Stride VC

“Because if you're not strategic, nobody has to buy you. If nobody has to buy you as a VC, I'm going to sit on that position for 12 years and end up selling it secondary to a horrible secondary buyer who's going to take a 40% discount on my book value.”

“I'd much rather be on smaller funds that we keep constrained by design so that we can really hopefully deliver to our investors a return that are more attractive than I think what the larger funds are trying to do.”

“I think your ability to assess markets Either bottom up or top down at the beginning of a life of a new company or a new, new segment is extremely hard to do. And very often because the legacy industries are unattractive.”

“Founder friendly means I will leave my fear at the door of the boardroom because I will come in and do the right thing by the company. Not by my partners, you know, not whatever. I get roasted at the fund level because the company isn't doing well. Well, I wil…”

“What I do now, which is, it's not a trick, but I start the work of building the company, like in the second meeting. So instead of sitting back and listening to a pitch and formatted information, it's like, let's map out the organization. Let's think about you…”

“My only recommendation, which I always tell entrepreneurs, is please don't ever take money from assholes. You cannot fire your board members. It is probably not worth it in your life in general. I'd rather not get funded than take money from people who are tox…”

“Now, if you say no to a world-class deal because the pre-money is three million off what you thought it should be, you're an idiot. Because world-class deals don't come through your door every day.”

“And there was definitely an aspect here of reacting to a market that was sort of pretending it was business as usual and sort of planting a flag and saying, hey, we're actually on pause for a month or two or three.”

“And honestly, on top of that, I don't know of any fund that was ever returned on nasty terms. Funds are returned by backing the right entrepreneurs and exceptional outcomes.”

“When the crisis hit, we actually accelerated our capital call. We kept it reasonable because we appreciate people want to limit liquidity at least, but we immediately issued a capital call, and it was a way to effectively flush out whether we'd have any LP iss…”