Menlo Ventures

“RealtyShares recently announced an incredible two hundred million funded deals through the platform, so a huge congratulations to them. For that, and they've also raised funding from some of the world's best investors, including the one and only Union Square V…”

“In my first 90 days, I closed Uber, Warby Parker Tumblr, and Machine Zone.”

“For twenty million at the time, later I got another six and a half million through secondary for Menlo. So that investment at today's prices is worth almost seven billion dollars.”

“I got more carry than I would have gotten in the fund by agreeing to do deal by deal carry.”

“I, so, I brought Snapchat to Menlo. Evan and I hit it off. I really believe that. I was on it in the first 30 days, because my kids were on it, and so they showed it to me, and I was chasing it, and Evan and I hit it off and unfortunately Menlo passed on the, …”

“They said they did the Series B, right? So they did the Series B at 203 hundred. Maybe we can figure it out on the fly. They're going to, this will be a nine. There'll be some dilution. They'll 10 or 15 X their money, right? That'll be a fun returner or more t…”

“They just said they have, they only retained 20% of their customers in a year”

“The first venture round at OpenAI was twenty-three billion pre with Thrive, and the first venture round at Entropic was four billion pre with Spark and Menlo, you know, right?”

“Anthropic last year warned Menlo, one of its best investors and others, enough with the SPVs, they said publicly, enough with the damn SPVs.”

“If Menlo Ventures sell secondary in a company, the company is dead because the signaling risk is, is huge or any firm.”

“Menlo will make ten billion dollars in carry Spot will too, plus Founders Fund will make more than that from SpaceX.”

“Menlo just raised a three billion dollar fund after 50 years on the back of a crazy bed in Anthropik that, that, that went very well, right? When the margins were crazy”

“All the benchmarks you could see that they were kind of better or at the same level of performances as ChatGPT at the time. And they'd spent like, I don't know, A 50th of the capital.”

“I don't really ascribe to this point of view where you need like a bunch of no's and there's one person who's a yes, and that leads to an outlier. I know there are examples of that, but that's not really been my experience in the firms I've been part of or wit…”

“No, our position is, is north of that, but that's not that you can do the math on what carry usually is.”

“We have very specific strategy around Neo labs too. We're in about seven of them.”

“So there's so much more there, and I think we started off investing in that area two, three years ago. Nothing really came out of it. Now these companies are really taking off.”

“The first check was a little over 10 and then, you know, the, so that was kind of the starter check because the average, like I said, you try to kind of, you know, venture fund kind of have this kind of narrow window of what you invest, but then the next round…”

“Like I think if you're a believer, I think more than ever, we're in an environment where your outliers, your winners will compound and drive fund returns. So those are certainly not the ones you want to sell from.”

“When we look around and see these companies doing zero to a hundred in a year, never seen anything like it. And there's more examples of that than I can probably count right now.”

“We don't have a 10 or twenty billion dollar fund, nor do we aspire to have that.”

“And I'll, that's, I'll take you back to our investment in, in Anthropic. Like, same thing. It's like, This doesn't really fit. This isn't what we normally do, but wow, if this works, I mean, you got such a special founder in Dario and an amazing market.”

“Menlo had never done an SPV before. It just happened to be over five hundred million.”

“Like that's over 50 companies, somewhere between a hundred K and one million where you kind of get in a seed round and the companies that have graduated out of that have been open router, whisper, axiom math.”

“It's rarely just, like, straight up, you know, valuation, stuff like that. Yes, valuation can be painful. But for the right companies, you know, you do what it takes to be in.”

“The round that just happened, you know, about six months ago. It was like it was kind of sub-fifty, but in that range.”

“The thing that's most often is that you were late to the party, right? Like, you know, you were not intentional enough that this was a company that you wanted to be tracking and building a relationship, so you're coming in, you know, a couple weeks or a month …”

“So we literally came out of that meeting and said, all right, we've got to do this. We've got to figure out a way to lead the round. And two weeks later, We signed a term sheet. We, you know, aggregated all the kind of demand from RLPs and folks we knew and, y…”

“We've pivoted the firm to be all in AI.”

“We have about eight of these models. I mentioned Chai, but we have a company I can go down the list of companies building specific models to do drug discovery.”

“Where you see a company go from zero to something like three hundred million in a year. I think we intercepted them around, well, we kind of got, tried to get in when they were around 30, 30 of error, but we around, we did was around one 50.”

“We've got the specific seed strategy where three partners can, you know, right up to an eight million dollar check, like on the spot that used to, that number used to be three.”