Hi everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and we're continuing slash starting our series today on how the outcomes of the election and beyond affect tech in this episode in particular capital markets, VC, etc. Joining us to have this conversation, we have our managing partner, Scott Cooper, and we have Bobby Franklin, the president and CEO of the National Venture

Capital Association. Welcome, guys. Great. Thanks, Searle. Thank you for having us. I mean, one very

obvious question to just kick things off is how do elections affect markets, like market behavior in

general? You know, and obviously, look, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, certainly and what

their ideas are obviously matters, but at a higher level, what you tend to see is, particularly when you

have new administrations coming in, this kind of excitement about what new policy can do to help

stimulate growth in the overall economy. You see this a lot in what's playing out today in the Trump

rally, right, that a lot of people on Wall Street talk about, which is if you look at the major stock market averages over the last two months in general, it's been pretty much an up and to the

right. And a lot of that is kind of excitement and saying, hey, based on what we heard in the campaign,

if they actually do some of these things, they might be, you know, net stimulative to the economy.

And then I think what happens is reality sets in, the reality of the Washington process, which is these

things take time to get done, and there's reconciliation and all these other things that have to

happen. Yeah, the way we think about it in Washington is when you have an election, and

particularly when you have results of election, where the White House and Capitol Hill,

both House and Senate are all now controlled by the same party.

There's this optimism that, okay, less gridlock, actually things will get past, things will get done.

When you actually get people in place and when you put a bill on the floor of the House or Senate and you start to deal with the White House. Now you're starting to realize

that, well, that's actually harder than it was talking about it on the election trail. So that's where

the reality sets in and it starts to get really difficult. Could there be a relaxation on things like

Volker Rule in the capital markets.

The Volker Rule was something that had been put in place,

which effectively kept banks from being able to make investments into, you know,

...