All right, lights there. Heat lamps. All right. Welcome, everybody. I'm Wes Selke, one of the managing directors and founders of Better Ventures, based over in Oakland. And I have the esteemed privilege this afternoon to be facilitating, moderating this panel of some really awesome people. We've got some serious firepower up here, as I'm sure you saw in the program, some excellent GPs that are working with top-notch VC firms working at the seed stage in sort of the impact space. I know each and every one of them quite well, in fact, have co-invested, I think, with everybody on the panel. And actually, Julie was just pointing out that Brian, all four of us invested in Book Nook and you passed on Book Nook. Not yet. OK, not yet, not yet. Next round. Yeah, that's a typical venture answer right there. Not yet. It's always leave it open. But yeah, I just wanted to maybe quickly frame this up before we dive into some questions here. But I've been working in the impact space for about a decade. And there has been tremendous evolution of this space since I joined. I was working with Good Capital, right out of business school in 2007.  And we really made people's heads hurt when we talked about impact investing. They just really didn't understand, shouldn't this be philanthropy? Are you just giving money away? And this space has really evolved over those years. And a number of us on this panel started off with accelerator programs that then sort of evolved into venture funds. And years ago, there was very little early stage capital available in the impact space. And that has really changed quite significantly in the last, you know, call it seven to 10 years. And this panel is a great example of that. So I do want to just sort of dive in and maybe allow the four of you to maybe quickly introduce yourselves, your firm. Maybe talk briefly about your strategy. Want to kick us off, Julie? Yeah, thanks to us. Hi, everyone. My name is Julie Lean. And I'm the co-founder and managing partner of the Urban Innovation Fund. We invest in startups transforming our cities. And we specifically provide seed capital and regulatory support to entrepreneurs tackling our toughest urban problems with the goal of getting them to be tomorrow's most valued and impactful startups. We also started as an accelerator program initially. My co-founder Claire and I launched an accelerator program called TUML about four years ago focused on urban ventures. Through the accelerator, we incubated 38 startups working in areas like transportation, energy and water, workforce development. And after the financial and impact success of many of those startups, we decided to formalize our investing efforts through the Urban Innovation Fund.  Great. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Shantel Poulson. I am a co-founder and general partner at Reach Capital. We're an early stage fund focusing on companies who are pursuing issues of access and opportunity in education. We're a $50 million fund. We primarily invest at the seed stage, although we will do some Series A and Series B. We spun out of New School's Venture Fund. We spun out of New School's Venture Fund, which is a nonprofit that focuses primarily in the K-12 space. So to date, most of our investing has been within K-12, and we're starting to broaden that to both early childhood and post-secondary education. Great. Hi, I'm Tasha Seitz. I'm with Impact Engine, which is the only non-bay area that is fun, actually, now that I think about it. We're also a black sheep. So we're based in Chicago. We also started life as an accelerator fund for impact companies. And a few years ago, we sort of made the observation that companies that were coming out of our program, it was taking them a long time to raise funding. There were a lot of investors they were meeting with who were quite interested in making impact investments, but weren't quite ready to pull the trigger on writing a check. So we saw an opportunity to launch a fund so that we could invest on behalf of interested investors into impact companies. So our focus is software companies that are driving improvements in education, health, resource efficiency, and economic empowerment. We invested the seed in series A stage. And because we have that background as an accelerator, we have an amazing community very, very deep in Chicago in the Midwest that we can put into service of the companies and use that community to help and add value to companies in a variety of ways. So hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about that, too. Thanks, great. I guess to that point, how many entrepreneurs are in the room? Oh. Okay. Just wanted to get a poll. I'm Brian Dixon, one of the partners at Capricapital, and we're a seed stage impact fund in Oakland. And I think the thesis of our fund is how do we help close gaps that acts as an opportunity similar to reach and many folks on this panel, especially for low income communities and communities of color. So anytime we're making an investment in a product, that's kind of the filter we put things through. And as a seed stage fund, we get a chance to work with entrepreneurs in their first round or first institutional round funding. And I've been there for six years. Awesome. Thank you. Great. Okay, so I've got about 100 questions for you guys and 50 minutes and definitely want to leave some time at the end here. So we got a show of hand for entrepreneurs. How many VC fund managers or sort of aspiring VC fund managers do we have in the house? Okay. And then LPs, investors in funds. Okay, we'll meet you guys backstage afterwards. Okay, we have snacks back there. We'll hang out. Great. So I wanna, there's a lot going on. There's a lot that goes into kind of seed stage fund strategy. And I've learned a great deal about that in the last seven years as have my colleagues up on stage. So I think what I'd like to do is sort of ask some questions around fund strategy, a number of things that we'll get to that we talked about before and also want to kind of, so speaking to an audience of VC fund managers as well as entrepreneurs and we'll get to some questions that really relate to entrepreneurs as well. So my first question is, do you think of yourself as an impact fund? That can be a little bit of a loaded word, the word impact, just like social, it means different things to different people. Depending on whose office you walk into, impact can sink your ship if you're trying to raise money or it can rise it up. So I'd love to, maybe very quickly, how do you guys think about impact? Do you talk about yourselves as impact fund? You wanna kick us off? Sure, I'll, I think they're switching to this. All right. I'll kick it off. So yes, we are an impact fund and why? Well, that's the whole reason for why what we're trying to do, right? It's when we're making an investment, we're not only thinking about, is this gonna get us the return, three extra turn of the fund, but also how does this actually make a difference? And we started rolling out with founders, pretty much creating a social impact deck where the founders, especially at the early stage, a lot is unknown and a lot is unknown with the business, a lot is unknown with kind of impact. So now we have a deck that we can kind of meet around or speak around. What does this look like? What do you think you'll be in 12 months? What will the impact be? And I think that was for us, one of the game changers, declaring we're an impact fund and actually putting some structure around that. Nice. Tasha? Well, impact is in our name. So we are very clearly an impact focus fund. It's part of our brand. We really do care about it and we're looking for entrepreneurs that are impact motivated. So that's why the brand matters. We dig in pretty deep with them. On impact, we create a separate sort of logic model around each company that we invest in in terms of making the link between the product that they are delivering to the market and ultimately the outcomes that we think that product can create. And so for us, it's also important on the LP side as well. So part of what we do is provide investors with opportunities to engage, to deepen their own understanding of impact investing. And so selecting LPs and bringing in investors that are impact motivated is important for us. So yes, it's an important part of our branding. And frankly, we love the entrepreneurs who I call them the closet impact entrepreneurs where they may be doing a company in health. They've got some great mainstream technology venture investors and then we say, hey, we really would like to talk about impact and dig in and construct a logic model and they're so excited to talk with us about that. And we love those kinds of entrepreneurs. Great. So yes, we also consider ourselves to be an impact focus fund. And I think unfortunately the word has gotten very diluted. So most funds you're gonna talk to today are impact funds. They'll have impact in their branding, impact in their deck, but what does it actually mean? And when it comes down to it, I think actions speak a lot louder than words. So we're impact by the nature of what we're doing in terms of being focused within the education sector. But I think we take it to the next level, both in terms of who we're investing in. So we like to say that we look for missionaries, not mercenaries, right? So I think it first comes down to that initial screen in terms of the entrepreneurs or are they in it for impact reasons? Are they in it because they're passionate about improving some aspect of the education system? The next piece is just how we evaluate impact as the company progresses. And so we work with a third party who helps us understand who you're impacting. So Brian talked about low income communities, communities of color. We look at that in terms of the user base. So we're not gonna invest in companies that are only serving like high net with individuals, for example. We also look at the usage and penetration. So we wanna make sure that our companies are not going to schools and ever being used by teachers, right? So we look at impact in terms of the depth of the usage and then just the satisfaction of those users. And then lastly, obviously, the holy grail is just improvement in student outcomes, right? And so because we're so early stage, you might not be able to get to that last aspect, but we'll have some early indicators showing that they are making progress towards their internet impact in terms of student achievement. Awesome. So at the risk of being, echoing what many of my panelists have said, we are a market rate driven fund with a specific investment thesis around urban innovation and making our cities a better place to live. For us, we are absolutely impact driven, mission driven, world positive, whatever spin you wanna put on it. To Tasha's point, I think many of our entrepreneurs would not necessarily self identify as impact because they worry about the challenges of that word. It is a charged word. And I think to some investor's mind, it does trigger, oh, maybe this is concessionary, maybe you're not focused on market rate returns. I think more and more we're moving to a place where you don't have to be concessionary when you're achieving impact goals. But I do understand why some of our entrepreneurs have shied away from it. I think it's true on the LP side too, right? So you'll have LPs that'll say, well, I don't wanna look at it impact focused fund because maybe they'll have lower returns. So like you said, we wanna lead with, we are a market rate return driven firm, but also looking at impact. Yeah, and to that point, actually many of our investors would not necessarily self identify as impact. I would call many of them impact curious, which is a name that actually Rick from Better Ventures came up with. And it refers to many are looking for differentiated investment theses. Many are looking for new types of fund managers that look a little bit different, act a little bit different from the norm. And I think that's a really great trend. Yeah, I think we must have come up with maybe 60 different ways to say that we're impact driven based on the 60 iterations of our investor deck for our last fund. And I do remember one time Rick and I were shooed out of an institutional LP's office in Chicago because we muttered the words mission driven. And I think his response was, what the hell does that mean? And clearly they were a good fit for the fund. But yeah, nomenclature is really important. Real quick, one word answers, do you measure impact? Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. Oh, look at that. All right. All yeses. Okay, when you're evaluating a deal, what is more important to you between the team or the market? And what else do you look for? Maybe we'll just have a couple of you guys answer because we have a lot of questions to get to here. Tasha, what do you look for? What's more important team or market? Do I have to? I'm a both and kind of investor. I'll go, I'll put a stake in the ground. So for us it's team. And first and foremost, especially at the earliest stages. Because at the end of the day, they're the ones that are driving the company and if it is the right team, they'll figure out the market. And if they're not in the right market, they'll pivot to the right market. So really it is the team and can they execute and do they have a large enough vision? And I could just jump in and add, I completely agree we also look at team, but a lot of times when people talk about investing in the team, what does that mean? And a lot of times I think in venture capital you see a lot of affirmation bias where the same types of faces and names and ages get funded over and over. And for us when we look at team, we really try to place a large stake on execution. So showing that even when you're early stage you can still have traction, you can demonstrate that you're hungry and scrappy and working really hard and starting to have a lot of market penetration at an early stage. So for us that's really the most important thing. Well and I'll just jump in on the team piece because I mean the old venture capital rule of thumb is you want an A team and a B market or with a B product rather than a B team with an A on all other counts. But I think, so I think the execution piece is key but we also do look for entrepreneurs that are either targeting large markets or where we see market adjacencies because we are trying to drive attractive financial returns alongside and there are a lot of companies that have great products, maybe even great teams but if there's not sort of a big market opportunity it's just hard to grow a big valuable company in that space. And both are important. So you're all early stage investors and sometimes a complaint is often no one will invest in my company, I'm too early, it's a chicken or the egg, I need the capital to build the product but I need the product to raise the capital. Brian, can you comment quickly on what do you look for, say we all know sort of team and market are really important but what is it that you see in an entrepreneur and in a team that signals to you okay, we're ready to go in here. Yeah, so I think it comes down to the why. Why is this the problem you want to spend the next five years tackling? For us a lot of the entrepreneurs we invest in they have some lived experience for why they're tackling the problem whether it be in education or whether it be in health we just made an investment in a company called Hustle and it's scaling text messaging, personalized text messaging. And it's like well why is that important to the founder? It turns out that his father and his grandfather both worked in politics and this is a problem that when he sat around the table as a child growing up, he wanted to solve and it's something that he wanted to solve for his whole life. So we're always trying to get at the why and probably ask that question too many times just to get the real answer. But if you ask the question why and you get a response that you like but it's still really, really early, will you invest or is there certain traction thresholds that you need to see? That would bring us in. We want to try the product. So that's the first thing, we like to touch the product. So do you not do pre-product? So we do not do pre-product at all, so that's one. Pre-revenue, we do pre-revenue? We do pre-revenue, but we want to talk to folks who are using it. So you might have a free product in a pilot stage. Well, let's find out who's using it if it's in the school district, talks to some teachers and see how it actually is going. Ultimately, I think any company who's gonna get a seed stage investment has to get to a point where they have revenue to get to an A. We know that as investors but I think sometimes entrepreneurs think it's possible to raise without a product and then possible to raise an A without revenue and we've seen that to be false. Yeah, agreed. Other thoughts? I mean, I'll jump in. When I started the venture business 20 years ago and it took $5 million to create a product and the world has changed dramatically. It doesn't cost a lot to build a product, a minimum viable product that you can get out there and test.  So, we will also invest sort of if they're committed pilots, we like to see money changing hands in those pilots but entrepreneurs can get a long way without a lot of cash nowadays in terms of at least getting something out there that they can test. It may not be the final product, they may be a lot more money that needs to go in to make it robust, to make it complete, to make it scalable but you can get something done on a little and the more scrappy can be as an entrepreneur the further you can get, the more impressed I am. Yep. And I'd love to jump in with an example. We had an entrepreneur who came to us and when we first met him he just seemed so early with his product. His basic premise was to try to make commuting in cities better specifically during commuter hours starting with San Francisco. And he came in, pitched us the idea, we like the passion but it was so early and we basically said, okay, this is a little too early for us. Two weeks later he shows up in our office and he's like, I did it. I started driving a van, I leased one myself and now I'm driving people, picking people up around San Francisco. And I'm like, oh my God, the regulatory nightmare but I was still impressed and it was amazing because he showed not only the passion but that willingness to get things done immediately. And you know what? He started transacting money, showing real revenue and growth. This company that we were the first investor in is called Chariot. You might have seen it around San Francisco. It's a crowdsourced commuter shuttle and less than two years after our initial investment they were bought by Ford Motor Company to build out Ford's smart mobility line. So I think it shows the power of being scrappy, being tenacious and even when you don't have the technical side all figured out you can show that there's a willingness to pay. And we think that entrepreneur is a great example of execution at work. You know, I asked you not to bring that one up because she introduced us to the founder of that company and we passed. And now I see a Chariot van just about every single day and I'm constantly reminded that we passed on a deal that was a nice exit after about two years. But you know, as a VC you have to get over the ones that you missed. We'll have other ones. Yes, I'm sure you will. No, both of us. That's right, that's true, that's true. You can send those to us. Brian's gonna miss out on a book note. Great, why don't we shift gears a little bit. I'd love to talk a little bit about sort of portfolio construction. And this is a big topic. This is something that Rick and I talk about a lot. Our advisors, we get a lot of advice from our advisors. I think maybe we can demystify it a little bit for maybe the entrepreneurs in the room as well because this gets to things like follow on strategy. You know, it's important to know when you're talking to a venture investor do you reserve for follow on or is it just a one and done kind of investment? You know, which can be good and bad. I mean, if they don't follow on, then that tells you something about what the next round is gonna look like. If they do follow on, but end up not falling on into the next round, that could be a negative signal. So these are things to be thinking about as an entrepreneur as you've got to fundraise. But maybe get a couple of you guys talking about how do you think about portfolio construction in terms of shots on goal versus going sort of wide or deep, you know, are you stake driven? Do you reserve for follow on? You maybe talk a little bit about that. You wanna take that one? Yeah, I can start because this has really evolved. It's evolved with both the landscape evolving as well as our fund strategy evolving. So recall that I said we spun out of new schools venture fund. And so when we were still part of that nonprofit we had a very different strategy. Number one, we weren't financially return driven. And so the goal was really about seeding the market, right? So we were making very small bets, 100,000, 200,000, kind of spreading those bets around. We made 50 investments, so lots of investments and zero follow on. So again, entrepreneur new or is new, like here's your kind of seed money to get you started. And our goal was let's grow this ecosystem, let's talk to other co-investors, other series A investors that can take you on the next round. But that was really the goal. So we were really just kind of sprinkling and kind of seeding the market. As we moved to reach one, we became more opportunistic. So still making small bets at the seed stage, but then really wanting to double down into our winners. So that means we reserve capital, but not everybody, like you were saying, not everyone we're gonna necessarily follow on on. It's really about do they reach certain metrics and certain milestones that we feel comfortable really doubling down and basically choosing our winners. And so that's kind of half of our capital now is just going into doubling down into our winners from our seed. So less initial companies and then doubling down. As we're moving forward, we're becoming more ownership driven just from a fun strategy perspective. And so we're actually making even fewer bets, taking a larger ownership stake from stage one and then again doing a double down. And that's partly driven by the fund economics that we're trying to achieve. And so part of it is also driven by your LPs, their expectations. And so that's kind of driving our strategy forward. So I say now it's more a couple of seed deals and then identifying the winners and doubling down on those. And what's your typical reserve ratio when you look at a deal? Yeah, it's usually 50-50. So 50 for the initial check and then the other half. So one to one? One to one. Okay. Other thoughts, Tasha? We're one to one. Yeah, we're one to one. I mean, I would say a very similar strategy in terms of doubling down on the winners. I will say just having been in the venture capital business for a long time, when you get to larger venture funds, you sort of are expected to participate per Rata. And as entrepreneurs, you should sort of think about this as a small fund. We do have a little bit of money to do follow-ups but not a lot. And as a small fund, you tend to have less expectation of larger funds around the signaling effect of whether dollars come in or don't come in. But that is something to think about. I mean, sometimes as an investor, as an entrepreneur, having pockets around the table that can buy you a little more time if you need to hit those milestones is really critical. And then other times, that signaling effect is important. It's tough to do as a small fund. So we're trying to be more strategic about where we place our follow-up bets but we're one for one. All right. Same. Same? So boring. 10 to one, no. Yeah. I will say that on the portfolio construction, there are some funds that are ownership stake driven. We're multiple of return driven. So that's part of how we think about it. We don't think, oh, we need to own 10% or 20% of the company. We really want to see the ability to make at least 10 times our money on any individual deal, ideally with upside from more than that because we are taking that early risk and that's sort of a different mindset around how we look at opportunities. Great. So let's shift gears again, talk a little bit about what the mechanics look like at the early stage. These days, before it was seed, and that was the first stage, but now there's a stage before seed called pre-seed. Who knew that there was a stage before seed but there actually is now called pre-seed? And I like to think of pre-seed as kind of a continuum of investment, right? Where typically you have a founder raising on notes over time until they get to the point where then they want to raise a priced round.  I'd love to hear from maybe two or three of you on what does that typically look like for you?  I know we've got a bit of an allergy to safes at Better Ventures, but we do do notes. And others are much more flexible and sort of open to doing whatever. And I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. You wanna? Yeah, sure, I can kick it off. We're open-minded, so I would say that the landscape, since we invest in the pre-seed and seed stage, we typically write an initial check between 100 and 500K. We're open to convertible notes, safes, priced rounds. We're pretty open-minded. I would say that landscape we've seen has shifted much more heavily toward notes and safes just given the fact that we are at the earlier stage. And I would say that for entrepreneurs just being careful around notes because they always warn you, but a lot of times when you have multiple notes with different caps, it gets really messy and it's hard to know your exact ownership percentage, which is why I think investors certainly prefer to have clarity around it through a price model. That said, it's less expensive and entrepreneurs need to be conscientious of time and you wanna be scrappy and thoughtful about that. So we are open-minded. All right, yes, same for us.  And we're just flexible and kind of working with both. I agree to the point of when you're doing a lot of notes that kind of rack up and nobody really knows or nobody's paying attention to, what does that mean when they convert? And that's the problem probably why you guys don't do safes or convertible notes because you're trying to avoid that. So one of the things that we try to do is just educate entrepreneurs, especially first-time entrepreneurs who might not know kind of the pros and cons of the choices that they're making. You know, safes are really easy to do. Anybody, you don't need a lawyer, you can kind of just download it, update. I think it's like three things you can choose. Valuation cap, a discount, or no discount, no valuation cap. The funny thing about safes though is when you do the drop-down on valuation cap, it starts at 10 million. Have you noticed that? Well, you gotta pay up for that, is it? Besides that point, I think that as a C-stage fund, you've gotta be flexible because you don't wanna miss deals. And for that reason, we do both. All right, all right. Any other thoughts about that? Yeah, okay. I mean, I would say we're open-minded, flexible. We do a lot of safes and convertible notes. We would never do one without a cap and lower than 10, typically. Yes, that would be nice. You can write that in. Right. I'm curious your thoughts about, you know, innovation and disruption in the venture market, especially as it relates to, you know, investing in the kinds of companies that we're investing in, you know, mission-driven companies. I had a long talk with someone just recently about, you know, the 10-year fund structure. Like, does that make sense for impact?    You know, I'd love to hear some thoughts on, you know, what's broken or what doesn't work about the VC model as it relates to mission-driven entrepreneurs and, you know, what are you doing or what do you think needs to be done to, whether it's, you know, looking at evergreen fund structures, looking at alternative exit strategies, you know, just different approaches that are maybe, you know, unconventional as it relates to the more traditional VC space. Yeah, I'd say for us, one of the things that we're really thinking about is the exit outlook for a lot of our companies. And so, primarily right now, it's gonna be M&A and extra fees, but it mainly be PE. So, within a tech, that's what we're seeing right now, versus an IPO route, but even normal tech is not seeing the IPO route as much. So, we're thinking about, what are some alternative exit strategies? And we actually just had one company, they're called Goldbook, they do technology for a special education market. And what they did is they got to, you know, raise a small, only raise a seed round, got to profitability, became very successful. And they decided to do a management buyout, right? And so, basically they bought back their investors and became employee-owned, which was a great story. It was, you know, a decent return for us. The founders are now, you know, completely owned the company and they're still making a large impact. So, we're thinking more about, is there other kind of exit opportunities like that versus the traditional IPO and M&A route? Right. Is REACH setup as a 10-year fund structure? We are set up 10-year. How many extensions? No extensions? Well, no, but you have extensions in place, if you need them. If you need them. Okay, got it. So, I'll jump in just because we have a unique setup, which is single LP structure, but run exactly like any other fund. And the reason for that is, well, one is benchmarking. If we want to kind of see our performance. Two, we've grown. I mean, we've got 130 portfolio companies in the portfolio and I think probably used to run more so of an angel investment kind of shop or a family office shop. But once you start bringing on folks to invest, investment professionals, and you have to manage this type of portfolio, it was just best for us to actually set up a fund structure. Bringing partners and recruiting is a big part of venture, right? And we all know carry is an incentive for folks. How do you have carry without a fund structure? So, for us it was, even though it ran as an angel shop for a while, probably 2013, the goal was set it up as a fund, raise a quote unquote, raise a fund one, although it's sole LP. And then have fund two and fund three after. I mean, I'll jump in. I mean, of the previous venture funds I've been involved with, every single one of them has used every single one of the extension years and then often still had businesses left in the portfolio. So I'm not sure the venture fund model works for the venture funds, but there does need to be a liquidity timeframe for limited partners. One of the things that we've been thinking about but not done yet is for those companies that can be sort of efficient and capital raising and nice cash flowing businesses, does it make sense to put in a revenue-based financing kind of a structure? You need to have investor alignment around that and you have to have the entrepreneur lined up so we have not found that right opportunity yet, but I think with looking at alternative structures for liquidity as an industry is really important. I would just say that we think it's important to actually match a lot of the best practices from a venture capital model and while there are certainly a lot of struggles including liquidity problems and extensions being used, I do think that there should be rigor in place from both a venture fund model as well from a startup model around expectations and our expectation is that you do return liquidity to the fund and that we return that to investors. I guess one point on that is that we have a bunch of folks who've raised funds in Clinton U.S. Would you go out with a different model? Like would you go out with a five year or four year model? A four or five year model? Yeah, like a shorter or a longer. No, I'm thinking longer. I mean, each fund we're gonna inch it out a couple years until we get to Evergreen. Some day. I mean, I think this is a hard issue though because I mean, as venture funds and we're sort of market rate venture funds, we are looked at and compared with other fund structures that are out there in the market and so anything that you do that deviates from that is a little flag that goes up and sort of more little flags go up and then becomes more difficult to get that done. I agree that with the comment about rigor and tracking carry and those kinds of things. But I do wonder if we should just call a spade a spade and quit calling them 10 year funds and call them 14 year funds. I did some research recently and was quite, well, not too surprised but found out that the percentage of funds that are fully liquidated after 10 years, four. Four percent. Four percent of funds fully liquidated after 10 years.  You're at about 48, 45, 48% of funds. Not just the impact. That's not just the impact. That's traditional. So this is the traditional space. Arguably, we're a bit more patient, maybe a little bit more longer term, a little bit pickier on our exits because we wanna make sure their mission aligned, but there's some give and take there with the length of fund. My question would be why should impact funds be the one leading the way on that? Yeah, everybody should and impact already has enough barriers against it. I don't think we need to create another. Agreed, agreed, but we're innovative, so people need to follow us. Last question and then I wanna open it up for audience questions. Speak to the entrepreneurs in the room. Do's and don'ts of fundraising. Do's and don'ts of fundraising.  You're getting out there.  What to do, what not to do. So what to do? Know how much you're raising and why. And why? And I'm out, right? A number, not a range. A number, like I'm going out and we're raising a million, a million and a half, two million, and here's what we're gonna do with it. So that's one. I think having the team pull together, we're gonna raise and then go find the team, but show up with the team and maybe some hires that you've identified that when you raise, they will convert, but you've identified all the folks to make this thing kind of work. You spent time on your product. You have something to show, to test with the minimal viable product, so that you can actually use it and see what real customers think of it. Those are all, I think, mandatory for a seed round. If you're pitching an impact fund, what is the impact? How does this play out, not only in the next year, but in the next five years? And kind of how is that piece of the impact attached to the vision? Because as we all know, it's really hard.  Well, why are you doing X? If you got rid of that, you can increase your margins by X percent. And it's those things that we're trying to look for of what we call core impact, so that it actually cannot fall off because it's attached to the product. I mean, I think if you have those four things, you're in a good place. I'd say do your homework and know who you're talking to, right? So come in to, you're gonna come talk to reach. I love it when entrepreneurs are like, I know I've looked at your portfolio, I know you guys specialize in ed tech, I know you guys specialize in seed stage. This is why I wanna partner with Reach specifically versus all the other ed tech funds. So really know who you're talking to, have done your homework about the fund, and really kind of convince me why I am the fund that you wanna work with. I would just add one of the don'ts is please don't fundraise for multiple rounds at the same time. We've seen this quite a bit and it's surprising where an entrepreneur will come in and they'll be raising seed and a series A. Or, oh, I'm raising my series A in one month once I close this, but it might get pushed if this doesn't happen. And it creates this confusion for me that makes me feel like you don't have real game plan in place. So I would say this seems intuitive, but it's amazing how often this happens. I mean, I would just say just a couple of different. I'm very impressed when entrepreneurs can go from big vision down into the details and then come back up again. I think that's incredibly, it's incredibly powerful and it means that I know you're gonna be on top of where you're going and where you think you can bring this company, but also be on top of the details that matter in terms of getting there. The other thing I would say just on the impact side, if I can articulate your impact story better than you can, that's not a good sign. So I think sort of be crisp about it, if there's evidence, share it, if there's not evidence, then make the case why I should believe that the impact is there. And that is something that, we do see entrepreneurs come in not prepared to have that conversation. What about cold emails? Will you answer cold emails? Yeah, so we answer all cold emails. We actually also have on our website, you can just click on a button and actually fill out an application. And so we're responsive to everything coming in. It does help though if you have a referral, but we're open to cold, inbound. But if you're gonna send a cold email, make it unique to the fund you're sending it to. Don't send me in Chantel and Brian, don't send us the same one, because I can tell when I read it. So you're not an advocate for the carpet bombing approach? You can't send it cold, it just can't be a carpet bomb. What if we, they CC everybody on the email? Oh that's even better, yeah, don't do that. Yeah, try to be subtle if you're gonna have a carpet bomb. I will say just one point for the cold email. Obviously it helps when you have a referral, but we actually feel very strongly about the power of keeping our cold emails open. We have open submissions on Angelus. What we found is it's really helped diversify our pool of founders. So for example, with our accelerator program, 76% of the founders have a woman or person of color on the founding team. We're really proud of that and we think a big reason for that is because we accepted entrepreneurs from everywhere and we didn't have to have, oh you have to go through my buddy Bob who's at the country club with Sue. I'm making that up because I'm not part of a country club, but the premise here is please be open and we wanna hear from you. Yeah, I second that. We have open submission, send any email, you'll get a response, it just doesn't go to a black box. You gotta think, entrepreneurs are working so hard on their business. They deserve a response of some sort. And I think that's how we ended up with the same numbers. We're over 50 or 56% of our founders are either a woman or a person of color. And a lot of folks just don't have those networks and that's okay because they have great businesses. Yep, great, awesome. So we've got about a little over 15 minutes left. Wanna make sure we answer questions in the audience. I'm not sure if we've got microphones in the audience but maybe just speak up. Yeah, right there in the front. I can hear her, I can hear her. My question is, what do you all think about equity crowd sourcing, both from an accredited and an unaccredited side? How does that impact your decisions if somebody's equity crowd sourced? Anyone wanna comment on equity crowd funding? Yeah, so I'll jump in because full disclosure, we're investors in AngelList which does accredited investors crowdfunding. I think it's great. Crowdfunding is great. If you have some traction, I don't think it's the place you go to start your fundraising. If you're trying to raise a million dollars, I would not start on AngelList. I think if you have 750K lined up, then you can kind of close out the round on AngelList because the angels who are investing on the platform generally don't have a chance to talk to you. They don't have a chance to ask their questions and they're really investing based upon some other investor has vetted this deal. So if you're gonna go out for entrepreneurs in the room to raise, try to get some initial cash in the door or commitments and then use AngelList to finish out the round. Great, other questions? We do have a microphone. Just raise your hand if you wanna ask questions so everyone hears your important question. I think this session is called The Rise of Seed Funds but I've read a couple things lately about a lot of seed funds moving up into Series A and there being less seed funds. Can you talk a little bit about that please? What was the last part of your question? Talk a little bit about funds, not a rise of seed. The fall. If there's a fall of seed funds. Thoughts? I don't know. I've actually seen a lot of movement towards pre-seed. So I think people are actually, there's both, there's people moving upstream but there's also a lot of movement downstream and I think you're also seeing a lot of the angel funds or the micro funds kind of move into that seed stage. I think what also is happening is that seed is becoming the new A, right? So I'm a seed stage investor but I'm writing $500 million checks right into seed. So just the terminology is changing so what used to be seed I think is now more pre-seed so I think it's more of a terminology versus people actually moving out of the space. I mean I would say there's also a fund economic component to this because if you've got, it's hard to make the economics of a small fund work so as funds become successful they will likely raise larger subsequent funds and if you're raising a larger subsequent fund your check sizes get bigger and then you end up being maybe more suitable for companies that are raising larger rounds and so I think there tends to be some natural progression over time but I do think that there's a lot of micro, you know VCs, there's a lot of seed capital out there now which I think is a great thing for entrepreneurs. Great, we got a question in the front. Where's that mic? Shall I go? Sorry, quick question. You talked about the struggles sometimes with exiting, sorry right here. Just curious, are there secondary impact investors and do you have examples of where you've sold your positions to other impact investors and is there a need for more players in that space? I mean I have not seen that yet. It's interesting sort of in the main VC space you see that a lot, it's driven by the need for liquidity for limited partners and funds and I think the impact fund space is still relatively young and the investors in these funds are still, you know, they have this sort of expectation, they don't need to drive that liquidity so I haven't seen that come up as much. I mean I do think there's an interesting opportunity with private equity buyers to create liquidity for venture funds once companies get to a certain place and you're starting to see more impact private equity funds so I think that's promising from a liquidity perspective, I don't know if others like that. Yeah I mean that's, we mainly see it in private equity so we were able to get secondary in one of our deals through Insight Venture Partners who does a lot of education work so I do not necessarily impact specifically but do have a lot of large education focus so I do think more PE and then I think you'll see some of the Bain capitals or maybe TBG can also provide some of that kind of secondary capital. We're here to shout. I'd like to know your experiences of being approached by B corporations for seed funding. Have you seen them coming to you? What percentage of them actually get the money? So if you could talk about that, that would be helpful. Yeah I can jump in and say we've seen a lot of B-Corps and I would just kind of differentiate there's B-Corps which is the certification by the nonprofit B-Lab and then there's the public benefit corporation model which is when you're actually legally incorporated for example in the state of Delaware and we've seen a lot of startups in that space so out of our first portfolio of 38 we had eight companies that were public benefit corporations. In fact one of our startups was one of the first startups to become a public benefit corporation in 2013 when Delaware passed that law. So we think it's great and a great model and it sets up expectations really well but again all of these are for-profit startups pursuing market rate returns. I think where it's really helped is when you have a beneficiary for their product or service that's lower moderate income and it really aligns incentives around the types of constituents that you're serving through your product. So I think it's a great way to kind of communicate that to the external world that you're for-profit but for impact. Chris. My question is regarding for an entrepreneur when do you think he should approach early stage fund like months before he's actually ready for the money? Do you guys like to be updated? Here's where I am right now. I'll be ready in a few months from now or should they go right when they are ready to receive the money? I would say today right after this panel is the right time to talk to us. I think building relationships is a good thing.  I think it's fine to do updates but I will say is just make sure there's meat with those updates so sometimes I get an update just checking in. It's like that's not helpful but if there's an update and you're saying hey we just closed this big contract, we just closed this big partnership that's more helpful just as you start to reach different milestones I'm happy to be updated. Heard you mentioned seed and precede. It seems like the definitions of startup and early stage are morphing and this whole class of seed and precede can you give some definition for the entrepreneurs in the room as to what you consider the differentiator between seed and precede? Sure, I'll hop in and say that as someone pointed out I think Sean Tell pointed out, so today's seed round was yesterday's series A round so seed rounds are priced seed rounds are two to three million upwards of sometimes even four, even five million and then today's pre-seed rounds are sort of yesterday's seed rounds. Everything just kind of shifted up one and part of that is because it's never been cheaper and less expensive to start a technology company because of Amazon Web Services and software that's available to use for free and so it's just there's never been a better time to an easier time to start a company and as a result there's been sort of an institutionalization of seed and so I think of pre-seed as that really early you've got the team, you've got the sort of founding team you've got an MVP but you're kind of just getting started and I still think there's even a round before pre-seed which is really kind of friends and family or slash accelerator so you raise like 100k from your friends and family use that to get an MVP into the market get a little bit of traction then go raise a 500,000 to a million dollar pre-seed round try to get a fund involved probably do that on a convertible note and then use that to get about 12 months maybe 18 months of runway to get some more traction then go and raise a sort of proper priced seed round of anywhere from two to three million that's typically what we see that's not always the case if you're a multi-time entrepreneur sometimes you can come right out of the gates raise in a really big seed round and then go and then raise a series A the other shift we're seeing is the multiple seed rounds so now on average companies are raising two to three seed rounds so it used to be seed straight to the A it is now seed series C2, series C3 which is fine and that's not just in the impact space that's kind of industry wide so now we're seeing entrepreneurs raise multiple seed rounds as well and I encourage entrepreneurs to think about raising to milestones like what are you are you raising enough to get to your next milestone what is your next milestone so rather than think about my seed or my series A we want to have that conversation with you beware of the bridge round don't ever call it a bridge round in my opinion at least whenever we see bridge rounds we usually run away because it's like a bridge to what it's an indication that you know what we didn't quite get as far as we thought we're running out of money we just need a little bit more money and it's a bit of a nuance but if you're raising subsequent rounds even if you're still at the seed stage so long as the next round is bigger than the previous round then it doesn't look like a bridge round it just looks like a next round but if it's smaller than the previous round then it looks like a bridge round and that's a bit of a red flag but if you haven't accomplished anything since your last round it still looks like a bridge round even if you raise more yeah, yeah right, right, no matter what you call it just because time went by that doesn't mean the valuation goes up like you actually have to make progress hi, I'm from Brazil and I'd be interested in hearing if you have strategies to invest in entrepreneurs from emerging markets and what those strategies are if you're looking at Brazil specifically anybody emerging markets? so for our fund we invest only in companies that are incorporated in the US what we do tend to see is that many entrepreneurs will come to the US and they want to use the US as a jumping off point and so we're open to that as long as they do incorporate as a US entity for us when we think about urban problems they're obviously universal not just here in the US where 81% of Americans live in cities but certainly across the world where two thirds of the world's population will be urbanized by 2050 so it's important to us that when entrepreneurs grow in scale that they do scale outside of the US but I would say for our strategy specifically we're mostly North American focus for now I had an emerging markets question too I represent empowerment works and we have social innovation trainings and also an event called the Global Summit where we like to use that as a platform for sourcing innovators and startups impact startups and so I'm wondering about your experience and how it might be best to work with you like rather than starting our own fund allowing you to do what you do best and ask more on the sourcing just what your experience is working with events that are sourcing and providing a challenge to bring out those entrepreneurs and encourage new ideas was there a question in there or just a statement? How do we work? With your experience with event platforms to identify investment opportunities is that efficient for you and how could you be approached and what would be a good way to approach that for us? Any thoughts or examples of... I think it depends on how targeted the event is so if it's sort of a sweet spot I know it's gonna hit like software companies in one or more of the areas that we're investing in and I know there's a high likelihood then that is an event I might come and attend I would say it's hard to sort of commit the time because time is sort of the most precious thing that we have and so I think the more targeted you can be and the more targeted the set of investors the more effective those events can be at least that would be sort of my two cents. Yeah, yeah, I mean the more sort of sweet spot and overlap you can hit I think the more people will be willing to come and spend their time attend the event, travel to it and then I listen to all the companies. And your challenge question I think identifying an area where maybe we're having a difficult time sourcing where we're not seeing a lot of entrepreneurs so I have seen challenges work in that case where we're not seeing a lot of that activity for example in, I was gonna say like we are now let's say early childhood and we want to spur early childhood innovation like a challenge works great because then you identify entrepreneurs that maybe we didn't have access to before so those type of challenges are really useful. I would also jump in and say we love events because it's a great way to source entrepreneurs so again if you're an entrepreneur come talk to me but I would also just add I'm really mindful of the fact that there are predatory events out there not that that is yours but there are some events that will charge entrepreneurs thousands of dollars to get access to an elite group of investors and I think that is just morally wrong if you're an entrepreneur don't do it and we refuse to participate in events like that. Great, we've got time for one more question. Okay, make it a good one, make it a good one it's the last one. Yeah, I know the pressure's on. You gave examples of when an entrepreneur comes to you a little too early so they need to go out develop some more evidence that this is gonna stick, has traction, et cetera. Can you give examples of when you tell an entrepreneur that they don't need you or they don't need you yet because they're already generating enough revenue? Idea here being when is it not in the best interest of the entrepreneur to engage you? There is a lot of skepticism about or fear about being taken advantage of by seed stage investments. I'll jump in. So I think a lot of these challenges happened the first time entrepreneurs because you don't know, you started a company it's going well, you don't want to lose control of the company. So one of the ways to do that is just look at when you're raising the first round choose your investors wisely, right? I think we all do deals all day long or a couple times a year and we have way more knowledge typically than an entrepreneur who's doing it for their first time. So there's an unfair advantage mostly for VCs. We try to ease that pain or ease that situation by sharing some of the things they should think about when proposing kind of the seed stage deal. So that's one. I think legal counsel is really important. You should have legal to kind of give you some advice for what should you be doing? What should you be thinking about? How should you write terms? And I think the third thing to do is once you raise the seed round that's probably the first of many rounds. So you've got to think not only about this round but about the next three rounds. And if you do it that way you can set it up in a way that even by point A or series A you're not gonna lose control of the company. Series B you won't lose control of the company. Now when you get to series D and beyond it gets pretty tricky. I think the other thing to think about so there are times I've met with entrepreneurs and maybe it's just not a venture business, right? So that could be the other consideration.  This is not necessarily venture business. And we can have that conversation and say, what kind of business are you really trying to build? Do you really want venture investors? Does that mean something in terms of control and expectations? Or maybe you're happy just to run the business, get to profitability, bootstrap. So having those kind of conversations is important too. Great. We are out of time. I want to thank you all for coming and thank our panelists for participating and sharing all your great insights and knowledge. Thank you guys.


Since 2020, 12 out of 15 of Arizona's counties have lost senior election officials. As a former county recorder myself, I can attest that the pre-2020 world for election administrators is gone. We don't feel safe in our work because of the harassment and threats that are based in lies. Just ask a former county recorder about her dogs poisoned as a means of intimidation. Her story is one of many veteran Arizona officials from both political parties who have left the profession for the sake of their own physical, mental and emotional health and that of their families. Threats to American democracy are real, and American election administrators are rising to meet these challenges, but we cannot do it alone. Now more than ever, we need a sustained and robust congressional commitment to support our efforts in protecting the democracy that upholds this great republic against the threats that every single one of us faces.


Another manufacturer has released a laptop, equipped with an older chipset. In a world of silicon and graphics card hunger, Dell is looking at previous generations, albeit with newly released processors to power the Inspiron 153505. With that said, the laptop offers an IPS panel, SSD support, snappy processors of choice, and a proven design. The latter ensures minimum financial effort and maximum yield. It seems like Dell has reused an older chassis for Inspiron 153505's build. It is made of plastic and leaves something to be desired when it comes to rigidity. On the other hand, its weight of under 2 kg and profile slimmer than 20 mm make it a fairly portable device. A rare sight in this class is the addition of a fingerprint reader, located on the power button. Weirdly enough, this laptop lacks a USB Type-C port. However, you get 3 USB Type-A ports, 2 3.2 Generation 1 and 1 2.0. Also, there is an HDMI 1.4 connector, a LAN port, an audio jack, and a power plug. Here, you can fit up to 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, thanks to two Sodom slots. In addition, there is one M2 slot for storage, as well as a 2.5-inch SATA slot with the connector being included. If you want to see how to open the laptop, you can check out our teardown video. Only 2 per 100 people watching this video are subscribers. If you decide to just start following us, we'll be able to reinvest more in our laboratory thus making even more helpful videos for you. Thank you, you're awesome! This laptop's 1080p IPS panel has wide viewing angles and a good contrast ratio of 1070 to 1. Unfortunately, it covers only 51% of the sRGB gamut, meaning that the picture looks a bit dull. On the bright side, you won't be suffering from the negative effects of PWM, because the display doesn't flicker at any brightness level. Battery-wise we are talking about a 42 Watt hours unit that delivers about 8 hours of web browsing, or a bit more than 7 hours of video playback. Good results! As we said, the Inspiron 153505 features processors from a bit old lineup. The top configuration here includes the Ryzen 5 3450U with only integrated graphics available. This laptop is not necessarily a beast when it comes to performance. On the other hand, you will surely get a snappy experience. Moreover, it will be comfortable as well, since the keyboard's hotspot keeps just below 40 degrees during sustained load. The model has taken a different approach with this device. Instead of pushing for the latest and greatest technology, they offer a sensible solution. Its idea is to give more people the chance of owning a laptop. At the same time, the Inspiron 153505 is actually a pretty solid machine. Its upgradeability and IPS display are easily the highlights of the model. If you'd like to find more information about this machine, you can see all of the tests we performed in our in-depth review. The link is in the video description below.


Hey guys, it's Nate, aka the Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. It is Wednesday. That means we're going to take a look ahead at tonight and tomorrow's Weekend League Rewards period during this foot miss promotion and talk about some Thursday flipping investments that you guys might be able to make this week for foot miss and on FIFA Ultimate Team. Now Thursday flipping is a common and popular investing method that we do often. It originated last year with the timing of Weekend League Rewards being early morning UK and basically what happens is a lot of people on this market, on this game, open up their Weekend League Rewards and they get coins, they get their players from their teams and they go out and they build squads for the Weekend League. That is the premise of Thursday flipping and Weekend League Rewards flipping just so you kind of can wrap your heads around that if maybe you're a little bit new to it and basically what we do is we take a look at a lot of things on the market especially during this foot miss promo. I'm going to talk a lot about the SBCs that are currently out on this game and how these SBCs and how many people have done these this week, how that impacts Thursday flipping and of course talking about Thursday flipping trends and stuff that I've seen this year that has worked really well. One thing we always do is we start off by looking at the potential team of the week because I'm recording this before the team of the week comes out and the reason why I record this early is because I just want to get this thinking in your guys' minds. I want you to be prepared for the Wednesday night time period before Rewards which is when we usually buy or end up looking at a lot of these things. So we usually take a look at this team of week prediction graphic from Patrick at Simpleblue88 on Twitter. This is looking like a possibility for a fantastic team of the week. We've got Salah and Bape Coutinho, De Bruyne or Tois. I mean a lot of solid cards in there. I would say that you know I don't imagine that we would get all these guys in a team of the week Vertonghen. I mean if they put out this team of the week I would suspect that we would get team of the week SBCs coming over the Christmas period like the end of foot miss. This is the team of the week that to me just says team of the week SBC. You have a lot of 80 ones in there as well. So if this is similar to how the team of the week ends up being I could see a team of the week SBC. But the reason why we look at this team of the week is for link investments right because a lot of people will get these cards as reds and if they get them as reds they're probably going to build a team around them right. So we kind of try to look for cards that are like in the 83 to 87 range that are more common on reds that people might just try to go out and use regardless to get in their teams. Obviously not a lot of people are going to get in Bape Salah De Bruyne. Coutinho could have a really nice card so we'll see what happens there but I mean this week's team of the week I see a lot of high end and a lot of low end type cards like Trippier is okay but he has a scream Jervinho kind of hard to link. We just got foot miss Douglas Costa and there's again there are really a lot of high tier guys that are really solid like big names but not a lot of guys that are going to be in that middle range for team of the week. So when team of the week does come out and you actually see it there might be some link investments that we can look at according to what does come out in team of the week. But I want to talk about the past couple Thursday flippings and what I've done that has worked and talk you guys through a few cards and some scenarios that I could see playing out this week with Thursday flipping. Now last week we were at the end of the team of the group stage promo and there was a lot of people that were like yo Thursday flipping is not going to work. Team the group stage card their pack weight is too high. I don't think Thursday flipping is going to actually work this week. Well it actually did in certain areas last week what I did I flipped a lot of low tier informs right. So you know some people that have the big budgets they can worry about the team the group stage cards and whatever is coming in the next promo. But a lot of people on the smaller budgets we're talking 500K and under they are kind of they just kind of build teams every week right. The more maybe it's like more the casual user base I guess you could say they're kind of building their teams every week and you know buying new cards trying things out. This is a card that I flipped last week right. When I'm looking at informs today and stuff to flip from Wednesday into Thursday the stuff that did the best last week was kind of like the 50K to 200K price range informs and even out of packs gold cards. We're going to talk about that today too. This was a card that did very well for me last week and you're going to hear me talk about this today multiple times in the video. When you're Thursday flipping this week I'm going to honestly say don't go for just normal cards go for cards with shadow or hunter chem styles. If you're looking at like a certain card and wherever somebody's going to play it get the chem style that fits most whether it's a shadow or hunter maybe an anchor maybe a catalyst like one or a hawk more of the expensive chem styles. Kula Bali is another one. There's just all these cards last week with my Seouls right. I flipped that informed Seoul last week and I bought Seouls at 45 to 47K and I sold the ones with shadows for 60K to 65K and I sold the ones that didn't have shadows only from like 55 to 57K. So there was some it was a massive amount of profit to be made and I got way better guaranteed sells on some of the cards that had shadows right because people are looking to buy the cards with the chemistry styles and I want to talk about some of the stuff this week. This card right here is a card that interests me a lot. We have the Malkuit SBC that came earlier this week and this card when that SBC came out with a shadow was about 80,000 coins without a shadow he's about 65K. That's a 15,000 coin difference in price between what the regular card goes for and what the card of the shadow goes for and that just tells me that a lot of people want this card with a shadow and they're willing to pay the big bucks for it. So this is a card that I kind of want to watch this week. Road to the final Allen's card is a lot cheaper because of the whole Champions League draw. He got the upgrade and the market is just low to begin with and of course we have the Malkuit SBC that came out. A lot of people did that and a lot of people were going to link that triangle with Allen, Malkuit and Kula Bali. So I'm a fan of this Kula Bali this week for rewards. I know that he does have the Team of the Year nominee version and we're going to talk about these cards in a bit as well but there are definitely some cards this week that I think are going to be really good flips on a lower level budget. Another one that I have here is Samedo. The cards that you want to focus on weekend and week out are just going to be the ones like your tried and true Week in League flips that are going to be in that low budget especially what we're looking at this week. But just those guys are going to get into a lot of teams. A lot of people run Usman Dambele. A lot of people still have ScreamPK in their teams or one of the new special cards for Ramos or Verran or like the Verran Inform that we got and the Ramos special cards. A lot of people have the back lines that include Barcelona players, Madrid, basically La Liga. So I'm a huge fan of this Nelson Samedo card again. For a lot of these prices, Nelson Samedo if you see him under 110K, I mean I think that's an easy sell at 120 plus this weekend. Especially with a shadow, a card like this is going to be very, very flippable into the coming days, into after Week in League Awards. He's 125K right now, the shadow. If you can pick him up for less than like 120, like 115-ish with that shadow chem style at some point in the next day or so, I definitely think you can get a sale at like 135 or even maybe 140 if you get lucky after Week in League Awards. Last week I bought this card at 125K with a shadow, sold it for 150 with a shadow. So there's definitely the chem style trading again, I can't stress that enough. The chemistry style trading with Thursday Flips is honestly, it's huge, it's massive, and it's a great way to add on some extra coins on top of what you're trying to flip and what you're trying to sell. Now I talked about some Informs, those are kind of like the same things every week, right? We look at the same Informs, the ones that are meta, the ones that people use. Again, the chem styles are very important. So you can look around Footbin, look for low prices on those, but try to stay in that 50K to 200K range on those Informs just because that's the stuff that has been doing good on Week in League Awards as of now. And I don't really know if the whole market's going to push up on Thursday after this rewards. I still think people are kind of in a state of like what is going on with the market, like what's happening. But I do think the lower tier market is definitely as a place to push up. So speaking of the rest of the market, though, Team of the Year nominee cards are still going to be at packs, and it's kind of the same situation that we had last week with Team of the Groups Age cards, right? Those cards, I mean, people wanted to get them for the Week in League teams, and the Week in League Awards came out, and these cards got killed in price. I'm talking Team of the Groups Ages from last week. Team of the Groups Ages got killed in price because they were getting packed left, right, and center because of their pack weight. Again, this week for rewards, these cards are going to get packed a ton because their pack weight's really high. I'm going to take that one and relist it for like 115 or so because he can sell there. Make a little bit of profit. Nice, nice. But these cards are going to get packed a ton during rewards. So if you have these cards in your team, I would highly recommend getting liquid of them and honestly selling them, taking the coins for whatever they are and waiting to see what happens with rewards. These cards are very popular, and they're going to get put into people's teams, but they're going to get packed a lot. So I'm kind of scared to mess with these until they actually go out of packs. So rewards on Thursday could be the low point for these cards before they go out of packs. I'm not entirely sure if I want to invest in them on Thursday after rewards. We will see because I'm unsure of what's coming on Friday with the Prime Icons, the new icon swaps and stuff. So we'll definitely see about that. But I would say that watch these cards during rewards they could drop. But since these cards are in packs right now, that makes for some very interesting situations on the market with normal gold cards like this Sterling right here. This card has been out of packs for two weeks. Literally, he's been out of packs for two freaking weeks. Raheem Sterling, who links to the newly informed right back Wambisaka, who also links to the Marcus Rashford SBC that came this week. This card, I mean, it's out of packs right now and it's dropping 62 K for Sterling. The whole market is dropping. It makes sense. Last week I bought these Sterlings for around 74 to 75 K average and I sold, I think I bought eight of them and I sold them for 90 K, 87 to 90 K after rewards. Now I think this is another great opportunity to flip a card like this this week. So look at some of the out of packs gold cards, you know what I'm going to pick that one up for 60. Never mind. Look at some of the out of packs golds, right? Maybe a guy like Sergio Ramos. I know that's kind of getting on the upper echelon of our price range that we've been talking about. How much is this card? I don't check this card out too much 90 K. All right. I was close with my initial initial initial search. He's somewhere around the 85,000 coin mark, actually. And this card is out of packs right now, man. This card is out of packs. He's got a special version of his impacts with the team of your nominee. But this card has gone down a lot in price and he's out of packs. So I think the out of packs golds, the OP usable meta, we can leak out of packs, informs, screen cards, and even maybe some road to the finals. Again, we talk about out of pack stuff every week. But I do think the golds have a specific opportunity this week to rise up a little bit because right now, if you look at Sergio Ramos, let's look at him as an example on foot bin, right? Let's go over here and take a look at his card. We haven't gone to foot bin at all today. What is a video without foot bin, right? We got to look at those. So right now, Ramos's special card, the team of your nominee is 162,000 coins and the gold card is 80 K. So it's basically half that, right? Let's say this card gets packed a bunch during rewards, goes down to like 140-ish, 140. I couldn't see him going much lower than that. He's got this other card at 171. So let's say this card goes down to 140 or so. This card still being at 80 K, I think is still a buy. I could easily see this card being 100,000 coins. Literally, this upgrade is only plus one. You're paying the big bucks for the dynamic image is what you're paying for. But again, this gold card is down in price a decent amount, even though he's out of packs. Look at this, 109 K out of packs, drops down to 90 or 88,000 coins. He's actually 80 K right now dropping by the day. So I usually say wait to buy for weekly rewards investing until after Wednesday's content, just in case we get an SBC. But this is a very interesting situation as it looks right now, you know, 80,000 coins for Ramos is cheap. We'll look at Sterling in as well. And what you can do is you can kind of look it through some of these on your own. There's many, many options out there that you can look at. Basically, just go through. If you want to find all these new team of the year nominee cards, all by the way on footprint, you can go up here at the top left, go drop down to players and do new FIFA 20 players. It'll take you to this page. Just scroll down to the bottom and talk about or in look at these cards right here. But there's plenty of cards in here that with their gold cards out of packs, I think could be very good investments for this week. Marco Royce is an interesting one in my opinion because he was in this week's team of the week, but he's this card is going to be going into packs on today Wednesday. So as gold cards going to be out of packs again, we're getting a team, a player of the month, Timo Werner, SBC should be very soon. This card is 77K, a direct link investment to that Timo Werner and he's out of packs. If that SBC comes today, this could be a look before 6pm UK on Wednesday. If you want to try to see if that, you know, maybe a little bit of a link investment to Werner, I thought Werner was going to come out today and he didn't. I was a little surprised by that, but I guess maybe EA didn't want to drop so many strikers in the game at once. I'm not entirely sure. But yeah, if you're looking through these cards and looking for ones that you might want to flip for weak only, right? Look for ones that have a decent price difference between their gold card and between the nominee. Firmino's nominee card is 88,000 coins. His regular card is 23K. If you're looking at a really low budget, I mean, this Firmino gold card might be something that you could look at. He's Brazilian, of course.  Now he's up to 24. So I mean, that's not really at a point in FIFA where a lot of people are using a card like that. But of course, the Sterling, the Ramos and those guys that are out of packs that are like really quality weekend league tier guys, I think those are going to be really good shouts this week. Maybe even a guy like Conte as well. I'm a little bit curious to see what happens with a guy like him because he is down a ton, right? He's like 270. Never mind. Right on 280. Wow, on bids around 270 though. So this guy's gotten pushed down a lot in price. His team of your nominee card, I think right now is on the market for around 400K, 380, 390. And maybe you see that team of your nominee drop down to, you know, somewhere like 375, maybe even 350 or maybe even like 340, 350 after a weekend league rewards. But there's a lot of people that might go for that card, but this card going up to 300K, I don't think it's out of question. I mean, he's like the best center defensive mid all around midfielder in the prem and everybody wants to use this card. So even people that have lost coins, because if you think about it this way, another reason why I like the low market this week and the lower tier kinds of cards, maybe like an informed Theo Hernandez as well. This is a guy that I usually flip on Thursdays. Another reason why I like this edge of the market this week is because there are a lot of people that have lost coins in the last two weeks.  A lot of upper tier, a lot of really meta players are down big time even wrote the final cards people losing coins on is just the whole market has turned downward in that direction. And that just makes me think, okay, people might have some less coins or they're scared of what's going to happen to the market. So they might try to buy some safer things for their teams this weekend. That's what again, why I like some of the lower edge lower budget investments this week, or Thursday flipping. Now the last thing I want to talk about is link investing to these foot miss SBCs. Of course, we're getting two SBCs per day and objectives as well. Cavani today was a good like today's SBCs were probably the best two in my opinion, the whole foot miss promo. This is day number five. I think is the best two SBCs we've gotten so far. A lot of people did in Aki Williams, you saw me looking at that Saul inform Saul is up like 5k from where he was earlier. I bought a couple when this SBC came out because people are linking him to an Aki Williams somehow. I mean, there's a lot of people that will change in Aki Williams to a center mid link them up with Saul and then link it to maybe like a Jordy Alba, or maybe a Samedo again, or maybe the like a trippie air or like La Liga, you know, the Spanish guys are trying to get their links in there in those teams. So I do think that Spanish investments, a lot of the investments look good because a lot of people did this card today, a decent value striker, pretty solid upgrade. I also think that a lot of people did Rashford and that SBC is no longer out, but I do think a lot of people ended up doing that SBC just because of the market movements that I saw on the game in terms of not really like Sterling moving and like link investments to that card. But the amount that I saw like 86s and 85s rise up on that day, not really much of the 86 price increase was really attributed to that Colombian center back that we got, Merillo. I mean, Merillo had an 83 or 84 rated squad, I think is all that it took. So when I was looking in the solutions, there weren't any 86s in the Merillo solution. So that kind of tells me that people did Sterling this week. And I know that I saw some people hyping up Sterling. I watched a couple of player reviews. People said that he was pretty solid. And he's English. He's Manchester United. So there's going to be people on this game that are going to do that SBC. And Sterling I think is a great, great investment to that card. Again, whatever foot miss SBCs we get today on Wednesday, if they're good value, if a lot of people are doing them, you got to remember and think, okay, people are probably getting this card in their team, there could be a link investment opportunity to these cards right here. So again, things to look for this week in terms of weekend at league flipping, focus on that 50 K to 200,000 coin price range and the chemistry styles as well. Chemistry styles are going to be huge. They're going to be massive. Very important for you to make the most out of your investments this week for Thursday flipping icons as well. If you want to mess around with some icons, if you're growing a higher budget, I mean, again, make sure it's a very meta card. Again, road to the finals are kind of low as well. Militow is like 550 K right now after the draw came out for who they're going to be facing in the knockout round. So if you want to mess around with some road to the final cards as well, you could just make sure that again, really meta, really usable, maybe an Allen, you could try to flip. I know it's kind of on the upper tier of our budget. But that is that is the card that got an upgrade. And it's links in that little triangle that we talked about with cool Bali and with malquite and an Allen. So again, look around the market, man. The best advice I can give you is on Wednesday nights if or even Wednesday at six PM UK, if you see a huge dip in the market, look around on team of the weeks and past past special teams and think about, okay, what kind of cards are meta? What kind of cards do people use in their week on the teams? This Mares card is a perfect example of a meta card 64 K. This one's 182. The 86 is at 49. So this card being at 64 K, he was at 61 on Sunday. You can see if I see this card down at 60 K again, I think that might be a possibility. Last week, he went from 77 K in packs, went up to 92,000 coins, and then kind of came back down. So this guy at 61 K right now, he could very easily be 80 K or upper 70s after Thursday rewards because it's a right wing in the prem. He's probably dropped down a little bit because of the price of Stirling. But is it in form? He's out of packs. He's a special card and people like the dynamic images in their squads and FIFA. So again, just scroll through the list of team of the weeks and past special cards, find the ones that people like to have in their teams a lot and use a lot in this game. Basically think about the squads you see in Weekend League, right? Because the squads that you see are the cards that people are going to be using and buying for Weekend League rewards. So the cards that you see often are Weekend Leagues are the cards you might want to invest in, right? Kind of makes sense when you think about it in that way. So again, these cards are going to be in packs. There's going to be a lot of talk about them. They're probably going to drop in price a little bit. I'd be very careful with those. Just, I still have a bad taste in my mouth from when we invested in Team of the Groups age last week. I bought some cool Bollies and then of course the next day, they come out with the Team of the Year nominees, which crashes the market again. On Friday, we're going to have Prime Icons and a lot of stuff around that. So again, I think the best thing to do with these is just wait on them and see what happens until they go out of packs after Thursday rewards. If you enjoyed this video and you think it's going to help you out, smash a thumbs up on it. Comment down below if you have any questions and of course subscribe to the channel if you're new. It's been Nate, Foot Accountant. Catch you guys later. Peace out.


As winter storm Urie rolled through America, dropping temperatures drastically, Texas was hit hardest, leaving millions without running water and electricity. Broken pipes, property damage, and lives lost across Texas, as fingers are being pointed at leadership for their lack of preparation. UT Austin student Nikul Nagaraj recounts his experience. Yeah, so we don't have water for like four days because the pipes at the bottom floor burst. So we actually went downstairs and like in the garage there, there was like an open pipe like that and like broken and there was like water like gushing out. But this energy failure has just scratched the surface of America's energy infrastructure problems. To top the list, the American Society of Civil Engineers rated our energy grid a C minus, as much of the grid has passed its 50 year life expectancy. With America's energy grid having about 55,000 substations, 30 of these substations play a critical role in grid operations. And nine of these being offline could cause coast to coast blackouts for over 18 months and causing irreparable, immeasurable damage. As UC Berkeley students are accustomed to the occasional power outage, it may not come off as a surprise that the US has more power outages than any other developed country in the world. While these power outages continue to happen, updating our energy systems costs tons of money. And that makes private corporations unwilling to update their systems when they fail. Although our energy crisis seems insurmountable, researchers here at Berkeley are working on these very issues, pushing forward with renewable energy to diversify our energy outlets. We design, build and test power converters that convert energy in electrical form, ranging from things like solar inverters to convert DC energy from solar panels to the grid. We're seeing more and more renewable energy, certainly here in California, but also, in fact, Texas is a very big producer of wind energy. So I think that's something we're going to see more and more, and that's driven primarily by the cost. They are now the lowest cost energy source in many places to put in the grid. I'm Parker Lushoy, CalTV News.


For those of you who are not interested or expert in P53 biology, HDM2 and HDMX are both proteins, components of a large, multi-molecular complex that exists in association with P53, primarily to limit P53 function and stability. HDM2 has E3 ligase function, and it's capable of attaching ubiquitin to P53 and diverting it to the proteasome for destruction. This relationship between HDM2 and P53 is not entirely monogamous. HDM2 does have other substrates, and P53 can be degraded by HDM2 independent mechanisms. But for all practical purposes, the interaction that I have on this slide is the dominant regulator of P53 stability in a cell. This is the reason why P53 levels are critically low, almost undetectable, and unstressed cells, and the disruption of this interaction between HDM2 and P53 is the reason why P53 levels increase in the setting of cellular stress, such as in the case of hypoxia or DNA damage. The idea of targeting the interaction between HDM2 and P53 is not novel. In fact, I think it's actually two decades or more old. The HDM2-P53 interaction is actually one of the first non-kinase targets selected by the pharmaceutical industry for drug development. And we are just now beginning to reap the advantages of all of this research that has preceded. And we now have as many, I think, as six HDM2 antagonists that are in Phase 1 testing. Okay, why are we interested in this specifically in renal cancer? And there are actually several reasons. The most glib is the fact that in renal cancer, the P53 gene is almost always intact, neither mutated or deleted. Well, that simply means that if you had a drug that functions primarily through P53, the effect of the drug is not likely to be undermined by something as simple as the absence of the relevant target. But the real reason we're interested in this has to do with the biology of the molecule. I think most of everyone in this audience is familiar with the canonical P53 functions, which is to induce cell cycle arrest, to kill the cell through the induction of apoptosis or necrosis, or in some cases to induce cellular senescence. However, there are all sorts of less well advertised functions of P53 that have to do with its role in tissue remodeling. P53, for example, is intensely anti-angiogenic through a variety of mechanisms that I'll show later on. It's anti-inflammatory. It interferes with the recruitment of leukocytes into tumor tissue. It modifies the extracellular matrix. It has effects on cellular metabolism, generally through the diversion of cells from glycolysis to oxidative phosphorylation. Now, the reason this is interesting is that across the board, these P53 effects on hypoxic tissue remodeling are almost exactly counter to those of hypoxia itself through HIF. We got interested in this primarily through our earlier work on the mechanisms by which tumors, especially RCC develop resistance to VEGF antagonists. These tumor cells experience drugs that target the vasculature primarily as hypoxia. So it occurred to us if you had a drug that could limit the ability of tumor cells to adjust to the hypoxia triggered by angiogenesis disruption, you might have something that would prevent the early appearance of resistance and other clinical problems associated with the use of TKIs. So to test this idea, we took a renal cell line and introduced a SHRNA to P53 under the control of tetracycline. I'm just going to draw your attention on this rather busy figure. The bottom growth curve, which is what you get when you implant these cells, allow them to grow to a fairly good size and then treat the mouse with sous-tent. What you see is a very brief period, maybe seven, ten days, where the tumor doesn't grow and then it begins to grow. I can assure you that if you were to study these cells under the microscope, you would see that in that compressed period of time of about a week, they do everything that you would expect to see in a conventional tumor that responds initially in a patient and then later develops resistance. The tumors develop necrosis, they lose their vasculature, and then rapidly reacquire it within that rather narrow time frame. But I also want to draw your attention to this curve, which is what happens when you delete P53 from the cells. The point is that the curve overlaps that of our untreated control. In other words, if you do not allow P53 to come up in the setting of hypoxia that is induced by angiogenesis disruption, sous-tent has no effect at all on the growth of these cells. But I also want to draw your attention back to the original curve. If the activation of P53 is such a big deal and so critical to the effectiveness of VEGF targeted therapies, why is it that, at least in this cell line, the drugs work only briefly? Why is the effects so limited? And the answer is that because P53 activation and the consequences downstream are in fact rather limited in time, it's very easy to show the activation of P53 with tumor-associated hypoxia triggered by sous-tent. And you see most of the canonical genes that you would expect expressed here. Naxa, the gene that's associated with apoptosis, P21, and a lot of the others. When these tumors become resistant, which they tend to do rather easily, P53 levels are still maintained, almost at the same level. But what you see is the disappearance of many of the genes, in particular P21 and Naxa. So P53 function becomes progressively compromised as the treatment proceeds and in particular as the tumor develops resistance. Now part of this, we think, is due to the expression of this protein here. HDMX, a known P53 antagonist. Now I won't show you any data of this, but we have done a similar experiment with an HDMX SHRNA, and it has the same effects as an HDM2 antagonist. It prevents the emergence of resistance. We asked the question then if we could use an HDM2 antagonist that would raise P53 levels to extremely high levels. Would we be able to avoid the development of resistance? In other words, if we could just simply sustain P53 function, would that be sufficient to avoid the emergence of resistance? So these are just two xenografts, 786 and A498. And you can see in both cases, when you treat the cells with both sous-tents and an HDM2 antagonist, in this case the Sanofi compound MI319, the development of resistance is at minimum delayed, if not in fact prevented. This is what happens when you look at the Western blots. You can see that in this case, you not only activate P53, which you can do with sous-tent alone, but you restore the function of P53. You can see P21 and NOXA, and many of these P53-dependent genes restored. One of the most dominant effects that we see in these cells that are treated both with a TKI and with an HDM2 antagonist is the profound lack of vasculature. I mentioned previously that P53 has anti-angiogenic effects. Well, this is just a simplified version or view of all of the anti-angiogenic effects of P53. Some of them are mediated through microRNAs. Some of them are through the metabolism of collagen, in particular the generation of angiostatic peptides such as endostatin or canstatin. But some of them are mediated through the suppression of HIF1 and HIF2. Now, the suppression of HIF1 is in the literature. That was actually reasonably well known. But there was no literature that suggested that P53 activation could suppress HIF2. So we actually looked at that. This is an IHE, an immunohistochemical slide of renal cancer xenographs that are treated with nothing with the P53 agonist or HDM2 antagonist MI319 sutent or the combination of the two. You can see the marked reduction in HIF staining in these slides. And it's better illustrated here with this bar graph and in particular with this western block where you can see that HIF2 is markedly down modulated in cells treated with MI319 alone or in combination with sutent. Now, to investigate the mechanism by which this occurred, we did quite a bit of work that I won't show you, but the mechanism is in fact P53 dependent. If you knock out P53, excuse me, and then treat cells with this HDM2 antagonist, you can see P53 activate here, not in the presence of the SHRNA. HIF goes down here, but not here. So it's certainly P53 dependent. Won't go into the details of it, but we showed that the loss of HIF2 here is mediated primarily at the level of protein stability. So we ask, is there a E3 ligase that could go after HIF2 that might be P53 inducible? And there is, actually. There's this protein called FBW7. It's a known P53 target. And if you look through the amino acid sequence of HIF2, there's two recognitions, motifs, for this E3 ligase. So what we did here, I can get it back if the reverse is not working. Can someone reverse this slide? It's just going forward. Okay. What we did here is introduce an SHRNA to FBW7, and we showed that when you treat the cells with the HDM2 antagonist MI319, FBW3 is induced, FBW7 is induced, but not here with the SHRNA. And we lose this ability to now modulate HIF. Now, the ability of FBW7 to ubiquitinate and degrade HIF2 is dependent upon its prior state of phosphorylation. Most of the substrates of FBW7 require prior phosphorylation by this enzyme Gsk3-beta. So if you knock out Gsk3-beta, the effect of FBW7 induction is lost completely. So here's with the SHRNA. You treat with MI319, P53 is induced, Gsk is not affected, but here the levels are low. Here, HIF2 is downmodulated, here it's not. So this basically says that the downmodulation that we induce in vitro, at least, by activating P53 is not only FBW7 dependent, but critically dependent upon the activity of this enzyme Gsk3-beta. I'm just going to review one other angiogenic mechanism if I have time, and that's the ability to suppress certain chemokines that attract inflammatory leukocytes. SDF1, for example, is known to be a P53 target, and it's readily suppressed by using an HDM2 antagonist. Here's what happens when you treat renal cancer xenografts with Sutent. This is readily induced in the stroma primarily, primarily through hypoxia, and you can completely prevent that. If you look at the cells that they regulate, these inflammatory myeloid cells, you can see a few of these cells in the control. In our hands, the recruitment of these cells is actually increased with submit-nib, presumably because of tissue hypoxia, but you can almost completely prevent their influx into tumors by using a P53 drug like MI319. This is just a biograph illustrating the same principle. We've looked at these myeloid-derived cells that we isolated from the spleen of mice that were treated either with Sutent or with MI319 or with both drugs, and one of the things that's characteristic of these cells is that they make massive amounts of TGF beta if they are taken from a mouse that got Sutent, but not from an untreated mouse and not from a mouse that got both an HDM to antagonist and a submit-nib. So these drugs not only regulate the trafficking of the cells, they also regulate their function. As you might surmise, the TGF beta that these cells make is extremely clonogenic. If you incubate 786O cells with the supernatants from these cells, you get tons of colonies which otherwise are hard to find. This is just an experiment to show that the effect on the ability to promote colony formation is limited to the cells that have both GR1 and CD11B expression. In other words, it's limited to this myeloid-derived suppressor cell phenotype. This again just examines the effect of treatment on the ability of these myeloid cells to promote clonogenicity. And as you can see here, I just want to draw your attention to the final two bar graphs. The effect is lost if the mice get treated with an HDM to antagonist. So in conclusion, I'd just like to sum up one of the reasons why or the reasons why we think HDM to antagonist have potential specifically as adjuncts to VEGF targeted therapies. One is that concurrent HDM to blockade does prevent the development of resistance to synitinid. Part of this effect is through the additive anti-angiogenic effects in which the HDM to antagonist adds to the anti-angiogenic effects of synitinid. The use of these drugs, in particular the Sanofi compound MI319, is associated with a diminution in hip to alpha, possibly mediated through this E3 ligase, FBW7. And we've shown that the inclusion of an HDM to antagonist interferes with the recruitment of myeloid cells to the tumor. I'd just like to thank the AACR curate and our kidney cancer spore for supporting this work. Thank you.