ramzi rizk / wip capital

Fabri Cara: There's a few core things that I truly believe in. We cannot think linearly in an exponential world anymore. We are living in the best timeline, even though we tend to forget about any measurable standard really, right? Less hunger, people live longer, they live healthier, literacy rates, poverty rates dropping.

I think optimism in this case is not being a denial. Optimism is recognizing that there is progress that has happened and there's progress that will happen. And for me, I technology will solve. every single problem that we're facing today.

I believe we're heading to reality with infinite energy and anything I can do to get us in that direction or to think about what the world needs when we get there. These are the things that form my thesis. Season four, episode five. Today we're talking to Ramsey, founder of Working Progress Capital.

Sunwoo, can you tell us a little bit about your conversation with this European guy? So crossing the pond for once. Yeah. Based in Berlin, Ramzi is someone who definitely trusts his gut.

Every major decision in his life, leaving Lebanon to go to Berlin, dropping his PhD to found a company after a single whiteboarding session, and then now starting his funds. They were all kind of felt. Let's get into it. Ramzi, welcome to the SlicePod.

I've been looking forward to this conversation ever since we met. You're building Work in Progress Capital, a 10 million euro fund backing engineers and scientists creating the future we want to live in. But what I want to understand today is how you actually got there, not the resume version, not the pitch deck version, but the real story behind you and how you got here. So let's start at the beginning.

I know you grew up in Lebanon and left on your 21st birthday to move to Germany, but what were you running from or what were you running towards? Starting heavy. I never felt like I belonged growing up there for a variety of reasons. It's a beautiful country, lovely, generous people.

I've always been drawn towards curiosity. I've always been drawn by people that are constantly trying to learn. They're constantly questioning the orthodoxy. They're trying to develop themselves.

And I felt throttled there. I'm more interested in reading a book than in knowing about sports cars, right? I'm more interested. and having a deep conversation where we have essentially a migraine at the end of a two hour chat because we're just opening up windows of possibilities instead of necessarily partying or whatnot.

In many ways, I think the reason I wanted to leave was because I assumed and I felt like I would find my tribe. I never found my tribe there and I felt like I would find it elsewhere. I was drawn to Europe both because of the culture and the proximity and really on a personal level kind of. To do my master's in Germany was a cheaper alternative to going to the U.

S., taking on a bunch of student loans. And that was the reason I left. And then when I got here, I realized that I found home, right?

I've been here for 20 years or so. This is where I go back to feel safe. This is where I'm inspired the most. This is where I'm proud of a lot of people that live here and what they do and our society and our system.

know you ended up studying computer science and then you were studying your PhD in privacy and social media, but you dropped out. start your first company, why did you drop out? What was the idea that you couldn't let go of and kind of build or tinker with while you were studying that you felt like you had to walk away? Relatively quickly disillusioned with academia in general, became very clear to me that even though we put it on a pedestal and think of it as this sort of higher calling, in many ways it was a business, right?

It was the professors trying to raise money to finance their institutes and was budgets. And there was this orthodoxy. think one of my biggest challenges on the research side Because I joined initially to work on information systems and focus on sensor networks and value chains and automation. Realized that that was insanely boring and decided as I can to always be drawn to the intersection of things.

I was given this one seminar to teach on web 2.0 back then, and that kind of dates me. Started getting really, really interested in what the second order and the third order effects of the prevalence of social networking and of people going online. And what the cultural differences and generational differences were, right?

There's a major difference between say a boomer going on their first social media or social network, consuming fake news. These were the things I was really interested in. I realized that most of the research, I think there was a researcher out of the US called Dana Boyd that was doing really exciting work on the topic of privacy. Generally, there wasn't much research happening.

In many cases, they were focusing on technology, right? They trying to figure out how can we build privacy preservation mechanisms. And I realized very, very quickly, I went down a rabbit hole of licenses and signing up to play a game on Facebook, what sort of data essentially proliferated through that. And I realized that the solution was not, could not be technological, right?

The solution was definitely not economical because the model is built on advertising, on eyeballs, on attention. I started to think of the definition of privacy and to redefine privacy because Why are we stuck with a definition that was 150 years old and which was coined for a total different reason. So I started thinking, okay, so what would privacy look like in this world? The privacy used to be called the right to be glad long, which seems impossible, right?

You cannot be part of today's society and still have any expectation of privacy. So I went from that in my thought process to privacy was about control, realize there is no control anymore. Something's out there, it's out there forever. And I landed on privacy is about knowledge, right?

So privacy is my definition at least is about knowing what data is out there and who has access to it or who is using it. And that gives me a little bit of power and control back. During the PhD itself, I was writing these papers and I'm looking at Heidegger and Habermas philosophers that talk about the public sphere and the private sphere. I'm looking at urban sociology.

I'm looking at economic incentives and I'm starting to draft these papers and coming up with these ideas and then. A lot of the feedback I would get from fellow researchers was, well, where's the quantitative proof? Did you make surveys? And I was like, who should I survey?

Should I ask people, do you like your privacy? It felt to me that they were kind of pigeonholing and trying to force a very rigid way of thinking about the world into something where it didn't fit. So that's where I started to get a little bit disillusioned. I started working outside universities.

I was teaching and researching and writing my papers. But I joined a little startup for a bit and I joined another company where I was playing around with building mobile apps and location based apps. And at some point I realized that I was dragging my feet, right? I had the papers.

I could have literally taken two, three to just put everything together and defend my thesis. And I took a sabbatical from work and on the first weekend of my sabbatical, I got together with my co-founders, ended up founding a company, doing it together, building it together for 11 years. And essentially dropped out of my PhD. There was a gut feeling as well.

think it's my own little machine learning model that is not entirely explainable, but I trust it. So I decided might as well make it simpler and just drop out and focus on building a company instead. That was like a photography platform. How did you end up meeting your co-founders?

How did you know it was the right crew and what role did you end up playing there? I'm going to have to say gut feeling again. I knew one of them because we'd worked briefly together and we ended up becoming friends and He was like, need to just do this other friend of ours. We get together this one night at my place.

Everyone leaves. They stay. We end up white boarding until like six in the morning. And the next day I was like, okay, we're doing this, right?

It wasn't clear that this was going to be an 11 year journey. This wasn't clear that it was going to be a startup in that sense. And you got to think this is 2010 Berlin, right? Where most of my friends didn't even know what a startup was.

Like the idea of, wait, you have a business, but you don't make any money and you're, you're just working all the time and you don't have vacations. It was quite absurd. I was one of the very first people on Flickr, like really early days. I've always been a photographer, probably my biggest hobby.

On the one hand, I've always looked back at those times and thought of how beautiful like an authentic genuine community was. And romanticize the notion of building products and building community products. The opportunity came along to start a company that was doing photography, artistic stuff and community and like this. Mixing all of the creative passions that I have with this privacy concept of maybe we can build a social network that isn't based purely on monetizing user data and prioritizing for attention and engagement.

So around 25 million photographers, mostly mobile photographers, pretty much any photographer that wanted to really work on the art of photography. started with mobile photography exhibitions in Berlin and New York, and then turned into a community website and an app. And this is 2010, Shortly before Instagram even, the community turned very, very vibrant. We started thinking about how to best monetize and realized the way we can do it in alignment with our photographers was to earn money together with them.

So we started looking at, we license the content? Can we help them earn? Which then led into a big challenge of automation, getting hundreds of thousands of photos uploaded every day. There was no way we can review them manually.

So we got into computer vision. We acquired a small company, started building an R &D team and became really best in class in image classification. Pioneered something called computational aesthetics, where we essentially, we're not just tagging photos, but understanding whether they were beautiful or not, whether the commercial be viable or not, whether they were on brand or not. BCG ran on IM.

So every single consultant for any slide they wanted to use, they would have to search through our database and they would get content sorted by their brand identity, which we developed together with their creative team. Fast forward a little bit, obviously, when you go on a 10 year journey and it's not a clear upwards trajectory, it's not clear exponential growth, that on the one hand, you end up effectively having a very complicated cap table, raising a lot of money, different rounds, different bridge rounds, different extensions of, I think in the end we were like series D to A or something like that, which tells you everything you need to know.

And at some point around 2020 with COVID hit and my co-founders leaving, and there was this whole question of where do we go with this? We had already at that point spun out the AI team into a separate company called Morris Labs. They just got acquired last year and we'd spun out the artistic side of the business. the exhibitions, the magazines and so on, we started exploring a path to hand the company softly.

Right. It was very clear. This was never going to become a multi-billion dollar opportunity, but also for me personally, it was not going to be something that I would just bail on. Right.

So. We reached an agreement, we started a dual process, founded a choir who was looking to SPAC into a bunch of companies together and went public together with them on the Swiss stock exchange in spring 2021. I left literally two weeks after the acquisitions. That was part of the agreement as well.

The SPAC, as you can imagine, it was right at the tail end of that hype market and it was a bit of a downward spiral from there onwards. But for me, I've done my job. I sailed safety into harbor and was able to move on with a bit less of a guilty conscience. Yeah.

Because you started angel investing in 2020, right? Do you remember your very first angel check? It was a consultant who was a technical guy and was building a tool to create PowerPoint via AI. The company didn't really manage to go far.

Early days, weird climate. At some point he shut it down and paid back essentially investors. I did a company called Bloom out of the US, which was trying to create computer vision powered image generation for product, something like that. They've also iterated a little bit and I invested in Pitch out of Berlin, which was like building a competitor to PowerPoint.

It was 150K I made on a secondary transaction a year and half before that, that I decided I want to allocate to investing and learning about this whole thing. So you were kind of thinking about. Seeing yourself as an investor in this next chapter of yours, did you ever think that it was going to turn into a fund or were you just angel investing because that seemed like the next thing to do? I wasn't thinking about that.

At that point, I was rather thinking on the one hand, investing the money and actually making it work for me. And on the other, I get excited about things and then I want to be part of them. And this felt like the... smoothest way for me to be part of a lot of really exciting opportunities in companies, entrepreneurs, without necessarily having to fund a company every single time.

So that was, I think that was the initial impetus. And then at some point I also realized, which probably is what led to me then, or one of the things that led to me deciding to become a VC full-time. I realized that a lot of the founders that I like tend to speak a different language and tend to be Dramatically misunderstood, particularly in Europe, because there's, let's say in most cases, there's a bit of a generic persona of what a VC is here. And people are measured on certain standards whereby I think the US is a bit different, right?

And so I felt like I could be that person to them and I could find these founders that just did not fit the mold of what is expected of a founder, which in many cases meant that they were outliers. They were possible. So that was a little bit the journey as an angel until a couple of years ago where there's this noise, right? It just keeps getting louder and louder.

And I just had no choice but to make this jump because everything else I thought of doing felt rational, but not necessarily exciting. And this just felt right. Yeah, I like that. There's no other choice than for you to do this.

But what was the moment for you where you realized like you can take on external capital to do this full-time as a solo GP? Like obviously investing your own money is one thing as an angel, but running a fund is very different, complex LP relationships, portfolio construction. Sometime in I think Q424 was when I was like, this has to be the next step for me, which The next kind of logical step was if I want to do this, then I need to be able to do this full-time, right? I don't want to be doing this as an angel, particularly if on the other side, there's my worldview of where we're headed and how I want to shape that future that we want to be part of.

That meant I needed to buy the time and the space to form these teasies, to evolve them and not just sit around waiting for someone to go like, Hey, have you spoken with this founder and putting in a small check. So that was the first realization at which point I started having conversations with friends and trusted advisors and entrepreneurs, as well as with other capital allocators. The feedback I was getting was mixed all over the place. And in some cases, there was the argument of all you need to do it by yourself because you have a unique viewpoint to, no, you should join a fund and learn the ropes for a few years.

I had a few opportunities to join funds, but they've performed well and they're really nice people. I felt that there were a few issues that held me back from joining, particularly the larger. early stage funds, I felt like they wanted a trophy wife. They want you to be that partner that sits in the corner.

You tick off the diversity checkbox, you tick off the CTO checkbox, you have a research background, you know, science and you founded companies and you've had exits and you know the journey. You look good on paper for them, but in most cases, they're still the ones running the show. And I see this even now, right? With some of the things that I'm planning on investing in, that I can invest in.

They're not on the radar of a lot of people yet. or they're slowly getting there. So I rather quickly decided that I didn't want to do that because it would be disingenuous to the reason I chose to go into BC. And I jumped into it again, gut instinct and with no parachute, right?

Like I didn't, there was no anchor. I had a few people that were like, oh, if you do this, we'd love to support, but I was like, okay, so let's figure out what it takes. I incorporated last summer. I started fundraising as soon as I was allowed to by the regulatory authorities here.

And whether it was the right decision, I think I'll know in, I don't know, 10 years plus one plus one. I know you mentioned it, but you're building a fund for the future that you want to live in. But what does that future actually look like? There's a few core things that I truly believe in.

We cannot think linearly in an exponential world anymore. And we tend to do that quite a lot. I think we are living in the best timeline, even though we tend to forget about any measurable. standard really, right?

Less hunger, people live longer, they live healthier, literacy rates, poverty rates dropping. We are living in the best time, even though there's a lot of things that are bad. I think optimism in this case is not being in denial, right? Optimism is recognizing that there is progress that has happened and there's progress that will happen and that we've solved a lot of problems.

And for me, think technology will solve every single problem that we're facing today. I truly believe that the body is deterministic and not random. Right? I believe that the brain is computable and not mystical.

I think that we need to go into a post-labor world. Labor is not a human right. I think dignity and self-actualization are human rights. I believe we're heading to reality with infinite energy.

These are the things that found my vision of the future and anything I can do to get us in that direction or to think about what the world needs when we get there. These are the things that form my thesis. I know you invest in scientists and engineers because they're the closest ones to building towards that world, but not all scientists and engineers are made to be great founders. So I'm curious what you actually look for in a founder and when you meet them, what are you trying to understand about them?

And is there a type of founder that you've learned to avoid? I might provoke people. We were talking about this with a group of friends yesterday and I told them like, When I see Forbes 30 under 30 on your bio, that's like a big red flag. Having worked a lot with researchers, they're much more averse to exaggerating their results and their roadmaps.

They're very much data driven. They can't tell a story that is aspirational, right? Because they're thinking everything I write is something that has already come to pass. Whereas in many cases, founders in different businesses, they're like, Everything I write will be read in six months and hopefully I'll be close to that then.

So I tried to essentially account for that. think there has to be a fire, a curiosity. When I was pitching for my first companies, you always get asked what is the big dream? And the answer is supposed to be always, I want to change the world and I want to become the next billion dollar.

God knows what. That was all a proxy to figure out, am I resilient enough to... stick around when things get tough. A founder that goes and says, here's the market opportunity.

And if I do this and that, I can increase margins by that much. And this could lead to a $200 million outcome. It's frowned upon a bit, right? Even though I find that in certain applications, that's exactly what I'm looking for.

I invested in a founder that is very much driven by the numbers and by figuring out these asymmetries and these inefficiencies in the system, and then leveraging technology to adapt that. And I invested in two founders that are essentially trying to digitize the brain and upload the human brain into software. And you cannot put any same metric to measure and quantify those two founders in the same way. And those companies might take 15, 20 years, God knows how many years to see some sort of return.

How are you thinking about timeline and what needs to be true for that math tour? As I construct my portfolio, there are some where they're leveraging a bunch of, know, whether it's a distribution advantage and a regulatory advantage, data advantage, and so on to apply AI to a critical industry in a way that gives them a unique advantage, where I think the timelines there are much shorter. And yes, there are moon shots where the founders will need two, three years of research to even get to a point where there's something they can show that is of commercial value.

And there's everything in between, right? It's just invested in a medtech company that is working on the modulation through implantable objects. They need a couple of years to get through clinical trials. So there are different timelines throughout all of this.

The way I look at it is I think the applied AI stuff and some of the lower hanging biotech innovations are companies that can exit rather quickly. And that will essentially offset a little bit some of the company with a longer trajectory. But I also think. that there will be opportunities along the way to return capital to my LPs.

Maybe this is my first time manager brain talking. I don't see anything wrong with me taking money off the table before a company goes public. If there's an opportunity in two, three years where they're raising their series B, where kind of the value add that I bring drops and the value of the company goes up and there's people that are willing, I feel like it's absolutely fine for me to then say, well, listen, I'll step up and I can actually already start returning capital. And I think a lot of the deeper tech kind of companies, those opportunities are going to be there.

And I plan on taking advantage of them. And then at the end of the day, think bio particularly has changed quite a bit. If you look at what Novo Nordisk has got, all of those MPEG and GLP ones of the world, what mRNA tech did. On the one hand, you have the big pharmas that are sitting on stockpiles of cash and are willing to deploy and acquire companies rather sooner.

And then there's a whole slew of... deregulations happening in Europe and in the US to accelerate a lot of this research. So I think that the climate is changing. I think like a combination of AI accelerating discovery deregulation and reserves of companies that are looking to figure out what is the next big thing in combination will lead to even those deep tech companies maybe getting acquired way ahead of the schedule of 10, 15 years.

A lot of your investments so far have been very technical and we talked about this briefly. previously, but you have to do a lot of technical DD that stretches beyond what you're able to do as a solo GP. Who helps you understand some of these markets that you're not familiar with? Do you have an LP base that you've configured to be more scientists?

Is it a bunch of advisors that you go to? Is it a bunch of agents that you've built? And on that, I guess, how do you make sure that you're not just outsourcing your judgment? There's this core part of every single decision that I make is based on the founder.

And I think when I do it, probably the beauty of investing so early means you have rather little to go on. So that part of the judgment, I can't outsource to anyone else. That's essentially me. And that's where I assign my risk.

And then my LP base, obviously there's a lot of investors in there. There's a lot of founders in there and I can refer to them and I can definitely check from them or ask them for their feedback, for their support. We obviously share a lot of deals as well. But formally, I don't have an advisory board of scientists and researchers and friends.

Generally, these are not logos, right? So it's not like, ⁓ look, I've got the CEO of XYZ and the inventor of this and that, but like actually people that I've known for many, many years that I've collaborated with, that I have invested in or built things with. And then I really talk to them to cover my blind spots. My brother is one of those advisors, for example, he's a biotech founder who's got his PhD in biotechnology, built this mycelium based...

company that's doing exciting work. And like, he's a formal advisor. He's not like all my pro's and advisor. is incentivized.

Either he answers my questions or I tell mom. I've got friends that are mechanical engineers. I've got an advisor who's a professor of quantum physics. So I do cover my blind spots through the researchers that I work with.

In many cases, I also rely on, especially if the deal comes through a fund that I'm friendly with because of the nature of my fund and the fact that I do rather small checks, I can be very collaborative, which is something I really like. I can also piggyback on the research that other funds have done. And I'm doing a biotech deal right now where exactly this happened. So I didn't need to go as deep because I know the fund, I trust the fund.

know they're scientists. I got on a couple of calls with them. I saw their DD and that allowed me to get enough conviction to make a decision. And then sure, I've got a bunch of agents and a bunch of workflows and a bunch of automations that helped me discover what's out there.

put things in my words and come up with the questions that I want to ask. So it's a combination of all of this. Let's talk a little bit about the fund model itself. Fund one is 10 million euros and you're talking about 35, 40 companies.

How are you thinking about fund two and beyond? 35 to 40 companies, 10 million is the target. Hard cap is 15. I don't think beyond that it really works.

The way I've structured it is minimal reserves, meaning 10, 15 % primarily to potentially catch up on warehouse deals. So I'm trying to warehouse now at something around 50 % of what I would do if the whole fund was raised 50, 75%. So the idea is to have a little bit of reserves to be able to get to the target allocation or the target ownership there. I know that already thinking about fund two, I'm trying to figure out as well a little bit how the model would be different.

It might be a little bigger because I might do... a bit more for reserves, a bit more follow-ons. I guess what's relevant here is potentially stage and ticket size. In terms of that, I think the stage will not change.

think once I have proven myself and have a bit more of a name, I would like to explore slightly larger checks. I don't think it's realistic to go and say, ⁓ yeah, I'm going to start leading seed rounds in my fund too after, or rather, I think it would be like a new fund, right? I would have to convince people all over again that I can do it. But I think gradually growing from.

What I have now where I see like 150 K at the pre-seed to 250 K at seed is sort of what I'm looking to deploy per company. Maybe I can grow that a little bit and have a bit more ownership. If I have 5 % instead of 1 to 2%. So I see it growing a little bit that way.

I don't know yet, rather don't think it would be a much more concentrated strategy. Primarily for the reason I wanted to have a bit of a broader strategy right now is that anyone who deigns to know how the world will look like in two years is either making it up or just really good bullshitting. So I think we need to have that flexibility to say it has to be a rather broad set of topics that we're open to investing in. And then we need to be able to zig and zag and we need to have multiple bets, right?

One of the things that I truly believe in is deterministic. I think it's insane that cancer is still such a major killer of human beings. And I don't want to just have one shot on goal. And I do have one investment that's doing really exciting work there.

But I think there's a couple of other people that are looking at much better ways to do ADC therapy. And there's a couple of people that are looking at potentially much, much better diagnostics, much better therapeutics. I think we need to be in a position to do a couple of these bets. having a very concentrated strategy probably is not where I want to go.

Yeah. And then fun three will progress from there. What I don't see myself doing is going from. 10.

15 now to 50 to 75 fund two and 150 fund three with an opportunities fund and a growth fund. you know, that's not what I want to do. I'm good at early stage. like early stage.

I add the most value early stage. The size of the fund and the shape of the tickets might change depending on whether I bring on a partner or not, and depending on essentially how the market changes. And why is being in Berlin the right place for this fund? Home is where the hardest, I guess.

I've been here for the longest time. have a large network here. Berlin itself plays next to no role in the fun. Of the five investments I've made and the five that I am in later DD with, one of them is from Berlin.

All of the others aren't. One other is from Germany. Being here is rather because this is where I've been so far. And when I try to, I'm doing something new and I wanted to reduce.

The complexity and the noise, like I don't need to move to a different country. I would be disingenuous if I were to move to San Francisco and pretend that I would have any advantage over the people that live there and have their network and have their access. So it had to be Europe to start. This is my home base and I'm an hour and a half away from Paris, from Zurich, from London, from everywhere else on the continent.

And I do see 70 % of my deal flow from here. So it's really rather that than Berlin per se. And as we come to a close, thank you, first of all, just being so genuine. think a lot of your perspective comes from the fact that you've been a founder before and you've raised capital from other investors.

You've seen what interactions are good and bad and what type of investor maybe you want to be. I think you've subconsciously just brought a lot of those lessons to who you are as a solo GP today. But if you could go back to yourself a year ago. What would you tell yourself going into building this fund?

Hindsight is 2020, right? It's so easy to look back now and go like, don't reach out to that LP because they're just going to waste your time. And don't do this, do that. I'd liken it to being a first-time founder versus being a repeat founder.

The beauty of a first-time founder is that you approach things naively with basically you're running on ideology and blind optimism, which allows you to essentially not take no for an answer and keep running through walls, breaking them down, opening the doors, doing whatever it takes to get there. The downside of being a first time founder is, from my experience, you waste a lot of time doing things that you don't need to do, that you can offload. Then if you're a repeat founder, you know how to set things up and get things up and running very efficiently or to prioritize.

But I feel like you tend to then give up faster because you've seen so many bad things. So. That's maybe a roundabout way of saying it would be very hard to look back and go like what I would tell myself. What I would tell myself factually is, one, to sell my crypto back in October.

Two is to plan with the longer cycles of fundraising and then to deal with it differently. I just assumed going in that if someone says yes, then I'd say yes. It's a yes, then it's a written yes, then it's a yes, I've gone through the process. And I think those timelines are probably what I've had to calibrate and adapt to the most.

I would just tell myself to tamper down my expectations a little bit on that side. But again, it's learning. And I think the minute I stopped learning, I would stop existing and I would stop enjoying life. So I'm happy to learn and I'm happy to make mistakes along the way that makes it more exciting.

Is there a question that you always get from LPs that you just want to set the record straight? I think there's one very interesting question that I've been getting quite a bit. More often from family offices and high net worth, which is the question of whether and how I could foreseeably imagine to support 35 to 40 companies in a portfolio. And I guess, yes, it's a valid question if I were to invest in all 40 today.

But my answer so far has been that not every founder is the same. Not every founder has the same needs. are founders, even in the portfolio of five companies right now, there are founders that I speak to. several times a week and others that I speak to once a month and others yet that I get a quarterly update from and they don't need any help.

And then I kind of, the way I see it going forward in time is as they grow and as they progress and as they build their businesses or as some of the companies fall off, it's going to be sort of a rotating circle or sliding window of companies that need a lot of my attention and some that need little less. On the topic of LPs, I'm curious because there is for European standards, what is probably to be considered very thriving VC ecosystem in Berlin. I'm curious to hear from you as a solo GP of a 10 million dollar fund, but there's not that many.

Like how is this product received by the LP base? Do they understand what you're doing? I think it's hard enough for somebody like Balderton to raise a fund because just the allocation to venture is not that big and there is no education around. The holding period, the liquidity of the asset class, there's a big stigma around the returns within European companies as such.

What has been your experience educating, interacting, who are these people? I think a lot of the larger capital allocators just I don't qualify for, right? So it's just not even going into the conversation. I decided not to apply for any of the public instruments just because it's a little bit of ideological take on things as well.

I know the pain. that they are if you want to get the capital from them and the restrictions. A lot of my investors are RGPs in those funds that do believe that there is a gap. Everyone says there's a bigger gap basically at the series A to series B in Europe, funds that are able to deploy 100, 200 million checks into the big stars.

Yes, there is, but I don't necessarily see that as a problem when I look at my worldview of if you cure cancer, I don't care really if... the series D comes from a German fund or a French fund or a Sandhill Road. Like who cares, right? So I don't try to worry about those things.

Everyone I talk to tells me it's the hardest time to raise. And I think a big part of that is that just money was so cheap for the longest time that just like there's zombie startups that were able to raise or both too much capital, too high valuation, which they're never going to grow into it. There's a lot of funds and there's a reckoning coming. I've heard that from a lot of people where I was pretty certain that they would be a very quick.

check in my fund that were like, I've done 12 fund investments over the last seven years. I haven't seen distributions. The fact that I also prioritized secondaries and returning money rather quickly to myself in my fund zero that resonates with a lot of the, let's say the non-traditional LPs that I'm talking to the high networks and the family offices that are like, you know, have cash. want to diversify.

There's definitely, they understand more about this asset class now than they did five years ago, 10 years ago. I think we need more, right? I don't think we need less. For me, the perfect setup for particularly early company doing science, and there's a lot of really cool funds out of Europe backing these companies.

The perfect setup is to have three, four people like me that are really on their side and really are willing to do the work. And then they can graduate to the seed stage funds that have the big operations and can deploy 5 million and so on and so forth. What do you think needs to happen systemically across the European landscape to enable more of these funds to exist. Do you think it's a replica of the sovereign model that it's currently underpinning all of the large funds?

Or do you think it's education of new generations coming into wealth? There is a lot of private wealth in Europe that isn't exposed to disaster class at all. What do you think we as a community could do better to accelerate this transition? Like you mentioned, there's a lot of wealth that is unlocked.

Germany, example, high net worth people in Germany are famously secretive. They have their family offices and they operate, but they are so under the radar. It's very different to the U.S.

And you have a lot of those throughout Europe. The younger generation there are coming in to those family offices and they're getting engaged. I've heard this quite a few times in the last months where they're like, we don't have any exposure in venture. We'd love to start getting exposure there.

I have a very complicated relationship to public money and to sovereign wealth funds. Just because generally of the mindset that less government is good. Typically bureaucracy slows down, not the best way to allocate. I think the one thing that's missing is essentially this notion of tech can fix the problems, right?

Now with all of the conflicts in the world, there's this feeling within Europe of, we've heard the alarm bells. We've seen the warning signs. We need to shape up. We can't rely on other people.

We need to be resilient. need to have our own technology. We need to have our own heroes. And I think couple both, right?

Wealth and a sense of mission that transcends and a little bit of fear. Europe was just so good for so long that people were just relaxed. And when you have a little bit of fear, when your way of life is a bit threatened, when your standards of living threatened, that's when you can move fast and that's where you can actually start shaking things up. And I do feel that happening on some levels.

Ramsey, thank you so much for your time. And this has been a great conversation. And you just listened to yet another episode of the Slice Podcast, where we uncover the stories of fresh emerging managers across the venture capital landscape. In the next episode, we're joined by a true crypto day zero believer buying Bitcoin way before anybody knew what that was.

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