00:00Joanne, it's been a while since we spoke to you.
00:01I feel like the last time we spoke, we weren't even talking about Anthropic or some of these
00:05now trillion-dollar names that are out there.
00:09Remind everybody where you and the Golden Seeds team get in on early-stage investments.
00:16So we are angel investors, and we are at the beginning of the companies.
00:21We are typically the first professional money in.
00:25So we are people who were not your friends.
00:29We're not your families.
00:30We're investing not in the personality of the founders.
00:35We're investing in the idea that they've put together, the team they've brought together,
00:41and the business that they tell us that they're going to create.
00:45So we're at the first and second rung of the ladder.
00:50And there has been lots of change for women in those first and second sets, steps of the
00:57ladder.
00:57And in fact, we've been investing since 2004 when we started, 2005.
01:05And we just crossed $200 million invested in women-led and co-led startups.
01:15So that's a pretty big number for any angel group, but certainly for one that only invests
01:22in teams that have women.
01:25No, it's an interesting statistic.
01:27And you certainly have some perspective on this industry and how it goes.
01:33I'm always curious, too, about like so many of the companies, listen, angel investing,
01:38you can throw a lot of money at a lot of different companies, and maybe there's only a handful
01:41that actually pay out.
01:42But what can you tell us about, for lack of a better word, Joanne, the success rate?
01:48Like what happens to a lot of the companies that you start to invest in?
01:52Do they then get larger funding rounds, any of them going public, or do they get acquired?
01:57Give us some idea of kind of the runway off of your initial investment.
02:02Okay.
02:03So I'm going to give you our experience, but our experience doesn't differ much from the
02:09experience that I know of in the angel industry overall.
02:13So somewhere between a third and a half of startup companies do not return the capital.
02:21And that's true for angel investing.
02:24That's also true for venture investing.
02:27Okay.
02:30About 90% of your total return, whatever it may be, comes from somewhere between 20% and
02:3815% of your companies.
02:41And that's true for Golden Seeds.
02:44That's true for the angel, all the angels in the US from our trade associations.
02:50And from many of the reports I've seen about venture, that's also true.
02:57If you're asking about our experience, I can talk about that if that's what you want to
03:04talk about.
03:04Yes, please.
03:05Okay.
03:05So we just crossed $200 million in total investments.
03:10Right.
03:12We've returned to our collective investors.
03:16They've returned themselves because they make their own decision.
03:2092% of that total amount.
03:24And if we add to that the unrealized gain in the operating companies that are in the collective
03:32portfolio, there's about 90 of them.
03:34Add those two numbers together, and that's about 210% of $200 million.
03:42In terms of count of our two, not quite 200 companies, we've had 30 positive exits and secondary
03:54transactions.
03:55So 30 divided by two.
03:56Yeah, that's right in there in those percentages.
03:59And those transactions have had multiples between, you know, a little over one up to 90X.
04:07And like us, you know, all angel groups, because we're continually investing, you know, of our
04:1590 operating companies, 12 of them are, maybe 14 of them are new in the last, you know, 14
04:25months, so we don't know what's going to happen to them yet.
04:28What thematically, apart from these being women-led companies, thematically, what are the companies
04:35that are most exciting to you and the network right now?
04:40Well, you were just talking a little bit about it.
04:44I knew you were going to go there.
04:46It was sort of a rhetorical question, because I don't know anyone who wouldn't say AI right
04:49now.
04:50Yeah.
04:51Well, that's not what I was going to say.
04:53I was going to say that if you only looked at the headlines, you would think that we were
04:59drowning in liquidity, because there's so much venture capital happening right now.
05:05But it is very skewed to mega deals.
05:07So, you know, in AI infrastructure, if you take those out, the amount of money going into
05:14non-AI stuff is, you know, 24 to 25, even now into 26, it's about the same.
05:22And we have seen some rotation, though, in those deals.
05:27We're actually seeing more investment in B2B technologies, and a little bit less in anything
05:36B2C or healthcare-related.
05:40I can speculate on why that is, but we're not sure.
05:45I mean, one thing is that, you know, women are continuing to, you know, they get, you know,
05:5340% of the STEM degrees, and they are continuing to innovate and come up with some incredible
05:59ideas and start to personalize them.
06:02And, you know, our reach and reputation means that we see a lot of that stuff.
06:06We're sort of like some, you know, the first port of call for some of these people.
06:10Hey, Joanne, just got about 25 seconds left here.
06:13You know, your read, you know, VC, we are constantly looking at different metrics to get a read on
06:17kind of the business environment and macro.
06:19Just very quickly, from what you are seeing, describes what kind of economy right now?
06:26I would say that nobody wants to invest in SaaS, and people are really looking for technologies
06:37that with a little bit of money can be highly levered in climate, energy, and green tech.
06:49All right.
06:49That's what we're seeing.
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