“The moment you [come out]… you're also creating an opportunity for so many others to see themselves reflected into roles that they had not seen or imagined possible before.”

Lorenzo Thione is the Managing Director of Gaingels and a co-founding chairman of StartOut, two of the leading groups dedicated to supporting and elevating LGBTQ+ leaders in the venture startup ecosystem.

There is a negative business impact when a gay person is uncomfortable being open about their orientation. The time and attention dedicated to that issue takes away from time building out an idea or company without fear. Gaingels and StartOut help support that movement by increasing awareness and highlighting members of the LGBTQ+ community who hold top tech positions. As Apple CEO, Tim Cook famously came out publicly, after some hesitation, in support of this mission. “He came to the realization that the value of representation is the power of giving people an idea of what's possible for them and seeing themselves reflected as a source of strength and diversity as opposed to just a reason to be called other.”

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SPEAKER

Lorenzo Thione.jpeg — Lorenzo Thione

Managing Director
*Gaingels*

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MODERATOR

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner
*SkyBridge*

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Rev.com

Joe Eletto: (00:07)
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is Joe Eletto, and I am the production manager of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform encompassing finance, technology, and geopolitics. SALT Talks is a series of digital interviews with the world's foremost investors, creators, and thinkers. And just as we do at our global SALT conferences, we aim to both empower big, important ideas, and provide our audience a window into the minds of subject matter experts. And today, we are quite excited to welcome Lorenzo Thione to SALT Talks.

Joe Eletto: (00:41)
Lorenzo is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for the intersection of technology, art, design, communication, and social value; a true Renaissance man. Lorenzo is the managing director of Gaingels and a cofounding chairman of StartOut, two of the leading groups dedicated to supporting and elevating LGBTQ+ leaders in the venture startup ecosystem. As the managing producer at Sing Out, Louise! Productions, Lorenzo is also a Tony Award and Drama Desk winning Broadway producer, Hadestown and The Inheritance, and the cocreator and lead producer of Allegiance, the Broadway musical starring George Takei and Lea Salonga, of which he also directed and produced the 2016 film.

Joe Eletto: (01:26)
In developing Allegiance, he spearheaded social media viral strategies that led to astounding growth and unprecedented awareness and audience engagement for George Takei, and to the founding of The Social Edge, for which he currently serves as chief executive officer. He previously cofounded startups Powerset and Artify.it. He is an investor, board member and advisor for startups such as Figure Eight, Weights & Biases, CrowdMed, Gobble, Just, and Lucid, and many more. He is an outspoken LGBT advocate and was named one of the most influential LGBT people in tech in 2014 and 2018 by Business Insider. He was born and raised in Milan and completed studies at the University of Texas at Austin, from which he holds an M.S. in computer engineering. If you have any questions for Lorenzo during today's talk, please enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your video screen. And now, I'm thrilled to turn over to Sarah Kunst, managing director of Cleo Capital, to conduct today's interview.

Sarah Kunst: (02:29)
Hi, thank you. Thanks, Joe. And Lorenzo, we're so excited to have you here today. So, let's jump in. That was a-

Lorenzo Thione: (02:38)
Sure.

Sarah Kunst: (02:38)
[crosstalk 00:02:38] background that Joe gave, but I always love to hear it from the horse's mouth, such as it were. So would love to just have you tell how we got here.

Lorenzo Thione: (02:51)
Sure. It's kind of a complicated story. I moved from Italy to Texas to study engineering, and then found myself sort of in the path of startups. I ended up starting my first company right in 2003, which was an artificial intelligence search engine, semantic search engine. And from there, we exited the company in 2008. I ended up really focusing on a number of different things, from venture investment to advocacy, and ended up cofounding StartOut, which was the first entrepreneurial network dedicated to helping LGBTQ entrepreneurs.

Lorenzo Thione: (03:44)
It's kind of like a crazy journey that took me from there to Broadway, and then back into venture. So I'm happy to go into any part of it that is interesting or talk about-

Sarah Kunst: (03:58)
Yeah. So, we're going to spend a lot of time on Broadway because I, despite being tone deaf, am a massive musical theater geek. Some of you might have missed my revival of Rent in my apartment the other night. It was accompanied by tequila, and it was fabulous. So, it's in previews now. So yeah, let's just jump in there, and then we'll work our way back. I have questions about how you think about the tech exodus to Austin and what AI looked like in 2003.

Lorenzo Thione: (04:27)
Amazing.

Sarah Kunst: (04:28)
But mainly, I just want to talk about Broadway. So, how did you get to be, in the immortal musical of Nathan Lane, a producer?

Lorenzo Thione: (04:37)
So, it's really interesting. I think the last year has given me a lot of opportunities to chart a path or sort of figure out what the thread was that led me to a lot of different decisions and a lot of different things that I've done. And it really is interesting that I think I can actually go back to the fact that I arrived in Texas sort of without knowing anybody and as a little bit of an adventure. But I arrived just a handful of months before September 11th happened. And it's really interesting, because even as a white dude from Europe with all that privilege, you look at being an immigrant as being something that is very much identify-forming. And all of a sudden, the rhetoric and the way in which people talked about immigration and immigrants had shifted.

Lorenzo Thione: (05:38)
And there's so much precariousness in the life of anybody that tries to establish a life and a job and a family and relationships in a different country, when you don't know exactly what is going to happen, and are you going to be able to say? And it took a long time. And the reason why I'm mentioning this, because it really had two major impact on things that had both personal and professional repercussions. One is, in a way that might sound pretty trite and sort of trope of a movie, it led me to come out. And it had a lot of an impact, of course, in not just personally, but on things that I ended up feeling like I wanted to do just in light of that experience and of understanding my identity better.

Lorenzo Thione: (06:29)
Which for example was after the exit of my first company, deciding that one of the things that I really had enjoyed was the mentorship I had received from people I had worked with, and the advice, and sort of had enjoyed the entrepreneurial journey so much. And had been talking to friends who were starting companies and running companies and still were feeling like they had to be in the closet with their investors and their board members and their employees. And really, StartOut was born out of that feeling like you wanted to give someone a reason for being sort of proudly and loudly part of their own community while at the same time building whichever vision for a better world all of these entrepreneurs were actually doing. It's really interesting because you realize how much of your mental energy is spent on this set of problems and layers that you otherwise would be dedicating to being a better founder.

Lorenzo Thione: (07:33)
And then the second thing that happened is completely unexpected and completely not something that was ever part of a grand plan, so to speak. One evening, I was in New York City in a theater, and I just happened to meet George Takei, who I and a friend of mine recognized as being the actor who had played Sulu on the original Star Trek series. And a little starstruck or whatever, we kind of struck up conversation. What I didn't expect was out of that conversation and out of the particular show we were seeing that evening came the recounting of his own personal experience and his own childhood, when he and his family, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans, many of which were American citizens, were imprisoned; lost their jobs, their property, their freedom, and imprisoned in internment camps for no crime other than the fact that they looked like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbor.

Lorenzo Thione: (08:43)
And this was 2008. There were definitely a lot of echoes that still were fresh from September 11 in terms of how Arab Americans had been treated, and the Japanese Americans who had stood up at that time to denounce the risk of falling into the mistakes that the country had made already. But something really struck me. My own experience and having felt that sense of precariousness, and really, the kinship to the experience of people who had come here, building a better life for themselves and their families, and all of a sudden had lost everything. I just found, and my friend, who happens to be a very talented composer, found just this idea or this notion that this was a story that needed to be told.

Lorenzo Thione: (09:36)
And as crazy as anyone who's ever founding a company or starting a new enterprise, we had never worked in the theater before. And we're like, "We're going to write a show, and we're going to put you in it, and we're going to take this to Broadway." And it absolutely sounds nuts, but it took about seven and a half years. And on the path, added an incredible group of talented performers, including Tony Award winner Lea Salonga; gave their Tony debut to a number of other incredible performers and creatives. And took that idea, reading after reading, workshop after workshop, to its opening in San Diego in 2012, and then from there to Broadway in 2015, and then again onto sort of the screen of movie theaters around the world.

Lorenzo Thione: (10:37)
And the show continues its life, and it's one of the things that I'm the most proud of. A new production is going to actually be in Japan very soon in March, which I'm hoping the world will have resumed operations enough to allow me to actually be in person and see it in person as opposed to having to see it through some kind of screen component. But that is the story of how I got really started and connected to the world of Broadway. The connections to my own interests and passions I think can be drawn back to the power of storytelling, which is really critical for anybody, be it an entrepreneur or a salesperson or someone who's raising money for a living, or someone who's investing money, and of course someone who is telling stories for the purpose of telling stories on a stage or on a screen.

Lorenzo Thione: (11:37)
It's that really incredible arcane and from time immemorial, part of our own identity as human beings, as social beings, that really focuses in stories, the power to not just recount and pass information, but to allow others to inhabit empathetically the world of someone or somewhere that doesn't yet or doesn't exist, and allows them to imagine what life would be in those circumstances. That's how hearts and minds are changed, and that's also how great movement forward is made into humanity and society. That's because people have the vision of imagining the world that isn't yet and are able to tell the story of how much better the world would be if that came to pass.

Sarah Kunst: (12:35)
I love it. So, that is incredible. I also love that you're just so good at things. You move to America, start a company, sell it. You go to a play, see George Takei, and then seven years later have a Tony. You plus five to seven years equals success, it seems like.

Lorenzo Thione: (12:52)
I don't know. I actually have spent a lot of time in my life sort of thinking about what success is. There's all sorts of ways in which I could look at the facets of things that I've done and say, "I've been successful." And there are ways in which I can look at the things that I've done and say, "I have not been successful." And it's really interesting because Powerset was an amazing company that we had built some really awesome technology. More than anything else, we had brought together an incredible group of people, of which I'm really, really proud. And I continue to invest and follow in the companies that our Powerset family sort of went on and found.

Lorenzo Thione: (13:40)
But in a lot of other ways, it was not the success we had hoped it to be, or did not realize upon its vision or its mission of competing sort of in the market with the big search engines. It became a fortunate exit, with value for all involved. But it became also a reflection of its circumstance, right? It was 2008, we had a really great partnership with Microsoft. The Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo initially did not go through. That meant pressure for the company to look at other ways in which it could compete in search. We also ended up closing our deal a couple of months, not even, before the 2008 market crashed.

Lorenzo Thione: (14:26)
So just a few things off on which I hadn't necessarily not a lot of input, and the story could have been very different. And Allegiance is the same thing, too. Ultimately, it just showed that ... was seen by hundreds of thousands of people, changed tons of hearts and minds, and I'm so proud of it. But hey, we opened just a few weeks after Hamilton opened on Broadway. And it was a difficult season to compete in the market. Broadway, it's a wonderful business, but it's also a ruthless one. And you have to sell 10,000 tickets every week. 10,000 people have to come to the theater every week to actually make it financially valuable and success, from that point of view.

Lorenzo Thione: (15:18)
So, we have to close after six months because the business wasn't there. But that doesn't mean that the accomplishment of having taken it there and having been able to create something that remains and has an impact for years forward in other forms and other countries, isn't there to be appreciated, either. So, I don't know. I've spent a lot of time, especially in the aftermath of Allegiance, thinking about what's success and what's not success. And closing the show was heartbreaking, but at the same time, it just allowed for a new perspective on whose metrics one should use to evaluate your own success.

Sarah Kunst: (15:59)
Yeah. No, that is very true. Every success only looks that way in retrospect when you squint. So, I would love to hear about AI, right? 2003 is not necessarily a time I think of as being the heyday of artificial intelligence. Tell us a little bit about how you got into that space so early, and your thoughts on how it's evolved to the point where now it feels like Elon Musk is spending lots of money to figure out whether or not we live in an AI simulation. For the record [crosstalk 00:16:41]

Lorenzo Thione: (16:41)
Yeah. For the record, you think we do or we don't?

Sarah Kunst: (16:42)
I don't [crosstalk 00:16:42]

Lorenzo Thione: (16:42)
We don't, okay. Yeah. I mean, especially because if we lived in a simulation, 2020 would really have to have been someone spilling the coffee on their keyboard. But so, yeah, there's a lot of things that have happened in the last 20 years that create what we are seeing now, as we can call it a golden age of AI, but really is just the beginning of an exponential acceleration. And ultimately, people have been talking about the singularity and what that means for a very long time. And it's just realizing some very sort of intrinsic tendencies of computation power growing, data growing exponentially or over-exponentially. And sort of all of those things happening together at the same time lead us to where we are.

Lorenzo Thione: (17:37)
I also joke often that I've looked at the 2010, 2015 time as the time where I literally saw projects I worked on in school or in research; I was for a few years a researcher at Xerox PARC. I saw those things become reality in people's lives, so Siri and everything that dialogue systems we are doing in 2000 and ... I don't know, what is it, it was 2010 maybe, something along those lines, where literally, the sort of productization of things that we had been doing in the late '90s and early 2000s in schools and research laboratories.

Lorenzo Thione: (18:23)
But what really drove me to the work I did was primarily a combination of two passions, one in computer science, but the other one in linguistics. And actually, the fact that having grown up in the country with a different language, and always having had a passion for learning languages and analyzing them, led me to stumble on computational linguistics and natural language understanding as the field I then later decided to take on, initially for what I just felt like was a master's degree, and then became a research project. And it was just the right moment. And Xerox PARC and Fuji Xerox at that time were just centers of excellence for research that had been going on for decades, and that felt, along with computational power becoming cheaper, became the right thing to explore at the time.

Lorenzo Thione: (19:28)
Funny anecdote, Powerset was the absolute first pre-launch customer of Amazon EC2. So, it was like the perfect use case. Up until that moment, every single startup, every single company that was trying to do something that was computationally intensive, had to build their own data centers, right? They had to effectively buy their own metal and install it and manage it and all of that. And once you did, your computational power stayed inflexible until you decided to put more money into buying more machines and connecting them and all of that. And that was just a moment in which we started hearing and having this conversation from this super secret project that was going on. Amazon was building this cloud computing thing, and we were ultimately the very first users of EC2 ever, before they even launched the product.

Sarah Kunst: (20:29)
Wow. And so, that's amazing. I would love to understand sort of the connection ... At what point, with StartOut and Gaingels, was that you were already angel investing, you were already building these communities? How did you sort of decide, and walk us through what some of those organizations looked like, and how you work with them, because you do a ton to give back, and that's how we first connected. And it's so inspiring, so I'd just love to understand more about how you got involved with these organizations, and what you do with them.

Lorenzo Thione: (21:04)
Yeah. So, I think a lot of it goes back to some of the things I mentioned before, which is a lot of the things that I've done ended up not being big plans or sort of things that I had been thinking about for a long time, but rather the reaction to a circumstance and an opportunity, and something that was just right there in front of me at that moment. So for example, after the acquisition and after the exit, I basically just met a few other people who had been talking about similar things in terms of, "Hey, there's no network or group or connection for LGBT entrepreneurs." And everybody was coming from a different angle. Someone was coming from the angle, "Hey, this would have been a resource I would have liked to use," and some others were coming from ... I remember the point of view I really resonated with or I came from, which was, I mentioned it earlier, I had a couple of friends who kept on ... We had these debates or these conversations around the fact that they weren't out with their boards and their companies, and I was trying to understand why. What was so scary or what was so in the way of that process?

Lorenzo Thione: (22:23)
And obviously, you just never know how people are going to react. But at the fundamental core of it was a new balance between the perceived risks and the perceived opportunities. So what I felt was like, "Okay, if we assume that there is a value in getting these great entrepreneurs focused on building their businesses instead of constantly worried about not disclosing that they are gay or that they have a partner or whatever it is, then how do we create that opportunity? How do we create that upside for people to now rebalance that idea of risk and benefit?"

Lorenzo Thione: (23:03)
And it's not very different also to the fact of saying, "The moment you do, not only you're doing a favor to them, you're also creating an opportunity for so many others to see themselves reflected into roles that they had not seen or imagined possible before." And I think we started StartOut in 2008, and it was a few years from there to when, for example, Apple's CEO Tim Cook actually came out publicly. It wasn't that people didn't necessarily already know privately, but he had always held that there was no value, there was no bearing on his job as CEO from what his sexual orientation was. And that is true, on one face of it. But what he came to the realization is the value of representation, is the power of giving people an idea of what's possible for them and seeing themselves reflected as a source of strength and diversity as opposed to just a reason to be called other.

Lorenzo Thione: (24:17)
And that realization was really core both for StartOut and how I continued to see the impact I could have in ways that I was interested in in my own community, and in general in society. So one way is to really think about the venture capital ecosystem in a more broader sense than just who the entrepreneurs are. And that was actually from the StartOut community, that the two cofounders of Gaingels, I actually connected them. One of them was on the board of StartOut with me. And they came to me with the realization that there was all this other impact that we could have if we didn't only focus on the entrepreneur, but also focused on who's making the decisions about investing, who is negotiating deals and terms, who is ultimately writing the checks, that ... Whose value multiplied thousands of time in the venture world. And up until that moment, all of that wealth had only flowed down to the same people in the same educational, socioeconomic background, and largely ethnic and racial backgrounds, as well.

Lorenzo Thione: (25:33)
And so, Gaingels is one of many other groups of investors who focus on bringing more diversity at various strata and various layers in the venture capital ecosystem. We are a large venture syndicate. We are able to invest in LGBT-founded companies but also companies that promote and embrace and make visible their LGBT leadership. And all of that reflects also into, who are the check writers, who are the people who are writing the investment? And I'll just add one thing, which is how that also reflects into the work I have been interested in doing in the theater world, because almost everything that I've worked with or I've worked on or that we've worked on has always been about some form of increasing representation and inclusion in different ways. Allegiance was the first show on Broadway that not only featured a largely Asian American cast in an Asian American story, but also had lots of Asian American creatives, an Asian American director, an Asian American writer. So, that was one.

Lorenzo Thione: (26:50)
I'm working on a new show that is about a story of a young woman with autism. And really, we're so excited that we've cast an incredible actress who identifies on the spectrum for the role. And it's just realizing how visibility and representation matters in so many second, third, multiple order ways that you don't even imagine, initially.

Sarah Kunst: (27:17)
Yeah. No, I couldn't agree more, and love that you're doing that. And everyone, feel free to drop questions into the chat. But to totally switch topics, I would love to hear your thoughts on two very different tech ecosystems. One, you went to school in Austin at UT, and now it seems that half the tech world has decamped for Texas and their zero state income tax life. Little do they know their sales tax is incredible high, so you have to shop elsewhere.

Sarah Kunst: (27:56)
But would love to understand what your thoughts are on that tech ecosystem and what you saw there? And then on a totally different side, what does the European tech ecosystem look like? Do you still spend a lot of time in Italy? Have you gotten involved in tech there? I've spent a little bit of time in Eastern Europe in that tech ecosystem, and it feels like there's so many brilliant people, but we don't think of it as being as much of a place to go to look for investments or to start companies. So, everything outside of New York where you're based, Austin to Italy, what do you think?

Lorenzo Thione: (28:38)
Yeah. I mean, I think honestly, having lived in Silicon Valley from 2002 all the way until 2010, with starting to living a little bit of a bicoastal life across the last few years of that, I really remember the difference in how it felt coming from Italy and sort of having been in the sort of ... if not entrepreneurial, still the educational academic networks in the computer science engineering world in Italy, to coming to Silicon Valley. And I remember this thing that people called the network effect, of everybody being there. And everybody being there really meant so many things. It meant that you could interact with companies, you could interact with investors. You had these serendipitous moments of encounters where you would meet and people would come together across very different stages in their lives, in their careers, and all of that. And all of that happened right here.

Lorenzo Thione: (29:53)
And I believe really ... I mean, it's really clear that that was a big reason of why. And if you add to that the fact that Stanford and Berkeley are also there, so they become these basins and these feeders of talent in there. It's really why it emerged the way it did. New York, certainly in the last 10 years, really has come on strong as another center for tech excellence. And a lot of the same reasons apply. Once enough people started believing that that was a possibility, the physical presence of all of those different parties started to create these network effects.

Lorenzo Thione: (30:38)
So I don't think that the shift ... the shift to Austin, we've seen it in some parts for a number of years. It really has accelerated, the shift to Austin and the shift to Florida, really accelerated this year. And it would be silly to not point to the pandemic as a massive catalyst for the change and for the shift. And the biggest realization is that there is a lot of business that can be done without physically being present in a certain given place, which removes some of the necessity for some of those network components to all be locally there.

Lorenzo Thione: (31:23)
And so what I really do think it will do is it starts to level the playing field between places where people may move, as you mentioned, for tax reasons, but also for other regulatory reasons. There's all sorts of people, "Why would you start a company in places other than California?" There's all sorts of reasons for that that go beyond just taxes. And one of the reasons why this has kept, for example, Europe behind has been ... I remember how difficult friends that were trying to start companies in Italy, how just simply difficult it was to incorporate a business, which is literally something that you can do off of a website in the United States, right?

Lorenzo Thione: (32:08)
And so, you start to really chip away at all of those pieces and really allow people to cooperate effectively from a distance. And you start to see a leveling of the playing field. So the short answer is, I think Austin and Florida are going to be maybe a little bit ahead of the curve, but we're going to actually see acceleration in a lot of other places where talent is and where there might be the sort of regulatory and infrastructural conditions for innovation to happen. I love the ecosystem in Berlin, in Germany. I think London and the U.K. has an advanced ecosystem as well. One of the things that Gaingels does, and we actually had started doing before the pandemic had hit was to actually do twice a year ecosystem tours. We would take a group of investors to other cities and other countries and sort of interact with both the local sort of regulatory infrastructure, but also with the local entrepreneurs, investors, LGBT ecosystem. And we were planning several more for this year that we'll have to now shift off by at least a few months.

Sarah Kunst: (33:38)
Yeah, yeah. No, that is awesome. From Austin to Italy and Miami and everything in between, I think we're definitely seeing a shift that it's possible to start a company anywhere. And certainly, lots of places are slightly more tax-friendly and have nicer valleys than Silicon Valley. So, we have a great question from Peter. And he was asking back to my favorite topic, theater. He said, "With Allegiance, did you ever think about the geopolitical significance or history lesson of the Japanese internment, particularly during the start of the Trump presidency?"

Lorenzo Thione: (34:18)
Yeah. So, I mentioned how the work on Allegiance was not a work of months or weeks. It was a work of years, right? And so, we started the work on Allegiance and the inspiration for it came at a time when Trump just was not even something that people could have imagined. What felt relevant and what felt emotionally important was the memory of September 11, which was only seven or eight years old, and the fact that the country had almost gotten close to repeating the same type of mistakes in the name of fear and a fear of others that we had done in the '40s.

Lorenzo Thione: (35:04)
And we never, ever would have imagined that, fast-forward to when we're actually opening on Broadway, the world feels like this is exactly the reason why this story needs to be told. And I do think that, I mentioned it before, life is timing, and you can't ever get too upset about it. But we opened at the same time as another important historic musical about the sort of relevance of the time. And with Hamilton being the success it was, I think that the story and the message got lost a little. But it certainly resonated enough.

Lorenzo Thione: (35:50)
Funny thing that happened, I think we were in previews or we had already opened. And a couple of people in the Trump camp made some really remarkable sort of remarkably bad statements. One was Trump himself, who actually said at some point that he didn't know if the internment of Japanese Americans had, after all, been such a bad thing at the time. He would have needed to be there to know whether or not that was the right choice or the right thing to do, which is absolutely insane. And we took it as an opportunity to basically say, "Well, you don't actually have to have been there. You just have to learn about what happened. So why don't you come and see for yourself what it was like for real people, for families, and what kind of impact it had on real lives?" And we made it into a little bit of a marketing gimmick, and actually kept a seat in the orchestra open with Trump's name, with a Trump sign, "Reserved for Trump," on it for a number of different performances. And people would take pictures and tweet the pictures, too, with the Trump seat.

Lorenzo Thione: (37:08)
But also, the other thing that happened is the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia. I can't remember exactly what he said, but to the same extent of sort of having said that it was justified at the time what had been done. And a better story or a better resolution there, we facilitated a call between the mayor and George Takei. And I think that that at least led to an eye-opening conversation and at least a change of heart on the topic from him.

Lorenzo Thione: (37:48)
We had just closed, we had already close when the child separation policy was put in place, and literally had children in cages at the border. We fortunately were able to continue to tell the story through a movie. We shot a really wonderful live capture of Allegiance and released it in movie theaters all around the country and then around the world. And so that was at least able ... another way for more people to actually get a chance to see it.

Sarah Kunst: (38:23)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. And you're living through that in real time, across all sectors of your professional life. That's amazing. So, what's next? 2020's been a crazy year, and what are you most excited about, particularly on the tech side? When it comes to investing, what do you think 2021 is going to bring for startups? And maybe we'll end with your tech predictions for the year ahead.

Lorenzo Thione: (38:58)
I mean, I think that there's going to be some really massive innovation happening in AI as it applies to more things that we have not really seen it applied to, just because the amount of data that we are producing and that we're able to train new models on is just astounding. I think the work that OpenAI has been doing and GPT-3 just gives us a little bit of a glimpse on the kind of exponential change and really revolution from the point of view of what's possible. We are going to see ... Things that excite me are autonomous vehicle, autonomous flying. There's lots of AI application to detection of disease. We're now seeing things that can be applied to anything from radiology to vision [inaudible 00:40:05] vision systems, applied to medicine. I'm personally a big fan of data science applied to health and wellness, and so lots and lots of health tech and wellness tech, more exciting things to basically improve and prolong people's lives, which I think is a big scientific next milestone or next frontier.

Lorenzo Thione: (40:31)
And I'm excited about other things happening. I'm excited about changes in medicine that are, for example, looking at the science of psychedelic and how those can really have a change and impact on people's lives. We're seeing the impact of gene therapy and CRISPR as being the very beginning of an absolute revolution. And actually, a lot of the investments we've made and we're making reflect a lot of those trends, so I'm expecting to see more ... Oh, and one other big trend is absolutely innovation, hardcore technical innovation to solve climate challenges. And so, we've been talking and there absolutely should be regulatory impact and legislative impact to how we deal with the question of climate change. But I think that what we are going to see in the next five to 10 years is an onslaught of new technology that really changes the ball game when it comes to how we deal with climate change.

Sarah Kunst: (41:46)
Couldn't agree more. I love it. Broadway, climate change, AI, you truly are a Renaissance man. And this has been so fun. Thank you so much for joining us. And Joe and the SALT team, thanks so much, as always, for having us.

Joe Eletto: (42:03)
Absolutely. I just want to say from my and Lorenzo, it's great that you're able to address this issue of diversity by being in the room and by also bringing the companies and having this two-sided focus on it. When we had Steve Case at SALT and on SALT Talks, he was talking about rise of the rest and how investment is now being distributed across the country. We had [Allyn 00:42:28] Shaw, who is chairing diversity at Bank of America, and he said people are prioritizing these things because diversity is good for business, at the end of the day.

Lorenzo Thione: (42:37)
Absolutely, absolutely.

Joe Eletto: (42:40)
So, just want to thank you for that. And to sort of also make this go into a little bit of overtime, you can give us a quick little thing if you want about how we evangelize those people who are already in those positions, too, at Andreessen Horowitz, at a Briar Capital, at these places that probably are emphasizing diversity, but how do we get those people to further emphasize what we're looking to do here?

Lorenzo Thione: (43:08)
This is a fantastic question, and it's one where I and my partners at Gaingels really think about all the time. The way that we've found and that we've found have really started to resonate is what you mentioned a moment ago, is just by simply being in the room and being a partner to those organizations that may have not in the past moved as quickly and as swiftly, you start presenting yourself and everything you would present and carry with you as a valuable partner, as a valuable piece of the conversation. And little by little, there are changes that happen.

Lorenzo Thione: (43:48)
For example, we ask all of the companies that we invest in to basically publicly state and sign a declaration of value, effectively. It's a letter, it's on our website. And it basically talks about all the things that we care about and that we expect our portfolio companies to care about too, from diversity in [inaudible 00:44:09] recruitment to diversity in board recruitment, to being good social citizens and looking at things like the 1% pledge of your profits and your equity to charitable causes that you and your stakeholders really care about. And one that is probably one of my favorite, it's an initiative that we didn't start, and we were so happy to be able to join as amongst founding members, and has so many of the VC organizations that may in the past have not seen this as an issue or a problem, also join as cofounding members. And we hope more will come onboard, too.

Lorenzo Thione: (44:49)
It's called the Diversity Term Sheet Rider for diverse investors or diverse check writers. And it's basically language that VCs and companies who are negotiating a term sheet can agree to include in their documents that basically commits them as investors, major investors and company, to make room in all future rounds for at least some portion that they can decide, an amount or an amount in percentage, for diversity-based check writers and investors. And that means creating access for people who traditionally have been left out of what ultimately are the most valuable and the most value-creating rounds, investment opportunities that exist ... We used to say in the Valley, and now hopefully it'll be everywhere.

Sarah Kunst: (45:42)
I love that. That's awesome.

Joe Eletto: (45:42)
That's fabulous.