How Marshall Hawks Helps Founders Reduce Equity Dilution with Venture Debt Deals

Anthony Codispoti (00:01)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Marshall Hawks. He is an author, speaker and advisor on venture finance and the author of Venture Debt Deals, a book that helps founders understand how to fund growth with less equity dilution.

Now with more than 20 years in venture banking and lending, Marshall has held key roles at Silicon Valley Bank, SVB, Wells Fargo and Comerica Bank. Most recently, he led relationship management in Northern California at SVB and was also responsible for the bank’s in-house private credit team. He has provided venture debt to hundreds of high growth tech startups over his career, including Twitch, Airbnb and Fitbit.

He holds a degree in economics from Sonoma State University and continues to share his expertise through speaking engagements and training sessions. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Advac Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your employees free access to doctors, therapists,

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All right, back to our guest today, the author of Venture Debt Deals, Marshall Hawks. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Marshall Hawks (02:02)
Thanks, Anthony. Glad to be here.

Anthony Codispoti (02:05)
So how did you your start in the venture world? Where did this first unfold?

Marshall Hawks (02:11)
If you go back far enough, and I’m going to take it one generation, maybe two generations back quickly, and it’ll be a quick to the present day. My parents are both originally from Arkansas and my grandfather happened to own and run a pawn shop of all things for almost 50 years in the Northeast corner of Arkansas. Which means I sort of lived a little bit of an inside like pawn stars of the show for a while. It’s not nearly as glamorous as that show makes it, but pawn brokering is.

Kind of the earliest form of banking where you have somebody come with an item of value, you give them some money alone, you keep the item of value. If they don’t come back, you keep that item. If they do come back, they give you some money, plus a little bit of that same money and then plus some interest and you give them item back. It goes back thousands of years actually. So it makes sense that I ended up into venture banking or lending from that perspective, but actually my father ⁓ who also grew up.

messing with some of that pond stuff, decided he didn’t want to stay in Arkansas in order to my mom. He was at electrical engineering degree out of university, Arkansas, went to a bunch of different tech roles around the country. I was born in Texas. My dad worked for Texas instruments and then moved early in the eighties. I was about six months old when I moved to California. My dad went into a number of different engineering and then more executive level roles at a variety of tech and then venture backed tech companies to the point of.

helping take a company public, being CEO of a couple different companies after that. Then he made the transition into venture capital for, I don’t know, about 25 years now. He’s been in the investing world, which he’s more of a retired partner emeritus guy now. So I got to grow up in California, right as Silicon Valley was really taking off with a father who was in the venture-backed company land as a technical guy and then more of a business guy.

that and then actually in my sort of formative college and early career in the banking world, ⁓ he was an investor. I coming out of college economics degree, which as you nicely pointed out from Sonoma State only means I can really draw a mean graph. That’s about the only skill I have from that. It also means I know incentive matter, incentives matter, but

I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t have a technical degree, didn’t necessarily think I could get directly into the technology world. So I was lucky enough to go to Comerica Bank, who had a training program and a tech lending sort of arm within the institution from an acquisition they’d made. That was my way to get into and be close to the technology and the venture backed company and investing land and never left until early in 2025 to be coming off.

Anthony Codispoti (04:53)
So you grew up around this. Did you know that you wanted to be in it and talked with dad about what this might look like in a path forward? Or did you kind of stumble into that first position at Clomerica?

Marshall Hawks (05:06)
I don’t think anybody really goes to college or maybe even in high school thinking, I want to be a banker. Like banking is adrenaline packed. Maybe some do, maybe investment banking. don’t know. Banking was not the thing I set out on the banking role. And then roles after that were a way for me to be sort of connected to the technology ecosystem, which maybe incorrectly at the time I sort of thought you had to have a technical degree. wasn’t a CS major. I didn’t have a double E. I can.

do a fair amount of technical things, having grown up with five PCs in my house in the early nineties, but didn’t have the degree. thought that was the way I had to go, which means banking was just more the avenue to have access to the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Yeah, for sure.

Anthony Codispoti (05:48)
So was really the tech that you wanted access to.

That was the draw for you. And banking was a means to that end.

Marshall Hawks (05:53)
Yeah.

Yeah. Banking was not the goal for sure. was just ⁓ a nice conduit for me to get to talk to lots of great entrepreneurs building interesting things.

Anthony Codispoti (06:05)
And so where was it that you first started to build this foundation of understanding the value of venture debt?

Marshall Hawks (06:12)
⁓ Well, you go into Comerica Bank where I started my career. You go through normal commercial banking sort of training there of how to lend money to normal companies. And then you go to this other group, their tech and life science group. TLS is what they called it. I think even to this day, though they’re just being acquired by Fifth Third Bank, if I recall correctly, Comerica that is, that the way that that group thinks about banking and obviously the broader venture banking ⁓

sort venture lending ecosystem is 180 degrees different than how normal banks would think about lending to normal businesses. know, most of the venture backed companies in the world are entrepreneurial companies, frankly, early on. Like you have no corporate history, you’re probably not profitable. If you’ve raised venture money, you certainly are not profitable. You’re to be burning cash for a long time. You have minimal assets. ⁓

You know, no, maybe the entrepreneurs might be first time CEOs and there’s a lot of these things that are the exact opposite of what commercial banks in general have ever said they wanted to do with. And the ideal client looks very different than that. So for me, that was very interesting to say, Oh, there’s this lending sort of tool or subset of tools that you can bring to bear and help this very atypical type of company go faster. Ideally help people own.

more of their company down the road when they have a good outcome. That sort of tool, venture debt, was what you started to learn about and hopefully you get a few companies to take when I started at Comerica Bank. So really 25 years ago when I started my career is where I started to really understand the lending ecosystem that could be brought to bear with technology companies.

Anthony Codispoti (07:56)
So it’s interesting that you cut your teeth at a more traditional bank because it yeah, as you were sort of saying and is as an outsider to the industry, I think about it and I’m like, yeah, bank, they want collateral, they want revenue, right? They want proof that you’re basically they want proof that you don’t really need their money, right? And so how is it that how many years ago was this 20 some years ago that Comerica was like, no, we’re gonna approach this different.

Marshall Hawks (08:14)
Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, Comerica was coming in almost in the middle of the game, to be honest. If you go back to the early, late 70s, early 80s is really where the industry got started at a very small level. You have Comm Disco, which was doing equipment leasing or venture leasing, which is collateral-based financing of equipment to venture-back startups. So it’s risky, but still has equipment sort of sitting behind it, which is probably the earliest version of venture debt, if you want to call it that. The first private credit fund focused

Anthony Codispoti (08:27)
Okay.

Marshall Hawks (08:53)
purely on lending to venture-backed technology startups was Western Technology Investment or WTI. Started I think in 1980 or 81. SVB, my former most recent employer of 16 years, started in 1983, ironically with a bunch of guys sitting around a poker game where they all worked or were related to Stanford University. And the husband and wife couple that was trying to get a bank account opened when they founded Cisco Systems.

couldn’t get a bank. So they said, ⁓ in addition to the lending part, which was sort of secondary, like how can we create a bank? This group of guys who had, you know, money and time, they created SVB, which became the first really venture bank, ⁓ that was focused purely on these types of companies. Comerica again in the 80, sorry, in the two thousands, they had come in, ⁓ they bought a comp, another bank called Imperial bank. And they had decided that was a

Anthony Codispoti (09:22)
you

Marshall Hawks (09:50)
sort of slice of the ecosystem they wanted to go after. So they were good at it, but they were not certainly early and they weren’t the largest by any stretch of the imagination.

Anthony Codispoti (10:00)
SVB, where do they rank in terms of size in the venture debt space?

Marshall Hawks (10:06)
⁓ Certainly over the last 30 or 40 years, SVB is deployed by far the most capital to venture-back startups of all types, probably around the world. So you have a few countries. That’s because all of the companies that are earlier on in their life cycle who are taking venture debt would take it from a bank. could talk about the difference between banks and private credit funds if you’d like at some point, but banks do the largest number of deals by far. And if you add that all up, aggregate dollars deployed or even larger, SVB was

as before March of 2023 when SBB had its really shining moment in the sun for anybody who didn’t know SBB at the time, they all knew the name when the bank sadly went through a failure, but it was the 800 pound gorilla. worked with 50 plus percent of the venture backed companies at the time. And today,

It’s nicely the U S organization as part of first citizens bank, ⁓ a bunch of great former colleagues of mine are still there. And I would call them more of like the 650 to 700 pound gorilla. Now they’re still very, very dominant player in a lot of industry or a lot of these sub niches within venture backed technology. And I’d say they’re probably still the largest while I don’t know the exact dollars having left almost a year ago now from SVB. I would argue that they are still by far the largest. Deployer of venture debt in terms of.

numbers of deals, total dollar size, but there are a number of other players, both in the venture banking world, pre and post SBBs, failure than acquisition. then private credit is kind of the asset class du jour these days for people in the investing world. ⁓ Venture debt is a small slice within that, but there are now way more players in venture debt from private credit than there have ever been for a number of reasons.

Anthony Codispoti (11:51)
Okay, so break that down for us. Assume that I don’t know anything about venture debt or private credit. How do these two worlds intersect? What’s the difference between them?

Marshall Hawks (12:00)
Well, venture banks, that second word, right? They’re looking to be the bank to the companies they work with. So they want that company or companies to use them for all the banking services, products, you name it thing that just a business is going to need. So that could be your basic checking account, running payroll, paying vendors, credit cards, foreign exchange, all of that stuff is not.

You know, related to lending, that’s just a bank wants to work with people, particularly venture banks. The idea is they’re trying to work with someone from the startup, you know, dog garage idea phase through to what they hope is a multi-billion dollar public company. They’ll do lending. I’ll come back to that in a second. Private credit funds are structured purely to provide debt to companies. So they don’t care about the banking at all. You can do whatever you want with your money ⁓ from a cash management.

perspective, you could have five banks, you could have one, you could have 20, it really doesn’t matter. they are structured, private credit is structured a lot more like the venture capital industry in that they raise a pool of money, mostly from private investors. Some have public entities as well. And they’re looking to get a return on those dollars that is equivalent to sort of not the venture capital world in terms of time duration, but a lot of the same IRRs and sort of 20 % returns are.

are there in the private credit world. Go ahead.

Anthony Codispoti (13:25)
So, sorry, real quick, to get

20 % returns in the private credit world, am I correct in believing then that the interest rates that they’re charging are well north of that?

Marshall Hawks (13:35)
Yeah, not well north of it. They’re below 20%, but I’ll tell you how they get to the economics. Let me just spectrum of when companies raise money from who. the venture banks primarily are looking for companies early on in their life cycle so they can do all the banking and they use venture debt in a lot of cases as customer acquisition financing. They would say, okay, Anthony, you’ve raised some money, series A financing from a number of venture firms or a venture fund. Let’s lend you a little bit of money on top of that so you can get a little further.

with the equity and debt. And for that, you’re going to move all your banking and do all that with us. ⁓ That type of capital tends to be on the less expensive end of venture debt ⁓ as companies scale. ⁓ So in today’s market, it’s going to be sort of Wall Street Journal Prime plus call it one to 2%, meaning you take that underlying index, add a spread onto it. That interest rate floats based on the underlying index most of the time.

Anthony Codispoti (14:18)
Give us an idea of the range. Today, end of 2025.

Okay. Yeah.

Marshall Hawks (14:34)
Most venture lenders will have a fee or fees on the front end and something on the back end of the life of the three to five year piece of capital. And they will ⁓ ask for a ownership stake in the business. So venture debt is not, ⁓ you might hear it described by different lenders, depending on how honest they are as non dilutive capital. And while that’s mostly true, ⁓ venture debt, less dilutive. That’s the better way to describe it. It’s the more honest way to describe it.

Anthony Codispoti (14:58)
It’s less dilutive. Okay.

Marshall Hawks (15:03)
By comparison to raising venture capital dollars, it’s way less dilutive, but you’re still as a entrepreneur in a company going to give your lender a ownership stake in the business via a warrant, which is a stock option, but for a company, essentially, it’s the right to purchase stock in the future at a set price. The dilution that comes with that is order of magnitude or magnitudes lower than the same amount of equity dollars, but.

Let’s say in today’s market for those bank deals, you’re in the 10 to 30 basis points of fully diluted ownership, which again, that’s a little technical, but it’s 0.1 to 0.3 % ownership in the business. If you go to the upper end where private credit tends to play, I should say venture banks are kind of zero to call it $20 million of capital right now is where that breaking point starts to show up. then beyond that, you’d have private credit firms that are willing to provide companies 50, 100.

$150 million of capital. And to your question, the cost of that capital, given sort of how much they’re providing, the lack of any kind of bank competition up at that end, the real risk of providing companies 50, $100 million. And if that company doesn’t work out, that’s a problem. Private credit firms tend to be somewhere in like the 11 to 12, 13 % interest rate. The underlying index may vary.

They’ll have a fee on the front end, a fee on the back end. So you get to probably about 15 % return in there. And then the return on top of that is the equity position they will take via warrants. Sometimes they want to invest in companies as well by giving the company dollars and they hope to get a return in the future. But the best private credit firms are going to be able to get sort of in that 20 % IRR number or greater. The multiples on the dollars, again, very pretty technical thing there is very different than the venture capital industry. The multiples are way higher in venture capital.

because they go longer duration 10, 15 years before a company becomes successful. In private credit lines, you’re getting your money back much faster, but the IRRs are sort of similar.

Anthony Codispoti (17:05)
And you’ve got some sort of early, like a first position on those loans then? If something were to go south? Yeah.

Marshall Hawks (17:10)
You mean like a collateral position?

So they, whether you’re a bank or a fund, you’re always going to have a lean on the underlying business. Now back to the start of our conversation, these businesses, if a venture backed business, depending on its scale, doesn’t work out, there may not be a lot of assets there. There may not be lots of things that have any real value, but yes, lenders are going to be, aside from a few people ahead of them in the payment waterfall, things like ⁓ statutory obligations in the United States, that’s like

PTO or vacation days or number of things for employees that would get paid out first, but any other proceeds of any kind of wind down or sale of a business or just not good situation that’s going to go to your lender first.

Anthony Codispoti (17:53)
That’s interesting. I didn’t realize

that those employee benefits, the PTO, etc, would need to be paid out first. I’m glad to hear it, but I wasn’t aware of it.

Marshall Hawks (18:00)
I mean, that’s great,

but I don’t think it makes employees feel that great in those situations because all their stock has gone to zero because they’re at the bottom of the waterfall typically in common stock. But yes, they get certain things that are viewed a bit like earned wages paid out before anybody else, including lenders. The difference between private credit and venture ⁓ banks would be venture banks are always going to be first. They have a first lien.

Anthony Codispoti (18:05)
Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Marshall Hawks (18:27)
Private credit funds of all types, lending to any kind of parties, including venture-backed companies are a lot more willing to be in a second lien or junior position, which means they’re behind somebody else. There might be a bank ahead of them or they’re willing to provide capital in a variety of forms. So one of the benefits you might say, why would I take money at higher cost from a private credit fund is that they’re willing to do things with a bit more flexibility around the banking side or the lien position it’ll take. Whereas banks are a little bit more within a subset of.

or rules they live in.

Anthony Codispoti (18:58)
Now I don’t know if you can share names but ⁓ let’s dive into an example of whether it was at Comerica, SVB or one of your other stops where a venture debt deal worked out really well for the client and why.

Marshall Hawks (19:13)
Sure. Well, in the book that I wrote, Venture Debt Deals, I have five case studies, four of which are companies that I personally lent money to and was the lead on. And the fifth is actually a story of SVB’s process of going through the failure in March of 23, coming out the other end and sort of the lived experience of a relatively senior person within the firm. Of those four case studies that I wrote about in the book, one in particular that I’d call out that is a great

example of what you just asked. I think it is Twitch, which most people would know if you happen to have kids or you’re a e-sports or video game person. They are to this day, sort of the dominant e-sports ⁓ media company owned by Amazon now. And yeah, you can go watch people. You can watch live as other humans play video games. That’s, that’s what e-sports generally is.

Anthony Codispoti (19:57)
It’s like a broad class platform for people who are playing video games. ⁓

Marshall Hawks (20:07)
You can also very easily broadcast your own play to, you your parents, dozens of washers, or, know, maybe tens of thousands. ⁓ they’ve live, they have video on demand, sort of the whole video, ⁓ suite for people playing digital sports. So video games. ⁓ we worked with that company. was literally the first transaction I did when I joined SVB in January of 2009.

which was, you might recall, you’ve got same amount of gray hair as I do. That was when the financial world was sort of ending and all kinds of things in the banking world. Unrelated SVB were having problems, but at the time the company wasn’t called Twitch. It was called Justin TV. And that was named after one of their founders, Justin Khan. And they were just trying to be live streaming video of any type for anything on the internet. They thought it’d be a novel way to attract.

viewers and consumers by strapping a camera to Justin’s head and live streaming his life for, think a number of months, 24 seven, like literally camera up here. I think they turned it off for the bathroom, if I recall correctly, but like that was these days, maybe less, less novel or less interesting, but back then that was sort of, you know, must see TV. And we, because of the, you know, the venture investors involved and they went through Y Combinator, one of the best, if not the best incubators.

Anthony Codispoti (21:09)
to. ⁓

Marshall Hawks (21:31)
planet tech incubators based here in San Francisco. We lent them a little bit of money. Not sure exactly we knew what the business was going to be, but we lent them a small chunk of money. And then over the span of the next two or three years, they had to work hard to see if they could make that business of live streaming to others a thing. And most of it frankly didn’t work all that well. At least there wasn’t a good business there.

But they figured out there was one piece of the business where they got huge amounts of time on site, huge amounts of interaction from users who would come back every day to watch people. And it was people who were broadcasting video game play of all things bizarrely. So they made the decision to pivot, to be focused purely on that renamed as Twitch. And I wouldn’t say the rest is history. There’s a ton of hard work, all of the success really driven by the founders and the team there. I was lucky to just be involved in sort of.

helpful. provided a bunch of capital over the years, sometimes when it made sense, sometimes when arguably we were a little worried that that money was going to be not coming back to us.

Anthony Codispoti (22:34)
And so each time you’re putting in more capital, is it in the same sort of venture debt structure where there’s some interest rate attached to it and you’re getting another slice of equity?

Marshall Hawks (22:46)
Yes. In the case of Twitch, that was what happened. think four strips of capital across the span of four years where back then also cloud servers were not a thing. They were having to buy infrastructure servers to run all this live video and needed to finance it. Otherwise they’d have to use the equity dollars they’d raised, which is not a very good use of that kind of money. So yes, we provided not even tied to equipment. just gave them, you guys can use this money for equipment or anything else you’d like.

Yes, those are the right economics. got a little bit of equity stake. ⁓ We even helped bridge to the sale of the business to Amazon at the time that it happened. They had gone through a couple of previous bidders and we helped get them to the end ⁓ outcome where they got bought for a little bit more than a billion dollars. ⁓ And at the end of it, if you did the modeling, ⁓ the amount of capital we provided relative to what they, at the time we sort of

they thought about could we raise equity versus venture debt? Because usually the companies that raise venture debt still could go raise equity if they want to. In fact, that’s actually a good place to be because that means maybe you’ve got things that are generally pointed in the right direction, things are working, but if you get a little bit more time from the runway that the venture debt provides, the next time you go out and raise equity will be at a better price and therefore you’re giving up less of your business to new investors.

less dilution, that’s good for everybody. So at the end of the day, was probably something like five to 10 % of the ultimate outcome of Amazon’s purchase of Twitch that stayed in the pockets of primarily the founders, the employees and the existing shareholders, which also included SVB at the time. We were a little bit less than like 1 % owner when they got bought.

Anthony Codispoti (24:27)
You’re saying by using the venture debt structure that SVB was offering that the whole Twitch umbrella got to keep an extra five to 10 percent equity in their pockets versus going out and raising more traditional like venture capital.

Marshall Hawks (24:42)
Yeah, they raised, they raised plenty of venture capital already, but had they gone to raise more because they needed it earlier, they would have given up. ⁓ and we knew some of the data because they talked about what they might raise equity at, at what valuation. we did some of the math and yeah, the business ended up, ⁓ being able to have more of the proceeds of the good outcome that they earned and deserve from having used venture debt as part of their capital structure.

So that’s one of the best examples I have of, know, sort of trusting that entrepreneurs are going to figure it out early in their career. We provided more capital as things started to really point in the right direction and work. And then they were able to find a great home for the business and are again, still the dominant player almost, you know, 20 years later now, uh, within Amazon.

Anthony Codispoti (25:33)
Okay, so that is a case study from your book Venture Debt Deals of how things worked out really well. And we would love to say that that’s how it always goes. But is there a case study we can talk about where things didn’t work out so well?

Marshall Hawks (25:40)
Mm-hmm.

Sure. Venture capital-backed companies, you talk to any investor or even an entrepreneur if they’re honest or a repeat founder, the default outcome is still failure. Even, we’re talking in late 2025 right now, Anthony, and there’s sort of this mania around AI businesses, whatnot. But even the most AI business, I’m going to be willing to bet all kinds of money that I have. They’re going to end up in failure. There’ll be some great successes, but…

That is the model, right? One out of 10 venture-backed you hope, ⁓ turn into the next SpaceX or OpenAI or Apple, you name it, but most of them don’t. They don’t become household names. So there is a lot of real risk, both in venture capital land that your dollar is going to go to zero, but in venture lending, certainly the…

thing you’re always paying attention to as a lender. You’re a little bit like Yosemite Sam, if you happen to watch Looney Tunes, like we were as a lender always walking around with a dark cloud over our head, just raining on us. cause we’re thinking about the, many different ways could something not work and how do we make sure we anticipate that and avoid it. But inevitably, if you’ve been a lender in the tech ecosystem for anything more than a couple of years, you’re going to be faced with situations where there’s real potential loss of capital companies that

not working companies that are going to fail companies, maybe that spectacularly fail. So yeah, there’s definitely plenty of plenty of that. Um, you hope to avoid some of that just with your early underwriting. You also hope to avoid, you know, really bad scenarios by everyone around the table, the board, the company, and the, the bank or lender or private credit funds sort of coming to an agreement that maybe this isn’t working and maybe a little more of a softer landing.

But I’ve had a number of scenarios. talk about another one in the book that I actually anonymized because I felt like I didn’t want to throw salt in the wound of anybody, but sort of an early FinTech company that we lent money to where they had been going for a while. They were on their series G financing. Anytime you get to the middle of the alphabet in venture capital land, unless you happen to be right on the cusp of going public.

Generally speaking, if you’re in the middle of the alphabet of the sort of named equity rounds that you raised, that’s not a good thing. There’s been ups and downs. This company certainly had plenty of that. They had customers, they had some revenue, they were in the single digit millions of revenue. We had lent them a bunch of money at SVB that ironically had been a member of another bank I’d worked for, right? Customers are now a member. When I was working at another bank, we’d lent the money years ago. So I sort of knew a bit of the history as I came to the company.

I came to work with company SVB via a promotion to run a separate team that had this company within it. And my team and I started to work and sort of get into the covers of the whole portfolio. look at this company, I’m like, I know the history of this particular company. It’s called phone tap and the, ⁓ the book that’s not the real name. ⁓ they were going to raise that series G and they were not giving us the signs that it was going to go well. They didn’t have a lot of traction.

They told us sort of out of left field at one point as we were asking for status updates. And this is within 30 or 60 days of me taking over and running this new team within SVB that it wasn’t going well. And they thought they might have to start the shutdown process of the business the next week, if there wasn’t something going well. And that’s never a good thing to hear as a lender. First of all, second of all, when it surprises you that that might be the case, that’s

Anthony Codispoti (29:16)
and we thought we might have to start the shutdown process of the business for next week.

Marshall Hawks (29:33)
bad. And then we actually talked to the board members of the company, we do regular, any lender does regularly. That’s a normal thing of checking in at the initial initiation of a debt deal ongoing. And certainly when things aren’t going well, ⁓ we talked to the two main board members, people we knew really well, talked to for a long time, ⁓ worked with over a litany of different portfolio companies. And it’s one of the clearest examples on the other end of from Twitch where they said, guys, we are

kind of done, we’re not going to invest any more money in this business. don’t have the capacity. It’s been going for too long and they haven’t made progress on this new fundraising. ⁓ It’s rare that you hear that kind of explicit we’re done statement. Not sure that was getting to the founder and CEO. The original founder was still a CEO. ⁓ We sort of came back to a conversation with them within a couple of days. And this is paraphrasing a lot, but

They actually asked to borrow a little bit more money and we said, no, we can’t do that unless you have other equity coming in alongside it. Cause we’d want to be last money into the business. The founder and CFO didn’t take that news very well. ⁓ They viewed me as the new guy who basically said, your baby’s not beautiful. And you know, how dare you.

say no to us and that CEO read me the riot act in front of a number of other people and the big group meeting he wanted to have the next couple of days after that. ⁓ said that I should never be in a position of leadership, that I should never make decisions about lending ever again in Silicon Valley. mean, a variety of really, ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (31:15)
A lot of big emotions there.

Marshall Hawks (31:17)
A lot

of big emotions and because of the way lending works, you worry about things like lender liability. So you really can’t sit there and have a debate, at least the person who was making decisions. So I’m sort of sitting there in a meeting with four people and this guy’s yelling at me for about 58 minutes of a 60 meeting, a 60 minute meeting. ⁓ Company ultimately started sort of a shutdown process within the next, I call it next month or so, because they just couldn’t get equity interest to the degree they needed it.

Ultimately, we got paid back out of that because they had some IP that ultimately was valuable. Unfortunately, none of the employees found a home. The founder that yelled at me, ⁓ he never worked again, I think in a real context, mainly because he was sort of the tail end of his career. And it’s one of the only times I can, it’s a very vivid memory of just being accosted for the better part of an hour from someone who blamed individually solely me for.

his business.

Anthony Codispoti (32:16)
Was there any part of you that took that? How do I want to ask this? mean, you take it personally, because somebody’s reading you the riot act in front of peers and coworkers. ⁓ But did you believe what he was saying? Was there any part of you that you believed in how he was demeaning you? Like, maybe he’s right about some of this.

Marshall Hawks (32:38)
No, ⁓ not in this, the more disparaging comments. ⁓ As time has passed, I think I’ve gained a lot of empathy, both when that initially happened to this day around just how much having seen it with both my dad, this particular CEO, other founders I’ve worked with, being the founder and CEO of a company, that’s your baby. And these things you live and die by how.

good or bad these companies are doing. And a lot of times there’s a lot less good days than there are bad days. Um, just the level of stress, how lonely that role can be. Cause he may not have been able to express how frustrated he was to anybody else within the company. Cause you want to have a uh, sort of shadow of a leader that you’re not worried or anything like that. Uh, so I’ve just gained a lot of empathy for like, I can appreciate why he was fresh. We were an easy, I was an easy person to blame, even though not.

really the cause of anything and he could take it out on me. that I don’t, I don’t fault the guy for that. I certainly wish him well and later in life. ⁓ but I think it also gave me again, empathy for just how personal and intense the journey of any kind of business, let alone venture back, just, running a business as a founder and you know, the success or failure of that, ⁓ company is gonna.

you’re going to wear it on your sleeve. You’re going to, ⁓ you were going to have that tattooed on your arm forever.

Anthony Codispoti (34:07)
I mean, you, you,

you call it the baby, you know, it’s a baby. And, ⁓ for people who haven’t been through the process before, it just sounds like one of those things you just say for somebody who’s been through it before. If it feels like a child, right. And when it works well, it’s the most elating thing in the world. Excuse me. And when it doesn’t, I don’t mean this to sound like over the top. It really feels like a death.

Like when something you have worked on, put your blood, sweat, tears, money into, and it doesn’t work out and you have to wind it down, there is a mourning process that takes place that I think that people who haven’t been through it don’t appreciate.

Marshall Hawks (34:47)
For sure, having not even directly gone through it, but I’ve seen by extension, of people, this one entrepreneur, but lots of others where it wasn’t them yelling at me, but it’s just like the business didn’t work and they did great. They gave everything they had, know, something just didn’t work out for whatever reason. It’s not necessarily always just the company got something wrong. just the market could have moved. The technology was early, you name it thing. And seeing them have to go through that and both the

you know, personal and professional implications of failure are, you know, felt pretty, uniquely by, by founders.

Anthony Codispoti (35:23)
So Marshall, from your nearly two decades plus, I should say, in venture banking, your experience, what’s the most common misconception that founders have about raising debt? And how does your book Venture Debt Deals dispel the myth?

Marshall Hawks (35:38)
Hmm. I talk about it pretty early on, just how and when to use venture debt is probably one of the things that people, not as a misperce, it’s not a misconception, but I’m just not sure that people always have a fully thought out process of when to use this capital. And by that, mean, a lot of people say, I’m going to raise equity. It doesn’t matter when I raise it. I’m going to raise a series A, B, C, D, and then immediately go raise venture debt after that to get a chunk of sort of.

additional runway and capital. And I got the benefit of that for years in SVB and other places where people would do that and they would sort of just have it as an insurance policy. They didn’t necessarily have to borrow the money immediately and they could ⁓ decide when to draw it down. So that’s not necessarily a bad thing per se, but I think the best use cases for venture debt, and it’s a tool like any other, there are places where you should pull it out of the toolbox and there

plenty of places, just like venture capital fundraising, like you can royally mess up your company if you take on too much equity or you take on too much debt. Like both those things are very bad, but I think companies having a well thought out use case or at least a scenario planning ABC of, I’m going to borrow this money and I need to know where and how I’m going to deploy it to get further hit another critical business milestone or two that.

will meaningfully drive the valuation of my business when I go raise equity. Or if you’re a later stage company, maybe you’re going to be able to, you think credibly get to break even or be profitable by the time you get to the tail end of the debt. Some of the best companies have thought that through. I would say most companies when they come to lenders haven’t fully given that the depth of thought it might need to be. So just making sure you’ve thought through.

before approaching lenders, where and how you might use this capital, I think is something that I’ve tried to talk about in the venture debt sense in the book. ⁓ And I think it’d be helpful for people when they decide to pull that tool out of the toolkit.

Anthony Codispoti (37:51)
You know, you make that the point in the book that really venture debt is meant to extend your runway, not replace good operating discipline. Are there some flags, red or green flags that indicate maybe a founder is using this for the right or wrong reasons?

Marshall Hawks (38:00)
Mm-hmm.

Well, the inverse of what I just described of trying to like get people to always have a good use case is some people would just say, Hey, I need more runway just for the sake of runway. And hadn’t really thought through where and how that capital could be, could be used. That’s usually a red flag or at least a yellow flag. guess I wouldn’t call it like a red red, red flag, but a yellow flag. Other places where, you know, venture debt can get off the rails is if you are trying to raise it with less than sort of

one year of your own runway that can typically get a lot of, gets a lot of lenders sort of spidey sense and red flags up where, throws off a lot of red flags where if you’re that close to having to raise another equity round, know, lot of what’s going to drive that equity round is sort of known. And if you think you need debt at that point, the odds that you’re going to be able to go raise additional equity successfully is percentage wise lower.

we should stop for a second to say most of what pays back venture debt from either banks or private credit funds. Well, it is certainly driven by the performance of the business. The functional part is that a company will go raise more equity from venture capitalists in their next round, hopefully at higher valuations. But even if not, some of those dollars will be used to repay venture debt. So what all lenders care about is likely access to capital.

Anthony Codispoti (39:10)
Most of what.

Marshall Hawks (39:37)
Who are the existing investors? How much money do those funds have to support companies if needed? What is the history of those venture investors in supporting their portfolio through good and bad? And all of that is a big piece of the underwriting of this kind of capital.

Anthony Codispoti (39:58)
You talk about how lenders evaluate companies in your book, Venture debt deals, financials, cap tables, investors, and the intangibles. I’m using your quotes. If you had to rank what really matters most today in this macro environment end of 2025, what’s moved up or down the priority list?

Marshall Hawks (40:04)
Mm-hmm.

not sure that the priority list changes too much depending on the macro scale, but what people might think would be the ordering is probably different if you’ve never been a lender or taken on venture debt. Obviously, thing I just described, cap table, investor syndicate, whatnot, is actually near the top of everyone’s evaluation of a business. Who are the existing equity investors? What do we think of the pedigree of those people? What’s their track record?

how new or fresh are the funds that they have raised to invest in these businesses. There’s a huge amount of diligence that goes into the cap table and even the human dynamics of the people involved. is not, other than the capital being for the company. Like you’re not looking at the financials of the business yet. You’re not looking at the projections. You’re looking at just who are the owners because again, the likely repayment of most venture debt comes from follow on equity investing, which would be sometimes from that.

cap table we just discussed, sometimes from new investors, but understanding those dynamics are pretty key. Number two is going to be financials and projections. ⁓ Historical financials might not matter, particularly if it’s an early stage business that just started because they have none. ⁓ Projections are always going to be interesting. The number one thing every lender knows with certainty is that projections are always wrong. Just a question of which direction and what you’re really looking for with projections is

How are these people running this business, thinking about the business? What are the assumptions that went into it? We don’t care that the numbers on the page are going to move or change or be meaningfully different. Like that’s fine. But the, just the thought process around it. So those are probably your top two things you look at. There’s other things that get near at the top of the list, depending on the particular type of business we’re talking about, particular industries are going to care about things like in the life science and healthcare world, you’re going to look at.

FDA approval pipeline and a number of other things that are pretty specific to that industry. If you’re building something physical, you’re going to look at, you know, what is in the bill of materials, where are you building this with a contract manufacturer or yourself and that kind of thing. At the bottom of the list, ironically enough is sort of, I don’t want to, I guess I’m generalizing here, but like team is something that I think venture investors look at a lot. Venture lenders.

sort of by extension that there’s already equity investors in the business. What we, and I say we as though I’m still a lender, I’m an author now, but you’re willing to suspend disbelief and say, listen, ⁓ venture investors that we know and like have bought this person or these founders are at least credible at going after whatever market they’re trying or technology they’re trying to build.

You make your joke about the quality of venture capital investor diligence here, if you’d like, but the venture lenders get to not have to worry about or spend as much time there because usually they’re not deep technologists, the lenders. So you kind of have to take it on faith that these people might be able to figure it out. So you sort of put team other than if somebody has a, I don’t know, they’re a terrible human or something that you just don’t enjoy working with. Like team is kind of at the bottom. And then you mentioned intangibles somewhere in the middle.

Like investors, ⁓ most venture lenders who are good see tons of companies, even the ones they don’t lend to. And you start to get pretty good at pattern recognition of both what’s normal in the good sense of like, okay, these guys have their governance or structure of the business figured out okay. And not necessarily that the company’s going to be a rocket ship or whatnot. ⁓ But also the other version of like pattern recognition where something, I don’t know, a company just stands out uniquely and how it feels or looks or.

You talk to a thousand founders over your career. I probably talked to that or more in my time. And, know, there’s several that you just remember and stand out both bad in the sense I had one yelling at me in a room for 58 minutes of a 60 minute meeting, but good on the other end of, this founder just had me roped in to what this business was going to become. And it felt so different. Another case study in the book I wrote about was Airbnb that I was lucky enough to work with early on in their life.

I remember sitting in a meeting, both walking into their office in their Rhode Island office here in San Francisco, before they moved to their current headquarters. ⁓ Both the office and culture just felt starkly different than almost anything else I’d come across in my career at the time. And then sitting in a meeting with both their great CFO and ⁓ treasurer at the time, as well as Joe Gebbia, one of their three co-founders and sort of telling the story of the business. ⁓

You just, came out of those meetings and you know, the intangible part of, wow, this felt like a culture. You know, everybody talks about culture being great, but you could sort of feel it at that time back in 2011, 2012, when we first sort of looked at providing capital to the business and that kind of intangible pattern recognition is what I think the best lenders use, not as the primary part of how they diligence a company, but on the margin, it would make you either be.

you know, more willing to be flexible or provide more capital or in the other direction. might say, well, I, maybe these things over here look great, but the intangibles tell me this is just not, something’s not right here. And.

these flex balls we might have been

Anthony Codispoti (45:47)
So Marshall, it’s clear in talking to you that you’re very passionate, very knowledgeable about venture debt. Is this the reason that you left a comfortable job at SVB because you had to write a book about this? What’s the fire going there?

Marshall Hawks (46:02)
Yeah, my, uh, my wife is really stoked that I left a nice, good paying, you know, relatively senior job to, uh, go be an unpaid and depending on when this comes out, potentially even unpublished author, the book comes out on January 20th. So 26. we’ll see if I’m published by the time this comes out. Uh, I’ve also gained a better appreciation of entrepreneurs everywhere by going into burn mode in my personal life, taking our own money, putting it in the barrel, lighting on fire. That’s, that’s really, really fun. Uh, I had this idea.

back in 2011, 2012, actually about the same time from I was talking to Airbnb because in fact, it’s a prior guests of your show, Brad Feld, general partner at Founder Group, a long standing venture capital fund based in Colorado that is very well known. He’s a big blogger over the years. He and his partner, Jason Mendelson wrote a book called Venture Deals. Obviously my book is sort of a play on their name that he was thankfully fine with.

⁓ That book was a sort of deep dive into how does a venture capital investment process work? What you’re going to encounter as an entrepreneur? ⁓ What is going to show up in a term sheet from an investor? What do all these things mean? What are the firms, ⁓ you know, thinking about in the background? And that was kind of a seminal work because there was a lot of asymmetry at the time between entrepreneurs over here and investors over here.

Investors could look at hundreds, not thousands of companies and negotiate this stuff all the time. An entrepreneur might raise on one hand, a number of equity rounds in their life. so you had ⁓ potentially not only asymmetry, but yeah, power imbalance. Entrepreneurs who weren’t as educated may be getting taken advantage of in certain situations. That book was ⁓ hugely impactful. We bought a ton of copies of it at SVV, but it ⁓ took off in the entrepreneurial community.

It’s on its fourth edition, still top one, two book in venture capital today, 14, 15 years later. Anyway, when that book came out, I sort of said, Hey, there should be a venture debt version of that book after I read it. I was not the right guy to write it at that time, both because I had more hair on top of my head and less gray on everywhere else. And also having a full-time job and writing a book, even though Brad and Jason did it. I don’t know how they did it because it seems a lot.

It seems almost insurmountable to try and write a book while fully employed. So fast forward to the last year or so, I happened to be at a conference put on by another great venture firm, Lobby Capital, formerly August Capital. David Hornick is also a big longtime blogger. He and Brad are friends. He has a conference in Hawaii every year, hard life. I got to go there a lot as a sponsor at SVB of it over the years. My wife never gave me a lot of sympathy when going to a work conference in Hawaii, by the way.

They have a bunch of, usually yeah, hard, hard life. Someone’s going to do it. User generated content is what they call it. Or UGC is where there’s no other content other than the attendees of the conference, ⁓ set up and sort of lead conversations about interesting topics. sat in a conversation with Sarah Lacey, who was. Investigative journalist for a number of years, founded the site Pando daily, sort of doing technology news for 15 years. She’s written free books. She’s.

Anthony Codispoti (48:51)
Rough job, somebody’s gotta do it.

Marshall Hawks (49:19)
very delightful human, also wildly inspirational. She gave a talk about how to write your first book and me and three other people in that conversation of about 15 decided all to start writing a book about a year ago. From that little small.

Anthony Codispoti (49:30)
from that conversation. I you’d had the idea of percolating

for a long time, but that was sort of the spark that triggered.

Marshall Hawks (49:36)
Yeah. She, she,

she was impressive enough in her conviction that she thought, you know, not just we, but generally people, thought everyone has a book inside of them. The question of like what it is and how you get it out. anyway, three, ⁓ guys, including me all on different topics decided to go write books. The two other guys kept their day jobs and kept writing their book. I left mine just because I didn’t think I could.

juggle that having a young family at the same time. And then actually the other thing about writing a book on the topic I’m writing it about, there’s time for him to do it, ⁓ working for a corporation and writing a book on something that corporation might do. You’re going to get the amount of lawyers and legal review involved in writing a book would be substantial anyway, but certainly even more so in this case, that was another reason to leave. And then the third was to be viewed as a independent voice on the topic. I don’t think you could be

incredibly employed by a lender providing said capital and then write the book about it. Venture capital is a bit different with Jason and Brad. There’s so many venture firms. It’s a very diffuse industry. There aren’t that many venture lenders. So to sit at what is still the largest one and write a book about it seemed a little bit like shooting myself in the foot. So that was the other reason I decided to leave.

Anthony Codispoti (50:48)
So what now? Let’s say the book comes out and it’s very successful. What do you hope that this could lead to?

Marshall Hawks (50:58)
You know, one of the best parts about leaving to write the book is that, and some people I think have thought I’m a little crazy for doing it. It’s like, I don’t know what the answer to that question is after the fact, partly because I truly don’t know. Partly because depending on the success or lack thereof of the book, you know, your options might vary, right? Like if I can only sell this book to a dozen people who are my immediate family, that’s, that’s one end of the spectrum. ⁓ you might see me back, ⁓ as a junior member of another lender somewhere else afterward. If it.

On the other end becomes sort of the venture deals equivalent for venture debt, which is hopefully my aspiration to impact, you know, the community that substantially and help a lot of people. Like that means you have a lot more things, ⁓ open to you, whether that’s speaking training, ⁓ maybe going and working in different industries, venture capital, private credit. don’t know. There’s a whole litany of things. I’m sure for your, your, journey, Anthony with podcasts has been, you know, it’s sort of things open.

various avenues open up that you might not have expected based on the ramp and who you talk to and interesting conversations you had that you probably I’m sure didn’t expect when you started.

Anthony Codispoti (52:08)
And so you’ve got an idea of where you would like this to go. But the reality of life is that it’s just unpredictable. And who knows what doors or windows this is going to open for you. so it’s, ⁓ I think it’s great that you’ve just got sort of this, ⁓ I’m open, I’m curious, come on, universe, throw at me whatever’s next kind of a mentality here.

Marshall Hawks (52:32)
Yeah. I also think just in my career at four institutions that did venture banking and lending, most of that at SVB, was never someone who also had the, here’s my five-year plan. Here’s my next thing I’m working towards. You certainly have, anybody is going to have aspirations or maybe things you think you can achieve, but I was never really formal. don’t know about you, but I was never really hard or formal about it with really distinct goals that.

In some ways served me well, because it frees you up to just do good work and what you’re currently doing. ⁓ Maybe being intellectually curious, learn, learn a lot about a lot of things, but that seemed to bring people seeking me out to do a variety of things within the context of SCB in a variety of places. I got to work in three countries across nine different roles. ⁓ Without me seeking any of those things out, I literally never applied to an internal role. kind of got asked to do.

something new, which I feel very fortunate about, but that was sort of the nice part of it. I wasn’t planning for any single path. It was just sort of doing good work. And then if you do good work, most people can tell when something is done well by another human and you’ll hopefully get sought out.

Anthony Codispoti (53:43)
You know, and as we’re talking about this, it strikes me you’re very knowledgeable about the subject matter, but translating that knowledge into writing a book, putting it into a digestible format, you know, chapters and just learning sort of the whole ⁓ business of writing and publishing a book, that’s like a whole other skill set. Just because you know about something doesn’t mean that you can write about something. I think that’s what I’m ultimately trying to get at here.

Have you found that to be true? Is this been a kind of a challenging transition for you to take this subject matter that you’re an expert in and translate it into a digestible book?

Marshall Hawks (54:25)
I I’d categorize it more as an interesting transition from a, get to go back to having beginner’s mind ⁓ or 20 plus years into a venture banking and lending career. I didn’t know everything, but I know a lot of stuff about how the world works, how my institution I worked with worked and others. I still know all that, but writing a book, there’s a whole litany of other skills to your point, both just like, how do you write a book? Can you write well? But even beyond those two things, how do you…

depending on which route you’re going, traditionally publishing or self-publishing or somewhere in the middle, how do you get the book formatted properly? How do you do cover design? ⁓ Who and how is the book going to be printed if it’s going to be a physical version? How do you then get the book into production and the different retail channels you want it to be in? All these things are running a small business. If you do traditionally publish ⁓ that path,

A lot of that might be handled by your publisher, but there’s a variety of ways and things you have to really learn how to do. It certainly takes a leap of faith and I, know, leaving to write a book when I’ve never written one before. And I’ve done writing internally in a corporate sense, but, ⁓ just getting the belief that you could do it takes some time. And there’s just like probably any entrepreneurial, ⁓ track where

early on for me, was like, I’ll get one good day of writing was followed by two bad days of just no motivation. She really had to make sure you could mentally keep pushing through and keep, uh, keep writing. But to me, that was actually pretty interesting to go from a more, I don’t know, stable, uh, bank failure in March of 23, notwithstanding sort of corporate job to then an author of a book that you were the only person writing like, okay, it’s all on your shoulders. You know, you, you get to, um, own the.

Good or bad outcome, whatever it is.

Anthony Codispoti (56:18)
So here we are four, five, six weeks away from the launch of the book. What’s left to be done at this stage?

Marshall Hawks (56:27)
So I’m doing sort of a complex hybrid self-publishing setup, which means I don’t have a traditional publisher doing a lot of the work. That’s both good and bad. There’s pros and cons to either side of it. So for me, I’ve got to make sure the book gets out of the offset printer that it’s currently in in the state of Michigan to a third party logistics firm that’s going to go fulfill a bunch of orders that are already in, as well as get into Amazon.

bunch of other places. I’ve got a print on demand company doing all the international markets. There’s all these things you sort of have to piece together within your supply chain. Obviously having a bunch of conversations, great ones like this one with you, Anthony, around just talking about the book marketing. So there’s a lot of, a lot of that kind of stuff leading up to the launch week in late January. And then you sort of do some ongoing marketing and support, but a lot of the heavy lift of both the writing is done and.

The book design is done. Now it’s more about how do you get the physical? In this case, I’ll have a Kindle and audiobook version too, but the physical printed hardcover book, how do you get it to the places it needs to be? ⁓ Same problem. Anybody who’s ever built any kind of consumer product is done.

Anthony Codispoti (57:36)
Why did you decide to

tackle all of this on your own rather than using a traditional publisher?

Marshall Hawks (57:43)
I think there’s lot of, again, there’s pros and cons to both, talking to a number of authors, including Brad Feld, ⁓ in the lead up to sort of making my own decision for a niche non-fiction business book where I’m coming out of the industry with lots of connections. ⁓ The publisher’s not gonna help you write that book. You’ve gotta be a good or bad writer. That’s all on you. But then the amount of…

Like marketing support and other things that they very well might be able to give to somebody who’s not, um, the writing, I don’t know, fantasy novel or a big broad audience, um, where being maybe in a physical bookstore matters. There’s a number of other things that that’s important for, but for the industry that I was writing, giving up what you give up when working with additional publishers, certainly as a first time author is you don’t control your intellectual property anymore. You basically signed it away to the.

publisher, ⁓ the timeframe that you’re going to operate under is more theirs than yours. And the royalty rate or what you will make per book sold will be substantially lower. The benefit is they have all these people who make books all the time. They can do a lots of other things that you don’t have to deal with. Whereas now I’m going to self publishing route where I control my IP. I can move as fast or slow as I’d like. And the royalty rates are three to four times higher.

again, can sell more than a dozen books to people who aren’t my immediate family. But I have to learn and wear all the hats of all the rules that they would help me with or a traditional publisher would. So I made that choice because I kind of wanted to learn it. And it’s sort of interesting from the entrepreneurial sense to understand the publishing process, ⁓ time frame, skill sets involved as a novice, which was sort of number of the things. But that in particular was a

big reason why I decided to do it on my own.

Anthony Codispoti (59:38)
Marshall, I’ve just got one more question for you today. But before I ask it, I want to do three quick things. First of all, anybody who wants to get in touch with Marshall Hawks, you can do it at one of two websites, marshallhawks.com and venturedebtdeals.com. We’ll have those links in the show notes for folks. Also as a reminder, if you want to get more employees access to benefits that won’t hurt them financially and carries a financial upside for the company, reach out to us at addbackbenefits.com.

Finally, if you’ll take just a moment to leave us a comment or review on your favorite podcast app, you’ll hold a special place in my heart forever. Thank you. So last question for you, Marshall. I traditionally ask, what’s something you hope to be celebrating a year from now? But I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of what that’s going to be for you. So let’s just do a fun one. What’s something you enjoy doing outside of?

Marshall Hawks (1:00:34)
It’s not the most regular thing, but I have really enjoyed it the last couple of years. My dad, I’ve talked about a little bit already. He is in his mid seventies, a spry 70 year old, 75 year old man. Uh, he again grew up in Arkansas alongside my mom, did a bunch of hunting and fishing. In fact, in addition to the pond shop, I mentioned, also, my family had a sort of early competitor to Cabela’s and Bass Pro shop that they won. lost, but anyway, hunting and fishing has been a thing for him.

In the last five or six years, he joined a duck club here in Northern California. And I’ve gotten the benefit of going to get my hunting license and I don’t go out there with him. I’m not a member of the duck club on the regular, but sort of once a season, I get to go out with him. Maybe twice a season, I’ll go out and just to get to go duck hunting with your dad, whatever the thing is, duck hunting, notwithstanding, like getting to spend time with your parents as they get older and doing something you both can enjoy. That’s, know, physical outdoors thing is.

Pretty great as a new parent myself. I appreciate that even more. ⁓ So did that last week. I might have another trip coming up in January. ⁓ That’s a fun thing I don’t do regularly a couple times a year, but means a lot to me.

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:44)
love it. Marshall Hawks, author of Venture Debt Deals, book available January 20th, 2026. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Marshall Hawks (1:01:52)
20th.

Thanks for having me on Anthony.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:01)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.