in order to execute on that model. We have that. You also need the funds to be big enough that you can administer them. You know, every fund manager and you know, small time fund manager, which is most of us that are not, you know, the billion dollar, you know, fund managers knows that tax time comes around once a year. Distributions, you know, are hard to execute.

0:23:34 - (Ashok Kamal): Signing documents and wiring money on time and into the right places, you know, is always a challenge. I mean we do over a thousand unique K1s every single year in our annual fund, you know, family and we've never been late past March 15, which is actually besides, you know, the performance of the, the funds, you know, being, let's say, good, if not great, but good. I think my proudest achievement is that we've been able to get everybody their K1 on time every single year. And there's more than a thousand.

0:24:01 - (Andrew Kazlow): I mean, that's, that's certainly the most complained about gap in the, in this private early stage ecosystem when talking to a investor who's been in it for more than a couple of years. That's, that's the number one complaint. So good on you. You guys forget I don't get a

0:24:17 - (Ashok Kamal): lot of K1 sometimes from some of the, you know, syndicates and funds that I'm in. So I'm on the other side of, you know, that equation. And, you know, probably that's why I'm ultra sensitive to it. But what I'm saying is it took scale for new fund to be able to, you know, run the number of funds that we do and to administer them. And so the funds helped us scale in that they bring people into the group who can invest, you know, with different strategies, whether they want to be very hands on or they want to kind of invest and set and forget and just get exposure to, you know, the best deals that the group is selecting over the course of a year. They brought different founders into our portfolio. Founders that only were looking for $250,000 in up checks.

0:25:01 - (Ashok Kamal): Right. That, that's our minimum check size. So it's changed the configuration of our stakeholders. That's not something that you could just layer on to, you know, pick any group anywhere and say, here's the formula, go do it. Right. And that's why I can't say what's the best for somebody else. But, um, somebody else might have 10 people investing in a very, you know, niche, you know, local vertical and might be doing much better than us. Right. But it's the scale that's enabled us to be able to operate at the level we're at today.

0:25:37 - (Ashok Kamal): Let's pivot topics.

0:25:38 - (Andrew Kazlow): I want to hear Ashok's thoughts on the market right now. Tell me about some categories that you are particularly interested in. Excited about things that you're seeing in your community that you feel like aren't getting enough attention.

0:25:52 - (Ashok Kamal): Do you end the podcast if someone doesn't say AI? Keep going, keep going. I mean, the answer is AI one way or the other, you know. Right. Unless, you know, a totally contrarian, you know, might say they're getting into flower shops. But I think in terms of what's interesting for us about AI, it's the intersection of AI and you know, sort of other industries. Whether it's, you know, physical AI, you know. Right. Making machines, you know, smarter, whether it's energy optimization or defense tech, whether it's, you know, vertical.

0:26:30 - (Ashok Kamal): We've made a few agentic AI investments recently in sort of unsexy industries, you know. Right. And it's not to say that we're only focused on AI because you know, we're not. One thing that's different about New Fund being this democratic crowd is we have members in the group who are still very passionate about medtech cardiac devices that don't have any AI in them. And we're still making those investments today and some of them are doing well. We just had an exit recently a company called Atreverse Medical that got acquired by J and J.

0:27:08 - (Ashok Kamal): And that deal is a great example of sort of the best of the angel group DNA in New Fund. We were looking at this company based in Chicago and we made the investment in our due diligence. One of our members, so One of the SMEs who has a cardiac tech background at Medtronic was leading our technical due diligence. That member ended up becoming the first CMO chief marketing officer of the startup after we invested. And you know, the CEO is the one that invited, I'm the founder CEO and the company got acquired two years later. Again, this is public information now. H Reverse Medical being acquired by J and J.

0:27:48 - (Ashok Kamal): Our member is now the head of the unit at J and J that the company became. And you know, the founder CEO is happily investing in other companies now and you know, doing other cool things. So that's an example of where, you know, the network, you know, really has muscle in a good way to help the company. And there's a number of examples I could give you, but that's one that just happened recently. So all that is to say we're excited about and interested in game changing technologies. And some of those are AI, some of those are enabled by AI and some of them are just, you know, good old fashioned scientific inventions that make people live longer.

0:28:30 - (Andrew Kazlow): Do you think we're in a bubble? And how do I invest if I do? I'm curious. You know, angels and angel communities are often focused on stuff that's sort of insulated from like immediate term stuff because it's whatever, five, ten years to cook before it, it exits. But curious just your thoughts on that?

0:28:48 - (Ashok Kamal): Smarter people address that question every single day. I'll say That I think we oscillate between being in a bubble and falling from a bursting bubble down a cliff. By that I mean there are many companies that are struggling more than ever to raise their financing. Yes. If you look at the small group of winners in a quarterly venture capital report who raised the biggest rounds, then you wouldn't think that anybody's struggling.

0:29:20 - (Ashok Kamal): And that's the bubble. That's the bubble that is growing. But the bubble has also burst. So I don't think we're in a bubble or not in a bubble. I think we're probably a jar of bubbles where you've got liquid, you've got bursted bubbles, and you've got, you know, bubbles that are, you know, foaming out of the jar. And it's just a question of as a company, which one are you in and as an investor, what are you investing in?

0:29:46 - (Ashok Kamal): So I think it's a much more volatile and a much more complicated ecosystem and economic environment. And that goes from the macro to the micro than we've ever experienced before. Where it goes from now, the PhDs at, you know, Harvard and Oxford and Silicon Valley and Andreessen Horowitz could give you a better answer. But we're staying in the game because we're trying to look for those companies that are finding ways to succeed.

0:30:14 - (Ashok Kamal): And you know, as much as AI is responsible for what a lot of people would call the bubble, we're also trying to use AI within our operations to make us better investors and hopefully, you know, find and invest in more of those, you know, rising companies.

0:30:32 - (Andrew Kazlow): So looking at the startup ecosystem and specifically the investor community ecosystem, you guys have obviously innovated on the model here three to five years. What's different about the investor community ecosystem more widely? Are more groups adopting things like this? Is it more of the same? Like what's changed, you know, three to five years from now in the investor community ecosystem, in your view?

0:30:59 - (Ashok Kamal): Well, I could certainly speak most directly for our investor community, which, you know, spans from San Diego to Boston to Silicon Valley and you know, the middle of the country, including, you know, Texas, where, you know, we have a cluster in, in Austin and you know, folks in, in Houston, other, you know, parts of, of that, you know, great state. We are using AI more to streamline our operations.

0:31:22 - (Ashok Kamal): This is a significant change, you know, within new fund. I mean, as far as dollars we're putting into companies, it's about the same today as it was three years ago. What are we doing differently, how we put those dollars into companies and how we optimize our network. I'll give you an example. If a deal comes to us today, we have a platform that we co created. It's called Creator. And if a deal comes in from anywhere, whether it's a member or just know out of the blue, we run an analyst report on it. It's an AI analyst to, you know, give it basically a score.

0:31:54 - (Ashok Kamal): Right. And then contextualize it within our fund history and our thesis. So there's, you know, is this an interesting company for us? Is this an interesting company that we might actually invest in now based on our, you know, kind of appetite? And then who within the group would be able to give a more informed opinion since we're not going to make a decision based on AI? That's all new stuff that happened in the last six months, let alone, you know, three to five years ago, and hopefully is helping us make smarter decisions.

0:32:25 - (Ashok Kamal): I believe a lot of investor groups are also employing similar types of tools. We're not unique in that regard.

0:32:32 - (Andrew Kazlow): So AI is continuing to refine the screening, the focus for the community's time, essentially to be more responsive to entrepreneurs. And, you know, if it's not a fit, it's not a fit that's going to get faster.

0:32:44 - (Ashok Kamal): Yeah. And I think the same way you see a lot more solar found solo founders today or you have, you know, a lot of more lean startups, the groups, including some of the classic angel groups that maybe are limited by the infrastructure that they have and the number of people, you know, that they have now also have an opportunity to employ some of these tools and maybe it can help fill some of the holes that typically create weaknesses for groups. So, in other words, that long decision cycle that herding the cats to find, you know, who can give an opinion on the deal, let alone who can, you know, write a check into the deal, I think there's, you know, opportunity, as always, in, you know, volatility and change.

0:33:31 - (Andrew Kazlow): Love it. Ashok, final thoughts for our audience.

0:33:36 - (Ashok Kamal): Well, I, I appreciate you curating best practices. So I would say there is no single formula. There's no way to cure cancer that we've discovered yet, and hopefully we will, you know, before long. There's no single way to be a great venture investor. I think there are best practices that different groups and funds and people are employing. And I think the knowledge sharing that you're doing, Andrew, is very valuable.

0:34:02 - (Ashok Kamal): And, you know, the, the toolkits are out there. It's about figuring out which ones work for you.

0:34:09 - (Andrew Kazlow): Well, Ashok, thank you very much for taking the time to walk through new funds history and how you guys are tackling this. I've very much enjoyed our conversation and I look forward to the next one.

0:34:21 - (Ashok Kamal): Thanks Andrew. Appreciate it.

0:34:23 - (Andrew Kazlow): Thanks for listening to this episode of the Diligent Observer. I'm your host, Andrew, and if you're an angel investor looking for essential angel intel in five minutes every week, I think you'd enjoy my newsletter. I send my best stuff, interesting deals and more straight to your inbox so you never miss a thing. Subscribe today@thediligentobserver.com.