S2G's Managing Partners Predict a Year of Complexity and Opportunity

But before we dive into where we’re headed, we’d love to take a moment to pause and reflect back on 2025. Last year was full of inflection points from policy and trade shifts to technology breakthroughs, the acceleration of AI, a global energy transition, grappling with unprecedented demand, and heightened pressure on affordability, both from consumer side and producers.

Each of these developments is really setting the stage for the investment landscape we’re stepping into now. So I’d love to kick things off to hear a bit from each of you on what are the defining moments of 2025 that stood out to you, and how are those trends poised to shape our sectors in the years ahead?

Sanjeev, why don’t you kick us off?

Sanjeev: No, I think some of it was like a continuation of some trends and then some new things that popped up in my view. Obviously, the private markets are still in flux. They’re from every asset class. There’s been a lack of liquidity. In terms of exits, however, there’s this great momentum for AI investments.

There’s continued interest in private credit, I think. I don’t think we’ve fully recovered from the Russia-Ukraine crisis that then drove interest rates to 4%. So I think from the private markets, it’s been I think, a continued challenge, but pockets of opportunity.

Obviously, public markets are overly concentrated on a certain number of stocks that define both sort of the beta and the alpha. I think from an industry perspective, political uncertainty and risk got introduced, particularly in the energy side, but across different segments of the market.

I think the consumer is coming back into the food system as a greater voice. Power, it’s a non-verb adjective AI, and AI data centers have been on the industry side. So I think in many ways, to me, 2025 was like a continuation of three years of bumpiness on the private market side.

Public markets seemed to tell a different story. And then industry-wise, I think there’s enough, there’s a combination of headwinds and tailwinds that define it. We can get into that down the road, but to me there were inflection points in 25, but a lot of it felt like a continuation of things that were happening for two or three years.

I don’t know if Chuck and Aaron have different views. They likely do.

Aaron: Yeah, I would agree and just to add to it, I felt like 2025 was a transition year in many ways, of kind of the theoretical down to more operational in the sense of moving from, does this work, to does it hold up under pressure? I think Sanjeev talked a lot about sort of the new risks that were added to the market in 2025.

Because of tighter capital, geopolitics, kind of reshaping supply chains, AI is really being mainstreamed into day-to-day operations, altogether, that really changed the nature of risk and the opportunity set. And we’ll go more into that in detail, but as we step into this age of adaptation that we’ve been talking about now for a couple of years. The constraints are actually a positive thing for many of these companies.

Chuck: Yeah. And for me, just the uncertainty that, again, Sanjeev and Aaron talked about is the cornerstone of where business is going. And the need for management teams, the need for investors like us to be able to keep up these trends is getting more and more critical.

A lot of the basic capabilities that AI brings, it democratizes a lot of things, a lot of industries, unless you really think about how to build your competitive moat in that world. And so it’s certainly created lots of opportunities heading into 26.

I’m excited.

Tonya: Yeah, when you look across our sectors today, how would you describe the state of the investing ecosystem? Maybe, Aaron, you can start. I know you’ve been spending a lot of time with investors over the last year, but how do you summarize the moment from an investor standpoint?

Aaron: I think investors, from what I’m hearing, are cautiously optimistic. If you just step back and look back maybe five, seven years ago, a lot of capital was committed, deployed during a significant runup. A little bit pre-IRA, but post-IRA by the last administration.

And I think as a result of that, valuations increased. There was a lot of euphoria about the state of the transition of food and agricultural, energy, and the oceans. I think sober-minded investors that stayed a little more balanced during that time are now sitting there with capital on their balance sheet and the ability to deploy it behind entrepreneurs in a kinda realistic fashion.

And I think investors are looking for those types of gaps where they believe that it’s not just about buy high, sell higher, but you can really build really strong businesses. And that’s a little bit of what I was saying earlier, and I think building on what Chuck and Sanjeev were saying, constraints can be a good thing. When you know the price of risk goes up, that tends to be a positive thing for the top market participants. And so I think investors are cautiously optimistic. But they are really trying to see niche opportunities that are not just playing the fad,

but can really understand who are the top entrepreneurs to back and founders and companies that are gonna really capitalize on what is an ever-changing marketplace.

Tonya: Yeah. We’re going into S2G’s 12^th year. What’s fundamentally different about this moment compared to the past? Are there particular headwinds or tailwinds you all are watching in food and ag, oceans, and energy that might be more nuanced by sector?

Chuck: I think in general, the idea that Aaron talked about with constraints as a thing, I think there’s a reality that comes across. There was a lot of sort of interest in these spaces, and even the Clean Tech 1.0, 15 years ago, the idea that you know, all sorts of these innovations that are happening and all these industries are the same. And so that’s what I think the biggest things that have to me fundamentally changed are this ability to go to the game that you’re actually playing instead of trying to be a different sort of asset class or different thing. Really focus on what helps win in this. What’s the right capital structure? And I think, over the last year and a half, maybe two years now, the markets have dried up from low cost of capital.

It’s really made entrepreneurs think about the right way to build these businesses to the right capital structures, the right amount of capital, the right team size, the right things that are really the right fit for these organizations to be successful and to have the kind of returns and impact, and innovations that we like to see.

And so for me, there’s been over this last sort of year or two in particular, a realism that has entered our space that I think is fantastic, right? And you’re starting to see a lot of these companies, especially even within our portfolio, really accelerate the traction that they’re getting.

And it’s taken some time to get there and really thinking about the right constraints and right company size, and when to spend on big CapEx opportunities. So it’s been awesome to watch.

Tonya: Sanjeev? Obviously, you’ve talked a lot about the age of adaptation. Maybe you can give our listeners a quick summary of what you see those forces being and will they continue through the coming years?

Sanjeev: I think three or four years ago, I think, we made a thesis that we’re going from the era of moderation to the era of volatility, and really the notion that Nixon’s world order brought forth, globalization brought forth a demographic dividend. Although his decision in financial liberalization, which he very much did with taking off the gold standard and global debt from 3 trillion to 300 trillion or more, that global debt led to really outperformance of levered asset classes, private equity infrastructure, and many others. And the other thing that globalization, it was really the entry of China and labor arbitrage. And then obviously the fourth is really Moore’s Law really got accelerated in these four. So those four forces drove, to me, the last paradigm. I think to me, five forces drive the next sort of 10, 20 years, which is really moving into parallel computing and AI to going from a sort of a value space, unipolar world to a more mercantalist multipolar world. And I would even argue, Venezuela and a lot of the things happening right now are mercantilistic approaches to multipolarity. The third is an easy price of money or a declining price of money when we liberalized financial markets to an unknown price of money.

I could give you any side of that trade. Fourth is, I do think that hydrocarbons are not gonna be shifting. And so you’re gonna see, I think, going from 1.5 degrees to a two or two and a half degree. And then the fifth secular force is really demographics. Going from a demographic dividend to a demographic tailwind.

Each of these factors have issues. They impact the food system, the energy system, the oceans. I think the combination of the five offers a ton of entropy and a ton of sort of anti-fragility opportunity across asset classes, venture growth, equity, buyout and credit infrastructure. So to me, the next 10, 20 years are about these five forces.

There are probably others that we’re missing, but these five forces are pretty profound. I think the big thing to me that I’m very curious about is really, if you think about GDP growth as the change in demographics times the change in productivity equals GDP growth. That’s the classic definition. Demographics, we’re actually aging. And so besides Africa, South Asia, Indonesia, and a few other jurisdictions, like there’s not a demographic change in the demographic tailwind. So it’s really a big bet on productivity growth, and it’s cheaper, faster, better across different commodity landscapes.

The big question to me is, are the channels willing to actually do the thing that’s more productive? Like we’ve seen it in many other sectors, particularly tech, and to me, tech in general is gonna be interesting to watch in terms of, if you think of global GDP as a hundred trillion, call it.

Software is 3 trillion, services is, call it, 25 to 30 trillion, maybe less. The big bet that I think of these, a lot of the AI foundation models are like they’re gonna take, the TAM is not the 3 trillion growth of software. It’s really, they’re gonna be able to automate with agents and other approaches that services economy. And so I think entropy and uncertainty define the era. I think there’s a ton of opportunity to what Aaron, Chuck said in that, and we’re gonna step into that, I think with a lot of interesting fit for purpose capital, whether it’s missing middle or something else, that I think is on the offer to really take advantage of this moment of entropy and uncertainty.

And it’s like weekly, monthly, that this gets things that we think, it would never happen or is happening now on a monthly, quarterly basis, and I think the people that are able to grapple with it and be sober about it have tremendous options to create value for investors.

Tonya: Yeah. Yeah. Just digging into one of those elements, Sanjeev, geopolitical shifts continue to happen. What are you watching most closely, and how is that having the biggest impact on investment decisions in our sectors? Are there any surprising ways investors should be thinking about this?

Sanjeev: I think a lot of what we are anchored on is the view that these are all commodities. So maybe I can just do a little bit of a quick round robin. American agriculture was built on peak pork demand from China and corn ethanol lending standards post  ⁹⁄₁₁. In a multipolar world, China is much more reliant on Brazil and Argentina to drive a lot of those raw commodities in agriculture. So TBD, what happens there. And I think there are enormous geopolitical things that are gonna happen in that respect. You look at electrons and energy density, America is the number one producer of oil and gas. It complicates the energy diversification or the energy edition that’s driven by AI data centers or anything else because there’s a lot of associated gas, particularly coming outta the Permian, and there’s LNG exports, there’s mine cycle power plants are going up either in the grid or be behind the meter to fund the load growth that’s happening secularly because of AI data centers.

And so in many ways, like the thing that you have to underwrite to is geopolitical.

Aaron: Just building on what Sanjeev said, though, I think it’s really important if you really step back and look at the US and the Western world, but particularly the US and our asset base, we are essentially a petrol state. We are the largest producer in the world of oil and gas and have massive assets there.

We also are one of the largest producers of corn and soy in the world as well. Obviously, there are other countries that are threatening that, Brazil, et cetera, but we have massive assets in sectors that we as investors are trying to really back the next entrepreneurs that have built some of the greatest businesses of the last hundred years for the next hundred.

And that’s really the opportunity I think we look at. It’s not political necessarily, it’s just saying, Hey, we move from extractive industries to more regenerativeor other better, faster, cheaper industries. And that’s really what we’re backing to take advantage of this transition more broadly and leveraging a lot of the resources and capabilities that we’ve had for a hundred plus years in this country and in other countries.

Tonya: The word affordability has very much entered the narrative in 2025 and is top of mind for many people. Are we entering an era where solutions that don’t consider price won’t scale, or is there still an opportunity for the faster and better category of products to win?

How should entrepreneurs be thinking about this as they grow their businesses and try to bring down prices over time?

Aaron: My quick answer to that is affordability needs to be something identified upfront if you’re waiting for the cost curve in three, five years.  I think that in a zero-rate environment that works. Today, forget about it. You’ve gotta be affordable early on, that’s gotta be part of your early kind of phase zero, phase one of the business plan.

Chuck: Yeah, and I think 25 was one of those years where I think for many people it did cross the chasm of a green premium just won’t cut it. Like, I think there was some belief for a while that you make a better product, and if it’s more expensive, that’s okay relative to the conventional solution, but 25 really was the breaking point of that. And things have to be cheaper, faster, better, or they just won’t be accepted. And I think we’ve seen across our portfolio a number of companies that actually have products or technologies that are cheaper, faster, better. They’re just better products than the conventional product.

And they’ve been able to do that because of this drive that’s been happening over the last several years of those constraints, you can’t have something that’s got this price premium to it relative to the environmental impact. The consumers have shown that they’re not in mass willing to pay for that, and companies certainly aren’t willing to pay for that yet.

And that’s caused entrepreneurs to continue to innovate and actually build solutions that are cheaper, faster, better than the conventional.

Sanjeev: I agree. I think we deal in low-margin industries that are capital-intensive and regulatory sensitive, and frankly, pretty consolidated markets. A lot of those channels, they tend to clear on price as opposed to attribute. Now that could change in certain premium markets, right? We’ve seen this in food a little bit.

There are premium segments of food, there are premium segments of other sectors, but largely, I think price is going to ultimately be your greatest insurance policy to scale, particularly if AI really does, it improves labor productivity, particularly in the service industry, across whether it’s legal services, architectural services, accounting services, et cetera, et cetera.

And you’re gonna have unemployment rates. Anytime I paint a picture of doom and gloom, my economist friends are like, you’re just not imaginative, ​’cause humanity always comes up with new things. There’s air pockets of unemployment that occur in every transition. I think that air pocket’s gonna be real. Top 10% of American society, I think is responsible for nearly 50% of US consumption. And if you have greater labor productivity and greater capital productivity that accrues to a certain segment of the population only, you’re gonna have issues that are profound in housing and healthcare in transport in power in calories, and there is gonna be an air pocket of pain that will occur that I think entrepreneurs and scientists have an opportunity to not have a false choice issue and come up with stuff. So I’m not a techno utopian because I think these transitions have real human cost.

One thing that I want to make sure, is that the audience uses our definition of transition, and it’s not just some political decision that we use. It’s taking useful energy and turning the useful materials. It’s happening for 10,000 years, so this transition is not time-bound.

One of the exciting things, I’m sure you’re gonna go there later, Tonya, is historically we’ve taken useful energy to useful materials, which have been largely physical goods, right? I think one of the things that I’m sure Chuck will get into is the useful energy to like useful intelligence potentially is actually gonna provide a whole new definition of what the equation of transition is.

And I think that’s gonna be an interesting thing to see play out, whether we’re in an AI bubble or not, there’s gonna be a ton of capital expenditure to go figure this out.

Aaron: Chuck, you’ve been spending so much time on this AI stuff with our companies. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you talked about, unit economics you’re seeing AI really drive that better, faster, cheaper.

Chuck: We think about the evolution of a company or idea, validate process, infrastructure, and scale, and I think a lot of companies in 2025 really thought about the first two aspects of that. The idea and the validation of taking AI and bringing it into their business.

And now you’re starting to see acceleration of opportunities materializing across a number of different parts of certainly the three sectors that we cover. It’s really going into that validation and building process and infrastructure, and I think you’re gonna see a lot of that happening in 2026.

This whole idea of AI for ROI, or really thinking about how do you make it profitable, and how do you make it so that the practicing and playing around with it, that happened in 25 is now really starting to be the foundation for these businesses accelerating.

And I think that’s gonna cause a whole bunch of, I think, positive rethinking of models, and it’s not just digitizing or building agents to do what we do today. It’s really building systems that do it differently and better than we do today, which can be more, again, go back to cheaper, faster, better.

It can reenergize or give those even more ability.

Tonya: Would love to hear your perspectives on where it’s actually changing outcomes and where people are still learning and talking about it more versus the ROI.

Chuck: Yeah. It’s all over. Aaron actually just sent me an article this morning as an example of some of the major food companies and how they’re using it to reformat their products. We’re seeing it at restaurants and thinking about hyper-personalization of guest experience. And using even my old alma mater, OpenTable is bringing in the ability to have AI help plan people’s weekends and booking and that helps OpenTable get more of their restaurants’ reservations. My wife, over the holiday, wanted to make fluffy pancakes, so she asked ChatGPT to give me a recipe for fluffy pancakes. You’re seeing, my dad was over, he uses Ozempic, and so what’s an Ozempic-friendly diet?

And just things like that, that are starting to show up in energy, forecasting of the intermittency, and when does the wind blow, and that kind of stuff. And being able to forecast that using AI, you’re seeing that roll out at National Grid and a number of other sort of companies doing that. We just sold Urbint, which is an AI company that’s really thinking about reducing the amount of risk that a line worker or an energy employee sees.

And example after example, you’re really starting to see these things come into play and actually have a meaningful financial impact on these companies.

Tonya: What traits are you seeing in founders that are navigating this moment of AI really well?

Chuck: As Aaron said, and other people, AI is a tool, right? And so it’s the contractor, the artisan, that’s using that tool. That’s really gonna be the value. And certainly, what we’re doing internally is thinking about how do we enable our sort of craftsmen, our team, to be able to use this tool in effective ways to help them be better?

And I think organizations that, yes, get the efficiency gains out of AI but also, really think about the effectiveness of these solutions and are bringing things to market that actually enable people to get more and move from actually doing the work to supervising the work.

People are gonna need to manage agents and other things that are gonna be doing the work. But the person in the loop has to be the one who’s guiding that and getting the opportunity you can out of it.

Aaron: And I would add it’s not just AI that is putting pressure on entrepreneurs. I think it just comes down to leadership. The best leaders at these companies will stand out. We’ve talked about, and Sanjeev talked in depth about, supply chain challenges with geopolitical changes.

The cost of money has gone up. There is not an abundance of resources. And so I think it really does separate the top leaders that can drive the organization, that can put a performance in an environment that is quite challenging, and you wake up tomorrow, you don’t know what the headlines are gonna be.

And so I think what we tend to look for goes back to the sort of basics of really trying to find and back entrepreneurs that are just very good business professionals that are great at leading organizations that really understand what their customers need and are very in touch with those customers. I think AI is a big part of that. It’s another kind of wind or headwind in a way or opportunity if you have the right team around you.

Sanjeev: I also think it’s gonna require a lot of systems thinking approach. Like we have a business, and it is a seed stage, hopefully graduating to a Series A company. And he was trying to get into trade policy ​’cause their supply chain for their particular product was in China, and then they’ve gotta move it up. But where they move it to, and then he’s thinking about using AI for marketing and influence, like the level of like dexterity that we’ve had to go through, particularly the last three years since sort of the drawdown.

Like people are talking about geopolitical things in inventory management, that like we lived in a stable period where you didn’t need to know geopolitics to run a company. And it’s also how wrong you are too, right? So it’s like that humility of can you plan for this era of volatility and from supply chain decisions, inventory decisions, working capital decisions, forecasting margin. Last year, we had a lot of people like, how do I invest in any company when I don’t know the margin structure ​’cause of trade uncertainty? And they weren’t wrong when they told us this. And so it’s like, why are you doing any investing? And so I think you’ve gotta think more broadly than your particular sector or sub-sector.

Tonya: Yeah.

Sanjeev: Maybe that’s done with board members and advisors. ​‘Cause not one person’s gonna be able to do all of it, but I think casting a wider interdisciplinary approach to leadership is gonna be needed because even simple inventory decisions have a ton of interdependency now that they didn’t 20 years ago.

Tonya: What gives you all confidence a solution can survive all this real-world complexity that you’re talking about? As we’re doing our diligence and making new investments, are there things that you’re looking for or vetting along the way?

Chuck: I think for me it comes back to differentiation, right? Making sure that you don’t have the same information that everyone else has, right? And so there’s all kinds of pockets of data and insight and information. And I think, a firm like S2G, we really focus on getting to know our markets well and deep, and making sure that we have connections and relationships with industry.

We keep our fingers on the pulse of all of the different aspects of these sub-sectors and where they’re going. We have conversations with CEOs down to managers who are at the front lines of these organizations. And I think that’s gonna be where that human intelligence, that human sort of interfacing is gonna need to be an important ingredient and a necessary ingredient in being successful. These general models train against the basic internet. And yes, the internet’s big, but there’s more data behind firewalls than there is outside of firewalls from like a like 20 to one type of thing.

And 5% of data is available out there f for everyone in the world to see. And 95 percent is locked up behind firewalls. And so the organizations that are taking advantage of the human, and I don’t mean in a negative way taking advantage, but leveraging the human capital that’s out there and the insights and knowledge that these organizations have built over the last 10, 15, 20 years, those are, in my opinion, gonna be the organizations that win.

And I think our team does a tremendous amount of that work and is really focused on how do we make sure we understand these industries really well. And so it gives us insights to be able to find opportunities.

Aaron: I was just gonna build on Chuck’s comment because I think ultimately what gives me that confidence, but also maybe a little bit about sort of our firm is we’re surrounded, whether it’s internally on our team, but also a lot of our entrepreneurs, by winners.

And it’s not always because they had the best athletic ability or the highest academics. It’s because they worked their ass off mostly. And they also had some skills around that. And then they surrounded themselves with, and we’ve surrounded ourselves with, people who have humility and are not jerks.

And that’s important. And I think in this environment where you are faced with all these headwinds, with all this complexity, changing dynamics, having a group around you, and I think this is true of the entrepreneurs we back as well, is making sure that they have around them at the board level in their own organizations, people that they can trust, that they may not always agree with each other.

And we have lots of debates internally, even, but ultimately coming to a decision that we believe is the best odds of success. It doesn’t mean you’re always gonna win.

You face setbacks all the time, but in the long run, you’re building a franchise and a portfolio that’s gonna achieve great success over time.

Tonya: Yeah. Looking ahead to the new year, where do you see opportunities for our firm and our portfolio in 2026? Anything you’re particularly excited about or focused on? 

Sanjeev: I think within these five forces, there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity across asset classes, whether it’s venture, growth, private equity, or private credit. So I think there’s a bunch of secular forces that are driving changes in demand. The macro side to me is always quite positive.

I think the opportunity is really better execution, and that requires talent and changes to talent and really assessing talent to tactics around distribution, pricing, approaches, forecasting. So I think to me, like we’re moving in much of our work to like micro opportunities as opposed to a big macro. 

Like, you could have the greatest tailwinds, but if you were bad at executing, you’re not gonna win. To Aaron’s point, around like ensuring, like you keep having a sober view of what it takes to succeed in these markets. Particularly these uncertain volatile markets and leaning into that uncertainty, leaning into that volatility, and using that as a great lever. I think the other thing that I see is the art of duration, there’s gonna be some great winners that come out of that where they’ve just gone through the last three years and are building businesses that have profitability, cash flow, scale, and have real value in the market. That is always gonna win. A lot of our sectors, I find, are inelastic goods that have real need, whether the Fed is at 0% or 4% or 6%. Whether the world’s at 30 wars or 50 wars. These things where people are gonna need eat, they’re gonna need power, they’re gonna need transport, they’re gonna need these basic things. And so to me, a lot of it will be continued dedication to managing uncertainty, volatility, and almost building businesses that thrive with that.

Tonya: Chuck, how about you? What are you looking forward to for our firm and our portfolio in 2026?

Chuck: Yeah, I am extremely bullish on where things are at right now. I think our approach, or at least how we’re thinking about it, is how do we find the right entrepreneurs?

And then how do we continue to help support those entrepreneurs through the evolution that they’ve got the right amount of capital, the right sort of growth trajectory? They’re not overspending, we’re not getting CapEx too soon.

We’re finding scrappy ways or good business. Ways to be able to do production or build the products or services they’re selling and creating. And so for me, really continuing to lean into these organizations and help them reach their vision is to me what’s the most exciting opportunity in front of us.

Because I do think there’s, like I said earlier, a tremendous amount of our portfolio that is starting to reach. That sort of moving from process to infrastructure to scale, and really starting to see the growth rates and the efficiency of their models kick in. So it’s exciting to see.

Tonya: Very cool. Aaron, what about you?

Aaron: Yeah, I think maybe taking it in a little bit of a different direction. I totally agree with what Chuck and Sanjeev said. You’ve got power demand going up, which is a tailwind for us. You’ve got the right and the left that both agree in this country, in the US, that we should eat healthier. I don’t think we all saw that coming a number of years ago.

I think for us, we’ve tried to, we’ve got 12 years of lessons learned and experience. We’ve stubbed our toe many times. We’ve had success. I think all of that together allows us the ability to hopefully be just a little bit smarter every day and improve 1%. And that allows us to be, again, a better partner for investors, for founders, and companies and their customers.

A lot of these large strategics that control the channel we’ve tried to invest heavily in being their partner, and I think that allows us an opportunity in this face of volatility and the age of adaptation allows us an advantage over others. So I think, while it’s maybe chaos and constraints in many ways, it’s just a great opportunity for groups like us that have the duration that others maybe don’t have.

Tonya: Fantastic. One last question: Would love to get your thoughts on one question investors and company leaders working in our sector should be asking now, but aren’t.

Sanjeev: I think the big thing that may sound meta, but are you asking even the right questions? Because I think the questions you ask whether about your revenue, your P&L, your competitors, your capital formation, a lot of those are based on certain assumptions, and those assumptions are more volatile than ever before.

And so just making sure you’re framing the right questions to yourself, to your board, to your leadership team, to your customers, I think, is important. Because a lot of things are going back to first principles, I would argue, and first principles are more clouded than ever. So I think a lot of it will be like first principles, thinking on micro execution, that I think will provide people an opportunity. And I think even ourselves in investment decisions, there’s a lot of first principles that we need to continue to interrogate and making sure we’re asking the right questions. Often I think the questions you ask at investment committee don’t survive the wild, and so you keep having to be like, did I even ask the right questions at the IC?

And similar at the board level, similar at the leadership team meetings of these portfolio companies. And so I think, seven years ago, you weren’t really thinking about these questions. How many people today are set up for a blockade in Taiwan, and how many people today are set up for geopolitical things that never happened before?

COVID should have taught us, but I feel like we forgot about COVID.

Aaron: I would just add that I think investors need to maybe ask what scales without subsidies or special handouts. ​‘Cause I’m not sure that’s asked enough. There’s a number of businesses that we see that are relying on significant subsidies that I’m not sure are going to be there.

And whether it’s subsidies or even industrial constraints around the ability to manufacture something at scale, I think when ultimately it comes down to the unit economics, even the simplest thing, the welder, or the ability to weld something, isn’t taken into account. And so I think, there’s some kind of basic fundamentals that aren’t related to the intellectual property that is fancy, but it’s more the kind of base of a business that I think sometimes investors are overwhelmed by, and they don’t think through the full kind of 360 life cycle.

Chuck: Yeah, so maybe just building on top of both those and maybe just a little bit different language but similar, I just think asking the question about what’s the right to win or the moat like that separates these companies because there are everything from geopolitical, tariff changes to what is this ability for you to build a resilient organization?

The whole, just-in-time, super-efficient organization, I’m not sure is the right model for going forward. For me, it is more thinking about is there resilience, is there a moat that’s big and can handle yes, different aspects of risk in these organizations.

And being able to maybe be not as close to that Pareto efficiency and really thinking about redundancies and other things like that, that are built into these organizations, so that they can survive more of these shocks or volatility that happens.

Tonya: Thank you all so much for joining. Really appreciate you sharing perspectives for the year, and look forward to having you all on the podcast and coming episodes.

Chuck: Thank you, Tonya.

Aaron: Thank you. 

Tonya: Thank you.

Sanjeev: Thank you.

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