435. How a Sports Journalist, Car Washer, and Rug Salesman Built a Tier 1 VC Firm (Pejman Nozad)

This episode dives into the remarkable journey of Pejman Nozad, from his beginnings in Tehran to becoming a top-tier venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

1. Persistence and resilience can transform any beginning, no matter how humble, into great success.
2. Networking and making the right connections can significantly influence career paths.
3. Understanding market needs and gaps are crucial for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.
4. Early-stage support for startups is critical and can shape the future of a new business.
5. The importance of adapting and learning continuously, even when changing fields drastically.

1: Introduction

Nick Moran introduces Pejman Nozad, discussing his background and the episode's focus. Pejman shares his early experiences in Tehran. Nick Moran: "Welcome to the podcast about venture capital where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction."

2: The Journey from Tehran to Silicon Valley

Pejman Nozad recounts his move from Iran to the U.S., his initial jobs, and how he ended up selling Persian rugs to tech giants in Palo Alto. Pejman Nozad: "I washed cars like no one else."

3: Transition to Venture Capital

Pejman discusses his transition from selling rugs to venture capital and founding Pear VC, emphasizing the importance of understanding and supporting early-stage startups. Pejman Nozad: "I realized there's an opportunity to build an institution to serve founders in that stage."

4: Building and Scaling Pear VC

Details on how Pear VC was built, its philosophy, and the specific support systems developed for startups. Pejman Nozad: "We want to build the best seed firm ever existed in the history."

1. Leverage Every Experience: Every job or role you undertake can teach valuable lessons; extract and apply these to your current pursuits.
2. Network Intentionally: Focus on building meaningful relationships within your industry.
3. Identify Market Gaps: Always look for what is missing in your market and think of ways to fill that gap.
4. Support Early Stages: If you're in a position to help, support early-stage endeavors which often need the most guidance.
5. Adapt and Learn: Be open to learning from every situation and ready to adapt based on new insights.

Pejman Nozad of Pear VC joins Nick to discuss How a Sports Journalist, Car Washer, and Rug Salesman Built a Tier 1 VC Firm . In this episode we cover:

Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, and Building a Firm for Generations
Entrepreneur Mindset, Sales Skills, and Storytelling
Investing in Startups, Pro Rata, and Valuation
Evaluating Startup Potential, Including Market Size and Founder Quality
Investing, Exit Strategies, and Building Relationships with Founders

People

Pejman Nozad, Nick Moran

Companies

Pear VC, Dropbox, Doordash

Books

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Guest Name(s):

Pejman Nozad

Content Warnings:

None

Nick Moran
Welcome to the podcast about venture capital where investors and founders alike can learn how VC's make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran and this is the full ratchet.

Pejman Nozad
Pejman Nozad joins us today from San Francisco. He's the founding managing partner at PearVC, a pre seed and seed fund investing in AI, Consumer B, two B healthcare, enterprise, biotech, climate tech, Fintech, SaaS, deep tech, and web three. Over the past two decades, he has been a seed investor in some of the most iconic tech companies including Doordash, Dropbox, Applovin, Gusto Garden, Health Branch, Aurora, Solar, Soundhound, course Hero and many others. He was included in the Forbes Midas list in 2021, 22 and 23, and he was ranked number one in the world on the Forbes Midas seed list last year. Page man received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 2014 for his contribution to America as an immigrant.

He started his career in Tehran as a sports journalist and played soccer. He has attended six FIFA World Cups, two of them as an accredited journalist to cover the games. Page man welcome to the show Nick. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Pejman
It's a pleasure to be here with you and your audience. It is such a pleasure to have you, sir. We've had Mar on the program and I've been very excited to get you on to learn about your background and your whole story. I know that you have a really interesting one. Maybe we'll start out with what was your first job when you came to America?

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I grew up in Iran. When I was ten years old, the revolution in Iran happened in two years. The war happened, the eight years of war between Iran and Iraq. So my teenager life was surviving a war, which was brutal.

And I was a very good student. I was a better soccer player, as you mentioned. I played for big clubs in Iran and then I started to write for Sports magazine. Then I became very popular because I was like 1718 years old analyzing soccer. And people really loved my writing.

They gave me the opportunity to host Iran's most popular sports radio talk show. So imagine you're 18 years old and LeBron James of your country sits in front of you. So it was amazing time for me and I learned a lot. I went to a top university in Iran, but after two years I dropped the university. I served in the army.

Luckily, the team was playing in the Premier League in Iran, so I played most of the time for that team. Rather than being in the military base, I went to Germany. My parents left Iran before me with my brother. They lived in Germany. I went there.

They gave me a scholarship to play soccer. But a few weeks into being in Germany, my brother pushed me to go to us embassy for no reason. And I actually first said to my brother, you're crazy. I don't speak English. I have a scholarship here.

My parents are here. He said, just go and get a visa, but don't go. So they interviewed me. The counselor asked me, why you want to go to America. I said, I want to go watch NFL, NBA.

I was very truthful. So I just arrived here in 1992 with no plan. I had only a few hundred dollars, $700 cash and didn't speak one word, English. So, as you might have heard, I was actually in love with the girl back home in Iran. And I thought, I'm gonna lose her.

So I called her every day from payphone here in San Carlos. And in 1992, there was no Internet, phones, and calling Iran cost like two, $3 per minute. So the money was gone and I had no plan. So I figured that I have to get a job. I managed to buy a 1973 Chevrolet for $150.05 payments of $150.

So I didn't have money to pay. And I drove every day for an hour to San Jose. I washed cars for 1011 hours and drove back. So my first job in America was washing cars. But I tell you, I was the best car washable has ever seen.

Nick, I wash cars like no one else. Amazing. Amazing. And I heard that you were homeless at one point. Like how?

Yeah, right after that, I. My English improved. I landed a job at the yogurt shop, but ran out of money. I slept on the street in my car, and I begged the owner to let me sleep in the attic above the yogurt shop. So it's real attic.

Imagine above your roof. There's an attic over there. No window, no air. So waking up every morning, 05:00 a.m. open up the shop till 05:00 p.m.

go to college, come back. Yeah. Again, surviving. But, you know, something was telling me, if I can survive this, I can do many things in my life. And, you know, something magical happened.

One night, I saw an advertising for persian rug store in downtown Palo Alto. I called, I got that job, and I started sell rugs. And again, I became a really good rug salesman. Persian rugs. Basically you come and say, paige, when I bought a home in Palo Alto or San Francisco and we look at rugs together, but ultimately I bring drugs to your home.

More than 95% of transaction happens at people's home. By coming to your home, obviously for hours, 2 hours, we get to know each other, so we talk different things. And I realized six, seven years into it, that all of my customers are top venture capitalists and founders. These are really, really important people like John Doar and Doug Leone is of the world. And I was hanging out with them, having barbecues, selling rugs, and, you know, I wasn't really in awe of what they do.

Obviously they were wealthy people, but mostly I didn't know that you can create companies based on knowledge. I thought like, you always built things like this or like this, and you sell it, but you know, when they were explaining what they do, I thought was just this. An unbelievable community I have. I'm very lucky to have this access, and I want to be one of these people. So started to ask a lot of questions.

This is late nineties. Like, none of these things that today it wasn't available, it was only Sandhill Road, and Ron Conway was the only angel investor in the world. So no podcast, no podcast, no Techcrunch, no bias, none of these things that are available today in the hand of venture capitalist entrepreneurs, it was not possible. I decided that this is an opportunity of lifetime. And I started to learn, and I convinced the owner of the rock shop to partner with me because I didn't have money.

So we started to invest in startups late nineties, when it wasn't really fashionable to be angel investor, and we made terrible investments. We didn't know what the heck we were doing, but I kept going and you know, my network grew. I remember I invited the entire Sequoia Capital Partners to drug gallery. I invited 100 entrepreneurs and people loved that interaction. Never happened before in that environment.

So day by day I got to know the business, I learned the world around me. And fast forward. I was fortunate to invest in some really category defining companies. As you mentioned, I was the first investor in Dropbox and Apple Garden, health, soundtound and gusto and many others. And then I made money.

I started to do angel investing professionally. And I realized around 2000, 920 ten that founders raised the initial capital. But venture capitalists leave them alone right after. And I thought there's an opportunity, not because intentionally it was they were either busy or. I've never done that early work like idea get you to product market fit.

And I realized there's an opportunity to build an institution to serve founders in that stage. You have an idea, maybe prototype. How do you build the team? What does the operation plan look like? Who are your first ten customers.

How do you get to those first ten customers? How do you grow as a leader? What are the important things? Like, really be the partner? Early days, I knew my skills were not adequate to be the best build that firm, because it was certain to me that in order to build a long lasting firm, I need a partner who has been an entrepreneur and built in ship products.

I reached out to my current partner, Mar. I didn't talk to anybody else. It took me four years to convince her. I actually funded Mars company, husband's company 2000, the year 2000, and her company in 2003. And we became really good friends.

I actually syndicated Mars two and a half million dollars seat round in 2003. And this was a time that I had to take Mars to my friend's home and offices, to eBay headquarters. So I got to know her through the whole process, and she successfully sold that company. And then in 2013, we partnered. Our first office was at Coupeau Cafe.

We want to build the best seat firm ever existed in the history, and we want to help founders build category defining companies, but more importantly, a firm bigger than two of us. We want to build the firm for generations. And Mara and I, I think we are. Yingen Yang. I'm a college dropout.

She's a Stanford PhD. She started three companies in tech. Believe it or not, I never worked for a tech company. She has 14 patents. I have zero patents.

But I have a lot of scars on my body. So this is where we are. The firm is eleven years old, and I can tell you more about pear and what we do. It's remarkable. Paige?

Pejman Nozad
Mom, what would you say is the most important lesson you took away from your experiences working at the yogurt shop or at the car wash or selling rugs. I truly believe whatever you do in life, if you become the master of it, something magical happens. I rest assure you, there's no better rock salesman than me in the history. I was just in it. My life was into it.

Pejman
Same thing today. I designed my entire life around parents. That doesn't mean I don't have a social life. I have a family. I have a beautiful kids.

But I wake up every morning thinking about founders and how can I make this firm successful. So I'm all in. I designed everything around selling rugs. I was designing everything my life around selling yogurt. Live there and grow.

So I think if you're cleaning windows and you become the best window cleaner in the world, one day you're going to have a company that will clean Empire State's windows Pejman, what would you. Say is the biggest change or evolution that has occurred at pear since your founding? So it was two of us, I think Pear was Pejman and Mar. Now we are 24 people. We grew as a team.

The DNA hasn't changed. It was always about being partner for entrepreneurs very early on, taking a lot of risk and stick to them through thick and thin. But we build an extraordinary team today. Pear, it's a pre seed and seed specialist, means that's the only thing we do. We are investing out of a $432 million fund, which is maybe among the largest dedicated precedent seed fund in the world by a non multi stage firm.

And our investment team have started and sold ten companies to the likes of Cisco, Instacart, Zynga, Yahoo. So a lot of know how early days, but we build a platform team that support the investment team. For example, we have a talent team of four senior recruiters led by Matt Bimbaum, who was a head of global talent of Instacart. He took Instacart from 300 to 3000 people. So we have, we have hired 99 people in last twelve months for our companies for free.

This is like extraordinary help for our companies. And these are, when I say companies are a team of two or three, we hire two or three machine learning engineers for them. It's just pretty amazing work we do. And you know, the seniority of recruiting team is amazing. One of them, for example, was just working for Elon Musk.

That's the talent team. We have a go to market team that really helped them to really understand how do you go to the market? Who are the first customers, what do you run the sales and just really a lot of workshops. You're building kind of the product marketing team at payer. So this is the layer supporting the investment team surrounded by a concept we call per studio.

We really believe in building a community. So we have two offices, one next to Stanford, one we just opened in San Francisco. The one in San Francisco is 30,000 square foot, is maybe the biggest vc offices in the country, but it's really not a venture capital office, it's home for tech builders. Our aim is between these two places we built the most active and engaged community of tech builders. So part would be home for our portfolio, part would be you call me, said Page man.

I know an amazing engineer, moved from Chicago to San Francisco. He or she is working on their idea. They need a place, so they give them home. And a lot of activity happens over there. We just hosted a hackathon with OpenAI last Saturday, we had 792 people applied and we selected 170 people.

And they came from 09:00 a.m. to 09:00 p.m. hacked and with partnership with OpenAI. So there's a lot of activities over there. So that's basically where peer is today.

We're eleven years old and, you know, we always think is day one at pear. There's so much to build, so much to do. Love it. Page man, you've said that the founder journey is very hard and very frustrating, but you hope that folks will learn to see all these obstacles and challenges as transformative experiences. How do you tease out that mindset in founders prior to investing?

Pejman Nozad
You know, do you have any insights that you can share with listeners that would help, you know, them get clarity on the mindset of the entrepreneur? You know, we as a team spend a lot of time to get to know the founders. As you mentioned, there's not much early on. We like founders who are master of their own universe. What does that mean?

Pejman
Means like if you're building a company, I give you example in space, you just know deeply better than anybody else what the pain is. What is the market? Who is your customer? Same thing if you're any other sector. So we want founders who have deep domain knowledge about the market, the type of the customer and the pain.

That's one thing I think we really like founders who are really committed for a long time, and visionaries. And, you know, typically when you talk about vision, people talk about what they want to do by series a, not, you know, 1020 years from today. If you look at some of the most legendary entrepreneurs of all time, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and even Steve Jobs, they were telling us things that we had never imagined will happen. I saw a stat last night that Elon Musk said. I think at the time they had $100 million revenue that he said in 20 years all cars would be electric.

I think it takes longer, but, you know, the company has, I don't know, $89 billion revenue and growing. Or a letter that Jeff Bezos sends in eighties to shareholders is one day all transaction merchandise. People buy things on Amazon. So I think we look for people who see future before us and they can articulate that in a right way. We like founders who have history together.

That's very important for us. That doesn't mean if you have met last few months, we say no, but it's a very good sign of a really good team. You know, we like founders who can attract talent, you know, if you look at and these are coming for you can attract talent. If you, if you're building something really extraordinary and you have the vision, you know, smart people have so many options. The, the top 1020 people at Meta, at Facebook have been there 80% of the time.

They've been there like 16, 1718 years. Wow. Just like if you look at those people still there, same thing in people that are Microsoft like 40 years over there. Satya Nadal, the CEO, has been there for 32 years. Sundar at Google has been there for 20 years.

They actually act as a founder. So it's pretty extraordinary what leaders of these startups at the beginning can attract early on. When you hire these people early on, you are not a big company. But the ability to articulate your vision will help you to just get amazing people. And the last thing we like, people who really, truly believe the company and their team is above anything else, including themselves.

Pejman Nozad
Pejman, you're known for your sales and negotiation skills. You hone them while selling rugs. Clearly. How, how important is, how important are sales skills in the founding team? I think it's very important.

Pejman
I think, I think I actually reverse sell to just storytelling. I think it's really, really important. I actually, when I look back, I never sold rugs. I never sold the rugs itself. I always explain the impact of the rug in your home.

Like, what does it to you? So if you buy a tie, you really don't buy a tie. You buy your look with that tie. You always imagine yourself, what is that to what this tie do to me? My look with the certain suit you have in mind.

So I think storytelling, selling is really impact of particular product or particular roadmap. For me, it's very important. I think the best founders, you know, they're great storytellers. Just watch what Brian Chesky, even today, does with Airbnb. It's just remarkable every time he comes with the new things that I've never seen the world like this.

You just keep telling stories and growing. If the market for Airbnb, you know. The journey to building a successful company is rarely linear and up to the up and to the right, it's often up down flat. It's frustrating. How do you advise entrepreneurs that are going through these challenges and getting pressure from other investors or other parties to grow 20% to 30% month over month?

I don't think there is any advice that can make entrepreneurs resilient. You're either resilient or not. I think it's just in you but obviously sharing stories and learning from the other founders who have gone through it, I think gives kind of encouragement to the founders. They're not the only one going through these things. As you mentioned, building in startup is kind of a roller coaster, especially emotionally things going.

You wake up in the morning, you know, your investors say yes to you, and then at noon your design partner says no to you. So you have to just be ready for it. And, you know, being entrepreneur is not for everyone. Do you have a standardized approach to working with and supporting companies? You mentioned things about platform and stuff, but I'm more interested in your engagement.

Pejman Nozad
You know, if you lead the investment, is it standard, is it always custom? It's very customized per company. You know, I'm very lucky to have like amazing partners who are investors of deep domain expertise. I don't have any particular vertical expert in it. I just have some understanding in the market and history of being an investor for 23 years.

Pejman
So I always have one of my partners with me who has domain expertise, has been entrepreneur before, built companies before, and I just do whatever it takes. For founders, I typically focus on what matters next three to six months. I always ask founders, what are the three things you need? And I move mountains to just at least do one of them. I'm curious for some thoughts on pro rata.

Pejman Nozad
When a business does not have product market fit and is still figuring things out, how do you decide whether to invest more money? Boys, really come back to the relationship you have with the founders and how much understanding you have on the product roadmap, the team, the finances. We have been multiple times bridging companies doing paradox. Sometimes we don't. It's not a blind pool of capital, but a good investor is always in the loop, is always in communication with the founder, and it all goes back to the trust you built from early days.

Pejman
The founders trust you and they can share a lot of information. You know, I remember we did the seed investment in DoorDash, and then Sequoia came series A. We did Series A, but at Series B, which was at the time nobody believed in kind of food delivery is a big market. Uber was ahead of Doordash. John Doerr came on board for series.

We had $600 million valuation, and this is fund one, which was only 50 million. We put our paradox was 1.4 million, which it was either shocked and this is back in 2014, I think, or 15. Even some of our lp's shocked at why a first time manager $50 million put money at series B. Typically you do see them Series A and goodbye. But it came back to the relationship.

We had Tony, the CEO and the rest of the team understanding where they are, their plan, and really believe that this could be an outlier. The company went out and we exited at $47 billion market cap. So when you look back, $600 million looks like no brainer, but it was a very, very hard decision at that time. Yeah, I think maybe I got this answer, but I'm curious, is there a top limit on valuation that you'll execute a pro rata on to maintain a seed return profile or if you. No, I think I learned that, you know, this is a given.

Everybody knows power law. There are, you do this portfolio construction, you talk about it, you execute it. But at the end of the day, there are only one or two. Just return the fund. That is not fun.

Our funds, every fund is like that. Historically, if you look at Kleiner Perkins fund was one of the best performing fund, was like Genentech was part of that and the other. So. And I think we, as much as the size of the fund matters that how far you can go, but we are not shy away to invest. We just invested in Vantas series B, which was over $1.5 billion valuation.

Pejman Nozad
Wow. When do you think is the right time to preempt and lead the next round of financing versus going to market and taking up pro rata? I think when you have this insane belief that this company is going to return your fund somehow. You love the team, the execution is flawless, customers love the product. That's when you preempt.

Pejman
Yes. Aside from overall size of a market or an opportunity space, what are some of the key elements that you look for that get you really excited about the business and the opportunity? Typically, early on, we call potential customers one or two. Just see do they pay for this? Is this a real pain or not?

So that's a great indication for us because the product is not built most of the time. So we just do kind of analysis if this works, you know, sometimes the market is not big enough, but has potential to grow. And Doordash started it. The market was food delivery in America was $3 billion. Total market today is 75 billion and growing.

Same thing with Uber. Taxi business was at 40 billion. Now it's close to $200 billion. Same thing with Airbnb. And it's hard for the investor to predict that it's really the founder who can come and articulate.

And I think no founders come and say, oh, I'm starting DoorDash. The market is 3 billion and it's going to be $75 billion in like ten years. This never happened. But I think the way they run their businesses and, you know, I typically want to dream about every opportunity and I just think in my wildest dream how big this company can become. Amazing.

Pejman Nozad
On the other side, what are some of the key factors that may be less obvious but give you more hesitation when you're assessing a market? You mean what gives me pause about one particular market that is big enough or not? Yeah, if you're looking at an opportunity, and let's just assume that the founder is strong, but as you dig in on the market side or the opportunity side, are there some common factors that come up that make you skeptical of the ability for that market to be, you know, to grow, to be a good profile, nice customers, sticky, etcetera? I think each company, each sector is different. I just, I think the companies who cannot become really big, multiple factors, but the pain is not big enough.

Pejman
And it could be for a certain type of the customer, but not all the customers in that space. And so, and we always do. We actually have a great blog that you do bottom up kind of market sizing and start that. It's a great guidance and I encourage founders to look at in our blog, on our website, and it gives you a really good kind of the homework how you study a market. Pejman I have this opinion that it's very hard to evaluate a person and a business when you're chasing them.

Pejman Nozad
Arthes at Nustack is constructed in a way that we don't have to chase. Most often the founders are pursuing us for investment. You're based in the Bay Area and you invest in many Bay Area companies. How are you able to appropriately diligence and learn about a founder and a company that is being chased by many firms and quickly gets oversubscribed? I think one, we built a very competitive offering to founders.

Pejman
So I think once we get a chance to founders to see what they're doing, and this is combination of having specialists invested in sector and our platform, plus the history and the size of the capital we have and the performance of the fund, we try to go meet them if it's necessary. We don't invest in any company that we haven't met. We typically, we either go, they should come to meet us or we go to meet them. You know, if you look at history of peer, we build a lot of sourcing platforms and we get to know them really through a long history before even they start the company. So for example, my partner Vivian, who leads healthcare and climatic at pair, started an amazing program for female engineers who are leaving big tech companies or academia and wants to start the company.

It's a free program for 15 weeks. We match you with mentor, there's workshops, speaker series, you get to know each other and you can go raise money from anyone. So she spends 15 weeks with them and then the team gets involved. So we get to know them long before even the start company. So it gives us some advantage.

We do the same thing for persian founders, for PhDs, for product managers. So majority of the companies that we invest, we have history with them. Love it. Page mono lesson that you shared from your experience at the rug store is don't be afraid to be different. Lean into what makes you unique and find a creative way to use it to your advantage.

Pejman Nozad
You're more defensible that way too. My question for you is, when you look at other VC's and your own approach, what makes you different? Yeah, it's a good question. I remember when, you know, when I, when we started to do this angel investing, our office was a beautiful rug gallery, which is the most beautiful rug gallery in the world on University Avenue. And yet when people came, I made sure that we served persian tea in a beautiful way.

Pejman
It was a beautiful gold tray with dried nuts and it wasn't like putting a teabag in the hot water with brew tea and then many years after fabric. We really love that interaction with you because typically we go to it's all glass and Sandhill road offices, which is great. But when we come to you, it all started with tea, our families and our culture before we even talk about product, market fit and market size and what we built. And it was like this kind of amazing relationship we had with you. And, you know, I learned that I could have said, oh, I could have, you know, hid behind my differences, which is a rock salesman in the rock shop in downtown Palo Alto, you know, investing in high tech companies.

But I thought, there is something about me, the rug business, my culture, that, you know, is my strength. And it proved to be right. And today is the same thing. I still serve persian tea. I think founders, I came from nothing and I think founders really relate with that.

Nothing scares me. And I really believe that you can create your own opportunities and founders every day create opportunities for themselves or for team members. So I think I relate a lot with founders. What's your position on taking board seats on your investment? We typically talk to the founders, see what they want.

Even when you write a big check, I think if there's no relationship with the founders board seat or no board seat, it doesn't matter. You don't have to trust. I think you need to just make sure at the time you make that investment, that trust is already established. And I think we have a great working relationship. So it just doesn't matter if you have it or not.

Even if you write a bigger check these days, it's not a requirement. We want to be involved, and I think we prove to them that we are helpful and we build a great relationship. I want making sure that founders think pair is the extension of their team. So as a founder, you have your engineering team, you have your sales team, you have your marketing team, you always have a peer team at your service. And if they don't really believe that's the case, I think it's just wrong partnership to start with.

Pejman Nozad
So you always make sure you have a team and support. You were saying? Yeah, I just think, like, I just want to make sure that, you know, pair is the extension of the team, of the, of the startup. So as a founder, you have your engineering team, your sales team, your marketing team. I want founders believe that Pear is one of those teams and you're at your service.

Pejman
If that's not the case, I think it's the wrong partnership to start with. And then we talked a lot about the relationship at investment. We talked a bit about post investment. How about the exit process? Do you get involved in the exit process when your companies decide to sell or explore an IPO?

Typically when there's a smaller. And we have been very much involved with, you know, smaller acquisition when they get to the size of Dropbox and, you know, Doordash of the world. No, I mean, they have big boards. They're soon to be public company at that time. We're not that much involved, although we're still involved.

Like, I help a lot with our companies with like series BC and beyond and, you know, building the board and hiring executives, but no, we are not involved that, but early on, we are very much involved in their past seats, series A and even b, and they want to just transact and there's no path to IPo. We get very much involved to help them. Page Bon. If we can feature anyone here on the show, who do you think we should interview and what topic would you like to hear them speak about? Oh, I think you should interview Leo Messi and ask him how does he do what he does for two decades.

Pejman Nozad
It's pretty remarkable. Yes. It's funny. I've got a I've got a Miami Messy jersey downstairs. Oh, that's awesome.

We'll try and get him on the show. Pagemon, what book or article would you recommend to listeners? Something you found helpful? I always think the book of. I keep reading it.

Pejman
The power of now by Eckhart Tolle. It just allows you to step back and look at the world from like 30,000ft. It's a great book to read and I recommend everybody to read it. Amazing. Do you have any habits, tactics or techniques that are a secret weapon?

Yes, I make persian tea that people love. I gotta try this tea. I'm a huge tea drinker. I'm curious how good it is. And then finally here, Pagemon.

Pejman Nozad
What's the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow along with pear? It's pagemonair, BC. Very simple. Amazing. Well, Pagemon, you know, I've been waiting to do this interview for many years.

I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing all your insights and wisdom and your backstory with us. So thank you, sir. Nick, thank you so much for having me. I'm actually. You made me jealous because I don't have messy shirt, so I have to think about it.

Pejman
Do you have the pink one or the black and pink one? It's black with pink striping. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much, Nick. What you do for the ecosystem is just pretty amazing for both founders or the venture capital community. So I just want to thank you. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you saying that.

Nick Moran
Alright, that'll wrap up today's interview. If you enjoyed the episode or a previous one, let the guests know about it. Share your thoughts on social or shoot them an email. Let them know what particularly resonated with you. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that.

Some of the smartest folks in venture are willing to take the time and share their insights with us. If you feel the same, a compliment goes a long way. Okay, that's a wrap for today. Until next time, remember to over prepare, choose carefully and invest confidently. Thanks so much for listening.