Why First-Timers Win

Brandon William Jones (00:00) OK, OK, I'm excited to welcome Brother Charles Hudson to the Owner Mode Summit. He is the founder and GP of Precursor Ventures, which is an OG brand in Silicon Valley. You know, I've I've done my tour in Silicon Valley and Charles was there before I got there. He was there after I left and and he's very well known in the space as someone who ⁓ is really top tier when it comes to.

Pre-seed, the earliest earliest founders understanding, you know who is worth investing in why they worth invest in worth investing in and looking past barriers and challenges that others might Run away from and he sees the potential and attract record to support that. So with that Charles I appreciate you joining us at the Owner Mode Summit to share some of your wisdom particularly around ⁓ You know why? earliest stage investors

What are they looking for in their investments? So thank you for joining.

Charles Hudson (01:00) Thank you for having me. It's really an honor.

Brandon William Jones (01:03) Excellent. So we got to start a little bit with the background. Again, I kind of joke, but I'm kind of serious at the same time. When I landed in Silicon Valley, you were kind of already like an OG, right? And so you were really early in this thing. I don't know if a lot of people have the same level of visibility into the evolution of where we are today relative to where you are. So give us a little bit of background on where you're from, how you got into this game, and how much time do you have under the belt at this point?

Charles Hudson (01:26) Yeah.

Yeah, I'm originally from Michigan, but I've been living in the Bay Area for 30 years. So it's crazy to think it's been that long. And I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. My dad worked in the auto industry. My mom was a lawyer. I didn't know anything about tech entrepreneurship, but I was an entrepreneur in high school. I had a landscaping business, paper route, you name it. I did it in high school. And I liked this idea of having my

business, but I didn't think that was a job. I was like, this is something I do for money. And I came out to California and my eyes were opened. And I think, sometimes, Brandon, like when you show up in a place matters. And I showed up to the Bay Area in 1996 in kind of the middle of the first wave of the commercial internet. So eBay, Yahoo, all that stuff was starting to really take hold. And I was watching people I know.

start companies right out of school. And like, I was like, you can do that? I didn't even know you could do that. And I was like, where do get the money to start these companies? And people were like venture capitalists. And through a bunch of internships and serendipity, I ended up going into venture capital right out of undergraduate. And so I worked for In-Q-Tel, which was the CIA's venture capital group, and learned a lot about how venture capital works, really through the people who were running that firm and the exposure we had.

and got to see my first real super cycle and venture, you know, the, rise of the internet and then 2001 happened and it all came crashing down. And that was probably the first of several times in my career where people said the internet is over. Ventures dead. just burned all this money. It's never coming back. And it rose from the ashes only to crash again in eight for different circumstances. And so, ⁓ I kind of fell in love with tech investing and with.

⁓ venture capital from my early exposure. And I just said, I think I want to do this for the rest of my career. I love working with entrepreneurs. I love being on the cutting edge of new ideas. And I love ⁓ watching other people achieve success. I really do.

Brandon William Jones (03:40) There's a

there's a purity in your story because you went straight from school into VC. You weren't somebody who saw the first Internet bubble and then was exposed to the opportunities in tech. You kind of got in there beforehand because you really like to work with entrepreneurs. And so from that perspective, like, you know, you're you're the purest VC right a lot of ways because, know, you've now seen two or three booms and busts. Right. But when you first joined, it was really for the love of the entrepreneurs. And so.

You were focused on a pre-seed state. Tell us what that means and tell us why that was where you wanted to focus.

Charles Hudson (04:10) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, so pre-seed, you it means different things to different people. So I can tell you what it means to us. To me, pre-seed means a very specific, simple thing. We're trying to find people post-idea, but pre-revenue, pre-traction, pre-launch. So at the idea where you need the maximum conviction, that's where we want to get involved. Other people would say, pre-seed is post-launch with a little bit of data. I don't know, Brandon. The people I meet, they need the money that we're giving them.

to build the prototype and to get the data that people say they want to see at pre-seed. And something, how are people who don't have means supposed to get shot? And so we'll invest in like 30 or 40 of these idea stage teams every year. It's a wide variety of ideas. But my belief in people is pretty deep. And a lot of people we back, 70 % of them are first time founders. So we're not just grabbing rinse and repeat people who've done it before. We're trying to create pathways for people to.

to build equity and become owners in companies that matter. And that is like, you know, part of what I love about venture is like the founders in our portfolio who succeed in building really impactful, meaningful companies ⁓ create outcomes that don't just impact them, but impact them, their immediate family, the next generation, potentially even the generation after that. And like being a part of those journeys, just it's really special.

Brandon William Jones (05:38) Generational wealth love love love talking about that concept here at gravy. So You are at the riskiest end of risk capital, right? You know, you're talking about pre-seed idea 70 % first-time founders Tell us a little bit more around your thesis at precursor ventures within that space

Charles Hudson (05:58) So if you'll indulge me for a minute, think one of the big things we believe that maybe other people don't believe is there are a lot of people out there who have ⁓ significant entrepreneurial upside, but they are in jobs and roles where they're not utilizing any of those skills whatsoever. You know, I've worked in corporate America briefly before and I was like, you know, most of those jobs are designed to keep you in a box. You know, you are a marketing manager of XYZ product, like that is your domain.

and you are not supposed to color outside those lines. And entrepreneurship, as you know, is about doing a lot of different things to get the job done, whether you've had the training in doing those things or not. And I think the beauty of first time founders is nobody knows how good they can be. No one knows what the ceiling or the upside is on these people because they've never had the chance to actually be in the arena and be the person leading a company. And I believe we can identify some of the leading indicator traits that those people have.

and give them the opportunity to blossom and shine.

Brandon William Jones (07:01) So our audience, right, just to kind of ground you here, a lot of these folks are, you know, high achievers. They've achieved a certain level of success. They're here because there's this question in their mind, what's next, right? And for some people it's, I feel constrained as you spoke to in my current situation. I think I can do more, I can be more. For some people it's, I'm creating a lot of value. For other people it's time to create value for myself. For other people I have some earned insight about something I think I'm uniquely qualified to execute on, right?

Charles Hudson (07:07) Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Brandon William Jones (07:31) But you did kind of throw out there. there is a perking up like, wait, I think Charles is talking to me. He's speaking directly to me. But then you also said we can identify the leading indicators. So what are those leading indicators that you're looking for?

Charles Hudson (07:36) Yeah.

Yeah, I some of them are surprising maybe and some of them are not surprising. One of the ones that we found helps a lot is it really does help if you've built something from scratch or been a part of building. It doesn't have to be a startup. But one thing we look for is has this person ever been at the formation stage of anything? It could be you started a nonprofit. It could be you started a tech business. It could be you started a services business. And the reason I think this is so important.

is one of the big failure patterns we've seen with founders is people who've been incredibly successful in corporate environments. They're a master of managing up and they can work a bureaucracy like nobody's business. And then you put them in a room with a whiteboard and no plan. And they're just like, well, I don't have all the tools and tooling I'm used to having. And it's not that those people become less good because they're in that unstructured environment. It just demands a different skill set. And so I tend to look for people who

been a part of a creation phase of something? Because if you've been a part of that, most people have one of two reactions. Ooh, I love this. I love starting things. I love building things. I love being part of figuring it out or ooh, I don't ever want to experience that again. That was too chaotic. That was too messy. That was too stressful. And I say that with no judgment. It's just different people have different skillsets and being an entrepreneur, in my opinion, demands some willingness to like run toward chaos.

and to believe that you can take a chaotic situation and make sense of it. So any evidence someone has that they've done that before is a gigantic plus. Maybe more surprising, half of our top performing founders are people who came from the industry or had some pre-existing familiarity with the problem. That's probably not surprising. The other half are what I call naive optimists. The people who are new to the industry, who didn't know all the rules, and in some ways weren't constrained by knowing all the things that you're not supposed to do or the things that quote unquote won't work.

And they built these really amazing companies because they approached the problem with fresh eyes. So I think industry experience can help you, but also can hinder you if you're too caught up in the rules of the game that have always worked in the past.

Brandon William Jones (09:55) So in some ways, there's no win sweeter than a pre-seed win, right? Because you were the first one. You're a talent scout basically at that point, right? And so superhuman, modern health, the athletic, these are opportunities that you have identified that have gone on to spectacular outcomes. You mentioned a little bit, OK, they need to have these attributes. But some people had industry, 50 % had industry exposure.

There's the person and then there's the idea. And we know at the early stages that idea might pivot. Tell us a little bit around how you assess the idea itself and how you think about the pivot points.

Charles Hudson (10:26) Yeah.

Yeah, it's been fascinating. So when I started the firm, I would say I probably had more confidence in my ability to assess the quality of an idea. So in the beginning, I was like, oh, it's 60-40. It's 60 % the person, 40 % the idea. And we're a generalist firm, so we invest in everything. And over time, we have increased the importance of the individual and decreased the importance of the idea. And it's not because ideas don't matter.

It's that there's actually a smaller domain of ideas where I actually have an informed strong opinion. There are lots of things as a generalist where people will bring you a problem you've never seen before. And if you don't know that market cold, it's maybe you shouldn't be so reliant on your subjective assessment on whether it's good. So what I tell founders is you've got to be in the zip code of a good idea. You don't have to have everything figured out, but you've to be in the right neighborhood.

Because if you're not, it takes too long to pivot and find your way to it. we're now probably 70, 30 person to idea, which means, and I tell everyone that means the idea has to be like decent. It has to be like in a good universe, maybe not perfectly formed, maybe not on the surface a breakthrough, but it's gotta be a good enough idea to get started. And then the people have to be extraordinary.

Brandon William Jones (11:57) You are a numbers guy quantitative. I'm hearing 70 % first time founders, 50 % industry exposure. Where does the data and your judgment, how do they intersect and how has that changed over time?

Charles Hudson (12:07) man, it's such a good question. We just made our 500th investment ⁓ late last year. So.

Brandon William Jones (12:13) virtual round of applause from the audience.

That shows a lot of, we're the wrinkles.

Charles Hudson (12:18) Yeah.

Zoom filters and filter. ⁓ we, we've made a lot of investments. We've worked over a thousand founders. And so we've, we have a lot of historical data on everything from, you know, how do solo founded teams perform versus teams of two or three to T the companies in Silicon Valley versus else. We have all of this data. And as you can imagine, the temptation is to turn all of this data into rules and say, well, we've seen enough.

And the problem is the very best companies in venture capital are always outliers and they always break rules. So I always tell our team, the goal of having all of this data is to make informed decisions, not to have the data tell us what to do. So you you might say, wow, this set of circumstances is a lower probability of success. I'll give you a perfect example. We've had some very successful companies that did not have a technical co-founder at the start.

It is much less likely statistically that you will succeed with that configuration, but it's not zero. And there are very few things in venture where like over the history of time, the odds of success with that configuration is zero. But the question is if you're a founder and you're already doing something hard, do you want something that works 50 % of the time or something that works 1 % of the time? I tell people if you want to make your life easy, do the things that historically have correlated with success, provide those things are still true.

Brandon William Jones (13:46) And it's funny because today on launch day for the Owner Mode Summit ⁓ Songe and Dave from Squire, Samir from Esusu, all of them non-technical, right? $750 million valuation for one, $1.2 billion valuation for the other because they had specific insights on a problem that they faced and knew very deeply and were able to convince people that there was an opportunity.

Charles Hudson (14:10) And very few people, I mean, I met both of those teams early. Very few people believed the scale of the opportunity that they were going after. And thankfully those founders were right. And everybody else to their chagrin, including me, were wrong. So.

Brandon William Jones (14:25) So ⁓ let's talk a little bit around it again. You what I love about the pre-seed model is you're at the table taking some serious risk, but you also have to be compensated for that risk. If someone is looking to work with precursor, what are they giving up for your partnership?

Charles Hudson (14:41) Yeah, I mean the funny thing is we're not a majority. We're not like a control investor. We're not trying to buy 51 % of the business. I'm not trying to take a seat on the board. I'm trying to be a partner to people and even a partner with people. The deal has to be good for everybody and what I tell people is like we're going to buy or going to attempt to buy 5 to 10 % of the equity in the business. And as a 510 % equity holder, I don't run the company you do. I would like you to.

take me seriously if I have feedback, but take me seriously means listen to it, digest it, figure out how much of any of what I just told you applies to you, and then move on. It doesn't mean that 5 % buys me the right to boss you around and tell you what to do. doesn't mean 5 % means that my opinion or viewpoint will be the one that carries the day. It means hopefully I can build a relationship with you where when you have important decisions, you value my input. And to me, that's more about building

a relationship with someone of mutual respect and trust, then it is like, I own 12%. So you should listen to me three times as much as the guy that owns 4%. I found that that doesn't matter. What matters is how closely aligned the founder feels with your vision, how much they believe you care about them as a person.

Brandon William Jones (15:59) So let's talk about relationships and alignment. You're giving money, which a lot of these folks, as you mentioned, no one's ever turned down. Like these people need money to actually build. That's something that you see and maybe other folks don't. But once they are at the table, what should they be picking up the phone and talking to you about?

Charles Hudson (16:08) Yeah.

Wow. Well, I think even before they sit down at the table, I think it's important to understand what are you trying to build? know, venture capital is this capital type that works really well for businesses that aspire to be high growth big businesses. Not every business fits that bill. And if you don't aspire to build that, you should absolutely not raise venture capital. If you do, you could very well make yourself miserable. And I hate to see that happen to people. So I just want to put that plug in there.

We divide the world in between two tasks. There are management tasks and there are advisory tasks. If someone says, I don't know where I want to put this button on my website or I'm debating like a logo change, that's probably something you should do as management. If you're like my co-founder and I are at each other's throat and it feels like one of us needs to go, we should probably pick up the phone.

If somebody offers to buy the company, you should probably pick me up and call me at that. If you're thinking about a major expenditure or a key hire, I would like to think people would pick up the phone and call us. But my view, Brandon, is we have to earn the right to get that call. Some investors get mad. They didn't call me. like, well, they didn't call you because you didn't earn the right to get that call. Like, they didn't either value their relationship or value your insights enough to think, let me check in with this person before I make that decision.

And every time we have someone who does something where they don't check in with us, try worst ahead, I always ask myself, what could I have done better as an investor to have made that? And sometimes people are just like, I didn't know to call you about that. I'm like, well, that's not me. I should have educated you. And we do this as part of our onboarding. tell you, well, these are the kind of things we want you to bring to us. If you bring these things to us, we will show up for you. You can bring us other things that are not on this list. I don't always know if we'll be able to deliver on those.

Brandon William Jones (18:07) Marriage vows, kind of. ⁓ When you ⁓ say things like 1,000 founders, 500 companies invested, how in the world are you able to juggle the amount of time with such a lean team that even if somebody wants a conversation with you once a month, right? We're talking about some serious juggling. How does that work across the portfolio?

Charles Hudson (18:08) Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have a team of five people whose whole job it is to make me as responsive and available to our portfolio companies as possible. I frankly don't know how they do it. It's really a challenging task. We've built a lot of systems behind the scenes that help us with all of this stuff. And those have been critical to helping the firm. But the other thing is I take 20 meetings with founders in our portfolio every week. So.

That's scheduled plus another five that end up being someone texts me and said, something happened. You know, last Friday, someone texted me and said, hey, you know, this bubbling up situation with my co-founder and I, it came to a head and he's leaving the company. I when did this happen? He goes, 20 minutes ago. And I was like, well, that's about as real time as it gets. So that gives me a hundred opportunities a month.

talk to our portfolio companies and we have about 150 of them that are active and about 100 of those are pre-series A where we spend the most time with them. So in theory, I have a window for everybody once a month. Some people take two windows, some people are like, I don't need my window or I've graduated from it. So a lot of what we try to do is make sure there's enough scheduled time that people know they're gonna get a window with me, but also that there's enough capacity.

for one off, hey, this thing is hot or this thing is happening. I need your help.

Brandon William Jones (20:03) Got it. So one thing that, you know, again, as I mentioned, there's some purity around how you've approached the game, but I also say there's a lot of conviction. There's the number of VC firms that exist today versus when you started has exploded. Right. Let's let's use that term lightly. ⁓ You again, correct me if I'm wrong. Two hundred thirty ish million AUM, which is not a small fund, I believe, but you could make the argument with Andreessen raising 15 billion, you know, and

Charles Hudson (20:09) Yeah.

Yeah!

Brandon William Jones (20:32) is getting kind of crazy, right? And so ⁓ you have decided and you figured out the systems and processes to be able to spend time with your founders, you know, stay committed to what your original thesis is. But what would you say, you know, ⁓ your level of conviction around staying pre-C, staying focused on that, staying relatively small so you can deploy based on what you think is going to drive effective outcomes for founders and yourself? Where is, how has that evolved and have you stayed convicted? What are your reflections on?

Charles Hudson (20:53) Yeah.

Brandon William Jones (21:02) how you've approached the game and how things may have changed over time.

Charles Hudson (21:06) I think this is ⁓ an incredibly timely question. And this was actually for me the question for all of 2025. I think I spent more time on the question you just asked than any other question internal to our firm. And because when I started, our first fund was $15 million, but Andreessen was probably like a billion. The biggest venture funds were a billion. And this might sound weird, a very small $15 million fund and a billion dollar fund.

actually are kind of in the same business. A billion dollar fund needs like multi-billion dollar exits, maybe three to five. You own 20 % of that company, you can return your whole fund. I need kind of 500 to a billion dollar exit. So we're kind of in the same general lane. So we can work together in a really like complimentary way. I do the early investments, we hand them off to them. If you fast forward to today, you know, our fund is five times bigger, four times bigger.

The biggest venture funds are 10 to 15 times bigger. And the only thing that matters for them are like hundred billion dollar companies, not even $10 billion companies really matter to those funds. And so in a world where like I, for our model, a $5 billion outcome should return the whole fund and then some for them, a $5 billion outcome, it's a drop in the bucket. It doesn't really matter. It means that like,

We're not in the same business anymore Which which begs the question well if the people who are not in your business anymore have raised significantly more money than you Are you sure you're in a good business? It's a question. I'd ask any other entrepreneur I think what I've realized is those firms have really optimized their processes and business models for these like very far outlier outcomes We want those outcomes too. I'm just of the mind that I think they're gonna come from a different place

They're not gonna come from the first few high profile employees at whatever the company at the moment is. They're gonna come from people who have net new ideas and they won't all be heralded. And I think if you look at a lot of the, you you just go back to Google, they were PhD researchers. There was no search, there was no real search business at scale before Google. I could name, you know, Jeff Bezos was a...

hedge fund, I mean, there are a lot of examples of people who came into startup land and built these really significant companies and they weren't repeat founders or early employees at known companies. And so I think there's absolutely a place for investing in those people and the big funds are great at those, but someone's gotta be doing the talent scouting to find people in different places.

Brandon William Jones (23:57) Hmm, interesting. And it aligns with a lot of what we, know, Nasir Qadree from Zeal Capital's thesis is right. And so what I'm hearing is pattern matching and you 30 years in the valley, you understand cycles, you understand pattern matching, the pros and the cons. You're basically saying, look, the alumni of these organizations, that's where these big boys are going. We're going to look somewhere else. And once you identify the Larry and Sergei's of the world, the base of the world, people have now

use that as a template for pattern matching, but you're saying we need a new template now. What does that template look like to you in terms of carving out your space?

Charles Hudson (24:35) I continue to believe that it's funny. I don't want people to think that being an early employee at OpenAI isn't valuable. It totally is. You had a front row seat or being an early employee at Uber. These are like, you saw the inner workings and development of special generational companies and you have some secrets and knowledge that other people don't have. ⁓

But there's no guarantee that that magic pixie dust is gonna follow you out the door. Some of those things were unique to those companies in those moments. then, know, what I found is whenever I take Google, a long time ago, I was like, wow, there's like 25 or 30 people here who claimed to have invented the company's core ad business. I don't know that they're all, I don't know that anybody's lying, but it's probably not all 25 of them. And so I think it's very easy in this business to say, look, let's just,

get people who are at successful companies early and believe that the pixie dust will follow them. And if it doesn't, it's very easy to explain to our investors why we back that person. If you take risk on a person and it doesn't work out, some people are afraid of that question like, well, why did you give money to this person? What made you think they were qualified to succeed? And I think that's way too conservative of approach of capital allocation for my taste.

Brandon William Jones (26:01) In some ways, what you're saying is, instead of using proxies, do the work. What elements of doing the work, what does that look like? What does doing the work look like?

Charles Hudson (26:07) Do the work.

⁓ I think the problem with doing the work for a lot of people is it's inefficient. So if I said, Brandon, you're going to meet, ⁓ you're only going to meet people this week from open AI, anthropic, Google, Google's Gemini team. And, ⁓ I don't know, pick your favorite startup. The probability of you having a bad meeting or meeting someone where 15 minutes in you're like, this isn't good. It's very low. All of those people will be smart. All of those people will be qualified.

you'll probably have nothing but great meetings. When you go looking in other places, you have to have some tolerance for inefficiency. Because if it were easy to identify all of the people in this other world, there'd be no money to be made. Because you could use algorithmic signals, like where did they work and where did they go to school, and just say, I'm only going to meet people who went to Harvard or Stanford, who worked at Google, Meta, Adobe. You could write a script and you're like, I'm just going to meet these people.

And they'll all be lovely, talented people doesn't mean they'll be successful as founders. I meet people where 15 minutes in and make this person shouldn't start a company or this person is going to start a company and we're not going to invest. And I know it. And there probably was a higher, better use of these 15 minutes I just spent. But that's the cost of like looking in new places is you can't be as obsessed with efficiency. Part of like my view of this talent discovery thing is it's serendipity.

and it's a volume based business. So we try to meet as many founders as we can once at Precursor and then spend more time with the ones that like pique your interest. But if you're looking in places where other people aren't, not all those people are gonna be great. But the point is you just gotta find a couple that are special and the business works.

Brandon William Jones (28:01) So you're trying to meet as many founders as you can. Previously, your motto was, need to see, know, some people would say, I want to see a prototype at the pre-seed level. Now with AI tools and the AI boom, everyone has the ability to build something. Has your thesis changed at all based on the elimination of needing even VC funds earlier on or a CTO or engineering lead or any of those things? How does that change your calculus as far as meeting founders and what you need to see?

Charles Hudson (28:29) ⁓ I've seen a lot of great vibe coded demos, but most of those things aren't ready for production. But still, if you said, would I rather see a great vibe coded demo or nothing, definitely a great vibe coded demo. And I think these tools have made it much easier for non-technical people to make progress. Like one thing that I found fascinating is we have a company that lost their founding engineer and the CEO who's not technical started committing code to the code base using Claude code.

Now he wasn't re-architecting the whole system. He was doing small bug fixes and feature requests from customers. And he's like, wow, I'm now contributing meaningfully to the company's code base. And five years ago when that engineer left, all work would have come to a halt. And so I'm always asking myself, what has this person done with the financial and time resources they've been given?

And in some cases I'm like, wow, this person has done a lot. They vibe coded something, they went out and convinced someone else to work nights and weekends. And this other person is just sort of sat around and bemoaned the lack of a technical co-founder. The first person's the person I want to back. The person who says, what can I get done with the resources that I have available? And I think that's a really good sign of entrepreneurial ability is the ability when you're under resource to still make progress.

Brandon William Jones (29:58) We can go on for hours, but I'm going to hit you with one question. And I stumbled across your blog and I was like, Charles is a thinker. All right. And so we are at these, this very pivotal moment. think everyone can acknowledge it's a lot happening. have AI, the boom, we have the AI investment and how that's changed in a landscape. have mega funds going on. have insecurity within corporate. So a lot of people that were comfortable in these W-2s, they're uncomfortable now.

Charles Hudson (30:15) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Brandon William Jones (30:29) what would you say to the audience as far as what are the fundamental truths that they need to lean into, particularly as it applies to creating opportunity around ownership and generational wealth in a landscape where so much is changing. It seems like the haves may be in a position to have the most.

Charles Hudson (30:47) It sure does feel that way. And as soon as you grow up in Michigan, like I grew up during the decline of the auto industry. And that was a time when a set of jobs, namely like working in the auto plant were the stepstone to the middle, in some cases, the upper middle class for a lot of people. And those jobs went away and they weren't really replaced with much for that set of people, unless you made a pretty big investment in re-skilling yourself.

And I think for a long time tech jobs were highly coveted and secure. Now I'd say they're like reasonably highly coveted and insecure. And look, not everybody is meant to be an entrepreneur. Not everybody, not everybody can be an entrepreneur in every season of their life, Brandon. Like sometimes it's just not the right time to take on that risk. What I would say is with all this uncertainty, the question's like, in whose hands do you want to place your fate? You could place your fate in your own hands and

have some control and agency, scary, but like gives you control. Or you can put your fate in the hands of someone else, a big corporation, the government, something else. Everybody has to make their own decisions. But what I would say is if you're gonna put your fate in someone else's hands, you really should be thinking about, what should I do if they make a change? Because you probably won't get consulted. And so I think everybody needs to have

on some level, an independence plan. You've got to have a plan that like, like I have friends who had big corporate jobs, lost them in the last layoff cycle, searched for six months and kind of concluded, this is hard. Maybe like I shouldn't continue to look for a new corporate job. Maybe I need to reimagine how I could deploy my skills and ability. And a couple of them have like gone on and built fractional consultancies or have teamed up with other people and they're making more money.

They're happier, they're a more stressed because they got to make it all happen. do the math, but they're happier. But they had to be forced into thinking about other alternatives. And I think a lot of people are going to find themselves in this situation. And so would say just think about your skills and abilities as separate from the person to whom you rent or sell those skills and abilities. Because I think there will be some of us for whom the choice is not ours. And we have to view that as an opportunity.

scary as it may be.

Brandon William Jones (33:20) You just articulated the thesis for the Owner Mode Summit better than I have. And so I love that because it's the culmination of 30 years of experience of highs and lows. With that, we got to do a part two at some later point. But Charles, thank you for taking the time. I think you shared some wisdom that this audience is really going to benefit from. Audience, give Charles a virtual round of applause. Thank you for joining the Owner Mode Summit, Charles, and all the best to you as we navigate this next crazy year.

Charles Hudson (33:25) you

Thank you and you as well. This is a pleasure. Awesome.

Brandon William Jones (33:49) All right, take care.