Gokul Rajaram
28 statements across 2 episodes · 12 bullish · 5 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Apr 25, 2023 by Avlok Kohli · said 32 times in 12 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Gokul Rajaram's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (12), Max Rhodes (7), Brian Hale (5), Avlok Kohli (3), Rich Liu (2), Sri Batchu (1), Rishi Garg (1), Jamin Ball (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 11 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli: The Funding Market Today; Last-Mile Delivery; Competing w/ Carta | E1005 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Rich Liu: Sales in 2023; How to Onboard, Manage and Scale Reps; PLG vs Enterprise Growth | E1023 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Sri Batchu: Biggest Growth Lesson from Instacart & Opendoor; 70% of Experiments Should Fail | E1040 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Alex Bouaziz: How We Became a $12B HR Company with 2,000 Remote Employees | 20VC #973 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 13 mentions in 2 episodes 7 per episode
- 20VC: Faire's Max Rhodes on Three Steps To Hire the Best Candidates, Why Every Company Should Have a Strategy Doc and How To Do It & The Art of Referencing; How to Get the Most Out of Every Reference
- 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2020 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Why the Theory of Pro-Rata is Often False, How Rolling Funds Impact Both Pricing and Competition & The Biggest Lessons from Working with Jack Dorsey with Avlok Kohli, CEO @ AngelList Venture
- 20VC: Figma Founder, Dylan Field on How Leadership Needs To Evolve with Scale, The Transition from Application to Platform & The Future of Remote Work, Education and Digital Spaces
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
Everything said about Gokul Rajaram, oldest first
Apr 25, 2023 positive
Kohli: Gokul Rajaram is his favorite angel investor due to end-to-end operational experience
“Gokul is actually my favorite angel to work with, and why him I think he's incredibly sharp and understands all of the life cycles of a company from the idea stage down to how do you actually scale it and become one of the enduring companies.”
Mar 16, 2026 negative
Mar 16, 2026 neutral
Rajaram: Data and workflow are the only reliable non-fintech software moats
“Data and workflow moats are the two things you're really hanging your hat on as a software investor, because if you're not doing FinTech and then I think it early stage is too hard to know what a distribution moat is unless they have some hack and these hacks …”
Mar 16, 2026 positive
Rajaram: Back founders who aim to replace digital labor across full stacks
“You want founders who are ambitious enough. To go after the entire stack, not just the earlier piece of the stack they were in. And you want to be the only product that the company uses and you want to replace as much of the digital labor as you can possible.”
Mar 16, 2026
Mar 16, 2026
Rajaram: AI replaces labor via BPO cuts, attrition, and finally direct layoffs
“The first thing that's happening is businesses are outsourcing to third party BPOs, many of them in India, Philippines, et cetera. That spend is the easiest to cut because now you can offer the same service, higher quality, faster, and 20, 30% cheaper. The sec…”
Mar 16, 2026 negative
Rajaram: Seat pricing fails when AI executes work instead of providing access
“Now, the big challenge is seed based pricing, which you alluded to, is it breaks when the product's core value is not about access, but it's about something doing the work on your behalf. So at that point, charging per user doesn't make sense because user isn'…”
Mar 16, 2026 positive
Rajaram: Seat-based pricing will not die due to enterprise predictability needs
“Seat pricing doesn't die. You know why? If you look at Chad GPT Enterprise is priced based on based on seats, because seats provide predictability for enterprise buyers But they don't drive expansion revenue by themselves.”
Mar 16, 2026
Rajaram: Long software roadmaps are rendered obsolete every six months by AI
“Model capabilities are improving every six months because if you have too long a product roadmap, you're going around your program and the model comes and just blows it out of the water. So you've got to really understand what the capabilities are of each new …”
Mar 16, 2026 bullish
Rajaram: Faire seed investment generated a 100x to 200x return
“I, for example, I invested in the seed round affair at Back in the, this is about eight, nine years ago, twenty million, which is very expensive received on that. It was the highest price YC deal at that point. I think it's been a hundred or 200 X for me.”
Mar 16, 2026 bearish
Rajaram: Marathon will not invest in frontier AI labs at billion-dollar valuations
“Not possible. I don't think with our fund it's possible. I think the ownership is just literally the first round for these companies is, like you said, a billion dollars. So I think it's just too high a, the risk reward is just not worth it.”
Mar 16, 2026 bullish
Rajaram: AI startups become multi-billion dollar businesses by owning full software stacks
“I believe that there'll be a multi-billion dollar company because earlier, I think they were limited to one part of the stack and they were folk. They were on top of a bunch of systems. Now they're taking over the entire software stack.”
Mar 16, 2026
Mar 16, 2026 bullish
Mar 16, 2026 positive
Mar 16, 2026 positive
Mar 16, 2026 bullish
Mar 16, 2026 positive
Mar 16, 2026
Rajaram: Mega fund investors will continue spinning out into smaller funds
“I think we are going to see a more spin out. I do think there is a limit, but I do think you're going to see the, you're going to see these mega funds train again, more waves of investors. And these investors are going to realize that being a mid-level partner…”
Mar 16, 2026 positive
Mar 16, 2026 negative
Mar 16, 2026 negative
Rajaram: Passed on Quince at $100M valuation before $10B raise
“Quince recently raised a ten billion. I saw Quince four years ago when it was at a hundred million valuation. And I was like a D to C company. D to C companies are kind of on the downswing. How, how good can this company be? What do you know, so I literally ju…”
Mar 16, 2026 positive
Rajaram: Passing on Vanta is one of his biggest investment regrets
“That's why I think my biggest regret is one of my biggest regrets is actually passing on Vanta because I met Christina But I had already committed. I was like, this person is going to win the market, but I've already committed to another company in the space. …”
Mar 16, 2026
Mar 16, 2026
Mar 16, 2026 neutral
Rajaram: Underestimating Shopify was his biggest market-size misread
“I remember seeing Shopify at a billion and I was like, how many, E-commerce merchants out there really. And that, or maybe even before, but in one of the early rounds, Tam felt really concerned. I think what I missed was that Shopify was not just selling e-com…”
Mar 16, 2026 neutral
Mar 16, 2026
Rajaram: Portfolio concentration removes venture capital deployment pressure
“Remember what being concentrated does. It gives you more time. It gives you more time to meet companies. It gives more time to think. It gives you more time to be helpful to companies, but you don't feel the pressure to deploy on a monthly basis.”