hi and welcome to another episode of Santa Road Show, where I talked to successful startup founders and venture capitalists about the companies that they built on investing. And the goal, like always, is to give you a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes, how their business take, how they got to where they are and to learn from their many successes and mistakes. Today I'm super excited. To be joined by John Lynn was a principle of Trinity Ventures.

Yeah, it's been quite a ride from the Internet E.

Trinity Ventures. He invests in vertical marketplace Work Cos. Before joining Trinity, John has worn many hats after a double major in computer science and business from UC Berkeley. He works in business development for Yelp as a management consultant for McKinsey and his adventure associate for Globe Spend Capital Partners in Boston. And this was all before 2014 when he decided to take a leap of faith to start his own company, Town Hall. Yuki Act for Business. His startup was later sold to Rumi, another start up where it continued to lead product and engineering.

You're the inception when we just had a really small at the opinion, all the way to where we were 1,000,000 users. So growing out that journey was 1,000,000 Brits Day,

spinning with Trinity Ventures for more than two years now and in this session will take a deep dive into some of his recent investments.

A lot of these companies were really taking up

verticals such as fintech mobility, vertical sass and real estate time. Let's hear it from John himself on Let's Jump right in. All right. So I'm super excited to be joined today by John Lin, who is a principal at Trinity Ventures and before diving deeper into what he does at Trinity Ventures. I want to take a step back and find out a little bit more about John. So John has worn many hats as a management consultant, as an associate and at a VC firm in Boston and as a startup founder himself. And I want to start at his own startup town hall, which he later sold to Rumi, and to really take a little bit into this transition from being an operator to becoming eventual capitalist. So maybe John talk to us a little bit about what town Hall was all about and how the transition from heading product and engineering that drew me to becoming a venture capitalist was for you. Andi, how this all came about?

Yeah, sure. A ton of questions that you have there. You're totally right in the sense that you know, I was a venture capitalist. I jumped on top, ready? I jumped back into venture capitalists, had the unique opportunity to kind of sit on both sides of the table. So So just quickly to answer your 1st 2 questions. One what was town hall in Roomie Town Hall was a platform for people to share thoughts and ideas within organization. So kind of thinking that about it, a mix between a hammer and yak yak. And then Rumi was a platform to basically help people finding roommates and find places to live. So I kind of think about that is something similar to Zillow except focused, particularly on different rooms and who you would be living with, as opposed to renting an entire apartment.

And that your second question toe what the transition was like. It was a super interesting transition. You know, I had the opportunity to look at a bunch of different companies and see how each one operated and looked at the key metrics for both every type of company and then to transition into someone who's ever actually operating and trying to improve those metrics. That was that was super interesting. And and I made a ton of mistakes as an entrepreneur, ranging from, you know, not testing my product out early enough to trying to build too many features that didn't matter. And and I want a lot through that. And then and then on the other end of the spectrum, after I had, you know, help the company grow, help raise, you know,

if he rounds of funding help take our user base over a 1,000,000 people on, begin to monetize some of our platform, Then to be able to go back into venture and kind of go through that same process with some of the entrepreneurs is really interesting, because I was there literally, you know, 18 24 months ago, and kind of my ideas and entrepreneur is Hey, how many of those mistakes that I've made Can I share with these entrepreneurs so they don't make the same mistakes, and they create a much more successful start of does any than I have had the opportunity

to do. Yeah, makes makes total sense to me. And so maybe, let's Segway from this to this medium post that you wrote about five he controversial learnings that you had from your journey at Town Hall. So your second controversial learning there was mobile is not always the best for you. And I think when you wrote this couple of years back, everybody wanted to have a nap. And we've now gone through a transition phase where everybody knows there's been a lot of activity. I think one trend that I've noticed recently is that people are starting to get back to building a Web app first. What's your thinking

around that? Yeah, I certainly think that's true and actually let me back up a little bit. When I first writing that trend, you're exactly right. During the time, mobile laps were extremely popular and everyone was going mobile first. Well, if you think about how people use mobile applications, most people only use their top, you know, maybe 7 to 15 applications, and it's incredibly, incredibly hard if you're not Facebook or Google are someone else like Yelp basically has that dominant mind share. So as part of Town Hall on as part of Rumi, we're trying to compete to be part of that dominant top 15 up mind share, and it was incredibly hard.

What is a lot easier to do is to build a CZ. You mentioned a Web application. Actually, an interesting thing is more and more so. We find that the majority of our Web traffic many of our startups, both that trinity and a roomy was driven primarily through mobile Web. Um, so if I were to suggest any platform to start up, I would I would start with Web, but I'd make it, you know? Ah, react app. It's respond to being on the Web and mobile wet.

I absolutely agree there, I think the advent off react. The ability to quickly turn your web into a mobile app has really changed a

lot. And I would say the only other thing is, whenever you're on, you know, 23 platforms, whether that be Web, IOS and android, it just takes a huge amount of effort to maintain that code base. And unless you really think you're driving more than 30% of their volume through mobile. Maybe arguably than 50% of your volume of the early stage started, you should focus those resource is love things like growth or what is more important. Instead of having thio fire two engine years for each different clubs,

it's a great learning, and I think this is a good segue way also to the next point off. Your third controversial learning there was that being a co founder has taught you that there's less decision making than you would expect. And basically what you said there was that 99% of decisions are so obvious when you talk to start it found often times you hear that they don't know where to spend their attention and focus and energy on. And what you're saying there is that this is actually the opposite from your personal experience. So talk a little bit about this learn, which I found quite

interesting. If you look at why people become founders, I feel like there's a subset of founder that basically joined or started their own company because they wanted more control over their lives than you know. They thought they could make all the decisions. And in fact, when you actually start a company or when your leader in a company, it turns out a lot of your decisions are made for you one way or another. So I'll give you a few examples of such a lot of time when you hire people or what you have a particular staff, your staff is an expert on a particular area, or they give you recommendations that you might not. Otherwise, no. So So I'm going back to their coding example as much as like a start of founder, you might be tempted to use one language or another. If you only have two or three people who you can have to join your team or you have one or two obvious candidates you wanna hire. You probably want to use the staff that their most familiar with rather than anything else when you're trying to choose between product decisions. A lot of times is,

you know, the head of product. It wouldn't be as much about hey, this is the right product decision or this is the right part decision. A lot of times you'll have three or four pack decisions. You probably want to tussle all of them. They probably want to test them in a methodical way by talking to users by building out, you know, NDP like features and then seeing which one has the best results. So in that sense, your path is often a lot more obvious than you think. And it's not you kind of like brainstorming in a room. It's usually you going out talking to users, you going out talking to other people in the field, getting those ideas and then executing on them. So So, as much as you know, the quote unquote decision making an important a lot of the execution is even more important, things become more obvious is more time in the field or as you experiment more with your start up.

Yeah, I like that. I think this is again a great segue way to the next section where you basically argued, Don't be too metric driven that that was the fourth learning. This is something that we've seen that we have more and more metrics and people start to get confused. What to focus on? Is it cactus at LTV is the traffic. Is it, um it's is it pulls. And so what you mentioned there is that in the beginning, really just focus on 3 to 4 metrics. I would call them North Star Metrics, in a sense, and basically just execute on them. So the question that comes up, how do you transition the metrics? Overtime I tweeted about this recently talked to us a little bit about the kind of metrics that you would suggest to early stage founders and how they should adjust him overtime.

I think just the backup here there. There's basically a few different uses of metrics that it really depends how you're using this tricks kind of on one side of the spectrum if you're trying to discover things about your user, if you're trying to discover things about your product. Yeah, I encourage you to track everything because you could even track videos of your users because by wording Maura, about your users, you get a better understanding of what your product delivers. That doesn't mean you said find some really small metric to track your company against when it comes to transitioning to what creates success for a start up. That's a totally different question and I think it. I think it differs from from point to point among your startup and from start up to start it. But I'll give you a few examples. So I think when you're first starting a startup, you want to focus on what I call kind of making that model work and creating a scalable model. So let's say it's a consumer model where you have, like a director consumer product. You probably want to focus on some of those key metrics that you mentioned like LTV CAC, making sure that each of those things are scaleable and really focusing on the right metrics to follow.

If you start to focus on things like growth or revenue or things like that way too early, you're not going to get the exact model right And and then more specifically, if you focus on these nitty gritty metrics, you probably aren't focusing on the bigger picture. You want to focus on what sex does bigger order metrics like what is my total TV rather than you know, my margin for one specific product is. Then you'll we focus on that one product and you won't think about all the other products that might drive tire higher overall TVs. I'm just really focusing and finding what the right metric is for you to track is super important. And then there's actually a really good book about okay, ours that that that I highly suggest reading for anyone out there

measure what matters from gender. Is

it that one? Yeah, yeah, No one's no one's awesome and and often for New Founder's. You know, it's a way that I suggest for start ups who are kind of at that mid tier stage or yeah, kind of growing and scaling toe organize their organization

around. Yeah, I can also highly recommend that book. So moving on to the last controversial learning you have there where you mentioned that distribution is even more important than product. Some of the greatest products never get into the hands of the users. One problem that we definitely sees that a lot of VC funding spend on acquiring users through Google AdWords and Facebook ads. So talk to us a little bit about the importance of

distribution. I totally agree with you, and there's so many great products out there that never see the light of day and a lot of entrepreneurs, and they first start, um, including myself. Back in the day, I thought if I built this great product inherently, people would come Well, that is true for, you know, one or 2% products out there for the majority of products. Figuring out what is the right method for distribution is super super important. So there there's a ton of methods for distribution out there. There's obviously paid. As you mentioned, you can spend money on things like Google and Facebook seem to be ki I encourage you.

If you are focusing on that distribution method, Thio just realize it's your company skills. Usually those claws go up, and as more and more action enters the space, it becomes more and more competitive. There's there's more organic or by rolling so you can do things like referrals. You can have things within Europe to have more people, and there's a bunch of other ways, like whether going to conferences, you know, for a large portion of you to be cos it sails a lot of times there's some channel you can sell three or some type of growth fact that you can have. I think, having the right distribution channels. Figuring out why you could happen. It vantage. To get customers cheaper is often one of the biggest advantages for a start up. So it's not something definitely to consider.

I absolutely agree with that. So let's move on to Trinity Ventures. Talk to us a little bit how you came to join Trinity Ventures and how you're during has been so far.

Yeah, that's a great question. So in terms of how I joined the firm, you know, it was it was actually a pretty pretty random coincidence. Um, I was honestly playing basketball. It and I had happened to play with someone who had worked with one of their general partners, were actually two of his previous startups. He actually recommended that I meet some of the people a Trinity Ventures and, you know, I would meet one person and then another person and then another person and have some really great, engaging conversation. I was trying to decide between going into product and joining another VC firm, and it was a really tough decision for me between being operator, being more of ah, investor type.

But what ultimately sent me over the barber Trinity Ventures, is that every single partner that I've met while there I I enjoyed meeting more so than any other venture capitalists I had ever met, and and I just thought it was a great group of people to be around. So that's why ultimately chose to join the company. In terms of Trinity Ventures is a firm we've been around for about 33 years, currently on 12 fund. And primarily we'd Siri's seed through Siri's be investments with, you know, had no lucky fortune of working with some great, be iconic companies over the time. Well, whatever first, in essence, is actually at Starbucks. Were the first institutional investor there all the way to companies like Kinky City. You know,

Zulu. We care dot com tomorrow and a bunch of others. And I think this year in particular has been a really exciting year for us because we only fun, you know, 10 to 12 companies every year, but this year in particular, we'd had five more companies actually announces unicorn. So it's been a really exciting year for Trinity of Veterans is a firm and Trinity Ventures as a whole. We really pride ourselves on being an entrepreneurial first type of company, two of our general partners and started public companies and our founder. Actually, Trinity Ventures was his third company. So really pride ourselves on being on the team of entrepreneurs. I'm happy to talk more about that. If it's interesting and just quickly answer your last point. You know,

it's been quite a ride for me, a Trinity. Been there close to two and 1/2 years. You got the chance that I think work on, I guess 10 companies now for which you know. But I found for the firm and and had the chance to work with some great entrepreneurs, like didn't hear.

So the next step, let's dig a little bit into your portfolio companies. Maybe. Let's start with the mobility vertical with the company called Grow, which is a Latin American base company working on micro mobility and payments. So it emerged from a merger from two companies. One is Grin, Mexican based Scooter company and Yellow, which is a player in Brazil, that the scooter space and micro mobility space have been very competitive spaces. We all know about the scooter wars in the last few years and also There's a lot of question marks around the scooter economics and making the unit economics work with lime now raising the next room. So talk to us a little bit about the peace is here because it seems quite daunting to go to Latin America to really pioneered this Mike. Remember Mobility space

there? Yeah, um, great questions. So actually, when I first joined Trinity, it was quite an exciting time because you had companies in China Open Mo bike and a bunch of other is going into mobile would becoming huge companies. And then you had companies in the U. S. Starting in the micro mobility space. No companies like, been like why, you know all the big ones out there. You jump mobility and a few others. And it was a super exciting time because basically all of them, you know, we're six weeks in,

and and I had actually brought in quite a few of them to try and understand their companies and hopefully invest in the and our team just wasn't sure whether they're willing to take the risk, you know, fast forward. Six months to a year, we noticed that in the U. S. A. lot of these companies were really taking up, and you're right that they face the ton of challenges. Most of them are growing extremely, extremely fascinating, based a lot of Skilling challenges. Would that came a lot of the unit economics questions. So our question was really, like, didn't make sense to place a bet in this area.

And in our mind, there's a few things that we didn't want to do. One was we didn't want to compete directly with people who were extremely well capitalized that point, you know, Burr Lime did. They've raised probably hundreds of millions in terms of combined capital between them. So we want to find something in two different geography. And the other thing that we wanted to focus on was, as you mentioned, the unit economics. So the Latin market has a lot of very interesting, I guess. Intricacies. One of the things that most people don't realize about about scooters is there's actually only a few things that really matter Well, when it comes to economics, one is Hey,

how many rides per day is the person writing to is how much are you charging for Scooter? Basically per ride so those things doing to your revenue and then in your cost. There's only a few Mr Costs. It turns out one of the major cost tends to be the cost of the scooter. Because these scooters wear out extremely fast. Most scooters are only there for three months or so, and a lot of them honestly tend to get stolen. We heard us that as high as 10% of them get stolen in many, many regions. And then the other thing is labor going on, charging all these cuter prison and getting them set up. And things like that costs a lot of money. So when we looked at that paradigm and those type of metrics, we realized that, well, this company in Latin America grin,

which we funded which later became grow, had a unique advantage. In one sense, I don't know if you know this, but Mexico City is actually one of the most popular cities. I think it might be the most popular city, so there was a huge need for Michael ability there. And if you look at the initial metrics of grin, the amount of rides that people were going on per day was extremely high compared to many places in the U. S. It was the informant cities. It was double maybe about Reid's. People were going on the U. S. And they were there still charging it pretty high. And now,

even though it wasn't a US based country and then on the other side of the equation, one of the main things was, How do you lower the cost? So in that respect, labor in Latin America is much cheaper than in the U. S. So you cut off one of your major expensive points and you can actually make your unit economics work a lot better. Well, and then, finally, the last point is like, How do you prevent bikes from getting stolen? Because that's a huge cost. How do you make sure they're well maintained? Thinks like that? With decrease labor,

you're able to, you know, maintain your bike's a little better, something that maybe in the U. S. Would have cost you, you know, $100 to fix. And you might just want trashcan scooter all together. And now you can fix it for 10 $20 laugh in America. And it might be worked into fixed on the other end of the spectrum in terms of getting things to be stolen. That was actually a huge question for us and locked in America. But it was great about the founder was who came up with this unique scheme of having, you know, designated areas where you can park called green sons that would basically, you know,

prevent people from stealing while still giving people the ability to have a dock with Spike. So so you kind of addressed all those questions and it's been a pretty wild ride. Sense were actually seed investors in the company. As you can probably tell from country based on the news, you know they've They've already had hundreds of thousands, millions of riders on their platform, and they raised a ton of money. It's probably one of the fastest growing Y C company that

we've ever seen. The different unit economic drivers in the Latin market is something that I didn't expect to be that different from the U. S. But it makes a lot of sense, really interesting investment. So let's move over to Fintech with a company called Branch. TechCrunch describes it as the start up. That's lending out $2 at a time. It was co founded by Matthew Flannery, who previously co founded Kiva. And they're Trinity. Let the 70 million serious be back in 2018. Bought me a little bit through the business

model there. Yeah, great question. So Trinity is a firm. You know, we looked really heavily and intact within the last two years. We have 5 to 6 active in tech investments in one area in tech that we were always curious about is lending. You'll see in the U. S. There's so many different lending. Quick there's and actually a lot of them are struggling. So we were wondering whether there was a thesis that made sense somewhere for lending. And we met Matt, and it was actually a super interesting conversation on one end of the spectrum. You look at what the company does, so let me call me back out. Just what the company does does not like working to the conversation.

So Branch basically gives won's to people in different countries, usually developing countries that don't have access to traditional finance. So if you look at some of these countries, most of them don't have Bank of Town's most of that, no hope credits floor. So the question is, how do you correctly underwrite some of these these people? And what we found was you can actually be a pretty good job just by using a lot of the data someone's phone. So that might be who you're connected to, your connected to someone who tends to have good credit or tends to use the platform the right way. You also probably used the platform of the Wrightwood. That could be questions like, What does your bank account with? Like a lot of actually used their phone mobile banking? So you're able to look at when, how much money they're getting,

what they're getting it. And finally, you can look at some of the usage and turns out people with certain models and phones people use it to search. In a way, you're able to cross and predictive insights in there. So with kind of the combination of all three of these things, along with a few of their net tricks, you're able to pretty successfully under rights how someone's going to repay their debt. What brush does is basically they lend you money and they start with a CZ you mentioned $12 that, as you kind of are repaid some of that debt and cycle three more money, you're able to borrow more and more money. And we think this is a huge difference because actually access the capital is one of the the major drivers of moving people out of poverty. So Matt gave the example of, you know, wending money to a fisherman. Maybe the fisherman,

you know, could only buy enough bait to catch, you know, $2 worth of fish. And then he had to use the rest, just support his family. But now, if you want him a little bit of money now by a lot more bait and then catch $4 a fish and then after yet captures $4 with fish, you can use that to you. No further build his business. So that was one part of our thesis there. And if you look at them person someone be, you know, even the top players in the market in the U. S. And abroad,

they had way better rates and terms of repayment rates, things like that. So it's a really interesting model. And on the other side of the spectrum you have a guy and that would previously started Keeve eso. If there's anyone in the world who's an expert, install a micro lending weaknesses and developing countries, it's

all of this makes a lot of sense to me now, on the one hand, these areas leapfrogging computer age and going directly to Mobile and then building up a credit history with these small micro loans. So that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so let's talk about another one of your portfolio companies, which I think is super interesting company called Squire, where Trinity Ventures participated in the series A in 2019. Squire is a booking and payments platform for a specific vertical, namely barbershops. There's been a lot of movement around vertical sauce and the way that I understand this is that Squires really ape us solution and, ah, vertical pos solution for the barber industry. Talk to me maybe a little bit about this thesis and how you got to make this investment.

Yeah, great questions. So just the quickly back at I think the way to think about Squire is they not only want to be a pls system, but they want to be the A partner, a business partner toe every single barbershop out there. So someone who you can partner with someone who will help you operate your business in all aspects and really a view if you look traditionally at vertical sas. There's been a lot of industries that people have stayed away from partially because, like, honestly, the markets too small or the economics are good or things like that. And I think the really interesting thing that has happened lately and you can see this and companies like square as well as with Squire in this case is there's been a lot of new fintech innovations that allow for an expansion of revenue. And and also people are beginning to adopt SAS a lot more than for just one functions. You're able to expand across multiple functions to that full staff, but you're talking about. So let me just give you, ah, a few examples of how this kind of plays out in Squires case.

So in Squires case, what you would traditionally considered, you know, Jessica us or something for payments. They're actually doing a ton of things on top of that. They're helping you. Look, Sessions, they're helping you eventually. You know, if you're Barbara, you could get a loan and eventually buy supplies directly. Althea Squire, or at least those that are things that were thinking long term. The real question is like, Why do we make this investment now?

And it's basically four different factors. One is we really like the team. The team actually occurred more and more people to do this if they want to become entrepreneurs, but actually became subject to experts in the barbershop actually went out. They started their own barber shop and they operated and help cut hair. The very few people you know, entrepreneurs and so compound that have owed the barbershop what it won't cut hair before. That was really unique. The second thing was, you know, they had a really strong value prop to these barbers because they were so specific on focusing on Barbara's. And there's a lot of, like, really small intricacies that you wouldn't think about. So one of the examples is, Do you ever go to a barbershop?

A lot of times when you go with your son and then you want a father and son Barbara cut. And that's all one payment. Maybe you want a tip Different barbers, because one Barbara cut your hand on Barbara. Cut your son's hair. So there's a lot of these weird barbershop intricacies, which they really understood partially because of their their experience, and they're able to build a platform for it. And then we talk to a ton of their barbers and ask them, Why did they choose Squire over there? There's a ton for there's a ton of software for salons like my Body Booker. Things like that. Honestly, it was a mix of a few things, one they really resonated with brand, like someone focused on Barber's.

But two. They also saw a huge business. Outcomes from many of them, you know, increase their bottom line, but then double digit margin points, and they're able to do that for a few reasons. One because Squire gives you a booking engine. So now you're booking things online, and you're forcing people to pay before they enter. Originally, if your barber actually if you're taking traditional phone calls, about 25% of people actually don't even show up for the appointment and you're not able to fill those last minute. So just by increasing your revenue by 25% you have a huge difference. In addition to look at, you know,

a lot of barbershops would have their own phone call people. A lot of owners would really spend a lot of time dealing with things like a leather back office, and it was a huge burden to them. And actually, Squire has taken all that away and enable them to open a bunch more shops. And the final reason is because, along with all these new fintech innovations and increases and you know, kind of going full stack, you're able to capture more value for the customer and therefore, you know, charge the customer more and get a bigger portion of a the company's

business. Yeah, that's that's really interesting. And one question that came up, probably a general question in vertical sass is is the vertical SAS approach really a land and expand model where he basically you used the vertical ization of the SAS as a wedge into a specific industry, and you can then expand from their own. But the way that you've been describing the barbershop industry Now it looks like this is so specific that it's probably best to basically do a geographic expansion first before moving into different, different industries. What's your what's your thinking around? This may be talking about it in more general vertical SAS terms.

Yeah, so I think the issue with vertical sass is You have to make sure few things when you have to make sure the market is large enough. And you wouldn't think that there's many barbershops in the U. S. But turns out there's 400,000 barber shops or they're related cos bet ball with that category just in the U. S. Is actually a sneaky big category. If you could get you know, $10,000 from every single barbershop, you actually have a chance to create quite a large company. So that's that's one aspect. I think the other aspect is like, How do you grow these businesses? And, yeah, you're totally right. In Swire's case,

there's really a few accidents of growth, so one is geo geographically, just covering more more. And when you're looking at that, one of the key things that we look at is you know how many people are they calling? What is their distribution method? How do they acquire barbers? As turns out, you know, barbers are super super receptive to something like this, especially since they built up such a great reputation and brand. The second question is, how can they expand their revenue? So in Squires case, it might be doing more fintech snuff. It might be,

you know, going into their supply chain. And it might be providing marketing and more value at service is to these barbershops basically doing everything that Barbershop hates the dude and and letting the barber's focus on really running their business and providing the best costing our service through the customer a CZ. The best of the best haircuts and the final way to expand is the way you're mentioning, which is expanding among different verticals. We think that Squire has a huge room to grow just within their own vertical. But you're right. There are a lot of, uh, intricacies that need to be tuned, but we also believe you know what term there's some ability to expand into other verticals. There's a lot of verticals either kind of focused on this client relationship, where you're basically operating a business. And then you have these individuals basically coming as contractors are or are working for for an overall shop. And there's a lot of companies that kind of have that type of models. Squire would be a good fit for anyone like that. They would not be a good fit for life vertical SAS software to run a dock or to run, you know, run or something like that.

So, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So let's move on to the last portfolio company I want to discuss with You, which is a company called Side. Trinity Ventures participated there in the Serie Speed. The way I understand it, it's a real estate tech company which focuses on the $1,000,000 listing agents there. There was this really interesting post by Chris Dixon from and recent Horowitz on the Full Stack startup that you have a couple of started to end to end. One example in the real estate to tech world is open door in the listing agency space, its compass and the way I understand it, the business model of side. It's a full stack model. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it, maybe walk us a little bit through the

thesis there. Yeah, that's a great question. And really interesting what he posed. So just kind of going back. If you look at the realist, they park it right now, it's actually incredibly, incredibly fragmented. And if you look at players like ReMax are Williams or or to your point compass, none of them really have more than 2% 3% of the market. And and there's been this growing trend with people where they care less and less about what the Brandon's and more more about the real estate agent. So who is Who is, uh, you know, Jenny or or friends? Who is the real estate agent with the day to day contact with you?

And how good are they? Instead of you know, this is Keller Williams. This is compass, et cetera. And with that, we noticed that more and more of these great real estate agents want them to be their own brand or run their own companies. So what side does this side actually enables? You can now be a basically run your own company, and they'll operate as the brokerage for you, but they'll basically be a white label brokerage on the back end. And don't take care of all your daily tasks all your boring back office functions, and they'll also give you the freedom to run your company. However you want eso no longer are you restricted by certain types of marketing or stripped about all these rules that you would get from your traditional real estate brokerages and help you really focus on selling houses. So So we made this investment. There was one major question that we ask,

which is what do the real estate agents want? And we talked to, you know, dozens of real estate agents to get an example. And one thing that we found, for example, that was really unique was, at least for many of the agents that we talked to who were on side. Their volumes actually doubled after they joined side, because side was able to take away so many of the excess things that they were doing. That was not their core job, and they could just focus on what they do best, which is selling houses and showing houses. So that was why we may be a best outside tow us. It was a no brainer for any agent to go from, you know, compass or re Max or whatever it might be to join side because you could basically double the amount of money makes

him that sounds like a really strong value proposition. So the last question about the next front here and you mentioned to me that one specific vertical that you are focusing on increasingly or that you are increasingly interested in is health and in particular, population health. So maybe talk to us a little bit about what this is all about and what you're looking at there.

Yeah. So hold your super interesting. We noticed a ton of different view trends in the spaces for everything from, you know, crisper Thio. There's gonna talk to consumer companies, and one of the more interesting friends right now is this thing called Population Health. So So, Population health is basically the practice of of looking at large population, trying to increase their health outcomes, and you'll see actual lot of large public companies are now instituting population health type initiatives or have an entire department for population. How how are they doing that? Well, a lot of them are figuring out what parts of the population are likely to have certain chronic conditions or two, you know, need visits to the E R need to stay at hospitals, and then they're trying to figure out how to improve their health outcomes.

So that could mean, Hey, let's monitor them or let's give them particular, you know, treatments that will make them healthier. Let's improve their lifestyle. That's make sure when they're about to get sick or before they're about to get sick with, bring him into the doctor s. Oh, that could be things like we're no patient monitoring. That could be things like There's an interesting company out in Florida called Papa, which actually lets you lend a grandkid, and they they help check in on you, increasing the amount of connection. You have two people kind of harkening back to the old article that that about real estate could be things like just making sure that you're triaging between all the noise. Someone's paying you about something.

As a doctor, you make sure you're focusing on high value patients, etcetera. So So it's a really interesting trend, and something that Trinity is is going to pay a ton of attention to

going forward. Sounds exciting. Where can people find out more about you and what

you're up to? I'm very open over. You know, Jonah Trinity Ventures, Doctor. Um, so my firm focuses across both consumer and enterprise, and we're looking for a great start ups the funds. So if you have a great start up, especially I I tend to focus and a lot of these vertical marketplaces and vertical SAS companies. So as you mentioned a real estate and attack healthcare and a few other verdict bulls between still free to drop me at Yoon Allan. Now get

back to you. Thank you, John, for being with us today. And I'm looking forward to follow your journey. So this is it for today. And if you want to learn more about what I'm up to check out san who wrote that I owe and subscribe to my newsletter there. Otherwise, you can just subscribe to this channel.