So I think the numbers just sort of seem to be, you know, what was interesting to me as I've sort of tracked the numbers over the years is they go up by very small proportions, but the absolute, because the ecosystem just got that much bigger, is, you know, there are more field female founders by absolute numbers, but the proportions haven't shifted massively. So I just looked at our 2022 numbers and we had, you know, about 10% of dollars in 2022 winter companies with at least one female founder. So within that is, sole female founders and also co-hosts, you know, so that means, and I think typically, to sole female founders, it's around 2%, you know, so there's a wide disparity in the industry still today. And it's kind of settled around those numbers. As it went up in 2021, the absolute counts, a female founders go out, but it's also come down. So it's kind of feels, I guess, somewhat static, although when I started in the ecosystem, it was, you know, I kind of looked back to the late 90s, there was like one or two superstar female engineers, and there was one or two superstar female investors, and there was, you know, women who led PR firms who were very powerful in the industry. It was almost like the female leaders were few and far between a lot within certain sectors, like marketing, but not as many CEOs, not as many engineers, not as many VCs. And I think, even though we're so far from equity today, women are more part of all of those, you know, ecosystems. And so it does feel very, very different today than it did when I joined. Yeah. But, you know, very far from parity, if you're looking at 10% of dollars going to female founders. So. Yeah.

Yeah. And do you think the, I mean, do you think there's any material impact on that with the next, you know, one to two years that we're going to go through? Or, I mean, it seems like, yeah, like, do you think it'll just continue to stabilize? Or is there any particular impact that you see from this unwinding?

Yeah. I don't, I imagine it would, it doesn't necessarily go down, but I don't think it goes up proportionally. And I think there are more, you know, I meet more people in VC who are women who are coming up the ranks. Yeah.

Then, you know, the fun on the fun side. On the

fun side, yeah, on venture. Yeah. And those didn't exist when I joined the industry. And, you know, they were not women on VC teams in the junior ranks who were kind of moving up, that just didn't exist. And that does exist today. So it feels very different. So I don't think, I don't think we're going to go backward. But I don't see anything that pushes this into something very different looking radically in the next few years. But,

you know, so just slow, slow and steady progress. Yeah. Yeah. Slow and steady progress. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Janae, that's, I mean, we're approaching an hour here. It flies by when we're just kind of nerding out about all this stuff. Is there anything else you think we should hit or that you want to share?

Yeah. I think, I mean, I read an interesting article recently from, I don't know if you know, Charles Hudson from Precursor Ventures.

Yes.

Yeah. But he wrote a piece recently, which is looking at, is there a decoupling adventure where he said it used to be the fact that the seed stage companies would then hand off to the mid stage firms to get funded and then the mid stage would go to the late stage. And he said he feels like in this environment, none of that is happening. So it's almost feeling like venture. There is no passing on. There is no path for companies. So I thought that was in, that was an interesting perspective on kind of where are we or where is this all going. And I think that's part of these investors stepping back. I also think we're going to go on the venture side much more to, you know, these firms have been investing in sort of one to two year cycles. They've typically still raised quite large funds, although recently some of the multi stage folks who've been raising large funds have raised lower. They've dropped the amounts they want to raise. But I think those fund cycles are going to expand back to three to four years. Yeah. Just because people are more cautious. And I think that de-risk their investment as well, where it's not just in one span of companies, but it's over a longer term and that, you know,

yeah, you have a lot less vintage concentration. I mean, yeah, I can attest to that anecdotally. I mean, I am speaking to institutional investors right now. And for sure, I mean, institutional investors are going to force VCs to go back to three to four. They're just not, they're not going to allow funds to keep coming back every two years.

Yeah. It's

not the type of risk profile that they want. And it's too strenuous on their business model. I think that decoupling is quite interesting. I mean, one thing that I've talked about a lot is the, I don't know if dangerous is the right word. I don't know if it's necessarily dangerous, but I think there's a lot of misrepresentation with the conflation of venture capital and private equity. So I think there's a lot of firms that may or may not have started off as venture capital and continue to seek the VC culture and brand. They don't want to be private equity, right? They want to be venture capital. But I would say a majority, if not almost the entire amount of their actual investment activity is private equity from an asset class perspective. And there is, I think a lot of, so to this decoupling idea, I think there's this like interesting overlap of Venn diagrams between what people want to be called versus what their actual asset is from a structure perspective and like venture capital and private equity, while both private market investments are very different asset classes. They have completely different risk and return profiles. They have different requirements on portfolio construction. I think it extends all the way down to like they require very different people with very different skill sets to be successful. And I think that it will be very useful to start to separate them out, not based on what people self report, but what they're actually investing in. And so my, I mean, as a very early stage investor, like I think anything after series A is private equity from an asset class. If you want to call yourself venture capital, that's totally fine. But to lump all of the dollars invested post series A into VC and call it VC is unrepresentative of the actual asset class. And so I think there's this like interesting sort of re identification and re sorting that needs to happen of like, where does everybody actually sit? And like, what is your actual risk profile? What's your actual portfolio construction strategy? What is your actual ownership and valuation targets? And like, how do we all work together? Because I feel like it's like everyone's VC, but it's like, not really, right? Like venture capital, not from a cultural perspective, but from a real asset class perspective is seed and before, right? It really is funding, whaling expeditions and your portfolio construction strategy is expecting that 75% of your investments go to zero, and that the ones that don't are big enough successes to make the math work. And if you do that correctly, it works. I mean, it's, it's a proven asset class. But yeah, I think there's a real reckoning in terms of like figure, and I think institutional LPs will start to push on this topic a lot, because there are funds who I think they straddle the fence. And so what institutional investors, I think, are starting to see is like, we're actually getting exposure to two different asset classes blended into one, and it's hard for us to actually understand our risk profile and like what's actually going how diversified are we actually here? Because again, if you see what's happening right now, when you have this, like massive reprising in the public market, and then it comes down into growth capital, how that affects a series A and beyond growth fund is very different than how it affects an origination fund, right? Like a fund who's writing checks into brand new companies, like, you know, that fund is largely counter cyclical. It's like, if I'm writing checks during 2023, when everyone's getting repriced, it's like, that's not affecting me at all. I'm originating brand new companies right now. And so I think that I sort of agree with this decoupling is like, everything's kind of got to mix together. And I think we're going to have to take a step back and actually re-categorize like, who's actually doing what? Because we can't just call it all, we can't just call every single private equity investment venture capital. It's like, we have to have a name for a specific type of strategy, which is investing with a very high amount of risk for a very high return is very different than investing in, you know, like a growth stage investor can't. Growth stage investor is not expecting the lose 75% of their investments that growth stage fund wouldn't work under those conditions. So there. So yeah, I, you know, and as I continue to spend time in the industry, it continues to become clear to me that like, there's a lot of misrepresentation, not for any, not, not, not maliciously, right? But it's just confusing to actually understand what's happening if we mix all this stuff together. Yeah.

So do you think the multi stage VC is a really private equity firms? Yes, for sure.

I mean, if I think if you actually bake down, if you, if you say like, I don't care what you call yourself or how you dress at work, if you look at the portfolio construction strategy and the risk reward strategy, it's private equity. And private equity, you know, like those guys don't want to call themselves private equity, because it's like, well, we don't wear suits to work. Like we're cooler than those guys were, like private equity has kind of its own. And we

want to take a check

in. Yeah, but it's like, yeah, but that's totally fine. But from a pure asset class perspective, if I took your investment strategy and a real private equity investment strategy, and I put them side by side, who could tell the difference? And I don't think it necessarily benefits anybody to conflate all those things together and act like it's all the same thing, because it's not, it's not exposed to the same cycle risks. It's not the same strategy from a portfolio construction perspective. Like, yeah, and what we're

seeing, what we're seeing in the data is companies state that seed pool a lot longer, you know, it's expanded now, obviously, because it's difficult to raise. But that seed stage has become bigger and more extended, and it's much longer to get to series A. I do, I don't know if I totally agree with you, because I do feel like there is, you know, the stage where you get to raise your series A, but then you're beginning to grow your company, you might not, you might have some product market fit, but there's still, and so there is the sort of handoff to growing. And then there's the late stage, which I see as private equity. So I don't know if I completely agree, but I do think there is.

On the dude, so you would push the delineation line back a little bit.