Sal Daher - Lessons Learned

Speaker A: Hey, this is Sal Dacher. I'm delighted to found the Angel Invest Boston podcast in which I interview people who know a lot about building technology startups. I now have a substack about, uh, losing and keeping off 100 pounds of body weight in my 60s. It's called aging Fit and my goal is to build a community of people interested in keeping fit as they age. Look for Sal Dacher on substack. Daher, by the way, is spelled Delta, Alpha, Hotel Echo Romeo. Enjoy the podcast. Hi, this is Sal Daher, an angel investor in Boston who is curious to learn better ways to build startups. I've been an angel investor since the early 1990s. My angel investing really picked up in 2013. By now I have invested in more than 70 startups and am on the board of a life science startup. Also, for seven years I have interviewed angel investors, founders, academics, venture capitalists, lawyers and other professionals on this podcast with the purpose of learning from their experiences. In this episode, I tried to bring together some of the more salient lessons I have learned from the interviews and from my angel investing. You will hear these lessons in my own voice and in the voices of several of my guests. Prior to becoming an angel, I worked for decades trading and investing in the distressed debt of emerging market countries. Those happened to be great decades in which to be doing that, and it allowed me to benefit both as a trader and as an investor. Since most of my investable Capital was in IRAs, I ended up investing mostly via the IRAs. I have done another podcast titled Startups in the IRA which goes into the pros and cons. Mostly cons of using IRAs for startup investing. Just Google, Sal Daher and Startups in the ira. If you want to find the episode page Lesson one Company Specific Risk the Bad and the Good why It Matters in Startup Investing in stock markets, traders and investors are leery of company specific risk, also known as idiosyncratic risk. You need to have a very good reason to be exposed to an individual stock beyond its participation in the broad indices you see, the probability of positive company specific surprises is usually much lower than than that of negative surprises. When good things happen to companies, they usually happen over months and years, allowing the market time to incorporate these positive developments into the price of the stock. However, events such as accidents, lawsuits and expropriations can cause sudden loss in the value of the stock. Thus, idiosyncratic risk is seriously tilted to the downside. Private assets such as startups, however, are more likely to experience upside surprise than traded assets. Since the value of their shares are not exposed to price discovery by an active market, a startup can be killing it, and few people beyond the investors may be aware of that success. It's not to say that startups are not risky, they are very risky. It's just to observe that they offer a different risk profile, which can be an excellent complement to an investor's traded portfolio. However, in order to benefit from this feature of startup investing, one needs to put in a lot of effort and to exercise a lot of discipline. Lesson 2A. You know nothing Jon Snow the need for tight risk control Startups are as ineffable and as alluring as a grit of Game of Thrones fame. We need to be very humble about what we think we know of a startup's prospects, and we have to resist the temptation to be carried away by the romance of investing in startups. I have learned I cannot pick winners. There were some companies I felt had such a compelling team and product that they were slam dunks. I invested more in them and put them in my Roth IRA post tax money. Almost every single one of them failed. My successes came completely from left field and mostly ended up in my pre tax ira.

Speaker B: Argh.

Speaker A: Uh, this emphasized to me that I cannot pick winners. The best I can do is to eliminate losers and to hope for the best. Speaking of the best, the best way to eliminate losers is to work with more experienced angels and to invest slowly and small at first. Veteran founder, angel and advisor Ben Littauer

Speaker C: says, I've been doing this, as I said, since 2008. I started off knowing nothing about investment. That's why I joined, um, Boston Harbor Angels and then Walnut, because there's no better way to learn the ropes than to work with people who have been doing this for a long time. And I did this full time, so I'm pretty committed to it. I jumped right in and I'm certainly perfectly happy to have lost some money early on through some, um, tyro mistakes. So, uh, one of the mistakes that most angels do is they spend too much too early, uh, and discover that that won't let them build a big portfolio. So I've been steadily decreasing the amounts of my investment still, um, hoping to find that 100x return in one of them that will cover the portfolio.

Speaker A: Lesson 2b. You know nothing Jon Snow whence a real 400x return? Speaking of Ben Littauer's hoped for 100x, here's a story of a real investment that paid off 400x and significantly affected the return of the entire portfolio over decades of investing. Howard Stevenson was a pioneer of the study of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School. Professor Stevenson's glorious career blended doing business and studying business. He consulted to businesses. He helped found one of the top hedge funds, the Baupost Group. He did research on entrepreneurship. He was a very astute angel investor. Here's Howard Stevenson talking about his best angel investment.

Speaker D: I mean, the best investment I ever made was in a company that had a really stupid business plan. But the people were fantastic.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker D: And they were in an industry that I thought was very interesting. I thought what they were doing in that industry that made no sense. And over a couple years they morphed and that's probably returned 400 to 1.

Speaker A: Oh, the 400 to 1 return that

Speaker E: everybody's looking for to pay for the rest of the portfolio.

Speaker D: Yes.

Speaker E: Which company was that?

Speaker D: It's a company called Asyrian.

Speaker A: Asyrian.

Speaker D: And they're very quiet, still invested. Yes. Um, and they're doing very well. One of my friends who was a noted venture capitalist turned them down because the business plan was too stupid. And that's been one of the worst decisions he ever made. Whereas one of the other venture capitalists that put a little money in said it's the best decision he made in his life.

Speaker E: I know those kinds of investments are very few and far between and when

Speaker A: you turn one of those down, it's hard to live it down.

Speaker D: Well, you have to live life forward. You can't live with regrets.

Speaker A: Later on in the conversation, Howard Stevenson related how significant his investment in Assurion was to the performance of his entire portfolio. By the way, the stupid business of Asurion is that of insuring cell phones and other high value devices. Being an academic, professor, Stevenson kept close track of the return on his angel investing portfolio. He talked about his investing in the 25 years since he sold down his position in Baupost, the company that managed the hedge fund for personal reasons. Here's a short clip of Howard Stevenson describing how important Asurion was was to his portfolio.

Speaker D: Now you ask how we've done. Um, we've been doing it for about 25 years since I sold down some of my position at Bow Post and left accident management. I was the president for the first eight years and we probably return 17 or 18%, probably 12% without the real big winner.

Speaker A: The real big winner is the business of ensuring my iPhone against the risk. I drop it on the hard tile of the bathroom floor. You know nothing, John Snow. Go figure. You can find the full Interview of Howard Stevenson by searching Howard Stevenson Angel Invest Boston Podcast Lesson three A what to look for in a startup what to look for in a founding team My first podcast was an interview with renowned founder and investor Michael Mark, the person most responsible for getting me into angel investing. I'm grateful to Michael for all his patient mentoring and I've learned tons from him. He has compelling answers to these questions. Here's a clip from that interview with all this experience.

Speaker E: Michael, what do you look for in a startup?

Speaker B: Well, I look for an interesting market. People have to be operating in a market where it's possible to build a significant size company and I look for a great team. To me, the founders are more important than any other aspect. I mean I've, I've invested in companies that had marvelous sounding business plans and it didn't work out because uh, it wasn't a first class team. They didn't execute well. And I've invested in multiple companies that didn't have that great a business plan but had unbelievable managers and became successful. So an airtight business plan is not on my list. Uh, I'd go further and say there are almost no successful companies I've invested in where the money that was made was made on the business plan that was shown to me on day one.

Speaker E: So when they show you a business plan, you expect to make money from something else they're going to come up with. So you better have a team that can come up with something that really can work.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker E: And not the thing that's impressive.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker E: Awesome. So what is it that you look for in a founding team?

Speaker B: They have to be intelligent.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Because nobody's going to set out a, ah, set of rules for them. And you follow these rules, they're going to have to take a tremendous amount of information in and figure out what the rules are. They have to be passionate, they have to be tenacious. I mean, there are hundreds of times an entrepreneur is going to say, oh, this is yeah, what a horrible day. You know, I got too many doors slammed on me. I mean there are too many chances, opportunities. You have to quit and you can't be somebody who quits. And I can point to all of the successful entrepreneurs I've invested in and none of them quit under circumstances that would have made almost any normal person want to quit. They need to be open because they should be dialoguing with their directors or with their investors and using the accumulated knowledge that those people have gotten over the years. And that dialogue won't work unless they're open and they talk about their problems as well as their successes. And I have to like them. I have to like them. You know, I, I'm going to be spending a lot of time over the next, you know, five or six years with this person, and if I don't like them today, I'm going to like them less.

Speaker A: Less in the future. Yeah, uh, uh, listeners who are curious to hear Michael's full interview can just search for Michael Mark and Angel Invest Boston and you'll find the episode page. There's only one place where you're going to find a podcast with Michael. Michael Mark's answer about the founding team brings us to what is the most highly supported result from the study of entrepreneurship? More founders, better. Here is professor ed Roberts of MIT's Sloan School on this topic.

Speaker E: Now, Professor Ed Roberts, what do you consider to be the most important result from your scholarship of entrepreneurship? What's the result that you think is the most significant?

Speaker F: Well, most significant in this case I will interpret as being. What is that that I really try most hard to communicate to my students? Uh, I run the entrepreneurship and innovation track in the MBA program. So it's the largest track in the school, and it consists of people who think that they're dedicated to starting companies. And what I most want them to understand is that if they grew up believing with this American myth of Horatio Alger, which is that individuals are heroes and individual heroes accomplish everything, they have a lot to learn. Relative to starting companies, our data are very clear. The failure rate of those who start companies alone is the highest by far among all of the companies we study. It is not the individual alone that matters. It is the individual as part of a team, along with other individuals who bring hopefully, complementary skills, attitudes and the like, while bringing, again, hopefully, comparable values together. So our data say as you go from one founder to two, you significantly improve the likelihood that you will succeed rather than fail. As you go from 2 to 3, it improves again. As you go from 3 to 4, it improves again. Now, at those levels, 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, my statement is a statistically significant statement. The data are, uh, clear and well defined. If you go to 5, the trend is still the same, more likelihood of success. But now, unfortunately, there's not enough five founder companies in our sample for me to say it's a statistically significant finding. I believe it, but I can't prove it to my level of satisfaction. Do I really believe more is always the merrier? No, I do not. I believe that if you get beyond something like Four or five, you're going from team to chaos. And it's going to be a very difficult thing to manage a very large group of individuals. Now, why a team? First is just the addition of the assets of those people. More skills, more money, more experience, more capabilities. Second is the increased likelihood of complementarity. What I know is different from what you know. And adding you and I together is not just one and one. It is something that may have some meaningful significance. Three, by bringing multiple people together, I'm bringing multiple sources of interpersonal strength and comfort together. It's a terribly difficult thing to start and build a company. You try to do it alone. Where's your backup for you, never mind for the company. Who are you going to weep on when you're in pain and suffering? It's great if you have a supportive spouse or partner, that's wonderful. But it would also be nice if you had a supportive partner who was a partner in the business where you could sit and talk together, coach each other, help each other, comfort each other and the like. And the more is merrier. At least up to a small number of people who could together be a much stronger group of people providing reinforcement to each other. So the data are clear now, two different additions. Number one, the team is more successful if the team is co mingling people with a technical background than people with a management background. So that combination of skills turns out

Speaker E: to, uh, make a lot of sense.

Speaker F: Statistically significant. And now one final thing. If of the management background someone has background in sales or marketing, it's still better. So I can, at each of those points I can say, okay, more people up to a given level is better. More people who come from different sets of skills base technical and management is better. More people that include some degree of experience in sales and marketing is better. Every one of those three dimensions of teaming is statistically meaningful and I think critical in the founding and building of a company.

Speaker E: So if I can paraphrase Dr. Roberts prescription for a successful startup team, at least three or four people from different disciplines, with different backgrounds, knowledge and people with different personalities that are complementary somehow.

Speaker F: Well, personality differences then have to really be managed. So what I would say that's very important is same values, you got to believe in the same kinds of things because if your values are in conflict with each other, you are going to encounter situations with the value. Conflict can't be resolved readily.

Speaker E: People can't get along because of it.

Speaker F: So they really believe in different things and they don't share the same goals.

Speaker E: So if I can try restating it. A team.

Speaker A: 1.

Speaker E: Lonely. 2. Better. 3. Even better.

Speaker A: 4. Tremendous.

Speaker E: Then a mix of backgrounds, technical founders, people with sales background, people with marketing background, uh, and so forth, and shared values.

Speaker F: Right now I challenge your use of the word prescription because if a doctor gives me a prescription, I believe it's going to cure my problem. And I would say, okay, that's a prescription that is going to help but not cure.

Speaker E: So this is a recipe for a successful dish.

Speaker F: It's a piece of a recipe because then you got to do everything else right? So then, you know, you need to have a good idea. By the way, we encourage our students to believe that ideas are a dime a dozen. We try to get our students to be open with each other about the ideas that many of them believe need to be hidden in secrecy. Uh, by the way, coming from different countries, uh, they especially have a secrecy notion about ideas as something that is

Speaker A: terribly important, has to be preserved.

Speaker E: And you don't agree with that, you

Speaker A: think it's wrong, talk about it.

Speaker F: It's not agreeing with it. It's wrong, it's wrong, it's incorrect.

Speaker A: So what, you have data to show that?

Speaker F: We got infinite experiential data. The experience is that in the classroom, where I've got 120 students in my class, when we do cold calling and they've got one minute to throw out an idea, the outcome is that they get all kinds of feedback from their classmates. Somebody else bumps into the corridor and says, you know, I had a similar to you, we ought to sit down and chat about that. Or somebody says, you know, the thing you said, I know a guy who's working on a company in that area. Or somebody says, you know, I tried to do the same thing. You're talking about it. Really it's a problem because here's what I ran into. So suddenly it turns out that the sharing community is much more powerful than the single secrecy community. And they begin to realize when we put them to exercises of generating ideas, which we do. So we put them through brainstorming exercises. We put them through simple exercise. Eric von Hippel, my esteemed, uh, colleague, shows very large fractions of startups come from user innovation. Namely, you yourself owned the problem and therefore you started a company to solve a problem you, you owned.

Speaker A: You can listen or read the complete interview with Professor Ed Roberts just Google. Ed Roberts angel invest Boston lesson 4b. The, uh, Google Problem why founders should be open about their ideas. This brief video with the founders of video marketing platform Wistia makes The same point Ed Roberts made. But they flesh it out with how they approach the maturation of an idea at their company. Brendan Schwartz and Chris Savage pack a lot of wisdom.

Speaker E: Ah.

Speaker A: And they're really compelling in these two minutes.

Speaker E: Founders are always afraid that somebody's going to steal their idea, so they hunker down, don't talk about it. What do you guys think about that?

Speaker G: We've made the mistake of, um, not sharing our ideas openly or being worried sometimes that when we, ah, we just need to get something to be perfect, uh, before it goes out into the world. But that's always the wrong thing to do.

Speaker H: Uh, this idea is not that good. You should be so lucky that Google will copy you.

Speaker E: Yes, yes.

Speaker G: Most like you need to be embarrassed by what you're putting out. Like you need to put out something that you know that it's missing stuff and you know there's other things you want to do it and you're afraid that people are going to ask you those questions, um, or ask, ask for things that you want to make that you don't have in there. But if that core thing you have isn't actually valuable enough, then there's no point in doing it anyway. So you got to learn as fast as you can. The only way to do that is to put those unfinished things out there.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker H: And you can learn a lot by talking to people about your idea before you even have made anything, I think, and getting that feedback. Which is why it's insane to me that people, when you're precious about the idea, um, instead of actually talking to people, and you can build an audience and you can learn how people will react to it before doing anything. M. And guess what? Once you build that thing, you're going to need people to use it. So if you were talking to people

Speaker E: and you got them excited, you're ahead of the curve.

Speaker F: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker E: You're protective of your idea, you're afraid to expose it, and also you're secondarily afraid it's going to. Maybe it's even an excuse, say Google's going to copy it and so on. And you should resist both of those things. And you should be being embarrassed.

Speaker A: Uh, so called the Savage test.

Speaker E: You have to be.

Speaker G: If you're not embarrassed.

Speaker E: If you're not embarrassed, you're not doing it.

Speaker A: Right. I interviewed Chuck Easley, who teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford and did his PhD with Ed Roberts at MIT Sloan. Chuck confirmed the finding about team size. In this brief passage of our interview

Speaker E: earlier on, you talked about the work that you're doing on teams.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker E: I know that Ed Roberts, during his interview, one of the many things that he pointed out was that more founders increases the chances of success. The more founders. There are up to 4 statistically significant data that success increases, likelihood of success increases. If you have additional founders with complementary skills, you're bringing in people with complementary skills. Like they said, they have an engineering team and they bring in somebody with marketing expertise as a founder. And so would you kind of talk a little bit about your work that you've done on founding teams?

Speaker I: Well, just one important note on the founding team size. This is one of the most robust effects and one of the stronger effects actually is that larger teams tend to do better and in general people tend to have slightly too small of a team. So we found that not only among MIT alumni, we replicate that same finding among Stanford alumni and even the international data sets that I've collected in China of the Tsinghua University alumni. Almost any entrepreneurship database out there, you see the same effect that larger teams tend to do better. So then the question becomes what other characteristics of the team are important?

Speaker A: A conversation that added nuance to these findings ensued. You can find the complete interview here. It's really well worth listening. Uh, Chuck Easley is a very, very compelling speaker. Very different from Ed Roberts in style and so forth. His last name is spelled E E S L E Y Chuck Easley. And look under Angel Invest Boston and you'll find a guy who's very interesting, very interesting. Lesson 5 a Focus, focus, focus. Another lesson that I picked up is the need for focus in startups. Founders frequently try to do too much and have many legitimate reasons for that. But they need to realize that radical focus is essential. Here are, uh, two passages that make that point. First, we hear from Gene Hammond, founder, angel and co founder of the leading edtech accelerator Learn Launch.

Speaker E: Is there some bit of advice that you find yourself giving to people all the time that you wish you could just put a little blue card and you hand out the founders?

Speaker J: Well, focus, focus, focus. Um, you know, if you're trying to do too many things, none of them will get done. And in fact, my lead investor in Quarry said that to me. I said, and the third thing we're going to do. And he said, what? I've been around startups a long time, Gene, and I know there's the first and I know there's the second thing, but I'm not sure that I've ever heard of a third thing.

Speaker E: No matter what it is, there's no

Speaker A: Third thing, Jean Hammond's full interview is available and well worth listening. She is really wise and very engaging. You can search for Jean Hammond, J E A N Hammond, H A M M M M O N D and angel invest, Boston. Lesson 5B. Focus, focus, focus. Here are, uh, Michael Mark's thoughts on how hard it is to focus.

Speaker B: If you're interested in knowing what we did. Yeah, we actually had two businesses, which I would tell any startup today don't do two business.

Speaker E: I've heard you tell them. Yeah, I'd like to come back to these narratives of startups, which are really interesting. But I want to go back a little bit to what you said about not trying to run two businesses, because I've heard you many times ask questions in this direction when we're doing diligence with startups and saying, which business are you guys in? Are you in this business, in that business? Can you expand a little bit on this, on this importance of focus on that? How did you feel it when you were juggling two businesses?

Speaker B: Well, we, like all the other startups that I run into, we had rationales for why we had to do two businesses. And in our case it was we had to build the clinical laboratory systems around the IBM 1130 because IBM was going to sell it for us. But the IBM 1130 was the wrong computer to use. It didn't have the resources we needed. So we had to add equipment to the IBM 1130. At the same time we were automating clinical laboratories. So we had a rationale. The problem is that it's very hard to be successful in a company and it's doubly hard to be successful at two companies. And when you have two companies that are interdependent on one another, they both have to be successful. For you to be successful, you're truly asking for trouble. So find a way at the very beginning to avoid that situation.

Speaker A: Lesson 6 Take the money and run. In 2015, I led the angel round into Squeeze BioTech. It's spelled sqz, but it's pronounced squeaze. An MIT spinoff co founded by the remarkably talented Armon Sharai, PhD. Armon not only could do the science and engineering, he was able to explain it to laypeople intelligibly. In addition, he was an affable person. Is a really affable person. I invested 50,000 in Squeeze, uh, like twice what I normally invest. Part of the appeal of Squeeze, in addition to the stellar founder, is that there was demand from scientists across the country curious to try Squeeze's technology for re engineering cells in a new way. There was the promise of being able to get new types of cargo, quote unquote into the cells and the possibility of doing it at scale. Squeeze set up a program to sell kits with their devices to labs. Armon had brought in a classmate and friend, Agustin Lopez Marquez, as president of the company. Agustin uh had worked in industry and had experience in commercialization, so he led the sales effort. Within months, Agostin uh and Armand realized that selling Squeeze's tech as a research tool was not a viable business. The cost of customer acquisition was high because it took a lot of effort to onboard the Squeeze technology at a new lab. On the other hand, the lifetime value of each sale was too small to compensate for the high cost of acquisition. It became obvious that a pivot was needed. Augustin um left for another life science company and Armond um stayed to pursue the next step at Squeeze. He went through MassChallenge, the startup accelerator. There he connected with an experienced life science executive who helped develop a new business model for Squeeze. The new direction was to seek collaboration with strategic partners interested in Squeeze's technology. In this new incarnation, Squeeze was able to raise venture money and eventually signed a significant collaboration with a major pharmaceutical company. This collaboration and others allowed the company to develop its technology and eventually to go public via an IPO in October of 2020. My $50,000 investment was was worth more than $500,000. Eventually I thought about selling down my position but never got around to doing it. Unfortunately, the stock market turned against biotech companies in Squeeze's stage of development and my stake became worthless. I now realize that I had beaten big odds in having an angel investment go public. I should have taken the money and run. By the way, I still think very highly of Armand Shari and Agustin Lopez Marquez. They are both involved in founding new companies. Were I doing angel investing right now I'm um, on the sidelines for personal reasons. I would be looking closely at their startups based on their demonstrated abilities and my experience with them. If you Google Armon and Angel Invest Boston, you will find my interview with Armand Charay. If you Google Agustin and Angel Invest Boston, you'll get my interview with Agustin Lopez Marquez about his startup. Lesson 7 It's a long way from the lab to the clinic. Life scientists work in the frontiers of knowledge. On the other hand, medical interventions have to clear high bars of safety and usefulness. This makes the distance from discovery to cure unimaginably great. For a scientific discovery to be used in medicine, it has to travel a very long distance. First the discovery has to be confirmed in multiple studies. Then safety has to be determined by testing in animals and humans. Then there are dosage studies, then tests for efficacy, I.e. does it work? Then there is an application for regulatory approval by the fda. Then there are production facilities to be set up. Concurrently, reimbursement from payers such as Medicare and health insurance plans have to be approved. With so many potential points of failure, it's a wonder new treatments come to market at all. In his interview on Angel Invest, Boston, respected life science investor Jeff Arnold provides us with an understanding of one of the causes of this distance. As he explains, technologies that work in the lab do not necessarily translate to the real world. Jeff Arnold observes that incentives differ greatly from business to the academy. In business, the goal is to fail fast so that you can find the ultimate solution. In academia, the goal is to discover new things. Thus reliability of the technology is not such a big issue. This is very true and very important. So whenever you're investing in a scientific technology, you just have to keep at the back of your mind that scientists really, really have a hard time understanding something that can translate into the real world. They often underestimate the hurdles in their way. And this is you have to spend a lot of time on this aspect of it. Anyway, I hope these lessons have been useful to you. At this point, I'd like to let everyone know that I'm ending the podcast with this episode. One of the reasons I started the podcast in early 2017 was to become better known among investors as I sought to raise a fund. I have now suspended the effort to raise a fund, so it does not make sense to continue the podcast beyond the 7th Year. The decision to suspend the raise came from a question posed to me by my friend and mentor Michael Mark. He asks how I would handle the life science assets, which tend to have long holds likely to still be in the fund in 10 years. My breezy response at the moment was that, uh, I would hire capable managers who would take over the running of the fund eventually. However, when I thought more about it, I realized that I would not be able to step aside, leaving others to take care of my investment decisions. The prospect of still having such responsibilities ten years from now was not inviting. That's when I decided to call it quits on the fund. As I explained in my startups in the IRA podcast, I am suspending investing from the IRAs where I have most of my investable funds. The limited funds I have outside the IRA will be dedicated to a personal project. When the project is finished, I may start investing as an angel again with such funds outside the IRA as become available. Outreach via the podcast was successful in that it connected me with many great people who have backed some of my uh, startups. The listeners to this podcast are, ah, an impressive group. Every time I meet one of them in person I think to myself, wow, this accomplished person spends her or his time listening to my meanderings and it prompts me to uh, up my game. It is also rewarding to know that several startups have been inspired in part by this podcast. I have found the experience gratifying. Unfortunately, podcasts with good sound and graphics are expensive to produce and take a lot of time. In the new year I'll be publishing a newsletter over on substack.com. startups will make occasional appearances, but the focus would be on staying fit as we age. If you are interested, look for Sal Daher on aging fit@substack.com While no new episodes will be launched, all seven seasons of the podcast are available on Apple Podcasts and other places and will remain available. On angel that's Boss Live you can find episode pages for 250 episodes, most of which have complete annotated transcripts. I hope you will dig into the archive for lessons that might be helpful to you. On the episode page it's possible to search for topics. If you are looking for a particular interview, it is better for you to google the name of the guest. Together with Angel Invest Boston this is Angel Invest Boston. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Sal Daher.

Speaker E: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Kathryn Woodman Maynard.

Speaker A: Our host is coached by Grace Daher.

Speaker B: It.