Hello and welcome back to Equity a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack

the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. I'm Marianne Asavado and this is our interview show where we sit down with a guest think about their work and

unpack the rest. Today we're joined by Hans Tun, managing partner at Notable Capital, formerly

G. G. G. V. Capital. A change we'll get to later in the show. It's a firm focused

on investing in the US as well as in Europe, Israel, and Latin America. Hans,

welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Marianne. It's always a pleasure to be here.

Today we're talking about a number of topics, including Hans' thoughts on the overall investment landscape.

Why Down Rounds are not such a bad thing.

What's going on in the world of FinTech, which has had a little bit of a rough start to the

year, Venture Capital as a whole, where we're seeing lots of musical chairs going on, and more.

Let's get started. Last year, I had the pleasure of going on

equity.

equity and one of the things that we discussed was down rounds,

which for a while seemed like they were almost an evil phrase but became much more accepted I guess in

2023.

At the time you said you felt like down rounds were okay and in fact you know not necessarily a bad thing especially when

faced with either shutting a company down or raising a round at a lower valuation are you still thinking that this year? What are you seeing when it comes to valuation?

Yeah, every time someone ask me the question about Down Round, I think of that episode in Silicon Valley where they found to realize,

wait, if I just raise more money down round I will still have my company, still have to shut it down.

It's a classic.

You know, I've been been this for almost 20 years and we're long-term in the

way we approach things I always know that it doesn't matter about the markoffs

...