A year ago, we didn't have a single person have a license to any AI tool. It became very clear internally that that was not going to be a go forward solution, and so I think really important shifts. The role that you as an individual person consumer and your use of technology and then your experience as an executive sitting within a company's use of technology and where sort of these eureka moments, I think, happen is when they converge. Twenty thirty, flash forward to it. TZP, what's different about the firm? I think it's Welcome to the Twenty Thirty podcast. I'm Keith Jensen, president here at CADRE AI, and we have Jared Berman, partner at TZ Peak Group. Welcome. Thank you, Keith. I'm incredibly excited to be here. Yeah. This is, this is gonna be an interesting one, because I feel like private equity is one of those things that some the people who know about it really understand it, and the people that don't, it's kind of like this fuzzy thing in the background that they hear sometimes negative things about, sometimes great things. How long have you been in this space? So I I was definitely one of those who really didn't know about it entirely. Heard about it, studied in school, but we sort of did not come from that world. I've been at TCP now seven years, but my background is from the operating digital transformation side and not the traditional banking trajectory that many people had. And so my role is I lead our portfolio growth group, which is really the operating side of the firm. So our job is to help the companies we invest in perform better after we invest in them, make them grow faster, accelerate, and have better exits for both us and the founders who generally roll a substantial portion of their equity into the business as well. You're not kidding when you say the traditional investment way that that people come up with. I was I've worked at a couple different private equity firms, and it's always been wild to me how standardized the upcoming it's like, graduate, you do investment banking, you grind your ass off in New York City for, you know, a year and a half to two. Typically, then you go be an associate at a private equity firm, then you go back to school to do an MBA. Yeah. And then you can get out and be like a VP and kinda work your way up. Yeah. It's it's interesting, we're look, Ravi, I know we're gonna cover a ton across AI as we come up to it, but it it's I think even that path is gonna it broken down even more with the advent of AI. And, like, my my trajectory was prior to TCP, which I joined in twenty nineteen. I was spent four years at Meta as the global head of ecommerce. I worked with Fortune five hundred and digital disruptors on creative measurement, machine learning, and all different ways that so that they can grow and and spend a ton of time traveling around the world, meeting with the best CMOs, CEOs, heads of growth, and you name it. And but what that sort of really prepares you for in private equity is you have a portfolio of different companies, like, not no two are the same. We have consumer, and some of them have very similar analytics that they look at and styles of growth, but then you have B2B companies, you have software, you have hospitality, and when you're in sort of this role, in sort of a meta role, and you're meeting with Anheuser Busch one day, and then you're meeting with Bombas another day, and then Wayfair, and then L'Oreal, like, they all are sort of coming at business very differently, but all have a lot of things in common, right, which is they wanna grow their customer base, they wanna retain them longer, and they ultimately wanna see their people be successful and the companies grow. And so, it's very similar to what we do at PE. The basket's a little more shrunk than some of the multinationals, but ultimately, everyone's sort of coming at it from a similar angle in what they wanna achieve. And so you mentioned the the portfolio of companies that you're overseeing, and it's pretty wide range in terms of, like, what they do. Is there a core investment thesis that TZP goes by? And do you do you invest majority, minority? So we have a couple of ways that we sort of look at our investments. So we manage a little bit over two billion dollars across now our eighth fund. We start as primarily majority buyout. We then added sort of a growth equity, which is traditionally more minority investments, and then we now have an SBIC SBIC fund, which is a structured debt and equity fund. And I'd say the thing that unifies the entire platform is that we are very focused on founder led, founder run businesses, generally in the size range of they have fully found product market fit, their revenue on this on the lower end is probably ten million in ARR if it's a software business, upwards of a hundred million when we invest, and then we invest check size anywhere from ten to a hundred and fifty million. So you're typically not purchasing this company from a another private equity firm. It's either they've got some VC backing, or they've raised some seed Yeah, whatever. From there. I'd say, friends and family money, of, many of them are bootstrapped, some of them might have had a small, like a safe round or something else where they've taken in one to five million early on Yeah. Depending on the background. But generally, it's still, when we're investing, it's still usually the original founders who are also the CEO of the company as well, and we pride ourselves on being incredibly founder friendly. Our goal is not to let the choice and style of capital get in the way of a great deal. If you are an excellent entrepreneur, you've built a wonderful business, we wanna be there at whatever stage that you're ready to take on a partner, and and then our job is to help you be more successful. With the types of businesses that you're investing in, is it is the growth after you're investing, is it typically coming from organic or inorganic, like, m and a, you know, acquisitions? Sure. I think we I'd say the majority has traditionally come from the organic growth, which is there's plenty of green shoots. There's more market share to take in their core market. There's international expansion. And then I'd say there's also sort of just performance improvement. So besides just sort of revenue going up, can your margins improve? Can your EBITDA grow by doing a couple of optimizations around supply chain that maybe they didn't have the right partner or the right access? And so we help with a lot of that, and so it's we look at it as two ways, which is how do we make the business perform better even if the revenue stays flat, and then how do we also grow revenue? We do do the buy and build, add on strategy. We're an investor in a youth lacrosse business called True Lacrosse. They have eight hundred teams in North America. They also sort of invest behind local coaches who wanna go into a platform where they have more resources, tournaments, other opportunities, and so we will invest behind that. We also do a hotel management company. Again, there it is. We manage eighty hotels. We found a partner that had thirty portfolio in a different region. We partnered with them, added on more hotels, more regions, and so we will do both. And and we have that's a large part of what the investment professionals spend their time on is what are the different ways to drive the revenue to hit sort of the thesis case, and it's a combination of both. And in this, you were talking earlier about the kind of operating partner model. This is where people who have actually been out in the workforce Yep. Have seen this before come into play a private equity So we have a team of three senior professionals that are operating partners, myself, I look after growth. We have another gentleman who is formerly the CEO of Bankrate. He handles sort of a lot more of the financial operations. And then we have a new talent partner who is sort of our chief human resources officer for all the portfolio companies, and he was at Pepsi and some other bigger companies, Cisco, and he's really helping find the best talent to go in the portfolio. And I think that's often the number one determinant of success in the business we invest in is the management team. Like, you have a great product, but execution wins every day in the businesses size we invest in, and so he's an incredibly important role in how do we uplevel our financial org. And there's things that come with you when you take private equity money. Like, there's more reporting. We're an SEC registered adviser. Like, they're a lot more a little more strict around sort of the financial protocols. We need to get things. Need to report out to investors as real deadlines. Then so a lot of our searches are CFOs, COOs, like, how do you do that? And he's incredibly helpful in doing that. And there aren't a lot of us in the firm of about thirty five. There's three of us that are sort of senior operating partners, and then there are about thirty plus that are on the investment side, plus sort of our own in house finance and admin staff. And with assets under management, you said earlier when we were talking about two billion. Right? And so that's actually I mean, for thirty five people, I I find that to be actually pretty small in the terms of, like, like, doing it well, like, you're operating well. I've I've been at firms where with that same AUM, it's it's around sixty people. Yeah. Look. I think I think there's opportunities to make things leaner, more focused, depends on where you are in sort of the investment stages. Are you putting out a lot of capital? Are you focused more on the return of capital right now? And so I think that number can fluctuate a little bit depending on where we are in investment cycle. The operating partner team is actually, I think, for our AUM is actually quite large. Most have one or two. To have three across three different disciplines is really rare, and tonight and it's not an easy role to get into to begin with, which we were talking about. Like, it's it's often when you go to these meetups and OpenAI hosted one a few weeks ago at the New York Stock Exchange For everybody, I mean, you see the same thirty to fifty people at all of them. And there are just not a ton of seats because it hasn't it's a newer role, I would say, within PE, is to sort of build this, and I think Blackstone had sort of done a great job of it, Apollo and some of the bulge bracket PE firms, and now I think sort of it's trickled down to sort of lower middle market to where you used to, if you invested a ten million dollar check, you didn't get extra resources. You sort of got the check. And and having those capabilities is really nice for our portfolio company, and I think it's it's a large reason why I think we have the right to win on a lot of different opportunities that we look at. And so now, tell me a little bit about AI. How has AI changed things? You know, you've got the internal firm operations, obviously, like, you've got the portfolio companies where you're like you said before, if we can get any more EBITDA out of it, if you can like, whatever it is that you can do, whether that is organic growth, m and a, or just efficiency across the organization, I would assume that AI is probably sitting in that efficiency category more at the portfolio level. How are you guys thinking about it first at the firm? So we think about it in we think about it two ways. We at the end of the day, we're a b to b company ourselves. Right? And so I'm a big proponent of if you're gonna sell it to portfolio companies for B2B, then you, as your own B2B company, need to be doing it on your own. And I'd say our journey to AI, I think like much of what's happening in AI, is happening very quickly. A year ago, we didn't have a single person have a license to any AI tool a year ago. We then started with what I'll call sort of like the LLM routers. It was sort of like you log in. It has sort of the chat interface, but it would send a query to OpenAI, it would send a query to Claude, it would send one to Grok or DeepSeek or whatever it was, and it was more around, like, token minimization because you paid, like, a very small fee to sort of get access to very much a chat interface. It became very clear internally that that was not going to be a go forward solution, and so we had that for two months, everybody got a seat. After that, at the time, it was sort of, I'd say, December, OpenAI was still clearly ahead of Claud even at that point amongst PE. We were like, okay, well, gotta get everybody OpenAI because that's the leader. So everybody got a seat on OpenAI. We connected as all the back end systems. I'd say OpenAI was holding steady in our firm for December, January. February, the Excel plug in comes out in Claude through Anthropic, and within days, and I think this is an important topic, within days, people who had been reticent to do anything, even within open AI, were like, I need Claude, need Claude, need Claude. And to me, when you sort of see it happening, it touches on two, I think, really important shifts, which is the role that you as an individual person consumer and your use of technology and then your experience as an executive sitting within a company's use of technology, and where sort of these eureka moments, I think, happen is when they converge. Yeah. When your personal life is, I'm already using it, and now it's available to you professionally. Yeah. The usage, the growth, the demand, people just start figuring it out a lot quicker, and there was a time when I was back at Meta that people were like prognosticating that Meta's over, nobody uses Facebook, nobody uses Instagram, and I always use what I'd call like the Starbucks or Subway test, which is if you stood in line at a Starbucks before everybody ordered on the mobile app, or you stood on the subway and you looked down at people's phones, what was open? And eight out of ten people had Instagram or WhatsApp open. Yeah. And I was like, Meta's gonna be just fine. Yeah. Like, people aren't going anywhere. And then when you sort of think about it from the AI side, in my house, I definitely would be considered more of the tech innovator, early adopter among my wife and my kids. And my wife in this standpoint beat me, and she has nothing to do with technology, she's a school psychologist, but she was figuring out how to make custom lesson plans for kids that have a range of sort of different learning styles, autism, Asperger's, you sort of name it, and they all have very, very interests, whether it's sort of Legos or F1 or sports, and she was able to take AI and say, hey, I wanna work on this activity. Help me come with a custom lesson plan around Roblox. And it would redo the entire lesson plan, pulling in the characters and the games and everything else. And when she was sort of telling me, was like, oh my god. I'm behind now. And we've now caught up a lot and mainly because I I did something that forced me to do it. I was like, I'm listen. This is you guys deal with this all the time, Akadre, which is the habit change for adoption. When people have that moment, then they're in, right? And it takes a little while to sort of like get them into that, but once they have it, it's all in. And so, for me, I was like, I gotta change my own habits. And so I blocked Google from opening on any surface of my computer. Whereas I would open in Chrome, which obviously a Google product, and the first thing would be the Google search bar. And so what would you do? You'd like, you had a question, you would search, and we went through a back and forth on this a lot, which is many people's first entre into AI is using the chat feature as just a better Google search. Right. And obviously, you could do so much more than that now. And I was like, I'm never gonna change if every time I start my computer, I just everyone goes to Chrome, if they're not using Excel or something else, and I just ask the same question. Obviously, Gemini and Google are getting better in in putting their products, their AI products into it, but I was never gonna change my own daily habits, and so I blocked my ability to get to Google, and was like, this ain't gonna do it. And what it did do is every time I opened Chrome, it defaulted to Claude. Yeah. And so then I was like, once I'm looking at Claude on the web version, we obviously know that Claude on the desktop is way more powerful, I was like, well, I'll just go to the app. And so now, like I'll call it, a little more traditional finance, I have three screens, One has sort of email, which hopefully will get erased as Yeah. These sort of AI tools become more prolific. One has, I'll call it still sort of a little bit of a browser experience, and the center monitor is just Claude and OpenAI split right down the middle, and I run both side by side now. Yeah. And once you're in it, you're in it. I feel like co work was the unlock for so many people, right? Like, the and it doesn't take long. Like, I I remember when people were telling me about it, and I was like, just give me a reason. Just just I I don't wanna I don't want something new. Explain to me how it's better. Like, well, it can run on your computer. It could go open up a Chrome browser and run for you. I'm like, so? Like, I I can go do that. Takes me two seconds. Like, what are we talking about? And and I feel like sometimes it's just the you find that one thing that you're like, oh, wow. I can set up a I can just talk to a co work interface and and have it, you know, go and scan something online, go scan my Fireflies calls, scan all these things, and come back with ideas for something, and then I can just say, make that a skill, and then make that an agent. And now it's doing it Yep. Consistently, and and then start building on it, you're like, Okay, well, now I want you to push in here and drop it as an MD file here, so I could reference it later. Like, there's just it's almost like this configuration puzzle that once you figure out, it's it just unlocks. There's that like, the thing that you have now, though, which is it's great, and I I don't know if I totally answered your question on the portfolio and our firm, but is once you sort of launch that skill, right, you come back to like that dude where's my car scene where it's like, and then, and then, and then, right, you like make the skill, and then somebody's like, oh, what if you did this? And you're like, go edit the skill, add one more bell and whistle. Then, like, two weeks later, it's like, what if it did this? And you're like, alright, so now it's doing and then and then and then. So it's like, it's a never ending skill. Like, they don't just sort of set it and forget it. Like, they keep getting optimized. But the getting the people to do it, I mean, that was I mean, we were so lucky to have CADRE to help TZP do it for us, which was we need to level everybody up pretty quickly because there was a huge sort of, I'd say, variance in the the most aggressive users and sort of the people that were a little bit behind. And I think help you guys helped us really sort of carve out how do we level everybody up and get people closer. And now we have really sort of said, hey, in order to be good at this, you gotta use it every day. And so if to run a PE firm is sort of there's a pretty standard thing, right, where you gotta raise capital, you gotta deploy capital, you gotta sort of make sure that capital is the companies are growing, and then you gotta get their capital returned. And so we use Claude and OpenAI to sort of say, like, what are the core functions that run through an entire PE firm across all the levels of people at Sydney? And it came out of the list of sort of like eighteen it broke it up into eighteen. We then said, what are the skills that sort of fall under these eighteen? And internally, we have a thing called the flywheel, which used to be like, there's a few people on the market that sort of help with the marketing, there are a few people that help on onboarding culture, and now we've taken those flywheels and we also said to everybody, hey, you're gonna get one skill, you, a junior employee and a senior employee, and you're gonna work together, and you're gonna come up with a skill that can be shared with the whole company. And that could be how do we make the best IOI template? How do we process NDAs faster? How do we build heads up memos that take less time? And it's really sort of forcing everybody to do that, and in concert with that, we also launched an internal competition where employees can submit things that they're doing outside of those skills that's making their day to day life easier. And then there's like a Reddit, vote it up, vote it down at the end of the year. We're gonna give out a prize to the employee whose idea was sort of viewed as the most valuable to the other employees. Then we sort of pivoted to, okay, well, now that we're doing it, how do we help the portfolio companies? And we started small with what we called AI office hours, which was a combination of the earliest adopters sort of sharing some of the things, a lot of them was like a thought bot or training it on how I write, and and then we also were bringing in, I'd say, experts that were a little bit further ahead of, like, how are you doing creative? How are you doing x, y, and z? And we were doing that once a month every for an hour, and it was pretty well received. We invited everybody in the any portfolio company employee could attend. It didn't matter if you were the CEO or if you were the front desk associate at a hotel. We were we basically said that we gotta make this available to everybody. Everyone wants to learn about it. And then I'd say the real big moment came. We, every year, do a CEO summit. It's usually in March. We were planning it. We were ready to go. It was three weeks out, and then Square, or I guess Block now, announced with Jack Dorsey that they were laying off forty percent of their staff, and they nominally wrapped it around sort of this AI ification of the workplace. And that was at, six o'clock at night on the East Coast. I was sitting with one of the other operating partners, and I was, like, looking at our agenda, and I was like, nobody's gonna care one iota about our existing agenda. Everyone's gonna be talking about this every time you go out to dinner because of the consumer pull of it. You're sitting at dinner with another couple, it's coming up of how they're using it, how their kids are using it. This is all anyone's talking about, and we literally ripped up the agenda and started fresh. And the whole focus of CEO Summit became how can CEOs learn from other CEOs? So we only invited presidents and CEOs outside of our portfolio to come present, and they had to do a couple of things. One was, how are they using AI in their day to day work role to be a better CEO? What is it freeing them up to do more of? And it wasn't a pitch fest, it wasn't a sale, like we're bringing out some people that were just vendor pitch pitch pitch, it was really you have a unique understanding of what it's like to sit in that seat. You have HR things you have to deal with, you have growth, you have investors, you have personal things that are coming up, so very busy lives, a lot of competing interests, a lot of things to do in the limited hours you have awake, and so we only wanted other CEOs who understood those pressures to come in and share. And we ended the day with a mandate that you couldn't come to the event if you didn't have a paid Claude account. We said if you had OpenAI and you already paid for it, great, we don't really care. Yeah. But you had to come with a paid account. And we did a one and a half hour hackathon, And it was very broad, but it was basically like, your phones are going away, you're opening the laptop, and you're gonna go be a keyboard warrior, and you're gonna come up with things that matter to you to make your day to day life. And hopefully, they've been inspired by hearing other people's stories for the first five hours, six hours of things that they can do. And someone was like, hey, just connect your email, just connect your calendar. I was like, don't make a reservation for a date night using Resy. Like, whatever the connector of your choice is, I didn't really care. I was just like, just figure out something that is make gonna make your life easier, run it, and everyone should be able to do something in an hour or less. And then we went around and everybody shared sort of what they were doing, and it just worked. Like, frankly, like, I did a lot of events at Meta. I think I threw three hundred events while I was at Meta over four years, like, reigning the people up to seven thousand people. When an event works, you know it works. Yeah. And this one worked. And it ended up with we had like a CEO who had that morning bought Claude, so never even opened it until the morning of the summit. You would've thought we like plugged him into the matrix. Like, he was like, this is crazy. I can't believe it. And he just like went almost like catatonic. Like, he was in there. Six weeks later, he reported that he's personally written two hundred thousand lines of code, and has changed sort of all of the SOPs about how they run the day to day business. And part of that was like, he was the founder, he was the CEO, but as the businesses get bigger, you sort of seed control, as you should, to really capable employees, and you had a great team. But you sort of start to lose a little bit of things of like, hey, how did I do this, and what was my reason for being, and how did I approach clients, and how did I handle account management, and how did I deal with these difficult situations, and all that lived in his head. And when he was a small firm and didn't have a lot of employees, it's very easy to sort of, like, have those water cooler conversations where you sort of share or or go back and forth. Distributed workforce now, work from home, like, people are spread out. He was like, I don't think that our operating manuals about how we do it have sort of really kept pace, and some of it has lost sort of like our secret sauce. And he went about recoding and writing everything, and some of it was he typed it, and some of it was he talked to it. Yep. And then we had another CEO who was the founder, consumer products business. She was originally the head merchant because it was a husband and wife team, and so she did marketing, merchandising, product, and he did finance ops and people, and they've been growing like crazy, and a big bottleneck has been sort of the design and launch of new products. And you talk a lot about vibe coding, and I think she sort of is doing something new, which is called vibe designing. Like, she just talks about the products that she thinks should be available from her brand, and now she told me that eighty percent of the products that have been picked up in retail in the last six months started with her vibe designing them in a conversation with OpenAI, Gemini, or Clod. And she uses a combination of all of them to sort of get the best imagery, but it starts there, it ends up with obviously an official product designer, and goes through safety, and all the things that you need to do. But it started with, hey, I'm just gonna talk about what products I wanna bring to life, and make it. And frankly, it's enabling her to get a much faster speed to market, which it product development maybe used to took thirteen months. Now they're getting to rapid prototyping in three months because the design phase is taking her three days. Yeah. Like it's her vision, graphic designer comes in, punches it up a little bit, it goes off to the manufacturer, molds get made, test products get sent, and they have the ability to go pitch product and make retail deadlines now a lot quicker. And so I think there's all these things are happening now, and it's just a matter of sharing those out across the portfolio, but getting people to engage. Because once they do, they will figure out a way to do the parts of their job they love the most better, faster. Yeah. It's really interesting with us having such a wide range of of clients. At at Cadre, we've we've seen the the gamut kinda range from sometimes we we sell the idea, hey, we're gonna go build this thing for you, and well, okay, let's start with training, we get everyone and before you know it, the CEO has coded what we were going to go build as good or better because they know their business way better. We would have had to Yeah. Ingest that information and then go do it. So there's like that They were like, We'd love that. Go do that. Hell yeah. Go do that, and and, you know, I mean, the the results speak for themselves when you can get a founder that that can do that. I feel like sometimes you get the founders that push back and they're like, I got into it, I went down a rabbit hole, I shirked all my other responsibilities, I need to get back to what I was supposed to be doing and, like, let other people do this, but others, it works great for. Yeah, look, think at the end of the day, the CEO needs to be knowledgeable enough because there is some benefit for top for things that can be rolled out top down. Yeah. Like, obviously, groundswell is already coming from bottom up of, like, every employee wanting it in certain instances, but the CEO has the most connective tissue, has the ability to sort of change priorities, understands the future vision of the business, deals the most with sort of the investors, the finance team, and understanding what are the different KPIs that really need to move in order to drive the business. So we're very big proponents that the CEO also needs to sort of at least share the title of Chief AI Officer. We're also very okay if they develop AI champions within the organization, which is, maybe it used to be a chief of staff type role, but now it's sort of this connective layer of understanding where there are bottlenecks within the company or wherever there's too many hours being spent or things aren't getting to where they need to be right away, and it's not just sitting with like, oh, IT is just gonna turn it on. Like, you need the you need the back end software to talk to each other. You need great data going in. You need uniformity to some degree on, hey, what is this supposed to look like? Like, I've always I, you know, I loved the CadreOS that you guys built. Like, to me, I was like, this is so game changing because when I go into an IC memo or I get a heads up memo, I'm like, each one's formatted slightly differently. The brand isn't always a hundred percent consistent. Now it's internal documents, does it really matter? I ultimately think brand matters, and we should always think about that as a core tenet of like what we have to do as employees is be on brand, right, and sing from the same song sheet. And so when you guys sort of showed off what you built, I was like, man, like, our PowerPoint decks need to be on point. Yeah. I'm not well, we could also get into this debate, and I know we're talking about the twenty third, like, there's a big belief that PowerPoint and Excel may or may not be obsolete in forget twenty thirty. Like, by the end of this year. Yeah. Like, we have built a skill. One of our the other partners, Super and AI, has always leaned in, probably the the most leaned in of everybody, even beyond me. And he rebuilt our entire model of building LBO models. Right? And to your point of, like, hey, the operating partner versus the investment professional, the biggest issue with going to be an operating partner is often you didn't have that banking background. You didn't spend time. You didn't go through the sort of training the street. You didn't you weren't an Excel keyboard junkie that could sort of like removed all the function keys because you're like, I couldn't have an error in this, and you knew all the shortcuts, you never used a mouse. At this point, I can take a raw deck that comes in, data room, I can talk to Claude, and I will have a working LBO model in a fully toggable, like toggles with situation in HTML that if we're like, oh, should the discount cash flow rate be twelve percent or eight percent? I just slide it. Now you have to go back to an analyst or an associate. They gotta make version ninety seven of the model, then somebody else pulls up. Now it's all HTML based, and it works as good, as quickly, and anybody can make them. Like, I don't have to have a background in banking to do it. And so I think this the what does the workforce look like at PE, think, was also gonna have a little bit of a change, which is you gotta figure out what are the core things that AI isn't gonna replace, right? The relationship piece of it, the knowing the intermediaries, knowing how to go out and sell to potential LPs, to sell to potential portfolio companies, and sell yourself, and not and some of that is softer skills that don't always come with banking, and some of it is the hard skills that you learned in banking, but now those are meshing together. Yep. And I think that's what is gonna make it pretty exciting as sort of the years go on, but, yeah, I'm not certain Excel is safe anymore. I don't know what's safe anymore. Honestly, I mean, we when we first started, you know, Kadri kind of Kadri's early to the game when it came to AI consulting services, and a lot of at the beginning, it was like building custom GPTs, you know? Like, it was all in on on OpenAI and building custom GPTs. And but you gotta remember, like, gotta build this thing, and then the the you gotta train the team to go remember which one to go use, and then there's this, six thousand, you know, line limit of code that you could put in the instructions. There was just limitations all over the place, and we started building MicroSaaS applications more and more. Even the SIEM analyzer that we built for you guys, the MicroSaaS application, you go to it to utilize, and there's a lot there's still a lot of benefits to an application like that because, like you guys, you wanna track all the sims that you had, wanna see the score, you wanna see all of that in one place. Harder to do that with a skill. But not impossible now, You know, if if you were to write a skill that, let's say, every day were to go look at your email, find anything that had a sim in it, a PDF, extract it, run the same prompt that we're running to grade it. And then drop a summary of that in a markdown file in SharePoint or Google Drive. It could then create an h t on that same skill at the end of it, not only could it grade it right there in Club, but it could create a HTML dashboard artifact that's reading all the past, you know, markdown files to populate all of them. So there are ways to build things around. Like, it's just it's evolving so fast that I think the native Cloud interface is really where everything is going. Yeah, like, I It's so hard to tell, I mean, you're sort of prepping me on coming up with things that I think are gonna happen in two thousand thirty, and we opened the AI Summit for the CEOs with one of the slides from Mary Meeker's old decks about inner which was like her Internet trend report was like the bible when it came out for like Internet and consumer and venture capital, and everybody read it, and it was two to four hundred slides and had so many things. And one of the slides we found, I wanna say from the nineteen ninety seven one, was that Netscape was gonna be the outright winner in the browser wars. It was gonna beat Internet Explorer, it was gonna be Chrome, there was no Firefox, there was no DuckDuckGo. Yeah. It was like, had that, like, ask dot com, as you use, like, roll those things, but it was like, Netscape's the one. Like, they had eighty five percent market share of the browsers at that time. And if we did the AI Summit now, obviously, our CEOs are closer in our our age, which is sort of, like, thirty to sixties age ranges. So some of them recognize it, but we had some of the junior employees at TCP there, and we asked how many people even heard of Netscape. And the twenty to thirty year olds said, like, I wasn't gonna have any idea what Netscape was. Yeah. Like, never heard of it. If you ask them, like, who's the leader in browser? Like, everyone says Chrome now, but the prognosticator was like, it was over. Game over. Game set mad. Netscape won. And for us, like, it's a big reason why we're trying to stay, I'd say, flexible on all this, which is this this might not be a long term relationship with any one of these tools, because you just don't know. Right. At the moment, it looks like OpenAI and Claude are still continuing to duke it out. It's hard to count out Google, given sort of the massive economic engine they have coming from behind with AdWords, and still pumping out money from that and gives them a real chance on Gemini and amazingly huge talent of folks already in the company that are sort of good at this and have been good at it for a long time. I mean, you can mistake sort of Meta's sort of very clear statement in the last few weeks, which was bye bye to a lot of people to cover AI expenses. So we just don't know, but I think it's really around how do you stay nimble, stay curious, and just develop those muscles around how do you use the tool to benefit yourself regardless of which app you're opening or which site you're going to? I think that's where we're spending the most time on, which is the development of those skills. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. We started talking about it already. Twenty thirty, flash forward to it. TZP, what's different about the firm? Forget the portfolio companies, forget all that. What's different about the firm and maybe the just standard operating model of private equity? I think it's it is a lot quicker investment decisions. I think the methodology around using external data and all your historical, I think, become will be so much faster. Right? Like, we looked at Bagel Store in two thousand eleven. We looked at a different Bagel Store in twenty eighteen, and now Bagel Store deal comes in in twenty thirty. Like, so much of this data sits within employees who might not work here anymore. It's on a drive. It's been archived. Like, that entire database now, like, we're already training a separate server just on everything that's on our shared drive already, like and that's right now. And that's with, like, a Mac mini. Like, The compute power by two thousand and thirty is gonna be so much better that you're talking about like seconds from the moment a deal comes in to being able to reference everything we've ever looked at, every reason we've ever passed on it. Yeah. What excites us? What's the real estate? Like, mean, you're gonna have the volume of data at your hands to decide, okay, well, they're saying they're gonna open thirty more. Can you open thirty more? Is every assumption will be verifiable, I wanna say, within seconds. Yeah. How much available commercial real estate? Is it available in the market? Can you pay what you think you can pay? And all that will be done with, like, you just click a button. I think it's gonna be called it'll call thirty seven real estate agents, if you even need to call them, or if it's all gonna be available publicly, and like, can I get the real estate? Yes or no? How many square foot? How much does it cost? Like, everything that now takes I gotta call somebody. I gotta get an estimate. Then I gotta wait for all these other service providers. Like, at that point, I think almost all of it's gonna be at the fingertips of everybody where you press a button, it's like, can I open a store in three weeks in this location for this amount of money? And it will tell you yes or no and why. And I think that ability to short circuit sort of the the the speed at which that can happen now, amazing. I still think, look, you've gotta be able to talk to people. At the end of the day, building businesses, building companies, there are gonna be people in every role still. They might be doing things slightly differently, their processes might but you gotta build the soft skills as much as you can right now, and I think that, to me, is an area that people need to lean in more on. Yep. And so I I think, look, you still gotta raise capital, gotta deploy capital, you gotta return it. Like, at the end of day, you need to do all that. Those things are not gonna change. How you deploy it, return it, I think the speed of all that, I think will happen a lot quicker. I still think people are gonna care about brands. It's still gonna matter to people. At the end of the day, you chose to put on that shirt and not another shirt. Okay. Why? How do you tell that story? Why does that matter? Can it get made in three days faster? Great. Let's make it three days faster. Hopefully, savings get passed on to the consumer because it's a lot easier on supply chain. But it's sort of to me, I think it's more of the the base economics. I think we'll hopefully get a lot better, which is you don't need as much overhead. You can get things from point a to point b quicker. And I think that will sort of hopefully allow cost to recede a little bit because I think costs have gotten very high on everything. But at the part of the I think the twenty thirty really is, like, can the underlying infrastructure to power all of the needs for AI be ready? And there's a lot of data out there right now that the power grid, the electrical systems that are flowing, the speed, the And so many people are like, oh, white collar, white collar, but like, who's gonna fix it when a transponder goes out and you have way more of them? Like, there aren't a ton more people going to be electricians. There aren't a ton more people going to do some of these jobs that in the past have sort of been labeled blue collar, but now are like, you gotta have an infrastructure that can be one of the most important jobs. And so I think that to me is like really gonna change. I think education, I think, is totally gonna get blown up. Like, my kids are right in this weird middle point where I have a thirteen year old, a ten year old. College, I think, will still be a thing for all the way through my ten year old, but if I have a one year old right now, I don't know. Like, they're sort of class of, like, twenty forty something, I don't know. Like, I think there is a lot to personalized learning, I think not everybody learns the same way, I think not everybody's interested in the same thing. I mean, you and I went through it, like, there are definitely classes where I was like, I love this, and I crushed it, and there are definitely classes where like, I really don't wanna be here right now, and I like, slogged my way through. Yep. But I don't know, like, there's a whole lot on the strengths finder, and what are people good at. Do you have to be good at everything? I don't know if you have to be good at everything. So if you can be great at these things, like, the assembly line model can apply to other parts of the workforce, which is you don't need to know how to paint the bumper if you can put on the door handle. Right. Okay, great. Be the best door handle put on her. If you're really great at talking with investors, like, maybe that needs to be your role. You're really great at this, and so I think how people learn and what they do is gonna be vastly different. I think it's already happening. It's it's hard to sort of put that in when these kids were already, I'll call it, voice native. They spoke to Alexa, they spoke to Siri growing up. That's right. Now they have AI coming at them. They use Notebook LLM to make a podcast like this that turns homework helper, sort of study sheet into a podcast that they can listen to on Spotify, where they're commuting on the subway or going being shuttled between practices. Like, that was an option for us. We had to sit there and read the thing, and then we had to write it in a marble notebook, and, like, that was how we learned. Now these kids are like, I just plug in AirPods, and the study sheet's been turned into an engaging conversation with real world news happening, and it's like, that's way more interesting and way to learn, and everyone learns differently. So I think that to me is like, by two thousand and thirty, the question will be sort of the incoming workforce, how much better will they be because they've never known a world without this? Yeah. Where we have to go learn it. Yep. And they've had it from day one. And so to me, think that's sort of the bigger question is, what are the type of people that you're gonna be able to employ now, and what skills are they gonna bring just because it's their entire life has been this way? I don't think we have an option but to wait and find out. Yeah. I mean, look, there's nothing more exciting. Like, I know there's a lot of there's obviously things that are not perfect with any technology that comes out in the world. There's a lot that has been written, said about some of the negative elements of AI. It's not worth rehashing there. When you sort of see that physics and math problems that were previously unsolvable are being solved now at such a quick rate, like, the opportunity for human evolution and what we can do and for everyone just sort of being nice to each other to some degree. Like, this is such a dramatic change in what the world could do for each other, that we all just sort of like stopped fighting, like, and just unified around, like, we all could be so much better off everywhere, like, not just in America, but in Africa can benefit from this and catch up much quicker now on certain things. Like, that is that's just super exciting to me, medical advances, like, and I think you're seeing every day, like, cancer treatments are coming out, like Yeah. Man, like I haven't hit PCP on my phone, I've been trying. It's great. Yep. I love it. I mean, I've loaded everything from every shred of medical of my own stuff that were sitting in, like, a MyChart has been loaded, it's Is it open? Been one thing. How I used to I mean, I still If I go to a website and it's, like, about cookies, I'm like, reject, reject, reject. Meanwhile, I will wear something around my neck that'll just record my entire day, if I could fix So I'm still an accept all on the cookies, because like, I feel like I owe it to like Yeah. My old internet advertising, where like, everyone who was like shutting this off were making my job harder. I was like, you know what, At this point, the amount of data that's already available about all of us and where we are at any one moment, like Wait. What flight am I flying? Everyone already knows that the two of us, but before this podcast came out, like, a whole bunch of Internet companies know that you and I have been sitting together in close proximity for the last forty minutes. That's true. And some of you probably heard half of what we said already anyway, whether we wanted to or not. So I'm still unacceptable on that. But, Jared, thank you so much for Elman on me, Keith. Appreciate it. Excellent. Thank you again as always for the help. CADRE has been an amazing partner to us and our portfolio, and we're we're incredibly excited about what we're gonna build together in the future. Love to work with you guys. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Alright.