RegFi Episode 66: Guiding Fintech Startups from Formation to Funding
39 min listen
RegFi co-hosts Jerry Buckley and Sasha Leonhardt are joined by Orrick partner Ellen Ehrenpreis, head of the firm’s US Venture and Bay Area Technology Companies practice. Ellen shares insights on best practices for fintech startups engaging with investors, navigating regulatory complexity, and structuring companies for long-term success. The conversation also explores the growing interplay between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., as fintechs and their investors become increasingly engaged in public policy discussions surrounding crypto, AI, and financial innovation.
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Jerry Buckley:
Hello, this is Jerry Buckley, and I am here with RegFi co-host Sasha Leonhardt. Our guest today is our partner, Ellen Ehrenpreis, who is a resident of the Silicon Valley office. Ellen leads the firm’s commitment to the venture fund community. She heads Orrick’s US Venture and Bay Area Technology Companies practice.
As listeners know, our RegFi podcast series focuses on how, driven by technology, financial regulation will change more in the next 10 years than in the last 50. And we believe the drivers of change will not primarily be the regulators themselves, but marketplace advances in technology that will create new financial products and services and enhance the way they are delivered to consumers.
Financial technology advances are often introduced by startups. Understanding how this happens requires consideration of several elements, including first, identifying a need that currently is not met by existing products, then developing a novel product, then assuring the product’s compliance with existing laws, then forming a company and obtaining appropriate licenses to operate. And none of this is possible unless the company can secure funding needed to bring its product to market.
Ellen, with the merger of the Buckley LLP firm with Orrick, the combination of our financial services practice with the venture practice you lead provides an opportunity to assist fintech startups and early-stage companies with every aspect of their formation and their funding needs. Maybe you could start out with describing the venture practice you lead and how you go about assisting startups of all kinds, including fintechs, as they seek to adopt appropriate corporate structure and secure the funding they need to launch.Ellen Ehrenpreis: Absolutely. First, thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Jerry and Sasha. It’s a great pleasure to be here and to join you for this conversation. So, thank you for the opportunity.
We lead collectively across our Technology Companies Group here at Orrick, a really robust practice that spans more than 5,000 startup company clients. We represent those companies from the very early stages, ideation, preformation, all the way through exit and beyond. So, we’ve got a practice that spans not only a variety of industries and virtually every industry in tech, but also stages.
So, we represent companies across the entire maturation arc of a startup. That gives us the opportunity to really think long and hard and deeply about how we advise our clients on many complicated questions and problems that arise over the growth cycle of a company. We start out advising companies in the earliest days. Sometimes it’s a couple of founders with an idea and a business plan, but they haven’t yet formed a company or raised any money. And we advise those companies on how to form the company, how to think about allocation of the equity of the company to the founders and potentially investors that they are targeting for early stage, pre-seed and seed capital, how they think about bringing on early employees of the company or service providers.
And then we advise them across many early-stage matters, whether those are issues around governance and who will serve on the board and what the board structure looks like, whether there will be special provisions that allow for greater founder control over the early and hopefully longevity of the company, what that looks like as capital is raised and investors may enter the picture in terms of serving on the board or having board designation or observer rights. We advise the company across matters related to the cap table, which obviously is one of the most critical issues for a young startup company. We advise on IP matters, so that may look like, how do you secure the rights to the name of the company or its URL to much more complex issues around patents or freedom to operate analyses and NDAs and how to protect trade secrets and how to make sure that the company owns the proprietary and confidential intellectual property assets that are developed over the course of the life cycle of the company.
We advise on employment matters and immigration for companies that may be employing folks who are coming from overseas or founders that may be here in the United States, but maybe changing immigration status or need to secure immigration status. We advise on regulatory issues and compliance issues across state and federal statutes and regulatory landscapes. That includes privacy and data security and a whole panoply of lots and lots of important questions that come up that impact the business plan of the company. They will impact how investors assess the opportunity to deploy capital into the company.
And then, of course, we represent companies across their transactional lives. So, whether those are financing transactions, those may be sort of the standard equity financing transactions that companies do from the early stages all across the growth arc. Those may be transactions related to third-party or commercial agreements that we are advising or helping them to put into place. Those could be M&A transactions, either buy-side or sell-side. So, it’s complex. And that’s just what we do kind of in the ordinary, of course, day to day.
But then we have across our platform all of our specialty practitioners. And those folks, in addition to advising on some of the legal issues and business issues that I just articulated, are also diving in on things like public policy and advocacy and litigation and tax and executive compensation and other areas of need that startups have either in small ways when they’re small companies, but in big ways when they’re bigger companies often. And hopefully small companies don’t have big needs for some of those things, but sometimes that happens too.
So, we’re advising on many, many, many things across our platform. We’re really fortunate at Orrick because we have a platform very intentionally built to advise companies. And by that, I mean that just thinking about that long list of areas of advice that we give to clients, we can do that because of the platform we’ve built and the expertise we have across all of those legal dimensions. And I think the merger between Buckley and Orrick really underscores that. Both finance and technology and innovation are two of our four sector areas of focus as a firm here at Orrick. And the amalgamation of our Buckley legacy practice and our Orrick legacy practice combined I think has really been a force multiplier for our ability to really fully advise fintechs in particular that are coming to us really at the seams of our traditional finance practice and our traditional practice in technology and innovation across really almost every dimension that a fintech company might have. We represent more than 700 fintech companies doing all sorts of things in the fintech space, whether it’s payments related or otherwise, crypto, blockchain, many, many, many dimensions in the fintech space, and we’re representing hundreds of companies.
So, I have the great pleasure of being able to collaborate with the two of you and many other members of our team. And I think what we bring to bear for our fintech clients and our technology company clients even more broadly across our venture practice is quite extraordinary.Sasha Leonhardt: Ellen, thank you for those kind words and, again, for joining us on RegFi. It’s been great to collaborate with you in serving our fintech clients, and it’s wonderful to chat with you today in this more informal capacity.
Orrick has a long and deep history connecting startups with capital in all industries. I’ve done diligence work for a number of firms looking to invest in fintech companies, but from your position as head of our venture practice, I’ll readily admit that your breadth far exceeds mine in this space. Could you talk a bit about how a fintech should approach prospective venture investors? And perhaps looking at the other side of the coin, what are the key due diligence items for a venture fund considering an investment in a fintech company?Ellen: Now, great questions. So, I mentioned that we represent more than 5,000 startup companies, but we also represent and advise hundreds of investors, including investors that are deeply investing in the fintech landscape. And beyond the hundreds of investors we actively advise, we have close relationships with hundreds of additional investors with whom we are collaborating and engaging in the ecosystem more broadly. So, the good news is that we have kind of the full 360-degree viewpoint or vantage point around how are companies looking at securing dollars from investors, but also how are investors thinking about deploying capital into companies. And what I see, I’ll start with the advice that I always give my company clients as they are thinking about going out to investors, and that is: first impressions matter. Make sure you are uber-prepared when you seek to have a conversation with investors, because that first impression will be remembered. And if you don’t make a good first impression, it may be the last opportunity with that particular investor.
You know, investors are busy people. They get pitch decks and opportunities presented to them on a daily basis, often for many of them, a daily deluge. And they have to wade through and find the diamonds in the rough. And you got to stand out and be prepared. Practice your pitch. Make sure you can tell your story. You need to be able to articulate why you have a great solution to an unmet need in the market. You need to be able to articulate what’s the total available market you’re going after and how are you going to capture it? What’s your business model? How will you generate revenue? And what it’s going to cost to get there. How are you going to execute against the business plan that you have? All of those things are really important to investors. They’re also looking for what’s your moat? How is it that you have an advantage for the capacity to drive revenue and not be impinged by either existing incumbents or new market entrants who may be seeking to do the same thing, either in the same way or in a different way, but maybe more effectively or efficiently than you’re doing? What is it that stands out about your model, your business, your technology? Are you a first mover so that you’re going to get a first mover advantage? Do you have trade secrets or patents, technology that differentiates the solution that you’re offering? Do you have relationships in place that are strategic that may preclude other market entrants? What are the ways that you can sell yourself as compelling to an investor?
And also, the fintech space is a highly regulated space. There are lots of laws to be contemplated, to be understood, and to be compliant with. How are you operating your business or how are you strategizing around the execution of your business model in that regulatory landscape? Have you fully considered the range of laws that will apply and how you not only today and tomorrow but over the sort of longer term of your business model, how will you make sure that your business plan is sustainable in that landscape? And quite frankly, kind of an ever-changing landscape. We’ll talk about that, I think, a little bit later in this podcast. But, you know, sometimes what may be the state of the world today may not be the state of the world tomorrow. And how will you be enduring or at least be able to flex in the face of some anticipated and some unanticipated changes?
How are you structuring key relationships? How will you talk to investors around stickiness of those relationships, whether those are customers or suppliers or partners? What you’re presenting today, how will those relationships be enduring and add value over the longer term so that those investors are going to realize a return on the investments that they’re making? Not to be understated and, in fact, very significant for every investor is, what does your leadership look like? What does your team look like? Who are the folks who are in the positions to actually make this business get off the ground and see it through to fruition and success, at least in the early days? That may change over time, but do you have folks in place who have the right level of experience, have they had prior financial services experience, have they had prior executive experience, have they had prior fundraising experience? Who are these folks and are they compelling?
And that’s just kind of on the business side. Those are just the issues that when an investor is thinking about investing in an opportunity, those are the things they’re asking as a matter of just sort of purely evaluating the business. Once they get past those hurdles and they’re excited about an opportunity, then there’s a deep dive if they’re going to actually put a term sheet on the table and invest, particularly as the lead investor, on legal diligence. And that’s a whole separate and complicated work stream that companies need to be prepared for. Investors are going to do a deep dive depending on who they are, what stage they’re investing in, and generally their MO, right? Not every investor is the same. And some investors do a deeper dive than others. Depends on, in part, whether they’re financial investors, whether they’re strategic investors, what their objectives are, what stage they’re investing, how much they’re investing.
So, all of those things will impact, at some level, the level and sort of degree to which they undertake a legal diligence process and a diligence process in general. But on the legal side, you can expect at least some basics, generally speaking, and those would be around the cap table for sure. Every investor wants to know, “If I’m deploying X dollars that I’m buying the percent ownership in the company I think I’m buying.” They want to make sure that they are getting what they think they’ve negotiated for at the end of the day once the deal closes. So, understanding who’s on the cap table, making sure that everything that’s reflected on the cap table is accurate, is a significant focus of diligence in the investment cycle.
Also, things like governance, who’s sitting on the board, who will sit on the board with the new capital coming in, who are the decision-makers, who will be overseeing both near-term and longer-term strategy of the company? What material contracts may be in place, what do those look like, how risky are they, how sticky are they? What does your employment landscape look like in your sort of organizational structure? They’ll look at the IP landscape. We talked about a little bit on the business side, but there are also legal aspects to that in terms of whether the company has adequately protected its IP and trade secrets, the stuff that’s the secret sauce in many cases for a company.
What risks are there, whether those are litigation risks or compliance risks, those could be around fintech-related items, whether they are statutory or regulatory compliance issues. But they may be the kinds of risks that every company today faces in the technology space. Those could be cyber risks or privacy risks, data risks, AML/KYC. Do you have a significant bank partner as a commercial or strategic counterparty where you’re having to think about maybe not the regulations or statutes that directly apply to your business, but that will be front and center in the negotiation over a commercial relationship because the counterparty may be subject to those other rules and statutes?
So, we’re helping the company to prepare itself when we’re company counsel to answer to all of these questions that investors will have in some degree and at some level. And when we’re advising investors, we’re helping them to assess, are these questions resolved by what the company can bring forward in terms of diligence responses.Sasha: Ellen, hearing you speak there, I mean, I hear you saying that you’re not really seeking to make a deal and just get through the technical points, though I don’t mean to belittle those. But you see a relationship as more serving as a full-service advisor and counselor to both investors and companies. Is that a fair statement? How do you think about that sort of relationship and the services that you and the team offer? Ellen: Well, we never do it at the same time. So, we’re very, very careful about conflicts. So, while we do represent companies on the one hand and investors on the other, we don’t represent them in the same transaction on opposite sides of the same deal. So, as a starting point, it’s one or the other, unless we have an appropriate waiver and it’s a waivable conflict. So, when we are company counsel, we are operating with the company’s best interests in mind. We are there to advise the company, in the best interests of the company and its stockholders in a particular context, whether that’s a financing transaction, it’s some other kind of corporate transaction, or in the day-to-day advice that we’re giving to a company as it’s growing and managing its day-to-day risks.
But we do. We are fortunate in that we get to operate, many of us, on both sides in different contexts. And so, I think what that does is to help us, as I mentioned before, it gives us a unique lens because I think we really appreciate what’s market. We understand when you’re negotiating a term sheet for a Series A, for example, in a particular sector and maybe even in a subsector, we’ve seen those before. We’ve probably seen many of the players in other contexts and other deals. We understand what they’re going to be looking for, what matters to them, what moves the needle, likely what they care less about. And so it helps us to help our client deploy its time, effort, attention, and money where it matters most. And I think that’s really our job: to help the client manage the risk and to properly and fully respond to investors or for an investor to help them get responses that are sort of full and complete that will help them get from a term sheet to a close.Jerry: You know Ellen, as you talk about this, it’s clear that there’s an awful lot that has to happen. And startups get a little nervous about, “Well, what’s this going to cost me?” How do you approach that problem? Because I know that we are about as efficient as you could possibly be because of the vast experience we have and the staffing we have, but it’s still an issue for them. And I’ve worked with you on matters where clients are wondering, “Well, how am I going to pay for this?” So, how do you approach that? Ellen: Great question, and a question that comes up all the time. When you work with 5,000 startup companies, many of which are earlier- rather than later-stage, and we work with companies across the whole spectrum, so we necessarily work with a lot of early-stage companies, they are, as they should be, properly focused on capital preservation and elongation, right? They need to make sure that they have enough runway so that they can actually succeed on the business plan that they’ve laid out. And they need the capital to get there. What they don’t want to do is spend it all on legal or other service providers, understandably.
And so, we work — depending on the stage of the company, if it’s a preformation or a very early-stage company, we have special programs in place that we use to help offset the costs for companies to bring us on board so that they can have sophisticated counsel. But as a general matter, because this is a core focus of what we do across our platform is to work with startup companies, we work very efficiently and at scale. By which I mean that we deploy the right asset at the right level of expertise to ensure that we deliver outstanding work product and advice, but most efficiently. Sometimes that means, and often — and I know Jerry and Sasha, you both know this because we together have done this many times — we will offer advice at our level of experience and seniority and we may defer costs to clients and not charge them in the early days because we are trying to help them get from point A to point B without pain of something they may need but maybe can’t afford. But we obviously also are ensuring that we staff appropriately. So, we staff leanly in the early days and we bring in resources as we need them. So, we flex up and we flex down.
Jerry, just an example of a way that you and I have collaborated recently for a fintech client that had a particular need and sort of a niche area of the fintech landscape, we needed to deploy your expertise and expertise of one of our other colleagues, and you came in and helped advise to get sort of over the hill on a particular transaction. And then we kind of downsized again our team back to our sort of core corporate team. And we do that as needed for clients to make sure that they get the advice they need.
I have a couple of CEOs, but one in particular, who recently told me that he wants to publish an article that is sort of a warning to all startup company founders that you’re so much better off, as he describes it, hiring sophisticated counsel and getting it right the first time because he didn’t do that. He hired less experienced counsel and came to me and to us with a signed term sheet in hand for a financing, and we had 30 days to both get up to speed and get this deal closed. And it turned out that there were a lot of issues that were problems created in its history that hadn’t been properly attended to by prior counsel. And so, in a very compressed period of time — and quite frankly, unfortunately for the company at extra cost, unanticipated cost to the client — we also had to fix the problems because the investors weren’t prepared to invest unless the issues that were discovered were fixed.
And it was really painful, and it was stressful. And thankfully, we were able to help that company cross the chasm and get that financing closed, but not without a tremendous lift and effort that didn’t necessarily have to be the case. And the learning that that CEO took from that experience was sometimes penny-wise, pound-foolish, and that it lands up in costing more, both in actual dollars, but also in stress and potential risk, because there existed risk through the entirety of that almost until we were able to close that that deal wouldn’t get done. And that is something I think is hard to swallow for many young founders in particular, or first-time founders, because legal is expensive but it’s also really important. And it’s really important to get it right.Jerry: Unscrambling that cap table can really be quite a challenge, can’t it? Yeah. Ellen: It can be quite a challenge, especially if there’s been a long history and a big cap table. Jerry: You know, Ellen, the financial services industry is at an inflection point. It seems more momentous than at any time in my career. Blockchain advances, the task of developing a regulatory framework for stablecoins that’s being considered in the Congress right now. Figuring out how AI should be appropriately deployed and how it should be regulated, dealing with cyber risk, and, of course, the ever-approaching post-quantum computing environment.
Each of these is a major challenge, and they won’t line up to be considered one at a time. We have to come to grips with many of them at the same time. The opportunities and risks associated with innovation are greater than at any time I can remember. Given the many issues I’ve just mentioned, trying to foresee societal changes as well as tech advances, what strategies are venture investors employing to try to get a sightline into where we’re headed? And do you find that some of them are more willing in the past to become engaged in public policy debate? That is a debate over how to regulate cryptocurrencies, for instance. You know that Washington was kind of a distant place for a long time for Silicon Valley. But I think there’s a growing realization that what happens in Washington is going to affect their business environment in a big way.
Are you getting more questions, I think we are, about, well, where are things headed?Ellen: Yeah. Jerry: And how can we have some influence over the way it happens? Ellen: Great question. Very timely question. I would say timely across the technology ecosystem in general and broadly. I think technology companies, more than ever before, understand that regulation and what happens in Washington matters to their business and to the bottom line of their companies and to the return that they’re driving for their stockholders. But probably no more saliently of late than in the fintech space. I think investors in the fintech space would say that the Biden era was the worst era for fintechs in the history of kind of the United States. The resistance to innovation in crypto and digital assets, I think, was extremely pronounced in their view under the Biden administration. And there was really an almost complete shutdown of conversation between technology companies and fintech companies, in particular, and those obligating statutes and regulations and sort of accusations and criticisms coming from every direction. Whether that’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau threatening to sue, whether it was sort of the daily deluge of articles, and that led to, I think, over the last few years, but particularly leading up to the last election cycle, more dollars than ever before in this space being deployed for PACs to sort of help advance I think from their perspective, kind of common sense conversation around innovation and where the U.S. needs to be in thinking about how to accommodate new types of digital assets and cryptocurrencies.
The regulatory sort of noose around crypto really forced a frenzy of activism. I think there were probably, if we looked at it, I haven’t gone back and looked, but I bet there were more dollars deployed generally speaking than in the past, and investors in some of the larger fintech funds really devoting more time, energy, focus, and resources to lobbying and trying to move the needle in D.C. I know for sure that there are some larger companies like Upstart and Chime that have actually devoted government affairs folks on the payroll that help them think about how do they engage in a meaningful way in Washington.
How do they be part of the conversation rather than being outside the conversation? That’s true for some prolific fintech investors as well, who I know have been spending a lot of cycles, both in advance of this administration, thinking about how do we break through the noise and get a seat at the table, and now with the new sort of policies and politics of the Trump administration, how do they engage meaningfully to create sensible and smart regulatory policy. So, I think it’s something on the minds of everyone in this space in particular.Jerry: Regardless of the political environment, as I said at the beginning, when you have new technology emerging, where is it going to find a regulatory home? It’s fascinating. No matter what, they are going to have to find a regime that works and allows them to do it because the financial industry is so highly regulated at both the state and federal level that if you don’t get involved in that conversation about where is the right regulatory model, you lose your business. So, I think it is significant that they are involved, they’re rightly involved, and hopefully we can give them some insights from our perch in Washington as well. Ellen: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s not so different from when you think about other regulated industries, just as an example, I spend a lot of my time, in addition to in the fintech space, in the renewables, sort of clean tech 2.0 space. There was not consolidated federal legislation for decades. And it’s very hard for investors to have confidence about the investment dollars they’re deploying in an industry when there’s uncertainty around what that regulatory landscape will look like. And I think that’s true in this landscape, just like it’s true in other highly regulated landscapes. It isn’t smart or sensible to not have both smart conversation and smart regulation. That doesn’t mean to stifle innovation, but it means to make sure that you’re doing it in a smart and sensible and in a way that balances the interests. And I think not having the folks who are deeply mired and sort of key to the industry at the table in those conversations doesn’t make sense because you don’t end up with smart legislation that actually moves the needle for all interests involved. And I think that’s where we want to get.
There are obviously advocacy groups in the fintech space. There are trade groups like the American Fintech Council. And when you think about it, a lot of our clients are just too small. They don’t have the resources, quite frankly, or the time to devote themselves to trying to be actively involved or engage in the conversation. Some of our bigger clients and some of the bigger companies in the landscape with more resources and more time and obviously more at stake have the luxury of being able to actually actively and directly participate. But there are these groups that I think many companies are engaging with who are really the voices or provide the optics and kind of the touch points to Washington that are necessary. But when you think about the fact that there are folks like David Sachs who are now in Washington from Silicon Valley thinking about how to engage in more robust conversation on these topics, I think that says a lot about where at least this administration is and where the needle has moved between the last one and this one.Sasha: Ellen, I agree that I think Washington has become more of a center of power, not just in the political sense, but in the regulatory sense as these industries come to bear, and I think we’re seeing that. To shift gears just a bit, though, to another topic, your team not only helps launch startups, but also assists early-stage companies as well. And obviously, that transition can be tricky to shift gears from a pure startup to moving into a more established position. Could you talk a little bit about the types of services and advice that these companies seek as they grow and evolve? Ellen: I mean, it really spans the gamut from sort of the plain vanilla corporate advisory needs that they have, whether that’s about HR issues that come up, they’ve got a difficult situation with an employee who they need to exit, or they’ve got an investor who has questions that need to be addressed or they’ve got compliance questions, they’ve got a data breach. I mean, there are so many things that come up over the course of the lifetime of a company, that we’re really advising — I would say day to day, we’re generally advising on general corporate matters, equity, we’re always, always, always helping them to manage equity, because there is nothing really more central or important to a startup company than proper management of the cap table. But around that, questions around governance, how do we prepare for the next board meeting; what approvals will be required; how do we get those approvals; will there be stockholder approval required for whatever action the company is trying to take; how do we make sure that we’re doing it right; what are best practices; what kinds of policies should we have in place? We help draft policies; we help advise on policies. That’s not just the sort of standard employee handbook, but far more complex policies that may be, for example, in the fintech space, specific to the business model.
When you think about the fintech ecosystem in general, there are so many statutes to be compliant with, whether those are money transmitter laws or statutes like the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act or Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act or Bank Secrecy or funds transfer or Truth in Lending or CRA, right? There are so many statutes that it can get kind of dizzying, especially for founders who may not be as well-versed in some of these and don’t always know that certain laws apply. So, for example, we will run into situations where this may be a fintech company or it may be something outside the fintech space, where they run into issues around investment advisory, where they’re bumping into laws they may not even realize, or maybe the securities laws, because there’s something that they don’t realize they need to disclose in the context of having conversations with investors. And privacy, whether that’s U.S. privacy at a federal level, a state level, European laws, right? There’s just a complicated web. So, we’re advising, and together with our Buckley colleagues across many of those that are specific to fintech, but many that are just equally applicable, whether it’s a fintech company or a startup company in almost any other sector.
We are obviously helping our companies think about how they’re positioning themselves in the market, including with investors. We help them with their pitch decks to make sure that they’re being compelling, that they’re telling their story, that they’re doing it in a both comprehensive and understandable way but also a way that is short and to the point and that they are prepared for those conversations. We have a full corporate development capability within our tech companies practice here at Orrick which means that we have folks who are not lawyers or, well, some of them are lawyers but they’re not practicing lawyers, and their job is to really mine and cultivate and maintain that whole sort of investor ecosystem.
I work very closely with our team and my role as head of venture with our corporate development team, building and cultivating those relationships. Why? Because it’s good for our clients. It’s good for our investor clients and it’s good for our company clients. As we have companies that are going to raise capital and they’re trying to think about, “Who are those investors who may be interested in the business that I’ve started?” We can help them think about because we have relationships with so many investors across virtually every part of the technology ecosystem. Here are some investors we think could really be interested and where we might be able to make a warm introduction because there’s an obvious synergy. And so, we even deliver those kinds of services.
We have a business advisory here at Orrick called Greenhouse. So, for companies that are thinking about all sorts of nonlegal issues, whether those are things like as simple as, “How do I think about insurance?” or, more complicated, “How do I think about the go-to-market strategy in this geography?” We have a team of people led by one of our colleagues who helps advise companies across those business issues. So, we’re really helping companies at kind of every level, whether they’re business issues or legal issues and across the legal landscape, across a very broad landscape.Jerry: Ellen, we could go on, but unfortunately we have run out of time. And I just want to thank you for joining us. Is there one last observation you’d like to make? And you don’t have to. Ellen: Yeah, no, I would love to. We try to be proactive. So, we are always thinking about how can we add value to the companies whose interests we serve, whether that’s thinking about what’s on the horizon in terms of new legislation. For example, we’ve been — Jerry and Sasha, you’ve been involved in these conversations, thinking about things like the GENIUS Act and other statutory developments or legislative developments that may be kind of coming along, being ahead of the curve and helping our clients be ahead of the curve so they can think about how they’re going to navigate whatever extension in policy or shift in policy may be on the horizon and help them sort of have that 360-degree look around the corner. I think that we try to do that in many ways, whether it’s the business advisory or the way that we work with our young companies. But our goal is to deliver the best value to our clients that we can and to do that as efficiently and as effectively as we can.
And the one thing I would say about Orrick that I think is a huge part of the value we bring is the seamless way that we coordinate and collaborate across our platform with each other. I think that helps to really add to our ability to fully and properly advise our clients. And that’s not just here in the U.S. where we all tend to sit, but we’ve got 26 offices around the world, and we are the most prolific player in the venture-backed ecosystem all across Europe, with a very active practice in Asia as well. We operate on every continent. The ability to sort of seamlessly advise our clients, whether they are a U.S. company that is seeking to do business in other parts of the world or they’re clients or companies or investors that are outside the U.S. seeking to do business or deploy capital in the U.S., our ability to navigate that for our clients, I think, is a real differentiator in the way that we service our clients and I think real value that we add.Jerry: Well, on that note, thank you so much. It’s been great to have you with us and we look forward to further conversations. Sasha: Thank you, Ellen. Ellen: Thanks so much, guys.