Frank Rotman
31 statements across 3 episodes · 5 bullish · 10 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Aug 26, 2021 by Frank Rotman · said 15 times in 4 episodes since 2021 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Frank Rotman's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (8), Nigel Morris (3), Nick Shalek (2), Mike Chalfen (1), Bill Cillufo (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2022 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: How Today's Market Changes How Companies Should Approach Burn and Runway, Are Financing Markets Closing? How To Know When To Pay Up vs Stay Price Disciplined & Why The Most Important Thing in Venture is Generating Positive Selection with Bill Cilluf
- Mike Chalfen: How to Build Anti-Fragile Venture Portfolios Today | 20VC #904 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 12 mentions in 2 episodes 6 per episode
- 20VC: Why Bundling Does Not Work, How The Best Founders Analyse Unit Economics, Why The Way We Approach Mental Health in Venture and Startups is Wrong with Nigel Morris, Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ QED Investors
- 20VC: Ribbit Capital's Nick Shalek on How To Think Through Ownership and Price Sensitivity, When More Money and Pre-Emptive Rounds are Good vs Bad & Investing Lessons from Yale's David Swensen
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
Everything said about Frank Rotman, oldest first
Aug 26, 2021
Aug 26, 2021
Rotman: Initial check size determines long-term VC fund ownership
“The challenge in venture today is that that initial check that you write almost sets the stage. For how much ownership you're going to have in the future, unless you are an extreme value added venture capitalist, a player where the founders, the other investor…”
Aug 26, 2021 bearish
Aug 26, 2021 positive
Rotman: Startups now grow faster during deal closing than 2008 winners did annually
“When I first started in this industry in 2008, you know, 2009, 2010, the early vintages of companies that we ended up investing in, the best companies would grow by two X. And now you're looking at companies that between the signing of a term sheet and the fin…”
Aug 26, 2021
Rotman: VCs must be more thoughtful per decision due to higher stakes
“The conviction that you have to have around the decisions that you make are different. You have to be much more thoughtful about each and every decision that you make. Because you make fewer of them, and they have bigger consequences.”
Aug 26, 2021
Rotman: Under 1% of venture-backed founders shut down before running out of cash
“I would be surprised if you did an analysis of them, if it was more than one percent of the companies, probably even a fraction of one percent where the founder shuts the door on the business for any reason other than they ran out of cash, right?”
Aug 26, 2021
Aug 26, 2021 negative
Rotman: Dismissing founder financial plans as useless is lazy venture underwriting
“I find it lazy underwriting when they say, well, the plan isn't going to happen, so why should I spend time on it? But there's a lot of embedded information that you can pull out of plans by having conversations with the founders and understanding what they ex…”
Aug 26, 2021 bullish
Aug 26, 2021
Aug 26, 2021 negative
Frank Rotman prefers operating over venture capital due to immediate feedback
“I will say that there's a part of me that likes being an operator more than being a VC because of the feedback loop, but you do eventually get used to it, and you figure out how to operate with very long cycle feedback loops.”
Aug 26, 2021
Rotman: At big companies, saying no yields 80-90% bonus
“You can actually earn 80 to 90% of your bonus saying no to everything. That's new, right? If you literally say no to everything, you have the power to optimize what's in your control so that you could hit 80 or 90% of your bonus saying no to everything new.”
Aug 26, 2021
Aug 26, 2021 neutral
Aug 26, 2021
Rotman: Every startup experiment produces either proof or anti-proof
“Everything that you do is either proof or anti-proof, right? Everything that you learn falls into one of those two categories. You're either proving that the assumption that you had is correct, Or you're getting anti evidence that it actually isn't correct.”
Aug 26, 2021 negative
Aug 12, 2022
Rotman: Modern startup growth velocity far outpaces 2008 benchmarks
“When I first started in this industry in 2008, You know, the best companies would grow by two X year over year. And now you're looking at companies that between the signing of a term sheet and the final documentation, a company could have doubled or tripled.”
Aug 12, 2022
Aug 11, 2023 positive
Rotman: QED's 100x+ wins de-risked their business models on minimal capital
“If I look at the history of our 20 X pluses and we have a few hundred X pluses, like these were businesses that for very limited amounts of money were able to de-risk the business so that you knew that you were on, on a path to something very big.”
Aug 11, 2023 neutral
Aug 11, 2023 negative
Rotman: YC encourages artificial growth for Demo Day, causing VCs to overpay
“A lot of the growth trajectory was in unscalable things in order to get the up and to the right, 45 degree chart so that you can package it for demo day. You know, so there are a lot of artificial things done in order to package it, like you know, to Sam's poi…”
Aug 11, 2023 negative
Aug 11, 2023 bullish
Aug 11, 2023 negative
Aug 11, 2023 positive
Aug 11, 2023
Rotman: Only 2% to 4% of venture-backed startups go public
“If you go back the past 20 years or so, it's a single digit number, right? And in fact, for some vintages, that number is two percent, for some it's three, some it's four. But it's not eight percent or 10% of companies end up becoming public companies.”
Aug 11, 2023 neutral
Aug 11, 2023 bearish
Aug 11, 2023 neutral
Aug 11, 2023 bearish
Aug 11, 2023 negative
Rotman: VCs prefer no-bids over down rounds for overvalued seed startups
“And if pricing doesn't correct at the earliest stage you're going to have a lot of no bids, you know, at the Series A because they wouldn't have gone far enough, fast enough for a Series A investor to come in and say they've earned their way into a significant…”