Amit Garg:
A.J., back at you. Thank you for having me. It’s an absolute pleasure. Hi to everybody listening in or watching. Just to add a little bit more to what A.J. mentioned, I’m a co-founder, co-managing partner of Tau Ventures. We’re at 86 million today as of the taping AUM, assets under management. We have just about 50 companies, 54 to be exact, over the four years that we have existed. And we focus on AI in healthcare and AI in enterprise. And the common word there is AI. We started four years ago believing very much that AI was at the cusp, at an inflection point where you could do a lot more with it. There was a lot more data, a lot more computational power. We could make sense of things that weren’t even conceivable a few years ago. So we have invested in companies that use computer vision to detect cancer, machine learning for drug discovery and so on. But let me take A.J.’s question here and let me start with a framework. So I think this framework is pretty common in venture, but it’s understood rather than expressed. And I’m going to try to actually making it concrete rather than abstract. So the framework is as a pre-seed, it’s two or three people in a garage, at least here in Silicon Valley. In New York, it might be in a loft, but it’s essentially a working space or some shared space. But essentially pre-seed is apowerpoint. It’s an idea you want to go build something. A seed, specifically an early seed is a prototype. You have something to show. It’s not fully baked yet, but there’s the beginnings of it. A late seed is, your prototype is built and now you’re starting to do some pilots. You may have some customers, even a pipeline. Early indications of product market fit, which is the Series A. And in the US we often use 1 million annual recurring revenues ARR as the benchmark for a series A for product market fit. And then a series B is your business model is taking off and then you raise a series C, D or E. Now, not all companies go through this step by step. Some people skip steps. You don’t have to necessarily go one step by step. There are many, many cases where you may say, okay, I’m going to spend more time at this stage and I’m going to do a seed and a seed extension. I’m going to do an A and an A prime or an A1 or an A plus. People come up with all kinds of terminology. What they’re really saying is I am still at this stage where I haven’t made the full leap to go to the next one. If I’m at the seed stage, I don’t have enough yet to convince myself and other people that I will be achieving product market fit. So I’m going to raise a little bit more, perhaps a slightly better terms, maybe the same terms. So with all that said, with this framework, when somebody is going out there fundraising, I ask them, tell me not the amount of money you’re raising, but what are you going to use that money for? If you are going to use that money to go from 0 to 1 to go from PowerPoint to minimal viable product, then you’re going from pre-seed to seed. And the types of questions that you will get from investors and the type of expectations that will be on you and the type of progress that you should be demonstrating should be commensurate of going from zero to one. It’s a lot about the team, but can you execute on it? Can you get to a go to market? Can you actually create some, a little bit of defensibility through perhaps your tech versus, let’s say you’re raising money that you will use to scale your business model. You’ll get a different set of questions. What is your CAC Customer Acquisition cost? What’s your LTV lifetime value? What is your churn? There’ll be financially oriented questions. You could raise 5 million for a pre-seed or for a seed or for a series A or for a series B. By the way, I’ve seen that 5 million, exactly that number, for all those stages is what people apply that money towards. So when you are fundraising, think about what do you need to achieve the objective and what that objective is, and then position also your company accordingly in your own mind and in conversations.

A.J. Lawrence:
I think what it does require is you must have a firm belief that your company is scalable enough, or at least future tense, large enough, that you are not only addressing a large enough market, but that you are going to build. Because I know people who’ve done both lifestyle and then also VC and the speed and sort of the requirement to build is a very interesting dynamic. It is that sort of extra bit of tension. I know you’re in Silicon Valley so this is probably a little less of a common discussion, but like how do you even begin modeling out? Is this worthwhile to go this or this, which direction to go to build it yourself or to take a time, slower.

Amit Garg:
I understand, I understand, Andrew. I think that’s a fundamental question when you’re building a company is what type of company am I building? There’s a difference between small business, small medium business, SMB and a startup. You could be 20 people, you could be making a lot of money. But an SMB is about steady growth, maybe linear growth or maybe very small growth. Stable company versus a startup is definitionally something that’s moving fast and exponential growth. So most companies in the US are actually SMBs. If you look at the numbers, just sheer numbers from the Department of Labor, most of us Americans work for small and medium businesses. There are some very large companies that deploy very large amounts of people that disproportionately affect the industry and the economy. And then there are startups. But I dare say that 99% of people should not build a startup. They should build a small and medium business and maybe it becomes a bigger business. 99% of companies are not a fit for venture capital. There’s many other ways of raising money. You could get a bank loan, you could get family, friends, rich uncle, rich aunt to invest. You could, or I tend to joke, family friends and fools. But you could get money from individuals, from families, from grants, government grants, university grants, from corporates who are interested. The ultimate source of funding is your own customers. In many cases, like many restaurants, most restaurants are funding from some combination of bank loans, savings and your customers own revenues, revenues you’re making out of your own customers. A startup is different. A startup is let me use this fuel that I’m getting to build a rocket ship. And more likely than not, as I continue building this rocket ship, I’ll need more and more fuel to go faster and faster, to go further and further. So if your ambition is to go build the next billion dollar company, or forget even the billion, a large company that grows fast, 10x growth, that’s a good metric. Then build a startup, then go talk to VCs, otherwise don’t. A VC is going to be a partner in your business. They’re going to own a percentage of your business. Hiring and firing a person is hard. Hiring and firing a VC is even harder because you got to get somebody else to buy the ownership off that investor. And it’s more complicated than that. But that’s what it is at the end of the day. So choose your VCs wisely, choose your investors wisely. You’re going to be stuck with them potentially for 10 years, which is longer than the average marriage in the US. So this is a very long term marriage. And last thing I’ll say about this is VCs come in all sizes, shapes and forms. There are some very big VCs that invest in a lot of different things. But many VCs have focuses. They have different fund sizes, they have different check sizes, they have different strategies, they have different interests. And many of them, if not most of them won’t invest at the pre-seed stage when it’s just a PowerPoint typically. Typically a first institutional round is at the seed stage. That is typically when you get business or investment, I should say from a VC. So be mindful of that too. It’s don’t go for the big fish when you’re not ready for that, go for a smaller fish. And fish in this analogy is the VC.

A.J. Lawrence:
One thing I would love to kind of talk is in going through your background and looking at the things you’ve done, you worked at Google and then you went to get your MBA at Harvard. Pretty nice. Then you went into the VC world, then you were a co-founder in a company, left that to go back to the VC to now have your own fund where you’re the co-founder and managing director. But what I found really interesting was we’re talking about growth and focusing on growth, aligned, yeah, fast growth, hard growth, whatever type of terminology you want, type of businesses. But even going further back to university days, you went off and started volunteering and started a hospital. And you’re still very active with Hospital for Hope and even including, I was reading through some of the stuff of like, teaching students how to volunteer. So on one hand you’re talking about growth, but the other hand you’re doing all this stuff around how to kind of make things better through a vision that seems to have stuck and built upon over the years for you. I would love to see how those two directions influenced your journey here as an entrepreneur now to an investor.

Amit Garg:
Wow. Honored here by your words, A.J. and let me connect the dots a little bit so the hospital you’re alluding to, there’s always a story behind this story, and there’s many stories. But I’ll give you the snippet here, share the snippet here with the folks listening in. I took a backpack when I was 19, went to rural India. This is not where my family’s from. I’m actually born and raised in Brazil and family’s from a different part of India. But I felt that there was a need in this particular region and that I could do something about it. So when I came back to college, I started helping them, this particular nonprofit that I had found there. And we started helping them fundraise and eventually we helped them fundraise to build a high school library and then eventually helped them to build a high school lab. And the idea always stuck with me that we could do more. So over time, this idea matured into fundraising to help build a hospital. And you have sort of singled me out here, A.J. and I want to make sure to emphasize this. It’s one person with an idea is, I think the right word is idiot. But one person with other people working with them, then you become a team, and then you become reality. So I’ve been blessed with having really good teammates, co-founders, and other folks have supported. And we went and did crowdfunding before we knew what crowdfunding was, what the word was, and the Internet was what enabled us. We got to people all around the world and we were able to manage things at a distance that weren’t possible before, not at the scale that we were able to do. So the story is, five of us who had worked mostly at college continued doing this work in our 20s and now 30s and 40s, and we were able to crowdfund and build a hospital that serves a hundred thousand people and has been in existence now for 10 years. There’s about 350,000 followers on Facebook. And for anybody interested in knowing more about this story, there’s a lot more online hospitalforhope.org is our website. The other part of the story here, A.J., is my professional career, which is you kind of described it. I went to Google and then I went to business school, and then I went to VC, went back to Silicon Valley, started a company, and most of the credit to my co-founders there honestly, and went back into VC and started Tau. And that’s 20 years that have literally summarized in 20 seconds. But the goal there was, I’ve always believed that when you create value, you get validations. It’s not the other way around. If you’re doing something meaningful, then you will figure out a way to also make money out of it. And I’ve been able to align this in my life. I focus on digital health. I find that there’s really two big levers in the world, and one is education and the other one is healthcare. If we can provide healthcare and education to every single human being on the face of this planet, we’ll create an incredible society. We’ll create an incredible future, we’ll unlock capacities and abilities that we can’t even dream of right now. So I picked healthcare for a bunch of reasons. I think healthcare in this country, in the US, is extremely broken. And it’s also perhaps easier to build a career and a business out of healthcare. Education is, I think, a little bit more complicated, at least in the US, not necessarily in all other countries. And what I do for Tau is invest in companies and then work closely with them for multiple years to help them succeed. So I have companies that use machine learning for detecting fraud, waste, and abuse in healthcare payments like that creates value because you make the system more efficient. I have companies that help simplify medical authorizations. That creates value because all of us are patients at the end of the day and want to get clinical tests. I have companies that are helping you lose weight. I have companies that are helping you manage your elderly care by yourself or for some loved ones. And when I look at Hospital for Hope, and if I look at Tau Ventures, the values that I operate Hospital for Hope, which is let’s make an impact, is the same values that I bring to Tau Ventures. And the mode, the ways in which I operate Tau Ventures helped me inform the ways we can run Hospital for Hope in a more efficient way. And I’m not saying it’s a business, it’s not a business. It’s a sustainable nonprofit, the Hospital for Hope. But there’s an intersection of learnings from each other. And I do spend 99% of my time at Tau. I spend my free time these days with Hospital for Hope. But that kernel is just enough to keep me grounded. So I’m very grateful for being able to do that kind of work. My fondest hope that is that I live in a world where Hospital for Hope, our organizations like that, are obsolete, that we don’t need to have those organizations. I think we’re far from that world. But until we get there, I intend to continue running my life this way. I don’t need to choose between making money and giving money away. There’s a third way, which is I can make money and do good while making money.

A.J. Lawrence:
You know, it’s funny because you said, oh, yeah, my partner’s at this. That timeframe and sort of the progress that you made together, that is a lot of work. I always laugh when an entrepreneur will say, oh, yeah, and then we did X. And I’m like, wait a second, I’ve done X. X is like five years. It’s like hard, hard work. Working at Google is not easy. Going to Harvard is not easy. Being a VC is not easy. So I think it is really impressive that you’ve been able to use this and kind of learn from it as you go forward. You’re not taking the path of like, okay, let me put it on easy mode here. So your ability to kind of pull these things together.

Amit Garg:
Yeah, well, you’re kind. My book of failures fills volumes that only I know. So all of us have books of failures that mostly only we know. What you described makes sense in hindsight. It doesn’t usually make sense in foresight because when I was at one stage at, I would do the second stage, and when I was at that second stage, I didn’t think I would do the third stage. So practically every single plan I’ve had in my life has not gone the way I wished or thought. But I think what’s important is to have a plan and to focus on executing it. And even more important than that is to have the sense of purpose, the sense of vision and mission. Like, why are you doing this? So my why is to do “I’m not alone in this”, but it’s to do the biggest possible things with my life, right? Like my one tiny, precious, small, precious life. I’m blessed enough at this point in my life. I’m not gonna go hungry. I have a roof over my head, so why not spend that time now doing the biggest possible things that I can? And to me, that means building Tau Ventures along with Sanjay who is my co-founder and with Sonal and Sharon who joined hands with us a few years ago and with our LPs aka our limited partners, the people who believed in us and gave us the money and of our advisors and venture partners and first and foremost I should have mentioned of our entrepreneurs. So I at this point play the role of enabling other people to do really big things and I’m a part of their success. And I’m in the meantime building my own “startup” which is Tau Ventures, whose whole product is to enable other people to have success. To me, that’s the combination of everything I have done in my life so far and God willing I have, you know, 40, 50 years ahead of me and I’ll continue doing it as long as I can.

A.J. Lawrence:
And with your type of investments, hopefully you’ll help extend it. Looking at the type of businesses because we were introduced through Nick from Together with Renee, who’s been on the podcast a couple of times and what they’re doing is really pretty amazing. And now with AI, what’s allowing them to sort of provide this tool and capability to create advocacy for elder care and just care in general I think is pretty amazing. But taking a step back, looking at both what you’re doing in building Tau and then your ability to support entrepreneurs. VC backed companies have different types of inflection points. They still end up being complex, like moments of complexity in their growth compared to more bootstrapped things. Sometimes they happen a little bit later or whatever. Money can help move it along, but complexity still enters the picture no matter what. Can you kind of talk about maybe some of those inflection points you’ve dealt with and how you’ve worked through them and then how you’ve either used that or other knowledge to help your entrepreneurs kind of go through similar types?

Amit Garg:
So raising a VC fund has many commonalities with raising money for any endeavor, whether it is for a startup, for a nonprofit, for a political campaign. It has many commonalities, but it also has unique idiosyncrasies. And one idiosyncrasy is that as a VC fund you have to do a lot of meetings. I tell people, if you’re looking to start a VC fund, talk to me first so I can talk you out of it. And if you still want to go do it, then yes, you should go and do it. It takes about a thousand meetings on average to raise a VC fund. Takes months if not years to raise a VC fund. It’s typically about 5% of the folks you talk to will convert into a check. Those are my numbers, by the way, but they’re pretty typical in the industry from everything I know. And we raised the first bond. By we, I mean Sanjay and I. That was 17 million. This is all public data. And started that fund, started investing from it. And it’s been about just over three years since that fund had officially closed, meaning that fund was officially done fundraising and we were just investing out of it. So that fund is right now at just about 3x in three years, because we did 25 deals, we got five exits. So one big inflection. There’s two big inflection points right there. One is actually raising the fund. And you don’t raise all the fund typically in one go. You raise it in steps. So we did a first close, we did a second close, and then we did a final close. To be very honest here, we did a series of closes towards the final close. But effectively it was one third, one third, one third. Roughly speaking, each one of those was a big inflection point. And the first big inflection point is really just when you do the paperwork and you finish the first close because then it’s real. You’ve actually started it. Officially started it. But a whole set of another inflection points is when you start getting returns and your portfolio companies start appreciating and they start raising next rounds or getting acquired. There’s one company of ours that dumb luck got IPO. So I will count all of them as steps, stepping stones towards another big inflection point which was raising a new fund. So in 2021, we raised another one and we raised a different kind of fund. We’re primarily seed, but we wanted to be able to do beyond seed. So we raised what is known in the industry often as an opportunity fund, and we increased the size of that. We had raised 17 million to start with. We raised 26.3 for this latest opportunity fund. We also did an SPV, which is just a fancy word for saying I brought a bunch of money together to do one particular deal. It wasn’t officially part of the Opportunity Fund, but in practical matters, it was. And then this year, we closed our second fund, officially fund two, of our third vehicle, but fund two. And that one is just over 40 million. 40.5 to be exact. And if you add up all those numbers, we’re just about over 86 million. So that’s three big milestones that I will highlight, which is similar to what a startup says, right? I raised a seed. I raised a Series A or raised a Series B. But raising the money is not the goal. Right? The goal is to use that money wisely, is to apply it towards good investments and then help work with them. The investment is the start of a relationship really that can last for years. And we’ve tried doing our best. For all the companies we work with, there have been some big successes. We have a 17x in the portfolio. We have a 14x in the portfolio. There have been some that haven’t done as well and there’s a handful that honestly I think will end up losing capital. But it’s heavily skewed towards success. And if you look at most VCs, 90% of their companies don’t end up making much money, if at all, and 10% do. And we, by the virtue of looking at 4,000 companies a year, by selecting them, by working closely with them, by affecting a little bit their odds of success, I think we have been able to push towards a higher rate of return. So that’s the goal, that’s the biggest inflection point, is continue doing good things, helping our entrepreneurs succeed and then returning money back to our investors.

A.J. Lawrence:
What are the types of things other than obviously capital that you’re able to help them navigate? You know, are you hands off? What is the type of support that you can give an entrepreneur in that after they’ve raised?

Amit Garg:
We believe in being hands on. So we are not spray and pray like some people say. We’re not taking thousands of bets. We’re about 25 bets per fund. And that means that at any given time one of us is handling about 10 companies, which is a reasonable number. Anything more than 10 means you’re not devoting that much time and attention to them. Now, which one of those 10 companies it is at any given point of time changes? If I invest in a company like Iterative Health, when they were at the seed stage, we did a lot for them. They were amazing. They executed phenomenally. Now they are way past the seed stage. They’ve raised just about $200 million. They’re a series B company. It’s a different kind of investor that works more closely with them. I still obviously engage with them, but not as much day to day. So at any given moment I’m working with them. And so the ones that I’m most engaged with right now are mostly the companies that we have invested through our latest fund. Our latest fund is, as we speak, up to 10 investments between healthcare and enterprise. And this is just about half and half between those two verticals. So where we pride of ourselves is when you’re hands on, you obviously help the co-founders, the CEO especially to think through product and technology and market and defensibility and competition and fundraising strategy and governance. All of those things. You are, I like to think of myself as the first mate of a ship. I’ll come in and I’ll do whatever you need me to do. I’ll help you clean the floors if needed. But you are the captain of the ship, you are running the show and I’m here to perhaps challenge you, but mostly to help you. And we help especially with two things. One, help them raise more money. I’m really proud of the fact that we have just over 2,000 VCs on our mailing list alone. We have relationships with so many different funds and we’re able to get to almost any fund with one conversation. There’s no shortcut for this. This is the result of years and years of being in the industry. Both Sanjay and I have been over 20 years in the industry and both of us are in many ways a product of both east coast and west coast of Silicon Valley, especially of Silicon Valley. But both of us have spent a significant amount of time in the east coast and then we also have inroads with other parts of the country. But those two are the biggest ones. We are proud of the fact that every single company in the portfolio that is over a year old for us as an investment has been able to raise more capital. So we actively help over portfolio companies to the extent that they want and they need to raise more money in this round or future rounds, we’ll make introductions. We’ll give them feedback, we’ll help them understand the market dynamics. We’re the partners, we have an asymmetric knowledge of what’s going on. We do this day in and day out versus an entrepreneur who will maybe do it a few times in their life. The second thing we focus on specifically is helping our portfolio get more customers. We have by certain measures just about 1.6 million followers at this point. We post them at variety of places and we get exposed to a lot of other people and we’re able to get a lot of people engaged with our startups. So we have a bunch of people highlighted on the website. These are CEOs, CTOs, CMOs in terms of healthcare payers, providers, pharma in terms of enterprise, a lot of fintech leaders, cybersecurity leaders and we put them in touch also selectively with the goal of helping create win-wins. It could be a partnership. It could even lead to an acquisition.

A.J. Lawrence:
It is interesting because I think a lot of people are noticing, not just noticing, been happening for a few years, but it’s sort of I think accelerating that. Developing an audience allows you to accelerate. You know, it used to be you would go through your business, you would try to touch and talk to as many people as you can. Now, I was looking at data, some of your articles on Datadriven. Is it.org or.com, i’ll put it in the show notes. Your ability to reach people who are thinking about things relevant to your investments to these companies, it’s kind of the whole–not new because like I said, it’s been going up for a few years– but it is so much more than it used to be. Like, oh, we have a Rolodex. And I’m actually, I’m old enough that I remember people saying, oh, we got a Rolodex. We can help you. Don’t worry. And it’s now like, oh, I have a presence. I can talk about you. And I know people who would be interested based upon, you know, what they read that you know how that has changed. Do you find yourself working on, given some of the really interesting content you are generating around different parts of healthcare, different parts of raising investments for entrepreneurs and stuff, do you find this audience development becoming more of what you do at Tau or?

Amit Garg:
Yeah, yeah, it’s Datadriven.com, by the way. Justin Chan, who runs it, does a phenomenal job. I believe one of the Top 100 blogs in the world. And he’s been a great partner to us for many years. But your larger question, I think creating content is ultimately about thought leadership. So there’s multiple benefits to that. One benefit is obviously to help us with name recognition. People get to know what Tau Ventures is, get to know who Amit Garg, Sanjay Rao, Sonal Panda, Sharon Huang, who they are, what work we do, what we look for. So obviously that’s a win for us. But I do see other values when I am interacting with a company, whether it’s prospective or an actual investment, we’re debating a topic. I often go like, hey, wait a second, I have an article about this. Let me just send it to you. That way you can look at it in more depth and understand a little bit better what position we’re advocating for or what insights we are trying to share. So that information exchange, that knowledge exchange is quite useful. I also find that teaching and sharing is an act of learning. When I write something or when I speak at a podcast with you right now, A.J. I’m learning and it helps me think things through, keep my mind sharp, keep myself abreast of what’s going on. And the questions that I get helped me realize, okay, there’s this other way of thinking or there’s these other parameters that I hadn’t considered. So I find that that’s extremely valuable also. And the last benefit I would mention is there is a component here of giving back also. It is an aligned interest when we are discussing how can you fundraise effectively in today’s market. Some people, a fraction of those people who read that article will be people who we will end up interacting with. Probably 99% of them will not be, but they will learn something, they will create something. And in ways that I can’t even imagine, they might end up benefiting me or certainly benefiting society. I do believe in karma. Like, I will do good unto the world and good shall come to me. The universe will conspire in my favor in that sense. I can’t tell you how many times this has happened in ways I couldn’t even have expected. Today itself, I was chatting with an entrepreneur, our own entrepreneur, and said, oh yeah, I had discovered about you because I read an article you had written and I didn’t even know that.

A.J. Lawrence:
It is kind of a fun thing. And it’s as someone who works with companies to help them grow also, everyone says, oh yeah, we do this so we can get customers. It’s like, no, it’s usually it’s the people who do read it, never talk to you, as you’ve said. But the people, they tell or someone says something related to what you say, and they’re like, wait, you know, I’m gonna discuss that. And it is so funny how you do good, good will come back to you. I really think it is that thing of like, look, you put out value to your audience, specifically to the types of value that are relevant to them. And then that second and third tertiary part of their network, all of a sudden that’s the part where interesting things starts coming and it’s like, how do you build those inroads here? We’re talking about you. I don’t want to get to- because I geek out about that type of stuff, but I really do think that there is a great way of positioning yourself. Because a lot of times there is all sorts of talk from a lot of people, a lot of content generation, but the relevancy of how it comes to play I think is very interesting. Looking at the things you’ve accomplished, you know, you’re on your third fund, the hospital is growing, you’ve been a co-founder of a company that’s successful and growing, even though you’ve gone on to other things, you’ve achieved a lot of the definition of success. But how do you, not for Tau Ventures, not for Hospital for Hope, but how do you Amit look at what success is going to be? You’ve talked about wanting to live much longer. You’ve talked about creating more things. What is the definition of success that you work with for yourself?

Amit Garg:
Well, A.J., you’re too kind. When you’re speaking about some of those things, I go like, well, wait a second. There’s all these other factors. Like, let me just pick up on the hospital. So we’re not enlarging it because we don’t want to enlarge it. We want to make it more efficient. But I get your point. I think success is not about accomplishments. I don’t think success is above material wealth. Success is about, well, first of all, happiness. And how do you maximize your own happiness and happiness in the world. And I know that’s a very amorphous concept, but I think that’s the ultimate success is that you lead a happy life and you have helped other people lead happy lives. And to me, those are one and the same. I do see if I’ve created happiness in the world that I will be happy about it and I will be happier in return. So we’ve talked a lot about professional success here, but I do think that the personal success is really important. The personal success comes from the depth of the relationships you have with your spouse, with your family, with friends, with loved ones, with coworkers, with general society overall. And to put it in a very blunt word, like perhaps stark reminder here, we’re on this planet for a flicker of time. It’s a light and it flickers and goes away. So I’m not going to be taking anything with me. Nobody is, right? I think what I will leave behind is legacy. What I’ll leave behind are my ideas, my thoughts, my works. So like many other people have said this before, I’m not the first one to say this. I want to make sure to leave a big footprint and a big footprint that helps a lot of other people do a lot of other, bigger things. I have the luxury of standing on the shoulder of giants so I want to add to that. And as far as life extension, just one quick word. I think many people want to live a long time. I don’t necessarily need to live a long time. I just want to live whatever. I live with quality. So I would rather be 80 or 90 with high quality of life than 120 with low quality of life. So there’s a difference between longevity and length, like length of life. I want to live with prosperity, meaning whatever years I have are really good years.

A.J. Lawrence:
Okay, well, I’m looking forward to seeing it. I’m actually talking to a couple more of the CEOs in your portfolio so I’m excited about that one. Just to keep paying attention to the stuff you’re doing, I’d love to talk to you down the road because I think what you’re building and the type of companies you support. We didn’t really go into healthcare other than agreeing upon America has gotten to be crazy, having lived abroad for five years. And yes, there are bureaucratic craziness and all that in Spain, but things worked. And I’m amazed, even at a very high level health insurance, just how difficult care is. And so the things you’re doing, I mean, we could go, we’ll start a whole different type of podcast. It’s a different type of podcast but I love you’re using Tau to then help work within that opportunity because wherever there’s difficulty, that means there’s opportunity. So I’m really excited to see what you do with this. Where can people learn more about you, reach out to you? I know you’re a very active LinkedIn. What’s the best way for people just to learn more about what you’re doing in Tau?

Amit Garg:
Sure, sure. I appreciate the remarks here. So if you are an entrepreneur building a company that you think could be a fit for us. Easy to find. We’re on LinkedIn. My full name is right here on the screen and our fund name is right there on the screen also. And the best way for an entrepreneur to get in touch, if they don’t know us already, is to go through a warm connection. We have 4,000 deals coming to us per year and we can’t do justice to all of them. So like any other good VC, we do filter our rate of return at this point. Return, as in giving a reply back, is about 10%. So we take a first meeting with just about 400 companies a year. And then we do second meetings with about half and the third meeting with just about half of that, and we actually end up making 10 to 12 investment per year. So it’s a very small output with a very large funnel that is typical of most VCs. One way you can distinguish yourself a bit is by leveraging trust. If I have invested with someone, or if they are somebody I’ve invested in, or if it’s somebody that I particularly respect because they’re close to us, they’ve done a lot for us, I’m obviously going to pay more attention. It doesn’t mean a guarantee of investment, but it increases your odds for sure. And that’s a general advice for everyone. I’ll certainly be grateful if somebody likes what we do and what we publish and wants to follow us on LinkedIn, wants to follow us on Twitter. Sorry, it’s called X now. And yeah, something, we will certainly take it. We are like many other entrepreneurs, we are building this from scratch and we can use all the help we can. And in terms of Hospital for Hope, which is the other side of my life, it’s essentially on autopilot these days. The closest description I will have is I’m the chairperson of the board. So it’s helping one hour a week maybe that’s how much time goes into it. But if anybody’s interested in engaging, more than welcome to go visit the organization. We have a guest house there. We host about a hundred people over the year from all over the world. And if somebody wants to help with fundraising or perhaps to support us financially, there’s a lot more on the website. Hospitalforhope.org. Last thing I’ll mention, going back to Tau Ventures, we host lots of events. We believe in building community. We open it up to the public. This year, we have done literally one event a month, and not just only in the Bay Area. We did in New York, we did it in Zurich, we did it in Vienna. We’re about to do one again here in Menlo Park in the heart of Silicon Valley. But we have done them around the world with the biggest ones being wherever our biggest bases, Silicon Valley, New York and Singapore. I should have mentioned Singapore up front. So if anybody wants to join them, our newsletter is on our website. Anybody can join the newsletter, so tauventures.com.

A.J. Lawrence:
All right, we’ll put all this in the show notes, put it in the email and of course in our socials. That way you can follow along and learn more about Amit. And like I said, go check out his LinkedIn and go see if you have any connections if you are interested in that direction. Don’t just bombard him over the head. But Amit, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate this. This was a lot of fun and a lot it was helpful to kind of have that different type of voice and the different type of perspective from a VC versus an entrepreneur. So thank you so much for coming.

Amit Garg:
Thank you for having me, A.J. big shout out. You’ve worked with a portfolio company of ours. That’s how we know each other. I’ve really enjoyed that conversation. And if you wish to speak to anybody else from our network of our portfolio, give the word. More than happy to connect the dots.

A.J. Lawrence:
Everyone, thank you for listening today. Like I said, go check out Amit. Go follow him. Go look at his stuff. We’ll have everything about Tau Ventures, Hospital for Hope, we’ll have it all in the show notes. We’ll put it in socials, everything. Just, I think, if you’re enjoying this content, if you enjoy those types of conversations, go give us a review on your podcast listening of choice. It really does help us get other cool investors, entrepreneurs and people who work with entrepreneurs to come on the show. The more we get, the better I can reach out and find interesting people to help you on your own entrepreneurial journey. So, hey, thank you so much for listening today. Thank you, Amit, for coming on. I can’t wait to talk to everyone again on the next show. All right, bye, everyone.