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Andy McLoughlin

Managing Partner, Uncork Capital · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorfounderexecutive@andymcloughlin ↗LinkedIn ↗andymcloughlin.com ↗

Andy McLoughlin co-founded the enterprise collaboration platform Huddle, as well as Founders Pledge and GBx. As Managing Partner at Uncork Capital and an angel investor, he has backed companies such as LaunchDarkly, Tailscale, Intercom, and Calm.

21statements → 7claims → 6claims resolved → 50%fully supported → 3.52/5average certainty → 2.05/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 31said about them ↓

3 supported 0 partly supported 3 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 predictions · 3 assertions · 2 opinions · 6 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 6 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Andy argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
McLoughlin predicts Pipedrive will be worth hundreds of millions or billions
“I think that's going to be a business which is worth many hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in the future”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 25:29 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Over 2,500 US seed funds have inflated Bay Area business costs
“There, you know, there are now two and a half thousand plus seed funds operating in the U.S. With a large focus on being on the Bay Area. What that means is, you know, there are probably too many dollars chasing too few deals Which has driven the cost of both …”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 23:33 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
33% certainty 3
67% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.5 · coherence 4.6 · precision 4.3 · compression 3.8

answered every one of 13 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

283 words/min while actually speaking · 18.1 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,301 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 2 rated episodes:

host pushback ▾ 4/10
pushed back at the host 1.5/10
setup questions received 68%

Everything Andy McLoughlin said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Startups Passing 150 Employees No Longer Need Hustler Founders
“When a company gets past a 150 people and, you know, start getting up towards, you know, 200, they don't really need the kind of hustler Founder there anymore. They need people who are going to adhere to processes and, you know, get stuff done and not trotting…”
Andy McLoughlin Feb 29, 2016 ▶ 3:51 20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimising Burn and For Startups
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Party Rounds Will Show Major Downside in Coming Months
“And I think, you know, the, one of the big issues that we're going to see in in the market over the next few months is this, the downside of the party round.”
Andy McLoughlin Feb 29, 2016 ▶ 11:02 20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimising Burn and For Startups
Opinion
Silicon Valley remains the best place to incubate global startups
“And I think if you believe that great entrepreneurs and great businesses can be born absolutely anywhere, but this is probably still the best place in the world to incubate them, then finding those teams and finding those people who maybe don't look, you know,…”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 12:22 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Insight
Series A startups compete against all fundraising companies, not just sector peers
“And, you know, given that there is such a glut of seed money out there and so many companies being seed funded, yet this, you know, the number of Series A deals is effectively the same, if not lower year on year. What that means is, and I, this is the exact wo…”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 19:28 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Assertion Contradicted
Over 2,500 US seed funds have inflated Bay Area business costs
“There, you know, there are now two and a half thousand plus seed funds operating in the U.S. With a large focus on being on the Bay Area. What that means is, you know, there are probably too many dollars chasing too few deals Which has driven the cost of both …”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 23:33 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Prediction Held up
McLoughlin predicts Pipedrive will be worth hundreds of millions or billions
“I think that's going to be a business which is worth many hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in the future”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 25:29 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Disclosure
SoftTech VC Avoids Outside Seed Plus Rounds as Red Flags
“What we don't generally do, though, is look at C C primes, or C pluses, or second Cs, or C twos, or C Bs, from companies that aren't already in the portfolio. Cause generally that smacks of a company that went out to raise a series A and failed.”
Andy McLoughlin Feb 29, 2016 ▶ 8:21 20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimising Burn and For Startups
Insight
VCs Will Use Leverage Over Startups Whenever Possible
“Well, exactly, because, you know, the thing that you have to remember is that VCs are, at the end of the day, in the business of trying to make money, and if they have leverage over a company, they will probably use it.”
Andy McLoughlin Feb 29, 2016 ▶ 10:36 20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimising Burn and For Startups
Insight
Enterprise Software Requires Top-Down Sales for Real Revenue
“Grassroots is great because it can just spread like wildfire inside an organization. It can move from org to org very virally, but I think, you know, to make real revenue, you kind of need to you need to be kind of selling top down.”
Andy McLoughlin Feb 29, 2016 ▶ 19:03 20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimising Burn and For Startups
Disclosure
SoftTech VC missed hardware deals because founders assumed a software-only mandate
“Given that fairly large chunk of the investments we make these days are in hardware and frontier technologies, I think we actually were missing deals because people thought we would only invest in software.”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 7:21 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Insight
Investors should not expect founders to be experts on the VC landscape
“I think that the art of fundraising and the art of pitching and the art of selling are all kind of bound up together. I just don't expect my founders to be experts in understanding the VC landscape.”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 11:25 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Insight
Startups should target 24 months of runway instead of 18
“Yeah, I mean, I think 24 is probably the right number. The issue with 18 months worth of runway is that by the time you close the funding ground, you get started, you might have 1011, 12 months before you need to think about fundraising again.”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 19:15 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Disclosure
Uncork Capital avoids health startups requiring upfront FDA approval
“Yeah, I mean, I think we stay clear of anything which is too highly regulated. I mean, we do a lot of look at digital health. We look at hardware and health, and in any of these areas, we try and find products that don't necessarily need FDA approval, in order…”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 21:41 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Assertion Supported
Seed Rounds Reached $1.5M to $3.5M by 2016
“Seed rounds have really, really gotten a lot bigger in the in the last three or four years, to the point now where you have a pre-seed Round. So you might have a friends and family round of, you know, 25 to 50,000 dollars to get you off the ground. You then do…”
Andy McLoughlin Feb 29, 2016 ▶ 5:06 20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimising Burn and For Startups
Opinion
Seed VCs Skipping Series A Follow-On Signals Severe Trouble
“Yeah, I mean, if we were, if there was a startup going out from one of our, going out for their Series A, and we didn't participate, that would look really bad.”
Andy McLoughlin Feb 29, 2016 ▶ 12:18 20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimising Burn and For Startups
Disclosure
McLoughlin's first angel check was $10,000 into Postmates in 2011
“And so I invested 10,000 dollars into this entity that became a company that turned into Postmates. And so that was my first ever investment.”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 4:44 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Assertion Contradicted
Jeff Clavier bought SoftTech VC's original logo on 99designs for $100
“Jeff had bought on 99 designs for like a hundred dollars or something back in probably 2005 or something.”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 6:34 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Disclosure
SoftTech VC was regularly confused with SoftBank after Vision Fund launch
“With the announcement of the Vision Fund and, you know, the huge investments into Uber and everything else that they've been doing, we were just getting confused on a pretty regular basis, which is kind of crazy considering that their fund is, I think, three o…”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 7:39 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Prediction Didn’t hold up
McLoughlin predicts Tray.io will raise its Series B in 2018
“I think they're probably going to be raising their Series B this year, and I hear a lot of great things from great VCs who want to meet them.”
Andy McLoughlin May 8, 2018 ▶ 26:16 20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founders, How To Distinguish Between A Good Bridge Round and A Bridge To Nowhere & Whether VCs Really Do Add Value?
Prediction Held up
SoftTech VC Will Deploy 50% of Fund V Into B2B SaaS
“About half of the fund will be deployed into BtoB and SaaS, which is great for me, because that's kind of my area of specialty.”
Andy McLoughlin Feb 29, 2016 ▶ 17:03 20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimising Burn and For Startups
Disclosure
SoftTech VC Evaluates 3,000 Companies Annually and Invests in 15
“I mean, we will see, in an average year, anywhere between two and a half and 3000 companies, and we'll invest in 15. So, you know, you do the math, about 99.5% of the businesses that we see, we won't invest in.”
Andy McLoughlin Feb 29, 2016 ▶ 20:48 20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimising Burn and For Startups

The other half of the tape: Andy McLoughlin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 31 times in 14 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 30Logan Bartlett 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00831562016201720182019202020212022episodesmentions
0362016201720182019202020212022episodes it came up in
001.53362016201720182019202020212022episodesmentions per episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 3 mentions in 1 episode
2019 15 mentions in 6 episodes 3 per episode
2018 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2016 7 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Andy McLoughlin on The Benefits of Backing Unsexy Businesses with Non-Obvious Founde May 8, 2018 22m
20VC: SoftTech VC's Andy McLoughlin on The Series A Crunch, Maximising Runway and Minimisi Feb 29, 2016 17m
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