Scale Venture Partners
72 statements across 35 episodes · 15 bullish · 15 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Mar 19, 2015 by Sharon Wienbar · said 96 times in 52 episodes since 2015 · across every show →
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (42), Jason Lemkin (28), Oana Olteanu (5), Sharon Wienbar (4), Rory O'Driscoll (3), Brian Halligan (2), Mark Suster (1), Hunter Somerville (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 20 mentions in 15 episodes 1 per episode
- Why You Need a $1B Fund To Do Series A | SpaceX at $2TRN & Data Centers in Space | Groq's $20BN Deal · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived | Tesla Launches Cybercabs | Index Pulls Out of Town
- Anthropic's $30T Assumption & OpenAI Confirms IPO | Why Customer Service & Robotics are Overinflated
- Canva Slashes Growth | Talent Exodus at Google | Revolut's $50B CEO Package | Musk's $55B Terrafab
- Enterprises Fear Frontier Models | Sam Altman Offers Trump 5% of OpenAI | DeepSeek Builds Own Chips · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Why Now is the Time for the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Mike Mignano, USV · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- OpenAI Kills Sora & Hits $100M ARR on Ads | Oura Going Public & Whoop Raises at $10BN · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- NVIDIA Predicts $1TRN in Revenue: Everything You Need to Know From GTC & Anduril Lands $20B Contract · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 44 mentions in 26 episodes 2 per episode
- OpenAI Restructuring: Who Wins and Who Loses & Mercor Raises $350M at a $10BN Valuation · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- How LP Deployment to Venture Will Change in 2025 & Are Endowment Funds in Trouble? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Thinking Machines Co-Founder Joins Meta for $3.5BN, Industry Venture's $665M Acquisition · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Are Burn Multiples BS in an AI World? & Sam Altman Needs $1TRN of Energy · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Databricks at $100BN, CoreWeave’s $11B Debt Bet & Nubank’s $2.5B Profit Shocker - Ep.19 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Figma's 250% Pop - The Greatest IPO Mispricing Ever? Meta & Microsoft Blowout Quarters: Broken Down · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman: Acquired by Meta | Microsoft Layoff 9000 People | OpenAI's Bombshell · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters? with Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin & Rory O’Driscoll · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 18 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2022 5 mentions in 1 episode
2020 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin
- 20VC: Upfront's Mark Suster on COVID Redefining What A Great Company Looks Like and What Valuations Look Like, Why Pay-To-Play Is Back On The Table & Why We Will See The Death of Party Rounds
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2017 7 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: The Power Of A Concentrated Seed Portfolio, Why Operational Value Add Models At Seed Do Not Make Sense & Why We Will See A Shakeout Of Growth Stage Investors with Roger Ehrenberg, Founder & Managing Partner @ IA Ventures
- 20VC: What Does It Take To Gain A Late Stage Cheque Today? The Fundamental Mistakes CEOs Make In The Scaling Process & The Importance Of Building The Next S Curve For Founders with Jules Maltz, General Partner @ IVP
- 20VC: SaaStr's Jason Lemkin on The 3 Things You Want From Your LPs, Why Most VCs Do Not Add Value & Why The Best VCs Know How To Package Startups For The Next Round
- 20VC: The Radical Changes In Public Market Expectations, The Right Way To Assess Valuation & What It Means To Be A Disciplined & Diligent Investor with Randy Glein, Partner @ DFJ Growth
- 20VC: DFJ's Josh Stein on Why VCs Must Adapt To Their Founders, The Major Transition Points For Aaron Levie @ Box & Why SaaS Startups Are Growing At A Rate Never Seen Before
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 6 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Scale Venture Partners, oldest first
Mar 19, 2015
Mar 19, 2015 bearish
Mar 19, 2015 bullish
Mar 19, 2015
Wienbar: Existing Portfolio Support Always Trumps Evaluating New Deals
“So the, you know, money, the rule we have in here is money in the ground trumps new deal. So if you have a portfolio company issue, you know, you owe it to them. It's your fiduciary responsibility as a board member and to your existing investors that you've go…”
Mar 19, 2015
Mar 19, 2015 positive
Mar 19, 2015
Nov 28, 2016
O'Driscoll: Scale Rejects Static $30 Million Markets but Accepts Fast-Growing Ones
“If someone says to me, it's a thirty million dollar market right now, expanding at a hundred percent, I'm intrigued. If someone says to me, it's always going to be a thirty million dollar marketplace, I got to turn it down.”
Nov 28, 2016 bullish
Nov 28, 2016 neutral
O'Driscoll: Scale Venture Partners targets one to two deals per partner annually
“We aim to do one to two deals per partner per year, so there's not much difference. You're taking a board seat in every case, so you're very much time limited by what you can do anyway. So it's, you know, no different than, I would say, early stage, or even th…”
Nov 28, 2016 neutral
Nov 28, 2016 bullish
Apr 17, 2025 neutral
O'Driscoll: Scale's portfolio companies bypass VC preferences in acqui-hires
“When I'm on the other side of the table and my late stage companies are trying to buy early stage companies, I do exactly the same thing. I don't give a shit about Jason and his bloody preference. I want to hire those five great engineers. Let's just give them…”
Apr 17, 2025 negative
Apr 17, 2025
O'Driscoll: Lost a deal by refusing founder equity refresh concessions
“Yeah, I've lost a deal to not doing that, and you're right, I'm going to be sympathetic to the investor now. I've lost a deal to not doing that, because again, it sticks back to my comment, I tend to be perhaps stuck in the, we, it's not war, stuck in the mud …”
Apr 24, 2025
Apr 24, 2025 negative
O'Driscoll: Missing 5X–10X deals in a firm's sweet spot is far worse than missing outliers
“I'm far more worried about missing a five or like a five or a 10 X deal that was in the scale sweet spot of, you know, one to ten million in revenue, series A or B enterprise software. When you miss that, or even worse, when you turn it down, that's when you h…”
May 1, 2025 neutral
May 1, 2025
May 1, 2025 negative
O'Driscoll: Selling known winning portfolio companies escalates investment risk
“What you end up doing, it always amazes me when I end up selling the company that I know really well, where I've been on the board, I have a pretty good sense of what it's doing and I'm six years in, to reinvest at a slightly higher revenue multiple in a compa…”
May 8, 2025 neutral
May 8, 2025 bearish
May 8, 2025 neutral
May 15, 2025 negative
May 22, 2025
O'Driscoll: Core AI features will commodify within 3 to 5 years
“You got to pick your wedge AI entry point for that two or three years where there's kind of magic AI premium, but you got to operate on the assumption that three, five years from now, the core thing you do is going to be commodified. And what you got to do is …”
May 22, 2025
O'Driscoll: Investors should sell late-stage private stock 80% of the time
“Private late stage companies in 2025 are just the same asset class as IPOs in 95 to 2005. The same analysis applies. Most of the companies barely beat their IPO price a year later or ever again, and a small number of companies compound and do amazing, right? S…”
May 22, 2025
O'Driscoll: AI startups face inevitable churn without mutual success metrics
“Step one on all these deals and every AI deal is do you, the vendor, and you, the customer, have a mutually agreed figure of merit on what success looks like that you can both track? If not, at some point, you're going to churn.”
May 29, 2025
Jun 5, 2025 positive
O'Driscoll: Non-generational Series A investments can still generate meaningful returns
“The overextrapolation of the only three deals make money, so therefore everything else at series A is burning money is just, I mean, it's true in that you prefer to be in Google, but it's not the only way to make money.”
Jun 12, 2025 positive
Rory O'Driscoll: Bill.com was second-quartile growth when ScaleVP invested
“For example, build.com It compounded to a huge network, right? And obviously, it was an amazing outcome for us, but the growth rate was always, I think, you know, second quartile, right? There were companies always growing faster.”
Jun 12, 2025 positive
O'Driscoll: Series A/B success probability jumps to 60-70% if targets met
“At the A and B stage, what we've observed is this. The going in probability of a five X plus winner, our mental model, remember I said it's 30, yeah, 20% chance of that outcome. If after two years the company has done what we said it would do roughly in terms …”
Jun 12, 2025 neutral
Jun 12, 2025
O'Driscoll: Initial startup growth quartile does not predict VC returns
“Very little correlation between great outcomes being top quartile or second quartile. In other words, they're almost as likely, they're growing quickly, but not astonishingly quickly, has just about the same probability of giving you a great outcome as the hyp…”
Jun 12, 2025 positive
Jun 19, 2025 negative
O'Driscoll: Scale passed on Gusto after underestimating the founder and market
“I think I underestimated both the founder and the openness of the market to switch and I'll say something else, the willingness of investors to pay up quickly for that, such that it got outside my price range very quickly, right? Stuff happens, you know, and y…”
Jul 3, 2025 positive
Jul 24, 2025 neutral
Jul 24, 2025 negative
Jul 31, 2025 negative
O'Driscoll: Tiger Global and SoftBank are shadows of their former selves
“Tiger's the obvious example. Now, they're still around, but a shadow of their former selves. Their quote unquote relevance in 2021 meant that they saw every deal that year, but they picked badly, so they got sent home. Same thing with SoftBank.”
Jul 31, 2025
Aug 7, 2025
Aug 7, 2025 neutral
Aug 7, 2025
Aug 7, 2025
Every major Sand Hill Road VC rejected HubSpot's 2009 Series C
“It was in the throes of the recession back in and we went up and down Sand Hill road, like Darmesh and I get off the plane from Boston, landed in Sand Hill road. We're like, we got this. We're going to go up and down. It's like 20 meetings. And we go all 20 me…”
Aug 14, 2025 negative
Aug 21, 2025
O'Driscoll: Standard Series A and B venture loss rates are 30%
“You know, your typical venture loss rate, you know, your 30% of your deals don't work out, and that's kind of where we play A's and B's. It's probably 50% plus in seed. So, you know, and I remember in 2001 and two, the loss rate spiked to 60.”
Sep 4, 2025
O'Driscoll: Sustained growth over 5-6 years rescues VC overvaluation
“In the end, the thing that bails out our incompetence is your growth rate, and that's the dirty little secret of the positive. If you get in these companies which can compound for five or six years, they can cover a multitude of cents.”
Sep 4, 2025 positive
Sep 11, 2025
O'Driscoll: Scale VP Verifies Bank Balances Directly Before Wiring Funds
“About 15 years back, we instituted the very obvious check the cash balance before you wire test. Because another firm had wired money on the basis of a certain balance sheet. And it sounds really obvious, but they will lie to. So every time we do that, now we …”
Sep 11, 2025
O'Driscoll: Every venture investment comes down to three sequential questions
“My mental model is always, we say this internally, is there a category that can support a big winner? Are these guys going to be one of the winners in the category? And are you getting paid for the risk? You could argue that's the kind of sequence of questions…”
Oct 9, 2025 bearish
Oct 16, 2025 neutral
Oct 16, 2025 positive
O'Driscoll: Hitting 2-Year Revenue Targets Boosts >5x VC Return Odds to ~75%
“If you get the first two years that we underwrote in terms of revenue from the moment of our investment, if you get the first two years correctly, your probability of getting greater than a five X goes from 30% to mid seventies.”
Oct 30, 2025 neutral
Oct 30, 2025
Nov 6, 2025
O'Driscoll: Large VC Funds Are Expanding Into Revenue Series A and B
“Given the fund size, all the large firms that were, you know, typically C to A are doing all those deals. So the competition set has stiffened, right? You're up against tougher, better firms, and you've got to bring up your A game, right?”
Nov 6, 2025
Nov 27, 2025 bearish
Dec 4, 2025 neutral
Dec 4, 2025
O'Driscoll: Public Tech and AI Companies Structurally Suppress Hiring
“But the interesting thing, when I lifted those three categories, the one thing they all have in common is they all don't need people. The big companies can't have people because they gotta be efficient. The model companies don't need people because they just n…”
Jan 22, 2026 positive
O'Driscoll: Non-AI SaaS Startups Growing 75%+ at $50M ARR Are Fine
“Like, I think the truth is, if you're going 75 to a hundred percent, you're fine. Stop. You know, like, this idea, like, because if you're going, look, if you're going a hundred percent at 50, you're going to be at a hundred, then your growth decays to 80, you…”
Jan 22, 2026 bearish
O'Driscoll: Yann LeCun's $3B Non-LLM Venture Is A Scary, High-Risk Bet
“Now, Juan Lacoon raising, you know, money at three billion. And that's an example of I personally look at that and say, wow, that's a scary bet, because, you know, in somewhere between 2017 and 2022, we unlocked, collectively, the industry unlocked LLMs, and w…”
Jan 29, 2026 neutral
O'Driscoll: $3B market cap is the effective cutoff for tech IPO liquidity
“The objective fact is, Three billion plus or minus appears to be the point at which you're, you know, it's easy to go public and it gets a lot easier the more you go up from there, right? Maybe three is a cutoff, right? And when you do something at two and the…”
Feb 19, 2026 bearish
O'Driscoll: SaaS companies ignoring AI will see multiples fall to 4x-5x
“If you don't get on top of this soon, That 10 X revenues is going to go on a five and four and where the other seven percent growth was are. Fast forward five years, there's really only one or two stories. They get on top of this, they get a third market share…”
Mar 26, 2026
Apr 9, 2026
O'Driscoll: Test VC partner hires on whether their deals beat existing partners
“One of the check questions we always ask when we're hiring someone and thinking about it, and in this case you are effectively hiring someone, is do you think the next check that they'll write will be better than a check that one of us will write?”
May 7, 2026 positive
May 7, 2026 bearish
May 7, 2026 bullish
May 21, 2026 neutral
Jul 16, 2026