Feb 14, 2022 · 34m · 20vc
20VC: Bedrock's Geoff Lewis on Whether VCs Actually Provide Value or Not, Why Bedrock Does Not Have An Ownership Focus and The Difference Between Principles and Rules When Building a Firm or Company
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In this episode of 20VC, host Harry Stebbings interviews Geoff Lewis, co-founder and managing partner of Bedrock, to explore counter-narrative venture investing, portfolio construction, and firm scaling. Lewis shares key insights on evaluating narrative violations, structuring follow-on capital concentration, avoiding rigid investment rules, and re-evaluating the actual value venture capitalists provide to startups.
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 36.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 4.1 Guest teaching 5.1 Guest disagreement 3.1 Harry pushing back 3.2
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 22:58 Explicit rejection of Bill Gurley's deployment mantra
Geoff explicitly rejects Harry's citation of Bill Gurley's 'play the game on the field' adage, calling the current market deployment pace wacky and asserting that top firms do not actually follow it.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 18:36 Harry challenges the 'narrative violation' framingHarry directly refuses Geoff's thesis by challenging whether high-profile investments like Vercel were real narrative violations or simply obvious consensus wins.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 7:22 Deconstructing valuation multiples and follow-on logicGeoff reframes Harry's real-world deal scenario by analyzing pricing elasticity, pointing out that both 100x and 150x ARR multiples represent insane valuations that demand total conviction.
Harry holds his own ▶ 17:58 Harry leverages 2,800 interviews to challenge ownership thesisHarry demonstrates his deep interviewing experience by citing 2,799 past show guests who emphasized ownership, using this baseline to challenge Geoff's contrary philosophy.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Geoff Lewis's Journey into Venture Capital | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Harry introduces Geoff's background and asks how he entered VC. Geoff shares his trajectory from founder to Founders Fund and Bedrock, lightly reframing Harry's question about GP jadedness by noting he is far too young to be jaded. | |
| Pricing Elasticity and High-Valuation Follow-On Decisions | 5 | 6 | 3 | 3 | Harry brings a concrete real-world deal scenario regarding pricing elasticity between 100x and 150x ARR. Geoff educates Harry on double-down pricing logic, bluntly noting that both 100x and 150x multiples are insane. | |
| Follow-On Diligence Framework and Trusting Instincts | 3 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Geoff details Bedrock's follow-on diligence framework and how he avoids emotional momentum. He emphasizes learning to trust the internal voice that flags underlying issues even when metrics look clean. | |
| Maintaining Mental Purity and Overcoming Bias | 4 | 6 | 4 | 4 | Harry admits his own past arrogance in thinking he knew markets better than others. Geoff playfully course-corrects Harry's view on youth and arrogance, then dismisses standard VC value-add claims by stating only a dozen VCs actually add value. | |
| Portfolio Time Management and the Reality of Board Seats | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 | Harry and Geoff discuss portfolio management and board seat limits. Geoff critiques VCs who seek board seats for self-actualization, arguing that formal board roles rarely add order-of-magnitude value over active non-board involvement. | |
| Delineating Principles vs Rules and Rejecting Ownership Targets | 6 | 7 | 5 | 7 | Harry challenges Geoff's rejection of ownership targets, citing 2,800 podcast interviews emphasizing ownership. Harry also pushes back on Bedrock's 'narrative violation' thesis by challenging whether companies like Vercel were actually counter-narrative. | |
| Transitioning from Counter-Narrative to Consensus Success | 5 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Geoff explains how counter-narrative investments transition into consensus winners using Flock Safety as an example. Harry references Brian Singman's stance on capital concentration limits, which Geoff reinforces. | |
| Deployment Pace and Temporal Diversification Strategy | 5 | 6 | 6 | 5 | Harry invokes Bill Gurley's phrase 'play the game on the field' to question deployment pacing. Geoff forcefully disagrees with the premise, stating that the current game on the field is wacky and explaining Bedrock's deliberate slowdown. | |
| Developing Venture Talent and Learning Through Osmosis | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Geoff breaks down how venture talent scales through self-starting initiative and osmosis rather than top-down training. He outlines why spending long periods getting to know candidates is essential before hiring. | |
| Avoiding the Corporate Machine Failure Mode in VC Firms | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Geoff highlights avoiding the 'unfun machine' as Bedrock's primary institutional goal. Harry conducts a rapid quickfire round touching on philosophy, changing personal beliefs, and recent investments like Praxis. |
Statements from this episode (25)
Bedrock manages over $1 billion in assets
“Now, with over a billion in AUM, Bedrock invests in breakout technology companies that are incongruent with popular narratives.”
Geoff Lewis: The 2012-2022 venture capital expansion wave is cresting
“This wave that might be cresting now in venture was really just starting back then in 2012.”
Geoff Lewis: The public-private valuation disconnect has never been greater
“Is the disconnect between the public market valuations and the private market valuations to me has never been greater. And so that is the new variable where I think how that variable ends up playing out is going to be really key.”
Harry Stebbings: Early-stage VCs make a big mistake ignoring public markets
“I speak to a lot of early stage managers who actually don't pay that much attention to public markets. I always think it's a big mistake.”
Geoff Lewis: Public market corrections will eventually hit early-stage valuations
“I think ultimately the correction will trickle down to the early stages. It's just going to take time. I mean, it's just going to be a delayed reaction at the end of the day, the micro always needs to dominate.”
Geoff Lewis: At 100x ARR valuations, invest your maximum or zero
“The difference between a hundred X AR multiple and a 150 X AR multiple, the reality is those are both insane. And so you have to have extremely high conviction and to have done your diligence and really believe this set of entrepreneurs, this company is going …”
Geoff Lewis: Bedrock treats every follow-on check as a first-time investment
“So we, in practice, view every follow-on opportunity as we're investing for the first time.”
Geoff Lewis: Youth is a venture manager's biggest asset
“Youth, I would say, is the biggest asset one can have as a venture capital manager. The youth enables you to not be jaded and to rebuild these mental models for every new market, for every new company that you encounter.”
Geoff Lewis: The best companies do not fit pre-existing patterns
“But I do believe that there's a pattern match thing in venture capital. And I think there's some value to that, but the best companies just don't fit any preexisting patterns is what I've found.”
Geoff Lewis: Only about a dozen VCs globally actually add value
“I think that some do. And by some, I mean maybe a dozen or so. And so I think there's probably a dozen VCs that you could say are actually value added.”
Geoff Lewis: VC board seats do not add significantly more value
“And then in practice, I don't actually think there's that much that a board can do to help a company. I don't think that being on the board enables you to add an order of magnitude more value than being a involved investor who's not on the board.”
Geoff Lewis: Bedrock's primary ethos is investing in narrative violations
“Our guiding ethos, our principle at bedrock from day zero was we want to search for narrative violations. We want to search for companies that for whatever reason are being overlooked or underestimated by other investors where we can get in at a counter narrat…”
Geoff Lewis: Uncapped note in Rippling was one of Bedrock's best investments
“I think one of our best investments at Bedrock was doing an uncapped note investment in Rippling”
Geoff Lewis: Bedrock does not require minimum ownership targets in startups
“Lots of VCs will say, we need to own a certain percent of a company. We don't have that as a rule here.”
Geoff Lewis: Bedrock invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2019
“We did Bitcoin and Ethereum shortly after launching our first fund in 2019.”
Geoff Lewis: Bedrock's best-performing deals started with low initial ownership
“For me, the companies where I've done the best, and wherever I look, you know, retrospectively to our bedrock track record, our pre-bedrock track record, the ownership percentages were actually quite low, and so you basically, for me, it's operating the world,…”
Lewis: Vercel is Bedrock's largest investment in dollars and valuation
“Well, of those three that you listed, Vercel is by far our largest investment in terms of dollars, and of those, just worth the other ones by a significant amount.”
Lewis: Vercel grew over 10x in the year following Bedrock's check
“Today, you know, they've grown over 10 X since we initially invested just over a year ago. It's seen as conventionally working and they've raised several rounds of follow on financing given it's working so much.”
Geoff Lewis: Bedrock never uses follow-on rounds or markups as validation
“I don't care about what other firms are doing and where other firms are pricing things like, sure. It's nice to get markups, But ultimately, I never want to use follow on financing rounds. It's like validation that a company is working. It's always about the a…”
Geoff Lewis: Capital concentration limits per company harm venture returns
“I think Brian's a hundred percent right on that, and I've learned a lot from him on how to concentrate capital into companies.”
Geoff Lewis: Bedrock has significantly slowed its capital deployment pace
“And we've actually massively slowed our deployment pace over the past few quarters. We're deploying actually much slower now than we were at the height of our prior fund deployment cycles.”
Geoff Lewis: Bedrock Three will take over three years to deploy
“And with Bedrock Three, I think it's going to be like a three-year-plus type deployment cycle, and future funds will be the same.”
Geoff Lewis: Bedrock evaluates candidates for over 18 months before hiring
“Eric and I knew each other for, you know, eight or nine years before we started Bedrock together. We got to know Spencer for well over 18 months before we actually hired him onto the Bedrock team, and that story is true of basically Basically everyone we've hi…”
Geoff Lewis: Building an unfun corporate machine is a VC failure mode
“I'd say the one that we are most paranoid about avoiding is building a machine that's not actually fun to operate. And so I think there are like lots of firms that have built really impressive machines. And then if I was to transpose myself into being the mana…”
Geoff Lewis: Bedrock invested in Praxis to build a crypto city-state
“I think the most recent publicly announced one was Praxis, which is they're trying to build a new crypto city-state. I'd gotten to know those founders for several years before we invested in the seed round, and I'm just very excited by the vision around innova…”