Is investing with Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) a complex and somewhat exclusive realm or can it be simplified and democratized? Nik Talreja, co-founder and CEO of Sydecar IO, joins Marcia Dawood on this enlightening episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast to offer some intriguing answers that challenge the norms. Nik, possessing a rich background in law and investments, has spent considerable time rubbing shoulders with venture capitalists, which led him to establish the remarkable Sydecar platform. As a passionate innovator seeking to alleviate investment complexities, Nik Talreja was born to be a game changer. He began his journey investing in Israeli startups and quickly noticed a gap in the marketplace for efficient SPV management. Unhappy with the services provided by vendors, Nik and his co-founder decided to take matters into their own hands. They created a fund called 18 Ventures, and ultimately, Sydecar was born. The platform began as a vital tool for their investors, but it rapidly gained popularity among other managers who were desperately seeking similar solutions. In this episode, Nik Talreja demystifies the intricate process of managing small-scale investments through SPVs, shedding light on how Sydecar standardizes and automates complex procedures – right from raising capital to issuing K-1 forms. The platform’s potential has expanded beyond just venture capital workflows and now serves the private market investing industry as a whole. As Sydecar aims to support emerging and mid to late stage managers, as well as fintech partners, this episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs, investors, and all stakeholders in the private sector who want to streamline their operations.
Is investing with Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) a complex and somewhat exclusive realm or can it be simplified and democratized? Nik Talreja, co-founder and CEO of Sydecar IO, joins Marcia Dawood on this enlightening episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast to offer some intriguing answers that challenge the norms.
Nik, possessing a rich background in law and investments, has spent considerable time rubbing shoulders with venture capitalists, which led him to establish the remarkable Sydecar platform. As a passionate innovator seeking to alleviate investment complexities, Nik Talreja was born to be a game changer. He began his journey investing in Israeli startups and quickly noticed a gap in the marketplace for efficient SPV management. Unhappy with the services provided by vendors, Nik and his co-founder decided to take matters into their own hands. They created a fund called 18 Ventures, and ultimately, Sydecar was born. The platform began as a vital tool for their investors, but it rapidly gained popularity among other managers who were desperately seeking similar solutions.
In this episode, Nik Talreja demystifies the intricate process of managing small-scale investments through SPVs, shedding light on how Sydecar standardizes and automates complex procedures – right from raising capital to issuing K-1 forms. The platform’s potential has expanded beyond just venture capital workflows and now serves the private market investing industry as a whole. As Sydecar aims to support emerging and mid to late stage managers, as well as fintech partners, this episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs, investors, and all stakeholders in the private sector who want to streamline their operations.
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Marcia Dawood
Hi, Nick. Welcome to the show.
Nik Talreja
Thank you, Marsha. It's great to be here.
Marcia Dawood
Well, I'm super excited to talk to you about SPVs and everything Sidecar, since you are the co founder and CEO of Sidecar IO. Now, here on the podcast, what I'm trying to do is make sure that Angels and anybody who is interested in being angel knows everything that they need to know about how to do it and how anybody can really get involved with all different types of money, time, whatever they're thinking. So I'm excited to have you tell us a story about how you started the company and a little bit more about what you do.
Nik Talreja
Happy to. Yeah. Thanks again for having me on. So Sidecar was started as a result of a personal pain. I was in the market for an SPV vendor as I was investing with my co founder David Behind, companies that would start up in Israel and look for a way to switch over to the US. And we found our niche as far as an emerging company segment startups that we thought had a lot of value to create and we were able to support them in that switch from Israel to the US. We figured, hey, why don't we start a fund around this niche of investing behind Israeli founders and helping them move their business operations to the US and grow and build their teams thereon. And we called it 18 Ventures. We launched the fund. We're both attorneys, so we pulled our own documentation together. But when it came to proving our value, making investments from the fund and from a syndicate alongside the fund, we didn't have a vendor. So we actually looked at the market. We chose a vendor that's no longer in the market called Assure and we didn't have a great experience. And we realized that part of why we didn't have a great experience was that there really wasn't any software behind the scenes at many of the service driven vendors in the market at that time. And there's perhaps an opportunity for us to just create a better experience for our LPs by building some of the software just for ourselves. We didn't have a grand vision for Sidecar. We had no idea what we do in the private markets beyond venture capital at the time. We were just savvy lawyers who wanted something better for our LPs. And Sidecar was really just born in the early days as a solution for ourselves. It benefited greatly again from our background as attorneys. I practiced law for about nine years before starting Sidecar. Worked in New York City at a major law firm and then in California at Cooley working with startups and venture funds. I worked very closely with venture funds when I had my own law firm after leaving Cooley. So I knew a lot of the ropes and I knew a lot of the processes inherent in starting and running a fund so we had that background knowledge which gave us confidence that we could at least figure this out, probably 80%. We knew that tax and accounting were limitations as far as our knowledge was concerned, but we were able to figure it out and create a solution just for our LPs. And what really happened after that is a snowball effect where other managers just like ourselves were looking for a better solution, something that offered software that was efficient, predictable, where K One Zol was arrived on time and we're willing to try what we had built for ourselves. And that led to Sidecar being born back in January 2021 and the rest is history. The company has, of course, scaled since then. But I'll pause here since I've already given you enough background, I hope.
Marcia Dawood
No, that's great. So you started it as just a fund or a way to put money together within the people that you were kind of pooling resources with, is that right?
Nik Talreja
That's right. We started it primarily for our syndicate under 18 Ventures, where we were investing behind precede and seastage companies. We wanted to bring some of our LPs along for the journey alongside us. We were investing in every deal ourselves also, and we just wanted something really simple to spin up SPVs and help us manage them for their lifecycle.
Marcia Dawood
Great. And so then it turned into you actually putting together then SPVs for other people.
Nik Talreja
That's right. So right out the gates we built basically a workflow to onboard LPs, our LPs. We had a relationship with First Republic Bank. We struck up a relationship with a tax vendor. I called my friend Ted, who is now at Sidecar as a VP of Finance for some support on an ad hoc basis for accounting help. And we basically just built out really efficient workflows to onboard LPs to open a bank account predictably with very little manual effort with that with first public bank and then to manage a lot of the inflow and outflow of capital in an efficient manner through a ledger we built ourselves, ultimately leading to really efficient tax processes where you could take the structured information, give it to a tax vendor who could run a tax process. What happened thereafter is, since we had built this out for ourselves and it was pretty economical for us to run, some of my clients who were venture funds said hey, I want to run SPVs. And you've built this, can we just use it? That led to our first customer besides ourselves at Sidecar, which then snowballed into about 40 customers within a few months. This was back in 2020, which then gave us confidence to say, you know what, let's disconnect Sidecar, which was Free Sidecar, let's disconnect this company we would call Sidecar from a law firm. Let's think about building a business around this because there's enough demand and at a minimum we'll get some great deal flow from collaborating with other managers in the space and maybe there's something to it where it could become something more sizable. What happened thereafter is in the earliest months of 2021 when Sidecar was born, there was so much demand that we were like, okay, it makes sense for us stop investing just to take off the 18 Ventures hat, to wear the Sidecar hat and make this our life's mission. And we started to develop a vision for Sidecar that expanded beyond just this initial footprint of workflows for venture managers, but really a full process standardization for how legal entities are created, how you can integrate with banking in an API driven manner to create accounts in an automated fashion, reconcile capital automated fashion. And I think the real crux for us was building an opinionated system so you can have a complex accounting ledger and a tax ledger of sorts that can understand all of the transactions inherent in investing in alternative asset like a private company to then automate financial statements and tax returns. Once we realized that we could do that, and we were already doing some of it ourselves, we figured, hey, this potential now is not just SPVs for venture capital potentially is a lot of how private market investing happens today. And we had conviction that we represented a segment that was interesting as emerging managers and we believed the world would include more people like us in the future. So we figured, hey, let's grow with this market, let's ride this wave and then build more products for more of the private markets over time. When we had that vision, we started to fundraise and built a team around us. We built the software that we committed to building. And it's been such a fulfilling journey, full of non intuitive learnings, which I'm happy to share, but that's sort of the genesis.
Marcia Dawood
So we hear a lot that entrepreneurs shouldn't have a lot of people on their cap table. So it's like, don't take this $5,000 investment from this one person and then a small investment from another person and things like that. So explain how for our listeners how the SPV actually works then on Sidecar.
Nik Talreja
So that is a very common nugget of wisdom is, hey, don't overpopulate your cast table because it's hard to undo it. You'll have a bunch of small checks, individuals that won't be engaged at the chase for stockholder consents and maybe they're going to be bothering you for updates, et cetera. I actually have a view on this that is yeah, it's not ideal to have a cap table of hundreds of people and you might even trigger having to file like an IPO related filing to take your company public if you cross a certain number of stockholders on your cap table directly. But in most cases, those individuals who give you your first dollars in your business that might be writing a $10,000 check, that's very meaningful to them as far as their income is concerned and their wealth is concerned. But they believe so much news that they want to give that to you can be some of your most helpful investors and some of your strongest advocates. So I can tell you my personal experience is that some of our smallest check riders in the sidecar have been by far exponentially more impactful than some of our larger check writers in the sidecar. Now that said, it is intelligent to think about using tools to consolidate the number of stockholders actually appearing on your cap table. And that's what an SPV can do. So with an SPV, you can invest alongside, let's say, a dozen other people, and you create a vehicle which is called an SPV, a special purpose vehicle that you all invest into. And then that SPV writes a check, one check to the company and represents one line on that company's cap table. So you can consolidate a bunch of angel checks into one check and one representation on the cap table. If you're a founder raising capital, you can use an STD in this manner and basically just represent those investors on record, if you will. I still have the benefit of a bunch of smaller investors who still are really passionate about backing you and being your partners in your journey. And if you're a sponsor, if you're doing all the work to find an opportunity and you have a community that you know will invest behind you, you can get the benefit of putting the SPV together for you. As the sponsor, as the venture capitalist, if you will, and also preserve some greater upside in the form of carried interest if that investment is successful. And that represents your effort in basically identifying this investment opportunity, doing the diligence, putting all the work behind, getting the founder to get you some allocation in the cap table, et cetera.
Marcia Dawood
So if one of our angels said, hey, I found this great deal and I have a bunch of people that want to invest with me, I want to put an SPB together, I'm going to go onto sidecar's website. Do they go right onto the website and they're able to do everything right there, or do they have to talk to people like, how does it work?
Nik Talreja
Yeah, we make you talk to us just to make sure that we level set with you and understand your expectations. Now the conversations usually with one of our amazing salespeople who are really partners with our customers and just making sure, hey, you're investing into an asset we support. We just want to make sure we don't set expectations that are misaligned with what you would want to do. But if you're investing into a company, our product is pretty much self service. Once you talk to someone on our team, you'll get a link to onboard with us. You'll go to that link. It's basically a web application. You'll create a profile. You'll then be able to launch your first deal. And deals take hours to launch with live banking. So the reason it takes hours is that when you launch a deal on Sidecar, you give us information about what you're investing in. We do a quick validation check on our site, which would take a couple of hours from an SLA standpoint to get back to you on. And then within minutes you'll have live banking and you'll have a live entity. So you can go ahead and start raising capital. You'll see capital flowing in an automated way. You get pings whenever someone signs, whenever someone wires. You can even view that in an application to see exactly where everyone is in the process of committing to your SPV and funding your SPV. And then even investing into the company is automated where we have a process of obtaining wire instructions that are certified and insured. And then we move money exactly as defined in our product through our product to the target company. And all of the records are maintained in our software. So it's pretty seamless.
Marcia Dawood
That's fantastic. So then the other pain point with having SPVs has always been like the upkeep then after the check is written to the company. So of course K Ones, which we haven't talked a lot on the podcast here yet about K Ones, but maybe just explain a little bit about what they are and how you go about making sure people get them.
Nik Talreja
For sure. K Ones are a touchy topic. They're in the news a lot because frequently people don't get their K Ones when they want them. K Ones are frequently delivered late. This is where saucers comes in and it's kind of a magic bullet. So what is a K one? What's all this process that comes after you create your SPV? Well, you've created a legal entity that you're responsible for. That legal entity has registrations with state agencies. So you have to file tax returns with the IRS to notify the IRS that you've created this entity that's in this business of investing in something. You have to file compliance filings with the SEC, and you as an advisor potentially have to file filings with FINRA and the SEC, depending on your qualifications as an advisor. So there's all this stuff you got to think about now. What you need to think about when you're using a vendor like Sidecar or if you're running your SPV with respect to the SPV itself, is hey, as long as this SPV is alive, it's got to maintain those registrations to stay in existence, and it's got to file tax returns on an annual basis to report its activity. Now, in year one, when you create the SPV, there are certain transactions that are almost certainly going to happen. One of those transactions is investing in a company money's, come into an SPV and it's gone somewhere. And that's a transaction where people have subscribed to the SPV. They've invested money in it. They've received securities in return in the SPV itself, the SPV has money. Now, the SPV invests in a company, receives a security in return, and it's basically acquired an asset, which is that security. And you like to also have some other expenses. Now sidecar charges the fee. That's how we earn our keep to run this business. Paying Sidecar fee is an expense associated with the SPD. That's another transaction. Whenever you have these transactions, you have to file a tax return. And when you file a tax return and you have members who've joined you on this journey in your SPV, you have to notify those members and give them a form that lets them basically have their slice or representation of the STV tax return to file with their own personal taxes. And that's called the K one. So let's say the STV had an expense of $1,000 and you had ten members. The STV would file a tax return saying, hey, I have an expense of $1,000, a loss of $1,000. That's what you file in the tax return. You would then issue ten K Ones to ten of your investors. Let's assume they all invest in the same dollar amount. Every investor would receive a K One saying, hey, you have a personal loss of $100 to file with your taxes and offset some passive income you might have. And that's the K one. Now, this whole process of filing an SPV tax return, issuing K One historically has been very manual, and even today at many vendors, it's a manual process, like at most fund admins. However, the benefit of software that I alluded to is that if you standardize approach in how you create and manage these vehicles, you can then automate this process of filing tax returns and issuing K ones. That's something we did early at Sidecar. We invested a lot in our infrastructure. We're really proud to have said this year, and even going to next year, we're going to file tax returns ahead of schedule. This year, we issued thousands of K Ones before the March deadline we issued in February. And wow, yeah, we're just really happy to have created software to solve for this pain point.
Marcia Dawood
That's amazing because I literally got the last K One I was looking for on August 31.
Nik Talreja
Crazy. And sometimes there's good reasons for it. Marcia when you create an SPV that's investing in a know, it's a corporation created in some state like Delaware, and it elects a classification as a C Corp with the IRS, that's like the most common corporation you invest in is the C Corp. You don't need to wait for anything from that entity. If you're the SPV filing a tax return, you don't have to wait for anything to file your tax return. However, if you invest in a pass through entity through the SPV, like another LLC, like a limited liability company or a partnership, you have to actually wait until you receive information from that pastor entity to report on your tax return as the FPV before you can issue K Ones to the FPV investors. That's the only good reason to receive a late K One. And it's because sometimes the corresponding K One at the underlying investment is late. Right. Because they haven't gotten their books done. And sometimes that does happen.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, that's very true. So let's talk a little bit about what happened with Ashore because there were a lot of Angel Capital Association members who were affected when they went out of business.
Nik Talreja
Yeah, it's really a sad situation. It's something that I don't think anyone could have predicted would have happened in the way it did, especially not Thanksgiving week last year. But as I understand it, and of course there's a lot of press about this, assure's business was premised on continued growth. They charged an upfront fee for a commitment to serve entities like the SPVs they managed for many years thereafter, but they hadn't really built any back office infrastructure to decrease their costs of serving these SPVs. It was manual. So you had to have a pretty healthy workforce even if you had zero net new business. You had to maintain many accountants to support these SPVs over their life. And they just simply didn't have gross margins to support a very heavy workforce to support all of the SPVs that they had initiated from their inception as an organization. And as the market slowed down, they weren't making enough to cover their operating costs of maintaining these individuals to support the commitments they had made. And this is something that we could foresee having been in this business because we knew how expensive it would be to maintain a bunch of fund accountants on our payroll to just handle business as usual. That's why we took a very opinionated approach to how we do things and build software to automate things like tax returns and issuing K One on our team. We have one tax expert to run hundreds to thousands of these filings, but Assure couldn't do that. So the business just didn't make sense at a certain point, which is when they tried to get out of it and then had to shut down.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, it's really a shame. How many people work at Sidecar total?
Nik Talreja
We're in the mid 30s.
Marcia Dawood
Wow, that's a big.
Nik Talreja
Yeah, it's grown over the past couple of years, but I would say half that team is our engineering product and design team. The other half of the team is our GNA team, with about a quarter of that team being the team that supports our customers in these active responsibilities year on year because we have so much leverage from our software.
Marcia Dawood
So you were talking a little bit earlier about lessons learned. So what are some of the lessons you've learned over the last year or two?
Nik Talreja
So many? One of the lessons I've learned is, as a founder creating a business, there's a point where you need to stop working in the business and working on specific It related tasks and instead focus on working on the business. And really just building a rock star team and making sure that everyone's pointed in the right direction, is aligned with the company goals and is feeling really empowered to achieve success. And this is maybe more personal, but having kind of cut my teeth as a lawyer and really worked really hard to get to where I am and really just been very task oriented and working alongside people to get a job done. It was hard for me to just pull myself out and to focus on larger mission, larger goals and just focus on hiring and being sort of the cultural emblem of sidecar. But I had to do it and it was not intuitive as to when I needed to do that. I learned that along the way. Another thing I've learned that I think is just nature of starting a business in 2020 into 21 during COVID is that we started as a remote team. And being a remote team certainly has its benefits of being able to optimize when you work and how you work, wherever you might work best. However, when it comes to building a team that has the resilience and passion that you want to build the best product for your customers, it really helps to see each other and to share some energy. And something that we've done and done well is held many off sites to get people together that we see each other and share energy. But one thing that we started to do more recently is to open up offices and to get back together. And I didn't think we'd have to do that as soon. It wasn't something that I was super concerned about in the early days, but when we started across about 20 people on the team, it became more relevant because the next person joining us doesn't get the same fuel that the prior 20 people did from being together and been on this mission for that time together. So it really benefits those joining us going forward. But returning to an office environment at least a few days a week, seeing each other, traveling more, to see each other as a commitment we make to each other is something that I think is going to be a permanent part of our fabric going forward.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, I love that about sharing energy. There is something that's just so different being working with somebody that you have to work with all the time and actually being able to see them in person.
Nik Talreja
Absolutely. Yeah. It takes a village to accomplish anything really of real meaning and purpose and starting a business as hard as it is and trying to build something and scale it up, it really matters to be on the same page and to feel connected to the people around you yeah.
Marcia Dawood
How about you mentioned earlier about First Republic, what happened after that kind of mess happened earlier this year?
Nik Talreja
Yeah, good question. So we had already moved off of First Republic when we started to build software. There's no way for us to automate the creation of bank accounts at First Republic, at least there wasn't when we started building our software. So we had already migrated over to another banking relationship that would allow us via software, to create accounts and run KYC processes. So we weren't impacted by, you know, with SBB shutting down and then FRB shutting down, there were certainly shockwaves to the ecosystem around things like risk and FDIC protection and whatnot and community banks not being as safe. So we had to weather a few storms around just defending our partners and negotiating with our partners, FDIC coverage up to astronomical amounts through swap programs and whatnot. But I think more than anything, it's just like a reminder that there's nothing that you can take for granted in these infrastructure partners. So you have to always consider risk whenever you create a business like Sidecar or invest in a startup or leverage a banking partner. But I think the way that SDB and FRB were impacted was also driven in large part by a herd mentality around just pulling deposits, which didn't have to happen. I don't think the banks were necessarily that insolvent, but it's a good learning for the future. For sure, for sure.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, I like how you said that. Take nothing for granted, that's for sure. So where's Sidecar going to be, let's say two years from?
Nik Talreja
Oh, I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball. But what I can say we're working on and where we hope to get is I think I'll probably still be in Texas, but maybe I'll move back to California to be closer to our product and engineering team. I think that much of our team will be physically in the Bay Area, new York and Seattle, which is where we have hubs right now. I think we'll largely still be working in the venture capital ecosystem, but you'll see us moving upmarket where we're not only supporting emerging managers as our primary segment, but also mid to late stage managers as well as partners, fintech partners that are creating businesses to expose LP interest to retail investors or work on investing in heavy machinery or whatever. The asset is where they need the software. The Sidecar is built to run their back office and can leverage Sidecar as a partner. And that's how we see our impact in this business, is our vision is to streamline our private markets, operate. We know we can't do that alone. We view ourselves as infrastructure where regardless of who you are in this ecosystem of the larger private markets, if you need a back office partner to help you with things like entity creation and structuring documentation, compliance processes, accounting and tax, you can trust sidecar as your partner and someone that will scale with you. And we think there's plenty of wood to chop with partners in the ecosystem, that's great.
Marcia Dawood
So if you have a company that has kind of a messy cap table and let's just say they wanted to consolidate some of their investors into an SPV after the fact, is that possible?
Nik Talreja
It is, but it's hard. And the reason it's hard is you're basically asking a bunch of individuals to give something up for basically nothing on the other side, let's say, like, I invested in the safe, you invested in the safe, and ten of our friends also joined us on this mission behind this company. So there's a dozen of us. We all hold a security directly with the company, and when that security converts to stock or whatever, we're going to have rights, voting rights, we'll have stockholder rights, et cetera. If someone came to us and said, the founder, hey, I don't want you to hold direct shares anymore, sign this document, join this SPV, give me the proxy to vote your shares, if you will. What's our incentive to do that? And if any one of us says we don't want to do it, it kind of defeats the purpose of trying to really clean everything up. And you're also creating a conversation that the founders to have with every individual person to explain the impact of this. I think you could certainly do it. We can maybe get some people to sign up. Is it really worth the time and effort? I don't know. I mean, maybe if you have 500 stockholders in your cat table at some point, it may be worth this effort and maybe offering them some sort of incentive for participating, like maybe get some liquidity out of it in the next financing or what have you. But I think it's hard and we don't see a lot of this happening for that reason.
Marcia Dawood
That makes a ton of sense. In fact, that's probably the best explanation I think I've ever heard somebody give for that. And what do you think about secondary sales? Any chance that we're going to be able to have some of the angels take some chips off the table at any time before there's an actual liquidity event?
Nik Talreja
I think the secondaries market is actually coming back in a pretty significant way. It's hard to say whether that will provide substantial value to all angel investors at every company because I think secondaries require that the company that you invested in have some sort of cloud or attraction that someone's willing to acquire like whatever share class you invested in rather than investors in the primary. It also requires that the company has raised adequate capital where they don't just need the dollars that would be on the table for them and they're willing to say, hey, we're going to let money flow into secondaries. We're going to allow investors to sell their. Shares instead because we're adequately capitalized. But I think over the next few years we'll start to see more and more of this where companies are doing well, great companies are raising capital, and companies we invested in the last few years are starting to mature where they may have adequate capital and there's still interest in their upside. So it's not just the SpaceX and the riplings that are able to offer these secondary opportunities, but it also is companies smaller in size and earlier in stage. So I think there will be more of it. One thing interesting to say on this topic is that SPVs as a conduit are actually a pretty good place to think about. Secondaries, because in a traditional secondary where you hold company stock directly, if you want to sell those shares to someone else, you have to get the company to consent to that transfer and waive a transfer restriction. And you also have to usually get other investors to waive a right or first refusal. And that's hard to do. So it only would happen at certain defined time points where the company is willing to permit this to happen, if at all. And that makes it almost impossible to really time it in a way that you might want it to happen if you're a seller. However, if you invested through an entity like an SPV, then you could theoretically sell your share of the SPV, which is a direct representation of the company shares that it holds without having to go through all those consent requirements. So what we see more of is liquidity through SPVs, through vehicles that the people have created for investing behind companies.
Marcia Dawood
That makes so much sense. Yeah, I think more and more I'm hoping that we will see some opportunities like that. Actually, the best exit I've had so far was when somebody came in on a Series B, bought out some of the Series A investors, but only 25%. But it was a high enough uptick that we ended up getting our money back. Plus, and we still have 75% our chips on the table. Yeah.
Nik Talreja
That sounds ideal, right? I know.
Marcia Dawood
Can that happen every day?
Nik Talreja
Yeah. Seriously?
Marcia Dawood
Totally. Well, Nick, this is super helpful. Thanks so much for coming on and explaining everything about sidecar IO. We'll put everything in the show notes so that people can link to it and be able to check it out.
Nik Talreja
Thank you for having me. Marcia, it's been such a pleasure.