Growing up in humble circumstances in Ohio, Bob Goodof discovered he had a head for numbers from playing with his baseball cards. At MIT he excelled in material science. After stints in the chemical industry and an MBA from Harvard, Bob became an investment analyst on Wall Street specializing in the oil and gas industry. He now invests as an angel with Walnut Ventures and teaches at Babson. He’s a sought-after advisor to startups and a valued colleague to other angels.
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Here are the highlights form this fun and engaging conversation:
Sal’s Pitch for Angel Invest Boston Syndicates
How Bob Goodof Dodged a Career in Journalism and Ended Up in Engineering
Bob Goodof Is a Guy Who Does His Numbers
Bob Goodof Dodges a Career in Aero & Astro, Ends Up in Material Science aka Metallurgy
Bob Goodof Gets an “Industrial MBA” from Dow Chemicals in His First Job
Bob Goodof Was Very Relaxed at Job Interviews, Perhaps Too Much So
Why Bob Goodof Decided to Get a Real MBA – The Real Value of a Harvard MBA
An Intro to the World of Investment Analysts
Bob Goodof Tries to Drag HBS Kicking & Screaming into Entrepreneurship Projects
Bob Goodof Gets Fired from His First Job after HBS; 18% Mortgage + an Attempt to Create a Software Newsletter
Bob Goodof Makes a Connection Playing Hockey & Gets a Job at Eaton Vance
Being an Analyst Was the Perfect Job; Bob Goodof Got to Ask Questions Companies Had to Answer
The Origin of Bob Goodof’s Entrepreneurial Urge + Breeding Lobsters in the Brine
Bob Goodof’s Rule: “Beware Wisconsin CEOs with Deep Tans” – What He Looks for in Management
How the Investment Business Changed during Bob Goodof’s Career
Bob Goodof’s Take on Why Fund Managers Buy and Sell Shares So Frequently
Sal Reads Helldoc88’s iTunes Review and Urges Listeners to Leave Their Own Reviews
How Bob Goodof Started Angel Investing
Bob Goodof’s Take on the Associative Nature of Creativity
What Bob Goodof Likes to Tell Founders
Is there a Danger in Investing Only in Areas You Know?
Why Bob Goodof was Intrigued by Fortified Bike
Bob Invests in a Nutraceutical Company
Startups Bob Goodof Is Excited About: UltraCell, DropWise & Poly6
UltraCell
DropWise
How Did Poly6 Avoid the Distraction of Too Many Possibilities?
A CFO That Can Say No
How Bob Goodof Stated the Off Wall Street Conference for Oil & Gas Bigs
Transcript of "From Oil & Gas to Cleantech"
Guest: Bob Goodof
Sal’s Pitch for Angel Invest Boston Syndicates
SAL DAHER: Hi. This is Sal Daher with the Angel Invest Boston Podcast. If you've been listening, you might have noticed that I love being an angel investor in Boston. The reason for this is that there's so much going on in the startup space here in Boston. Practical founders working with leading inventors, venture capitalists, angel investors, patent attorneys. It's a really exciting scene.
SAL DAHER: Now, you can join us in syndicates which allow people who are not part of the angel investment community to invest alongside Boston's leading angels. I invite you to leave your email address at angelinvestboston.com in the syndicate section and we'll be back in touch with you to help walk you through the qualification process as an accredited investor. Remember, there is no obligation to invest when you put your email address there. I hope you really enjoy today's podcast.
SAL DAHER: Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angel investors and founders. I am Sal Daher and my goal for this podcast is to learn more about building successful new companies. The best way I can think of doing this is by talking to people who have done it, people such as investment analyst and angel investor Bob Goodof. Bob, thanks for making time from your really busy schedule to be here.
BOB GOODOF: I'm happy to be here, Sal.
Bob Goodof Bio
SAL DAHER: It's tremendous you're here. Listeners, a disclosure is in order about my guest. He is excessively humble. In an age of constant hype, Bob Goodof is always underselling. With that in mind, here is his biography. Bob grew up in Columbus, Ohio in a family in which there was food on the table and not much else. An early love of baseball cards allowed him to discover a facility with statistics. He was surprised to be admitted to MIT and struggled to catch up, eventually maintaining a 4.8 out of 5 GPA in material science, a pretty demanding major.
SAL DAHER: After a productive stint in the chemical industry, he did his MBA at Harvard. Bob went on to a 30-year career as a respected investment analyst in the oil and gas sector. Bob Goodof now invests as an angel and as a highly valued colleague at Walnut Venture Associates. This is not idle praise. Bob has few rivals in how much work he does in trying to understand companies. This assiduousness and attention to detail, plus his always generous willingness to connect startups with his vast networks, adds a lot of value to our investing.
SAL DAHER: Bob co-teaches a course on sustainable finance in Babson's MBA program, and is a guest lecturer in energy finance at the Brandeis International Business School. He also advises companies on energy and chemical projects. He is on the advisory board of Poly6, a very promising clean tech startup. Bob still manages the Off-Wall Street Energy Symposium, an annual conference he started for top brass in energy companies.
SAL DAHER: Bob Goodof is not only generous to other angels and founders, but also to people who are much in need. He is a lifetime million-dollar fundraiser for the Pan-Mass Challenge and is very active in an advisory role at Hebrew Senior Life Elder Care. I'm really proud to have Bob Goodof with us. This is great, Bob.
BOB GOODOF: Thank you.
How Bob Goodof Dodged a Career in Journalism and Ended Up in Engineering
SAL DAHER: Bob Goodof, the good in Goodof means he's a really good guy. Okay? The name fits perfectly. As a tradition on this podcast, the first question or few questions are aimed at helping our younger listeners, still trying to find a direction in life. And I know that you're a person who likes to help people. So, Bob, I understand that in high school, you had the ambition of being a newspaper reporter. But then you changed your mind. Please tell that story.
BOB GOODOF: Well, as usual, what you want to do sometimes relates to the first thing you can do. And as an early child, I read history books, the most memorable being A Child's History of the World, which was a history book written for children in fairy tales fashion. And in school, when asked to write an essay about something, I would write about something I read in the history book. And it turns out, that I could put a subject and a verb together fairly early in life and I became known as a good writer.
BOB GOODOF: So, I went on and worked on newspapers and did such things into high school. It was sometime in high school that I started looking at what careers were available for journalists and found that out of a hundred or a thousand journalists, there was only one Walter Lippman, and said, well, maybe the odds aren't that great. So, I looked at what was next and I was pretty good at math and okay at science and said, well, maybe I should find something in the science and engineering direction.
SAL DAHER: That is splendid illustration of the concept of self-knowledge and also of having a rational attitude about your passions.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah. I still like to write and I think I'm a good writer, although my wife is an editor and she's better.
Bob Goodof’s First Entrepreneurial Venture
SAL DAHER: You are very helpful with your writing. You really help a lot, because you write up reports on your due diligence calls, which a lot of our colleagues don't do. And I'm so, so grateful for your due diligence reports. They are very, very useful. Also, in your humble way, you disclaim ever being an entrepreneur, but you did fund part of your high school and college education by driving an ice cream truck and how did that come about? What did you get from the experience?
BOB GOODOF: Well, it started out when I was making $1.65 working at one of these K-Mart pre-companies. It was called Tops or something like that and moving boxes around. And found that a good friend of mine was selling ice cream and he was in his second year. Back in Columbus, there was a-
SAL DAHER: Second year of high school?
BOB GOODOF: Second year of selling ice cream.
SAL DAHER: Oh, of selling ice cream. Okay.
BOB GOODOF: And back there, there was a fellow who owned about 35 trucks and you could go down there with a driver's license basically and train for a day and buy inventory and he'd give you the truck, the gasoline, and everything. And you'd make 23%.
SAL DAHER: Wow.
BOB GOODOF: And so, he was starting his own business trying this, but he was kind of a wild kid and about halfway through the summer, he wrecked the truck and ended up having to go back to work for 23%.
BOB GOODOF: I was a little more diligent, made it through my summer, and then spent, unfortunately, certain parts of my first year at MIT, planning for doing exactly what he did, but with better results.
SAL DAHER: Right, right.
BOB GOODOF: Ran the numbers, found out how much the truck cost and knew I had to have a freezer, looked for sources of ice cream. And then in the spring, on break, I went back to my old boss and said I was going to compete with him. And he says, "Well, you don't need to do that. That would be bad for both of us." So, he took out a piece of paper and wrote down my new prices. And I said, that's pretty good. So, the risk I took was I had to take care of my own truck and everything else. But I got my own district and I had less competition. And I spent the summer selling popsicles and Drumsticks and everything else.
BOB GOODOF: The plan worked out just about right because I had assumed that the truck would be worthless at the end of the summer and about three days before the end of the summer, it threw a rod and was useless.
Bob Goodof Is a Guy Who Does His Numbers
SAL DAHER: This is the guy who does his numbers, okay? You know, it's so funny that you're talking about you were going over the numbers when you were in your first year at MIT and calculating the cost, the fuel, all the ... Fast forward forty years, and you're sitting there, we're doing due diligence to this company and you're looking at us saying, "Oh the feed stock costs so much and there's this supplier and that supplier." It's the same thing. It's amazing.
BOB GOODOF: That's a good point, because I hadn't thought about it at that time, because later we could talk about my investment analysis experience. But what I really decided I liked was business models, was understanding how things worked. And if I found an opportunity that worked for me, then maybe I could participate. But I was always interested in other people's business models, too, whether I understood the business or not.
Bob Goodof Dodges a Career in Aero & Astro, Ends Up in Material Science aka Metallurgy
SAL DAHER: Oh, speaking of business models, you had another pivot, so to speak, when you were at MIT. Please talk about that.
BOB GOODOF: So, I had decided I wanted to be an engineer. So, I did get into MIT, surprisingly, and worked awfully hard the first year after some early failures, then sold ice cream between the freshman and sophomore years. After sophomore year, where I had taken some aeronautics courses, I had a job that was linked for me from the material science professor that I had had the year before. And it was kind of fortuitous, because this was after the Santa Barbara oil spill and there was a demand for oil boom to try to corral oil spills so you could limit the damage to the beaches.
BOB GOODOF: And so, this small company down South Boston, near the water, had gotten a franchise to sell what they called Oil Boom, which is 160 feet of plastic with weights in the bottom and floats on the top. And you pull it around on the water and it corrals the oil and then you can vacuum it up and reuse it, theoretically.
SAL DAHER: Right, right.
BOB GOODOF: Another friend and I got the job, spent a couple weeks working in the scow of a boat, not training but just being cheap labor. And then we started driving this truck around the country, doing demonstrations at port authorities and coast guard terminals and things like that. So we get to the West Coast and I'm looking around and I'm finding that all the Boeing engineers are driving taxis. It was one of many of the cyclical downturns in the aerospace industry and I said, "Jeez. If I didn't want to become a journalist because I wasn't sure about the prosperity, maybe I don't want to be an aeronautical engineer because of the cyclicality."
BOB GOODOF: So, I go back east and I change to material science. And it was the best decision I could have made, because I loved every course and did all right at it and had fun at it.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. And it's particularly unfair because aero and astro is one of the hardest majors at MIT, not that material science is easy, but aero and astro is just like famously, famously demanding. And yet you get out and you have a ... It's extremely cyclical. You can only go work for Boeing or a handful of companies.
BOB GOODOF: There weren't many opportunities back then.
SAL DAHER: Or NASA or so forth. Yeah. It's a pity.
BOB GOODOF: That's true.
Bob Goodof Gets an “Industrial MBA” from Dow Chemicals in His First Job
SAL DAHER: You got an on-the-job MBA at Dow Chemical, yet you went to Harvard Business School. You got out of college and you connected with that first job. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that first job, where you got your on-the-job MBA. And then we'll get on this thing about the real MBA.
BOB GOODOF: One of my professors, late in my MIT career, was a composites/polymers guy and back then, material science was basically metallurgy and steel and a little bit of ceramics. And the plastic stuff was left to the chemical engineers.
SAL DAHER: Right.
Bob Goodof Was Very Relaxed at Job Interviews, Perhaps Too Much So
BOB GOODOF: I ended up with a course that he was taking where we hit it off and he was a consultant to several chemical companies and asked if I'd be interested and I said, "Of course." And by then, I was a little tired of Boston and was willing to move elsewhere and he helped me get interviews at a couple of the chemical companies. I got offers at the companies, probably more because of him than me. I remember falling asleep on one of the interviewers.
SAL DAHER: Not a good interviewing technique.
BOB GOODOF: And that was at Dow, it turned out. I took the job at Dow. I moved out to Midland and started as a lowly engineer. Worked a strike, actually, at one time and had a couple of different projects within their plastics department. And in looking for other things to do and having a fairly good resume at the time for Dow, I was offered the chance to become an economic evaluator, which was a business-type job where you got to sit there and help work on capital authorization requests and pricing strategies and so on. And I got an exposure to an entire part of the world that I had no idea. I didn't know what marketing was. I didn't know what business was. I had almost not been through a plant.
BOB GOODOF: So, I got to spend a year wandering around as the guy who said, "Well, that's a good business," or not, with the education of how to do discounted cash flow and run all the Dow assumptions and so on. This was back when you would run it all by hand once and then after you learned it, you'd get everything on a punch card and somebody else would run it.
BOB GOODOF: So, I remember the head of one of the departments telling me, "That is the equivalent of a ... That's the industrial MBA." The problem was, an industrial MBA was only good at Dow. And there was a saying at Dow that the number one reason people stayed at Dow was Midland and the number one reason people left Dow was Midland. Small company town, well taken care of, but everybody knew everybody else and what they were doing. And after about five years, I was tired and wanted to come back east.
Why Bob Goodof Decided to Get a Real MBA – The Real Value of a Harvard MBA
BOB GOODOF: Coming back east, I took another plastics job in New Hampshire, and it was like going from the top of the heap to something closer to the bottom. And it wasn't long after that that I figured, how else can I find a career change where I can stay in the Northeast? And applying to business school seemed to be the right thing to do.
SAL DAHER: So it was a way to pivot from the chemical direction you were going in?
BOB GOODOF: Yes. And I didn't know what I would be as an MBA, but I applied and what I like to say is I got into the only business school that let me in. And so I attended Harvard.
SAL DAHER: Okay.
BOB GOODOF: But, to your question, my analogy was that MIT education, to me, was knowledge, was power. And Harvard Business School or most MBAs is who you know is more important than what you know and not to denigrate on Harvard, and I don't necessarily exploit that network, but it certainly showed me the value of a network.
An Intro to the World of Investment Analysts
SAL DAHER: And you are somebody who certainly exploits networks very well. Before we get into your career, 30 years on Wall Street as an analyst, please explain briefly for our audience what an investment analyst does, so we're all starting from the same basis.
BOB GOODOF: So, the basis of the industry is the Fidelities and the Capitals and the Hancocks of the world invest money for clients in, whether it's mutual fund or for pension funds, and they typically hire portfolio managers to structure a portfolio, and they usually have a raft of analysts who cover specific industries. There might be a consumer products analyst and a tech analyst and a waste analyst and an oil analyst and a chemical analyst and others. And sometimes there will be a large cap oil analyst and a small cap oil analyst and so on, depending on the size of the firm.
BOB GOODOF: And so, the analyst's job is to understand his industry, figure out the pecking order, and then deliver recommendations based on the interests of the portfolio manager. So, if you had a growth portfolio manager, you're probably not going to be giving him too many chemical stocks, but if you've got a small cap oil guy, you might be giving him all kinds of small Texas drillers or things like that. So it's kind of a horses for courses recommendation.
SAL DAHER: You're sort of the intelligence analysts for the operatives who are the decision-makers, the fund managers, and you're telling them what the lay of the land is and you're letting them pick stocks based on that.
BOB GOODOF: Yes. And-
SAL DAHER: Making recommendations, but they're the ones that make the decision.
BOB GOODOF: They make final decisions in most environments. There were some cases where you make the decision. And then, there are two divisions. There's the buy-side analyst, who works for the mutual fund and then there's the sell-side analyst, who works for the Wall Street brokers, the Morgan Stanleys and so on. And the buy-side analyst might cover a hundred companies. The sell-side analyst might cover 15 but cover them really deeply. And he has to run around the country, marketing his ideas and schmoozing clients so they pay brokerage fees. He makes his money off of brokerage fees. We make our money only if the stocks perform one way or the other.
SAL DAHER: Right. And you were a buy-side analyst.
BOB GOODOF: I was a buy-side analyst.
SAL DAHER: Right, right. So, you got your MBA at Harvard. So how is it that you got into investment analysis?
Bob Goodof Tries to Drag HBS Kicking & Screaming into Entrepreneurship Projects
BOB GOODOF: So, between there, I ran a small business field study program for Harvard for the business school in my second year. This is an interesting one, because at the time, HBS did not have an entrepreneurial environment. They had an entrepreneur professor, but nobody else really cared. And we had a small business club and our job was to try to find field projects for second year students and I took it on myself to do that. And I ran all over the East Coast, not ... the Boston area, looking for folks who had projects that they might be willing to farm out. And I remember standing up at an SBANE meeting, the small business consultants, I think, of New England, or associates of New England, saying, "This is your chance to hire a Harvard MBA for what he's worth." And I got a number of projects, maybe 25 projects. But I needed a professor to advise on them. And the professors had no interest.
BOB GOODOF: I put leaflets under all their doors, and nothing is happening. So one day, it was a Sunday afternoon, I just remember it so clearly. I get a call from the dean of the case study curriculum at the Harvard Business School, Chris Christiansen, and he says, "These are wonderful projects." He says, "I will take on every single one that you can't find someone else for." And we were able to fill those projects.
Bob Goodof Gets Fired from His First Job after HBA; 18% Mortgage + an Attempt to Create a Software Newsletter
BOB GOODOF: At any rate, I took on a project for something out of Hanscom Air Base, which I thought was interesting, and met the entrepreneur. And he was a terrible entrepreneur, but he offered me a job and I wanted a small business venture-type job. I really wanted to be in private equity, but back then you had to be a graduate of the Air Force Academy or something like that to qualify for the profile of private equity and venture capital. But I took what I could and I worked for him.
BOB GOODOF: I had an 18% mortgage and after about four or five months ... It was 1982, end of a recession, and his wife fired me. So, I spent the winter with a big mortgage, trying to start a software newsletter. And the reason I had done that is that I had had a summer job where I learned to use VisiCalc and said, "Wow. I could study a lot of stocks doing this." And so I tried to start a consumer's guide for software. And I begged for software from companies. I got free software. I got a couple of MBA kids who helped me review them. We put out a newsletter. It was terrible. I knew nothing about graphics. And so, I had maybe okay content, but not much else.
BOB GOODOF: Meanwhile, I had started ... I was a hockey player and I ran a couple of hockey games-
SAL DAHER: You knew nothing about graphics of your newsletter.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah, I knew nothing.
SAL DAHER: So, the design. Not about graphics software.
BOB GOODOF: I knew nothing about that either. I could do the word processing and the spreadsheets, but I couldn't do the rest of it.
SAL DAHER: Right.
Bob Goodof Makes a Connection Playing Hockey & Gets a Job at Eaton Vance
BOB GOODOF: So, meanwhile, I was a goalie in a couple of different leagues and I got to know Harvard alums who wanted to play hockey and one of them happened to work for Eaton Vance. 1983 comes around, the market's taking off, he's the chemical analyst. He doesn't want to be the chemical analyst any more. I came out of the chemical industry. So he says, "Would you like to give it a try?"
SAL DAHER: Okay.
BOB GOODOF: I said, "What the heck?" not knowing what the investment business was like. They always said, "If you don't like it, you can put your pencil back in your pocket and leave." So what I found was, I love asking questions. I love learning about businesses. I love the peripheral stuff like what's going on maybe a little bit off the stage. As opposed to the summer I had consulting, when you asked them a question, when you make a cold call asking a question, they have to call you back.
SAL DAHER: Right.
Being an Analyst Was the Perfect Job; Bob Goodof Got to Ask Questions Companies Had to Answer
BOB GOODOF: So, I really enjoyed it. This was a perfect job for me back then. What I also found was, since the industry had not grown in 10 years, most of the people in the industry, the professionals, were 10 to 15 years older than me. And they were still living on price to earnings, pretty simple metrics. And I had just come out of business school, where I had learned about discounted cash flow and costed capital and all this. And I started using VisiCalc at the time, where they were barely using VisiCalc. And at the end of every report, I added a little DCF.
SAL DAHER: VisiCalc, a predecessor to Lotus 1-2-3, which was the predecessor to Microsoft Excel?
BOB GOODOF: Yeah.
SAL DAHER: Yeah.
BOB GOODOF: And so all of a sudden, I was able to do something that nobody else was doing to evaluate these things. Now, maybe they didn't like what I was doing and maybe the stocks did or didn't do well, but at least it was a different form of analysis.
BOB GOODOF: And so, I was able to appear creative by doing something that just was coming in from a different perspective.
The Origin of Bob Goodof’s Entrepreneurial Urge + Breeding Lobsters in the Brine
SAL DAHER: Good. You were asking questions that were different and new from other people. Let's go back a little bit to your attempt to write that software newsletter. What led you to think that you could have your own business?
BOB GOODOF: You know, I think I've always been a chicken entrepreneur and interested in new ideas. The ice cream was something I actually did. Later on, at Dow, for instance, Midland was ... That was started basically to exploit brine wells, you know salty water in Michigan and make chemicals out of the brine. And I'm sitting there with a good friend of mine, who's the younger MIT grad, out in Midland one day and we said, "Well, jeez, brine is salt water. Why don't we grow lobsters?" It turned out that the problem was, if you put all the male lobsters down the well, they wouldn't procreate and if you put them too close to the females, they'd fight each other. And it wasn't going to work.
BOB GOODOF: But I was always willing to come up with a kind of a crazy idea and that probably came from my mother who used to ask some really interesting questions about air conditioning and things like that.
BOB GOODOF: So, along the way, I think I just ... I asked different questions. I don't think it made me creative. It just was coming in from a different direction.
SAL DAHER: It's funny that you mention this business of asking questions. Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired Magazine, in his book Inevitable, which is by the way a book I highly recommend, it's an interesting way of understanding technological trends. He speaks for the value of asking questions. At a time where answers are so readily available, where you can get an answer from Google really quickly on things, the value of good questions is at a premium. And he's saying as AI develops and so forth, it's going to become a distinctly human thing to come up with questions for AI to answer. What are your thoughts on that?
BOB GOODOF: I think it's helpful for research and in my teaching, I Google all the time. I'm looking for the right chart to show within a context. But it's one level of learning that's not, especially as an analyst, and probably as someone who's just curious about the overall question, it's not enough. For instance, when I'm in a meeting with you, I can tell whether you have a tan. It tells me something about your lifestyle.
SAL DAHER: Right.
Bob Goodof’s Rule: “Beware Wisconsin CEOs with Deep Tans” – What He Looks for in Management
BOB GOODOF: And the reason that was important in investing, was every once in a while, you'd see a CEO from Wisconsin with a really beautiful tan and you'd wonder, what the heck is he doing for us? And that has helped me more often than I would say I could count.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, this guy is checked out.
BOB GOODOF: Yes. And so, even in the world of conference calls, which until the mid-90s never existed. You-
SAL DAHER: So you'd look for a healthy pallor in a CEO from a Northern state?
BOB GOODOF: Well, you look for a variety of characteristics. That's just one idea. But you learn by listening to someone talk and seeing his intonation. Visiting company headquarters, which rarely happens anymore, now it's all analyst meetings in New York or somewhere like that, and finding out, for instance in one case, that every time I left the men's room, the lights were turned off the next time I went in. Well, there's a company that's really particularly concerned about, at the time it wasn't the environment, it was just the cost of electricity. It was a culture. And so you learn so much about culture and I think even in angel investing, culture is probably 50 to 70% of the opportunity.
How the Investment Business Change during Bob Goodof’s Career
SAL DAHER: Yeah. I had meant to get into that. How did you, in the 30 years that you were an investment analyst, how did the business change? How'd the work change?
BOB GOODOF: Oh, boy. Early 1980s, the average holding period of a stock was something like seven years and I didn't know it at the time. And when I found out 20 years later, I couldn't believe it. But by the mid-90s, it was probably a year and now it's in a period of months and there's a huge part of the market that trades multiple times a day. And I attribute it to two things. The first is ERISA. You know, ERISA was passed in 1986 and it was basically the pension program which basically allowed folks to set up 401Ks and 401Ks could invest in a tax-deferred basis until you withdrew the money and you'd pay taxes at the other end. And that grew to be probably two thirds of the US equity markets. They don't have to be short-term investors.
BOB GOODOF: In 1983, there were all long-term investors. 1993, 2000, 2005, sure there were long-term investors, but maybe we're suckers and so the-
SAL DAHER: So you're saying that because of ERISA, two thirds of the portfolios are not taxable, so if you sell a stock early and you take a gain, you don't get hit for the taxable.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah. It's not a level playing field. So maybe a third of the market cares about tax implications. Two thirds of it doesn't. And it doesn't matter about the third. The two thirds is basically driving the market. When it was 5%, it was one thing. But now we have, between quantitative trading and a tax-deferred nature, you just have a different playing field.
BOB GOODOF: The other factor to me was called Reg FD and it used to be ... It's funny. Call in 1995, I could call my favorite company. If I had a really good relationship with a company, which was one of the things you got from visiting the company and spending time with them, is you could say, "How was business last week?" And they'd say, "Well, we didn't ship quite as much but we got a big order, so we're going to be okay."
BOB GOODOF: Back then, you probably didn't sell the stock if the orders weren't quite so good, but you get a couple of those weekly reports and maybe you think it's time to sell. That's illegal now. People lose their jobs for that. And so, it's leveled the-
SAL DAHER: Right. Right. Reg FD is full disclosure.
BOB GOODOF: It's leveled the playing field, which is good. But it has leveled it to such an extent that it's a different kind of analyst. And so, I evolved to being an industry analyst as opposed to a company analyst, because you could know the companies, but what you really had to do was understand industries. But the Reg FD, I think, changed the timeframe when combined with ERISA, because you get a statement, you say, "How's the meeting going to go?" You spend a lot more time looking at the short term. And so, I think both of these made either for more nervous markets or for shorter term investment.
SAL DAHER: Interesting. And during that same time, that's the same period that Gene Fama was studying and saying that active management doesn't pay. He looked at a 35 year period and he looked at all the active managers and he came to the conclusion that basically, they cost 2% a year. They were all fully loaded. And they didn't pay for that. I remember him saying in Chicago, at a talk once, "Yeah, there was 3% that outperformed the market, but from year to year, you couldn't tell who was the 3%." So it's just completely useless. So, active management didn't pay, so it's all kabuki. It's all investment theater.
BOB GOODOF: Well, and that's the other thing that I should say this is maybe more important than the Reg FD because the Reg FD was the right thing to do, but probably 80 or 90% of a stock's performance has to do with a combination of the market and the sector. The economy's growing, autos are selling, Ford's going to go up. Ford has to do some pretty dumb things, and it happens, not to go up in concert. And so, the value of picking stocks versus sectors, i.e. stocks versus ETFs, is not nearly as great as perceived. For which companies that do active management get paid more.
SAL DAHER: There is indication that sector rotation pays. Yeah.
BOB GOODOF: And so that's a computer. That's a chart. I mean, understanding charts is important. But, it's a different-
Bob Goodof’s Take on Why Fund Managers Buy and Sell Shares So Frequently
SAL DAHER: But Bob, Bob, the competitive position of Ford in a market doesn't change by the hour. You know the culture of the company's not going to change. Why are these fund managers trading in and out and in and out of this stuff ...? This is not high-frequency trading. They're not arbitraging this stuff. These are guys who don't have a clue, but they're still buying and selling this stuff based on little blips. It doesn't change the company's long-term competitive position. So why?
BOB GOODOF: Some of this is tied to the old joke is, the bear is coming. I'm putting on my tennis shoes. You think you can outrun the bear? No. I only have to outrun you. And so, these managers, they're not necessarily trying to make you more money. They're trying to make more money or outperform the guy next door.
SAL DAHER: Right. They're trying to be less of a loser than the guy next door.
BOB GOODOF: Or whatever.
SAL DAHER: Which, they could probably do very well if they just stopped trading their portfolio so frequently and would trade it the way that Warren Buffett or someone like that trades, based on long-term fundamentals. But that's another discussion.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah. It's another discussion and I know money managers who have phenomenal records with two trades a year. They've got to be the right trades.
Sal Reads Helldoc88’s iTunes Review and Urges Listeners to Leave Their Own Reviews
SAL DAHER: Yeah, yeah. Coming up next, I will ask angel investor and oil and gas whiz Bob Goodof what it is that got him angel investing. You know, this is, like he said, a chicken entrepreneur. He's a very cautious guy. But at the same time, he's very curious about things. So how did he start investing?
SAL DAHER: But first, I wish to thank listener Helldoc88 for this great review in iTunes. "I have listened to several of Sal's angel investing podcasts. He has terrific guests that speak to real world experiences with either investing or founding startups. Sal asks thought-provoking questions that keep the information flow moving. I highly recommend Angel Invest Boston for anyone thinking about investing in or starting a startup." Thanks, Helldoc88, for a really thoughtful review.
SAL DAHER: The Angel Invest Boston podcast features outstanding guests, such as the tireless and generous Bob Goodof, is professionally produced, has no commercials, and comes to you free. The only thing we ask in return is that you help get the word out. Please, tell an angel or founder about us. Take a minute to review our podcast on iTunes. You'd be surprised how effective that is. It ties into their algorithm.
SAL DAHER: Also, and this is a great opportunity. Sign up at angelinvestboston.com to be notified of free, upcoming, in-person events, where you can meet people of the caliber of Bob Goodof, or some of my other guests. So, sign up, review, and refer.
How Bob Goodof Started Angel Investing
SAL DAHER: So, Bob, in fulfillment of the promise made just seconds ago, I ask you to tell us how you started angel investing. What got you over the hump?
BOB GOODOF: Well, I've always been interested in new ideas. I used to have a higher risk profile, probably, when I had less money. But I always was listening and I made some small investments during the 80s in friends' business ideas, real estate projects, things like that. Had ideas at HBS. I remember one in particular around 1990, we invested in a piece of hardware/software that would provide demand management for, say, McDonald's, where your utility bill was based on the highest 15 minutes of use every month and this had a way of smoothing out the 15 minutes, so you paid a lower bill.
SAL DAHER: Right.
BOB GOODOF: You know, it was the wrong guy, but 20 years later, it was EnerNOC, in a way, so I was early and in some other cases, I was not at all. I was always interested in the models, although I have a somewhat conservative risk profile, my view is 5% risk and 95% something else, especially over the last 10 or 15 years. As I've become less interested in my personal involvement in the public markets, I've been more interested in ideas which may be less liquid, but offer some fun, but also a chance to find something new.
BOB GOODOF: Also, as I remember, and I had completely forgotten about this. In the mid to late 70s, MIT started an enterprise forum and I used to go to those meetings fairly regularly early on and I lost touch with that.
BOB GOODOF: About five years ago, I reconnected with a number of MIT programs, largely because of its energy initiative and started mentoring at MIT doing the VMS project.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, VMS, Venture Mentoring Service. Yes.
BOB GOODOF: Mentoring service, where you have about 150 to 200 alums who give their time and sign up to help startups, usually startups, but it's really more of an education of entrepreneurs than necessarily a business. And so I pretty much focused on what I could understand, because so many of them were ... whether it was artificial intelligence or other software, SaaS or things like that, and I was kind of a materials, chemical, energy guy and I was looking for opportunities there and found them. And through that, I met Adam Poole, who invited me to a Walnut meeting and I ran into old friends, Ed Belove. I used to cover Lotus at one time, something that snuck in on there and that was another point in creativity we'll get to later.
SAL DAHER: So, it was connecting with friends and that got you back into angel investing after varying forays back in the 70s.
BOB GOODOF: And it's another opportunity to learn by listening, because there's not a lot I can contribute during a conversation except to ask questions and just listening to the perspectives of different successful folks in that group has been really educational for me.
Bob Goodof’s Take on the Associative Nature of Creativity
SAL DAHER: You know, when I think about it, the Walnut meetings, the stuff that sticks with me the most are the questions. Questions that people ask about the companies, which are really tremendous. Now, your professor of managerial psychology at MIT, Tom Allen, believed that, except for cases of genius, most innovation is associative. Would you care to unpack that idea for the benefit of the audience?
BOB GOODOF: Well, I think most people in their everyday life, in their careers, are somewhat siloed. They have their experience, their expertise, their focus, and they're assigned to do a job, whether it's raising a family, getting to work, or whatever. And a lot of problems can be solved by just a slightly different view and I think it starts by asking questions, but you sometimes learn something it says, oh wow. That reminds me of somebody I knew or something I did. And that could benefit you either as you look for something new or as you enter a project and say, well, have you tried that?
BOB GOODOF: Now they call it thinking out of the box, but in 1969 or whatever, it was just associative creativity. And-
SAL DAHER: So, thinking out of the silo, to be more specific.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah. Thinking out of the silo. And so, my classic was being a metallurgist in a plastics company, a chemical company, because at the time, Dow hired chemical engineers and chemists who knew how to throw molecules together, but really didn't know a heck of a lot about material properties, mechanical properties, fracture mechanics, things like that. And so, by bringing a metallurgy background and some mechanical engineering to it, mechanical strength and materials, to this, I was able to ask the questions or come up with ideas for attacking problems which were just thought to be creative. They weren't creative, they were just me doing something else, taking a different view on things. And that's carried me so many years, whether it's relationships with companies and, gee, I think another company's doing something like this. We ought to ask about that. Or, as you say, a network of people who come up with one idea that you forget about it and a few years later, it's just, oh wow. Maybe I should ask him again.
SAL DAHER: So, when he called it associative, there's a social element to it, which means that you're interacting with other people and exchanging ideas and then you come up with something new by interacting with others that you hadn't thought of and the other people had not thought of.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah. Although, I wasn't thinking of it as social, but associative is just you associate something else with whatever's going on here. So you draw a link that didn't necessarily exist.
SAL DAHER: But there's a networking component here, which is important.
BOB GOODOF: There is that. Yes.
SAL DAHER: Because it's one thing to get knowledge from books. I mean, you usually read books within your discipline, you tend to go outside your discipline by running into people.
BOB GOODOF: Yes.
SAL DAHER: Books don't walk. They don't get in your way. They don't bump into you and so forth. People do.
BOB GOODOF: Yes.
SAL DAHER: So that's how you bump into new ideas.
BOB GOODOF: Yes. That's a way of putting it and the stupid idea was the lobsters in the brine well. But, it doesn't hurt to ask the question and maybe it would have worked.
SAL DAHER: All these brine wells and the audience may be hearing rustling of papers. Bob goes nowhere without his copious, copious notes ... that describes the particular qualities of my guests. Earlier episode, Diane standing up, Bob with his copious notes.
BOB GOODOF: Part of it is because, and I get this from teaching, is I'm always nervous going into a lecture or a conversation with students and once I talk, I find out that I almost don't refer to the notes. But having done it a couple of times-
SAL DAHER: You never do because you've got an incredible memory.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah.
SAL DAHER: It's just like a security blanket.
BOB GOODOF: Also my handwriting is so bad. I'm looking at this thing saying what the heck is this?
What Bob Goodof Likes to Tell Founders
SAL DAHER: So, that is interesting. I understand you like to tell entrepreneurs certain things. Learn to listen and kiss every frog. Kindly expand on that.
BOB GOODOF: Well, other people like to talk. Most people like to talk about themselves. And so, you can be different by listening to them talk, because you learn a little bit about them as an analyst. You will learn a little bit about what makes them tick. And once again, you'll never know when you'll get some advice worth having, because you can't know everything. If you are not the entrepreneur, kissing every frog is ... the old book, never dine alone, I guess. Never eat alone. ... is you should always find a chance to improve your network and learn from somebody else. And I'm not always innocent to this. I'm guilty of walking off to the side sometimes and not feeling quite comfortable in certain environments. But when I am, I really try to listen and learn about different things.
BOB GOODOF: Now, an entrepreneur, you can't always do this, because focus is pretty important. But in a lot of ways, if you can listen and you have good advisors, they can do that for you. You never know where you'll get a perspective on a business opportunity or a business environment that relates to what you do that is helpful. And so, I think it's very important to listen.
SAL DAHER: As an investor, trying to advise a startup, I asked a startup the other day, are you guys really ... You know how important focus is in a startup. Are you guys really focusing on the right thing? Because they have two directions they can go in. And I just asked the question because I wanted these guys to be thinking. Because I don't know their business as well as they do, so I wanted them to think. So then I got the question back, so which business do you think we ought to be in? Now I'm stuck with that. I have to come up with an answer for that. And I told them, I don't think I'll be able to give you an answer. I don't know. I just wanted you guys to grapple with the issue, because I know it's such a problem for startups is that lack of focus is a killer.
BOB GOODOF: And again, to kiss every frog is applicable to lots of folks, not necessarily to each entrepreneur, but in an environment-
SAL DAHER: There should be some amount of frog kissing.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah.
Is there a Danger in Investing Only in Areas You Know?
SAL DAHER: But, at some point you've got to put down the frog and you've got to run your business. Yeah. Put down the frog, wipe your lips, and get to business. Bob, in your investing, you prefer ventures you can understand. I've heard you say that a lot. I like to invest in businesses I can understand, I can figure out the model. I think it should be the goal for every investor. In particular, I like the way that you reach out to your really vast network of analysts and managers and investors to help you achieve that understanding. Has this approach allowed you to invest beyond your immediate area of expertise?
BOB GOODOF: We're getting there.
SAL DAHER: Because there's a danger that you end up ... You're an oil and gas guy. You're going to invest only in chemical or oil and gas deals.
BOB GOODOF: And that's a risk. There is some need for diversity and I think that comes with learning about the models and learning to trust others who have that expertise. And that's the nice thing about Walnut is you've got a chance to sit there for a couple of years now and listen to all of the other entrepreneurs, get a sense of what they're thinking, what they invest in, and when something comes up that requires more of a stretch for you, then say, well okay. I can make that step. And I've made a couple of those steps.
Why Bob Goodof was Intrigued by Fortified Bike
BOB GOODOF: One, for instance, was Fortified Bike. I have some relationship to this because I'm a biker. But I am not a city biker. I'm not a retail guy.
SAL DAHER: By the way, Tivan Amour was interviewed on this podcast as well, the founder of Fortified Bike.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah. But as I thought about him and his background, this is one where if you've read his resume or if you've listened to a conference call, maybe you would have gotten enthused. But seeing him talk about his history, how he got to where he is, this is a guy who gets things done. And if he's going to fail, it's not going to be because of him.
SAL DAHER: No.
BOB GOODOF: And so, he has been very creative. We've invested. And I'm happy with what's going on there.
Bob Invests in a Nutraceutical Company
BOB GOODOF: Very recently, we made an investment in a nutraceutical supplement company, mostly because of my wife who has a different perspective on marketing and so on. But it's one that has a focus on the quality of the nutraceutical as opposed to just selling the stuff that shows up out of the manufacturing. So, I've done a little bit. I'm really interested, for instance, in Esportudo. I've-
Bob & Esportudo
SAL DAHER: Explain what Esportudo does.
BOB GOODOF: Esportudo is Brazil's answer to Bleacher Report. The idea where a lot of contributors, most of whom are not paid-
SAL DAHER: These are a couple of Brazilian-American entrepreneurs and one of them worked at HubSpot. The other one worked at a similar company and they got this idea of creating content in Brazil talking about particular sports events in Brazil, with a Brazilian audience, with Brazilian content creators.
BOB GOODOF: And it's ... Brazil and Latin America are sports-mad. We had the opportunity to do enough due diligence on someone who did business there and on one of the other investors, who was the CEO of a major media company. And so, from a perspective of some-
SAL DAHER: And they have unbelievable traction, right? They have very fast growth rate.
BOB GOODOF: They could have unbelievable traction and they have a lot of hits. This is an area that, although I'm a sports fan, don't understand the media world, don't understand how volatile it is. Know a little bit about the business model. The due diligence helped a lot. I couldn't quite get over some of the valuation issues because it's Brazil. It's not New York.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. I've got enough Brazil risk.
BOB GOODOF: And so, I may or may not invest. But it's something where, at the right circumstance, I felt comfortable because of Walnut connections who are more comfortable, more knowledgeable with that market and where things can go that I can say, okay. I can play here. But, I'm getting there but I recognize a need to diversify. But I also think develop more trust in certain technologies or skill sets that others might have so that I can invest along with them.
Startups Bob Goodof Is Excited About: UltraCell, DropWise & Poly6
SAL DAHER: Tremendous. Tremendous. So, do you want to talk about some startups that you really like, that you're invested in and that you're excited about?
UltraCell
BOB GOODOF: Well, we'll talk about one later. But I like UltraCell. Here's a guy who I happened to have met in a different venture, in a completely different environment 10 years ago. And it didn't quite work, probably because the energy world changed. He was developing pellets for wood furnaces, pelletizing business. Comes back, shows up at Walnut, and he's got this technology that came out of one of the schools for converting waste cardboard to blown-in insulation. And the reason that was important is that blown-in insulation is currently made from newsprint and newsprint volumes are collapsing with the newspaper industry.
SAL DAHER: Good choice not going into journalism.
BOB GOODOF: So he found an opportunity, with some technology, to develop a similar or possibly superior product and he had a paper company, a cardboard company, that was willing to contribute assets to the venture. And he now has, I think he's now got orders to sell out about half of their first plant.
SAL DAHER: Wow.
BOB GOODOF: Maybe it's the pilot plant or I forget right now. So, he's been through two or three fundraises at higher values. He's met his milestones. And so, this is one of those low-risk ventures ... theoretically low-risk, you know. In a world of high risk, it's relatively low risk. ... that has a chance and so I like that. I like the progress, I like the milestones, I like the margins.
DropWise
BOB GOODOF: Another is DropWise.
SAL DAHER: Okay.
BOB GOODOF: DropWise is a startup with some MIT materials guys who have figured out a really thin coating.
SAL DAHER: By the way, I'm an investor in DropWise. I dropped in on them the other day. Dropped in, get the pun?
BOB GOODOF: Yeah.
SAL DAHER: ... hoping that they will come on the podcast. So, please, continue about DropWise. Yeah.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah. And they've got some interesting chemistry that resonates with my material science background to some extent. And that's real potential value in the utility industry and in the oil service industry. Although I passed on one round, when I learned more about the oil service opportunity that I could understand, I did invest. They've got a chance ... Their material is highly corrosion-resistant, especially in the saline solution, and can take the heat required in a downhole well and those two applications are really unique and they may get paid a lot of money per part, if they can finalize the approval.
SAL DAHER: Another startup you're involved with is you're an advisor to Poly6, a very promising clean chemistry company whose founders Keith Hearon and Matthew Stellmaker have been on our podcast. It's a hugely popular episode, by the way, that people like the team. What intrigues me is the process by which a company like Poly6 finds its most effective first use case or a company like DropWise. They both have the same problem.
SAL DAHER: As a matter of fact, DropWise and LiquiGlide and Poly6, they have some connection with the same lab at MIT because DropWise and LiquiGlide are all about this business of putting surfaces on things. And LiquiGlide was a company that was creating a surface that's very slippery so that all the-
BOB GOODOF: Ketchup.
SAL DAHER: ... ketchup or whatever comes out of the bottle. There's a famous video of that. And their problem was that they got so much in-bound interest, just overwhelming in-bound interest from all these companies from the biggest consumer companies to the smallest or medium-sized ones. And they basically had, I think nine months of runway. And in nine months, we'll have a deal with one of them, we'll be getting revenue. So we don't need money for that. Well, guess what? These people, like the tide, it says in the old pilgrims, the tide waiteth for no man. Well, guess what? These big consumer companies, they will hurry for nobody. And so they ran out. They had some technical problems along the way as well. And they just had to reboot the whole thing and because they just mistimed that first use case.
How Did Poly6 Avoid the Distraction of Too Many Possibilities?
SAL DAHER: So, how is it that you find first use case and not get distracted by the hundreds of possibilities that will come your way?
BOB GOODOF: Well, what's interesting with Poly6 is when they first heard the pitch, the first product they talked about was a coating for furniture. Their chemistry was based on orange peels, basically, where you could break out the citrus oil, polymerize, add some curing agents and other ... And you could create a green coating. And they had some real interest from one of the leading green furniture companies.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, green in a sense of being friendly to the environment.
BOB GOODOF: Friendly to the environment, which also had sustainability characteristics and so on. What they learned fairly soon after that was that this was what looked like a three or four-month qualification period was a three or four-year qualification period. And they immediately moved to plan B. And plan B was 3D printing, using this for 3D printing. They ended up having to reformulate, almost away from the green chemistry, but with some full-cycle environmental benefits. I attribute this to having a really strong material science skill in Keith Hearon.
SAL DAHER: Both of those guys are stars.
BOB GOODOF: Yeah. And willing to move. So, I think they do have a couple of other projects they're working on. I think you and I have both commented to them that you need to watch out for overdiversification. And this isn't kissing every frog. This is just prioritizing what you're hearing back from the frogs and they're getting a number of in-bounds. But I think that they seem to have a level head about them and the chemistries are similar enough that I don't think that they'll be moving in too many different directions that soon. They're also in revenue already, which is really an incentive to stay there.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. I understand. So you spent an entire career evaluating management, measuring the suntan that they had, among other things. What advice can you give founders in building a team?
BOB GOODOF: Well, you want a leader who listens. He needs not only to communicate but listen. And communicating is different from talking and there are lots of folks who love to talk and aren't that good at listening and that's important.
A CFO That Can Say No
BOB GOODOF: You have to have a CFO who can say no. I think that even, and I know this from covering larger companies, but I think it's also important for smaller companies at some point, and probably earlier than you think, is to have a nuts and bolts turn around, hands-on guy who can see a problem and just go out and fix things. I come from a manufacturing environment, so I'd equate this more with manufacturing. But I would suspect that it's true in a number of other circumstances. I don't know much about software, so I'm sure software engineers suffer from the same problem as other engineers as they're always trying to improve a product and maybe sometimes you've got to say, hey. It's time to go and sell the thing.
BOB GOODOF: And at all points, an ability to accept and deliver bad news.
SAL DAHER: This is a sore topic for me. Entrepreneurs should report every month, that way bad news gets delivered little bit at a time, instead of surprising you, "Oh, we ran out of money!" 12 months later. Please continue, Bob.
BOB GOODOF: Well, you've said it. Investors want to hear it. The CEO wants to hear it. Money is a precious commodity and credibility is even more precious and in the public investing business, credibility is probably the single-most important personality trait, I think, of a top management and I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be true in a startup and venture.
How Bob Goodof Stated the Off Wall Street Conference for Oil & Gas Bigs
SAL DAHER: We had meant to talk about Off Wall Street, so please tell us this.
BOB GOODOF: Well, this is one of those ideas, one of those concepts that came out of thinking just a little bit out of the box. I'd say it was about 10 or 12 years ago, I'm a skier and I had a timeshare where I used to go out every year and ski in Jackson Hole. It was getting harder and harder with Reg FD and management showing up at big conferences, to get access to companies to learn about how they think. And one thing that I think is important in evaluating companies and managements, especially in the public market, possibly in the venture market, is you get your idea of what the world should look like and when you find a management that agrees with it, that's competent, you invest in them.
BOB GOODOF: It was getting harder and harder for mid-size firms to get access to managements to see what they really think because brokerage fees would drive the meetings. We couldn't get the one-on-one meetings and so on. So I'm out there skiing with another investor friend and we say, you know? I'll bet we could find eight or 10 skiers in the oil industry and invite them out here with eight or 10 investors and we'll spend a couple days skiing and we'll spend two or three days talking about topics. Not earnings, not slide shows, not brokers. Just about what they see going on in the world.
BOB GOODOF: And so we started. We invited some companies. We found interest. We found investors of interest. And we've been doing this, we'll be 12 years in January. And I've had analysts from the biggest firms in the world tell me it's the single best investor conference they go to because it gives them an idea of what these guys really think and it gives them investment ideas.
BOB GOODOF: And I get-
SAL DAHER: And you get to ski, too.
BOB GOODOF: And I get to ski. I also get comments from the managements that say, given any other option, this is where they go. In fact, this year there's a conflict with the Goldman Sachs conference in Florida, and we have not seen a problem with our registrations.
SAL DAHER: Wow. Wow. That's impressive for a guy who disclaims being an entrepreneur.
BOB GOODOF: Well, I get a lot of help because it keeps my network, but there are other people on a team. I have an organizing committee I give full credit and they are better connectors with some of these companies. I like to say that now I'm the party planner. But we have a conference that we're really proud of.
SAL DAHER: Bob Goodof, you're a mensch for coming on the podcast. Thanks. I hope our listeners have found this interview to be as rewarding as I have.
BOB GOODOF: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
SAL DAHER: Awesome. It's awesome. Listeners, if you enjoyed this podcast, please review it on iTunes. iTunes reviews are really important. I cannot overestimate that because it helps us get found by other listeners. We don't have ads on this program, so our reward here is just get more people to listen.
SAL DAHER: If you have any critiques, if you have any ideas, suggestions, whatever, write me at sal@angelinvestboston.com. You will find transcripts of the podcast, which is a great learning opportunity. I listen to this podcast and read the transcripts at the same time and make notes on it. So that can be found at angelinvestboston.com. And please, sign up for future in-person events. You get an opportunity to meet people like Bob or other really illustrious and accomplished guests.
SAL DAHER: This is Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I'm Sal Daher.
SAL DAHER: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme is composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.