Drill Down Ep. #254: Innventure (INV:NASDAQ) CEO Bill Haskell

Añadido: 2026-05-23

[00:00:08]Welcome to the drill down. We've got the business stories behind stocks on the move. I'm Corey Johnson. Just ahead, Inventure builds companies around technology licensed from other big companies, multinationals. One of them just booked a $50 million single quarter cooling AI data centers. What is this company and why did activist investors have so many concerns? What happened there? We'll drill down on that. But first, it's sponsor time. The drill down is brought to you by ERA. Never miss another critical insight or event ever.

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[00:00:47]I'm Corey Johnson. Welcome to the drill down. We explain the business stories about a stock on the move. In ventures, one of those stocks. It's an Orlando based company that licenses breakthrough technologies from multinational corporations building operating companies around it, then holds them through commercialization. It's got three active uh subsidiaries today in data cooling, sustainable packaging, chemical plastic recycling, all of them fascinating stories. Bill Haskell the founder and CEO of Inventure. Um Bill, yours is such an even even in the world of of incubators and that I've seen for decades. This is a really interesting company. Um glad to have you join us. um what tell me what was behind this notion of of how your company works.

[00:01:27]>> Yeah, sure. Well, thanks Corey. I'm glad to really be here. So, this story goes actually back to the mid 1990s.

[00:01:36]So, I was an applied mathematician going way back in the day, a rocket scientist and met an individual who had PhDs in physics and high energy astrophysics.

[00:01:49]And our view was if we wanted to be entrepreneurs and do startups, there has to be a more deterministic way of building companies with a higher success rate than what you typically see in venture. And I'm not being critical of venture. It's been a great asset class.

[00:02:04]It's borne out over the last 50 years.

[00:02:06]Really nice uh return for investors. But our view was is that if you're going to spend five years of your life and some of your best ideas and your own capital in something that has a probability of failure, it's kind of a lousy place to be. So we thought we could being scientists, engineers, first principles thinkers, we could come up with a way to build companies with a higher success rate and help mitigate the risk. Many things we could do before we started.

[00:02:37]So, we do this in a a number of ways.

[00:02:39]And the first thing we do is we actually partner with multinational corporations for a variety of reasons.

[00:02:47]And one of those reasons, believe it or not, is that they tell us what the market wants.

[00:02:53]42% of startups fail because there's no demand for the product that people build because people tend to in invent things that they enjoy, things that they're interested in. But the multinationals have thousands of feet on the street every day and they're wandering the planet listening to what the market needs. And if it's something disruptive, they typically won't build it themselves, but they may engage in an R&D initiative to go prove out the the technology platform.

[00:03:24]>> Well, let me let me take ahead. Yeah.

[00:03:26]know I want to take it back just a little bit cuz you know I sit here in San Francisco in the San in the ferry building up at Shack 15 where I'm surrounded by entrepreneurs starting companies desperate for venture backing.

[00:03:37]But you're right, the venture capitalists kind of don't care if nine out of 10 of those businesses go out of business based on their advice. They will they will they will shoot them off into space hoping that one of them makes it to the moon. Uh no SpaceX puns intended, but you're right. the the notion of failure that's might be acceptable to the investors might not be acceptable to the uh the entrepreneurs themselves.

[00:03:58]>> Exactly. Like I say, you invest a lot of time in a startup and you know when you think about it objectively, you know, why would you want to start something that's likely to fail and invest all that time, energy, money and and so forth. So, so the multinational serves a number of of functions, but one of the interesting ones is that they have huge R&D budgets. The top >> and we're talking about companies like Proctor and Gamble companies >> Proctor and Gamble, Dow, Nokia, Bell Labs, um yeah, all all of all of those large players. The top 100 R&D spenders spend about 3/4 of a trillion dollars on R&D every year >> and about 6% of that makes it into commercial product.

[00:04:42]So there >> that's kind of like the the success rate of venture capitalists, right? It's in that range, right?

[00:04:49]>> Yeah. Huge stores of intellectual property that are really unccommercialized, but they're building things or they're developing technologies that they think meets the demand of the marketplace. So what we do is we go look for not just any technology that the multinationals have but things that have strategic value to them. What they consider to be crown jewels that they would like to see commercialized but that they don't want to commercialize themselves. It's outside of their core mandate. So they need it in the market but they don't want to be the person who commercializes it. So for example, a company that makes soap might not want to make the plastic bottles that the soap goes into.

[00:05:32]>> 100%. So yeah, we we started a company in fact with a technology we licensed from Proctor and Gamble around that very thing. They had promised their shareholders and their customers that they would meet certain sustainability targets and one of those was putting their products in recyclable containers.

[00:05:52]And there was no technology to recycle polyropylene at scale. And so they developed a technology spent many tens of millions of dollars and many years developing a technology to recycle old used polyropylene into the equivalent of virgin resin. And but they don't want to be in the recycling business. That's not their core business. So they came to us and we licensed the technology and we do it for a very small amount of money upfront relative to what they've spent.

[00:06:23]But the value to them isn't getting a return on their their R&D dollars. The value to them is having it be available in the market to meet a broader initiative. Sometimes economic, sometimes not. And so they often will get either, you know, some license fee or some small equity stake in the new co, but we ask for no capital. We pay them for the for the the technology, but it gives us a huge head start because we already know that we've got a need that we're addressing that's significant in the market. We have a technology that's been proven at least at the physics level. And in the the world of technology, they have something called technology readiness levels. And things that we find typically might be at the, you know, 5 67 range. So they've they work from a physics standpoint may need to be scaled. But in this particular case, you know, we raised about a billion dollars and stood up a big a big plant in Ohio that can produce a billion pounds of recycled polyropane a year. Well, and let me throw also you've got a often got a customer already rolled into that which is one of the hardest things for a startup is to get one big referenceable customer. You kind of start with that.

[00:07:37]>> Well, that's the third piece that the multinationals provide, right? They provide an unknown market need a technology to meet the need. And the third thing is they can help be a channel to market and they know where all the customers are. In that particular example I was just talking about through the help of PNG, we pre-sold 100% of the output of the first plants for 20 years before breaking ground which enabled us to go raise the capital. So we had an >> that's a good business model.

[00:08:09]>> It's fantastic. So PNG is a customer.

[00:08:12]They're not the only customer um because we don't build companies around a single customer. Um but that's where they got the value. Now they can deliver their products in those sustainable packages in the marketplace which is was their goal in this particular instance.

[00:08:29]So those are three ways we help mitigate risk. You know we have a an unknown market need we have that that is needs to be met. We have a technology that meets the need. We have now a channel to deliver that solution into the marketplace and things that are disruptive. It's hard to get traction in a new marketplace often. So the multinationals play a big role there and then we provide the capital which is a big risk for a lot of startups and then finally we put our own people in to run these companies at the at the inception.

[00:09:02]We have folks like myself and others that have developed many many startups from zero to commercial scales.

[00:09:10]>> Yeah. Tell me how that that works. I I sort of when I first started reading about the company I kind of imagined you've got like a closet in the back where you just pull out executives. Hey, we need a sales guy. We need an R&D guy.

[00:09:20]You over there from sales. You're going to be selling plastic bottles. Now, no, never mind. It's going to be liquid cooling and data centers.

[00:09:26]>> That's exactly right. We have what we call CXOs, you know, we have a bench of CXOs that have done this over and over again that have started companies from zero, taken them to commercial scale because we don't want to take the risk of betting on a first-time entrepreneur.

[00:09:41]We've been first- time entrepreneurs and second and third and in my case, I don't know, 17 or 18, >> right? And you know, so it's you don't know real quick.

[00:09:51]>> A lot of landmines. And while we certainly make mistakes, we only try to make what we call original mistakes. Um, >> it's kind of like a lot of venture firms have got an entrepreneur in residence.

[00:10:02]>> It is similar >> um and similar, but to your point, if you're managing a portfolio for a portfolio return, you don't need to win on every company, right? So our whole model is around finding those crown jewels that can make companies and by the way we only do things that we think can achieve at least a billion dollar enterprise value over a period of time. And the reason is having done this many times it's no more difficult to build a billion dollar company than it is a $20 million company. You just have to pick the right game to play. And we have a whole team of folks that that run our new code development process. And we have a process called down select where we winnow down these ideas that we get from multinationals. And we pick one out of 50 maybe how many you look through. That's >> cuz with the venture capitalist I deal with our, you know, the the name of that game isn't just helping the companies grow. It's it's having lots of deal flow, having being able to look at so many ideas and talk to so many entrepreneurs.

[00:11:10]>> Yeah. So, we h we see a lot of technologies. We have relationships with a number of multinationals that regularly show us technologies. Remember, we're not betting on companies. We're betting on technologies and markets. So, we're not buying an existing company. We're just licensing a technology. We start the company from zero, right? So, we're we're the founders. We have all the 100% of the founder shares when we start and which is an e economic advantage for our investors because they get access to things at the very formative stage but with a lower risk profile and and so that's the whole asset class that enable investors to come in and have access to the equivalent of venture capital but with lower risk and more more financial leverage in the sense that you know we form these companies with sort of a zero basis. We're not buying into a company at a $20 million pre- money valuation or anything like that. We own all of the shares at formation. And so therefore, our our shareholders have access to not only the existing companies, but future companies with no incremental investment. So if you own 5% of invention, you get 5% of our holdings in each of the companies we own and 5% of every company we own thereafter and creates. So right now there were I would I want to get to them quickly which is the three companies that you're Am I right? There are just three companies you're investing in right now.

[00:12:36]>> Yeah. So we started for one is already an independent public company as own the one I mentioned uh which is a standalone public company worth not >> you spun it out into an IPO. Yeah.

[00:12:44]>> Yeah. 2.2 billionish market cap today.

[00:12:47]Um just to give you an idea. So that really proves the thesis that you can build billion dollar companies by doing what we do.

[00:12:54]>> I'm going to look at your market cap today. your market cap is 523 million as we record this.

[00:12:59]>> Right. So for in venture we have three companies that we have stakes in. We have one that's called Aeroflex which is a packaging company. It's a it's a liquid package that's flexible. In fact you can ship it through, you know, an Amazon channel with no packaging. You put a stick a label on it because it uses an airframe to make it flexible which is interesting >> to contain liquids. It's not made of >> contain liquids. Right. So, it stands up like a rigid bottle and you kind of rip the top off it and it has a self-sealing valve. So, think of shampoo and you're in the shower, you know, you just tip it upside down and squeeze out your shampoo and it selfseals. You can throw it on the floor, it doesn't leak, you know, you can throw it across the room for that matter and >> like a zip lock, but you don't have to lock zip it, >> right? It automatically closes as soon as you stop squeezing. And you can do everything from beverages to so and food items, you know, think of, you know, condiments like ketchup or mustard. Uh but you can also do oil. And in fact, we're in in business with companies that do various types of gear oil. Um all kinds of consumer products, shampoos, body washes, and so forth. So the TAM on that, you know, the industrial market is like $400 billion in in packaging. It's big. Um again a technology we licensed from uh PNG. Um another company we started is Excelsius which is in the data center cooling space. Really interesting opportunity here and we have a technology that we licensed the core IP from from Nokia which owns Bell Labs which is where the the foundation >> they got from Lucent but that's another story. Yes.

[00:14:40]>> Right. Yeah. Back in the day. Right.

[00:14:43]And so that technology provides a mechanism to cool the hottest processes that are in the market. So if you think about, you know, the Blackwells and and Reubens and other chips that have come up from Nvidia, the other processes that are being developed by AMD and Microsoft, Intel, others.

[00:15:00]>> Well, let's let's sit with this for just a minute. So obviously the biggest problem biggest problem in the biggest gating factor in data centers right now is memory. But power is a is a a giant issue, maybe the second largest gating se factor in in growing out data centers right now. And power is such a big deal because the power is used to cool. It's used for HVAC which is the most common way to cool um data centers but maybe not the best. So we've seen this emergence of liquid cooling. So talk about where Excelsius clever name uh sits in what it does differently in liquid cooling.

[00:15:31]>> Yeah. So, so there are traditionally data centers have been cooled with air conditioning and these hot chips you will actually break through what they call a thermal wall and you can no longer cool these hottest chips with traditional air conditioning. So, we've evolved to liquid cooling and >> historically the bigger the chip the more heat and the heat density >> right and the heat's uneven and you don't know when it's going to be hot.

[00:15:57]you know which parts of the chip are going to be hot. But the chips have gone from, you know, little CPUs from from Intel to big GPUs from uh Nvidia now to these giant dinner plate size G GPUs coming out from uh um Cababus went public just last week. Yeah.

[00:16:16]>> And as you think about a genetic computing, you know, for the consumer, >> we're going to have more CPUs coming out too. So that's where an AMD or an Intel will play as well. in addition to Nvidia. So the idea is you take a metal plate that you put on top of the hot chip, right, in different form factors and you put a a plate on it. Could be copper or aluminum. You hollow out a channel in it and then you pump a fluid through that to dissipate the heat from the chip. Removes the fluid. The fluid circulates back. It gets cooled again, chilled, and then and then drives back to the chip. And when you open up a if you look at a server with Nvidia chips in it, you can see all these copper tubes going all around it for these liquid cooling systems.

[00:17:03]>> Right? So so the first evolution of liquid cooling is water-based cooling where you pump water through these channels. But the there are many challenges with water. One of which is that first of all they can't dissipate heat and they can they can for the the tip chips of today. But you know two years from now they won't be able to even cool those chips. you can't pump the water fast enough through the channel and it would be have to be under very high pressure and and so forth which causes all kinds of challenges because sometimes they leak and as water destroys electronics. So the next generation which is where excelsius is is something called two-phase directed chip. So instead of pumping water through that channel you're pumping a working fluid a refrigerant through the channel and when it hits the chip it turns into gas. It vaporizes and the vapor can dissipate far more heat than liquid. It's also very uniform. So when you flow water over a chip, you know, it's it gets hot where it first hits the edge of the chip, but it's going to be differential heat across the chip. So these larger format chips start to warp because it's colder in one area and warmer on the other. Whereas when it when you use vapor, vapor just instantly has a uniform uniformity across the the face of the chip. But if you can also also can do it under very low pressure and it's also uh vapor at room temperature. So so it's not toxic. It's you know it's uh non nonconductive. So it doesn't ruin electronics if if even if you were to have a leak. So it's a far better solution than singlephase water. And now we're starting to see some adoption of of two-phase. So the whole world has evolved now. They know they need liquid cooling, >> right?

[00:18:50]>> And they know that, you know, in the next year or two, they're going to have to have two-phase cooling for many of the of the hotter processors.

[00:18:56]>> And you've got, you put out this kind of interesting press release saying that you got $50 million in orders or backlog just in a quarter.

[00:19:05]>> Yeah. So it's starting to tip. you can start certain to see the inflection point of liquid cooling and in particular two-phase cooling and we enjoy the pole position and I say that uh honestly meaning we have the number one market share you know sort of I'll call it earn media share uh in the world for all liquid cooling and there are only two two companies in the world that provide two-phase there are a hundred or so that provide singlephase daughter.

[00:19:37]Um, so now clarify around that $50 million. That's a $50 million uh booking, but that could go out for many years. I like that shouldn't be confused with a $200 million run rate.

[00:19:48]>> Yeah, 100%. So, you know, one of the challenges for delivery are sort of outside of our control or any any vendor's control in the following sense.

[00:19:59]You know, when you're building a house, you can't put the drywall guys can't show up until the electricians and the plumbers are done. It's sort of like that we're in a position where we can manufacture quickly the volumes that we've committed to and you know significantly more than that in fact and you know what we've projected externally in the market is that we anticipate being at a hund00 million run rate revenue-wise in excelsius by year end and that it'll reach uh cash flow break even. So we're not far away from that.

[00:20:33]And so we feel confident in in that projection as we sit here. We're not projecting 100 million of revenue this year. We're projecting being at an annual run rate of 100 million by year end.

[00:20:44]But we're well on our way to doing that and we are projecting to deliver most of what we have in backlog this calendar year. It just uh some of those things are outside of our control because of supply chain constraints and and other things. Again, it doesn't affect our manufacturability of the product for >> Can you talk about who those orders are from or or the type of company that makes these orders?

[00:21:05]>> We can't. Although I will say there are sort of several categories of clients.

[00:21:10]We're engaged with many of the hyperscalers. There are only four or five. So, pretty much know who those folks are. the OEMs and and you can look on the chip >> the well both the chip OE the the chip manufacturers and the um data center OEMs so like a Vertive as an example is a partner um who they're on our website so I can talk about Vertive so they're the largest OEM in the world in fact >> right so they sell to all of the right the the other players in the marketplace >> then there are um AI I'd argue that Oracle is a bigger OEM of data centers than Verdive, but go ahead.

[00:21:50]>> Well, yeah, fair enough. Fair enough.

[00:21:52]And then you have AI as a service providers, right? Um, and then you have then you have the coloss, right? So, those are the four categories. I would say we're actively engaged in all four of those, >> but the folks we're dealing with, all our folks that we have what we call a multiplier effect. We could be delivering units virtually every day to small players that want five, you know, CD CDUs, right? Um, but we're focusing on those strategic players that broad scale 100%.

[00:22:28]>> Because those other two Yeah. two companies here because we run out of time because I I like I could talk about data centers all day.

[00:22:34]>> Yeah. So, there's actually only one more. So, we've talked about um we there again four total. One is pure cycle, the one that's pump, we talked about aeroflex, now we've talked about excelsius. And then the final one is called Raffinity.

[00:22:48]Really interesting space also. So what Raffinity does is it takes waste plastics of the lowest quality and converts those into ethylene and propylene, which are chemical precursors that you make most the things in your house from. Anything that >> lowest quality like saran wrap, that kind of thing.

[00:23:07]>> Well, I mean foils um you just cheap plastic PEX that you use in your you know plumbing in your house. I mean all kinds of kind of lowcost plastics and you can do it in any combination. So I call it the dog's breakfast which is just a m a mixture of all kinds of different different plastics together.

[00:23:29]They get grinded up and we used a fluidized bed processor. And the beauty of this is that you you bypass the steam crackers in big refineries and bypass a step that's very energy intensive and very costly and you get way more yield than the competing technologies. Um so there's a technology called paralysis which has been around most of my life and it produces a lot of char and they get about 25% conversion of plastic into enduse product. we get 60 or 70% conversion and so that extra conversion is you think about it it's incremental margin and you bypass a very costly part of the pro of the uh the steam cracker process and you can go directly to olence right which are so you can create both a liquid product and a gaseous product any event it's a gigantic marketplace our our plants will be colllocated with large petrochemical plants so for each one we build we'll have a 100% offtaker for that plant. And this is a a company that we're doing in collaboration with DAO Chemical. Um, obviously a big player in the space.

[00:24:41]They're very excited about it. They've leaned in very heavily. They're, you know, they provide a lot of resource to this company in the f mostly in the form of people. You know, they have about a dozen full-time people uh at our at their cost working on this because they see the opportunity in the marketplace.

[00:24:57]Um, so it's early days for that company, but we've already proven the technology works. We've proven it works at a decent scale that we we know we can scale up to full commercial scale and uh and it's very very differentiated from anything else that's out there.

[00:25:13]>> Now, let me um tie two things together.

[00:25:16]So, there was a company uh investors sent uh um activist investors showed up wanted some changes at your company and you engaged with them. And I think it's so interesting cuz this is happening more and more and I've seen some companies that I know quite well that uh and I've seen some lousy companies also get approached by activists want changes and I want to know like that must not have been a happy moment when you find out there's an activist investor involved >> but it seems like you engaged with them and and and and maybe even listened or maybe learned something out. Tell me about that briefly. What was that like?

[00:25:47]>> So so first of all being public is a full contact sport I would say. Um, so you there are a lot of things.

[00:25:53]>> It's different for everyone though.

[00:25:54]>> It is. It is different for everyone. And I've I've done this before, so I a pretty good idea of what what we might be facing. But yeah, I think you know part of it weirdly is tied to the fact that we have a very very exciting company in the data center space and it's the nearest to large revenue. And so I think the view from shareholders is we want a lot of that. Don't spend any money on anything else.

[00:26:21]Now in reality having done this for 30 some odd years we know we can create more exceliuses and we've already we have out of four companies we have one that's you know trading at a couple billion dollars. We believe all the other three will be successful and will trade in the multi-billion dollar range.

[00:26:39]Um but that's the closest end and so they're like don't take any capital to to put money over here you know just put it all into into Excelsius. It's a fair point and the second >> back your winners. Sure.

[00:26:51]>> And yeah and the and the second concern they had was around governance and they wanted more independence on the board.

[00:26:58]We had a ninep person board. We had you know five independents and four executive directors. Um so we signaled that we would do that and we've made some changes to the board. So we did listen to our shareholders and look they're my boss right? Our shareholders are my boss right? That's that's the reality. And so they had some good suggestions, you know, we leaned in, we listened, you know, um so so yeah, I think it's it's fair to engage and they've come out and have supported what we the actions we've taken and we've also signaled that we would raise capital independently for the refinities and the aeroflexes of the world that are not yet in you know generating cash flow and >> those raises just for those deals or would they be for the whole company?

[00:27:42]Yeah. So they would be specifically in those operating companies that we we control. So we would take dilution at those companies by bringing in capital there as opposed to taking delution at topco because dilution at topco affects not only excelsius and the other things but everything in >> I see merits for both approaches.

[00:28:03]Absolutely. capital is good especially because you guys have a going concern from your auditors saying >> something's got to give or you'll run out of you'll go out of business so I want to ask you about that as well >> yeah so let me tell you so first of all we're now S3 eligible shelf eligible we can access capital any day right and so really it comes down to cost of capital I mean if I wanted to raise $und00 million by the end of the week we can do that right we people come to us every single day and say we've got investors that want to put in 50 million or 100 million. So, we can do that any day of the week. So, we don't have a problem with access to capital. We're not going to run out. Um the going concern test in the public market is you have to have a a year's worth of capital on hand, you know, in your bank account. And so, we've opted to say, look, we want to optimize the cost of capital, >> right? So, since our share price hadn't been deflated, we didn't want to raise a bunch of money, you know, at, you know, today's prices or lower. We said, "Look, we expect some news in the marketplace.

[00:29:05]We expect our share price will will grow over time." Back to the rational long-term discussion we had earlier. And so since we know we can get money on a day's notice, right? Let's use the capital we got, you know, play out things, let other things happen, and then we can raise capital at higher valuations down the road, take less solution for our shareholders. So, so that's the model and that's the the remedy I'll call it for uh for our shareholders and it addresses really some of the concerns the activists had.

[00:29:37]But since they've come out and and you know have the support of the measures we've taken. So it's been a good a good interaction. I I'm happy to you know we don't know everything and we're happy to listen to shareholders. They're they're value. No, it's it's it's it's I mean, look, if you've got one business that's going to be doing a hund00 million run rate and you're the overall company's trading at, you know, five times those revenues.

[00:30:00]>> Yeah.

[00:30:01]>> And it's in the AI data center space, that's not a ridiculous valuation. I'm not giving investment advice. I don't do that. But I don't own the stock. I'm not involved. But >> yeah, >> if you can keep the plate spinning, why not?

[00:30:12]>> Well, yeah. And so, you know, if you look at Excelsius, you know, we did raise capital directly into Excelsius.

[00:30:17]It has cash on hand to look to to get through to to the point where it's going to be cash generative itself. And you raised money last year at a $665 million post money valuation for it right now.

[00:30:31]That was before, you know, all the bookings. It was before partnerships with Johnson Controls and Lrron. It was before a lot of things that have occurred before new products have been into the market. So, I can't tell you what it's worth today. I have some ideas, but it's likely to be north of where it was last year. Probably not less, right? Yeah. Yeah. Probably not less. So, >> so what's are is the hardest thing evaluating like having the partnerships like you've got with Proctor and Gamble and then being able to evaluate or even find out if they've got some mad scientist sitting in a back office somewhere who's got a great invention that no one wants to talk to.

[00:31:09]>> Yeah. So, so again, we have this whole team, independent team, and their job is to go sift through all of the various technologies that we look at. We've got lots and lots every year, >> which has got to be fun.

[00:31:20]>> And it it's a blast. Yeah. And and they're in all different spaces. We we tend to find a lot of overlap in the sort of where industrial meets um sustainability.

[00:31:32]just happen to be a lot of but we're really agnostic when it comes to the types of verticals we go into and we hire outside experts to help us evaluate in areas where we don't have the domain expertise but we have first principal thinkers we have a lot of you know mathematicians and physicists and engineers and scientists that can look at a broad spectrum of technologies very smartly and assess not just does the technology work but can you make a business out of it and as there differentiated IP mode around it that will protect us so that we can maintain good margins and things you need to do to be a multi-billion dollar company and and that's really the I'll call it the secret sauce or the or the beating heart of inventure and so we're very fussy about what we start and but we don't have to start one every 3 months or 6 months or a year even because if you're building a billion dollar company every you know year or and we're spending a tiny fraction of that funding that company and funding in venture itself, right? The math works out really nicely, right? You know, even if you're not 100% successful, the math works out better than most any asset class you can you can think of. So, >> fascinating stuff.

[00:32:50]>> So, yeah, it's it's a it's a blast. It's really a lot of fun.

[00:32:53]>> I can only imagine, right, Bill Haskell, CEO of Adventure, thanks for your time.

[00:32:56]Sharp answers to a a complicated and interesting story. We appreciate it.

[00:33:00]>> All right. Thanks, Corey.

[00:33:01]>> All right. Well, it's time for the drill down bite. The one number that tells a whole lot. But first, you can watch the drill down podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and now on iTunes, uh, or catch the podcast on your favorite podcast platforms, also including iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, iHeart, TuneIn, but hit the subscribe button. Make sure you catch every show. It's time for the drill down bite. The one number that tells us a whole lot about Inventure.

[00:33:22]That bite is indeed 665 million. That was the post money valuation for Excelsius after its December 2025 series B only series B at that valuation. Their own market cap of course as I mentioned is a fraction of that number. All right, thanks for checking out the drill down.

[00:33:38]I'm Cory Johnson.