TSP015 | John Allen –Transcription

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John Livesay:
On today’s Successful Pitch podcast with have John Allen. John Allen worked for a pharmaceutical company that was instrumental in solving HIV and his company was bought by Warner-Lambert for $2.3 billion dollars. He’s an innovator in bio-tech. He shares with us how he’s taken that and now is working on solving pancreatic cancer. In addition to that, he’s also involved with a lot of other startups including helping the poor in China, with an incubator in China, and also he’s been involved with helping innovation in the financial world where people can invest.

So, he’s quite the entrepreneur, quite the investor. He has a company where he works with people on their secret sauce, their team, and their market place potential and then takes it one step further where he says, “If you’re making dog food. I want to make sure you show that dogs are eating the food and I want to talk to the users who are using your product.” I love that analogy.

I think that’s great, but what is really interesting is his team has a proprietary software that can analyze teamwork compatibility and investors love to know who they’re investing have compatibility. He looks at three or four key areas around team work which include, making people feel secure, giving them a sense of identity, their knowledge base, and their sensation of what it feels like to work together. I think you’re going to enjoy this interview as much as I did.

Hi and welcome back to The Successful Pitch podcast. Today’s guest is John Allen. John Allen is the founder of iBlaise Consulting and serves as the managing member. He previously served to incubate a number of companies in their seed stage, startup stage, and first stage development, including Catalyst Research, Paper Tongues, and the Open Finance Network. He was one of two co-founders of the open finance network in 2002 and spent eight years with this leading fintech innovator which serviced $20B in assets at its peak.

He served on the board of directors and has raised 33 million in venture funding and prior to that, John spent six years at Agouron Pharmaceuticals, which is a leading bio-tech innovator, joining the firm in 96 pre-revenue and built that out so that it now got bought for $2.3 billion dollars by Agouron, that was bought by Warner-Lambert.. John, welcome to the show.

John Allen:
I’m delighted to be here, John. Thanks for having me.

John:
That’s quite an impressive background. I could barely get it out including some of the pronunciations, so please feel free to connect the listeners if I mispronounced something. Can you take us back to those days when you were at, is it Agouron Pharmaceuticals?

John A:
Yeah, it’s actually called Agouron Pharmaceuticals.

John:
Agouron, okay.

John A:
Yeah, it actually comes from a Greek term called Agora, which means marketplace. It was founded by five professors out of the University of California in San Diego and the idea was to have inner disciplined information metabolism and information transfer between silos of science that typically didn’t talk to one another.

So, the vision of the CEO, Peter Johnson, was to have physicists, bio-chemists, biologist,s physiologists, and so forth, really break down the institutional walls and collaborate on creating an novel platform, which they were successful in doing. Agouron was experts in x-ray crystallography and x-ray diffraction. They actually invented those techniques, which are widely used now, but in the early 90s, developing small molecules to look at biological targets was novel and it was actually created out of La Jolla by Agouron and there are a number of firms that currently use those techniques.

John:
I love how you say that there was a problem of science, things being siloed, right, because what I’m always telling my clients when they’re working on their pitch to investors is, figure out what your problem is and who you help and what problem you solve and obviously back in the 90s, you were solving a problem that existed that things were siloed and you figured out a way to get them integrated and the solution, obviously was so big that you got acquired by Warner-Lambert for $2.3 billion dollars. What was it that made Warner-Lambert want to buy that solution you had?

John A:
Well, they were a couple of things that the company had built. The ability to go from looking at databanks of small molecules, where you’re looking at two or three thousand molecules against a particular target, which is, for example, we were looking at the HIV enzyme as a target to rest the devastation of HIV AIDS. Our competitors took between two and three thousand compounds to development, because they actually didn’t know what the protein structure looked like. Agouron only actually took six compounds through development, because they knew exactly what the substrate looked like, built a designer molecule to fit tightly into that substrate to arrest that particular metabolic process.

So, it gave us a competitive advantage to actually design a molecule that fit very tightly into the active target. That’s now common place within the industry, but at the time, that was state of that art and that was one reason they wanted to buy us. The second reason is wound up having the largest commercial launch in bio-tech history. We went from zero revenue from $335 million in one year.

John:
Wow.

John A:
And I was part of that inaugural team. I was actually the first person hired in the field-based commercial ops and helped build out a very robust team over 18 months and when we launched, we just had a massive launch. We got a lot of coverage and a lot of people wanted to be in the HIV/AIDS space and we had the protease inhibitor that wound up, there were four competitors, we wound up being almost 60% market shared the first year.

John:
How does it feel to be part of something that grows that fast and literally saves lives at the same time?

John A:
It’s was absolutely thrilling and very compelling on a lot of different fronts. The first was we were going from a position where some of my best friends who were infectious disease doctors, literally were escorting people to the grave. Every single HIV/AIDS patient they had, they knew were going to die and they were giving therapy to extend life to make them comfortable, but ultimately they knew they were going to put them in the grave and to be part of the revolution that actually extended life so that people could live a normal life and die at a normal age was just very, very compelling.

So, they’re often a moral compounded particularly in bio-technology when you’re looking at disease in diseased states to find funding, because they’re very, very compelling. Currently I’m involved with the company called Sun BioPharma. It has a new drug for pancreatic cancer, but 94% of people that have pancreatic cancer die.

John:
Yes, in fact, a lot of celebrities are in the news about that and it’s so sad when they get diagnosed and that’s what puts a face on it.

John A:
So, the ability to actually combine a moral imperative with a funding imperative is very, very compelling. That’s what happened at Agouron, that’s what’s happening at Sun BioPharma and there are a number of startup companies that have things that are interesting, changing the market place, innovative – bringing efficiency, market efficiencies to life, making life better, easier, faster. Those are reasons that are very compelling. Certainty entrepreneurs are most interested in their vision and specifically, secondly interested in making money and it’s the division that we really want to look at and is the vision compelling in the marketplace and if that vision in compelling in the marketplace to make certain that we have the right dynamics in place so that you can actually gain funding and attract funding, because there is a big difference between a compelling vision and gaining funding.

There are two stories that have to be told in a compelling way. One is the vision or what I call the creative story and it doesn’t matter if it’s in film and entertainment, bio-technology, technology platform, you’ve got a creative entrepreneur who can tell the story about why their platform, their idea needs to come to market.

John:
Yes, great.

John A:
You have to be able to tell the financial story to investors with the same type of enthusiasm and those are typically very different skill sets.

John:
Yes. Left brain, right brain, right?

John A:
That’s exactly right. The neat thing about entrepreneurs is they have the ability to suspend reality and when they suspend reality and they have vision over visibility.

John:
Vision over visibility. I love that. We’re going to Tweet that out. That’s great.

John A:
Yeah, so the classic entrepreneur has vision over visibility, is not burden by reality, they see the future very clearly, and it’s very compelling to provide a creative story standpoint. However, investors are doing risk assessment, which is based in reality and probability, not possibility. So, there’s a difference between the entrepreneur that’s full of possibilities and approaching investors that are about probabilities.

John:
Let me just take a moment to process that for the listeners. So, the contrast is the entrepreneur is all about possibilities where as the investors look at things on probabilities and they’re very different stories, but you have said they both have to be equally compelling, most people don’t have the skill sets to do both. They are either one of the other, but you have to have the ability to suspend reality and tell us a story that is not bound by reality. In other words, the possibilities that are out there, but then the investors want to know what’s the probability that you’re going to be able to make this come to life, right?

John A:
That’s correct, because money deserves two things. A rate of return and accountability and the rate of return is based upon risk. So understanding risk, which is based on probability, it’s critical in valuing the company, approaching the marketplace, making certain that you are given an investor the appropriate rate of return based upon the risk that they’re taking and the risk to an entrepreneur, particularly a visionary entrepreneur, there are very little risk and their idea coming alive and helping them understand the risk from an investor standpoint is critical.

John:
That empathy of what the investor is looking for and what their concerns are is really the key to getting an investor to say yes. I often get asked by clients when I’m working with them on their pitches, how do I come up with evaluation and you given us some great insights into it all depends on what the risk is, right? Can you expand on that a little bit?

John A:
Yes, absolutely. There are, no methodologies that are taught at some of the best institutions. Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, and so forth, that look at rate of returns based upon where a company is in a stage or life cycle and those life cycles are typically what we call seed stage, startup stage. First stage, second stage, mezzanine and then IPS. And the rates of return that are needed per annum go down from seed stage, which is typically 80+ percent down greatly as you improve the outcome for the investor or IE you remove risk for investors.

So, if you, for example, have a business plan and a partner, that’s very different than having a business plan, a team of eight people, and a prototype complete, which is also very different than having a business plan, eight people, a prototype complete, and people in the market place that are actually getting new purchase orders.

John:
Nice, yeah, right. Proof of concept and revenue coming in, yep.

John A:
That’s correct. So, each one of those steps moves you from seed stage to start up to first stage and we help entrepreneurs understand exactly where they are in the life cycle, what type of IRR, internal rate of return, is necessary to prove up to an investor to make sense from the risk that they’re taking. Sometimes we use IRR or internal rates of return to determine that risk and sometimes, particular in bio-technology where we’re looking at future revenue close where we will use an IRNPV or what’s called a risk adjusted net present value and that’s where we look at future revenue streams and discount them back based upon the risk to the investor.

John:
Fascinating. It’s obviously a skill that a lot of people don’t have and that’s why people come to you at iBlaise to get that expertise. Let me ask you some questions since you incubated a number of companies in the seed stage and you were referring to that seed stage and exactly what it looks like. There’s three, Catalyst Research, Paper Tongues, and Open Finance Network, can you pick one of those and tell us what that story is?

John A:
Yeah, so what don’t I go with the Open Finance Network. The Open Finance Network started in 2002 and at that time, 80+ percent of registered advisers, these are folks registered with FINRA, that currently is the SEC, but they are either registered investment adviser or a registered rep where you were selling a commission or taking a fee. 80% of those people were at, what we call, the large wire houses. Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, etcetera and at the internet group and access to information group, we felt like there was going to be a revolution in which people would want to go independent and get independent advise, not sell a Smith Barney solution, not sell a Merrill Lynch solution.

At the time there were certain products that you could only get through those large institutions and as technology grew and the internet grew, everyone was getting access to everything. So, let me give you an example. In 1992, I love bio-technology. I started in pharmaceutical sales. I started with the company called the Upjohn Company. I wanted to break in bio-technology because my mentor, my bio chemistry professor kept evangelizing all the chemistry grads, go into bio-technology, go into bio-technology. He wanted us to go work for these companies like Amgen or Genentech that had 24 employees. He kept saying, you guys are going to go to work in bio-technology.

So, I followed bio-technology. I used to call my broker all the time, he worked at Smith Barney and we’d get a quote on different companies, Matrix, Cenikor, different companies that were in bio-technology and I would call him and say, what’s the stock trading at? Well, in 1993, I could go online and actually get a quote. I didn’t have to call my broker anymore and I can see that quote within 15 minutes. In 1994, I could see instantaneously. Technology was growing, the internet was growing.

In 94, I could start doing trades at $25 instead of a $100. in 96, you could start building portfolios yourself, online, so I was getting access to information that I could only through my broker before and I didn’t need my broker anymore. So, the idea behind the Open Finance Network is that these financial advisers were going to get access to product services and be independent and give independent advise. We were corrupt. In 2008, 72% of the market was independent.

John:
Wow.

John A:
So it did a complete reversal in six years.

John:
I mean, that’s really unheard of. It’s almost like comparing what you did to that taxi industry. If you wanted a taxi, you had to call one of three taxi companies. If you wanted to invest, you had to call one of three brokerage houses and now with Uber and Lyft, there’s all kinds of choices of how to get lower priced transportation. Now, you in six years completely revolutionized, just like you did in bio-tech, the way that people can trade and buy and sell stocks.

John A:
And typically what you find with a visionary entrepreneur, they’re really two types of entrepreneurs. My partner was a visionary entrepreneur. He had the vision. He had vision over visibility. The other type of entrepreneur is what I call a marketplace innovator and a marketplace innovator is an entrepreneur that has the ability to into a market and innovate the market. So that means we’re taking the vision and translating it into an executable plan at a certain price points, adoption points and understanding what the market will and won’t take in order to get that vision adopted.

John:
Does a marketplace innovator need to have a vision as well?

John A:
You gotta have the vision.

John:
So, is there ever an entrepreneur that is both a visionary and a marketplace innovator?

John A:
There are some. They are typically different skill sets and when I run into them, they don’t need me.

John:
Oh, I see, got it. So, if you’re a visionary, you need you and if you’re a marketplace innovator you still need help creating a vision, is that the jist of it? Got it.

John A:
That’s right. My skill set is more marketplace innovation, that’s more my skill set, so I typically partner with people that are more visionary. To have the ability to suspend reality.

John:
Right, but in order to get the investors to say yes, they’re going to need some really sophisticated risk projections and all that good stuff that you just walked us through. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, you are serving on the board of Gateway Partners, which is a Chinese business incubator and everybody here is about the incredible growth going on in China. Tell us about that.

John A:
Gateway Partners International is a, it’s an enterprise that plants for-profit businesses in China to relieve the poverty of the rural poor. So, it actually has a mission, really a mercy mission to help the rural poor get access to business, understand business, and be involved in marketplaces. They are lots of the Hon Chinese, which are along the coast, have access to lots of different businesses and so forth, but in the rural parts of China, it’s still primarily agricultural based and the mission of Gateway is to help plant businesses in those parts of China to relive the suffering of the rural poor.

John:
The rural poor in China have been like that for not just decades, almost centuries, right? I mean, nothing has changed in so long.

John A:
A millennia.

John:
Yeah.

John A:
So, Gateway Partners is really a philanthropic initiative that I’m involved in.

John:
That’s fantastic. Well, if I were a betting man, I would bet on you and your team being able to do for the rural poor what you did for Open Finance Network, you know, if you did, what you did in the Open Finance world in six years, I’m sure you’re going to make a difference to the people getting out of poverty in China. It’s so inspiring from what you’ve done in bio-tech in AIDs to what you’ve done in Open Finance to what you’re doing to help make the world a better place.

One of the things that really struck me about iBlaise Consulting is your values and I loved to see people’s values on their website. Truth, team work, trust, accountability, all those factors are the kinds of things investors look at when they’re valuating an entrepreneur, but the one that really stood out for me is a big differentiator is the concept of gratefulness and I just wanted to ask you to tell us what makes gratefulness one of your key core values and how has that helped you in your career.

John A:
I think there’s a great sense in which people live their life on their own life’s journey. As you are and as I am, you’re doing what you love, I’m doing what I love. The best thing that you can do in life is to find satisfaction in your work and in order to find satisfaction in your work, you really need to align your key skill sets the way that you’ve been uniquely designed in your experiences to do everyday exactly what you want to do and when you have satisfaction in your work, there’s nothing greater in life, that brings gratefulness and when you’re grateful, it shows in your work, how you treat your clients, how you treat your employees.

John:
That’s so great, John. It’s not something that we often hear in the business world and I definitely think it’s something we all need to remind ourselves and have that be just as important as all the other skills that we have and all the other things that we bring to the table and it is part of the culture that you obviously have created and when investors are looking to engage with startups, they tell me that, you know, we invested in a team and does the team get along and there’s going to be bums in the road and how are they going to deal with it and if you have gratefulness as one of your core values like you do, then the clients you attract are going to be appreciative of our willingness to not get stuck on just what the problems are and refocus on, well, what do we have to be grateful, what is working here right now.

John A:
Yeah, absolutely and investors that are looking for reasons not to invest, if you’re in front of an investor, they’re interested, but they are always looking for red flags, so when typically we value you companies, there’s traditional way of valuing companies where you look at the execution team or you look at the IP protection or what’s special, what’s your secret sauce, and then what’s your marketplace potential. Those are kind of the three classic ways of evaluating a team.

John:
Can you repeat those for the audience one more time? What’s your secret sauce.

John A:
You’re looking at the execution team.

John:
Yep, the team.

John A:
I would probably get a higher evaluation than a first time entrepreneur, because I’ve built a number of companies. Steve Jobs is going to get a higher evaluation than I would if we had the same business plan. So, investors are looking at the execution team. Who does the executing, the plan. Secondly, what’s your IP protection or your secret sauce? Do you have patents? Do you have unique work flows? Are there things that are trademarked? What makes what you have special? Can it be easily replicated? Is it protected? And the third thing is the marketplace potential and just a quick example, you can use the same amount of work to develop a small molecule for cancer, but if you’re using it at a cancer – disease state that only has 5,000 patients, that’s going to get a very different evaluation then one that has 500,000 patients a year. So, that’s the market place potential.

John:
I love that example. That’s so helpful, thank you.

John A:
One of the things that we do that’s unique at iBlaise is we do take that traditional approach, but we have, I would call it a proprietary way that we evaluate startup companies. We look at four things in addition to the traditional market. Number one is we look at, do you have your prototype complete? We will not work with a company that they don’t have their prototype complete and that means different things for different – there are plenty of people that spend a lot of time in the garage, a lot of sweat equity to get their platform done, to get their script done, to partner with a particular university if it’s a bio-tech company. A lot of sweat equity to get a prototype completed. Investors do not want to invest in your dream. They don’t want to invest in your prototype. Investors want to invest in a rate of return toward their money and so you need to get your prototype complete.

John:
We’re going to tweet that out. Investors do not want to invest in your dream, they want to invest in a rate of return for their money.

John A:
The second thing that we evaluate is we look at marketplace and marketplace potential, but we don’t look at that in a traditional sense. You know, how many people in the market and how many users can you get on a platform, how many people are going to use this particular cancer drug, how many people are going to come see this film. What we do is we look at, do you are already have users and purchase orders. Traditionally, this has been said before, so this is a cliche, but it’s true, if you’ve got dog food, I want to see dogs eating the dog food.

John:
I love that. I actually have not heard that. So, that’s another great tweet. If you’ve got dog food, I want to see the eating the dog food so that we know that the dogs like it, right?

John A:
That’s right. We want to talk to people that are typically early adopters. They are typically about 7% of the market that go inline with the visionary entrepreneur early and say they will use our service or be first users. We want to talk to the early adopters to understand why they want to adopt this vision and they are often able to give a clearly more articulate statement of why they are adopting the particular product than the entrepreneur themselves.

John:
Yeah, sometimes there’s a surprise. You think they’re using it for one thing or that they like one particular aspect of the product and they you ask a bunch of user and they’re like, actually, the reason we keep using this or come back is because of this and it can totally change the marketing plan. So, we’ve got the working prototype, make sure you have users, talk to those early adopters and there’s two more things that you have in your wheel house.

John A:
The next one is financial. So everybody develops and operational plan, of course. We look at operation plans as, we make them what we call, investment grade operational plans and what that means specifically we are looking at, if an investor comes in with an investment, does that investment get the company to the place that it is cash flow positive with a robust staff. That typically means and I won’t get into all the details. I’ve written a white paper over/around Fibonacci and how Fibonacci is used rightsizing a startup company, but that typically, $2.1 million dollars and about 20 employees that you want to be able to support. Once an investor knows that they’re cash flow positive, the company is not desperate for more money.

John:
Right.

John A:
But if you’re having to lay off employees, you don’t have enough employees, you’ve got insignificant cash flow, then you’re not going to be able to get the critical curve to get the type of rate of return to an investor that they need or if the investor gets in trouble, but they’re cash flow positive, they’re not in big trouble.

John:
Right.

John A:
And a difference between a wealthy person and someone who makes money is a wealthy person understands risk and they don’t lose their money. So, when we build investment grade financials, we build on steps that an investor comes out with either a push, they don’t lose their money or they hit the rate of return.

John:
Got it. So you really minimize the risk. Either worst case scenario you’ll just get your money back. Best cash scenario, you’re going to get a great return on your investment. I love that sweet spot. If you have 20 employees and you’re bringing in $2.1 million dollars in revenue or that’s your positive cash flow, that’s different.

John A:
You can build a big company.

John:
You can build a big company. Okay. And then the forth and final secret ingredient at iBlaise?

John A:
It’s probably our best ingredient. We call it IBC compatibility studies and you were talking about team work and execution and we do a very deep dive into what we call the compatibility of the team. So, we built a properitary software that we look at the compatibility of the team, becuase there is a difference between the employee at Bank of America, where Brian Moynihan, the CEO, if he gets hit by a bus, they will have a new Brian Moynihan tomorrow. Last year Bank of America laid off 3,000 employees. I know the executive that did that. Bank of America is fine.

If you’re a startup, if you’re 6-8-10-12 people, if there’s friction on the team, that is a risk to investors. So, we actually forecast that risk and we develop a software that’s a lot like eHarmony or Chemistry.com, but it’s not for romantic compatibility, it’s for business compatibility.

So, John, if you were the CEO of a company. We would come in and we would do temperament studies around you and then help you select on the team based upon your information metabolism and information transfer. So, you’re the CEO, we know you’re going to need a CMO. We all know what the core competences are of a CMO, COO, CFO, etc, those core competences are well known, but the information metabolism and information transfer is not. So, we’re actually forecast is, what is, if you could select among three or four different CFOs, what’s the best CFO for John?

John:
Right. Is it someone who is going to indicate me with a bunch of numbers or is it someone is going to give me the highlights, right, depending on my personality and how I, if I want a lot of details or if I just want the bare minimum.

John A:
That’s correct. So, we actually forecast that among a lot of different parameters and the one you just spoke to has to do with intuition and sensing, but it’s a lot broader than that. We actually look at the core things that people seek and there are only four things that people seek. They seek seek security, they seek identity, they seek knowledge, or they seek sensation. Those are places of conflict. We make sure those are aligned.

We understand how people transfer information and how they metabolize that information that’s transferred and certain, everybody that’s listening to this podcast has been on a team that it was just great chemistry. You couldn’t put your finger on it, but there was just a great team and then you’ve been on another team when it wasn’t a great team, for whatever reason there was just a lot of friction. It didn’t have anything to do with morality or ethics or whatever, you just didn’t get along.

John:
Didn’t click. So, it’s security, identity, knowledge, and sensation. Where does acknowledgment of saying good boy or how often do you need to be acknowledged or appreciated come in, which of those four bucket does acknowledgment fall under.

John A:
That’s typically in the world of identity, for identity seekers and that’s typically a management skill that if you have employees that seek identity, you’re giving people a task to do, letting them do that task and then thanking them for a job well down and for people that are more identity seekers, you need to do that more often.

John:
Right, have an award programs in place and things like that and it’s the whole difference about somebody who needs a lot of micromanaging and someone who hates it, right?

John A:
That’s correct.

John:
And the other thing I think you really tapped onto is this whole concept of intuition and, you know, that says, I don’t think you can teach that to somebody. Either somebody knows or has a sense of this is a good time to ask the question or not a good time to ask. My boss is stressed out, I’m going to wait, right? Or is it being empathic to what’s a good time and just not thinking about your needs all the time?

John A:
That’s correct and I agree with you. I think intuition is a gift. It’s often called the six sense or people that are intuitive, I use intuitive language when I talk to them. I am not intuitive. Typically visionary entrepreneurs are intuitive. They all are intuitive and when I talk to them, I ask them, tell me what’s in your gut.

John:
Yeah, feeling questions. They really, I’ve heard them described as having their pulse on the zeitgeist, would you say that’s accurate?

John A:
Yeah, I think that’s correct.

John:
Yes.

John A:
And I usually don’t ask them about details, because it drives them nuts.

John:
You know, I think you could have your own, yet another huge successful startup just licensing this software for team compatibility based on my experience with all the different investors and startups. I think that’s really an incredible tool and gift and that alone should make everybody start reaching out to you, so before I let you go, ask you a question I like to ask people, which is book are you currently reading or do you recommend investors/startups to read or it doesn’t even have to be about business, it could be about gratefulness, whatever book you think you would think would be helpful to the listeners.

John A:
Edward Gibbon, Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

John:
Okay. What is it about that book that resonates with you?

John A:
It’s a very, very difficult read and it will help you become a fantastic communicator and a fantastic writer.

John:
Great. Well, obviously complex topics don’t scare you if you’re able to understand the way molecules work. John, what is the best way for someone to get in touch with to find out more about all the difference things that I always can do to help them get funded fast. Should they follow you on LinkedIn, Twitter?

John A:
Yeah, the best way to contact me is just through email at JohnAllen (at) iBlaise.com and that’s like Blaise Pascal. The company was actually named after Blaise Pascal for some itneresting reason. So, that’s iBlaise.com.

John:
Great. John, thank you so much. This has been one of my most inspiring interviews in a long time, because you told us about how you’ve saved lives, you’ve talked about gratefulness and you’ve talked to us about this whole concept of team compatibility and how to actually quantify it for the first time, so it’s been incredibly valuable to me and I’m sure to our listeners. I can’t thank you enough.

John A:
John, I’m really grateful for the opportunity. It’s been thrilling to be with you. As I count you as a friend and look forward to seeing you next time I’m in Southern California.

John:
That’ll be great. Thanks, John.