David Blumberg on Fintech & Supply Chain Software during Covid

David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital - Podcast Transcript

Singer:	So, when your troubles are mounting in tax or accounting, you go to Kruze Founders and Friends. It’s Kruze Consulting, Founders and Friends with your host, Scotty Orn.
Scott:	Welcome to Founders and Friends podcast with Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting. And before we get to an awesome podcast with David Blumberg, a Blumberg Capital, quick shout out to Rippling. Rippling is our favorite payroll system, favorite benefits system and amazing IT integration that allows you to get your new hires up and running with all the web services super-fast and just provisions them automatically. And in this kind of climate, if you’re unfortunately having to let a couple people go, it helps you deeper vision very quickly. So, it’s an amazing service we love, saves tons of time for us and, and just love Rippling in general. So, check them out and now to David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital. Welcome David.
David:	Thank you Scott. So good to be here.
Scott:	Yeah. So, well it’s awesome to have you. We had one of your… I was just telling you before you turned the mic on that you’re very smart for investing in Lendio. I was incredibly impressed with Brock who was on I think, last week. And so, but maybe you can start by just giving your background a little bit how you started Blumberg Capital.
David:	Sure. Venture capital is a business where you need to learn by losing a lot of money from other people first. So-
Scott:	That’s very true.
David:	I have a lot of scars and a lot of errors in my history and errors in my back. But now that I’m a little bit older, that experience and those trials and tribulations are useful as warnings for other people. So, I, I specialize in saying, “Well, I don’t want to tell you what to do, but here’s what happened to me in a similar situation.” So first of all, thank you for doing this. You’re doing actually a public service as well as a commercial enterprise. And sometimes people don’t even remember that commercial services are public enterprise. And I’m going to quote Walter Williams, who’s one of my favorite economists. And he says, “What is profit? Profit is a sign that you delivered something of value to somebody else who through their freewill, and of course we’re not talking about coercion or deception, but if it was freewill and full information, you transacted something that somebody else couldn’t build, couldn’t make, couldn’t do, and they want it and you make profit.” That’s wonderful. That is, if you’re religious, that’s godliness.
Scott:	I love it. And you get to reinvest in your business and make it stronger and better. And so, you keep serving more people and helping more people.
David:	Exactly right. So, we’re all endeavored in this together and there’s no red, there’s no blue, there’s no richness, no poor. There’s only all of us together. And some of us are healthier and some of us are sicker and we need to take care of each other and support and do the best we can through a completely unprecedented time in world history. And that’s true. I mean-
Scott:	I totally agree.
David:	The Black Plague was not like this quite, I mean it was bad. It was worse, but it was different.
Scott:	This is fast. This is very fast. It’s crazy.
David:	Okay, so you asked the basic question of how did Blumberg Capital start and what’s a venture capital firm? Let me start with what’s a venture capital firm? Venture capital firm takes in monies from major investors, institutions and wealthy families, but it can be insurance companies and banks and pension funds and corporations and church endowments and all that stuff. The money’s put together in a 10-year fund and then we invest in entrepreneurs, usually starting companies. Usually they’re young people, groups of two or three that then grow companies that go on to become Google or Facebook or in our case, some of our unicorns, we’ll get to, so that’s our job. So, we take a very long-term horizon. Our companies take five, 10 sometimes more years to grow to their maturity. They’re picked by date. And so, we’re not day traders on the stock market, so even the stock market can be highly volatile as it has been in the past two weeks, it doesn’t really bother us. We’re concerned about an entrepreneur’s wellbeing of their whole company over a long-term duration and almost all of them have cashflow to sustain them for at least 15 months that we’ve seen across our portfolio. And by the way, our portfolio is about 70 companies, primarily in North America, Israel, and a few in Europe. And so, we have different global touch points and these companies are selling in over 200 countries. And so, they have data points of feedback from the market. And I’m happy to tell you that the Asian markets are already starting to reopen.
Scott:	Oh, that’s awesome. Were you getting feedback from like your company’s selling [crosstalk 00:04:28]?
David:	Yeah.
Scott:	Did you know about this two months ago basically kind of thing?
David:	No. We’re not that foresightful. I mean we had some inklings and we were paying attention, but I don’t think anybody quite understood. I’m sure somebody will come back a year from now saying I predicted at all. But not many people really understood the full trajectory of the epidemiology. In any case, venture capital is a long-term team sport. It is not a sport for individuals. It’s every founder has a team around them and they have their customers and their suppliers and their vendors and almost all venture capitals in syndication with other investors. So anyway, we’re all in this together. We need to play by good kindergarten rules that you learn about sharing the ball and all those things.
Scott:	I totally agree, totally agree.
David:	Wipe your hands, wash your hands afterwards. So, our time frame is long. Blumberg Capital started in the early nineties I had been honored to learn at the knees of great VCs, Fred Adler in New York, Patrick Hough in New York and Paris and Charles Bronfman in Montreal. And I made a number of investments for these groups over the years and then started my own firm called Blumberg Capital based in San Francisco with offices in Tel Aviv and teams in New York and Florida. So, we invest North America and Israel, we’re early stage investors. So that means we are the pretty much the first institution that an entrepreneur would turn to. We often invest with angels, other individual investors and with other venture capitalists and corporate investors more and more increasingly. The area that we focus on is mostly business to business enterprise software kinds of businesses. We have quite a large portfolio of FinTech companies and we’re going to get to Lendio and a few others in that realm. We do a lot in cybersecurity, a lot in the combination frankly, of artificial intelligence and big data, which thank God right now in this time of crisis are really serving to save humanity frankly. I mean, it’s amazing how AI to the rescue.
Scott:	It’s really cool. Also, just being like, there’s so many cool things happening where people are mapping outbreak data or it kind of helps people get serious and understand like, hey, we do need to stay indoors. We do need to be careful because the visualizations and the data’s in there. It is an amazing time for AI and data visualization.
David:	If there’s ever been a poster for your kids to study STEM courses, this is a good one. But I want to also give a shout out to all the blue-collar folks, all the first responders, the military, everybody’s doing their job right now and that’s pretty amazing and we should be grateful. Gratitude, most important human virtue in my humble opinion. And if you’re grateful, you’re always going to be happier than if you’re not grateful and you’ll share that, you’ll radiate that grit, that happiness to other people, which is also important.
Scott:	Very well said. I put my life that way too. I like it.
David:	So, let’s move on. So, entrepreneurs, we talked about that. Venture capital, so Blumberg Capital now manages about $550 million across different funds. 70 companies, as I mentioned internationally, and most of them are software business. So relatively speaking now we go to COVID-19 crisis. We are doing better frankly than most sectors of the economy and I don’t want to Lord it over anybody. We’re just lucky. But our businesses are relatively less impacted because we don’t have many companies that sell directly to the consumer in a bar situation, a flower shop, the restaurant, that’s not our area of investing. Most of our businesses are SAS model. That means software as a service and they have continuing contracts and very few of their customers are stopping contracts for critical software. It’s just not really happening. We’re able to keep most of the employees, again, because most of our companies have relatively large resources. They have-
Scott:	Well you said your average company had like 15 to 20 months of cash or something like that.
David:	That’s right.
Scott:	So, they can weather it and they can keep investing, which is super important. It’s almost like a… It’s not a benefit, but it’s kind of nice that they can fight through it and keep building and not have to slow down.
David:	Exactly right. So, our companies have on average about 15 months of cash and we’re of course encouraging the entrepreneurs to do scenario planning first. That’s the first thing you do, you analyze the situation. You marshal the data best you can with your team of C-suite folks. You get all the input, you try and read reality right in the eye, don’t hide from it and then you do plus 10%, minus 20%, et cetera, et cetera, different scenarios and in that process of planning, you will learn a lot about the pivot points of your business. Where do I have to react? How can I not only turn a defensive move, but maybe flip to an offensive move if things turned out a little bit better and I can now do an acquisition. We’ve had two of our companies do acquisitions during this crisis where we acquired smaller companies on unprecedented terms. One of them was 100% earnout acquisition.
Scott:	Well, you’re probably getting like some incredible technical teams too, right? That are just maybe didn’t have product market fit, they’re outer resources and now’s the time to, you couldn’t hire those people six months ago, but now you’re getting them in a good situation.
David:	That’s all right. So, I mean, again, there’s a black cloud and then there’s a silver lining on many of these things. I mean, horribly, sadly we’re losing people right now to COVID-19 but there are no traffic accidents.
Scott:	Yep. Yep. Well, I think to your point about on the company and venture capital size, the strong companies consolidate the market and they can offer jobs to people because they’re doing so well and give an extended employment, which is huge. That’s going to be probably the story for the next six months is-
David:	Correct.
Scott:	Unemployment numbers and people going to the big companies that are, or not even just big, just the strong companies that are doing well and finding a new vocation there.
David:	Correct. Here’s an idea. Let’s talk about FinTech and specifically the role that the SBA loans under The Care Act will provide stabilization for employment and so on because that’s really where this can help and how some of this new technology we’ve been investing in in Blumberg Capital across our portfolio and especially FinTech are here to help. We’re part of the solution.
Scott:	Well, and before we turned the mics on, you had some amazing news last week we had Brock from Lendio who was just a phenomenal guest and he actually hopped on the podcast with me Friday afternoon. The Cares Act had passed like an hour before and that podcast was incredibly valuable to our client base because he really framed it really well and was pushing everyone towards the paycheck protection loans. Maybe you can give kind of like this is a happy update. What’s going on with Lendio?
David:	Well, I’ll start pre-Lendio. Last night at about 10:00 PM in my kitchen with my kids looking on, I signed one of these PPP program applications. I’ll show it to you. Here it is.
Scott:	Very nice, very nice.
David:	And here’s my signature and I’ll protect the privacy of the company and the details but basically, we applied in this case for this company and because Blumberg Capital owns more than 20% of this company, we are potentially under the affiliate rules of the SB. I won’t go into huge detail. I’ve since heard from a law firm today that that form has already been changed and they’ve taken off the 20% requirement. So, less bureaucracy in the way. But the point is this little loan that I just applied for our company is going to probably save 43 jobs in [inaudible] and it’s like about a million bucks. And it’s going to mostly turn into a grant because if you’ve been following, the way it works is that the loan is 2.5 times your payroll and then you can spend it on payroll, rent, mortgage and utilities. So, no capital equipment and don’t go off to Tahiti but you can spend it on the basic meat and potatoes of your and it mostly becomes a grant.
Scott:	Yeah. I’ve been telling people it’s like almost, I think the grant’s actually a great way of saying, because I was saying it’s an equity injection without the ownership like-
David:	Non-dilutive.
Scott:	Yes, non-dilutive. That’s the big thing because sometimes more debt isn’t going to solve the problem for why these companies-
David:	Here’s an analogy for young people. If they knew what student loans are, this is like a scholarship.
Scott:	Oh, great analogy. I love it, and I’m like you, I’m a pretty huge fan of this program because there’s so much chaos right now because COVID has come on so fast that stabilizing the market, stabilizing companies and stabilizing families through employment is really, really important. In two months, we’re going to know so much more.
David:	Absolutely.
Scott:	The [inaudible] are wisely built up. The hospitals will know what they’re doing. We may even have a-
David:	Antibody test.
Scott:	Yeah. Antibody. So, we’ll know so much more. So actually, I think this is a great investment by the government in the people of the United States is really cool.
David:	I won’t go to big macro theory. It’s controversial because here’s the negative. I have to be honest here. Let’s be honest with each other. This is a redistribution. It’s not producing any more money. There’s no money that’s free. This money is being borrowed from the capital markets that our descendants will have to pay off or taxes will have to rise or something. It doesn’t come from nowhere. This is a enormously costly event for the world. I mean, it’s trillions of dollars are just being lost and they can’t come back. Now, they’re trying to mitigate this through this temporary cast redistribution. Maybe we’re borrowing a little bit from the future. Maybe some of us will pay higher taxes, but we’re saving these jobs and let me just go now go to Lendio. Lendio.com as Brock was on last week, its CEO is a company based in Utah and New York. They’re a marketplace for small business loans. And before this happened, before COVID, they were the largest small business marketplace in the world. Okay? They’d already load out pre-COVID they’d done $2 billion in loans to tens of thousands of businesses. Now today, this morning, when it opened up, by noon, Utah time, mountain time, they had processed over 20,000 loans.
Scott:	Wow.
David:	They typically do 25,000 in a week, and that’s halfway through the day. Actually, they’re going to be open until 9:00 PM mountain time or maybe if they open later. Listen to this, they’ve hired over a hundred people to be agents. Now they’re working from home, but ultimately, they’ll be in the office in Utah to help guide people through the process if needed. But most of it is automated. For most cases, you don’t have to talk to a person. So, it’s lendio.com and the nice thing is you’re not borrowing from Lendio. The business model is ideal for this. As a VC, I have no risk for lending credit worthiness because we are a marketplace for lenders. So, there are entrepreneurs borrowing and on the other side of our marketplace are banks and non-bank lenders, et cetera. And all of that money through The Cares Act is guaranteed 100% by the government so that the lenders will not lose money either.
Scott:	Yep. And I think the beauty of Lendio’s business model is kind of why they were able to accept those applications so quickly today while other banks had been installing or not be able to do it, is they have a network of banks, right, that they work with and who are already SBA lenders and already approved and already had kind of their process set up where SVB and First Republic, they’ve had to kind of get their process up. They’re building it, they’re building as the airplane takes off. Right? And that’s the situation.
David:	Totally. Perfect analogy. That’s it.
Scott:	Yeah, so Lendio is ready to roll. This is just like a normal week of their business on steroids, right?
David:	Well, it’s not exactly normal.
Scott:	Yeah.
David:	Pre-COVID they got 25,000 applications a week. I’m not sure I should go into exact details, but suffice to say they would turn down about 85% typically. Today it’s going to be 80 to 90% probably that’ll be accepted.
Scott:	Yeah, that’s amazing.
David:	The reason for people to not going to be accepted is people have probably filled out the form wrong or made some terrible mistake or it’s a Japanese company that’s trying to apply for a loan from the US government, which won’t work. Only American companies can apply and I don’t want to be a lawyer. I’m not sure about subsidiaries. I think subsidiaries can apply and they’ve now also taken off the rule that if you’re a foreign citizen and you own more than 20% that’s no longer a barrier either.
Scott:	Oh wow. I didn’t know that. That’s actually super important to know. That must have happened like last night or today.
David:	It did, it did. I was on a call two days ago with Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader in the House. And he said he had just spoken with Steve Minutian at the Treasury and that they were going to get rid of some of these barriers, including the venture capital affiliation rule as well, so.
Scott:	Yeah. I love it. I love it. Well and then I mean the cool thing is you and the Lendio team have put the hard work in to build the infrastructure and now there’s a catalyst like this. I mean, what other catalysts are you seeing out there in the FinTech sector? Because you’ve made a lot of bets in the FinTech sector. What other companies or what other things are working out for you?
David:	Well there are three that I’d like to mention. Two and [inaudible] Lendio right now. One is called Fundbox.
Scott:	Oh yeah.
David:	[crosstalk] They’re headquartered here in San Francisco. They were born from the last time there was a crisis. Remember back to 2008/9, when the mortgage world fell apart and people thought the world would end. Remember the world came back.
Scott:	Oh yeah.
David:	[crosstalk 00:17:52]. Very important for everybody, whether you’re a housewife, you’re a house husband, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a student or grandma, grandpa doesn’t matter. We will come back. The world will not end. Everyone has long-term and short term. Think both ways at the same time, whenever you get to short term and nervous, think about over the rainbow, things will get better and if you’re too far over the rainbow, come back to earth and go call a neighbor or see if you can help somebody.
Scott:	I totally agree. Totally agree. So, Fundbox. I know the background but share with the audience. It’s a really cool company.
David:	So, the thing about Fundbox is last time of the crisis of mortgage crisis, banks also pulled back for different reasons and stopped lending to small businesses and it’s just took that really struck us when we listened to the pitch from the founders Eyal Shinar was that typically the day sales outstanding ratio that means your receivables essentially equate to about 45 days of cash flow for a typical American small business. During the crisis in 2009 it doubled to 90 days.
Scott:	People just pay their bills slower, they pay their suppliers slower, so that [crosstalk 00:18:59].
David:	That’s right, it means more collection problems and so on. So what Eyal and the team at Fundbox did brilliantly and now they’re, I would say a unicorn-ish. They basically created an automated system to do credit underwriting and it uses AI machine learning specifically and all kinds of new data sources that come from the E invoicing systems like Quicken and FreshBooks and Zero to essentially instantly do your credit underwriting, whether you’re a small hardware store or a small software company, and then create a loan that is a very short term loan and you can use it to manage your cash flow. So, they’re up and running and doing very well and they’re part of the Lendio marketplace.
Scott:	Are they integrated into QuickBooks too or they have a deal with QuickBooks or relationship?
David:	Yes.
Scott:	Okay.
David:	And many others, many others.
Scott:	There’s a young lady named Lori Rosenberg who’s a Kruze Consulting alumni who I think is the number two in accounting there at Fundbox. So, shout out to Lori, but that’s because I know the company so well is they’re doing really, really… That’s phenomenal. So Fundbox has been great. Who else is-
David:	And then let’s talk about the consumer and let’s not talk about those of us fortunate to live in San Francisco and to be doing okay, let’s talk about people who are more at the lower end of the economic ladder. People who are subprime, what are called subprime borrowers. They need help too, probably more help than anybody and especially if they’ve been hourly workers and they may be now completely out of a job or their contractors that got cut off. So those folks really need help. Now luckily, we have a company called Katapult based in New York and they are a lease to own subprime lender that works with online retailers. [crosstalk]
Scott:	Oh, very smart, very smart.
David:	Okay. Or Lenovo or [inaudible 00:20:46], a bunch of others. And so, if you want to buy your big screen TV because you’re all cooped up at home, perfect thing to do. And their business has been booming in the last two weeks as has Fundbox as has Lendio as we just spoke about. So those are three examples and we have more. I want to get to supply chain in a moment. But FinTech is here to help and it’s not perfect everywhere and there’re going to be errors and there are people going to be frustrated and some people won’t get the loans that they deserve. We can’t solve all problems but people are doing better than I expected and I think we’re doing kind of pretty well given the gravity of the situation.
Scott:	Yeah, I love what you said too. FinTech is here to help. I believe that sincerely, and I’ve been a FinTech investor for many years and I’ve seen innovation in FinTech and it really does help. And Lendio example is probably the best example I can think of because like a lot of traditional banks haven’t been moving as fast and I’m seeing it on the accounting side it’s really stressing our clients out and I don’t blame them. And so kudos to the pioneers.
David:	Let me give one more point and that is a little bit of empathy to the banks.
Scott:	Oh, big time, yeah.
David:	They are mostly dealing with legacy software. They have been over-regulated for decades. They live under scrutiny of critics that will attack them in the press ruthlessly for the least infraction. And even in advertent problems, I mean nobody’s, not many people are trying to hurt their customers. Some people, there are a few bad guys in every creative outlet, but most of these people are frankly being strung up for mistake and violation of certain obscure pullet policies and regulations. It’s so hard and there’s often a great judgment zone and so on. So, I have a lot of empathy for them. I’ll give you one example of how quickly the government responded when the banks sort of cried foul. The original interest rate was going to be 0.5% and the banks said that guarantees that we will all lose money. [crosstalk] We have staff to pay. [crosstalk 00:22:52].
Scott:	I saw that. It was crazy.
David:	Quickly. I mean like overnight change it to 1%.
Scott:	Even that, I, [crosstalk 00:00:23:00].
David:	That’s too low still but better than nothing.
Scott:	Yeah. Well I also think I agree with you because I’ve been talking, we have a lot of relations… Well, our clients have over $1 billion in cash. So, like we have a lot of relationships and I’ve talking to the First Republican SVB like three times a day, four times a day, and they’re kind of being left out in the cold. Because what really happened was the SBA didn’t give them enough guidance to know actually how these loans are going to be funded and stuff like that. So, they’re kind of taking a bullet for the SBA and Treasury. Now I’m glad the SBA and treasury did move really fast because people need the money, but the banks, the banks are actually, they’re doing good work here and they’re kind of getting blamed for lost stuff that’s not their fault.
David:	If I could just give a little bit of a soapbox.
Scott:	Yeah.
David:	I urge people to do less blaming.
Scott:	Yeah. Yeah.
David:	Turn yourself from a mentality that like, Oh, woe is me. It’s all how do I avoid getting the virus? How do I save my money? How do I protect me? Instead of that, turn it around and flip it backwards. How can I help avoid giving it to anybody else? How can I care for those most in need? How can I become an ordinary hero and do the right thing? Let’s take John F Kennedy’s famous phrase. “Ask not what my country can do for me. Ask what I can do for my country.” Take it family, take it to your community, take it to your business. And then here’s another thing. A man named Greg Brennaman on another podcast that I listened to and he said something very profound and I think at this time it’s super important to repeat and repeat and repeat. Great leaders and every, I want to say every CEO listening, you are already a great leader. Young or old, man or woman, doesn’t matter, anything. You’re already a great leader because you’ve taken the initiative to create something that didn’t exist. Your business wouldn’t have existed but for you, so praise you. Amen. Now, number two, great leaders in a time of crisis especially absorb fear and exude hope.
Scott:	Oh, love that. I love that. Yes, very good.
David:	[crosstalk] for ourselves and we spread out the good news and think about it. If you’re a parent, you don’t want to scare your kids. You don’t want to scare those around you. You’re not in a position to evaluate or frankly to react. You’ve got to absorb that fear to a great degree, not everything, but as best you can and put out the good stuff. Not happy face Pollyanna, but you know what I’m talking about.
Scott:	Yeah. Absorb the fear and exude the positive strength. I love that. That’s really good. Well I promise not to take too much of your time. So, let’s talk supply chain because it’s as important as FinTech right now. And I think you’ve actually made some bets in the sector, so you’re super plugged in, right?
David:	Yes. And I’ll just say I’m sitting in my third-floor office in my home in San Francisco, high on a hill looking out over the Bay and I’m so excited whenever I see container ships going in or out. Fully loaded is better than empty.
Scott:	[crosstalk 00:25:51].
David:	The supply chain is what keeps all of us fed. Now, those of us in California should be thanking the lucky stars that we have the farm community. I grew up in Fresno, so thank those farmers and the truckers and the packers because we supply two thirds of the fruits and nuts in the United States and one half I believe of all vegetables, something like that. It’s incredible. Maybe a third, a third. But anyway, it’s way out of proportion and it’s mainly the central Valley and the region around Monterey Bay. It’s amazing, they’re so productive. Thank goodness those supply chains have remained open. And then also the United States in general is the world’s largest producer of food, et cetera, et cetera. And best of all, I was telling you, we just made a new investment in one company. We have I think four in the supply chain area and software. And what is the supply chain? Let me define that. Supply chain is what helps the ultimate consumer, whether it’s a business or a family, get the products with all of the intermediary retailers, transportation, production, wholesale, retail, mineral extraction, all of that. So, you’ve got to go all the way back. One thing to do is take a candy bar, think about where all the ingredients came from, what processes had to go into that. You will find that it comes from a hundred countries, thousands of people worked on it to get you that candy bar. It’s kind of amazing. So that’s a supply chain and it involves warehousing and truckers and trains and boats and planes and all that. Okay. Software that can manage all of this is rare and it’s almost all legacy and it’s very clunky and it doesn’t do predictive analytics very well. It doesn’t do intermodal. That means between the types of transportation very well. One company we just invested in this week is called Slync. That’s spelled S-L-Y-N-C.io for their website. They are a producer of software for global supply chain management and we just talked about supply chain. This is the software that helps optimize, do route management and tracking of intermodal shipments, keep track from end to end, say factory or port to destination retailer or distribution center. Very complicated stuff. It usually competes with things that have been built 20, 30, 40 years ago in house in most cases. And their customers include some of the largest freight forwarders in the world such as DHL, Expediters and a very famous, the largest in the world called Kuehne + Nagel based in Germany. So, they’re doing really well. And we’ve heard from them that their offices and ports in China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore are starting to reopen. And so the supply chain is working again, there’ll be some creakiness for a while, but as soon as demand starts to reappear, the supply chain will bounce back into resilience. And with using technology like Slync, managers in the supply chain will be easier able to react, be proactive, manage and optimize going forward.
Scott:	It is so important. Also, they can, I’m sure there’s like some smart routing and smart stuff like that where like I was telling, it was kind of a joke, but there was one of our team members, the truck with all the toilet paper was heading into Dallas and they caught on fire. So now Dallas is not [inaudible] there, but a smart supply chain software tool could see that event happened and probably reroute some other stuff and make everyone more efficient and probably take advantage of the opportunity there. Right? That’s kind of how it works in software world.
David:	That’s right. You want to get ahead of a problem like that so you know what doesn’t hit the fan.
Scott:	Wow. That was masterful right there. That was amazing. Well this has been amazing. Thank you so much coming by. First of all, I love your John F. Kennedy kind of thing where we can all help each other and the amazing thing is I’ve been seeing that there’s so many companies that are doing good in the world that’s really powerful and people are really pulling together. It’s really fun to watch and I’m excited that some of the companies that you’ve invested in are enabling companies that really need capital, they’re able to access it through the companies that you’re working with or the toilet paper beep, the things that we need and all the household’s essentials, they’re getting it through the companies you invested into. So that’s really cool. You’re making a really nice contribution to society too, and it’s amazing that you’re doing deals right now. That’s a real show of strength. That’s really cool.
David:	We are continuing to invest in new companies and support our existing portfolio. And it’s not the same all across the board. Some are easier to support than others, but yeah, we’ve been through this before and we will all get through this together and as you know, information is power and you are part of the network that gets information out and distributes it. And here’s one more recommendation. If you’re getting a little bit stressed, don’t watch cable news, don’t watch news at all. TV is a bad medium. Listen to podcasts, read, do long form journalism, not short form and you’ll thank yourself. You’ll get a lot more knowledgeable and you’ll be a lot less anxious.
Scott:	Totally agree. One of our clients is Calm and I’ve been doing the meditation app every night now and it really helps. It just does, so. Well David, thank you so much for coming by. If people are interested, checkout blumbergcapital.com and we’re very grateful for you [crosstalk 00:31:14].
David:	By the way.
Scott:	Yes?
David:	Our companies are still hiring.
Scott:	That’s amazing.
David:	Okay? Yes, everybody should get to know venture capitalists because all of our companies are still, not all, but many are still hiring even through this. They might not be hiring as fast. And some of them are unfortunately are doing layoffs or freezes, but most are still hiring selectively. And that may not be the case for the rest of the economy for a while. So, check us out. [crosstalk]
Scott:	And they’re well-capitalized and can make it through, which is what you’re also looking for when you’re taking a new job. So, okay, David, thank you so much. Really appreciate you coming by.
David:	Thank you.
Singer:	So, when your troubles are mounting in tax or accounting, you go to Kruze Founders and Friends. It’s Kruze Consulting, Founders and Friends with your host, Scotty Orn.

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