Ben Lerer

Managing Partner, Lerer Hippeau · 1 appearance on the record.

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

investorfounderexecutive@BenjLerer ↗LinkedIn ↗lererhippeau.com ↗

Ben Lerer is the co-founder and Managing Partner of venture capital firm Lerer Hippeau. He previously co-founded Thrillist and served as the CEO of Group Nine Media until its acquisition by Vox Media.

12statements → 1claims → 1claims resolved → 3.83/5average certainty → 2.5/5average debate potential → 4.5/5argument clarity · the sources → 9said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 1 opinion · 10 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved. 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 Ben 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

Ben Lerer: Legacy retail and media will heavily acquire DTC startups

“The last few weeks in retail, I mean, just look at the jet and dollar shave acquisitions. You're seeing, these are the first dominoes in what will be a bunch of dominoes falling. I believe in consolidation where the traditional guys in retail, the traditional …”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 19:22 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

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

4.5 / 5 directness 5 · coherence 5 · precision 4 · compression 4

answered every one of 8 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? →

234 words/min while actually speaking · 8.4 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,752 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 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10

pushed back at the host 1/10

setup questions received 80%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 10:03“How much of a role does that play for you when investing? Do you suffer from it? If so, how do you try and kind of negate it?” ▶ 7:02“I'm really intrigued to hear about the mentality shift for you from, from investing with your father, small checks and building that early angel portfolio to, to spending instituti…”

What they said12 What others said9 Episodes1

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

Opinion

Ben Lerer: A Donald Trump Presidency Would Be The Worst US Event

“Him becoming the president would be the worst thing that has happened in the history of the United States since its inception. I think he is a racist pig who makes other Racist, sexist, misogynistic, disgusting people feel like they are allowed to share those …”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 25:38 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Insight

Ben Lerer: Best Early-Stage VCs Are Former Operators, Not Number Crunchers

“But for me, the best investors, particularly the best early stage investors are going to be people who have actually been in the trenches and built and sold their own businesses and raised money for their own businesses and gone through sort of that slog versu…”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 6:41 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Insight

Ben Lerer: Most Big, Obvious Tech Startup Ideas Have Already Been Claimed

“So many of the big obvious ideas have been taken and there's multiple companies building them. It's rarer that we see some life changing, brilliant invention or idea that we never imagined would be possible.”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 13:52 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Insight

Ben Lerer: Simply selling direct-to-consumer without middlemen is no longer disruptive

“I don't think Just being direct to consumer is disruptive anymore, though. Just selling products without a middleman is no longer enough to sort of consider yourself to be, you know, sort of breaking the old model.”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 16:33 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Prediction Held up

Ben Lerer: Legacy retail and media will heavily acquire DTC startups

Insight

Ben Lerer: VCs Should Invest Institutional Capital Like Personal Money

“I think in its best scenario, you invest other people's money the same way that you would invest your own money.”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 7:20 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Insight

Ben Lerer: VC Firm Branding Drives Top-Tier Deal Flow To Spot Outliers

“Brand is what gives us so much Amazing deal flow, which enables us to really be able to see enough companies to be able to identify the ones that seem to be the outliers and the really special ones”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 8:46 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Insight

Ben Lerer: Seed Investors Must Rely On Imagination Because Startups Pivot Frequently

“So many of the businesses that we invest in don't end up looking like what we invest in. We need to be able to have an imagination.”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 9:16 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Insight

Ben Lerer: FOMO Is A Bigger Factor In Early-Stage Investing Than Late-Stage

“FOMO is a part of life as an investor, and I think more so a part of life in early stage than in later stage.”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 10:10 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Insight

Ben Lerer: Blinding Co-Investor Information Leads To Cleaner Venture Decisions

“Making sure that we in some cases have less information about who's investing makes me more capable of making cleaner decisions.”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 11:20 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Insight

Ben Lerer: Long-Term Independent Startups Must Provide Early Investors Periodic Liquidity

“Generally speaking, we'd love our companies to sort of take the approach that you've seen a war be take, for instance, which is we're going to build something for 20 years. We're going to put our heads down. And then in those situations, you would hope that th…”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 20:56 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

Insight

Ben Lerer: Television made brand building easier 20 years ago

“Brand building 20 years ago was easier in that you, like, you sort of Could buy your brand growth, which was, there was really one channel that, that was so much more powerful than all the others from a marketing perspective, which was television advertising.”

Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 22:03 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A

The other half of the tape: Ben Lerer's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 9 times in 3 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4 Kate Shillo 3 Josh Udashkin 2