Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and I'm here today with Jamie McGirk, who runs our corporate development function, James Loftus, who is on Jamie's team and focuses on consumer side of corporate development. And Tyson Clark, who focuses on the enterprise side of corporate development. Welcome, guys.

Thanks.

So the reason we're doing this podcast is because, you know, you guys wrote a post

talking about why founders should engage with corporate development to kind of counter

the meme out there that comes up every so often, like, oh, don't waste your time engaging

with corporate development.

And, you know, you can find that post on our website, obviously, but we thought it'd be

great to talk it through because it really struck a chord with a lot of people. And you guys got a lot of comments and questions on that. So let's kick off by actually just talking about what corporate development is. I know that's kind of a thing that comes up a lot. Sure. Yeah, corporate development has a, it's a generic moniker. I mean, we have a corporate

development function here, and you don't usually associate that with a venture capital firm.

Core development means a lot of things. They're focused on the inorganic growth opportunities

for a company, so whether that's investing in a company, whether it's partnering with a company,

whether it's acquiring a company.

It's most known for the acquisitions that they do. But it refers to all of the inorganic activities. So the activities that come outside of a company through partnering acquisition

and investment. Why we said about writing this post and doing this podcast doing this podcast was, um,

uh,

we got a lot of questions from our portfolio companies of,

you know,

should we engage?

Should we not engaged?

And, you know,

the meme was out there that's,

as someone will mention that,

...