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Scott Orn

Scott Orn, CFA

Prashant Fonseka, VC with Tuesday Capital, talks about pre-seed, seed and post-seed VC investing in a COVID crisis world

Posted on: 04/12/2020

Prashant Fonseka

Prashant Fonseka

Partner - Tuesday Capital


Prashant Fonseka of Tuesday Capital - Podcast Summary

Prashant Fonseka, a venture capitalist with Tuesday Capital (formerly the CrunchFund) explains his process for evaluating pre-seed, seed and post-seed VC investing. Prashant also lists the advice he gives to portfolio companies during the COVID crisis.

Prashant Fonseka of Tuesday Capital - Podcast Transcript

Scott: Hey. It’s Scott Orn of Kruze Consulting, and welcome to another episode of Founders and Friends, and before we start the podcast, let’s give a quick shout out to Rippling. Rippling is the new, cool payroll tool that we see a lot of startups using. Rippling is great for your traditional HR and payroll. They integrate very nicely. But, guess what? They did another thing, they integrate into your IT infrastructure. They make it really easy for when you hire someone to spin up all the web services in their computer, which sounds like not a huge deal, but actually, we did the study at Kruze. We spend $420 on average just getting a new employee’s computer up and running and their web servers up and running. It’s actually a really big deal, saves a lot of money. The dogs are in the dog food. We see a lot of startups coming in. Kruze’s now using Rippling, so please check out Rippling. Great service. We love it. I think we have a podcast with Parker Conrad. You can hear it from his own words, but we’re seeing them take market share, so shout-out to Rippling. And now to another awesome podcast at Kruze Consulting’s Founder and Friends. Thanks.
Singer: (singing) 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 today, my very special guest is Prashant Fonseka of Tuesday Capital. Welcome, Prashant.
Prashant: Thank you.
Scott: We’re taping on a Friday afternoon, and we’re ready to talk venture capital here. Always exciting.
Prashant: I’m always excited to talk about venture capital.
Scott: Prashant, do you want to maybe just retrace your career? How’d you end up at Tuesday Capital?
Prashant: I was recruited about a year after college to join as an intern. I was a high school and collegiate entrepreneur. When I was a kid, my interests were business and computers. I was very interested in open-source software. I was obsessed with things like wireless routers and working on wireless router firmware. I think I started my first business in first grade, which was selling bookmarks, and I got-
Scott: Nice.
Prashant: I got shut down. Apparently selling bookmarks is not something you were supposed to do as a first grader, but I sort of kept at it. It was a while before the computers and the business interest actually came together, like I was interested in business in ways that often had nothing to do with technology. Then I started selling things on eBay as a kid. Then I ran a business called the Helpful Student Network when I was in high school, which actually scaled to be quite large in the Washington, DC area where we had high school students going and helping older people, mostly seniors with technology. It was with computers, sometimes even TVs, entertainment, a little bit of everything. When I got to college, I was like that entrepreneur kid who had… I ended up rooming with someone who ran a company called Boom Boom Batteries, which he got to several hundred thousand dollars of revenue. It was a bit of a funny name for a battery company-
Scott: That’s awesome.
Prashant: … But it was remote control car batteries. It was because of the relationships that I developed when was in college where I became an advisor to a bunch of groups of people who were starting companies that I became known by folks who went on to fund venture-backed companies. I even met some VCs. Because of my longstanding interactions with the community and people thinking I was a fun person to just, frankly, bounce ideas off of, I got pulled into being an investor. I thought I would go be an entrepreneur and that I would be an investor for maybe a year or two. Here I am seven years later.
Scott: You went straight from college into venture capital.
Prashant: Not straight. Okay, so I did Teach For America after I graduated from-
Scott: Oh, that’s cool.
Prashant: … College. I-
Scott: That’s cool.
Prashant: I was on this track to… I grew up in a community where my interest in computers was very frowned upon. They were like, “If you spend so much time on the computer-“
Scott: Really?
Prashant: ” … How are you going to get into medical school, law school?” I grew up in DC. DC’s culture is very… It might be different now, but back then… I went to good schools. I was good at math, I was good at science, I as good with computers, but they were always like, “No, you need to learn how to write. You need to go to law school. There’s this school, it’s called Harvard. You need to figure out how to go there. Computers aren’t going to get you there.” I don’t think that was right but that was-
Scott: Turns out that might’ve helped.
Prashant: Might’ve helped, yeah.
Scott: Yeah. Yeah. What cities did you teach in?
Prashant: I was teaching in Dallas, Texas. I taught high school math at Bryan Adams High School in East Dallas. I taught algebra one and geometry for 9th and 10th graders.
Scott: Did you like it?
Prashant: It was a very challenging experience. I’m very glad I did it. It was very rewarding. I would never… I would do everything the same again. It was an incredibly tough experience though. When you ask most people if they liked it, you’re usually not going to get a, like a… It wasn’t like, “Oh, it’s so much fun.” It was like, “Oh, man, I’m trying to not cry every day.” It was-
Scott: Yeah. I have a friend who did Teach For America, she did end up crying most days because it was… She was great. She went into an inner city school and did a lot of tough work and changed some kids’ lives but also really difficult for her. I think good for you for doing that. That’s God’s work. Then you got smart and went to the venture capital industry.
Prashant: Yeah. That summer that I interned at was between my Teach For America years. I actually spent the first month of that summer working on a lesson planning startup that I wanted to build. My programming skills were pretty rusty at the time, and after talking to a bunch of people, I realized ad tech was maybe not the best market to get into as a 21 or 20-year-old over the summer. I gave up on that pretty quick. I called my friend back who had been trying to get me to go and to join into this internship. I was like, “Hey, about that internship. How about we do that? Is that’s still an option?” [inaudible]-
Scott: And the [crosstalk]-
Prashant: … [crosstalk] capital was the person who brought me in so thank you to him.
Scott: Oh, awesome. You did that, you started in 2013?
Prashant: I started in 2013, and then after that summer, I had another year of Teach For America, and I was working part time. Then I joined full time at the beginning and moved to San Francisco at the beginning of 2015.
Scott: You’ve been at Tuesday Capital for, what, seven years now?
Prashant: Years including the internship and part time, five years full time.
Scott: Awesome. I mean, that’s been a lifetime in venture capital. It’s been an incredible market. Now with COVID, we’re hitting kind of a tough market. I want to talk about kind of the stuff you’re doing on behalf of your companies a little bit later, but maybe give… So people know because Tuesday Capital rebrand. It used to be the CrunchFund. Maybe give the history of the fund a little bit so people have a little more context.
Prashant: Sure. The fund was started by Pat Gallagher and Mike Arrington. Pat had, immediately before that, been at Vantage Point Partners. He had operated at a few companies during the dot-com era, and he was at Morgan Stanley Venture Partners before that. Mike was the founder of TechCrunch and Crunchbase, which is where we got the name, the original name of the fund. They started investing at the end of 2011, that first fund is a 2012 vintage. There were about 150 portfolio companies in that fund, including Uber and Airbnb, Pinterest. I think DigitalOcean comes from that fund. I think what is now a Zipline is also from that fund, was originally Romotive. They got off to a very, very strong start. Pat and Mike raised fund two together. Mike went part time for fun three as he was thinking about what he wanted to do next and went off to go into to crypto. We have kind of continued with the same strategy ever since. Changes have been that we’ve gone from 150 companies to, in fund two, we went to 80 companies, in fund three we had, I think the number was 54 companies total, so we’ve gotten a little bit more focused. We’re writing slightly larger checks. In fund one, we were writing 100, $150,000 checks, very high volume, but again, backing a lot of great founders, and today, we’re writing closer to 250… The range is 250 to 500,000 for initial check that the average is somewhere between there.
Scott: You guys, what stage do you like to invest in?
Prashant: I’d say pre-seed, seed, post-seed, really, anything that’s before series A is fair game for us. I think when I think of what a series A is in my head, that means a 10, $12 million round. For the marquee funds, I think, that’s kind of where the floor is for a series A today. I’m happy. I’d rather go earlier than later these days. If we’re really excited about a company, we might invest in that five, maybe $7 million slightly larger round, but given our check size and the stage of company at which we’re able to help the most, I’d rather be as early as possible.
Scott: Yeah. That makes sense. Well, the valuations are lower. You actually have more contact with the founder, you’re actually helping shape everything, so it is kind of more fun too, and if you catch Airbnb or Uber at that stage-
Prashant: It’s incredible.
Scott: … The portfolio’s [inaudible].
Prashant: Yeah, it’s incredible.
Scott: We were talking before we turn on the mics about the kind of the categories you’d like to invest in, but it sounds like you guys are very open minded. You’ll look at kind of anything that’s interesting to you and that has the venture type of profile, right?
Prashant: Absolutely. I think if it’s a company that’s in a space that is traditionally not something that gets VCs excited, I think any founder in these spaces with all of this, like if you’re in ad tech or marketing tech or if you’re doing hardware, there’s certain spaces where that VCs allergic to, and we’ll look at those companies. It’s just what are they doing that’s totally different because as much as it is true that investors for the most part, their group think is usually because if they don’t like to invest in a space, it’s because that space is very hard, very difficult, maybe overly crowded, maybe it’s easy to get to 10 million in revenue, hard to get past that. That’s what people think about ad tech, marketing tech. It’s obviously true, but what I’m looking for a founder in those spaces is just why are you not that company? I love the contrarian thinkers who come to me and are like, “I know you don’t ever want to bag an ad tech company, but here’s why you’re going bag this ad tech company.” I like those. Those get me excited.
Scott: I do too because they usually, those are founders who usually found something, and they have something that the rest of the world doesn’t know, and you can build a company on that. That’s really cool. You guys, are you guys kind of pricing the pre-seed round or the seed round, or what’s your role in the syndicate? How do you manage that?
Prashant: We can be the first check, but we’re not going to write the term sheet because with the 250 to $500,000 check and the typical round size for seed being anywhere from two to five, maybe even larger million these days and pre-seed usually being 1 to 2 million, our quarter million to $500,000 check, I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing a term sheet and only putting it in that amount, and because of our fund size, that’s really all we can put in for the first check. But we’re happy to, I’m happy to go to a company and say, “Look, we’re in. I’m happy to invest money on a note. We don’t price round, SAFE note, convertible note. We don’t have any strong preference there. As long as the terms make sense for us and we’re excited about the company, we’ll find a way to make it work.” We have very close relationships with a lot of other firms so… And I’m actually doing this right now. There’s a company that came out of YC that I like a lot. It’s very noisy. It was just sort of disruptive year for YC companies. They’ve pulled in about a 100K of commitments from angel so far, still talking to a bunch of funds, but I was like, “You know what, I want to put $250,000 into this company.” I emailed 10 funds today, and I was like, “Look, I will do this company if you are interested in lead, and I’m just looking for a friend or someone I would like to work with to help.” That’s how it works if there isn’t a round. Obviously, if there’s a round that’s already mostly come together and they’re looking for some other people to syndicate, it’s a very straightforward thing.
Scott: That’s really cool. Just for the audience, you’re actually providing like a lot of leadership and a lot of value for the company there because there’s a lot of people who will sit around and just hop into around when it’s already priced and when it’s moving and already done, but that’s great that you’re working on behalf of these companies and helping catalyze the round.
Prashant: I had a founder actually tell me what they call most of those fund. Again, I say this is because we do write small checks and we’re not writing term sheets, I think it’s easy for people to classify us this way too, which is why I make a big point of like, “No, I will commit to your round. I can do that.” But the founder told me they call, at YC, they call these barnacle fund. I was like… Then he was like, “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that.” I was like, “It’s okay. That’s actually, that’s really funny.” I wouldn’t call anyone that. I love all other VC firms, but it’s interesting about that is how one can be perceived, so I’m going to make a very-
Scott: I love it.
Prashant: … [crosstalk] I will commit. I don’t care who the lead is. I might care that you have enough money to operate. If you need $3 million, I’m going to work with you to make sure you actually get that money. If you need 3 million and I give you a quarter million, and we have a problem.
Scott: Yeah. It doesn’t get you anywhere. You said something really interesting before we turned the mics on, which is your decision making criteria or company picking criteria has really changed since you joined. Maybe can you walk us through that because I think that’s a super interesting question.
Prashant: Oh, my gosh. Yes. Has it [crosstalk]-
Scott: By the way, thank you for doing my job for me. You did my job. That was great.
Prashant: Happy to try. I try to make everyone’s life easier here. Trying to make Scott’s life easier, trying to make our portfolio companies lives easier, trying to make other firms… sending them great deals. All they have to do is write the term sheet.
Scott: That’s really nice. Yeah, that’s amazing.
Prashant: Okay, so when I was new, and I think most junior VCs start off this way, I was very analytical, of course. I was… Okay. I had literally a list of pieces of information I needed to collect during a meeting, like founder background, list of competitors, market size, TAM, unit economics, cost. I mean, it went on and on and on. Some of them are weird, like fire, what was the fire in the meeting because when you have no-
Scott: [crosstalk].
Prashant: I would diligently write all of these things down and trying to tease this information out of a conversation, and then I’d go back, and I’d look all this information, like, “I don’t know what to do with this,” because when you don’t have that much experience, specifically, as an investor, even if you have a lot of experience doing other things, but especially when you’re 23 and have no experience really doing much of anything, that’s all you have to go off of. You don’t know what else is out there, so you try to figure out if this is good or bad based on these 18 inputs, but you can’t. Now fast forward seven years, and I’ve just seen a lot of companies. I’ve met a lot of founders. Now I understand what all the other investors were saying back then that it’s about the people. It really is about the people, right. There are some founders that just stand out in terms of their understanding of the market, their understanding of how the game works, their understanding of recruiting. Recruiting should be harder than fundraising almost all the time. Fundraising can be difficult, and it’s something that takes practice, it takes experience often. Maybe not if you just made an app and it went viral or you made a software or self-serve tool and it went to 100,000 in revenue in two weeks. There are cases where maybe people are just going to throw money at you, but for the most part, there are people who, for whatever reason, just really stand out. I can’t explain that as well as I could’ve explained what I was doing in 2013. I can’t go through the list and say, “Well, these are the 18 factors,” but that’s the truth of it. That’s how people really decide.
Scott: You’ve seen a lot of the companies you’ve looked at over the years play out, so you have this… You’ve got the end-to-end knowledge base now. You know exactly what happened. You’ve run all these experiments. You know exactly what works. In addition to people who have great insight on the market or who are great recruiters, one thing I always look for is people, CEOs who are organized or founders who are organized. Actually, organization and prioritization can help you so much as a founder. It’s incredible because we see the whole spectrum at Kruze, and it’s like sometimes people… Part of our services is getting them organized, but even that, we can’t do that for you. As long as you’re working on the right things as a founder and continue to make progress, odds are, you’ll end up in a pretty good place. But it’s the folks who bounce around a little bit too much or fall don’t follow up or whatever it is, those companies tend to have a difficult time.
Prashant: Absolutely. I totally agree. It’s something that I don’t think I paid enough attention to, but it’s interesting. You pick up on little heuristics over time, things that you start to pattern-match, and that’s absolutely one of them. Organization is huge. Just people who are on top of things. I think being able to prioritize, being able to know what’s important. I think a lot of investors will say, and it’s true that in a pitch meeting, what I’m paying attention to is not as much what people are saying but how they’re saying it, what it signals about the way that they’re approaching the problem. When someone has a pitch deck with all the answers, I’m very skeptical because if it’s a new company, you shouldn’t have all the answers. You should have a lot of interesting hypotheses. Maybe you’ve thought some things through, but at the end of the day, you have to been, have been strategic and smart about picking a space where there are opportunities, you have to put together a good team, and then you need to be able to put together good hypotheses and execute quickly on them and figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Scott: Yeah. The last part, the figure out what works and what doesn’t is the critical part too because if not, like you said, if you have all the answers, you’re probably not right. It’s just not going to… They aren’t going to be the right answers. That’s really great. Talking about like all this criteria you use now, like your new criteria, is there like a founder or a company that jumps out at you that you, in your memory, you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, this person or this company was the quintessential kind of my new decision criteria.”
Prashant: You know what? There’s a company called Onfido. Onfido or Onfido. This may be my biggest critique of the company. When I asked them how to pronounce the name, they said, “Either way is fine.” What do you mean either way is fine? I think it’s okay for me to tease them about that, but-
Scott: [crosstalk].
Prashant: … Husayn, the founder of that company, is just… I just have infinite, truly infinite trust in his ability to… Everything he says he’s going to do, he does. He’s the… On that point of organization, he is the most organized. He has this system where he takes… When he has a to-do, he takes a post-it note, and he puts it on his laptop screen, literally on the screen blocking the-
Scott: Wow.
Prashant: … Screen, so he has to do it; otherwise, he can’t see his screen. If he gets too-
Scott: [crosstalk].
Prashant: … Backlogged on things he has to do, he literally won’t be able to do anything.
Scott: I need to start doing that.
Prashant: It’s brilliant.
Scott: That sounds like a great [crosstalk].
Prashant: I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else do it, but I was like, “This is how you become the most organized entrepreneur in the world.” He’s the one founder, literally the only one… And normally I would say it’s a bad signal. If someone says they’re 100% certain someone will be successful, like that’s crazy. No one’s 100% certain, but he’s the one founder who I’m just like, “I just, I know you’ll… I don’t have to worry about this company ever at all.”
Scott: That’s fantastic. How’d you guys meet? How did that intro happen?
Prashant: We met through this group called the Kairos Society that I was affiliated with. It’s a collegiate entrepreneurial group. It was started… I think I was a freshman in college, so it was 2008, and the founders were I think one year older than me. The individual who was the head of the organization was at Penn, and there were some USC and Harvard people as well who got together and created this across the country and eventually became a global organization pretty quickly. I think in the second year we had people from China coming in and pitching startups there, so that was a cool organization to be a part of. Someone from the UK had… Onfido is a company that is based in the UK as well, though now they’re bi-country I guess.
Scott: Fantastic. Well, the other kind of thing that was on both of our minds was just the fallout from COVID and what’s going to happen in the startup ecosystem and how people should deal with it. Maybe we should break this up into two things, which is let’s start with the companies that are maybe series A or series B or series C that are the companies that you’ve already invested in a couple of years ago and that are doing their thing or other companies you see about, and then we can get into advice for the people who are just about to start a company or at pre-seed, those kinds of super early stages. But I’m curious to think, what kind of advice are you getting to the As, Bs, and the Cs right now?
Prashant: I would actually break it up slightly differently. Pretty close, but I think the way that I was thinking about it was when does a company need to raise next? It could be a relatively earlier stage or relatively later stage companies. Raised next implies they’ve already raised at least one round, so for companies at ABC or even seed that were planning on raising in Q3 or Q4 of this year, my feedback to them, and I think is, this jives what other people have been telling them is you just need to do whatever you can to get more runway and buy some more time because the only thing that’s certain right now is uncertainty. There’s just a lot of chaos in the market. There’ve been the immediate effects of people switching to work from home, people having to look after their kids, just that shift in lifestyle, shift in working habits, but we haven’t even had the major hit of very high absolute numbers of infections in the United States yet. That’s still going to come. Venture capital firms will definitely stay in business, but it’s not business as usual. I think people were saying that last weekend, you two separate issues as well. You’ve got the virus, and you’ve got the markets and the overall economy, which are linked, but they are actually two different things. I’m telling folks, if you’re raising in Q3, Q4, buy yourself some more time. Assume rounds are going to be slower and they’re just going to be fewer of them done. The buyer might be higher. It’s also going to be a very difficult year to add revenue for most businesses, so we have to keep all of that in mind. For companies that were planning on raising almost immediately, I’ve actually told them to raise… We’ve already kind of started raising. For companies that we’re planning on raising in three, four weeks, we’re raising now. We started having meetings this week because we just need to get ahead of it however we can. To the companies that are getting started now and to the pre-seed and seed companies, here’s what I think will be different potentially. I think because of uncertainty, firms will cut back a little bit. I think the number of deals will drop. I think valuations might end up being lower than they would have a month ago. That’s just the reality of what happens in a downturn, but the money is there. There are so many employees, so many incredibly talented people who have had to be let go already, and that’s probably going to continue happening. There’s a lot of talent out there. In your first 12, 18, 24 months as a business when you are still in the product market fit discovery phase, you often don’t need to really actually sell very much to anybody. You’re focused on building your first product and getting it out there. To look at the silver lining, this is the perfect opportunity to do that, the next 12 to 18 months. I mean, let’s assume that an 18-month economic shutdown. I hope that’s not the case. It’s entirely possible. Let’s assume that. If everything just went on pause for the next 18 months and everyone’s working from home, what would you do? It could actually be a great time to start a company now. I hope that some of those folks who got laid off who just, not because of anything they did, but because just bad timing, I hope of them start companies and pitch me and have some great ideas, things they can work on for the next 12 to 18 months. When the market does come back and the economy does recover, they’ll be ready. They’ll have actually built something. It takes time to build things. We invest in companies that we don’t expect any revenue from all the time. Now is the perfect time to be working on one of those projects.
Scott: I agree with you 100%, and it’s actually really inspirational to hear you say that because there are going to be some amazing companies started out of this, out of the trauma here, and it is real trauma. A lot of companies are going down right now or they’re furloughing everyone or they’re going to be three months of cash. Yes, if you are someone who has a vision that you’ve always wanted to pursue and you have the tools and the talent to build it, it is a really good… This is the great thing about the pre-seed and the seed market is investors there are used to a lot of uncertainty. They’re used to giving you the money to build a product. They’re not used to looking at your revenue traction and deciding that… Like the series A or series B level, so you’re going to get some real shots on goal if you have a compelling vision. I think that’s really, really great advice. Then I think on the… You said something on like on the companies that are raising this year or maybe six months from now, the separation of the virus and the economic damage, I think that was a really great observation because right now the virus is front and center for everybody, but there’s real economic damage being done. I do think there’ll be a hangover for that because you’re right, how much disposable income will consumers have, how much disposable investment will small businesses or other types of businesses be able to actually put into new software systems or technologies? It may get really limited because they’re doing so much triage everywhere else. I think that was a really great observation of buy yourself some more time, push it in the 2021, and if you need to raise now, you should start raising now, like get going on that.
Prashant: Totally, and funds. My observation right now is that people a little slower on email. I’ve had almost no funds. Some have said that we’re just not investing now. That’s not the case for most. There’s at least one that has said, “Crisis is a great time to find the best opportunities. We are now investing more than we ever have.” Most are slowing down a little bit, but deals are happening. People are getting used to working from home. People are getting more comfortable with the idea of investing in companies and founders that they have not been able to meet in person, they’ve only met over zoom.
Scott: Yeah. Have you done that before? Have you ever invested in the companies that you haven’t met the founders in person?
Prashant: I have. I’ve invested in companies that I’ve only had a phone call with. I think that’s because the nature of… Those were usually cases where we were just kind of the last check into a round, and it was very heavily bedded company, and I had a lot of excitement about the space and knew the other folks around the table as well. Normally, it’s important to meet the company up. Of course, I met all these founders afterwards, but sometimes you have to make really quick decisions as a seed investor. I have. That was not-
Scott: [crosstalk]-
Prashant: This was not new for me, but it might be new for some of the folks who are writing larger checks, writing term sheets, going through a different type of diligence process or doing later stage rounds. Imagine, I mean, there’s some series Bs and Cs, 50, 100 million dollar rounds that might be getting done over Zoom.
Scott: That’s totally incredible thing, but we’re a remote company, so for me-
Prashant: You’re like, “This is normal.”
Scott: … Over the last year, this is… Yeah. That’s the thing. It’s totally normal for me, but it just takes some practice and some familiarity, and people will get used to it.
Prashant: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting. We’re investors in GitLab, which has always been a fully remote company, and a lot of people have been looking to them now. They’re like, “How do you do this?”
Scott: Oh. I’ve given that link out to their playbook like 20 times in the last two weeks. That is the greatest lead generation tool ever invented. For those who don’t know, GitLab has basically written out every procedure and every tip and the way the company actually runs remotely. Any new company that’s thinking about going remote can actually just read that… It’s very long too. It’s a big thorough playbook, and it’s an incredible resource they gave to the world.
Prashant: Yeah, and timely. I think a lot of people are going to spend less money on office space even when all of this is done and clear because they realize like, “Oh, video conferencing costs a lot less than an office in San Francisco or in New York,” and for certain business functions, it’s totally fine.
Scott: I totally agree. We used to have a 30-person office in San Francisco, like downtown San Francisco, and actually, that was one of the biggest money sucks and probably mistakes we’ve ever made. Then we went to WeWork and had been hiring remotely for a couple of years. It’s so much easier, and it’s so… People are so much happier because especially you’re able to attract the people with young families because those people really value their time. They really value being around their kids, and they’re not around their kids when they’re working, except for now in this crisis, but it just cuts like an hour or two hours out of their commute every day, and they really enjoy the flexibility. I feel like we’ve experienced the movie, and now the rest of the world is seeing the movie, and we’ll find out that’s actually a really great way to live and work, so I’m with you. I think WeWork will still do well if they don’t go bankrupt in this trauma from this whole downturn. But that type of coworking is here to stay. People will really like it.
Prashant: I think so. I think there’s an interesting evolution of it coming in the near term as well. I think the model might be less… The idea of we work was this idea of easy, scalable, flexible office space. That was the original vision. What we think of as an office might not be you go somewhere from 9:00 to 5:00, and then you go home. It might be, “What do we do when we do need to have an in-person meeting? What do we do when we do want to go work quietly somewhere that’s not home because our kids are running around and screaming, and we love them and that’s fine, but sometimes we need to get away from that to get things done?” I think the way that we think and the way that of what commercial real estate is, is it going to evolve what office space is, which is cool.
Scott: I like that a lot, and maybe you become more of a membership thing and you just drop in and drop out and don’t have… Yeah, I would be all for that. That sounds really, really attractive to me. Well, hey, you’ve done an amazing job. Thank you so much for coming by.
Prashant: Thank you.
Scott: It’s great meeting you. Tell everyone how they can reach out to you and how they can find you.
Prashant: Yeah, so the best way to get me is via email, ps@tuesday.vc.
Scott: Awesome.
Prashant: You can also follow me on Twitter or feel free to ping me on LinkedIn as well, Prashant Fonseka.
Scott: Before we leave, huge congratulations on your promotion to partner. That’s unbelievable. I know you worked really hard to get there. That’s a big deal. It’s hard to do.
Prashant: Thank you very much. I am humbled by it. Same job that I’ve had for a long time, now just bigger expectations, so I will do my best to live up to it.
Scott: Awesome. All right, man. Great meeting you. Thank you so much. I’ll talk to you soon.
Prashant: Thank you.
Singer: (singing) It’s Kruze Consulting, Founders and Friends with your host Scotty Orn.

Kruze Consulting is regularly reviewed as one of the preeminent providers of finance, accounting, tax and HR services to high-growth companies. For our offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica, New York and now Austin, TX, our experienced team serves venture and seed backed companies in diverse industries from SaaS to biotech to hardware to eCommerce.

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