Jun 15, 2020 · 38m · 20vc
20VC: Craft Ventures' David Sacks on How To Assess Founder Psychology, How To Accurately Evaluate CAC, Burn and Churn & What Makes The Very Best Startup Boards
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of The 20 Minute VC, host Harry Stebbings interviews David Sacks, co-founder and General Partner at Craft Ventures, discussing startup operational mechanics, capital efficiency frameworks, and founder psychology. Sacks shares key metrics like the Burn Multiple, offers guidance on CAC and retention benchmarks, and details strategies for wartime leadership during economic downturns.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 41.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.7 Guest teaching 5.3 Guest disagreement 2.7 Harry pushing back 2.0
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 29:53 Sacks denouncing failure culture
Sacks forcefully rejects the popular Silicon Valley ethos of celebrating failure, stating he hates it and advising founders to burn the boats instead.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 22:27 Harry pushing back on enterprise sales cyclesHarry directly questions Sacks' Burn Multiple framework by highlighting how heavy upfront enterprise investments in sales and customer success skew initial capital efficiency metrics.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 13:48 Sacks exposing blended CAC pitfallsSacks educates the host on how blending organic inbound customer acquisition with paid channels creates a false sense of efficiency and leads founders to over-invest in failing channels.
Harry holds his own ▶ 15:21 Harry framing net retention performance tiersHarry demonstrates market expertise by pushing Sacks for specific benchmark ranges (110% versus 130%) for net negative retention in SaaS startups.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| David Sacks' Transition from Operator to Venture Capitalist | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry sets the stage asking standard macro questions and mentions his own active deal pricing at 10x ARR. Sacks outlines his transition from operator to investor and notes that SaaS valuation multiples have compressed from 20x to 10x. | |
| Evaluating Unit Economics, CAC, and Enterprise Sales Strategy | 4 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Harry quotes Peter Fenton on distribution challenges and asks about Bird's unit economics. Sacks breaks down B2B versus B2C acquisition economics and explains attribution challenges when separating corporate and unit costs. | |
| CAC Benchmarks, Blended Channel Pitfalls, and Churn Metrics | 4 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Harry probes on CAC rules of thumb and net negative retention benchmarks. Sacks provides detailed guidance on the dangers of blended CAC masking underperforming outbound channels and defines retention benchmark tiers. | |
| Assessing Founder Psychology and Maximizing Board Value | 3 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Harry asks how to evaluate crazy founders within fast deal cycles and candidly admits his own struggle as a people-pleaser board member. Sacks details good versus bad founder craziness and warns against the Hollywood auteur mentality. | |
| Capital Efficiency, Burn Multiples, and Runway Management | 4 | 7 | 2 | 3 | Harry challenges Sacks' Burn Multiple metric by raising enterprise upfront sales lags and mentions a portfolio company with ten years of runway. Sacks outlines his Burn Multiple benchmarks and advises maintaining at least two years of runway during downturns. | |
| Wartime Leadership, Decision Velocity, and Silicon Valley Failure Culture | 5 | 5 | 5 | 3 | Harry frames debates around wartime leadership, decision velocity, and time allocation using quotes from Ben Horowitz, Ryan Smith, and Fred Wilson. Sacks strongly rejects Silicon Valley's culture of celebrating failure, arguing founders should adopt a burn-the-boats mindset. | |
| Quickfire Round: Lessons, Literature, and Investment Thesis | 3 | 5 | 5 | 1 | Harry runs a quickfire round covering books, board members, and investment theses. Sacks strongly pushes back on Paul Graham's famous advice to do things that don't scale, calling it a shibboleth that leads to unscalable startups. |
Statements from this episode (19)
David Sacks Predicts Venture Capital Investment Pace Will Slow Post-COVID
“We're still very much open for business, and I think a lot of other VCs are too, but I do think that the pace of investing will slow down.”
David Sacks: Hot SaaS Startup Valuations Dropped From 20x to 10x ARR
“During the frothy times, you would see a sort of hot SaaS startup, the deal being priced at something like 20 times forward ARR, and now deals have returned to a slightly more normal 10 times ARR, which was the rule of thumb up to the last couple of years.”
Harry Stebbings Is Executing a Startup Investment at 10x ARR
“I'm actually doing one now at 10 times, so I'm pleased it's not 20 times.”
Craft Ventures Backed Bird for Its Ability to Build Durable Scooters
“Certainly in the case of Bird, what we saw in the early days It was a explosively growing service, and the thing that we gave them credit for was the ability to develop a higher quality scooter, because the original scooters were kind of these retail scooters …”
David Sacks: B2C Startups Cannot Scale CAC Without New Distribution Platforms
“So I would agree that in the absence of new consumer distribution platforms, it's very hard to get a CAC to pencil for a new consumer company.”
David Sacks: Economic Downturn Will Expose Non-Mission-Critical B2B Software
“Well, there's going to be air pockets ahead. So I think nobody is going to be immune from the economic downturn. What we're really going to see, I think, over the next several months is who is truly mission critical and who's not.”
David Sacks: A 3x LTV to CAC Ratio Implies Unacceptably High Churn
“Another good one is that the long-term value of a customer should be at least three X the CAC. And I would agree with that, but say that it's got to be even higher than that because a three X LTV to CAC ratio implies that the customer is churning after about t…”
David Sacks: Selling to Startups Is Easier Than Targeting Fortune 500s
“Startups are so much easier to sell to. And so therefore they can provide a great entry point into the market for other startups. Which may find that the difficulty level of trying to sell to a fortune 500 company is just too high.”
David Sacks: Blended CAC Misleads Founders Into Over-Investing in Bad Outbound Channels
“And if you average the CAC across that sort of organic or inbound growth with other types of programs, it will give you an exaggerated sense of the efficiency of outbound channels, and you'll end up over-investing in those channels.”
David Sacks: 100% Net Revenue Retention Is Minimum, 130% Is Industry Leading
“You really want to start with at least a hundred percent retention on a revenue basis. And then certainly if you can get up to something like a 130%, that would be industry leading.”
David Sacks: Great Founders Need Extreme Aggression but Fail When Uncoachable
“Founders need to be far more aggressive than what the average person might think. They need to have these traits of being visionary and pushing and being able to run through walls. And so just having a quote unquote sane level of crazy may not be enough, but w…”
David Sacks: Founders Select Their Board Members, Not the Other Way Around
“The reality is that founders are the ones who choose their board members more so than the other way around. It's really up to founders to decide who their board members are going to be.”
David Sacks: A Hollywood Auteur Mentality Has Entered the Tech World
“Over the last decade or so, a little bit of that Hollywood auteur mentality, you know, among directors has sort of creeped into the tech world, where founders like Hollywood directors want total creative freedom. They want final cut, and that's as it should be…”
David Sacks: A Startup Burn Multiple Under 1.0 Is Amazingly Efficient
“If the burn multiple is less than one, which means, like, let's say you've got an early stage startup, and we've seen a few like this, where they're able to burn a million dollars or less to achieve a million dollars or more of net new ARR, I would qualify tha…”
David Sacks: A Startup Burn Multiple Over 3.0 Is Bad and Suspect
“The flip side of it is, if you're burning more than three times your net new ARR, I would define that as being suspect or bad. And that's the case where burn needs to be very closely scrutinized.”
David Sacks: Startups Need Two Years Runway Because Recessions Last 18 Months
“Well, I do think at least two years is a good starting point for thinking about it, because we're in a highly disrupted period right now. We could see tremendous economic disruption for two or three quarters, and just the average recession takes about 18 month…”
David Sacks Rejects Silicon Valley's Culture of Celebrating Failure
“Frankly, I hate it. I don't believe in celebrating failure. I think that being a founder is so hard and running a startup is so hard and I've never seen a case. Where a successful startup didn't almost die multiple times.”
David Sacks: Glorifying 'Doing Things That Don't Scale' Leads to Unscalable Startups
“I strongly disagree with that mantra, and I think it's one of the chivalests that gets startups in trouble. The whole point of technology is to find the elegant, scalable approach and the sooner you do that, the better off you're going to be. When you start to…”
David Sacks: Top Startup Outcomes End Up 10x Larger Than Founders Expect
“Probably just that the outcomes are going to be 10 X or bigger than you think. When we were doing PayPal, it was hard to envision that it would be a hundred billion dollar plus company in 20 years. We thought a one and a half billion dollar outcome was great. …”