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Ciaran O'Leary

General Partner, BlueYard · 1 appearance on the record.

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

Ciaran O'Leary is a General Partner at BlueYard, an early-stage venture fund. Prior to BlueYard, he was a Partner at Earlybird with investments in Peak Games and 6Wunderkinder.

12statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 4.08/5average certainty → 2.33/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 4said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 predictions · 1 opinion · 5 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 3 name 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 Ciaran 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
O'Leary: BlueYard will never raise a growth fund or expand geographically
“Blue Yard is always going to be a small firm, everybody's always going to be equal we're only ever going to have one strategy and one fund, and we're only ever going to have one office, and we're always going to focus on early stage, we're never going to raise…”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 12:38 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard

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

4.4 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 4.8 · precision 4.1 · compression 3.9

answered every one of 16 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? →

242 words/min while actually speaking · 27.5 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,460 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 ▾ 3/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10
setup questions received 45%

Everything Ciaran O'Leary said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Held up
O'Leary: BlueYard will never raise a growth fund or expand geographically
“Blue Yard is always going to be a small firm, everybody's always going to be equal we're only ever going to have one strategy and one fund, and we're only ever going to have one office, and we're always going to focus on early stage, we're never going to raise…”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 12:38 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Insight
O'Leary: Large venture capital fund sizes prevent genuine early-stage focus
“I think for entrepreneurs, what is a good guide is always looking at the fund size. So you can say that you're an early stage firm or you focus on early stage, but if you You've got this huge, big fund, you know, it will never be it can never be a core part of…”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 9:30 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Insight
O'Leary: Most VC firms fail by trying to build a legacy brand
“Assume that with Blue Yard, we have to leave some kind of lasting legacy and brand. Cause that's where a majority of VC firms fail.”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 13:41 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Insight
O'Leary: Early-stage startups often fail by hiring senior executives too early
“The one thing that the board should hopefully protect you from and have, give you good guidance is on hiring the wrong people, or sorry, the right people too early, because sometimes you can bring in somebody who really only works well if they have 50 engineer…”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 18:33 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Prediction Not checkable as stated
O'Leary: Great European startups will always be acquired by global capital
“No, because the capital is global, highly mobile. The biggest occurs in Europe are Google, Microsoft, SAP, and I don't care. And now Chinese companies Chinese companies, Japanese companies, I think that that makes it less of a problem. So big companies will be…”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 21:04 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Prediction Not checkable as stated
O'Leary: BlueYard Capital intends to invest in science fiction technologies
“Jason and I were huge astronomy geeks and science fiction geeks, and so we think we've told a couple of people we're also going to try and do a couple of science fiction investments.”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 7:17 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Prediction Not checkable as stated
O'Leary: The European tech ecosystem will become increasingly engineering-driven
“So we think the European ecosystem is going to geek up and it's going to be much more supportive for this wave of entrepreneurs.”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 9:04 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Insight
O'Leary: Willingness to scrap all code predicts seed-stage startup success
“Looking at seed and going to A, the more fluid and brutally honest teams are with themselves and how good their product is and the willingness to make extreme iterations, even if it means canning literally every line of code. That I've found to be a recipe for…”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 15:29 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Opinion
O'Leary: Business books are nauseatingly predictable and should be half a page
“I hate reading business books. I think they are nauseatingly predictable, and they should be half a page instead of 200 pages, so you're not going to hear a business book from me.”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 20:30 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Insight
O'Leary: The ultimate investment thesis is unbundling economies into atomic units
“I'm not excited by any sector the most. The most excited about economies being broken down into atomic, highly efficient atomic units versus inefficient big entities, and that applied to every single sector.”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 21:34 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Disclosure
BlueYard Capital operates a $120M fund writing $200K to $6M tickets
“So, you know, BlueYard is a hundred and twenty million dollar fund and we're focused on seed and a, you know, you write tickets from a couple hundred K up to say five, six million maximum as a first ticket.”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 9:49 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard
Disclosure
O'Leary: BlueYard is structured as a small, partner-only venture firm
“We wanted to create a firm that is very small, and where entrepreneurs really only deal with the partners, and where we can be very agile, and quick, and also where we can form the entire firm around a thesis.”
Ciaran O'Leary Mar 16, 2016 ▶ 5:51 20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard

The other half of the tape: Ciaran O'Leary's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 2 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Christian Reber 3Harry Stebbings 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
002131201620172018201920202021episodesmentions
011201620172018201920202021episodes it came up in
001.50.531201620172018201920202021episodesmentions per episode
2021 3 mentions in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard Mar 16, 2016 17m
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