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David Hornik

Founding Partner, Lobby Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

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

investorfounderhostauthoracademic@davidhornik ↗LinkedIn ↗lobby.vc ↗Wikipedia ↗

David Hornik is a Founding Partner at Lobby Capital and a former General Partner at August Capital. He created VentureBlog, the first venture capital blog, and has made early-stage investments in companies including Splunk and Fastly.

7statements → 1claims → 0claims resolved → 4.14/5average certainty → 2.71/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 5said about them ↓

1 not checkable as stated how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 2 opinions · 3 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 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 David argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

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

4.4 / 5 directness 4.7 · coherence 4.6 · precision 4.5 · compression 4.1

answered every one of 10 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? →

229 words/min while actually speaking · 33.6 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,180 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 ▾ 1/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10
setup questions received 45%

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

Opinion
Hornik: Peter Thiel's 20 Under 20 fellowship is "bullshit"
“I think it's bullshit.”
David Hornik Jan 18, 2015 ▶ 20:23 20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups
Prediction Not checkable as stated
David Hornik: Google is best positioned to become the first $1T company
“I think that I think that Google is in the best position to do it today.”
David Hornik Jan 18, 2015 ▶ 21:48 20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups
Opinion
Hornik: Legal training is a terrible asset for venture capitalists
“Well, largely venture, sorry, lawyers are trained to be to be very conservative, right? They're, the training is to sit, to find all of the problems that one might run into, and to try and you know, worry about those things, and not say to yourself, what are t…”
David Hornik Jan 18, 2015 ▶ 5:36 20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups
Insight
Hornik: Big tech giants are slowly morphing into the same company
“I think that if you look at what Amazon is doing, what Google is doing, what Facebook is doing, they all are slowly but surely, and in many ways Apple, they're all slowly but surely morphing into the same company.”
David Hornik Jan 18, 2015 ▶ 21:15 20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups
Insight
Hornik: Starting a startup is unreasonable and extraordinarily unlikely to succeed
“Now, the reality is that, of course, it's completely unreasonable to start a startup. They're extraordinarily hard. It's extraordinarily unlikely they succeed.”
David Hornik Jan 18, 2015 ▶ 4:38 20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups
Disclosure
Hornik: August Capital investments Ebates, Zulily, and Splunk were multi-billion-dollar exits
“Valuable investments that, that we have made in, you know, the Ebates or Zulily or Splunk were all multi-billion dollar outcomes.”
David Hornik Jan 18, 2015 ▶ 11:58 20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups
Insight
Hornik: Venture funds require billion-dollar addressable markets because startups capture small fractions
“You really need to have markets that that, that span billion dollars of available opportunity, because in all likelihood, you're going to get small fractions of those markets, and it's incumbent upon you to then you know, eek, eek out your hundreds of millions…”
David Hornik Jan 18, 2015 ▶ 12:43 20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups

The other half of the tape: David Hornik's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 4 episodes on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 2Matthew McCall 1Jason Lemkin 1

Statements about David Hornik, by other people (1)

Assertion Supported
David Hornik created the first venture capital blog, VentureBlog
“David created the first ever venture capital blog, Venture Blog, and he also lectures at Harvard Law School, where he teaches entrepreneurship and venture capital.”
Harry Stebbings Jan 18, 2015 ▶ 0:32 20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
002233201520162017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions
023201520162017201820192020202120222023episodes it came up in
000.51.513201520162017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2015 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups Jan 18, 2015 17m
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