companies

“So the later stage VCs will Potentially have quite aggressive agreements with their companies with lots of you know, first rights to any income or to any proceeds at their disposal you know, conditions that the company, tying the company down, what they can do…”

“A lot of investors are Really screw up companies because they sit there thinking they know everything when they don't.”

“One of the great frustrations of our friends who work at, ah, most other VCs at our stage is they spend 80% of their time talking with companies with whom they can't consummate an investment.”

“Usually, companies pivot too late. Usually, when it, you know, when it fails, it's because they pivoted too late. They stayed with the wrong model too long.”

“I think there's a big asymmetry in how much diligence investors do to companies versus how much companies do to investors.”

“Too often, I see companies that are plateauing in the phase two of company building is really because, A, they wait too long to hire senior execs, or they've switched their exec team at least twice, and all these things basically slow down the company because …”

“Most companies go bankrupt because they weren't responsible about their growth.”

“There are companies that have gone from zero to hero overnight, but they are the .1%, and they have a large amount of luck that goes with it.”

“If you look at companies that have been able to make that transition, most people have failed.”

“We found is a lot of dynamics going on, one of them being companies staying private longer, another that these funds are getting raised faster and bigger funds are being raised, so these Portfolios are getting pretty large.”

“I find that where companies start failing is when boards get overactive and start micromanaging or vice versa, and that's when you see deterioration, but it's really pretty simple, at least in our approach.”

“Well, our belief strongly is that there is no exit to a company. The most enduring companies are just going through a financing event and will continue to build on.”

“So I think you're going to see a lot more companies that were on the 22 and 23 calendar pushed back a public listing.”

“I think most companies, you know, suffer from a lack of alignment because they talk about generalities, but they're not all really anchoring on the exact experience we want to enable for customers.”

“All companies end up gravitating to is the more senior people they can possibly hire over time.”

“I think actually maybe one of the bigger mistakes that companies make is doing that too late. And so they stay on their current product and they don't actually know how long it's going to really take to build a brand new product, to actually get it to market, …”

“And I think a lot of companies spend a lot of time solving problems they don't have. And then they solve them, they don't have them, and they think they did good work because they don't have the problem, but they wouldn't have had the problem in the first plac…”

“I think that the way companies go to market is really inefficient and is that growth is solved by adding more heads and not adding better processes and systems for go to market.”

“Companies are spending seven percent of their entire budget on T&E”

“We're not that good at building companies. We're not that good at building products. We're not that good at making teams. We're not, like that earth is like maybe a three out of 10 on, on, on, on, on, on, on the score of this.”

“I think you can learn more by studying World of Warcraft raiding guilds than you can learn from studying companies about coordination and what great looks like.”

“Companies need to learn to make money at low levels of scale, right? Either you're in an unlimited TAM market where you can justify putting capital into the business and continuing to pour capital into the business. I think some SaaS companies Like, the TAMs a…”

“If you're an LP that has a, as a sort of existing book of venture business, and you've got it over different times, you will a hundred percent see that people will value their companies differently.”

“Most companies are not getting anywhere close to 40.”

“The entertainment world is all about storytelling, and storytelling by companies and founders is not always as good as it needs to be.”

“And I believe that Companies can have these refounding moments where, where a really outstanding individual comes in with the right set of skills for a given moment in time and takes a company on a different trajectory.”

“Often companies, the way that they lose time and get slow is not just about, like, what to do fast or slow, but they end up talking about too much stuff that won't happen for three or four months.”

“If companies have too much money, they get spoiled and they're not judicious and sometimes say, you know what, scarcity breeds the best outcomes because you're very judicious about how you spend your money.”

“No, it's a complete negative. It's a, because they do less work, and they have a different bar, right? Because if you're managing ten billion, and you've got a five million dollar stake, or ten million dollars, and that company is just, it's just in the top de…”

“My experience is even the best companies go through some significant period of time where everyone thinks they're crap. So, and common wisdom is like, it's a pile of junk. And so like, I think there's this notion that like, oh, we'll spot it and we'll know it'…”

“But if you hire missionaries who believe in the company's missions, who believes in your leadership, I don't think the stock price make that big of a difference. And actually, if the stock price goes down and those employees leave, it's probably a good thing f…”

“I don't think IPO market is closed. I think the issue is companies don't want to go public because their expectations are too high.”

“I'm a big proponent that companies should go public earlier than later, and no revenue multiple is a BS multiple.”

“When companies start talking about loving their employees and being a family, etc., they've tied themselves in a knot. They've borrowed the language of private life. In order to foster a short-term sense of togetherness.”

“I think there's a lot of companies out there that are Features and not products. And so you better have a very clear vision for how that feature is a wedge to something much, much bigger or something indispensable for an organization, not like a, well, we're j…”

“I feel like what's shocked me is how many companies, how many VCs, Have abandoned the values of diversity, equity, inclusion over the last year to now openly mocking it in ways that I could have never, never expected before.”

“I would say these hype cycles are generally bad for companies because it allows them to avoid learning hard lessons.”

“But the truth is, I think most companies That take a big swing generally have multiple near-death experiences.”

“And so LMs are already good enough. They just need to be brought into companies to be actually made useful.”

“I think that most companies at some point will have a The ability to like switch between open source models, paid models, whatever model is the best model for their task, because it's going to help them optimize their costs.”

“There's a lot of good ideas that you need to test out at small scale. And in a university, you have a lot more freedom to pick pretty risky ideas at a small scale, but still, you know, no one's asking you to justify your research in, in ways that, that often h…”

“The best companies have hostages, not customers.”

“The companies that, the found, that, where the, like, founders are buying, or the companies are buying huge amounts of stock back, like, that, that to us would make one more bullish on that company versus, like, another company, a hundred percent.”

“Some of the companies that are not hiring young people, They're making a huge mistake because young people are more AI maxed, as you could call it, like looks maxing, AI maxing than anybody else.”

“Companies need to be very clear which are the profit pool products and which are the retentive products. If you confuse the two, your teams don't know and they're built for the wrong outcomes.”

“We see many examples actually in mega funds of partners leaving the fund and the companies orphaned within the mega fund because their partner has left. And now they don't have a single person to advocate for them in any way, shape or form, and they're adrift.”

“The needs of product and companies are extremely divergent unless you're taking a perspective three years out, at which point they kind of become to come to the same point and actually augment each other.”

“Absolutely. I think that It's objective.”

“I think in three years, companies will essentially be, like, board of directors, where 20% of the work is the strategy and the thinking, And then agents just do 80% of the execution, right?”

“I think it will have to happen, and I think probably as companies will get more efficient and probably they will need less people working for them. Probably they will get taxed more to make sure that we can distribute universal income to everybody.”