venture capital
also referred to as: a vc · vc · vcs · venture capital industry
1104 statements across 571 episodes · 214 bullish · 471 bearish · 447 people on the record · first statement Jan 18, 2015 by David Hornik · across every show →
Everything said about venture capital, oldest first
Jan 18, 2015 neutral
Hornik: Venture funds require billion-dollar addressable markets because startups capture small fractions
“You really need to have markets that that, that span billion dollars of available opportunity, because in all likelihood, you're going to get small fractions of those markets, and it's incumbent upon you to then you know, eek, eek out your hundreds of millions…”
Jan 18, 2015 negative
Hornik: Legal training is a terrible asset for venture capitalists
“Well, largely venture, sorry, lawyers are trained to be to be very conservative, right? They're, the training is to sit, to find all of the problems that one might run into, and to try and you know, worry about those things, and not say to yourself, what are t…”
Jan 19, 2015
VC board members must keep their nose in and fingers out
“When you flip the table and you become the VC and a board member and a representative of the money you've invested, your fingers really need to stay out. Your nose is in, and you're constantly smelling for things that don't smell right, and you're letting the …”
Jan 19, 2015 neutral
A VC's operating background must match the firm's investment stage
“And I think even more important is, is, you know, VCs invest at all stages of companies from very, very early to very, very late. And I think it is important that you have operating experience at whatever stage or stage is you're investing in. I don't think ha…”
Jan 22, 2015
Jan 22, 2015
Jan 26, 2015 bullish
Jan 28, 2015 negative
Jan 28, 2015 positive
Feb 2, 2015 neutral
Feb 23, 2015 neutral
Venture capitalists must actively assume regulatory risk in emerging markets
“VCs generally have to take, ah, a bit of regulation risk, right? You either make a call that regulation is going in, in the direction that's favorable towards, towards you know, the potential investments you're looking at, or they're not.”
Feb 26, 2015
Mar 12, 2015 negative
Wise: FOMO is a dangerous inclination venture investors must actively correct
“It's something we constantly have to check ourselves against. I think it's a natural human inclination. I think it's a really dangerous one, and it's something which we are aware of and trying to correct for all the time.”
Mar 12, 2015 bullish
Mar 12, 2015
Mar 12, 2015
Mar 19, 2015 negative
Mar 26, 2015 positive
McCall: Continuous random acts of kindness drive VC success and deal flow
“There's only one rule that I found and we've tried over 20 years, I've been in the business 20 years, we've tried everything under the sun to try and figure out what drives success and what doesn't you know, in terms of predicting, and it's, it really comes do…”
Mar 26, 2015 bearish
Mar 30, 2015 neutral
VCs no longer invest in funding rounds below £5 million
“What we're seeing is that VCs aren't coming in into a round until it reaches a certain size, and that size is getting larger and larger. So, so what A VC would have done a few years ago, five or 10 even, you know, playing in a two million round. Now they won't…”
Apr 23, 2015
Active venture capital firm count dropped 30% between 2010 and 2015
“I think also you have to look at where venture is, and over the past four or five years, we, we've seen a reduction in the number of firms, a slight reduction in the amount of capital available, but A significant 30% reduction in the number of firms out there …”
May 7, 2015 negative
May 7, 2015
May 7, 2015 positive
Staenberg: Five years of operational experience makes for better venture capitalists
“You can do venture, but why don't you get some real world experience first? Why don't you go somewhere for five years? And actually know what it means to go through cycles, know what it means to hire and fire people, know what it means to have to work on a tea…”
May 11, 2015 positive
VC Platform Roles Offer Creative Control and an Engaged Audience
“I kind of want three things in my career and that's the ability to create things, creative control over those things, and then an audience that cares. And the platform role at a VC is like the perfect blend of those three for me right now.”
May 21, 2015
Tran King-Yens: Build VC relationships by showing progress on their advice
“I think the key to building any kind of relationship is making sure that there's progress going forward. So let's say I meet Harry today and I give Harry advice. Hopefully Harry takes that with gusto and comes back with progress and So that we keep building a …”
May 25, 2015
Menashy: VCs use pitch questions to test founder thinking and data
“I think the reality is that a VC is testing you. They're testing your thinking. They're testing you know, really is the business model going to work? Really is the market as big as we all think it is? And is that really addressable? And you need to know the an…”
May 25, 2015
Menashy: Founders over-prepare pitch decks and under-prepare for VC Q&A
“I mean, honestly, I think a lot of founders make the mistake of thinking that they need to come up with a really big formal pitch. They need to fill an hour. They produce a big IM you know, and they kind of over prepare on the documentation and the format and …”
Jun 4, 2015 negative
Jun 4, 2015 negative
Jun 8, 2015 negative
Short VC internships fail because deal vetting requires thousands of hours
“Being able to vet deals, I think, requires some amount of experience and just, you know, getting your 10,000 hours in looking at looking at startups. So I think it's really hard to just pop in somewhere for a couple of months and expect to be productive.”
Jun 8, 2015 positive
Crowdfunding pre-sales make early-stage hardware VC investments economically viable
“All these various pre-sale platforms are really making it economically viable for VCs to make early stage investments, because you're not funding the manufacturing, the customers are funding the manufacturing, and so, you know, you, it's a lot easier to swallo…”
Jun 11, 2015 negative
Jun 15, 2015
Pitching Requires Emotional Storytelling, Not the Standard VC Metrics Template
“So we need to become great storytellers, and that never, never, never Fits the templates that the VCs want to see. Why? Because the VCs want to punch all the metrics into a spreadsheet and judge you coldly and rationally. The best thing that we can do is grab …”
Jun 18, 2015 positive
Chiu: Great VCs identify founders balancing strong conviction with adaptability
“One of the things I've observed with great VCs is they are very good at reading entrepreneurs, in picking the entrepreneurs that have the perseverance and the right balance of strong conviction and adaptability. To both pursue the vision with relentless grit, …”
Jun 18, 2015 bullish
Chiu: Top VCs hold winning investments past 50X for 1,000X potential
“But some of the best companies We'll have, we'll still have a very exciting growth curve ahead of them, even after these late stage investors have come in. And the greatest VCs know to identify which companies still have a lot of potential and hang on to their…”
Jun 22, 2015
Junior VCs must start as hunters before trading or farming deals
“So I think when you start in VC, you have to be a hunter because you've got nothing to trade with. Farming hasn't had any results yet. And so, yeah, I think you always start off as a hunter and you're kind of chasing what you think are interesting new sectors.”
Jun 22, 2015 neutral
Moffat: Startups are being funded earlier and with less data
“And what you're now seeing is good companies are getting chased by VCs. They're getting funded before they were thinking about doing a funding round. They're getting funded on less sort of traction, less data than would have been the case a few years ago.”
Jun 22, 2015 bullish
Jun 22, 2015 negative
Jun 22, 2015 negative
Jun 26, 2015
Avoiding early VC funding gives founders leverage in future raises
“If you can avoid it, For as long as possible. It's a good thing. You'll also have more leverage at the time when you do fundraise because you're coming to them from a position of strength. You know, you're not asking for sort of a handout to survive.”
Jun 26, 2015 neutral
Venture capital will evolve slowly as technology companies become cheaper to build
“I do think the VC model is one that is going to need to evolve, right? I think companies are increasingly less expensive to build, especially tech companies and so I think we're gonna see experiments in venture but, you know, they're gonna play out over many y…”
Jul 1, 2015
Jul 3, 2015 bearish
Stebbings: Crowdfunding Cannot Replace Venture Capital Value-Add
“I've asked a lot I've asked Luke Lang, Tom Britton, Crowdcube Syndicate Room, is crowdfunding replacing VC which many think it might do, and that VC value-add is something that cannot be replaced by the crowd, in my opinion, giving it a real sustainable longev…”
Jul 6, 2015
Jul 8, 2015 negative
Helgason: Working in venture capital is less stressful than being a founder
“It's less stressful than being in the trenches as a founder. But it quite appeals to me in that you can kind of take a step back and think more strategically and be more analytical Rather than having to be in kind of animal mode every day.”
Jul 13, 2015 negative
Jul 15, 2015
Venture Capital Will Be Disrupted and Practiced Differently in Five Years
“Venture will be disrupted. It's being disrupted today. It's being practiced actually today differently than it was 15 or 20 years ago, and it'll probably be practiced five or seven years from now differently than it is today. So I do believe that venture is no…”
Jul 15, 2015 negative
Pakman: Venture capital is too efficient at funding obvious winners
“Right now venture capital is super competitive, and it's a very efficient market at funding things that are working right now. So if you're a VC and your goal is to look for things that are exploding at this moment, that's a very competitive space, and it's go…”
Jul 15, 2015 neutral
Pakman: Former CEOs entering VC must accept they no longer make decisions
“The hardest part, though, is appreciating that you're not the one in charge anymore, and that the CEOs that you're backing are the ones who are in charge, and you can give them advice, but ultimately they have to make all of the final decisions, and that's jus…”
Jul 22, 2015
Jul 22, 2015 positive
Jul 22, 2015 positive
Turner: Consulting work directly prepares venture capitalists for deal evaluation
“The consulting work was probably a little bit more transferable in the sense that, you know, as a consultant, you spend one to four months at a time looking at an industry and hopefully learning just enough with just enough of a different viewpoint than the co…”
Jul 22, 2015
Turner: Vague responses from VCs usually signal a rejection
“At the end of any meeting with a VC, you should be looking for next steps and commitment on those next steps. Most of the time, there won't be that kind of commitment. It'll be something like, let me talk to my partners. Or let me think about it, or things, th…”
Aug 5, 2015 positive
Aug 17, 2015
Galston cold-emailed VCs a mapped relationship graph of his gaming network
“What I did is I created like this interest or this relationship graph where I put myself in the middle and I put all the different players in the gaming world around me and showed who I knew, like what executive level, how like the relationships developed. And…”
Aug 17, 2015
Aug 19, 2015 negative
Aug 26, 2015 negative
Aug 28, 2015 positive
Portfolio founder introductions are the most effective way to reach VCs
“Once you get those introductions, you actually get introductions from startups that these VCs have already invested in, and of course, for that reason, already trust and believe in. And I think it's one of the most relevant introductions you can get to our VC.”
Aug 28, 2015
Pitch decks should provoke questions, not answer everything about the business
“Because as it turns out, the purpose of a deck is not to answer all questions about a business. It's to create ground for, like, interesting discussions to come. Like, VCs, in general, are interested people, and they want to be curious at the end of a presenta…”
Aug 31, 2015 positive
Sep 2, 2015 positive
Sep 6, 2015 negative
Sep 7, 2015 bearish
Sep 7, 2015 negative
Sep 16, 2015 neutral
Sep 16, 2015 negative
High entry valuations prevent venture returns from covering startup failures
“Most startups do fail, and you need to make sure that the startups that you do succeed with actually help to cover all the losses that you make otherwise, and if you invest at way too high a price, you're not going to cover all the other failures that you have…”
Sep 21, 2015
Treskow: Founder experience is helpful for VCs but not essential
“All else being equal, all incremental experience helps. And so if you can have somebody who has had prior entrepreneurial experience, all else being equal you'd like that, right? And the question is, is more around to what extent that's necessary, right? Becau…”
Oct 5, 2015 negative
Oct 5, 2015 negative
Kamal Ravikant: Venture capital is not real work compared to running startups
“And honestly, I don't think it's real work, because what is my work? It's meetings and research, and maybe once in a while fundraising, right, and helping companies, which I do anyway. Like, real work is making payroll, you know, having to go and put payroll o…”
Oct 7, 2015 neutral
Oct 7, 2015 negative
Oct 19, 2015 negative
Nakache: The era of the generalist venture capitalist is largely over
“The days of sort of the generalist venture capitalist is, is I think mostly gone exists in some rare pockets, but, you know, I think when I, and that's been a transition that's happened during the time I've been in venture capital I think, you know, it wasn't …”
Oct 19, 2015 negative
Nakache: Market retrenchment disproportionately harms minorities in venture capital
“I think there was a, when I joined it was higher, I believe, because we were in the middle of the dot-com boom, and in growth times, that's when opportunity exists, actually, I think, For minorities to make progress. I think in retrenchment, times of retrenchm…”
Oct 23, 2015 negative
Nov 2, 2015 bullish
Nov 11, 2015 positive
Zink: Venture capital should be impatient, not patient capital
“I often hear about the notion that venture capital is supposed to be patient capital, and I always smile, because I think the opposite is all about being impatient. If something is not working, change it. Don't wait and see if it improves.”
Nov 11, 2015 bearish
Zink: Tourist investors like hedge funds will exit VC during downcycles
“I see a lot of valuation bubbles in certain subsectors or in late stage VC investments, and that's really because you have a lot of tourists coming in, like hedge funds and other, other non-consistent players putting money into the VC game, and I think as you …”
Nov 13, 2015
O'Hear: Fundraising Creates Conflict When Founders Pitch VCs
“There's, like An absolute conflict of interest in that stage when you're fundraising, because essentially you're telling your VC, in a way, you're trying to tell them what they want to hear, because you want to close the round. But the minute you close the rou…”
Nov 20, 2015 positive
Mitra: Equity crowdfunding and VCs will collaborate rather than compete
“I don't think they are. I think look, the ecosystem is evolving, and actually there is room and requirement for both types. VCs have been around for ages, and VCs are sort of classes, you know, a capital pool with discretionary decision-making to invest in com…”
Nov 23, 2015 negative
Venture capital is too random for a traditional career ladder
“I'm not sure that venture is really supposed to be a career that you sort of join at 21 and sort of slowly progress yourself through. It's a little bit too random and a little bit too you know, too much of it is, is a little bit too much of a random walk to be…”
Dec 2, 2015
Dec 2, 2015 negative
Dec 4, 2015 bullish
Glenn: Equity crowdfunding will complement venture capital, not displace it
“I think it's going to be a sympathetic relationship. You know, there are instances when companies need 50, a 102 hundred, fifty million dollars to grow in scale, and the crowd is never going to provide that capital, and I think VCs provide important seats at t…”
Dec 7, 2015 neutral
Dec 7, 2015 negative
Maqubela: GP commitments exclude talent and drive young VCs to risk aversion
“I think it's fundamentally excluding a lot of people who could otherwise be great VCs, because they either don't have the capital, or if they happened to, it's too much capital to allocate in one place, and thereby makes them risk averse.”
Dec 7, 2015 positive
Maqubela: VC deal flow relies on investor coopetition at Demo Days
“VCs get great deal flow from each other. They learn to trust each other. This is a, an industry that I, you know, to coin a term from a friend of mine is, is, is, driven by coopetition, and so we're cooperating constantly while we compete, and that means that …”
Dec 9, 2015 negative
Dec 9, 2015 positive
Dec 9, 2015 bullish
Dec 14, 2015 neutral
Startups require operational detail while VC requires macro trend analysis
“Working in startups you only get to see a few ideas get to any stage. So you're very into detail, and you're really into, like, growing that one company versus suddenly, you know, I'm exposed to, you know, thousands of ideas, and trying to think about longer-t…”
Dec 14, 2015 positive
Dec 16, 2015 positive
Bradley: Small Business Experience Provides Key Operational Baseline For VC Careers
“Definitely I think some kind of expertise and working with for or starting your own small businesses is really helpful to understand the sort of The mechanics, the challenges the important variables going on challenging small businesses and small teams and sol…”
Dec 16, 2015 negative
Dec 30, 2015 positive
Teli: Crowdfunding complements seed venture capital instead of threatening it
“No, I actually think it helps it. I mean, a lot of the best crowdfunding runs I've seen have been alongside a VC. One. And two I think, you know, there, there's a lot of businesses out there that frankly don't need venture capital. They need capital, but not v…”
Dec 30, 2015 negative
Teli: Firm Twitter accounts are ineffective compared to personal VC branding
“A lot of them, so what I see a lot of is like VCs where the firm has a Twitter account, and I don't think that's very effective. Because I think for entrepreneurs, right, your relationship is with the investor, the specific person that you're going to be worki…”
Dec 30, 2015 negative
Teli: VCs giving 'maybe' responses unfairly string founders along with false hope
“A lot of times, VCs say maybe, which is, I think, just a very not nice way of saying no, right? Right, because it gives the entrepreneur hope, and a lot of times the entrepreneurs interpret them maybe as a not no, you know, and it's just keeping them hanging o…”
Jan 6, 2016 negative
Jan 6, 2016 negative
Jan 6, 2016 positive
Jan 6, 2016 positive
Moehring: Startup operational experience is essential for modern VCs
“Joining startups after that which I think is a great preparation for being a VC running your own startup, being part of a startup in, you know, in a crucial role really shows you much more what building companies is about, what growing companies is about and t…”
Jan 11, 2016 negative
Jan 13, 2016 negative
Jan 13, 2016 neutral
Shillo: VC is highly stressful because investors lack operational control
“That it's easy. You know, I think from a lot of people looking in, it's fun because we're the ones controlling the capital, but it's incredibly stressful, and we're sitting in between having no control over the company, and hence the outcome.”
Jan 15, 2016
VCs told Gimlet Media to ignore revenue and focus on user growth
“We had conversations with some VCs who we would begin to talk about revenue, and they're like, we don't want to hear it. We're not actually interested in that. We want to see just a really steep user growth curve, and like, we know that if you get a large audi…”
Jan 18, 2016 negative
Destin: VCs earn a bad reputation by abruptly pulling founder support
“The reason why VCs get a bad rap is because typically they'll be like, founder, supportive, founder, supportive, love the company, and then suddenly from one day to the next, they're like, actually we're not backing you. And entrepreneurs fucking hate that wit…”
Jan 18, 2016 negative
Destin Criticizes VCs for Operating Under a Control Mindset
“VCs are very often assholes because they're in a logic of control. Their viewpoint of the world is like, Hey, you work for me. You have to deliver results. Which is, of course, completely wrong, because the reality is we're only trying to enable a project call…”
Jan 20, 2016
Feb 3, 2016
Prominent VCs warned Eniac founders in 2010 that mobile was too niche
“A lot of the VCs that we had worked with as entrepreneurs who are Very well-respected VCs and continue to be very well-respected and nothing against them, but a lot of them told us that, you know, it was too niche, that we needed to be broader.”
Feb 8, 2016
Feb 8, 2016 negative
Feb 17, 2016 negative
Feb 22, 2016 bullish
Tim Draper: Bitcoin and blockchain will disrupt venture capital like Uber
“All of these things, Bitcoin, the blockchain, there are going to be new technologies applied to venture capital just the way file sharing was applied to the music industry, or Uber was applied to the taxi industry. I think venture capital is going to be change…”
Feb 29, 2016 negative
Mar 4, 2016 negative
Mar 4, 2016 positive
Hiten Shah: Startups should only raise VC after achieving product-market fit
“Once you're at a point, my ideal scenario is, you get to product market fit, You start experimenting with channels and things like that so that you're basically ready to scale, and then you wanna make a, make an argument, so to speak, that without money, we wo…”
Mar 9, 2016 bearish
Venture capital cannot be disrupted without changing the 10-year fund model
“We're still seen in the same bucket as a private equity fund, 10 years capped, Return my money based on capital calls, minimum return, and until that change, some of the flexibility that might be needed to disrupt the asset class is not going to be there.”
Mar 9, 2016 bullish
AngelList's platform and $400M fund could disrupt venture capital deal flow
“AngelList is a great example where AngelList builds a platform on top of which they prove success, on top of which they go raise a four hundred million dollar fund. That could have, that has the potential to be a disruptive new way of doing both deal flow and …”
Mar 21, 2016
Mar 30, 2016 negative
Apr 8, 2016
Apr 8, 2016 negative
Apr 11, 2016
Apr 20, 2016 positive
Bartlett: Pitching executive recruits is a VC's most important value add
“The board and the C-suite executives, you know, at the end of the day are kind of recruiting arms and chief evangelists for the company. And so I think the biggest value add that, that a VC can have is just being able to look either other independent board dir…”
Apr 25, 2016
Wise: Venture capital offers loose oversight compared to banking or startups
“If you don't love it is actually surprisingly easy for people to disappear for three or four hours a day and not really do anything, right? You get rumbled after six months, but it's not like a fight. It's not like being in a bank or being a consultancy or it'…”
Apr 25, 2016 bearish
Apr 25, 2016 negative
Wise: Mobile gaming startups no longer require venture capital
“If you launch a mobile game today, there are rigorous data models, which basically mean you don't need venture capital anymore. You know that there'll be certain targets you need to hit, and some growth investor or someone else will buy you.”
Apr 25, 2016 negative
Wise: Raising new micro-funds for quick capital is short-sighted
“There is a huge, there's quite a big rush, actually, I've noticed of people saying, hey, I'm going to go and raise my own fund now. There's, you know, there's some money on the table. And I think it's great, but it's quite short-term view for what is a very lo…”
Apr 25, 2016 negative
Apr 25, 2016 negative
Wise: Core VC tasks do not require prior operational experience
“It's really not clear that you need to have huge amounts of entrepreneurial experience in order to do the two things which VCs should be able to do really well. One is insightfully source companies. So find interesting companies in areas which are fast growing…”
May 9, 2016
Charles Hudson: VCs Without Operating Experience Underestimate Startup Organizational Friction
“I think as a VC, it's easy to sit in the boardroom and see strategically that there's something off with the business and to kind of dictate, Hey, we should fix sales or, Hey, we've got to fix marketing. We've got to fix product. But until you've actually been…”
May 11, 2016 negative
Clifford: Traditional VC criteria for evaluating founding teams are outdated
“So all the conventional wisdom about how good teams formed come from a world where very few people became entrepreneurs. But now we're moving into a world where many more people would be entrepreneurs and many more people should be entrepreneurs. And that actu…”
May 16, 2016 negative
May 30, 2016
Turck: Venture investing requires balancing deep sector expertise with deliberate naivety
“There is a, this interesting tension between becoming a deep student of a specific industry like big data, internet of things, or any of those these different areas, and the industry in general, so really understanding all the nuances of how companies become s…”
Jun 1, 2016
Basu Trivedi: Venture experience eventually trumps operating background for investors
“But now that I've been in venture capital for five to six years, the venture experience trumps the operating experience at some point. It absolutely does now for me. And so I think the venture experience now informs much more what I do every day with finding n…”
Jun 6, 2016
Jun 8, 2016 negative
Hyatt: Most VCs prioritize market modeling over team and product
“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…”
Jun 15, 2016
Jun 17, 2016 negative
Jun 22, 2016
Jun 22, 2016 neutral
Jun 27, 2016 negative
David Cohen: Tech industry rewards loudness over performance
“I'm very concerned about the health of the long-term dynamic where entrepreneurs and investors value fame and boisterousness over shut the hell up and do a great job and help the company, right? I think most industries evolve towards rewarding performance and,…”
Jul 13, 2016
Jul 18, 2016
Bussgang: VCs evaluate startup risk as data-driven pattern recognition algorithms
“VCs, VCs are big data decision makers. Think about us as pattern recognizers and machine learning, deep learning algorithms that feed on data. And the more data we take every data point and make decisions and judgment based on those data points and signaling r…”
Jul 20, 2016 negative
Jul 20, 2016 neutral
Baseline venture capital return expectations have dropped from 3-5x to 2x net
“The return expectation of venture used to be three to five X and above, and now there are folks in the industry that are perfectly fine with a two X net return because internally their return expectations are much, much lower.”
Jul 20, 2016
Jul 20, 2016 neutral
Venture capital is inverted because entrepreneurs select their fund managers
“Today, the entrepreneurs are picking the managers. This is in stark contrast to any other asset class. So in any other asset class, you can look at a great manager and you can assess their ability to pick securities. Ok, so it's a security selection. So ventur…”
Jul 20, 2016 bearish
Jul 25, 2016 negative
Semil Shah: VCs Misuse 'Founder Friendly' to Avoid Giving Honest Feedback
“I think in the way people think of founder friendly, I am not. People think founder friendly is like they walk on eggshells around other people so that they don't piss somebody off, even the founder. They're so nervous about losing deal flow or getting a negat…”
Aug 1, 2016 negative
Justin Kan: Venture Capital Is Easy Because VCs Do No Real Work
“Because you don't do any of the real work. You know, like, this is, I can, I talk to founders all day, and I give them my advice, and they either do it or they don't do it. But at the end of the day, you know, I, you don't have any control. And so you wait, se…”
Aug 1, 2016 neutral
YC Continuity Fund Was Designed to Compete With Public Market Investors
“The continuity fund originally was conceived of as a way to compete with more of the growth stage investors that were coming into the market in the later stage. So that's people who weren't actually classically VCs. I think as you've seen like tech companies, …”
Aug 29, 2016
VCs expect founders to answer pitch questions using standardized mental frameworks
“I think there's always a miscommunication a lot of times when, you know, a VCO asks a type of question, like competition, where you see growth, what does this mean? I think in their mind, they want to hear it An answer in, in a framework that they're going to …”
Aug 29, 2016 negative
Fundraising is structurally stacked against founders because VCs default to no
“I think it's unfair, I think, in the battle of entrepreneurs, the VCs to get money in the sense that a VC has been doing this for years, right? They're getting a couple pitches a day, years, and so their default answer is a no.”
Aug 29, 2016 negative
Sep 2, 2016
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016
Sarver: Venture capital is less stressful than founding or operating a company
“It is definitely, having gone and seen both sides of this job was less stressful than, you know, being an operator and for sure being a founder. There's no doubt, you know, you have a whole team of people riding on you.”
Sep 19, 2016
Sep 19, 2016
Sep 21, 2016 negative
Sep 26, 2016 positive
Founder sentiment is the leading indicator of a VC's potency
“So we find that founders and entrepreneurs are leading opinions are the leading indicators of the relevancy and potency of a VC Find that many LPs opinion of a VC's brand is actually a lagging indicator. The most powerful form of social proof for us is the opi…”
Oct 3, 2016 neutral
Hannah: Venture capital lacks the compounding flywheel momentum of entrepreneurship
“It's a job where I think unlike an entrepreneur's job, you don't get as much a sense of the flywheel working, right? Like you don't sense that you don't get the sense that you've got this thing going and you're building strength to strength. Like it's a, you k…”
Oct 5, 2016 negative
Venture Capital Lacks Feedback Loops Due to Five-to-Seven Year Deal Cycles
“There's just no feedback loop in, in VC. You don't know if you're good at your job because, okay, you can measure yourself if you're doing deals, but you just don't know if those deals become good till five, six, seven years. And you need to do a lot of work w…”
Oct 12, 2016 positive
Oct 26, 2016 negative
Wong: Starting early in venture beats pivoting from an operating career
“I think the best investors stem from actually being investors. So the earlier in venture that you start investing, the better you're going to be over the long term. So I don't think doing a career, a lifetime career in another field and then switching over as …”
Oct 26, 2016 neutral
Wong: Late-stage VC returns can match early-stage IRR via faster exits
“So there's no definitive optimal stage because if you're on that efficiency curve and you're investing in the late stage, it's as good as investing in the early stage. Even if your multiple isn't as high as So not in the hundred X, but you're really faster to …”
Oct 26, 2016 positive
Lyon Wong: Real-time operator networks will outperform individual VC operating experience
“So I think having an operational network is key, but not necessarily you have to be the one to have experienced All aspects of operating and you to be imparting the wisdom yourself. I don't think that's the, that in 10 years from now, I don't think that that w…”
Nov 2, 2016 positive
VC remains inefficient, letting investors win deals on relationships over price
“I see VC as being one of those last industries, one of those last categories that's inefficient still. And what I mean by that is it's not like the public markets where the highest bidder is always going to win. I think VCs through relationships, through vario…”
Nov 2, 2016 negative
Aggressive, short-term VCs eventually get forced out of the ecosystem
“I don't I think it's a market of bullish predators because I think those bullish predators get forced out of the system. I think you can be a short-term predator, but to be a good VC, I think you have to be an excellent long-term actor.”
Nov 2, 2016 bullish
Y Combinator is disrupting venture capital by flipping founder supply and demand
“I think it will. We're starting to see that happen with Y Combinator. There was a great article I just read Profiling Sam Altman in the New Yorker, and I respect what Y Combinator has done, and I'm a big fan of what they've done over the last three to four yea…”
Nov 4, 2016
Nov 4, 2016 negative
Nov 7, 2016 negative
Nov 14, 2016 negative
Nov 23, 2016 negative
Paley's study of 71 IPOs shows capital raised doesn't drive startup success
“We looked at 71 IPOs over the last five years, the 71 tech IPOs over the last five years. To study whether venture capital in the outlier cases could be argued to have really driven greater success. And it turned out there was effectively no correlation betwee…”
Nov 23, 2016
Founders drive inflated valuation expectations just as much as VCs, says Paley
“Actually, the expectations come as a result of a tough negotiation where, Not just VCs, but founders typically want more capital and higher price. And so it's on both sides, the intention of the VC to get more capital in and incentives to do so, and the desire…”
Nov 25, 2016 positive
Srinivasan: VCs are financially incentivized to make founders wealthier than themselves
“VC is incentivized to build people up. You know, what I mean by that is as an investor, you want to invest in somebody and make them richer than yourself. Example, Peter Thiel investing in the young Mark Zuckerberg put 500,000 dollars into Zuckerberg. Thiel ma…”
Nov 25, 2016 positive
Srinivasan: Venture capital creates a unique financial incentive for seeking truth
“VC has many, many faults, but there's a couple of things I think are really interesting about it, and one of the biggest is that a VC is very interested in whether they were wrong. You know, pass on a Series A company, and then it's successful, and it becomes …”
Nov 28, 2016
Nov 30, 2016 negative
Nov 30, 2016 negative
Farmer: Traditional VC model is outdated and must be rebuilt from scratch
“After a few years, I felt that VC was outdated. So I left Bessemer to study one question. If you were to strip a venture curve down to the bare metal to where to recreate a firm from scratch, how would you build a next generation VC?”
Nov 30, 2016 negative
Farmer: Too many VCs lack conviction and rely on peer validation
“There's probably too many people who, and VCs in the industry who sit on the fence and don't have the conviction themselves to make their own decisions without Without pure validation. And so there's some awesome entrepreneurial, you know, investors that reall…”
Dec 2, 2016 negative
Petersen: Massive Market Dollar Capture Outweighs Pure Software Gross Margins
“Six percent of what is the question you need to ask yourself, right? And if what is a trillion dollars, Who cares if it's six percent? Wouldn't you rather have six percent of a trillion dollar market than like, you know, 90% margin on a ten million dollar?”
Dec 12, 2016 positive
Ohanian: Kindness in venture capital is a smart long-term investment strategy
“A hundred percent. Yes, because kindness is a long-term investment, and if you're a smart investor, you are thinking about the long-term. Kindness does not mean being weak or being dumb. It just means looking at the world as though it is not this purely zero-s…”
Dec 14, 2016 neutral
Dec 19, 2016 positive
Dec 19, 2016
Dec 19, 2016
Dec 21, 2016 bearish
ICOs and token marketplaces will not replace traditional venture capital firms
“When we talk about disruption, I'm very skeptical that where we're going to be in 10 years is, you know, everything is initial coin offerings, and there's no VCs, and, you know, there's just sort of marketplaces like AngelList and Bitcoin, right? Like, I don't…”
Dec 23, 2016 negative
Dec 30, 2016
Dec 30, 2016
Jan 2, 2017
O'Donnell: Venture investors must separate decision quality from outcome control
“It's important to separate decisions and outcomes. Hopefully, you make all good decisions, but you can't control the outcome, and that's sort of the humbling thing, is that you can check off every which box you come up with in terms of decision making and scre…”
Jan 2, 2017 positive
O'Donnell: VC personal branding is essential in SF due to extreme deal competition
“So in San Francisco, where I happen to be visiting right now, I think personal brands and marketing that comes from sort of being public as a VC, it is important because it is extremely competitive here to get into deals.”
Jan 6, 2017
VCs accept execution and team risk but refuse to take market risk
“Almost all VCs will tell you they will take on execution risk. They'll even take on team risk. But they'll never take market risk, because that's the one thing they can't do anything about, which is why VCs tend to look for really big markets.”
Jan 6, 2017 negative
VC failure rates are unnecessarily high because funds only seek home runs
“I actually challenge the notion that VCs have to have such a high failure rate. I think Part of the reason there is such a high failure rate is because everyone's swinging for home runs. No one's, no one, there are very few VCs that feel like they can assemble…”
Jan 6, 2017 negative
Jan 6, 2017
Startups staying private longer is a permanent structural shift
“The time it takes to build a company these days at the scale that venture and our investors would like us to build companies at just takes longer and longer. It's harder the journey's longer, and it's much more expensive. So I think, and I think that trend's g…”
Jan 11, 2017
Jan 11, 2017 negative
Judging all startups by outlier growth forces premature capital risk
“I think that some of the trajectory of some of these amazing companies, which are truly outliers, that have had this, you know, up and to the right success, has forced all companies to be, you know, judged by that same curve, and that's not the way that, that …”
Jan 11, 2017 neutral
VC transformed from small partnerships into corporate financial services
“Subsequently, the industry has become a lot more professionalized, so you see a lot of associates and analysts, and, you know, people have hired up, and it becomes much more like a traditional financial services firm, but at the time, it was still, you know, l…”
Jan 25, 2017
Guo: Context Switching in Venture Capital Is Extremely Costly
“The context switching in venture is very costly, right? And so, it's very important to me to have some time when I'm not trying to field emails from people in the portfolio or jump from one meeting on perception for autonomous vehicles to another on developer …”
Jan 27, 2017 positive
Jan 30, 2017 negative
Feb 3, 2017 positive
Feb 15, 2017
The highest-returning venture investments are non-obvious deals that consensus rejects
“It's sort of a core belief that the best investments we've made and the best investments out there were not obvious, and they were the kind of wacky deal in the corner of the room that everybody else sort of passed on”
Mar 1, 2017 negative
Ehrenberg: Complex term sheets and document obscurity in VC mean nothing
“I spent 12 of my 18 years in the derivatives markets, and I know that mystery and seeming obfuscation and complexity adds mystique. It's such bullshit. It's like the hardest part of VC is finding great people who are aligned on the challenging mission that's i…”
Mar 1, 2017
Ehrenberg predicts the VC industry will consolidate into a barbell model
“I think it really is, is going to, that the industry is going to look like a barbell, and I've long thought you'll kind of have firms that are really focused on helping build companies at the seed stage and proving out their businesses, and then you'll have la…”
Mar 8, 2017 negative
Hower: No 'subprime model' exists in venture capital due to power laws
“There's no subprime model to venture capital investing, right? You can't invest in the mediocre companies at a cheap price and produce a good outcome because the distribution of outcomes is a power law. It's not a normal distribution.”
Mar 13, 2017 positive
Grady: VC hiring will swing back toward younger apprentices within 10 years
“My personal view, I think the pendulum in the last five years has shifted towards wanting founders and operators as VCs. I think in the next five or 10 years, it's going to swing back the other way towards Hiring younger people with fresh perspective and more …”
Mar 20, 2017 negative
Mar 24, 2017 negative
Pitching on stage at VC conferences is an ineffective fundraising strategy
“I never really liked this idea of going, like, you know, to some conference and standing on a stage and pitching myself in front of 50 VCs. I don't think that's a very good way to get attention. I think there's a lot of connectors in the ecosystem. Getting to …”
Mar 27, 2017 negative
Gur: Venture capital needs diversity to overcome male and white bias
“You know, I definitely don't think we need more VCs, but we definitely need a All the great businesses I know out there that aren't getting funded and could have a big impact in the world, and they just don't get funded because of the biases that we have as a …”
Mar 31, 2017 negative
McCloskey: VCs maintain information asymmetry because transparency isn't in their interest
“The challenge is that founders can't really share that information because it's not in their best interest, and VCs don't Really want to be transparent because it's not in their best interest, right? They sort of hold all the power. And what that means is that…”
Mar 31, 2017 negative
McCloskey: Leaking low runway to VCs severely damages fundraising terms
“When, I mean, the biggest challenge is when you are, let's say you're in the A stage of raising money, and you don't have a lot of runway, and as a startup, you need to try and keep as much of the power in that negotiation process as you can, while also, you k…”
Mar 31, 2017
Apr 5, 2017 negative
Breinlinger: Relying on early metrics like MRR leads VCs to bad decisions
“If you are so focused on just the data of user acquisitions, MRR growth, whatever, especially at the early stages where it's probably only a million or so in revenue, I think you can just buy into hype too easily and make bad decisions that ignore common sense…”
Apr 5, 2017 positive
Apr 7, 2017 positive
Apr 7, 2017 positive
Shedletsky: Asking VCs for advice yields free consulting and builds relationships
“I think what I have kind of stumbled into is you just go and ask advice. This is a great way to get like half an hour of free consulting about what you should be worried about in your business and what you should be doing about X, Y, Z, or the other.”
Apr 10, 2017
Apr 10, 2017 negative
Apr 10, 2017
Apr 12, 2017 positive
Apr 12, 2017 negative
Kashyap: Venture capitalists judge founders too quickly in one-hour meetings
“I feel that myself, you know, VCs and myself included, we pass judgment too quickly. We meet a company. We really don't know what journey they went through before they got To presenting us across the table, but you know, they basically get an hour and we pass …”
Apr 12, 2017 bearish
Kashyap: Venture capital funding for semiconductors has almost disappeared
“Very few VCs will touch semiconductors, and it's a core innovation. Hardware is a core innovation on which software resides. So we do need to see continued innovation at the bottom layers. But that has sort of almost gone away from the VC ecosystem.”
Apr 14, 2017 positive
Kimball: Top VCs Win Allocations by Staying Proactively Engaged Between Rounds
“But I think that what separates the wheat from the shaft there is that the really good VCs, the ones that really want to land the deal, assuming that is their priority, you know, these guys will, and gals, will stay in touch, and they'll be proactive about it.”
Apr 14, 2017 negative
Kimball: Cockroach Labs Rejects Late-Arriving VCs Who Skipped Between-Round Touchpoints
“And then many of the VCs that I talked to in the previous round, they start to hear about it through the grapevine, and then they pop up, and they want to be involved, and no matter how much I like them, it's often pretty far along at that point, usually past …”
Apr 17, 2017 positive
Felser: Venture capital is easier than entrepreneurship due to flexibility
“It's obviously easier than being an entrepreneur, but I can do it from anywhere. I'm flexible about my hours. I can work, you know, sometimes I work until one AM, sometimes I work until three PM and have a portfolio of companies to spread the stress across.”
Apr 19, 2017 negative
Polovets: Bad VCs tarnish venture capital due to lack of public accountability
“I think most VCs are great and then a small number are not. And because there's no public repository of people, you know, saying what it's like to work with a specific investor, a lot of times, like both the good and bad investors will be able to get into roun…”
Apr 19, 2017 positive
May 8, 2017 negative
May 8, 2017 positive
May 10, 2017 bullish
Wolfe: Investing with a 3-10 year horizon creates time arbitrage advantage
“If the public markets are thinking one or two years out and discounting back, and VCs are thinking one or two years out, then if you are thinking three, four, five, or let alone 10 years out, then you've got a time arbitrage advantage.”
May 15, 2017 negative
May 17, 2017 neutral
May 17, 2017 negative
May 29, 2017 positive
May 29, 2017 negative
Zaveri: Dismissing founders or ideas as just a feature is dangerous
“I'd say, like, huge market, and then the other pet, you know, pet peeve is, oh, this is a feature or something like that, right? It's like, you know, companies evolve and change, and I'd say there might be sort of folks that may sort of poorly phrase things, a…”
May 31, 2017
May 31, 2017 bearish
Ascher: Venture capital has become overly transactional and cap-table focused
“I'd like to see it be less transactional and more relationship oriented. I feel like it's become a bit of a, yeah, yeah, yeah, write me a check and join this long cap table list, but ultimately for me, again, it's about the long-term partnership relationship.”
May 31, 2017
Ascher: Breaking into VC requires starting young or an executive track record
“Well, there's kind of two paths. You beat and kick and scratch and claw your way in as a young person who doesn't yet really have much to bring to the table by way of a track record or proven deal flow based on your stature as a founder or senior executive at …”
Jun 5, 2017 positive
Jun 21, 2017 negative
Gil: Traditional venture capital unnaturally bundles capital, governance, and advice
“The traditional BC model bundles capital, governance, and advice, and the people who are great investors aren't necessarily good at governance or advice, or vice versa. People who are great advisors may not be great investors. They may not be able to identify …”
Jun 26, 2017 negative
Levine: Claims that operational VCs add superior value are bogus
“So I think this whole idea of VC being better or adding a lot of value to their operational experience, I think it's bogus. And I think it's sort of a, it's a new idea that's been perpetrated by folks who are competing as VCs who happen to have a lot of operat…”
Jun 26, 2017 bearish
Jun 28, 2017 neutral
Kurzweil: Pre-Sold ICO Demand Is a Better Success Indicator Than VCs
“I'm one of the ones that think it might, and I think the way it disrupts our business is it allows folks to transact directly with the buyer of their product before they have said product. So, In a block in, in these ICOs that we're seeing now, you can put out…”
Jul 5, 2017 bearish
Jul 10, 2017 negative
Lasky: Venture Capital Has Become an Over-Hyped PR Machine Like Hollywood
“Even the pre-internet bubble days. VCs were kind of shadow warriors. They were in the background. They were enablers. They were not really the center of attention. And I think increasingly, firms have brought a kind of Hollywood-like public relations and hype …”
Jul 10, 2017 negative
Jul 12, 2017
Jul 19, 2017 bearish
Jul 26, 2017 negative
Jul 26, 2017 positive
Aspiring VCs can perform analyst duties before getting hired
“I mean, it's actually possible for you to basically act like an analyst associate at a fund without getting a job. You can meet with founders. You can write market maps. You can basically do the job. You can send over these deals to VCs, and you'd be surprised…”
Aug 2, 2017 neutral
Max Gazor notes VC apprentice model time constraints limit firm hiring
“In general, I think because they are small teams and it's an apprentice model and you spend and invest a lot of time in people, you really want to make sure that the people that you bring on are strong fits internally. And I think that that's The key barrier i…”
Aug 4, 2017 bearish
Armstrong: ICOs will disrupt venture capital over next two to ten years
“If this trend around ICOs goes through its correction period and then continues to get traction, which I believe it will, it's hard to say on what timeframe, but let's say, you know, over the next two to 10 years or something like that, I do think that is pret…”
Aug 9, 2017 negative
Quintini: VCs shouldn't offer operational value-add just to satisfy LPs
“I think the important thing is you should only do it if it matches your skills and it matches your The relationship and the way you want to work with your founders, right? You shouldn't do it because the industry is doing it. You shouldn't do it because LPs, y…”
Aug 9, 2017
Quintini: Lower startup costs enabled the emergence of smaller VC funds
“Cloud, mobile, processing power, all those things that happened in the past, you know, call it 1520 years, they made founders need differently, and I saw what in 2006, seven, eight, people kind of taking that big step back and say, okay, what's changed now, an…”
Aug 9, 2017 neutral
Aug 14, 2017 negative
Aug 25, 2017 negative
Abrams: Claiming to 'fall into VC' is usually masking unacknowledged privilege
“Really it does sound like the benefit of privilege when a family member or a former college roommate or somebody gives you this lucky break that is an entree into that world. It's a weird way of saying that you fell into it. It just doesn't sound like somethin…”
Aug 25, 2017 negative
Abrams: VCs claiming to 'fall into VC' contradicts firm diversity excuses
“When you hear venture capital, you know, famous VCs sometimes in the media talking about the lack of diversity in their firms and being challenged about it and saying that they can't relax their standards, and fair enough, but when then you hear people saying …”
Aug 28, 2017 bullish
Jones: Tokenization and ICOs will fundamentally change early-stage venture capital
“It is going to change venture. I mean, it has changed venture. It's just, if I look at my investing activities over the last six months since we've been participating in this, it's changed the way I think about equity and the way I think about early stage comp…”
Sep 1, 2017 negative
Harris: VCs care more about company size than profitability
“At the end of the day, I think everyone's just going to keep accepting this big lie, because as long as markets still appreciate size over return, they're going to continue to support these types of companies. And if you look at it, proof is in the pudding. Th…”
Sep 6, 2017 negative
Sep 6, 2017 bullish
Sep 6, 2017 negative
Sep 8, 2017
Sep 8, 2017 negative
Sep 8, 2017 negative
Sep 8, 2017
Founders should never tell VCs which other investors they are meeting
“You never reveal who you're talking to the others, because VCs will always try to back channel each other. So you says entrepreneur raising, I believe you should never reveal while you're fundraising, who else you're fundraising from. That's only to your detri…”
Sep 11, 2017 neutral
Weissman: Traditional VC works near-perfectly for software, but nothing else
“I believe on one point that early stage software technology based venture capital is a near perfect craft for what it does. And by that, I mean, it is a near perfect allocation of a certain type of capital, risk capital, into endeavors that are focused on retu…”
Sep 11, 2017
Andy Weissman: Venture Capital Success Stems From Process, Not Foresight
“And so, I believe that a large, if not the largest part of that, is about the process you create to make those decisions, and if you have a process, and you perfect that process, and you stick with that process, sometimes it works, and that's luck, right? Whet…”
Sep 11, 2017
Sep 11, 2017 negative
Weissman: Venture capital is a service business and VCs should be invisible
“By the way, I don't believe at a fundamental matter, I'm old fashioned in the way that I believe actually VCs should be invisible, you know, and so I know you ask this question to a lot of people, what would you like most like to change in the world of VC? I'v…”
Sep 13, 2017
Good VCs should deliver target introductions for founders within 48 hours
“If your investor is worth anything, it should be able to get you to the right person. And that person should have enough respect for them to either say, yeah, it's a fair or no, it's not. And so you should have that connection within 48 hours.”
Sep 13, 2017
Being a VC is a lifestyle that must be as important as family
“So I think that's why I say it's a lifestyle, and I tell all these young people that are going to try to get into VC, like, to realize that this is their life, and that it's as important as their family, and it should be their top priority.”
Sep 27, 2017 positive
Oetting: Young VCs Have An Advantage Because Incumbents Aren't Threatened
“The real benefit of being young, and I'm sure that you've experienced this, is that people are really willing to help you. Partially, that's because they probably don't see you as that competitive. And so they don't see you as threatening, which is probably tr…”
Sep 27, 2017 neutral
Oetting: Venture Capital and Private Equity Are Identical Businesses
“Venture capital is so distinct, at least culturally and, you know, in the media from private equity, because fundamentally they are very similar and really they're identical businesses done at different scale and at different times in a company's life cycle.”
Sep 27, 2017 negative
Oct 2, 2017
Oct 6, 2017 negative
Inkinen: EIR roles at VC firms stifle crazy, contrarian startup ideas
“My viewpoint is that, first of all, in a, in any VC, venture capitalist environment, you're surrounded by extremely thoughtful and extremely smart people who can poke holes into any idea that's not completely logical. And you know, these smart, thoughtful, lik…”
Oct 6, 2017
Oct 18, 2017 positive
Arbesman: VCs can succeed in deep tech by avoiding naive cross-domain analogies
“Yes, I do think so. As long as we're really just not stepping too naively from one domain to another, and we recognize essentially both the promise and perils of analogizing from one complex system to another. So as long as we do this with open eyes, I think w…”
Oct 25, 2017
Nicole Quinn: Board members provide peripheral vision, founders drive the car
“It's not the VC's job to grab the wheel at the end of the day. It is your job to have the periphery vision. So if the founder's the driver, it's your job to have the periphery vision and say, hey, there's this thing happening over here. I just want to make sur…”
Oct 30, 2017
Rowghani: Unlike operational decisions, venture capital investments cannot be reversed
“The biggest challenge is, as an operator, almost every decision you make, you can either test at small scale to see if it works, Or reverse it if it doesn't work. And as an investor, once you've made an investment, there's really no reversing it. There's no su…”
Nov 6, 2017
Nov 8, 2017
Nov 15, 2017 negative
VCs assess founders on pitch skill and pedigree, not execution
“And very often VCs assess people based on those meetings, just basically by how well you talk. And also based on your resume, especially at the early stage, when you don't have a whole lot to show, Do you have pedigree or do you not have pedigree? VCs don't ac…”
Nov 15, 2017 negative
Nov 17, 2017 negative
Barrett: Founders must follow a playbook for single-company success, not VC portfolios
“And I think that as an entrepreneur, we don't have a portfolio. We have one company. We need to make it work, and so I think we need to follow a playbook For how to make your company succeed, not how to make your VC's portfolio succeed.”
Nov 17, 2017 bearish
Nov 17, 2017 negative
Nov 22, 2017 positive
Unattached VCs Build Credibility and Value During M&A Negotiations
“If the VCs can kind of step in as a more seasoned, maybe less emotionally attached person, Player at the table to really help get to those truths and understanding earlier, it can be really beneficial for the shareholders of the company that's being acquired b…”
Nov 27, 2017 positive
Gordon: Controversial startup deals are better VC investments than obvious ones
“The other thing that we've discovered is we go around the table and it's controversial. That's often a good thing. And at that point, we depend on one person being a fervent champion on behalf of the company. But if it's really obvious to us, it's probably obv…”
Nov 27, 2017
Nov 29, 2017
Dec 1, 2017 negative
VCs miss out by avoiding children's products and inventory risk
“So many VCs, they don't want to touch the children's space with a ten-foot pole. They don't want to take on any inventory risk, and I think it's a shame because I see so many really, really exciting young entrepreneurs and innovators who are tackling really, r…”
Dec 8, 2017 positive
Jan 3, 2018 neutral
Jan 12, 2018 negative
Jan 17, 2018 neutral
Altman: Capital Crowding Forces Investors into Undiscovered Sectors for Alpha
“After you do something for a while and it starts to work, that area gets so flooded with other people trying to do the same thing that you've got to continually push into new areas to find these sort of undiscovered returns.”
Jan 26, 2018 negative
Neil Young: VCs who slow roll founders waste time and lose deals
“I would most like to see VCs respecting the time of entrepreneurs. I can tell you that when I go spend time talking to a VC, there's three types of interaction I have. There's one interaction, which is like very exciting. Holy shit. We have to work together. T…”
Jan 29, 2018 positive
Jan 29, 2018 neutral
VC hesitation over valuation usually reflects underlying execution or financing risks
“I just think that that's never the thing that you're really looking at alone. Right. Instead, maybe that vacuum doesn't exist, and you're like, oh man, I really don't like this price, and then you ask yourself why, right, and if you're exploring, like, well, I…”
Feb 5, 2018 negative
Feb 5, 2018 neutral
Feb 16, 2018 negative
Boujarwah: VC gender imbalance leaves transformative female-led startups unfunded
“I think one of the biggest opportunities that we have for change in the world of VC is really in having more women venture capitalists. I think that there are so many opportunities, so many businesses that are likely not getting funded today that could have tr…”
Feb 23, 2018 negative
Feb 23, 2018 negative
Hutchins: Founders should never name-drop other VCs during fundraising
“Oh, I think none. If I'm a founder, and I tell someone at VC or at GV, oh, you know, I just had this great conversation with this other investor. I'm going to be like, great, I'll call them and see what's really happening. VCs all know each other. They all tal…”
Mar 26, 2018 positive
Loftus: The best VCs serve as steadying forces during M&A
“I think that the best VCs, especially in the M&A process, can act both as a balancing and a calming factor for founders. It's an incredibly difficult and challenging task for a founder to sell their company, whether it's big or small. There's just a lot going …”
Apr 2, 2018 neutral
Chen: Venture capitalists are advisors, never company decision-makers
“Part of venture you have to realize is you're an advisor, an influencer, you're a mentor and a coach, but you're actually never a decider, right? So I think a lot of ventures getting comfortable with a lot of things being out of control.”
Apr 9, 2018 positive
Founders should pick individual VC partners over firm brands
“Vice says CEO is that ultimately an entrepreneur's relationship with VCs is with one individual of the firm. You rarely see other partners, so picking the right GP for you is the most important and not the firm, and I've seen that to be very true.”
Apr 30, 2018 positive
May 14, 2018
May 18, 2018 positive
Sternberg: Great VCs offer strategic advice without trying to run companies
“They really understand that the company is run by the founders, and they understand the limits of their knowledge on what's going on on the inside, kind of tactically, and so they're really, like, the truly great VCs are really good at giving strategic advice,…”
May 18, 2018 negative
May 21, 2018 negative
Startups need cash reserves during fundraising to prevent predatory VC pricing
“I think you need enough money so that you can achieve your milestones and achieve the mythical product market fit, and still have enough money in the bank that the VC goes, Ooh, I better invest now, rather than let them say, ooh, I'll wait this out, and I'll g…”
May 25, 2018 positive
Jun 4, 2018 negative
Jun 11, 2018
Jun 11, 2018 negative
Jun 11, 2018 neutral
The VC Industry Had Only 200 Firms Worldwide in the Late 1980s
“There were probably, we thought, maybe 200 venture firms in the world, and in those days, the U.S. Was the predominant player in venture capital. Now, this is early stage venture capital. A lot of these were efforts that spun out of investment banks or other e…”
Jun 18, 2018 bullish
Jun 25, 2018 negative
Motschwiller: Capital Gluttony Causes Startups to Lose Discipline and Focus
“There is a ton of capital in the system, and access to capital is a great thing in some respects, but to use a Rob Ward term, he frames it, there's capital gluttony. When there's too much capital, it can lead to deprioritization and defocus, Because you think …”
Jun 25, 2018
Jun 25, 2018 positive
Motschwiller: Early conviction helps junior VCs win competitive deals
“Entrepreneurs want people who believe in their vision and have conviction around the same belief that they have. And if you To that entrepreneur. And instead of have them convince you go to them and you are already convinced and share that with them and offer …”
Jul 13, 2018 positive
Blumenthal: Former operators make better VCs due to empathy and prioritization
“An investor that was an operator, which I have to say is really hard to find, but an investor that was an operator, I'd say first and foremost, really understands how hard it is to be a founder, how hard it is to be an operating team, and so there's a sensitiv…”
Jul 17, 2018 neutral
Elad Gil: Mega funds will drive preemptive rounds and VC defensiveness
“I do think these billion dollar funds will effectively lead to an ongoing trend of preemption. And it also means that certain VCs will double down much more aggressively on companies that are working and potentially shut out others from participating in their …”
Jul 23, 2018 negative
Aug 10, 2018 negative
Dadgar: Silicon Valley VC prioritizes high valuations over capital efficiency
“I think people have forgot what capital efficiency means, so I think To me, it's not impressive if you spend four hundred million building a hundred million dollar a year business relative to the same group spent a hundred million to build that thing, right? A…”
Aug 13, 2018
Aug 17, 2018
Aug 20, 2018 bullish
Garg: Crypto-native companies will accrue the most long-term value
“So I think that's always the risk for the VCs or for the ecosystem in general is that investors pursue things that pattern match to things that we already know rather than identifying the places where the platform is natively able to do things that we weren't …”
Aug 31, 2018 neutral
Krim: Strategic corporate investors often have non-financial motives unlike VCs
“A lot of times, strategic are investing for reasons that are not financially motivated, unlike a VC who usually you know what their motivation is. So understanding what the motivation is, and then what they're looking to solve with the investment, I think is r…”
Sep 4, 2018 negative
Sep 4, 2018
Eggers: VC from 1980 to 1995 was a hands-on craftsman era
“If you start in 1980, starting 1980 to 1995, I like to call that the craftsman era of venture capital, and that was where venture investors Didn't make a lot of investments, but when they did, they got in very early, and they stayed all throughout the company'…”
Sep 7, 2018 negative
VC decision-makers and corporate boards suffer from extreme demographic homogeneity
“I think that it definitely could really use some improvements in the diversity of the people who are making those decisions. You know, whether it's corporate boards or it's managing directors, it is amazing, the homogeneity.”
Sep 7, 2018 positive
The best VCs assume a founder's premise to evaluate upside potential
“The best venture capitalists I've ever spoken to assume your premise and then ask, okay, what could happen if you were right? And you spend 45 minutes talking about that portion of the idea and not 45 minutes justifying your existence.”
Sep 14, 2018 bullish
Lerman: Going Public Is Essential; VCs Discourage It Out of Self-Interest
“First off, being public is way better than being private. For those people that say that you shouldn't be public, that's just a timing thing. And honestly, sometimes it's a VC that has a self-interest that wants to do a late stage round before you go public. B…”
Sep 24, 2018
Sep 24, 2018 negative
Startups raising massive capital struggle to yield positive returns, warns Tavel
“And I worry about what the effect is going to be on returns for our asset class. And also for, you know, the eventual outcomes of these companies that are raising a lot of capital. And it's not clear to me when you raise As much capital as many of these compan…”
Sep 24, 2018
Sep 24, 2018
Effective board members focus on communicating one to three key strategic issues
“The really experienced VCs, experienced board members, come in to the board meeting knowing exactly the one issue that they really want to make sure that they get across, and that's the goal for them of the board meeting. It could be one, it could be two or th…”
Sep 28, 2018 positive
Webb: Mega-funds and angel capital allow VCs to wait for proven startups
“There's a lot more money in the market today, both at the low end, which frankly makes it even easier for the VCs who used to have to do more of their funding. They're able to see things that are more Proven out by the time they actually deploy big bucks, but …”
Oct 15, 2018 bearish
Phin Barnes: High Capital Velocity Lowers Startup Quality and Venture Returns
“When you think about what it takes to get funded as the velocity of capital increases, what it takes to raise money. Decreases. So not only do you have increasing prices due to increased supply, but you also have a lowering of quality due to the increase in ve…”
Oct 15, 2018
Oct 26, 2018 positive
Oct 29, 2018 negative
Nov 5, 2018
Startup board members must work for the company, not for prestige
“Board members have to remember that they work for the company, and you don't join a board with For the prestige or the addition to your resume, you join the board because you're ready to work. You become an extension of the organization. And if you're not read…”
Nov 9, 2018
Nov 9, 2018 bullish
Garg: CPG industry sees D2C food delivery playing out over 20 years
“And especially in our market and direct to consumer food delivery, venture capital oftentimes thinks that it's played out based on a couple players trying and failing, but actually the CPG industry could not be more excited about the shift to direct to consume…”
Nov 12, 2018 negative
Nov 19, 2018
Dec 3, 2018 negative
Dec 7, 2018 bullish
Sanwal: VC funding would have locked CB Insights into 1000x smaller TAM
“And I think if we were not revenue funded, we'd have not seen that opportunity. I'm pretty sure that we'd have raised a bunch of money. We'd have burned time and effort on that. It's ultimately a total addressable market. For that first segment of dealmakers, …”
Dec 7, 2018 positive
Sanwal: Revenue funding beats VC on cheap capital, clarity, and speed
“There are three main reasons before that I think revenue funding is the cheapest form of capital, and I'll kind of dial into these. Two, it provides clarity on where you as an organization and your team should focus, and then third, I think it helps achieve pr…”
Dec 10, 2018 neutral
Dec 14, 2018
Vasen: Evaluating VCs during downturns yields better signals than success stories
“The situations that I think are very telling is when it doesn't go well, when there's an outcome that folks weren't happy about or things turned in the wrong direction, how people act in those situations, I think is really telling.”
Dec 14, 2018
Vasen: Founder-VC relationships can be evaluated much faster than marriage
“I just think you can condense it more when it comes to an investing relationship, maybe more than a personal relationship. I think when it's time to fundraise, then you spend the time, you do your diligence, you back channel the And you think through one of th…”
Jan 15, 2019 bullish
Destin: Portfolio of 25 seed companies mitigates venture loss risk
“The reality is if you invest with a certain level of discipline across 25 companies, you own enough of them, you know, 10, 12, 15, 18%, you're actually really looking at a relatively spread risk and with odds of certainly returning a multiple of capital that a…”
Jan 15, 2019
Jan 18, 2019 negative
Wand: VCs undervalue InsurTechs because they misunderstand insurance de-risking mechanics
“VCs don't really understand insurance. So they don't understand the risking that was done behind the scene. To lower the risk and actually bring you to have a customer. They don't understand how you manage your claims, and what you've done on the reinsurance, …”
Jan 21, 2019 negative
Jan 21, 2019 neutral
Somerville: Venture funds face scaling limits unlike buyout and growth equity
“Yeah, I mean, I think within venture, there's still limits to scaling that you don't see in large growth equity or in elements of buyout. I think there still is a limit You don't see a ton of multi-billion dollar funds, and even the funds that are above a bill…”
Jan 25, 2019 negative
Mathé: Silicon Valley operates on a rigid company-building and funding monoculture
“And what strikes me here is while we have this adoration of entrepreneurship, the way we're supposed to build companies is like a monoculture. There's traditionally like one way to build a company, one way to fund your company, One way to do things X, Y, and Z…”
Feb 1, 2019 negative
Feb 1, 2019 negative
Feb 8, 2019 bearish
Midha: Late-entrant platforms will disrupt and displace incumbent VC firms
“I think that venture capital is going to go the way of past financiers of creative mediums where usually you have, you know, the early folks end up being pretty comfy execs because they took a risk on the industry and on early creatives when there weren't too …”
Feb 11, 2019 negative
David Cohen: Seed and angel investing are not venture capital
“I believe that angel investing, seed investing is a completely different thing than venture capital. I don't think it's part of venture capital. I think that it's a different type of asset, which has different needs and requirements and has a different perform…”
Mar 8, 2019 positive
Mar 8, 2019 negative
Mar 15, 2019 bearish
Mar 15, 2019 neutral
Consumer brands suitable for venture capital financing are rare exceptions
“They tend to have very few skews and have a strategy in which they underprice the incumbent by selling direct, and those categories might include mattresses, razors, eyewear, and beauty, but again, I would say those are rare birds. Those are the exceptions to …”
Mar 29, 2019 negative
Gascoigne: VC forces startups into a rollercoaster of 100% annual growth
“For the longest time, the only option has been VC. And then the only option is that you lock yourself into this white knuckle ride rollercoaster and that the outcome has to be this a hundred percent year over year growth for the longest time. And I think there…”
Mar 29, 2019 negative
Gascoigne: VC incentives drive overfunding startups to see what happens
“The way the VCs are set up generally is structured towards basically triggering an environment where it is almost better if they can pump up these startups, put a lot of money into them, and just kind of see what happens, see if it works, and 90% of the time i…”
Apr 1, 2019 bullish
Apr 5, 2019 negative
Russakow: Modern VCs Are Generalists Driven by Consensus
“VCs tended to have very deep expertise in certain industries or technologies and could go very deep on, on diligence, whereas today's investors tend to be more generalists. So you're less likely to find investors today who develop a proprietary view versus hav…”
Apr 8, 2019 negative
Comparing venture capital fundraising and investing to dating is silly
“One saying that I really do not like in venture and in entrepreneurship is the idea that raising capital is like dating or investing in entrepreneurs is like dating. That's quite silly if you think about it. A VC and an entrepreneur should be quite up front”
Apr 22, 2019
Liew: Founders should build VC relationships early rather than always raising
“You shouldn't always be raising. It's exhausting, but if you're going to consider adding someone to your board, that person is going to be on your board for years, and if you're going to make that decision on the basis of having met somebody two or three times…”
Apr 22, 2019
Liew: VCs must see 1,000 companies to spot a 1-in-1,000 outlier
“The job of venture is to spot that one in a thousand company. Not one in a hundred, not one in 10, but one in a thousand. And the challenge is you don't know what a one in a thousand company looks like until you've seen at least a thousand companies.”
Apr 22, 2019
Liew: In venture capital, there is no prize for second place
“There's no prize for second place. If you almost got the entrepreneur to choose you, but they ended up taking a temperature from someone else, it doesn't matter. Like, it didn't matter that you identified this was a great opportunity if you didn't get to inves…”
May 10, 2019 negative
Jun 3, 2019
Jun 3, 2019 negative
Coelius: VCs make a mistake by not leading follow-on rounds
“The venture capital industry generally makes a mistake by not taking advantage of that. Why is it that we get an inside position and then we let somebody else lead the round and take all the opportunity to deploy capital in subsequent rounds?”
Jun 3, 2019
Jun 3, 2019 negative
Jun 3, 2019 negative
Jun 10, 2019 positive
Kupor: Venture capital is fundamentally a network-effects business
“I think the biggest one has been that this is fundamentally a network effects business. If you do things right, if you respect the entrepreneurial process, if you know, handle yourself professionally, you get tremendous lift from that.”
Jun 17, 2019 negative
Jun 17, 2019 neutral
Jun 24, 2019 positive
Jun 24, 2019
Jun 24, 2019
Gurley: Venture capitalists spend 85% to 90% of their time selling
“I think people on the outside may not realize how much selling goes into venture capital. It's probably the one thing that I didn't realize when I joined that I know innately now. But I could argue you're spending 85 or 90% of your time selling, and so if you …”
Jun 28, 2019
Galanis: VCs should convince founders to take their money, not vice versa
“When you're fundraising, it should never be you convincing VCs or any investor to invest in the business. You want to find that investor that seeks you out and has so much conviction about what you're doing that they spend their time convincing you to take the…”
Jul 15, 2019 positive
Subotovsky: VC should only fund early risk, not proven models
“Venture capital should be used For discovery, for product development, early on when you're taking a risk, then when the model is working out, you should be able to access a different type of capital, and we're gonna start seeing those distinctions for differe…”
Jul 15, 2019 bearish
Subotovsky: VC will be disrupted by specialized capital, not mega-funds
“I feel that venture capital is going to get disrupted, and I feel it's not going to get disrupted by humongous funds. It's going to get disrupted by people who are funding businesses and are providing the right capital for the right needs.”
Jul 15, 2019 negative
Jul 15, 2019 negative
Subotovsky: VCs rejected him in 2010 due to demographic background
“I talked to a number of venture firms, and the message that I got from a lot of venture firms was that given my background, I was not a perfect fit for venture. And when I double clicked on what they meant by that, it was more that there were not a lot of Lati…”
Jul 22, 2019 negative
Beyroutey: Many viable companies should not raise venture capital
“There are a ton of companies that are worth building that Are not necessarily with the present level of information that the founder has a great high volatility upside call option that makes it a good idea to raise a bunch of capital and to scale it.”
Aug 9, 2019
Hiten Shah: Venture capital investing beyond seed is a numbers game
“I feel like investing is something that you have to be pretty dedicated to in order to do an amazing job at it beyond like pre-seed or seed rounds. The reason for that is it is a numbers game. You are basically writing enough checks so that some of them work o…”
Aug 12, 2019
Aug 26, 2019
Aug 26, 2019
Sep 2, 2019 positive
Messerschmidt: Asking VCs to define target metrics tests their partner quality
“Well, I think you can learn a lot about who you might want to work with by seeing if they actually do the work. And so it's a good first test of, you know, is this person going to be in the trenches with me? And are they going to help me?”
Sep 2, 2019 negative
Sep 13, 2019 negative
Sep 13, 2019 neutral
Sep 16, 2019 neutral
Sep 16, 2019 neutral
Shah: Tech operational experience replaced university degrees as founder talent signals
“The pedigree of what people look for as a signal of talent now has shifted where if you are, you know, it doesn't even matter where you went to high school or college. If you were working for five years on the infrastructure team at Stripe in the early days, o…”
Sep 23, 2019 positive
Sep 27, 2019
Founders should validate ideas before raising to avoid VC portfolio bet dynamics
“I think that there's a lot of incentive for the VCs to put money into a lot of different ideas with the hope that a one or two of them truly become businesses. But for the founder, you don't want to spend your time working on a bad business idea. And so you re…”
Sep 30, 2019 negative
Sep 30, 2019 negative
Brad Feld: VCs excel at self-promotion, but crisis behavior reveals true quality
“Most VCs are really good at selling themselves. That's not where it matters. Where it matters is when things get all screwed up or when you're having tension or when there's exogenous pressures on the other person that have nothing to do with you or the compan…”
Oct 18, 2019 negative
Bahat: VCs requesting early customer calls is a bad sign for founders
“VCs who ask founders to talk to their customers right off the bat, I tell the founder like, whoa, slow that down a minute. Like that's a bad sign about the VC that they want to go for the sanctum sanctum. Before they've even had a chance to build trust.”
Oct 18, 2019 bearish
Oct 18, 2019
Oct 18, 2019 bearish
Bahat: Venture capital's greater fool dynamic will not survive a market downturn
“We do have this greater fool dynamic happening in our industry. And one of the challenges is if your strategy, nobody's explicit strategy is this, but if your actions reveal that actually your approach is making money on the greater fool, which is to say the l…”
Oct 18, 2019 positive
Oct 21, 2019
VC feedback loops take five to ten years to evaluate investor judgment
“In the venture capital world, the feedback loop is slow. You can prove that you can win deals, but you, it takes time to really learn whether you're good at winning the right deals. In many cases, it can take five, maybe 10 years to know if your judgment is ri…”
Nov 4, 2019 positive
Nov 4, 2019
Edgar: Globalization is the biggest shift in venture capital over 20 years
“It's changed, obviously, dramatically from a very small cottage industry that was really Silicon Valley in Boston, so it was really US-based, and I would say the biggest change that we see today is really the globalization, and sitting in this room, you know, …”
Nov 4, 2019 neutral
Nov 4, 2019
Nov 4, 2019 neutral
Premium venture capital carry should require a 3X return hurdle
“For carry, I think you have to start at 20%. That is the base when you're getting started, and to have some type of premium carry after a return hurdle is okay, but really that return hurdle should be three X, you know, not two X, because you kind of have to d…”
Nov 11, 2019
VCs must proactively issue term sheets instead of waiting for fundraises
“So you can't reactively wait for someone to raise their hand and say they're raising. You have to proactively be focused on the best companies and the best entrepreneurs, and basically proactively kick off a financing process by putting out a term sheet or bei…”
Nov 11, 2019 positive
Venture capital will not lose its artisanal, craftsman approach
“I don't think we're going to lose it because there's folks like you or I who really treasure that, and they really view working with an entrepreneur as a partnership and not being, especially at the earliest stages, solely driven by quantitative and being data…”
Nov 11, 2019 neutral
Nov 29, 2019 negative
Brown: Founders should assume VCs offer zero baseline value
“My starting point is you have to have the mindset that VCs are going to provide no value. They will all go on and on about the value they'll provide, but what you're shooting for as a base starting point is zero value. And what you're trying to avoid is negati…”
Nov 29, 2019 negative
Dec 2, 2019
Tisch: Watching a hyped startup collapse grounds venture investor expectations
“I think the first feedback loop you get is actually Something that goes all the way up and then all the way back down. And so I think that that's where you are able to find the rational side of this business. So if you for two years, see a company go all the w…”
Dec 2, 2019 negative
Tisch: Founders avoid public VC criticism to protect future fundraising
“It's incredibly hard to be public about bad experiences, because as an entrepreneur, as a founder, you at some point will need to go back to market, and if you're viewed in any way as a risk, that just lowers the probability that you're going to get the outcom…”
Dec 2, 2019 negative
Dec 2, 2019 neutral
Dec 2, 2019 neutral
Dec 6, 2019 negative
Schalit: A startup board is not the CEO's boss
“With VCs, because your board is not your boss. You are running the company and you're running the board and you have to really understand that because you become effective at working with your board and your VCs. The moment you understand that the board is the…”
Dec 9, 2019 positive
Dec 9, 2019 neutral
Vrionis: VC firms must specialize to achieve best-in-class performance
“To be best in class, to be truly the best you can be. You have to specialize and it's not just sports. It's medicine. It's music. It's art, right? To do things very, very well here, which is what venture capital and entrepreneurship is. It's such a competitive…”
Dec 9, 2019 neutral
Dec 16, 2019 positive
Dec 16, 2019 neutral
Dec 16, 2019 neutral
D'Augelli: In highly uncertain markets, knowing more leads to worse decisions
“As an aside, there's an awesome academic paper called Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable, which argues that in markets with many unknowns and things you cannot know, Knowing more actually leads to worse decisions for an investor, and rather they should fo…”
Jan 6, 2020 negative
Jain: Venture capital is a human service business that cannot scale like software
“But I think people forget that venture is a services business. This is not a software company. You know, two core parts of being a venture capitalist are exercising judgment and advising founders. And both of those things cannot be productized. Well, at least …”
Jan 6, 2020 positive
Jain: VCs should ask founders questions rather than dictate actions
“Don't tell founders what to do, even though you have that urge all the time, because you've seen that before, but instead to focus on first principles to ask the right questions of the founder. So they can make, they can come to that conclusion themselves and …”
Jan 6, 2020 positive
Jain: Success in venture capital requires staying small and resisting expansion
“Success and venture actually means you have to fight that inherent desire to expand and grow. Success and venture means you have to get really, really good at what you set out to do. You stay within your lane. And that's counterintuitive because it's staying s…”
Jan 10, 2020
Rathmann outlines the five core ways venture capitalists add value
“If you boil it down, I think VCs in general can do about five things for a company and varying levels and varying levels of expertise and execution. But the first would be they can write checks. The second is they can make intros to talent. The third is they c…”
Jan 10, 2020 positive
Jan 10, 2020
Rathmann: Founders must actively extract value from VCs rather than expecting hand-offs
“As a founder, you have to know that all those things are available. It's really your job To extract it. I think folks get into trouble when they think that a lot of these things are these kind of marketing elements of a particular VC or particular firm are goi…”
Jan 13, 2020 bullish
Samir Kaul: Double down aggressively when positive startup signals emerge
“The odds of one of our initial investments being successful is lower than 50%. Sometimes it's 10%. And so when you get a signal that it might be better, you've got to really push your chips to the table and have the courage to do that.”
Jan 13, 2020
Feb 7, 2020 positive
Makani: Venture Capital Experience Helps Founders Avoid Pursuing Bad Ideas
“And I think venture doesn't by any means guarantee success as an entrepreneur, but I really do think it kind of makes sure that you don't at the minimum pursue bad ideas. And that does improve the likelihood of having an outcome.”
Feb 11, 2020
Gomila: $50M-$100M exits do not move the needle for VC fund math
“It's okay if you have a fifty million exit or a hundred million exit. And most people around the world would say that is absolutely insane. But for the VC, that's not going to cut it. It's not going to move the needle. The math doesn't work. They need some muc…”
Feb 11, 2020 positive
Feb 11, 2020 bullish
Gomila: Faster market dynamics will force VC verticalization
“So I think if the markets are changing faster, then we'll see a lot more verticalization and people focus, you know, that our algorithms in a verticals are focused on, on particular verticals and markets, and that's going to change much quicker.”
Feb 11, 2020 positive
Investors Must Introduce Randomness to Maximize Their Learning Speed
“And there's another component as well that you've got to add a little bit of randomness in because your algorithm, you won't be able to learn in the quickest possible way unless you need a little bit of randomness to go against your kind of feelings and your a…”
Mar 2, 2020 negative
Mar 2, 2020 neutral
Mar 20, 2020 negative
Esipov: VCs should make fewer bets and spend more time per company
“Any one of their eggs, I think, is directly correlated to how much time they spend with that egg. I would love to see the VC engagement extend beyond the boardroom, and some VCs are very good at this, and spend more time on site with the company, get to actual…”
Apr 6, 2020
Viswanathan: Venture capital fails if private companies do not provide liquidity
“The other way to think about it is, at the end of the day, you can stay private longer, but you really do need to figure out a way to give liquidity to your investors, your venture and other investors, and even your employees. Because if you don't do that, ven…”
Apr 6, 2020 neutral
Apr 6, 2020 negative
Apr 8, 2020
Apr 10, 2020 negative
VC pattern matching rewards SpaceX copycats over broader aerospace innovation
“The industry as a whole pattern matches very strongly on exactly what successes have existed previously. So for example, for today, it's really easy to raise money for a rocket company because SpaceX is a success, but that doesn't strongly translate over into …”
Apr 14, 2020 bullish
Apr 20, 2020 neutral
Apr 20, 2020
Apr 20, 2020
May 1, 2020 positive
A VC's Greatest Value-Add Is Keeping Founders Focused on Forward-Looking Strategy
“What I think is most helpful is when your investors are always looking forward because they're not caught up in the day to day. And many founders get so caught up in the day to day, their context switching, their racing between fires, that they sort of lose tr…”
May 4, 2020 negative
Cuban refuses to invest in venture-backed companies that buy market share
“The type of investments I won't do or don't do is ones where companies buy sales. So this is going to be a company that has to raise five hundred million to do one hundred million in sales because they want to own market share. And then they can get an exit be…”
May 11, 2020 negative
Maples: Venture capital has become overly self-promotional with platform noise
“It's gotten a little bit Too self-promotional, I think. So I think that a lot of people now are overly focusing on their personal platforms, and I can understand why some do, but there's an awful lot of noise out there now.”
May 11, 2020 neutral
Jun 8, 2020
Harry Stebbings lost two investment deals by moving too slowly
“I've lost a deal, and it's happened twice, and the feedback was actually the same for me, which was great relationship with me. Trouble was, I wasn't there quick enough, and so, although the relationship was great, they had deeper, more trusting relationships …”
Jun 8, 2020 positive
Venture capital needs more female and diverse check-writers
“Venture-backed companies are this outsized engine of wealth creation and societal change relative, right, to the dollars at work. Venture funding changed my life, and it changes the lives of founders and employees. And venture-backed companies have the scale a…”
Jun 8, 2020 positive
Jun 15, 2020 bearish
Jun 26, 2020
Toney: VCs should join early to build multi-fund track records
“Get into the venture business as early as possible. You're going to, you're just going to take a minute to figure out whether or not you're good. And when you have some wins, that's helpful because you'll need to be able to negotiate for better economics and s…”
Jun 29, 2020 neutral
Zeev: VCs should work for founders rather than act as equal partners
“Oftentimes, VCs talk about themselves as partners to the entrepreneurs, and I actually don't like the terminology, because a partner implies that I have a say, he has a say, or she has a say. No, I think I'm more than a partner. I work for them.”
Jul 10, 2020
Mather: Founders must prepare for press like VC pitches
“I would just give any entrepreneur the advice of investing in comms. Someone who's wonderful on the comm side, and Taylor Patterson on our team, is just amazing. Keeps me honest. Keeps me trained, and dealing with the press is a job, and you have to have a str…”
Jul 13, 2020 bearish
Palihapitiya predicts venture capital returns will decay to single-digit IRRs globally
“The thing that I think people need to realize is as that happens, returns will decay. And it happens in every market when you expand. So real estate used to generate 30% IRRs. Now they generate high single digit IRRs. But the asset class and the category is a …”
Jul 31, 2020 bearish
Aug 14, 2020 negative
Aug 14, 2020 negative
Anna Khan: Former Operators and CEOs Do Not Make Good Venture Capitalists
“That operators don't make good VCs. That's what I believe. I think it's really tough to have two CEOs in the boardroom. I think CEOs, when things work well for them, they're so used to repeating that, and sometimes it can work for another founder, but it's oft…”
Aug 14, 2020 positive
Anna Khan: Sharing Carry Is the Most Meaningful Validation for Women
“When you hire a female GP, you're telling the rest of the world, I believe in this woman's work so much that I am willing to give more share of my dollars in my pocket to her, and more than that, I believe she is going to bring so much more to this GP pie that…”
Aug 14, 2020 negative
Anna Khan: VC Pitching Has Become Overly Commoditized Around Software Metrics
“Unfortunately, I see that less and less in venture, because I think it's become So commoditized, where within five minutes, we're asking about the ARR, and the net dollar retention, and the growth rate, and few people really take time to ask the questions like…”
Aug 14, 2020
Aug 14, 2020 negative
Aug 14, 2020 negative
Anna Khan: VC Networking Is Antithetical to Good Deal Sourcing
“Hanging out with other VCs as fun as it is, is It's antithetical to good sourcing. If we're very honest, the only deals you pass on to other VCs are deals that you don't want to do, especially if you're collaborating with firms that invest at the same stage.”
Aug 24, 2020 neutral
Sahil Lavingia says VCs lack incentives to give honest rejection feedback
“The incentives just aren't really there for VCs like us to sort of really say, look, you're just not impressive enough. You need to go work at a company, or do this, or do that for a few years before I really am going to be sold on this opportunity.”
Aug 24, 2020 positive
Sahil Lavingia advises founders to raise as much capital as reasonable
“VCS want their same rough allocation, and that roughly means that a founder's gonna get hit with the same dilution if they're raising a million bucks, or five million bucks, or thirty million bucks, frankly, right? Everyone wants their 10, 15, 20, 25%, dependi…”
Aug 31, 2020 negative
Sep 11, 2020 neutral
Oct 1, 2020
Boyle: Journalist VC's Superpower Is Listening and Pressure-Testing Founder Conviction
“I'd say that the core superpower of a former journalist or the core superpower of many investors is to just listen to the And actually decide whether you believe the story to be true, and then be kind of a helpful, almost Socratic guide to the founder on their…”
Oct 1, 2020
Boyle: Venture Capital and Journalism Hunt for the Same Three Elements
“They're the exact same job, except in journalism, you write a story, and in venture, you write a check. But you really are hunting for the same things. So the three components of a great story are strong protagonists, A contrarian hook or thesis that really ma…”
Oct 1, 2020 negative
Boyle: Young VCs Are Highly Mimetic and Desperate for Peer Validation
“And to me, that was some of the most liberating advice that I had received, because this field is so mimetic, and so many young people start out their careers wanting to impress other investors, and they're desperate to get into the hot deals because other peo…”
Oct 1, 2020
Oct 5, 2020 negative
Oct 5, 2020 negative
Oct 8, 2020 negative
Lawee: Venture capital is overly clubby and white male-oriented
“It's incredibly clubby. And white male oriented. And I don't think that's helping the entrepreneurial world. It's kind of not helping the venture world decision making. So that's the biggest thing. It's also the hardest thing, but it's kind of the biggest thin…”
Oct 12, 2020
Oct 22, 2020
Oct 29, 2020 negative
Bad VC board behavior stems from LP pressure and asset illiquidity
“When I've seen sort of bad behavior or weird behavior, I think it often comes down to the fact that VCs are money managers for other people, and it's a bit the same as you get in kind of middle management in companies, that you get people that are under pressu…”
Nov 2, 2020 negative
Nov 2, 2020 bullish
Eggers: VC firms will collaborate on diversity rather than compete
“I think generally the industry wants to collaborate, and we want to learn from each other as peers to accelerate the industry faster versus treating this as an area of competitive differentiation between firms. So I expect to see a lot more collaboration among…”
Nov 2, 2020 bearish
Nov 2, 2020 bearish
Nov 6, 2020 neutral
Nov 6, 2020
Nov 12, 2020 bullish
Nov 12, 2020 negative
Levine: Individual personal branding within a VC partnership hurts firm cohesion
“I'm very nervous anytime somebody tries to develop an individual brand at a venture firm, because I really believe that it's a team sport. I really, really, really fundamentally believe that you need a group and a partnership, and it makes everyone stronger.”
Nov 19, 2020 positive
Ohanian: VC diversity is a capitalism issue, not a social justice one
“I would like to see more people doing this job who don't look like you and me, Harry, because I want to make more money because that's actually how we're going to have better things. Like, and this isn't like a social justice argument. This is a, we have 24 ho…”
Nov 19, 2020 neutral
Ohanian: VC deals split between consensus access plays and contentious nascent bets
“There's the like intelligence test type deals where, you know, it's a repeat founder, really strong, obvious market. Maybe they're just taking a second swing at the thing they had done before. So you know, they're capable. You've worked with them before. Like …”
Nov 19, 2020 neutral
Nov 23, 2020 negative
Tavel: Compressed venture timelines will cause suboptimal board relationships
“Rounds are just happening so quickly right now, and to use the analogy I used before of speed dating, it just feels like It used to be that a round would happen over the course of a couple weeks, but now I just see things happening in a few days, and it is the…”
Nov 30, 2020 bearish
Dec 7, 2020
Dec 21, 2020 positive
AngelList data shows more check-writers leads to more founders and innovation
“Is that when you have more VCs in the ecosystem, you actually do get more innovation, which I know is against what most VCs think, but we're actually seeing it play out in our data that when you have more people writing checks, you actually end up getting more…”
Dec 21, 2020 positive
Rolling funds operate as high-resolution fundraising tools that democratize venture capital
“Rolling funds enable capital to flow to more VCs who fund the tech innovation. And before rolling funds, managers would have to raise capital through closed networks. Now, all you need is a tweet and a fund, and the network just comes to you. And really, rolli…”
Dec 28, 2020
Clark: Former operators in VC miss operational control after two years
“The other hump comes around two years in where most people after, you know, long operating careers, it's kind of a relief not to have to like drive and make decisions every day and be in that machine. But after a couple of years for a lot of people, that charm…”
Dec 28, 2020
Clark: Former operators face schedule shock six months into venture capital
“The two spots are kind of six months in and two years in. At the six month in mark, it's kind of, what am I doing exactly? Especially for a lot of people that come into venture, they show up for their first Monday or whatever, and they literally have nothing t…”
Jan 4, 2021 neutral
Jan 25, 2021 negative
Libin: Early-stage VC incentives force startups to take damaging shortcuts
“The incentives are when you're investing, especially if you're doing early stage investing, just like me, you're not looking for things that are likely to succeed, right? You're looking for things that have a plausible chance of succeeding, even if it's not a …”
Feb 4, 2021 bullish
Feb 15, 2021 positive
Feb 18, 2021 negative
Feb 18, 2021 neutral
Feb 18, 2021 negative
Simkoff: VCs resist specialization because they hate extinguishing option value
“The one thing VCs hate is extinguishing option value. So, like, when you're in a meeting with them, you're like, what's your typical investment size? Well, we do Series B and C. You're like, oh, we're looking for And they're like, oh, we do seed investments to…”
Mar 8, 2021 positive
Ek: Venture capital timeline constraints prevent endless startup pivoting
“I would say generally speaking, I think where the industry has netted out has been good, right? Because if you had unlimited amounts of funding in a limited amount of timeline, it's very likely that you would just pivot, pivot, pivot, and actually never ship a…”
Mar 11, 2021 negative
Sandell: VC differentiation is harder as competitors push absurd valuations
“At the simplest level, it's harder and harder to differentiate yourself as a venture capitalist when people will come along and offer valuations that might be, in your mind, sort of absurd, and so we've been facing this challenge now for a number of years, but…”
Mar 11, 2021
Mar 29, 2021
Apr 15, 2021 positive
Foster met select VCs quarterly to preserve fundraising options without pitching
“I did want to be in a position where we could do that quickly, and so I just sort of set up a, like, simple calendar where I said, you know, hey, One Friday, every quarter, I'm gonna, like, go snag lunch with somebody, or I'm gonna jump on a Zoom call with som…”
Apr 19, 2021 positive
Apr 19, 2021 positive
David Sze: Domain-focused VC investors must be stage-agnostic
“The business was becoming very specialized and much more focused, and so I was pushing to say, we need to have people that have expertise in a domain, and as a result, if you're going to narrow down your domain focus, we need to have to give them the freedom t…”
Apr 26, 2021 positive
Conrad: High modern VC valuations enable founders to build ambitious compound startups
“Part of why everyone said five years ago, you have to focus, focus, focus, is that was the reality. That was the sort of bite-sized chunk of risk and product that investors were willing to fund. And now in this new world where unicorn rounds are the new series…”
Apr 26, 2021 negative
Apr 29, 2021 negative
Fralic: Increasing Early-Stage VC Ownership Post-Initial Round Is Way Harder
“I think it's way harder for everything you mentioned, and there's so much more capital that's around so many more firms. Again, like, I think Roblox was unique in being under the radar company for so long, whereas anything that's got traction and visibility wi…”
May 4, 2021 bullish
May 4, 2021 negative
May 24, 2021 negative
Morris: Venture capital is full of boring people with identical backgrounds
“There's a lot of really boring people in it, Harry. I want people that, you know, quirky, funny, orthogonal, stimulating, thinking people. You know, I'd love to see more of that. So many of us come from this classic, went to business school, strategy consultin…”
May 24, 2021 neutral
May 24, 2021
May 24, 2021
Jun 24, 2021 neutral
Jun 24, 2021
Jul 26, 2021 negative
Individual deal attribution creates unhealthy political biases in venture firms
“Like it can be easier to bring the wrong biases when it's a deal attached to a person. Like we need brutal honesty as a firm and a kind of no holds barred kind of debates, but you might think about supporting the person behind the deal, which is a nice sentime…”
Jul 26, 2021
Shalek: Core VC metric is whether top founders choose your firm
“A friend of mine has a theory that any decision or any investment can be whittled down to like One single most important question. And for me in venture capital, that's like, will great entrepreneurs consider working with us? You know, there are lots of good p…”
Jul 26, 2021 positive
Shalek: Sector-Focused International Funds Can Succeed in Venture Capital
“Look, the thing that Mickey wanted to do, which was start a sector-focused fund that would invest internationally, it went against everything that I'd learned as an LP about what worked in venture. You know, I told Mickey sector-focused funds don't work, and t…”
Aug 12, 2021
Aug 16, 2021 negative
Szekasy: Local network edges make cross-border VC investing ineffective in distant markets
“We believe that the fact that we have been around for 20 years gives us an edge on many dimensions, where one degree of separation from anything that a founder might need might argue that we could not be successful VCs in Indonesia, for example.”
Aug 16, 2021 negative
Aug 26, 2021
Rotman: Initial check size determines long-term VC fund ownership
“The challenge in venture today is that that initial check that you write almost sets the stage. For how much ownership you're going to have in the future, unless you are an extreme value added venture capitalist, a player where the founders, the other investor…”
Aug 26, 2021
Aug 26, 2021
Rotman: VCs must be more thoughtful per decision due to higher stakes
“The conviction that you have to have around the decisions that you make are different. You have to be much more thoughtful about each and every decision that you make. Because you make fewer of them, and they have bigger consequences.”
Aug 26, 2021 negative
Frank Rotman prefers operating over venture capital due to immediate feedback
“I will say that there's a part of me that likes being an operator more than being a VC because of the feedback loop, but you do eventually get used to it, and you figure out how to operate with very long cycle feedback loops.”
Aug 30, 2021 positive
Claure: SoftBank disrupted venture capital just like Uber disrupted taxi drivers
“The same way Uber disrupted the taxi drivers, we disrupted the venture capital industry. While people used to write these small checks, we suddenly showed up with a hundred billion dollars, and we disrupted the way venture capital works today, and therefore, w…”
Sep 14, 2021 negative
Leone: Inflated VC valuations distort essential feedback loops for founders
“What founders need is a true feedback type of system. If you build a great product, customers will buy it, valuation will increase, people are going to be interested. But what do you do with founders that build a crappy product, nobody's buying it, and somebod…”
Sep 20, 2021
Oct 5, 2021 negative
Levy predicts unprincipled venture capitalists will be ejected from the ecosystem
“So I think that's also the future of our business. I think a lot of the jerks get ejected from the system because you're going to call around and people are going to say that guy, Anton, you don't want to work with him.”
Oct 11, 2021
Successful venture capitalists are obsessives lacking intellectual balance
“The people who succeed in this business, and this is not an endorsement, this is an observation, are not normal. They don't have incredible balance. And so they may like make good time for family and good time for health and working out and may put vacations o…”
Nov 4, 2021 negative
Nov 8, 2021
Nov 11, 2021 neutral
Nov 15, 2021 neutral
Nov 15, 2021 negative
Nov 15, 2021 positive
Nov 29, 2021 negative
Dec 6, 2021
Dec 6, 2021 neutral
Eisenberg: Nineties VC Was Concentrated Solely in Silicon Valley and Israel
“Venture capital was decidedly a Silicon Valley and Israel, candidly, investment theme in the late nineties. You almost didn't see it anywhere else at the time. You know, New York wasn't a thing. London certainly wasn't a thing, and it wasn't China yet to the b…”
Dec 6, 2021 negative
Gurley: Claims of Disrupting Traditional Venture Capital Have Been Proven False
“I think this whole notion that you're going to disrupt and fundamentally take over the business has just been proven false over and over again. AngelList is awesome, but it's not 20% of the industry, you know. Andreessen said, we're going to completely, you kn…”
Jan 20, 2022
Sacca: Successful venture capitalists are obsessive, not balanced
“Look, the people who succeed in this business, and this is not an endorsement, this is an observation, are not normal. Like they don't have incredible balance. And so they may like make good time for family and good time for health and working out and may put …”
Jan 21, 2022 positive
Partovi: The 'us versus them' founder-VC dynamic is unhealthy and false
“If there was one thing I would change, it's the us versus them attitude between founders and VCs. It's, I touched on this just earlier. I think it's just false. You know, it's an unhealthy, false implication that these are two different species, or that the go…”
Jan 21, 2022 negative
Feb 14, 2022 negative
Feb 14, 2022 negative
Feb 23, 2022 bearish
Mar 1, 2022 bearish
Sahil Bloom predicts mid-sized venture funds will face severe survival pressure
“The middle of this landscape that exists here is going to be challenged. And I think what it leads to is maybe not the death of the middle. It's going to be a survival of the fittest though, where they have to, and will be forced to figure out what their true …”
Mar 28, 2022
Mar 28, 2022 bearish
Lieberman: VC industry's 50% returns are ridiculous, unsustainable, and will mean revert
“50% returns I read this weekend across the industry. Like, as an industry, that's ridiculous. Massively unsustainable. We're not all that smart. We're not all that good, including myself. It's not possible. So there's clearly something going on, and there'll b…”
Apr 8, 2022 negative
Apr 8, 2022 positive
Liaw: Unprepared introductory pitch meetings with founders are now obsolete
“The idea of, you know, have a first meeting. So tell me about your company and you know nothing like that's a dead meeting. And that's actually great. It saves time, saves the entrepreneurs time so they can get back to running their companies and doing the bus…”
Apr 8, 2022
Liaw: Early-stage venture is about picking; late-stage is about access
“I think at earlier in seed stages, I think there's Probably more picking going on. I think that those stages companies need capital or else they're likely to die. Capital is more like a necessity. I think as you get much, much later sort of companies that are …”
Apr 11, 2022 bearish
Garg: Mid-tier venture firms face severe disruption from on-chain capital competition
“The people I think should be worried are if you're like VC firm, 15 through 1000, right? Like I think you get disrupted because capital, as it becomes a commodity, if you're a venture firm, 25 and you're like not breaking the top decile in terms of returns, An…”
Apr 11, 2022 bullish
Apr 25, 2022
Stebbings: Sending VCs three relevant deals monthly for six months gets hires
“Show the freemium version of yourself. Like, choose five VCs that you want to work with. Like, all of our portfolios are very public. Understand the type of deals they like, and for six months, send them three deals every single month. And after six months, Di…”
Apr 25, 2022 negative
Apr 25, 2022
Shakir: Aspiring VCs should pitch specific deals instead of asking to network
“So rather than asking for someone's time, for the love of God, please don't ask me to freaking pick my brain, which reminds me of the COVID test stick going up. I mean, that is like the worst words you can hear. Tell me something interesting. Tell me is a comp…”
May 6, 2022 negative
Lemkin: Pass on Founders Lacking 20-Year Commitment
“My rule is, and I've made this mistake since, don't invest. No matter how much you love, you can love them as humans. They can be doing very well. But if you don't have this crazy 20 year commitment to building something huge, it's hard to make money in ventur…”
May 6, 2022
May 9, 2022 neutral
May 16, 2022
May 21, 2022 neutral
Fabrice Grinda notes annual US seed deals expanded from 5,000 to 20,000
“There used to be 5000 seed funded startups per year in the U.S. That would raise 500 K or more. And last two years, it was almost 20,000. So we tripled, we more than tripled, I mean, it was over 15,000. It was between 15 and 20,000. So we tripled or quadrupled…”
May 24, 2022 negative
Zeev: LPs face no competitive consequences for moving slowly
“I think that it's an extremely non-competitive space. I'm talking about the LPs now, because generally speaking, like, When you're a VC, you're competing for a deal. If you don't move fast enough, if you're not attracted enough to the, for the founders, they'l…”
May 27, 2022
May 27, 2022
May 30, 2022
May 30, 2022
Rabois: Spending time on failing startups will not drive VC returns
“In venture it's really tricky because actually in some ways you should rationally allocate your time to your best performing companies. It turned, if you're not careful though, the worst performing companies will, it will require the most of your time. And whi…”
May 30, 2022 negative
May 30, 2022 negative
Jun 10, 2022 negative
Jun 27, 2022 positive
Jun 27, 2022
Jun 27, 2022
Jun 29, 2022
Rabois: VC paper gains are fake returns unless distributed
“The problem for younger VCs over the last three or four, maybe even five years, is with everything inflated, most of that inflation is paper, not real. So unless you were also savvy enough to sell, those are fake returns. Depends on whether you distribute it.”
Jun 29, 2022
Jul 8, 2022 negative
Aug 1, 2022 neutral
Aug 15, 2022 positive
Aug 15, 2022 negative
Aug 15, 2022 negative
Aug 22, 2022 negative
Aug 30, 2022
Venture capital has evolved into hyper-personalized offerings for founders
“It's, I think the venture capital world that we live in today is is more akin, we went from a generation, and I, I've made this analogy, that we were in the generation of Broadcast television, right? Where there were only a handful of channels and what you wer…”
Aug 30, 2022 positive
Aug 30, 2022 negative
Legacy VCs retired rather than adjust to higher market competition
“A lot of very famous investors retire, and I don't blame them at all because the game on the field has definitely changed and it's far more competitive than it was in their day. And you're chasing around people trying to earn the opportunity to invest. And whe…”
Aug 30, 2022 neutral
Aug 30, 2022 negative
VCs maintaining unadjusted peak valuations are delusional and lose LP trust
“It is some level of delusion. If you actually believe That all of these companies are worth what they were worth six months ago, then and you're saying that with a straight face to your limited partners, and I think you're losing trust, right? A hundred percen…”
Sep 12, 2022
Quist: Venture capital exists to fund testable high-upside experiments
“I fundamentally believe the point of venture capital, right, is to allow a founder to run an experiment against a hypothesis that is knowable, testable, right? Where a true answer dramatically changes the enterprise value of the company.”
Sep 12, 2022 negative
Sep 12, 2022 bearish
Quist: Mid-sized VC funds will struggle to find alpha by 2027
“I think the pie gets bigger. But unfortunately it subsists less people. Goldman and Morgan are much more profitable than a lot of other investment banks. And so I think you'll see firms that have picked a quadrant and set up their organization and strategy wor…”
Sep 12, 2022
Quist: Venture capital follows the evolutionary path of private equity
“When I look at whether it's investment banking, mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity, and now venture, they've all followed a very similar curve where early on in the assets class lifestyle or business model lifestyle, it's really subscale and it's volati…”
Oct 1, 2022 bearish
Oct 7, 2022 negative
Weil: Venture capital industry is fifty-fifty on hard work versus hype
“Less hype, more hard work for founders. I think the industry's kind of fifty-fifty there, you know. Some people are in, like, hustling every single day for the right things and helping their portfolio companies, and others are not.”
Oct 10, 2022 neutral
Oct 10, 2022 positive
Oct 10, 2022 negative
Oct 10, 2022 positive
Gerstner: Proactive first-principles investors outperform passive trend-followers in venture
“The history in venture has really inured to the benefit of first principle thinkers, who frankly, rather than waiting for the founder to show up in their office, they identify what they want to invest in, and they go find them.”
Oct 10, 2022 bearish
Oct 10, 2022 neutral
Oct 21, 2022 negative
Harrison: Venture capitalists are avoiding self-criticism following the market crash
“I thought that it would be more humbling for more people I think that there's been this sort of, like, suspension of criticism. Like, people are desperately trying to avoid having to come to grips with what they did, basically, like, with what a lot of people …”
Oct 21, 2022 bullish
Harrison: Excess capital will remain in venture capital despite market correction
“I don't think that people are just going to say, oh, nevermind. Venture is actually not that great of an asset class, you know, back to bonds and real estate. Like, I think that people recognize that there are still large outcomes to be had here. And so there'…”
Oct 25, 2022 negative
Oct 31, 2022 negative
Oct 31, 2022 bullish
Nov 4, 2022
Mauboussin: Venture return dispersion leaves median and bottom firms with dismal results
“What we know is that there's huge dispersion in returns in venture capital. So if you own the top decile or top Quintile type of firms you do spectacularly well over time, but if you own the median firm or a bottom quartile firms, the results are actually quit…”
Nov 4, 2022
Nov 4, 2022
Mauboussin: Venture capital excess returns are highly episodic and short-lived
“If you look at long-term public market equivalent, so, so this is how academics are measured is public market equivalent for venture capital. It's actually been pretty good over long periods of time, but it's extremely episodic. So almost all the returns are e…”
Nov 4, 2022
Nov 11, 2022
Escobari: Three warning signals that mark the end of a bull market
“You know, things are really, really silly, and it's beginning to be the end of the bull market when three things happen. First, everyone's making money, even the least talented people in the market. That's a clear warning signal when everyone's making money. S…”
Nov 14, 2022 neutral
Nov 19, 2022 negative
Stebbings: Seed VCs seeking early DPI creates core misalignment with founders
“It is not in the interest of the founder for you, the lead seed VC, to sell your position at this time, but It is in your interest because you need to provide DPI to your investors. Very common right now. Core misalignment between founder and VC.”
Nov 19, 2022 negative
Nov 30, 2022 positive
Nov 30, 2022 negative
Nov 30, 2022 negative
Nov 30, 2022
Dec 3, 2022 negative
Hockey: Venture capital is just mutual fund management, not operating
“I think everyone should just admit that venture is just capital allocation and private tech and, you know, It's more like being a mutual fund manager than an operator maybe present company excluded, but I think pretending otherwise is probably anything but a d…”
Dec 6, 2022 bullish
Casado: Tech downturn will drive tourist VCs out of the industry
“We're at the tail end of a decade long bubble. So of course, you know, you've just got, you know, a bunch of people that just want to get the spoils. And of course you run into them the most because they're the most flamboyant. But I think with this downturn, …”
Dec 6, 2022
Dec 6, 2022 negative
Casado: Operating background likely hurts venture capitalists more than it helps
“I don't know if operating helps or not. Like, I don't know if it helps you pick. I don't know if it helps you close. I don't know. Like, I don't know how to answer that. Probably not. It probably hurts more than helps.”
Dec 16, 2022
Partovi: Convincing elite engineers to join is harder than VC fundraising
“It is far easier for a VC to write a check with somebody else's money than to get a stellar engineer who has a hundred options, but can only pick one of them to basically say, you're going to be the company that I'm going to make my bet on.”
Dec 21, 2022
Dec 21, 2022 positive
Dec 21, 2022 positive
Stebbings: VCs have a duty to review pitch decks before meeting founders
“I would have asked for a deck pre the meeting, and I as the VC should have gone through this beforehand. That's really my duty as a VC to have done the work beforehand, and so in the meeting we can really spend the time to double click or try and expand upon m…”
Dec 21, 2022
Stebbings: Standard startup rounds assume 15% to 20% dilution
“The truth is, when you say the size of your fundraise, say two million, the basic assumption is that each round will dilute 15 to 20%, and so the average VC will think of a ten million post money valuation, Straight away, when you say a two million raise.”
Dec 21, 2022
Stebbings: VCs spend less time on checks under 1% of fund size
“For example, if the check size they are investing is less than one percent of their fund, It's not that meaningful. If it's less than .5%, it's really not that meaningful. Now this could be bad, as it means that they are unlikely to be able to provide you with…”
Jan 11, 2023 negative
Jan 13, 2023 negative
Jan 13, 2023 negative
Jan 16, 2023
Jan 27, 2023
Jan 31, 2023 bearish
Patel: Momentum investing fails to generate outsized returns in changing markets
“Everyone was focused on being part of every company that seemed like it had momentum because everybody else was investing in it, and that looked great because the bull market ran longer than it did, but in markets that change, like, that's not a strategy that'…”
Jan 31, 2023 positive
Patel: VCs should let struggling startups ride if founders can pivot
“VCs, we're in the business of losing money, right? Like, there's a reason that the power law is a thing, and if you still believe that the founders are smart enough to try to figure something out, even if it's a pivot, then you let it ride, and you see if they…”
Jan 31, 2023 negative
Walk: VCs refusing founder liquidity risk exploiting entrepreneurs while collecting fees
“Like the very least you're missing opportunities to de-stress founders in a way that will increase the probability of a wonderful outcome. And at the worst, you know, you're exploiting, you know, founders who have all their eggs in one basket, you know, while …”
Feb 13, 2023
Feb 13, 2023 negative
Loverro: Venture capital is too hierarchical and promotes talent too slowly
“And I think venture is too hierarchical we promote people too slowly, but a lot of the talent and the ideas come from people who are younger in their careers and so I think venture firms need to promote sooner, give mid-level junior people more credit, it'll o…”
Feb 18, 2023 neutral
Harry Stebbings: VCs focus on incremental milestone de-risking between funding rounds
“I think the other thing that people forget with VCs is we think in increments, people often think they want to see like the twenty billion dollar outcome. And yes, we absolutely do, but we also want to see where the next round comes from.”
Feb 24, 2023 negative
Feb 27, 2023 negative
Tisch: VCs who overpaid deserve no sympathy; valuation is their problem
“The valuation to me is the investor's problem. And I just don't like, I don't believe that my sympathy sits for all the VCs that overpaid on things that they did. Like, everybody could, again, back to this, like, you could have said no. If you thought somethin…”
Feb 27, 2023
Feb 27, 2023 negative
Mar 3, 2023 negative
Siminoff: VC Overfunding Harmed Entrepreneurs by Pushing Them Toward Wrong Goals
“It over watered the grapes and that was an unfair thing to do to entrepreneurs. It actually hurt the entrepreneurs. It gave too much money to too many people too fast and the wrong goals. And it led people who are great people into the wrong places that it rea…”
Mar 4, 2023 bullish
Mar 13, 2023
Reses: VCs will start requiring treasury controls and multi-bank strategies from startups
“I think it'll change the dynamic for how people manage their deposits going forward. Like I would not be surprised going forward if when a venture backed company raises money that VCs don't demand that they take controls over where they put their funding, how …”
Mar 17, 2023 negative
Brown: Founders should not pick VC partners in under a week
“I don't know how people would decide on a VC that they want to work with within, you know, 48 hours or a week. Like you want to know how that person's going to be able to support you, how they're going to work with you, challenge you, open doors.”
Mar 17, 2023 positive
Mar 24, 2023 negative
Stebbings: VCs did not cause the Silicon Valley Bank run
“Can I be honest, it really pissed me off when I saw a lot of people say, oh, VCs are to blame for the bank runs. I was like, are you kidding me? Have you studied the mechanics of how banks work in SVB's balance sheet? It was not VCs that caused the bank runs.”
Mar 24, 2023 positive
Apr 5, 2023 bearish
Apr 5, 2023 bearish
Apr 7, 2023
Lacher: Venture Capital Is All-In, Part-Time VCs Fail Founders
“I think it's an either all in or not business because the moment you start hanging out maybe in southern France at your holiday home and tanning and only working three days a week, I think that moment you're not a good VC anymore because every founder will say…”
Apr 21, 2023 negative
Tunguz: Single fund closes are vanity metrics for VCs
“The purpose of a close date is just to drive people in unison to a cadence that you're trying to set. There's nothing magical about it. There's nothing terrible about having multiple closes. It's just a way of organizing a particular process. And that close da…”
Apr 21, 2023
May 9, 2023 negative
May 9, 2023 negative
May 9, 2023 positive
May 9, 2023 positive
May 9, 2023
May 9, 2023
Paik: VC is only for companies that cannot exist without it
“I think that is almost certainly like if the company Literally could not exist without venture capital. That probably is the area where venture capital is a suitable, like, spitballing this in real time. That's probably a good criteria to suggest that it is wi…”
May 24, 2023
May 29, 2023
Besvinick: Venture capital will bifurcate into small thematic funds and behemoths
“What you're ultimately going to see is a very distinct bifurcation of relatively smaller vertical oriented, thematic oriented funds, and then behemoths. And if you're just in the middle, it's very tough to stand out.”
Jun 7, 2023
Jun 19, 2023 negative
Lebrun: Founders Need VCs Who Are Ex-Entrepreneurs, Not Former Bankers
“10 years ago, VCs in Europe were all from the financial industry, you know, there is nothing about financial industry, finance in being a VC, a little bit, of course, but it's mostly about entrepreneurship, and so 10 years ago, all the VCs I was working with i…”
Jun 19, 2023 negative
Jun 23, 2023
Rob Go: Energy and Hustle Give Young VCs a Competitive Advantage
“But I really believe venture is a young person's game. Like the amount we were talking about this before you started recording, right? Like the amount of like energy and hustle that you're able to deploy as a young person is truly a competitive advantage.”
Jun 23, 2023 neutral
Jun 26, 2023 negative
Jun 26, 2023 positive
Jun 26, 2023 negative
Jun 30, 2023 bullish
Jul 17, 2023 negative
Mohnot: Even top venture capitalists struggle to identify moats
“And I think it's like, there are ways that you can invest, but actually knowing what to invest in or what a mode is, I think people are still figuring it out. And even if you look at the greats, they have a bunch of misses and they have a bunch of companies th…”
Jul 17, 2023 negative
Jul 21, 2023 negative
Jul 26, 2023
Batchu: VC strategy changes fundamentally with every 5x increase in check size
“I think the strategy only works up to a certain size. And, you know, my general understanding with venture is the job is like materially different every five X or so the check size. So and it's a completely different job. What can help you win in the previous …”
Jul 28, 2023
Stephane Kurgan: Venture capital operates on an eight-to-ten-year feedback loop
“When you're an executive, especially in the digital business, you have a daily clock, right? The feedback loop is, is extremely fast. So, you know, every morning I would get a thousand data points, you know, with all the reporting, and then suddenly you go to …”
Jul 31, 2023 bearish
Nyatta: Indexing and Trend-Chasing in VC and AI Will Fail
“Passive beta capture, you know, this whole idea that you just buy an index of tech, and you sit aside and let it perform, I think that's gone. I think you have to be a stock picker, and so people that are just trying to place a range of bets, I don't think tha…”
Aug 9, 2023 negative
Aug 9, 2023 negative
Aug 9, 2023
Lemkin: One early iconic VC winner can support three subsequent funds
“The earlier you get a winner and a winner really being like the person on the board, the first investor, like an iconic winner where the founders will back you. The earlier you get in your career, you could probably raise three funds on the back of that, even …”
Aug 9, 2023 negative
Aug 9, 2023 negative
Aug 11, 2023 negative
Aug 11, 2023 negative
Lessin: VC's worst outcome is picking a winner without equity upside
“You know, I think the most depressing thing in the world is not being wrong. It's being right and not making money. You know, being right to the tune of, like, having these epic outcomes and being like, ah, fuck, that was a one-ex returner of the fund, right? …”
Aug 11, 2023 positive
Lessin: Muck Rack Raised Zero VC Money Until Late Private Equity Round
“By far, the most successful company come out of that is a company called Muckrack, right? Unbelievable success, right? And it was a team in the corner that actually took zero dollars of VC, Right? Until very, very late in the game when they did a private equit…”
Aug 11, 2023 negative
Aug 21, 2023 negative
Huber: Tech VCs haven't set foot in a Walmart in 10 years
“These folks have not been in a Walmart in 10 years. They have, they just haven't been in one. They haven't looked at the average American. They have no idea what the average American thinks about, you know, looks for, eats does with their free time. They have …”
Aug 23, 2023 negative
Lemkin: Founders view 40% VC ownership as granting zero governance say
“Founders don't think of, Hey, I sold 40% of my company. That means they have a 40% say. I think a lot of founders think that means they have a nonce percent say, a zero percent say. I don't know what it is, but it ain't what it was five or even five or six yea…”
Aug 23, 2023 negative
Aug 23, 2023
Aug 23, 2023 negative
Aug 23, 2023 negative
Aug 23, 2023 positive
Sep 6, 2023
Basu Trivedi: Exceptional startups deserve exceptions to standard VC portfolio rules
“Exceptional companies deserve exceptions. And it's a mantra that I've tried to always have in my venture career, which is yes, you have this model of how you want to invest this dream idea of portfolio construction and the profile of company that you're lookin…”
Sep 6, 2023
Sep 18, 2023 negative
Grimshaw: Venture investments are only complete upon LP distribution
“It's only a great investment in some sense when the, you know, shares are distributed to a broader shareholder base in terms of distribution or the like. I think people forget about, you know, in, in, in the push for forever funds and forever, you know, people…”
Sep 18, 2023 neutral
Sep 18, 2023 positive
Grimshaw: Venture investing should be commitments, not bets
“If you think of investing as betting I think you spend a lot more, you know, a lot more energy on the funnel and winning the first, like you're placing chips on a roulette table. And I just don't, I don't think of it that way. I really think of the work we do …”
Sep 18, 2023 positive
Grimshaw: User Focus Matters More in VC Than Metrics Frameworks
“And the most important thing is always like, who's the user and why do they care? If you ground yourself in that always, instead of sometimes a sort of like whirlwind of other, you know, framings from investing, it'll probably serve you pretty well.”
Sep 20, 2023 negative
Sep 20, 2023 negative
Sep 20, 2023 bearish
Sep 20, 2023 negative
Sep 27, 2023 negative
Lanng: AI will completely disrupt traditional venture capital workflows
“I know, but on, on the investment side, right, I mean, beyond work, we worked with Moonfire, and they're really interesting because they actually tried to build an AI-first venture fund. Yeah. They went out with a real framework, invested heavily in, you know,…”
Sep 27, 2023 bearish
Sep 27, 2023 negative
Sep 27, 2023
Lanng removed team slides from pitch decks to control VC questions
“I used to always take out one or two slides of the deck, like I'll make the perfect pitch deck, and then I'll remove the team slide. All VCs will then ask the question, but what about team? And that's the question I want them to ask instead of asking some stup…”
Sep 27, 2023 negative
Lanng: VCs own most equity after six years for 99% of startups
“The first thing is, for 99% of startups, you know, I mean, No offense, but VCs is gonna own most of your company by the time you have worked for six or seven years, and your salary will probably be less than if you had worked anywhere else combined.”
Oct 2, 2023 negative
Barnes: Traditional VC Technical Diligence Is an Ineffective Game of Telephone
“The traditional process of understanding what a founder is doing technically is as a VC, that's not technical. You sit in that room, you do your best to understand, you reach out to someone who is technical, you provide some bastardized description of what tha…”
Oct 2, 2023 negative
Oct 2, 2023 negative
Oct 2, 2023 negative
Oct 16, 2023 positive
Oct 18, 2023 neutral
Oct 20, 2023 positive
Oct 23, 2023
Oct 24, 2023
Oct 30, 2023 negative
Tomaino calls VC fund size focus the fakest part of venture
“Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I, to me, it's one of like the fakest parts of venture capital. It's like everyone, it feels like everyone's competing for prestige. Everyone talks about fund size or, you know, is trying to get press. These kind of vanity you …”
Nov 3, 2023
Nov 3, 2023
Nov 3, 2023
Nov 3, 2023
Hoffman: VCs should focus their time on mid-tier portfolio companies
“The winners don't really need you. So spending time with them doesn't really change the outcome. The losers don't really need you either. Cause they're going to lose. So it's actually kind of the people in the middle that probably need you the most”
Nov 3, 2023 neutral
Hoffman: Board Oversight Matters Little Compared to Securing 10x VC Winners
“I also don't, I don't know how much oversight matters in the, if it's really power law driven, like the bad ones are bad. And, you know, so yeah, maybe you could have got a one X and you get a .5 X or something out of this thing. If you, if you're really in it…”
Nov 17, 2023 neutral
Kaden: LPs will reshuffle allocations rather than exit venture capital
“I don't think it's like there's going to be a massive retreat also because innovation is exciting and it will always be, and this is at the heart of it. And Long-term such a believer in it, but I think you're gonna see at least a little bit of a reshuffling an…”
Nov 17, 2023 neutral
Kaden: Slower Series A startups face severe fundraising difficulty
“On the other hand, I think anything with a complicated story, things that are figuring it out and are seeing some growth curve, but it took a while for that to figure it out, so maybe they had to spend some of that seed money, so their, you know, ultimate reve…”
Nov 17, 2023
Kim: Multi-stage funds write seed checks primarily to train junior partners
“And it's a, it's candidly, it's an effort for their earlier partners to get some experience because they're not going to be able to put growth in dollars to work because growth is harder. The traction needs to be higher. Now you're like, okay, well, why don't …”
Nov 17, 2023 negative
Nov 17, 2023
Kim: Long fund return lags obscure underperformance and shorten LP memory
“The lag is long. By the time you've had a bad fund, you might've had another good fund. You know, start to return. And so it all gets mixed in where, you know, the returns are happening from funds that are earlier than the bad ones that we have yet to see play…”
Dec 1, 2023 bearish
Richter: Most DTC startups should raise angel capital, not VC
“I do think there were a lot of companies that ended up being venture backed when the better path would have been to raise an angel angel round, trying to get to profitability and actually scale the business to a 102 hundred million in revenue.”
Dec 1, 2023
Dec 1, 2023 neutral
Dec 11, 2023 neutral
Corcos: VCs Have Far Greater Market Exposure Than Founders
“The reality is that VCs or investors broadly just have way more exposure than a founder does. If you're a founder and you're working on your one company for five years. You don't know what's going on outside of your company. You don't have the capacity. You're…”
Dec 11, 2023 neutral
Stebbings: VC associates fall into research or outbound sales roles
“Being in the industry, there's kind of two functions or two types. One is like the research person who is just incredible depth and analysis, post meeting, benchmarking, landscape analysis, you name it. And the other is outbound sales prospecting. We can't mis…”
Dec 15, 2023
Dec 15, 2023
Dec 18, 2023 positive
Jan 4, 2024
Jan 4, 2024
Jan 4, 2024 negative
Salary-dependent VCs focused on downside protection are toxic
“I think there is a category of Lifer VC with no other opportunity that are mediocre investment investors that are, can be inadvertently toxic. They can be so focused on the downside. They need their million dollar salary. There's nothing, they have no other po…”
Jan 4, 2024 negative
Jan 12, 2024 bearish
Rabois: Venture capital returns outside the top funds are horrific
“The general returns in venture are not strong at all. The general returns in 7580, and if you normalize against, like, the two hot periods of the last 50 years, like, 1996, 99, and take out, like, I 2019 and 21. The returns are horrific except in maybe the top…”
Jan 12, 2024
Jan 12, 2024
Jan 15, 2024
Jan 15, 2024 negative
Brian Halligan argues AUM-driven management fees created an oversupply of venture capital
“I do, I think this tendency to grow the AOM because you get management fees on the AOM and limb off those management fees, and there's such a long timeline on, on where the returns are coming in. I think that's just incredibly tempting to general partners and …”
Jan 22, 2024 negative
Fisher: Early venture capital was adversarial and paternalistic toward founders
“I worked back then at a time where it was much more adversarial relationship with entrepreneurs. The VCs kind of acted as if they knew what they were doing, that they knew the right way. A lot of these VCs were former Maybe entrepreneurs themselves, or at leas…”
Jan 22, 2024 bearish
Jan 29, 2024 bearish
Stebbings: Venture Capital Will Never Return to a High-Margin Boutique Model
“I don't think we ever go back to that boutique high margin business. I think we've forever private-equitized or hedge fundized. Our business has changed so seismically, and there's not a going back, just like hedge funds are the asset allocation industry that …”
Jan 29, 2024 bullish
Akkina: Venture capital is a secular growth industry despite cycles
“I think this is something that only goes one direction, and of course there will be cycles, like right now in things to You know, having a bad spell the past few years, it's become a little less popular and there's a little less competition, but I think that i…”
Jan 29, 2024 negative
Akkina: Generating consistent public market alpha is harder than venture
“I just find it much easier for me and my personality to I think generate alpha on the private side. I mean, the public side is always becoming more competitive. You think, if you think venture is competitive, try making alpha versus you know, the NASDAQ, right…”
Jan 31, 2024 negative
Feb 5, 2024 negative
Feb 5, 2024 neutral
Feb 5, 2024 neutral
Rohan: Founders should aim to make venture capital optional after seed
“I think it's the right way to look at venture is like, you know, raise, raise that initial capital. And if you get to the point where venture capital is optional and you can dip in and dip out, that's the ultimate. And you've, you know, you choose your own des…”
Feb 5, 2024
Feb 5, 2024
Tisch: Pre-Series B investing is art, post-Series B is math
“I think venture is two different jobs. There's the pre-series B job, and there's the post-series B job, and I don't think they have any relation to each other. I think at pre-series B, you are doing more art, and at post-series B, you are doing more math.”
Feb 5, 2024 negative
Feb 5, 2024 negative
Tisch: Outside the top 25 VCs, investors are commodities or net negatives
“I don't think outside of the top five to 25 VCs, individuals, that VCs can magically impact a company. I think most of those investors join your board at series A or B, and they, those five to 25, whatever the number is, and the rest of the investment Sort of …”
Feb 5, 2024 positive
Feb 5, 2024 positive
Feb 9, 2024
Leone: Price-insensitive VC strategies fail when bull markets end
“But if your attitude is invest, invest, invest, price don't matter, that is going to serve you well in a momentum driven economy, and may serve you well for one fund cycle, maybe two fund cycles, as long as the momentum increases. You've got a public market ad…”
Feb 9, 2024 negative
Feb 12, 2024 bullish
Feb 19, 2024 negative
Ehrenberg: VCs Are Value-Destructive Unless Humble About Their Limitations
“I don't know about the percentage, Harry, but I do think that there is something to the general view that VCs think a lot of themselves and probably attribute more skill than they act to themselves than they actually have. I think unless a VC is, is proactivel…”
Feb 19, 2024 bullish
Feb 19, 2024 negative
Ehrenberg: Corporate venture LPs are cyclical and fair-weather investors
“So I think that corporates, I don't even need to make the argument. They are fair weather and they are cyclical. So as a generalization, there are obviously a few that are in it for the long haul, but it is very much a fruit of the day.”
Feb 19, 2024 bearish
Feb 19, 2024 neutral
Ehrenberg: Late-Stage Venture Capital Will Face Hedge Fund-Style Fee Compression
“So what I would expect is a normalization that would look a lot like the hedge fund industry where smaller Longer dated, higher returns, differentiated managers will still command premium fees, and then more mature strategies, late-stage growth, pre-IPO, massi…”
Feb 19, 2024 bullish
Ehrenberg: Inflow of sovereign and family office capital into VC is permanent
“If there's no going back because there are now these much larger firms that are institutionally investable that can take sovereign money and, you know, massive family office money in that trend, that wave is just going to continue.”
Feb 19, 2024 bullish
Roger Ehrenberg: Continuation Funds Will Be the Primary VC Liquidity Source
“I think probably the greatest source of liquidity now is going to be continuation files, and it's going to be existing portfolios, raising money from net new investors, yet it reflects today's valuations, and you basically get fresh capital to join the partner…”
Feb 19, 2024
Feb 19, 2024
Ehrenberg: The best founders use VCs for psychological support, not dependence
“I think the best founders aren't dependent. I think the best founders benefit from really good VCs to act as a sounding board, especially in those earliest days and to give them honestly, empathy and psychological support, because that is often the hardest thi…”
Feb 19, 2024 neutral
Ehrenberg: Venture Capital Returns Below 10% Fail to Compensate for Illiquidity
“If you could get risk adjusted returns of. 12 to 15%, that's pretty freaking good. If it's below 10%, then you're not getting paid for the risk. Right, so there's, it's what is the premium that you're willing to accept Above liquid strategies over long periods…”
Feb 28, 2024
Feb 28, 2024 positive
Inkinen: Top founders purposely select and leverage the bundled VC offering
“It's false, and here's why. The best founders recognize that this bundle, what VCs often deliver, is a bundle of three things. Capital, advice, and for better or worse, onboard governance. Capital, advice, governance, often is a bundle and you can't unbundle i…”
Mar 6, 2024 bearish
Wagner: Excessive fund scale gets in the way of VC excellence
“The adventure is a scale game. Like, I think it actually kind of runs quite the opposite, that excessive scale, you know, gets in the way of excellence. So, you know, you can be too small too, you know, don't get me wrong, and scale, scale has its benefits, bu…”
Mar 6, 2024 positive
Wagner: Word of mouth and personal touch no longer cover modern VC market
“Well, the industry has scaled to the point where you know, just things like word of mouth and direct personal touch you know, are insufficient to reach the market, and even though I happen to prefer working that way but I just have to get over myself a little …”
Mar 6, 2024 bullish
Mar 6, 2024
Wagner: VC partners are rarely punished for consensus mistakes
“There's this kind of safety in the herd thing, and I, a belief within, you know, firms and partners, and not incorrect, that if they're making the same mistake that everyone else in the industry is making, they probably won't be punished for it, because, you k…”
Mar 6, 2024 neutral
Wagner: Early VC Success Builds Credibility but Can Delay Crucial Lessons
“You know, it's a double edged sword, right? So it can be very good in terms of building some credibility and some reputation. And that certainly was the case, you know, for me. And so it brought, You know, maybe sort of more relevant and interesting to founder…”
Mar 8, 2024 negative
Mar 13, 2024
Narayanan: Avoiding bad investments is venture capital's biggest opportunity
“I actually think that good investments are relatively, I mean, there may be this one great investment that nobody knows about, and those are hard, and I agree with that. But if you think about the good investment, very quickly, everyone knows about it. It's no…”
Mar 22, 2024
Mar 25, 2024
Clark: 30 companies yearly drive over half of global VC exit value
“Venture is a power law industry, and it's one percent of the exits that ultimately generate the bulk of the returns created by the entire industry globally. So we're looking at around 30 companies a year that generate more than half of the total exit value for…”
Mar 25, 2024 negative
Clark: LPs prioritize capital deployment over 15-year fund performance
“Most LPs probably aren't going to be in the same job when that feedback comes. So they're more worried about deploying than they are about what happens 15 years down the line when, you know, when the performance data is, is actually in.”
Mar 27, 2024
Mar 27, 2024 negative
Mar 27, 2024 neutral
Mar 27, 2024 negative
Apr 3, 2024
Apr 3, 2024 positive
Stephens: Venture Capital Would Be Better if Dominated by Founders
“I think it would be better and more interesting if it were because I think that most of the advice that I've gotten the most out of is from existing founders or former founders or operators. Like they're the ones that have lived in those shoes. They're the one…”
Apr 3, 2024 neutral
Apr 3, 2024 negative
Apr 8, 2024 negative
Apr 8, 2024 negative
Apr 8, 2024 negative
Apr 10, 2024 neutral
Kevin Ryan: VCs will deploy existing dry powder over five years
“There's another characteristic in our business is there's actually a lot of VC money. You know, there's tons of cash sitting on the sidelines. That money is not going to be given back. That money is going to be spent. We're only debating whether people are goi…”
Apr 10, 2024 negative
Apr 10, 2024 negative
Kevin Ryan: Vast majority of venture rounds are not preempted
“There's, I think you're being misled by the 10 supposed hottest deals who get preempted. That's not where the industry is. The vast majority of things are not being preempted. They're going out. They're raising good rounds. They take a couple of years to be re…”
Apr 24, 2024
Zaparde: VC-founder misalignment stems from portfolio math versus all-in commitment
“It's like the time horizon, maybe and like how much the outcome matters, right? I mean, ultimately, like for an investor, this is one of whatever number of portfolio companies they have, you know, of course, the dynamics are such that, you know, only one, mayb…”
May 1, 2024 negative
May 8, 2024 positive
Hulme: Founders and VCs should take secondary liquidity to minimize regret
“And my recommendation often to founders, often to VCs is to take some money off the table. It's a classic place. I like to apply a kind of regret minimization framework. Will you regret taking 10% or 20% off the table in this round? Probably not. Will you regr…”
May 8, 2024 negative
Hulme: Requiring every VC investment to be a fund-returner is flawed
“I think, ah, a lot of VC strategy is a lagging indicator of what did work in the past, and the test, Or the experiment that worked very well in the past is funds with 25 portfolio companies, power law of returns, and one or two return the whole fund, and then …”
May 8, 2024 negative
May 8, 2024
Hulme: VC learning depends on deal cadence over time, not cash losses
“The learning cycle is number of deals and time To see how they do. And so for me, it looks more like five deals over five years to figure out, actually, if you're building the muscle and you're learning, then it looks like an absolute quantum of cash.”
May 8, 2024 neutral
May 15, 2024 negative
May 15, 2024 negative
May 27, 2024 negative
May 27, 2024
Lemkin: LPs Are Giving VCs Mulligans on 2021 Funds to Focus on AI Deals
“Everyone's getting a mulligan. Everyone is getting, the LPs have decided they just, there's no point in being a critic for your, A hundred X deals in 20, 21. We're gonna more be a critic for your hundred X AI deals in 20, 24, but the 20, 21 deals are behind us…”
May 31, 2024 neutral
Jun 3, 2024 positive
Lemkin: Founders Shouldn't Stress About Losing Single-Digit Millions for VCs
“But I worried too much as a founder. I remember about losing single digit millions for my VCs. I shouldn't have worried about it. It was bad for them and it was bad for me. I should, I stressed it too much. Like they can survive. You know, a four hundred milli…”
Jun 17, 2024 neutral
Danny Rimer: Future VC will split into aggregators and artisans
“I mean, of course, we're trying to wedge ourselves in between, right? That's the plan, but I agree with you. I think there will be asset aggregators and artisans, and what we're trying to be, what we talk about internally, is scaled artisans.”
Jun 19, 2024 negative
Jun 28, 2024 negative
Jul 1, 2024 positive
Jul 3, 2024
Eyal: Private VC insight provides no edge in public market trading
“The fact that you've known how the company operates in the private sector does not mean that you know how the company trades in a public market, where it's at the whims of trading machines, of hedge funds of other people that can manipulate the stock price and…”
Jul 8, 2024 negative
Grady: Venture capital has devolved into passive order taking
“And the venture business in the last several years has turned into a business of order taking. And it's a business of order taking in the sense that a lot of companies are raising money rounds are happening frequently. And when the round comes along, you raise…”
Jul 8, 2024 positive
Jul 15, 2024
Motamedi: Uncompetitive VCs Fail Slowly Due to Lagging Signals
“And if you're wired that way, I think it doesn't matter if you're 20 years old, 30 years old, 40 years old, 50 years old. But I think if you're not wired that way, you're dead. And it takes a while to notice, given the lagging nature of our business.”
Jul 24, 2024 bearish
Jul 29, 2024 negative
Asparouhov: Venture capital is tech's most commoditized sector; brand is the only moat
“Venture is the most, you know, sort of commoditized let's say, you know, industry within, you know, sort of tech. You have no moat other than your brand. The product that you deliver at the end of the day is, you know, US dollars, just like anybody else can de…”
Jul 29, 2024 negative
Asparouhov: VC advice quality degrades without recent operational experience
“Unless you have been, you know, in a true operational day to day role, In the last, like, you know, sort of three to five years in some ways, your ability to significantly, you know, sort of provide, you know, high quality advice really degrades.”
Jul 31, 2024
Aug 5, 2024
Cahn: Generating $1B+ Gains Is the Only Definition of Success in VC
“There is a definition of success in this business. You're either a slugger or you are not. If you are generating billion dollar gains, you are a slugger. Doug Leone is a slugger. Pat Grady is a slugger. And Jurita is a slugger, right? So you either are sluggin…”
Aug 5, 2024
Cahn: Hardest part of VC is taking personal risk, not finding good deals
“And something I like to say to people is I don't think the hardest part of venture is figuring out what are the good companies. I think the hardest part of venture is figuring out when are you going to put your neck on the line for this company and all good pa…”
Aug 7, 2024 negative
Aug 7, 2024 negative
Aug 9, 2024 negative
Aug 9, 2024 negative
Dasilva: SaaS Startups Shortcut Product Basics to Chase VC Metrics
“But when I've mentored companies that are building these SaaS solutions in order to have a track Tip metrics that are going to be interesting to VCs. They're shortcutting a lot of the product development and like they're the basics of building a business like …”
Aug 9, 2024 negative
Aug 9, 2024
Aug 26, 2024 negative
Khan: Pushing for shorter IPO lockups signals insiders lack conviction
“A lot of the VCs, you know, I never like it, but a lot of the VCs push hard to shorter lockup. Hey, the stock goes up a lot and stays up For a certain period of time, then we can sell. But I think that's, if I were like an operator, you know, or a banker, I wo…”
Sep 6, 2024 bearish
Sep 6, 2024 negative
Sep 6, 2024 negative
Sep 6, 2024 positive
Chirls: Only a small percentage of VCs actively destroy startup value
“In my experience, actually, it's a smaller percentage that actually destroy, like, when I think about lots of VCs in the community that we work with, like, there's not a long list of folks where I'm like, oh, this person is gonna be, like, dangerous to the com…”
Sep 6, 2024 negative
Chirls: VCs push founders to raise money for markups and promotions
“VCs are obviously incentivized for founders to think that or to be scared of that. Some ways it's a threat and there's all sorts of weird incentives in the middle, right? It's I'm raising my fund. I need to show some markups or I'm a trying to get a promotion …”
Sep 11, 2024 negative
Schneider: 'Seagull VCs' distract management without providing real assistance
“My terminology from experience is there are VCs that are seagulls, And here's my definition. They fly into a room, or fly into a meeting, fly into a location, they basically take a shit, and they fly away. They talk a lot, they give work to do for other people…”
Sep 16, 2024
Sep 16, 2024 positive
Sep 16, 2024
Sep 23, 2024 positive
Gurski: Flo's success will make fundraising easier for future femtech founders
“Our success was so beneficial for the industry because you are VC and you know that VC are making decisions based on benchmarks. And now, like all VCs will start believing that it's possible to have a great success in this industry and all founders will have m…”
Oct 16, 2024 bearish
Oct 16, 2024 negative
Oct 21, 2024 negative
Oct 25, 2024 negative
Goldberg: VC has shifted from boutique partnerships to high-AUM platforms
“The direction of the industry, and I'm sure everybody who observes the industry would say the same thing, has been one of industrialization in the last decade. And when I say industrialization, what I mean is the boutique experience of, hey, there's going to b…”
Oct 25, 2024 negative
Oct 25, 2024 bearish
Oct 25, 2024 negative
Goldberg: Knowing too much domain information can ruin Series A investing
“If you know too much, because the crazy ideas are crazy, right? Like they, You can out think yourself from any good series A by overthink. I've done it myself. I've seen other people do it. And I think knowing too much can actually be dangerous.”
Oct 25, 2024 positive
Oct 25, 2024 neutral
Goldberg: Typical Series A round sizes grew from $15M to $40M
“You know, I think I'm seeing deals in the market that are 30 to forty million dollars Series A's, and I think one thing you have seen or I've observed in the industry Is that A's that would have been fifteen million, you know, five years ago could be 30 to for…”
Oct 30, 2024 negative
Saarinen: VCs push founders to hire executive roles prematurely
“VCs? Tend to push you to hire more leadership people, but then it's not always the right time, or it's also tough to find the right person to like, at least for me, I'm again, looking for a fit in that leadership role. So I think there's way too much push on l…”
Nov 11, 2024 negative
Nov 13, 2024 negative
Markus Villig: VCs Focused on Narrative Over Numbers and Were Wrong
“I think with VCs, it was their way around. So the numbers were great, but they didn't really focus on numbers. They sort of focused on what they thought was sort of the narrative in the industry. And that turned out to be completely wrong. So all these New Yor…”
Nov 13, 2024 negative
Nov 13, 2024 negative
Nov 18, 2024
Nov 20, 2024
Sertoglu: VCs sell time, attention, and portfolio capacity, not cash
“I think our, what we sell is not our cash. The cash is available. It's I mean, the seed and a rounds are flush with New capital coming in all the time. So I think what we sell is our time and attention and capacity, and we're selling one of those 20 slots in t…”
Nov 20, 2024 negative
Nov 20, 2024
Nov 20, 2024
Nov 27, 2024 negative
Nov 27, 2024
Hommels: Price sensitivity does not matter in venture capital investments
“Because the good things, I would still do them, the good companies I've invested in, even if they were 30% more expensive, and the shit, I don't want to have it, but it's worth 30% cheaper. So the beauty is, I'm not in the buyout where buying makes a differenc…”
Nov 27, 2024 bearish
Stebbings: Multi-billion-dollar VC funds perform poorly and max out at 2x
“They are investing respectfully in immensely large funds that everyone in the business knows will do at best two X. At best. They are enormous. The three, four, five plus billion dollar funds. And, bluntly, they're not very good. They're not great assets.”
Nov 27, 2024 negative
Stebbings: Europe Has Too Few Good Startups for Available VC Capital
“When you look at deal cycles, when you look at deal pricing, when you look at quality of deals, I think we have dramatically too few good companies for the amount of cash that we have, which is why we're seeing the exorbitant prices that we are in Europe.”
Nov 27, 2024
Dec 2, 2024 bullish
Dec 2, 2024 positive
Storonsky: Bootstrapped, cash-generating businesses are in some ways better than Revolut
“So I've got a couple of friends who build very large businesses, and some of them, they never used VCs and they just print cash those businesses. So I think, you know, in some ways they are much better compared to me.”
Dec 2, 2024 negative
Storonsky: Most VCs follow the crowd and rely on emotion over science
“A lot of investors, they are A following the crowd very often, and B they're very emotions driven, right? Sometimes they like the founder, sometimes they don't like the founder, they don't like the founder, they don't invest. So it's not very scientific.”
Dec 6, 2024 bullish
Bookman: Bootstrapping is superior to venture capital to avoid alignment conflicts
“However, for those who can like bootstrap, that's the ultimate That's the ultimate, in my opinion, to avoid all of the conflicts that come from raising venture capital, and to own much more of the company yourself, that, that's when I'm like, tip of the cap, a…”
Dec 11, 2024 bearish
Dec 11, 2024 negative
Jan 6, 2025 neutral
Jan 6, 2025 bearish
Jan 10, 2025 negative
Jan 13, 2025 bullish
Jan 13, 2025 bearish
Jan 20, 2025
Kanji: Winning VC requires contrarian bets validated by consensus within two years
“You kind of have to do things that are a little bit off-piste. You kind of have to build for the big outcome, and you have to be a little bit contrarian, and then very quickly, about a year or two later, you have, the world has to recognize that you're right i…”
Jan 27, 2025 negative
Feb 3, 2025 negative
Hyatt: Treating venture capital as a packaging industry is a losing strategy
“I hate that analogy deeply. Well, I to a certain extent- I understand it. I don't think it's good for startups and I don't think it's good for founders. And I also, maybe more importantly than just some kind of value judgment, I think it's a losing strategy wh…”
Feb 3, 2025 negative
Hyatt: All VC measurements prior to exit are false profits and packaging
“The reason for that is that all of the measurements before exit are all false profits, right? Until the thing is actually a return back capital, and you see this wonderful, enduring institution, It's all just games and packaging”
Feb 3, 2025
Hyatt: A job protection mindset leads to the biggest VC investment mistakes
“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 …”
Feb 3, 2025
Hyatt: B2B SaaS investing was about metrics; AI is a mystery
“Greg Treverton uses this phrase of puzzles versus mysteries, which is just like puzzles are this thing that you can like, you know, use that raw horsepower to solve. And mysteries are, you know, there you have to go on the journey. There's like fog of war and …”
Feb 3, 2025
Hyatt: VCs should focus on analyzing successes rather than studying losses
“I don't know that you should look at your losses. I mean, maybe if you felt like the decision that you made at the time, if you look back on it and like you just were in a bad place when you made the choice and you should try to not be in the bad place the nex…”
Feb 3, 2025
Feb 3, 2025 negative
Feb 3, 2025 negative
Hyatt: Junior VCs prioritize quick markups from later-stage firms for promotions
“Well, that means if I want to get a promotion and I'm inside of schmooby schmooby VC firm, then I need markups. So if I need markups, how do I quickly get markups? I figure out what the guy one stage after me is interested in. And so my job is not really to go…”
Feb 3, 2025 positive
Feb 3, 2025 negative
Feb 3, 2025 negative
Feb 26, 2025
Founders Should Never Assume Pitch Conversations With Venture Capitalists Are Confidential
“I think one thing I realized as a first time founder, when I spoke to VCs back then, I thought I was having a one-on-one conversation. And in reality is like, if you are broadcasting to the entire VC community now, so the amount of chit chatting that happens a…”
Mar 26, 2025 negative
Mar 26, 2025
Stebbings: Sending free deal flow is the easiest way to land a VC job
“The thing I find astounding with people who want to get into venture is, Actually, it's quite easy if you just give the freemium version of yourself. If I send you three companies every quarter that align to LeadEdge's model and the companies that you like, an…”
Apr 7, 2025 negative
Garcia: VCs rejected Carvana over capital intensity and being in Phoenix
“And I think at the time that we were trying to do our early fundraisers, I think, you know, capital intensity, operational intensity were not popular. Marketplaces were very popular. That was kind of like the pattern people saw. Phoenix was not viewed as a mar…”
Apr 10, 2025 bullish
Tom Hulme: Hardware is under-invested and massive value will accrue there
“I'll go hardware. I think if you take a hardware company out to market, the people, investors, immediate response is, oh, that's really hard. But the paradox about venture capital is you need it to be difficult to be valuable. You need to be contrarian and rig…”
Apr 10, 2025 positive
Apr 10, 2025 negative
Stebbings: UK lacks enough high-quality founders to absorb more VC money
“As a day to day venture investor on the ground trying to find companies and great people to invest in, There is simply not the supply of entrepreneurs. If I were to keep my bar as high as it needs to be to build great companies to deploy that money.”
Apr 14, 2025 bullish
Lazarte: AI replacing human workers is venture capital's top opportunity
“One thing that I think is super exciting right now is, like, just replacing people. It sounds really bad when you say it this way, but I actually think it's the most exciting opportunity and venture right now, and it's actually gonna be fantastic for humanity.”
Apr 17, 2025 positive
O'Driscoll: Venture capital economics depend entirely on generational outlier companies
“The whole reason this business is awesome is there are singularly amazing companies in every generation. And maybe these are they, and when you do those companies, everything works and you're just so glad you bought it at any price, right? That's why this game…”
Apr 17, 2025
Apr 17, 2025
Apr 24, 2025 negative
Stebbings: University endowments are pulling back from venture capital investments
“The withdrawal from endowment funds is very real. The awareness that fines is coming, ah, very likely for many of them, and tax-exempt status is at risk, means that there's just a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of them are just waiting.”
Apr 24, 2025
Apr 24, 2025
Lemkin: Private equity illiquidity causes far more strain for LPs than VC
“PE is the big problem. They're really the same thing. I mean, venture is a subset of PE, right? And the PE is so much bigger. And the fact that these deals are, did not go public in two to three years is the bigger stressor. Venture, venture, they don't love i…”
Apr 24, 2025
Lemkin: Venture capital is just a rounding error used to juice endowment returns
“Venture's a rounding error in most of most endowments, right? It's a subset, just like seed is a subset of venture. Venture's a subset of PE. It's not that important. It's just juice, right? It's just a way to juice your returns. P.E. Is where you put, deploy …”
Apr 24, 2025 neutral
Stebbings: Multiple tier-one endowments held over 30% in venture capital
“When we raised the fund last year, whatever it was, nine months ago, you know, obviously spoke to a lot of tier one endowment funds. The amount who had over 30% in privates was shocking to me. And over 30%, even in venture, was shocking to me.”
Apr 24, 2025 neutral
Apr 28, 2025 negative
Hinrikus: Startup boards dominated by VCs are ineffective
“The things that I don't like about boards, they oftentimes become way too big, way too quickly. You know, your C round investor takes a board seat, your A round investor takes a board seat, your B round investor takes a board seat, your C and D. So you end up …”
Apr 28, 2025 neutral
Apr 28, 2025 negative
Apr 28, 2025
Hinrikus: Investor alignment depends on investing personal capital alongside LP funds
“I think there is one thing if you're a rich investor and you play with only other people's money, there's a different thing if you're a rich investor and you're investing your own money. So I think it's a question of alignment and hopefully we'll talk more abo…”
Apr 28, 2025 neutral
Apr 28, 2025 negative
Apr 28, 2025 negative
May 1, 2025 bearish
May 1, 2025 neutral
May 1, 2025 bullish
May 5, 2025 bearish
Moore: VC will consolidate into a barbell structure
“I see a world in which both ends of the barbell really, really continue to rise, meaning small dedicated specialist firms on one end and large platforms on the other end. And I think that uncanny valley in between is is, is going to be an increasingly challeng…”
May 5, 2025 negative
May 5, 2025 positive
May 5, 2025 positive
May 8, 2025 positive
May 8, 2025 neutral
May 8, 2025 neutral
May 8, 2025 bullish
May 8, 2025 neutral
O'Driscoll: Private equity structurally beats venture capital except for massive outliers
“Almost everything about PE is better in terms of making money than what we do. And the only thing we have in our favor is that every once in a while, maybe once every five years, you find yourself with a 10% ownership in a thing that's already worth billions o…”
May 9, 2025 positive
May 15, 2025 neutral
May 29, 2025
O'Driscoll: VC math requires heavy concentration in a single winner
“The only way the math works is if you stuff money into the very best company and you don't end up with a balanced portfolio. You end up literally with one company having 20, 30% of your fund in it, and that company turns out to be the big winner.”
Jun 5, 2025 negative
Jun 12, 2025 negative
Jun 12, 2025 neutral
Jun 26, 2025 positive
Jun 30, 2025 negative
Jul 10, 2025 neutral
Jul 10, 2025 negative
Jul 10, 2025 bearish
Jul 10, 2025 negative
O'Driscoll: Venture capital cannot fit into liquid target-date retail funds
“One thing we know about venture is you can't target your return date, right? If you could, it would be easier. So it's a hard asset to fit into a liquid Individual portfolio, and I think they'll try. I think it'll be hard.”
Jul 24, 2025 negative
Jul 24, 2025
O'Driscoll: Anti-portfolio regret is the price of good deal flow
“Anti portfolio regret is the psychological price you have to pay for being in the game because it's literally the emotional tax you pay for being in good deal flow. Because if you're not seeing 10 great deals, you're probably not going to do one great deal, wh…”
Jul 24, 2025 bullish
Jul 28, 2025
Casado: Company diligence is far more reliable than predicting market adoption
“And so, I actually don't believe You can predict the future of technology adoption. It's a very tough thing, right? I mean, you don't know what a big company is going to do, can wipe out an entire market. You don't know what innovation will wipe out entire mar…”
Jul 28, 2025 negative
Casado: Traditional VC Partnership Models Kill Decision Velocity And Adaptability
“And I think it's very, I mean, it's kind of a historical quirk that VC was created around a partnership model. Like that's the same thing you'd use for a dentist office or a law firm. And I think it's, there's Positives in that there's a bunch of different age…”
Aug 4, 2025 neutral
Aug 4, 2025 bearish
Aug 4, 2025 negative
Aug 4, 2025 positive
CMU's Private Investments Were Self-Funding for Three Years
“From a liquidity perspective, we've been fortunate compared to most endowments where that private equity book has been self-funding the past three years, so our distributions Have paid for our capital calls over the past three years. Now, the sub asset classes…”
Aug 4, 2025 neutral
Aug 4, 2025 bearish
Aug 4, 2025 bearish
Aug 7, 2025 negative
O'Driscoll: Startups raise unchanged follow-on rounds weeks after big-name leads
“It's like in the venture equivalent that we're seeing now, you know, the way we're seeing it now when someone really big brand name Does a round. Like, six weeks later, many of these companies are doing a follow-on round. Nothing's changed.”
Aug 7, 2025 positive
Lemkin: VCs should size funds smaller to enter carry mode faster
“Normal times you want to optimize your fund size to achieve the maximum carry you can in a given time, right? And then just go raise another, right? In an ideal world, you might even raise the fund a year, right? So you can get into carry mode as quickly as po…”
Aug 11, 2025 negative
Mignot rejects narrative that VC is splitting only into mega-funds and boutiques
“I know there is a meme which is the industry is gonna, is diverging into two camps. You either have the mega funds, the asset gatherers, or you have the tiny boutique shops. And I don't truly believe in that. I think there is a third way”
Aug 11, 2025 positive
Mignot: VC relationships are cooperative because late-round returns remain high
“And most of our relationships are very cordial and they are very cooperative because we're creating value. There's so much value creation that happens that you don't have to, of course you compete to win a deal, but then you can still go on at the next round a…”
Aug 11, 2025 neutral
Mignot: Venture capital has institutionalized into a career rather than a calling
“I don't know if I would say Tourist VC, but I would say it's, ah, the asset class has institutionalized. You know, it's become, ah, you know, funds have become larger, there's more people in, in, in general, by and large. And so you bring people who, ah, may s…”
Aug 14, 2025
Aug 21, 2025 neutral
O'Driscoll: Extended private market stays mathematically guarantee $100B+ VC outcomes
“In a power law world, the longer you let things cook in the private markets, the bigger one or two of the outcomes will be, and things have been cooking in the private market for, I mean, yes, I think SpaceX is almost 20 years old, they've been cooking a long …”
Aug 21, 2025 bullish
O'Driscoll: Broad venture capital returns depend on more $5B outcomes
“For the venture business to work for us all, you're going to have to see more of these five billion dollar market cap outcomes. Yeah, as you say, the hinge helps. The owners of this world start to take place, and I think it will.”
Aug 25, 2025 positive
Aug 25, 2025 negative
Deeter: 2019-2020 peak entry valuations washed out many promising venture investors
“Cycles matter a lot. I really feel bad for great potential investors who joined our industry with checkbooks in 2000, you know, two, 2020, 2019. And they did great deals, but at market prices, which were way too high. And many of those people got washed out of…”
Aug 28, 2025 negative
Sep 11, 2025
O'Driscoll: 80% of venture capital dollars now go to late-stage deals
“Most of the money in quote unquote venture capital is with venture cap. It venture capital is 20% old school venture capital and 80% plus or minus late stage. What would have been fidelity growth, public investing. Right. This is where most of the dollars are …”
Sep 18, 2025 positive
Sep 22, 2025
Taneja: Maximize portfolio value while minimizing capital raised to drive alpha
“AUM can be one of two things. How much money did you raise? Or what is the value of the capital you raised? I want the value of the capital we raised to be the biggest, but the amount of money we raised to be smallest. That's when you've created the most alpha…”
Sep 22, 2025 positive
Sep 22, 2025 bearish
Sep 22, 2025 bearish
Sep 22, 2025 positive
Taneja: Iconic VC firms require leaders to be both investors and CEOs
“I carry the title of CEO and managing director for a very intentional reason, which is General Catalyst is a business but it wouldn't be a business if it wasn't venture capital at its core. So, I am a managing director and a partner just like everybody else in…”
Oct 2, 2025 negative
Oct 9, 2025 positive
Stebbings: Investors can identify best and worst investments within 60 days
“I also think that you can tell your best and your worst within the first 60 days. The messy middle, you don't know. There's a TBD, but the ones where you're like, shit, we regret that one. That, you tell pretty quickly, and same with the god, they're on it. Th…”
Oct 9, 2025 negative
O'Driscoll: Asking founders if they'd sell for $500M is meaningless
“I think it's a stupid question on its face, on, on multiple dimensions. Let me give you just two ways in which it's a stupid question. The first thing is, and I said this before, people's opinion on what they'll do if they're offered five hundred million dolla…”
Oct 9, 2025 bullish
O'Driscoll: High variance makes venture capital forgiving of overpaying
“It is the most forgiving equity business of getting the price wrong. Let me tell you what I mean by that. PE, if you get the price wrong, they're low variance assets. If you overpay by 50%, you're toast, because they're three X assets and they're not going to …”
Oct 9, 2025 positive
Oct 9, 2025
Oct 16, 2025
O'Driscoll: A VC's Prime Career Window Lasts Only Three Years
“There's a huge period of time wherever it says you're a little too young, and then there's this brief shining moment where you're good, and then there is the When is he going to retire moment, right? And it seems to me it's like 10 years each and three years i…”
Oct 16, 2025 negative
Oct 23, 2025 negative
Oct 23, 2025
Oct 23, 2025 bearish
Oct 23, 2025
Oct 27, 2025 negative
Cahn: Venture capital firms cannot 'king-make' startups with capital alone
“I don't believe in King making and that's maybe a controversial thing to say. I think one of the lessons, you know, you'd think like, oh, Sequoia should be able to King make companies and like, that's so great. And that would be, by the way, if that was true, …”
Oct 30, 2025 neutral
O'Driscoll: AI and delayed IPOs are the biggest recent VC shifts
“The two biggest changes of the last three to five years have been the advent of what's happening in AI and the transformation of the late stage and IPO marketplace to this ultra, ultra late stage where companies are way beyond the IPO threshold and still priva…”
Oct 30, 2025 neutral
Oct 30, 2025 negative
Oct 30, 2025 neutral
Oct 30, 2025 neutral
O'Driscoll: VC Ownership Targets Matter Usually, But Not for Outliers
“90% of the time, your ownership target is a really meaningful metric, and it should run your business on it. And, you know, 10%, one percent of the time, who the hell cares? One percent of the biggest company on the planet is five billion dollars.”
Oct 30, 2025 bullish
Oct 31, 2025 negative
Ferriss: VCs and crossover funds bloated seed valuations and ruined angel terms
“Then around 2015, a lot of the VCs started coming downstream. Or upstream, as it were, choose your metaphor. And they were hunting in the same ponds that the angels were. And before you know it, then you have like Tiger Global and all sorts of other folks who …”
Nov 6, 2025
Nov 6, 2025
Lemkin: VCs refrain from giving critical feedback to successful founders
“I think there is so much fear among VCs of getting out of step with the most successful founders. There's so much fear and you guys are going to disagree with me, but I see it all across my portfolio. The better the company is doing, the more everyone's a grin…”
Nov 13, 2025 bearish
Nov 20, 2025 neutral
Lemkin: Half of the $184B invested in VC in 2025 went to four companies
“They're estimated in a hundred eighty four billion in venture capital invested this year by their definition. Okay. The peak was 20, 21 of a hundred eighty three billion. So one more billion this year. Okay. But four of those half of the hundred eighty four bi…”
Nov 20, 2025 positive
Nov 20, 2025 negative
Nov 21, 2025 negative
Altman: Venture capital is a cutthroat market, not a collaborative environment
“I think that it is, people say it's this sort of chummy, like, collaborative thing where we're all kumbaya and having fun, and then, like, You know, you get to it, and someone just, like, elbows you out of the way. It's not. It's a competitive market. We're al…”
Nov 21, 2025 neutral
Dec 4, 2025
Lemkin: VCs Should Focus Almost Exclusively on Top Winners
“There's like only a couple of deals that matter to VCs. So when you, you'll see a VC stay on a board for 20 years and you'll see them always hanging out with this one CEO and Thrive has a lot of winners, right? But this is a big winner, right? And so anything …”
Dec 4, 2025
O'Driscoll: A VC's Best Marketing Is Staying Close to Top Winners
“First of all, I think it's a great deal for Thrive because Jason's right. The whole trick in venture is we try and pretend we matter, but in our hearts, we know our best companies matter and the best marketing you can do is get as close as possible to your big…”
Dec 11, 2025 neutral
Dec 11, 2025 negative
Dec 15, 2025 negative
Unscaled mid-tier venture capital firms face high risk of being squeezed out
“Yeah, there's scale players, and then there's specialists. And I think, you know, we're obviously a scale player. I think the risk is, is everything in between, right? Department stores that have general merchandise, but don't have scale, for example. And that…”
Dec 18, 2025 positive
Jan 8, 2026 bullish
Jan 8, 2026
O'Driscoll: VCs should never force founders to reject exit offers
“And what you'll discover pretty quickly is trying to persuade a founder to hold on when they don't want to is a very hard thing to do, right? And arguably you shouldn't even try. Right? In fact, not even arguably, you shouldn't even try. In the end, you know, …”
Jan 12, 2026
Rampell: Top VC deals differ from PE because founders choose investors
“A lot of the best deals will go to the best firms. Like that's, what's very different about venture capital than like private equity. Like if you and I are trying to take a public company private, You know, you're KKR and I'm Blackstone. We're both trying to, …”
Jan 12, 2026 neutral
Jan 12, 2026 neutral
Rampell: Winning Top VC Deals Makes Venture Capital Fundamentally a Sales Job
“The entire job of venture capital is to find, pick, and win investments. If they're good investments, the winning is very, very hard. And the winning therefore goes to the person that is, like, the best, like, you have to sell. Like, this is a sales job.”
Jan 19, 2026 negative
Jan 19, 2026 negative
Weinberg: VCs give bad hiring advice because executives manage them up
“The thing that I think they've been wrong about is who to hire. And I think sometimes the problem that VCs have is they're managed up. Right? Like they don't actually see inside a lot of these businesses. They see the board meetings. Right? And so sometimes th…”
Jan 22, 2026 positive
Jan 29, 2026 neutral
O'Driscoll: Venture capital has split into two distinct asset classes
“I think venture is actually two asset classes. It's the traditional early stage venture that's existed for 2030 years, and this new late and later stage venture asset class that used to be called small cap growth, and is now it is now privately held.”
Jan 29, 2026 negative
Lemkin: Venture capital is not an asset class because the bottom 75% underperforms
“The classic take in ventures, it's not really an asset class. It's a weird niche of PE. Yes, the top Your quartile, certainly the top decile perform, but the rest is a disaster. So it's not an asset class. If the bottom 75% isn't even worth getting out of bed …”
Jan 29, 2026 bearish
O'Driscoll: Excess capital will erode venture capital returns
“I don't think in either case they benefit from excess capital because I do believe that, you know, Martin Biggs, I've said it before, there's no investing business so good that excess capital won't ruin it, right? And I do think that excess capital will make t…”
Feb 2, 2026 positive
Zeev: A 50% VC hit rate is great given 100x upside asymmetry
“In my, in 50% of the time I'm right and 50% I'm wrong, that's actually a great result because a winner is so much more important than the loser. Because you know, as you know, if we lose something, we only lose one X our money. If we win, it could be a hundred…”
Feb 2, 2026 negative
Zeev: VC anti-portfolios are fallacious because seeing deals doesn't mean winning
“This is one thing that is, Consistent fallacy within VCs that they think that just because they saw a deal, they necessarily would have been able to do it. No, you know with all due to anti-portfolio, it doesn't make sense that the same deal appears in 20 diff…”
Feb 12, 2026 bearish
Feb 12, 2026 negative
Cannon-Brookes: VCs waste capital following tech trends for five to six years
“That means a lot of capital is raised and deployed and a whole bunch of it turns out to be torched because VCs are very individual thinkers that they pile into the two winners and then the next 10 companies and probably the next 15 and a whole bunch of those d…”
Feb 12, 2026 negative
Cannon-Brookes: VCs back OpenAI at huge valuations for logo marketing
“One thing that they don't say is a lot of VCs want the loose side on the wall, so when you walk into the office, on the wall is a nice logo that says, oh, you invested in OpenAI. You invested in Anthropic. Well, if you put money at three hundred fifty billion,…”
Feb 16, 2026 negative
Feb 23, 2026 negative
Swisher: Deploying a $3B early-stage venture fund is exceptionally difficult
“If you are a venture fund that is staring down the barrel of having to deploy three billion dollars, I think that is hard because again, at the early stage, it is hard to capture disproportionate ownership in the few companies that actually generate all of tha…”
Feb 23, 2026 negative
Feb 23, 2026 positive
Swisher: Small venture funds don't need SpaceX-level outliers to succeed
“If you're a small, if a small venture fund, I think it's super possible in today's world. You don't actually have to be in, you don't have to catch the seed of SpaceX. You'd really like to because those are the only, the platform companies generate liquidity. …”
Mar 7, 2026 positive
Mar 9, 2026
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 neutral
Mar 28, 2026
Gili Raanan: Venture capital is the science of exceptions, not linear rules
“The conclusion, again, in my mind, is that we are exercising the science of exceptions. And it's good that we share that, those lessons, but if you just take those lessons and apply them linearly I think that it would be very hard for you.”
Mar 28, 2026 negative
Gili Raanan: Venture Capital Is Difficult Because Feedback Takes Five Years
“And I think that, that's what makes this profession, you know, in many ways, it's a terrible profession. You know, it's a profession where you don't know if you are good in what you're doing for five or six years. You know, show me another profession where you…”
Mar 30, 2026 negative
Mar 30, 2026 neutral
Mar 30, 2026 positive
Mar 30, 2026 negative
Andreessen: Learning from mistakes is uniquely pernicious in venture capital
“In venture, the same thing happens. If you invest in a category, or if you invest in a kind of company or you invest in a kind of founder and it doesn't go well, it's extremely easy to learn from the mistake, right, and to basically say, all right, I touched t…”
Apr 9, 2026
O'Driscoll: Power law dynamics make venture capital psychologically brutal
“Psychologically, the thing about a power law they don't tell you is you can have the third best outcome in venture history and be only one-tenth as large as The largest outcome in venture history, and if you're going to let that into your head, it's going to b…”
Apr 11, 2026 negative
Reyna: VC advice on sequential market expansion is bullshit
“In general, like one single market going one market at a time, it doesn't work. Traditional BCs, like, they've, like, the traditional method has been like, oh, you open one market, you go deep, you win the account, you show, like, the value, then you go to the…”
Apr 11, 2026
Apr 14, 2026 negative
Midha: VCs Are Burning Hundreds of Millions on Redundant Inference Startups
“It's not clear to me that we need 50 inference companies, and it's not clear to me that VCs are smart enough to realize that they're just lighting hundreds of millions of dollars on fire in a category where having four or five really good inference trusted pro…”
Apr 14, 2026 negative
Apr 16, 2026
Lemkin: VPs who complain to VCs about their CEO will be fired
“And whatever, if any VPs get this far on the pod, whatever you do, do not reach out to your VCs to say there's problems with their CEO. You will, you're losing your job. And not only are you losing your job, it doesn't matter if you're right. You're your, at s…”
Apr 18, 2026 negative
Jake Paul: Most Creators Lack the Skill Set for Venture Investing
“It's a very tough game, and if you like actually aren't good at it or know how to do it, Then, like, maybe don't just, like, try to do it, because it's almost second nature to me, because I have vision and can see, like, where things are heading. I'm ahead of …”
Apr 18, 2026 bullish
Apr 18, 2026 positive
Apr 25, 2026 negative
Apr 30, 2026 neutral
O'Driscoll: VC requires 25%+ gross returns to justify 2&20 fees over public markets
“The only reason you can pay in the long term, two percent to VCs and 20% of the profit is because the gross returns have to be high enough, 25% plus, that the net return is still, you know, 20%, which is so far above the Ibbotson small cop return of 11, 12% th…”
Apr 30, 2026 neutral
May 18, 2026 bearish
May 18, 2026 negative
Browder: VCs err by scouting high school math Olympiads over grit
“And I think this is actually a mistake a lot of VCs are making. They are focusing too much on, on these credentials. So there's a race right now to back the math Olympiads. VCs are like going to spelling bees and math competitions in high school.”
May 18, 2026 negative
May 18, 2026
Browder: Founders should never reveal target valuation when pitching VCs
“Pitching VCs is like a game of poker. You should never reveal too much information about what you're seeking. So every founder I invest in, I say, don't reveal the price that you want. The price is a function of how hot the deal is, which ironically is less ho…”
May 18, 2026 negative
Browder: VCs make fake customer promises to trick founders into signing SAFEs
“The VCs will say anything to get you to sign right there and then. Anything. They'll say, I, they, so they'll reverse engineer what the founder is looking for and say, oh, I'm friends. I'm buddies with that guy. I know someone at that company with golf buddies…”
Jun 11, 2026 neutral
Jun 11, 2026
Jun 13, 2026 negative
Stebbings: VCs use elite founder credentials as a crutch amid AI uncertainty
“Fundamentally, there is intense uncertainty around what Anthropic and OpenAI will do and who they will kill at the application layer. And so in a world where we desperately seek certainty, we look for validators, and the validators of someone being a math Olym…”
Jun 20, 2026 negative
Jun 20, 2026
Petersen: Founders should cherry-pick their best metric when pitching VCs
“You should never share your metrics because what you want to do when you pitch a VC is take, you want to cherry pick whatever metric looks the best and pitch that as the important metric for your firm. But once you've shared a metric, you're now committed to t…”
Jun 20, 2026 negative
Stebbings: Passing on Great Companies Over Market Size Is My Biggest Mistake
“So my biggest mistake is when I focused on market at all. All of my biggest mistakes in investing have been actually not really like, you know, losing money. It's been turning down great companies, but because I thought that I was smarter than the market.”
Jun 20, 2026 negative
Jun 25, 2026 positive
Jun 27, 2026 positive
Jul 2, 2026 negative
Jul 16, 2026 neutral
Jul 23, 2026
Jul 23, 2026 negative
Lemkin: Series B VCs now need seed-level picking skills to survive
“I think the real pressure is, it means anything below that growth stage, you better be a damn good picker. Because it used to be when Rory and I met, Series B, even into Series A, you actually didn't have to be a good picker. You just had to be good at math an…”
Jul 27, 2026 bearish
Sub-$100M boutique seed funds will be the worst-performing VC category
“I think one of the worst performing groups in terms of venture in this vintage will actually be the small boutique seed funds, which is what every single LP that you speak to today, Matt, wants. Every LP. This is the funniest thing. Every LP wants San Francisc…”
Jul 27, 2026
Small stakes in massive outliers beat high ownership in mid-sized exits
“You have to be in the big outliers to drive great returns, and you're better off being in them at a very small percent than owning a large percent of a company that exits for three to 500. Those just aren't going to move the needle.”
Aug 7, 2026 neutral
Aug 7, 2026 bearish
Stebbings: Scaling From $1.5M to $15M ARR Is No Longer VC-Fundable
“I turned down a company the other day that went from one and a half, and they were gonna go to five, and then they were gonna go from five to 15, and it's just not enough anymore. It's just not interesting. I'm sorry for venture. We have an opportunity cost of…”
Aug 7, 2026 bearish
Frankel: Billion-Dollar Early Rounds Are Momentum Plays, Not Seed Value Investing
“I think that that's the momentum business, and I think knowing how and when to get out quickly with some of those really, really matters, and that's not really my business. So my business is value, is getting involved early, and trying to find value opportunit…”
Aug 7, 2026 bullish
Aug 20, 2026 bearish
Aug 24, 2026
Aug 24, 2026 bearish
Bek: Largest venture outcomes will emerge in mature markets over greenfield
“Ultimately what matters to you is how much ownership you have and how big the company can get. And that will be true only when that investment crystallizes in almost guarantee that will happen for the biggest outcomes in markets that are more mature as opposed…”