Spark Capital

“I don't make a lot of investments. I make one to two new investments a year.”

“We're the first investor in Oculus”

“And I also, I've just never bought into this kind of elitist way of thinking about like where you went to school You know, where you work, you know, whether you work at Google or, you know, Apple or something, it's more of, you know, what's your idea? What, wh…”

“I think first time founders have a level of audacity that, you know, sometimes more experienced people don't have because they, they're just, there's no fear.”

“There was less than 250,000 daily active users.”

“But that's not something you could have ever modeled your way into before we made that investment, right? Like, virtual reality was dead, and it'd been dead for, like, 15 years plus until, you know, Brendan and Palmer and Nate walk in and give you a demo, and …”

“If you look at all of our big wins from Oculus to Twitter to Tumblr to Cruise, like all of these companies were, at the day that we invested, were very hard to actually model the exact market size of that company,”

“It, I think was the absolute right thing to do for the company. You know, I think I supported Kyle in decision, and it is a good exit but more importantly, you know, Kyle wants to lead the self-driving revolution, and we knew all along that that would require …”

“I think VCs generally, despite whatever they say on their websites, are market-first investors. So they want a market that they can model, you know, that they can give to an associate, and an associate can say, this is a one billion dollar market or a one tril…”

“If they're able to recruit outside capital, then we always find a way to be supportive. I don't think we've ever sent kind of a negative signal that you're describing about some other serious cause for concern in the company.”

“So when I make initial investment in the company, I always tell the founder exactly that. And I tell him that the best way to compliment me on the board is to add an independent director to the board. That's either a current or recovering CEO. That can help wi…”

“They went public in 2012, one hundred sixty million dollar in run rate. It was a single product company. Fast forward to today, they have five plus products. They committed to launching one to new products every year and new products are 30% of new business. A…”

“For the best companies, I feel like once you do 10 to 15 calls, and they're all starting to sound the same, you know you've sort of figured it out. But we like to do at least that many for every company that we're thinking about investing in.”

“15 to 18 months for high growth businesses is what we like to see. Very rarely, everyone talks about 12, it's very hard to get it down to that level.”

“You had to be around about 15 years. You're about two hundred million plus in ARR, growing around 40%, have 75% gap gross margins, are losing money, have at least 120% net dollar expansion rate, sell a thirty-k product per year on average, Have about a thousan…”

“I think you want to have at least 75% of your ramp reps at a hundred percent of quota.”

“Let's just say you're kind of between five and 15, 20 of ARR. I think you want to be growing seven and a half to 10% month over month. That would be best in class.”

“At the end of the day, it's like, is this product core to business continuity? So what does that mean? If you ask the customer or stakeholder, If you rip this thing out or if it shuts off, what's going to happen to their business? I think the best products are…”

“I think on a net expansion or net dollar retention, which is kind of the North Star number that we focus on, you want to be a 130% plus.”

“I led the seed round in Plaid and joined the founders, William and Zach, as their first outside board member.”

“As I was joining Spark, Bijan Sabat at Spark led Twitter series B and that investment catapulted us into the upper echelon of VC firms.”

“I don't know that the Brita filter version of investing is the right way to evaluate, or at least I'm not executing the way that I want to do my job and the way that I think my partner should do their jobs together in that kind of like trying to get, win the c…”

“We could have very easily raised five billion dollars. We could have very easily You know, tripled or quadrupled the size of the team. We didn't do that. We stayed seven people, six people partnership.”

“We don't talk about or look at market size at all, unless it's sometimes there's a, you know, a confirmation that it's a small market.”

“They're setting their bar too low. Like that's the bottom line. Like they're settling for mediocrity because they're afraid of risk.”

“And so I came in with a nothing to lose mentality, which allows you to sit on the front end of creative risk and being willing to take that extra risk, which of course, that's what this business is about. Versus this kind of protection is like, I just want to …”

“I think our quality of investing went down on the early stage team and has since recovered.”

“About 20% of the time, 25% of the time, founders are down for it. After we invest, I immediately try and have a conversation and get a pitch deck together for the next round. Like, what would the next, just a glossary, just a table of contents. What would you …”

“I wrote the fewest checks I've ever written in my career. I think I wrote like two checks in a year and a half.”

“I think most of them fall into, if you just really think through the second order effects of it, fall into kind of like near-term arbitrage, which might just take that whole market to zero, especially if you are meeting the market where it is today with the mo…”

“The last investment I did was a company called Wordware, and that was a very, very fast, very, very competitive. They had term sheets for quite a bit higher, but you know, I'm getting dinner with the founders. I'm going for walks in the morning. Like, I met wi…”

“If we had believed that only capital was going to win, Then we would not have invested in Anthropic, because you know, surely Sam was telling us and everybody else, like, we're going to win the capital game. The capital game is the only way to win, and so ther…”

“Discord, Jason, I knew for seven years. We were founders together before, before investing in Discord, and also smartly passed I was twice on Discord before investing.”

“So TalkSpark Capital, our Series A lead, you know, the deal after Get Your Guide was Oculus Rift, right? You know, Palmer Lucchi. So, you know, we were basically off the hook a couple of months after they made the investment in us because the fund was already …”

“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?”