All right, well, hopefully AirPods don't screw things up too bad, can look like humans on air,

and if we ever end up in a situation with microphones that are out of frame,

it'll be game-changing, it'll be like we're talking to each other.

Welcome to season 10 episode 4 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies

and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder and

managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund PSL Ventures.

And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

And we are your hosts. We've done Sequoia, we've done Andres and Horowitz,

but we have not gone deep on one of the biggest stories in venture right now,

crossover investing. We are watching hedge funds like Tiger Global and Cotu come all the way down

to seed investing and we're simultaneously seeing classically early-stage venture capital

firms like Sequoia completely reinvent their structure to hold onto their winners longer even

as they become public companies. And today we wanted to analyze one of the firms that pioneered

this dual approach of operating a hedge fund and a venture capital firm simultaneously,

altimeter capital. There has been so much change in venture in the last few years. More change

I think in the last few years than in the decade that I was doing venture than watching it before.

And listeners, to tell the story right, we are joined today by Brad Gersner, the founder of the firm

and actually to tell you the truth, he is joined by us. We actually recorded this episode in person

even with video, stands, microphones, everything at the altimeter office on Sand Hill Road.

And for those of you who don't know, Brad has had an unbelievable career starting five companies,

so he's got a very different mentality than your sort of classic hedge fund guy. On the investing side,

he led the series C in Snowflake and still owns a massive stake of the company. He's led large

...