Key Strategies for Venture Capital and Emerging Tech With Ken Hall, Part 1

 

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Welcome to another insightful episode of The 7 in 7 Show with Zack Ellison, where we explore the cutting edge of venture capital and innovation with the world’s leading investors.

Episode #14A of Season 2 features Ken Hall, a Partner at Orlando-based DeepWork Capital, where he supports the firm in sourcing and executing investments, fund operations, portfolio management, and more.

Prior to DeepWork, Ken worked for IBM in New York City, where he held numerous roles for IBM in Corporate Development and Corporate Venture Capital and supported some of the company’s most innovative brands, including IBM Watson, IBM Blockchain, Watson Health, Hybrid Cloud, and IBM Automation. He gained additional venture capital investment experience as a former advisor to 1843 Capital and various family offices, where he supported over a dozen early-stage investments ranging from industrial products to autonomous vehicles and cryptocurrency banks.

Ken is currently the Chairman of Startups for the Orlando Tech Community, where he leads initiatives to help early-stage companies throughout Central Florida. He is a frequent guest speaker at Rollins College, Stetson University, and University of Central Florida and is an advisor and mentor to numerous startup accelerator programs and organizations, including Endeavor Miami, Techstars Miami, leAD Lake Nona, and Plug & Play.

Ken completed his undergraduate studies summa cum laude and the top of his class at the College of Business of the University of New Haven. He received his MBA with top honors from Boston University. In his free time, Ken enjoys finding new restaurants, trying to be “less awful” at golf, and exploring all that Florida has to offer while still being a die-hard Boston sports fan.

In this episode, Zack and Ken discuss:

1. Investment Strategies in Emerging Technologies: Exploring sectors like biotech, life sciences, and enterprise software, and their impact on venture capital.
2. Founder Quality and Resilience in Startups: Why a founder’s obsession and persistence are critical at the earliest stages of a startup.
3. Capital Efficiency & Scalable Business Models: Insights into building scalable startups and leveraging capital efficiency for sustainable growth.
4. Valuation Sensitivity and Market Dynamics: How market conditions affect valuation and the importance of strategic entry and exit points in venture capital.
5. The Role of Humility and Confidence in Founders: Balancing confidence and humility to build strong, trustworthy relationships with investors and teams.
6. Current Venture Market Trends and the Future: Analyzing the current state of the venture capital market and what the future holds for early-stage funding.
7. Venture Debt and Diversified Investment Strategies: Understanding the role of venture debt in providing safer access to innovation and its benefits for investors.

Key Strategies for Venture Capital and Emerging Tech With Ken Hall, Part 1

Welcome to another episode of the 7in7 Show with Zack Ellison. I have with me Ken Hall, a partner at DeepWork Capital in Florida. Ken, thanks for joining.

Thanks, Zack.

Career Journey

Tell everybody how you got here. Maybe we start with what you’re doing at DeepWork now and then your path to get to DeepWork.

I am one of the partners at DeepWork Capital. I was made a partner. I’m now getting used to the title change. I joined DeepWork a few years ago. Maybe we could touch on that in a second. DeepWork is an early-stage venture firm based in Orlando, Florida. We were founded in 2015. It’s one of the first Angel networks turned into institutional investment firms in the state and the Southeast. We’re now investing out of our third fund.

We also manage a handful of investment programs for the state. We have both public and private funds that we manage and invest primarily in the State of Florida. We invest in under-capitalized markets throughout the country. We invest in seed and series A stages. We believe that you can build great companies from anywhere. Not in Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston.

 

 

That fits with my thesis as well. Are there any sectors that you focus on or are you industry agnostic?

Out of those two options, I would say more industry-agnostic. There are certainly industries that we stay away from which I could rattle off, but we invest in emerging technologies. We’re not afraid to invest in biotech and life sciences. If we’re investing in enterprise software, it’s usually pretty tech-forward. Things like cybersecurity or fintech, but we invest in emerging technologies within the enterprise software, on that side of the house, and then we invest in life sciences and biotech as well.

What are some of the things you don’t invest in?

There’s a handful of industries that we have been burned on that we would typically stay away from. Areas like HR tech, for example. A lot of those businesses are in industries where they’re providing wants and not necessarily needs or must-haves. That’s an underpinning of a lot of the areas that we stay away from.

In addition to the sector that you focus on, you said regionally, you look at underserved areas. Are there any areas that you focus on? You’re investing in the state of Florida. Is the Southeast a big region for you as well?

Eighty percent of our capital is in Florida and its surrounding regions. We’ve done deals in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. There was a period where right after COVID, everybody was happy doing diligence remotely and writing checks after a few Zoom meetings. It is nice to be able to do due diligence and build comfort from afar, but at the end of the day, these are relationships and long-term relationships.

If we’re putting RLP’s money or stakeholders’ money into early-stage high-risk investments, you have to spend a lot of FaceTime with those founders. It’s great to be able to get in a car and not do a five-hour flight to see them. We’ve gotten a lot more comfortable. The pendulum swung back, in other words. We’ve gone back a lot more to investing in companies in our backyard and being able to see them in person, meet with them, make introductions all in person, and being able to help them.

Leadership Team-Founder Relationship

I wrote an article relatively for Venture Capital Journal, which is part of a monthly column. I write on Venture Debt. I’ve been breaking down the key components of how venture lenders should analyze startups. We’re looking at a different stage company than you guys are in later stage but still, many of the companies that do well for you will eventually be eligible for venture debt. The piece I wrote was on the importance of the leadership team and the founder.

Nothing goes according to plan all the time. You need somebody who is resilient enough to break through. Share on X

There was an interesting piece of research that was in the Harvard Business Review written by a number of very good professors, including Steven Kaplan who’s at the University of Chicago. He’s like the VC maestro. They interviewed close to 1,000 VCs or 900-something VC firms on their process and how they invest. I think it was 94% or 95% of VCs who said they evaluate the founder when they decide what deals to do. That was by far the most commonly cited factor.

Number two is the business model, which was 74% cited. To your point, it seems like having a great relationship with the founder and making sure that the founder and the leadership team are excellent is mission-critical, especially in the early stage because they’re betting on the people more so than anything they’ve done historically with the business.

I’m increasingly convinced that’s almost the only thing that matters at the earliest stages. The things I look for in founders are obsession and resiliency. At the earliest stages, if I go to bed at night and we have RLP’s money in the company. Do I believe that this founder isn’t going to rest easy unless they’ve exhausted every means to advance the business forward, preserve our capital, and have it appreciated?

It’s like if door A doesn’t work, I’m convinced that they’re going to go through door B. If door D doesn’t work, they’re going to go through door C. If door C doesn’t work, they’re going to build a door and then go through that. The resiliency and tenacity of some of the early-stage founders is what makes it breaks the company at the early stages because nothing is going to go according to plan. You need somebody who is resilient enough to break through.

I think about it the same way. I envision a founder or a team that has a battering ram that you see in LAPD or SWAT. They’re not taking no for an answer. They’re coming in one way or another. One of the things I wrote about in the article in Venture Capital Journal was how I don’t like it when founders have a plan B. If you ask them, “What if this doesn’t work out? What are you going to do?” They’re like, “I’m going to do X, Y, and Z, and go work for this firm,” or “I’ve got these other startups I want to do.” To me, that’s a quick no.

It’s like burning the bridges.

Founder Characteristics

Burn the ships behind you. It’s the only way you’re going to make it, in my view. Especially with the early-stage folks, they’re going to encounter so many difficulties. They’re going to have to pivot. They’re going to experience a lot of hardship along the way. Even the best-run startups are going to have to pivot consistently. I 100% agree with that. While we’re on the subject of what you look for in founders, what are the other things that you look for outside of resilience, persistence, and a sense of relentlessness? What else do you look for when making investments? Maybe not just with the founders but in general. What are the key factors that you look at?

The other thing with founders is if you experienced having solved the customers’ pain points or being a second-time or third-time founder, we have had more success betting on second or third-time founders. There’s an analysis done that if it’s a second-time founder who had some mild success, not some astronomical multi-billion-dollar outcome, they tend to be motivated. We’ve seen it with second-time founders backward. Even with the efficiency and the board meetings and reporting to investors, they know when to lean on their investors to ask for help.

 

You often see first-time founders not wanting to bring problems to light because they are afraid of how the investors are going to react. Experienced founders know those dynamics a lot better and know when to leverage their network and when to ask for help. That’s the other factor. Those things can be overcome with a first-time founder, but it’s a lot more common in second or third-time entrepreneurs.

The other factor that we look for when we’re investing in undercapitalized markets is the scalability of the business model and to do it in a capital-efficient way. I mean like self-service software and product-led growth SaaS, where you don’t incur an incremental sales and marketing expense or a dev expense with an additional sale of the product. It’s a self-service product. It can create a lot of momentum without incurring a lot of expenses.

Even in life sciences, which is a lot more capital-intensive, being able to bring in nondilutive capital so our dollar stretches further. We look for these efficiency gains and capital that we can leverage from undercapitalized markets. There are a lot of dynamics that maybe we can talk about later around the market and demographics or trend lines that are underpinning a lot of the markets that we would look at.

I like this idea of what I call footprint. When you have a second or third-time founder, they have a greater footprint for you to examine. I distinguished footprint from track record because, a lot of times, when you say track record, people mean a numerical base track record that you’re porting from your last firm. When people ask me about ARI and they’re asking about my track record, what they want to know is what are your percentage gains every year.

If you’re a founder, especially if you’re a first-time founder, you don’t have that track record to show to people, but you do have what I call the footprint, which is evidence of all the other things you’ve done in life that you’ve either succeeded at or you fail that, but sensibly learned from. That’s critical to figure out how you find the signal through the noise because there’s a lot of data to look at. It’s not transparent, especially when you’re looking at people’s backgrounds. What are some of the things that you look for to try to figure out if the founder is going to be everything they say they’re going to be and they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do?

That’s the name of the game. That’s one of the hardest things to figure out before you write them a check. That’s one of the benefits of a weak market that we’re in now. You’re able to spend a lot more time with the founders and derisk that and maybe answer that question a little bit better, the more time we get to spend with them in person before making an investment better. Also, a lot of it comes down to our due diligence process prior to even meeting them.

There’s all these examples now. They’re almost like clickbait articles where it’s like, “Here’s how I raise $100 million with my cold email.” Maybe they can count on two hands the number of companies. Maybe one hand for a number of companies that have done that successfully, but that’s not real. If you’re relying on that as a sheer fired way to fail, to me, it’s a relationships business and it always will be. If we are deploying millions of dollars of capital into a company, we have to trust that founder.

One of the best ways to do that is through referrals from other people that we already trust and you’re hacking months ahead because I have a warm intro ideally from another CEO or founder that I already trust that has executed that. If you’re trying to break into a portfolio and you can get a referral from somebody else in that portfolio, it’s going to go a lot further for us from evaluating the founder and their ability to execute.

First-time founders do not want to bring problems to light because they fear how investors will react. Experienced founders know when to leverage their network and ask for help. Share on X

Even throughout the diligence process, that’s one thing that we love to hear when we talk to customers from early-stage founders. We’re talking to a customer and the customer is singing them praises like, “This is a person I can call at 8:00 PM or whatever and they’re going to go resolve any issue I have.” We want to do due diligence on that prior to even meeting them. They were brought into our network and right before we were about to write them a check after months of due diligence. After we’ve built that trust with the founder, we’re still going to have to understand that from the lens of a customer, a partner, and other employees in the company.

To summarize, some of the things you look for are a very strong founder or founding team, scalability of the business model, and a lot of capital efficiency as you mentioned before. The diligence, which you’re digging into on many friends. How do you feel about humility? This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about because I’m finding there are two different types of founders that I’m meeting a lot of in this market. One is the founder who still has a little bit of ego from 2021 and 2022. They still think that they’re entitled to a lot even if they haven’t put up results yet.

Some founders maybe started a little bit later or for whatever reason, didn’t benefit from that bubble by raising a bunch of money at the peak. They’ve been raising money in the last two years, which has been very difficult. They are a lot more humble. They realized that VCs, venture lenders, and other investors have a lot of options. They don’t need to chase the shiny object.

People have an AI and they’re probably going to get burned. We’ll see. We can talk about that later, but I’m curious what you think about that in terms of how you feel about the market influencing people and their egos. Also, if you want a big ego and you want somebody who’s got a lot of confidence but is also coachable and humble in other words, what do you think about that?

There’s a very fine line there. At the end of the day, we can get caught up in all of these interim metrics around the company’s ability to raise capital or whatever. Ultimately, it comes down to what shareholder value can you build and what is the exit value of your company when you exit it. The ways that can bite you are what I was saying earlier, not being transparent to the board, not leaning on your network, not admitting when you have issues, and not asking for help when you need to ask help because you are too confident. You are too arrogant in your accomplishments.

There’s that balance and the benefit of when you go to school, you are a little confident because it does take extreme confidence to think that you can display a billion-dollar company that’s already servicing a customer that you’re trying to win. To convince an employee to take a 50% pay cut for Microsoft to come work for your team, you’re not going to get there without being confident. There is certainly a balance there. It matters to what value you’re building for the company and shareholders.

Valuation

Two more questions before we move on when it comes to evaluating opportunities. One is around valuation. How important is valuation to you?

It depends. There are certainly some opportunities that when you’re underwriting them, it’s extremely sensitive to entry price because the exit potential is very finite or measurable. If you’re looking at a medical device, for example, we’re very sensitive to entry price because we can bottom upsize the market and assume a certain share. Therefore, the exit is going to be $400 million. The only way to 10X it is to get in below 40, for example.

 

There are other opportunities where we might be a little more price-insensitive because the outcome potential is a lot larger. I think of those as almost like category-defining businesses. If you were to try to underwrite some of those businesses typically and say, “We’re super sensitive. We need to get in at this pre-money or that pre-money,” you’re going to miss out on potential upside because you’re going to measure it and say, “It’s going to look like this,” without factoring in what the other markets are going to open up with the other businesses. They’re going to expand the size of the TAM. They’re going to move to adjacent markets or introduce these other businesses. If you overthink those opportunities, then you’re going to miss out entirely.

In general, we are more sensitive to enterprise than most. Especially, outside of a zero-interest rate policy environment, you see the size of outcomes drastically fall down. The number of companies that were going public at over $10 billion was absurd 3, 4, or 5 years ago. It’s a lot easier to exit at multibillion-dollar outcomes when companies are trading at 50 times revenue. When companies are going back to long-term historical averages for how they trade, then the exit environment gets a lot tougher. Therefore, you need to be a lot more sensitive to where you’re getting in that price.

It all matters like the entry price and exit price. I think you need to underwrite what the long-term averages are from an exit standpoint. That’s one thing that post-COIVD semi-crash that we saw. The total of investors at the early stages and the people were writing, “Snowflake is trading at 150 times revenue.” Therefore, this cloud-based startup might exit at 150 times revenue.” That was absurd. You should be valuing them according to long-term historical trends. Not off of what a 30-day average move looks like.

Measuring Traction

It’s a great point because people often use comparable analysis or comps, but you have to make sure you’re choosing the right comps. You can’t say, “We had a couple of exits at 150 times revenue. Therefore, all these other companies should be trading 150 times revenue,” which is pretty ridiculous. Last question on this before we move on to the macro environment. How do you measure traction with some of these early-stage companies? That’s important. They can talk a good game, but how do they show you that they’re living up to it?

I would maybe attack that in a couple of different ways. Even pre-revenue, there are things like traction. One of the important maybe takeaways is founders should build in public a lot more than they do. You see a lot of founders and a lot of startup companies that are operating in stealth. They’re not getting the product into the hands of customers or even soliciting feedback. They are not trying a marketing campaign. It’s analysis-paralysis.

There are examples of this even when Dropbox was launched. They launched a video 6 or 12 months before the product ever came out or was even ready to see what people thought about it. If you launched a business like that and solicited feedback, then you could demonstrate traction without even having a product. If you have a product in the market, it’s user signups. It’s the amount of time they’re spending on an app or in a product even pre-revenue.

Once the company is at a revenue-generating stage, we’re looking at a growth rate. We want to see triple-digit growth and see improving trends and SaaS metrics where we have permission to believe that the business can get to $100 million on our stage and do so in a capital-efficient way. If we see them spending $10 for every $1 of ARR they’re getting, it’s not going to go very far.

Those are great points. I love the idea of getting a lot of feedback and then iterating a lot. I agree with you that this idea of building in stealth is not the right way to do it. There are a couple of founders I’ve seen on LinkedIn that have hundreds of thousands of followers now because they’re building in public. They’re very open about what they’re doing well, but they’re also very open about what they’re not doing well. That transparency has helped them quite a bit, and it winds up generating so much more free or relatively cheap marketing.

Founders should build in public a lot more than they do. Share on X

They’re not paying for those eyeballs outside of their time and maybe a little bit of production costs. It’s very low-cost content. Something I’ve seen a lot of too is a shift towards content-driven founders. They’re coming out with ideas and they’re getting feedback. They’re getting people interested before they even launch the product. They’re building their own brand in this sense.

That’s always been important. One of the things I have been thinking a lot about is technology and where it is now with AI and a lot of the efficiency tools that we have, you can scale infinitely faster and cheaper than ever before. What makes a company more scalable than others? There are some obvious things like the size of the market and the competitive environment. The big factor is how good is the founder and the leadership team to a lesser extent at generating organic viral content. It depends on what sector you’re in, but I’ve seen so many companies doing well because they have a charismatic dynamic founder. They’re able to get visibility that their peers can’t get.

I don’t want to have founders think that they need to be Elon Musk or whatever. He’s probably not even the most charismatic. You know what I mean. You don’t need to be the most flamboyant and publicly available and visible CEO. One of my beliefs is products can be viral. If you have a product-led business and it’s capital efficient, one of the main components I look for in a product in itself is virality. If you have Zoom, Zoom users introduce Zoom to other Zoom users. The product sells itself. The same thing with Dropbox and Calendly.

The same thing with most of the best-in-class product-led SaaS businesses. The product itself is a component of virality. There are a lot of ways to create virality from an individual standpoint, but you can also create virality from a product standpoint. You’ve seen it on social networking businesses. It’s not like Mark Zuckerberg early on was the most charismatic founder, but the product has network effects. There’s virality in the business and you can create a billion-dollar business by users introducing your product to other users.

I agree with you. That’s more important than the founder being a viral brand in a sense, but you can go both ways because some folks are very charismatic founders. They don’t have the best product, but their marketing is so good that it doesn’t even matter if there are better products. Nobody is going to hear about them. At least not in the same way, but to your point, I’d rather have a product that created product virality.

That’s certainly one of the things we look for within the capital efficiency element and tying that back to our thesis of investing into undercapitalized markets in places like Florida or outside of the tech hubs. You don’t know where those businesses come from. It doesn’t matter if Calendly was built in San Francisco, New York, or Georgia. That’s where that business came out. Zappier was founded out of Missouri. There are a lot of great components or great stories of these multibillion-dollar enterprise SaaS businesses that have this virality in them that were built from markets outside of the major tech hubs.

Macro Picture

Let’s shift gears and talk about the bigger macro picture. In terms of the current state of the markets, what are you thinking about right now in terms of the last couple of years, how it has been in terms of fundraising for companies but also, the number of companies that have been successful, a few that have IPOed. What are you thinking about now? Where might we be headed over the next year or a couple of years?

It’s hard to predict over the next year and a couple of years.

 

Let’s talk about where we’re at now.

Volatile market environment, for sure. Venture as an asset class is struggling a bit because there are a lot of very price-insensitive buyers that got into the market when it was very frothy. There are a lot of companies that shouldn’t have gone public that have gone public. Now, there are a lot of companies that can’t go public that should go public. In a way, maybe this is a broader theme of the conversation but almost all the private markets have this bigger theme of building in private or building in stealth, where the public markets used to be medicine and forced companies to mature. It has all these controls and processes in place and mature as a company.

You do have to shift to quarterly reporting and that sucks for long-term business building. There’s this huge backlog of companies that need to go public, in my opinion. That will create liquidity that’s much needed for LPs, and then that will create a downflow of more activity at the earliest stages. In my opinion, the venture market is a lot weaker than it even is signaling.

Year over year, it’s pacing to be about flat from ‘23, which is way down from ’22 which was way down from ‘21. We’re at ten consecutive quarters of flat activity where it’s more or less stabilized. If you take out some of the outliers like xAI, Elon Musk’s company raised $6 billion, CoreWeave or Wiz raised billions of dollars. You take out a few of these outliers and mega-rounds, and the market looks extremely weak.

My analysis of Q2 was that it was the highest concentration of deal value in rounds over a billion dollars in the history of the venture. If we’re going to talk about AI, it’s like an arms race where there are billions of dollars flowing into a subset of maybe ten companies. Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI combined have raised over $20 billion in the last twelve months. You take that away and the venture market looks a lot different.

To me, companies need to go public because it’s hard for some blockbuster M&A to go through. The DOJ and FTC are blocking a lot of acquisitions. Private equity buyers are hypersensitive to interest rates. They’re not gobbling up a bunch of billion-dollar venture-backed companies either. They’re doing a lot of taking privates because the public markets have been beaten up. The only real way to get liquid and for liquidity to start flowing back through the venture markets is for some highly qualified companies like Stripe, Wiz, CoreWeave, or Databricks to go public in a few months, which would be a big catalyst for more activity in the venture.

It’s tough. It makes me think that there’s probably going to need to be a shift in the entire model because the model that worked previously has not been working for the last couple of years. To your point, we’ve got this giant backlog of companies that would be great to IPO. The fact is they probably aren’t going to anytime soon because the IPO market is still shut. That’s when the general broader stock market and risk markets have been performing better than ever.

I would disagree with that. I think the broader risk markets have been performing very poorly. It’s been influenced by seven companies. I think the Magnificent 7 has accounted for 62% of the S&P 500 gains in the last years or something like that. I was reading an article on it. Whatever it was, it’s believable. The fact is there’s a broader tech in SaaS and risk asset recession that has been obfuscated by the performance of 10 to 20 companies.

I agree with you. I’m glad that you brought that up and the way you framed it is perfect. This is what I’ve been saying for the last couple of years. You see these public market investors and they think things are going great. They’re like, “The stocks are killing it. I put money into meme stocks or the Magnificent 7 or buy crypto and it goes up, or you buy houses and they double in value.” The reality is that’s all on the surface, but the underlying machinery of the markets is completely screwed.

If you invest at the right price and build the right business in an innovative space, you will find ways to make money. Share on X

IPO market volume is down over 95%. You’re getting almost no IPOs getting through the hoop. You’ve got a lot of people that I would call speculators that are driving the public markets. The reality is much bigger than the public markets are the private markets. People forget this. They think stocks like the S&P 500 and the implication of global performance in a sense, and it’s not. The public markets are the tip of the iceberg.

The reality is the tip looked good in the last couple of years, but underneath that is a complete disaster. People who are in VC know how bad it is. People who are in other certain risk markets know how tough it has been. The point I’m getting at is there’s going to need to be a new model because this model throwing money at early-stage companies and then hoping that one day, they’ll learn how to run a business that generates profitability. That model doesn’t work.

It only works when people are super euphoric. Euphoria doesn’t last for that long. We’ve seen this. There are always peaks. You had the tech bubble leading up to 2000, then you had a little bit more before the financial crisis. 2007 was great for everybody and then you had fifteen years of great times. Now, we’re maybe headed towards another downturn. I don’t know what the answer is exactly but there’s going to need to be something that changes in terms of how early-stage funding happens or how these companies exit because they’re not going to exit into an IPO where they’re trading at 150 times revenue anymore. I don’t think that’s sustainable.

Episode Wrap-Up

To me, it goes back to what I was saying. Your entry price and your exit price matter. That’s all that matters. I still think betting long-term on innovation and technology is a good thing to do. It is a time-proven and time-tested way to make money. I am not disparaging the asset class. The challenge is that we need to find other ways for liquidity, which may come from secondaries. It may come from different relationships with private equity and growth-stage investors, and then playing an outside role in venture because they do have more dry powder.

There are also well-funded corporations with hundreds of billions of dollars of cash that should be more acquisitive moving forward. If you get into innovative early-stage companies at the right price and they wind up generating tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, there’s going to be an accident environment for them regardless of these trends that we’re talking about. If you invest at the right price and build the right business in an innovative space, you’re going to find ways to make money doing so.

 

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About Ken Hall

At DeepWork Capital, we are working to invest in the future of technology and life sciences. I am working to shape the future of Florida’s startup ecosystem, invest in underserved geographies and underrepresented founders, and help founders to grow their businesses and achieve their dreams.

I received my MBA with high honors from Boston University Questrom School of Business in May 2017, and I previously graduated from the University of New Haven as the top student in the College of Business as well as the University’s Quantitative Analysis program.