David Sacks
Founding General Partner, Craft Ventures · 1 appearance on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
investorfounderexecutivehostauthor@davidsacks ↗craftventures.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
David Sacks was the founding COO of PayPal and later founded Yammer, which sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012. He co-founded venture capital firm Craft Ventures in 2017 and co-hosts The All-In Podcast.
18statements → 4claims → 3claims resolved → 33%fully supported → 4.17/5average certainty → 2.33/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 106said about them ↓
1 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 2 assertions · 1 opinion · 12 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 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.
Their most notable supported claim
David Sacks: Startups Need Two Years Runway Because Recessions Last 18 Months
“Well, I do think at least two years is a good starting point for thinking about it, because we're in a highly disrupted period right now. We could see tremendous economic disruption for two or three quarters, and just the average recession takes about 18 month…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
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
How they sound: speaking style how? →
242 words/min while actually speaking · 0.4 um and uh per 1k words
No argument clarity score for David Sacks: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 29 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.
Measured by listening to 4,860 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of David Sacks is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →
How the interview went all their pushback → series average →
Across 1 rated episode:
host pushback ▾ 3/10
setup questions received 55%
host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 5:56“I guess bluntly, do you believe this is true, and do you think that VC will retrench and deal volume will dry up?” ▶ 6:30“With the dry powder on the side, do you think we will see a price reduction, or do you think actually, given the dry powder, we'll see prices remain the same for the best companies…”
Everything David Sacks said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
David Sacks Rejects Silicon Valley's Culture of Celebrating Failure
“Frankly, I hate it. I don't believe in celebrating failure. I think that being a founder is so hard and running a startup is so hard and I've never seen a case. Where a successful startup didn't almost die multiple times.”
David Sacks: Glorifying 'Doing Things That Don't Scale' Leads to Unscalable Startups
“I strongly disagree with that mantra, and I think it's one of the chivalests that gets startups in trouble. The whole point of technology is to find the elegant, scalable approach and the sooner you do that, the better off you're going to be. When you start to…”
David Sacks: Hot SaaS Startup Valuations Dropped From 20x to 10x ARR
“During the frothy times, you would see a sort of hot SaaS startup, the deal being priced at something like 20 times forward ARR, and now deals have returned to a slightly more normal 10 times ARR, which was the rule of thumb up to the last couple of years.”
David Sacks: A Hollywood Auteur Mentality Has Entered the Tech World
“Over the last decade or so, a little bit of that Hollywood auteur mentality, you know, among directors has sort of creeped into the tech world, where founders like Hollywood directors want total creative freedom. They want final cut, and that's as it should be…”
David Sacks: A Startup Burn Multiple Under 1.0 Is Amazingly Efficient
“If the burn multiple is less than one, which means, like, let's say you've got an early stage startup, and we've seen a few like this, where they're able to burn a million dollars or less to achieve a million dollars or more of net new ARR, I would qualify tha…”
David Sacks: A Startup Burn Multiple Over 3.0 Is Bad and Suspect
“The flip side of it is, if you're burning more than three times your net new ARR, I would define that as being suspect or bad. And that's the case where burn needs to be very closely scrutinized.”
David Sacks: Top Startup Outcomes End Up 10x Larger Than Founders Expect
“Probably just that the outcomes are going to be 10 X or bigger than you think. When we were doing PayPal, it was hard to envision that it would be a hundred billion dollar plus company in 20 years. We thought a one and a half billion dollar outcome was great. …”
David Sacks Predicts Venture Capital Investment Pace Will Slow Post-COVID
“We're still very much open for business, and I think a lot of other VCs are too, but I do think that the pace of investing will slow down.”
Craft Ventures Backed Bird for Its Ability to Build Durable Scooters
“Certainly in the case of Bird, what we saw in the early days It was a explosively growing service, and the thing that we gave them credit for was the ability to develop a higher quality scooter, because the original scooters were kind of these retail scooters …”
David Sacks: B2C Startups Cannot Scale CAC Without New Distribution Platforms
“So I would agree that in the absence of new consumer distribution platforms, it's very hard to get a CAC to pencil for a new consumer company.”
David Sacks: Economic Downturn Will Expose Non-Mission-Critical B2B Software
“Well, there's going to be air pockets ahead. So I think nobody is going to be immune from the economic downturn. What we're really going to see, I think, over the next several months is who is truly mission critical and who's not.”
David Sacks: A 3x LTV to CAC Ratio Implies Unacceptably High Churn
“Another good one is that the long-term value of a customer should be at least three X the CAC. And I would agree with that, but say that it's got to be even higher than that because a three X LTV to CAC ratio implies that the customer is churning after about t…”
David Sacks: Selling to Startups Is Easier Than Targeting Fortune 500s
“Startups are so much easier to sell to. And so therefore they can provide a great entry point into the market for other startups. Which may find that the difficulty level of trying to sell to a fortune 500 company is just too high.”
David Sacks: Blended CAC Misleads Founders Into Over-Investing in Bad Outbound Channels
“And if you average the CAC across that sort of organic or inbound growth with other types of programs, it will give you an exaggerated sense of the efficiency of outbound channels, and you'll end up over-investing in those channels.”
David Sacks: 100% Net Revenue Retention Is Minimum, 130% Is Industry Leading
“You really want to start with at least a hundred percent retention on a revenue basis. And then certainly if you can get up to something like a 130%, that would be industry leading.”
David Sacks: Great Founders Need Extreme Aggression but Fail When Uncoachable
“Founders need to be far more aggressive than what the average person might think. They need to have these traits of being visionary and pushing and being able to run through walls. And so just having a quote unquote sane level of crazy may not be enough, but w…”
David Sacks: Founders Select Their Board Members, Not the Other Way Around
“The reality is that founders are the ones who choose their board members more so than the other way around. It's really up to founders to decide who their board members are going to be.”
David Sacks: Startups Need Two Years Runway Because Recessions Last 18 Months
“Well, I do think at least two years is a good starting point for thinking about it, because we're in a highly disrupted period right now. We could see tremendous economic disruption for two or three quarters, and just the average recession takes about 18 month…”
The other half of the tape: David Sacks's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 102 times in 46 episodes on 20VC. 4 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 43Jason Lemkin 26Shervin Pishevar 2Parker Conrad 2Keith Rabois 2Justin Fishner-Wolfson 2Jason Calacanis 2Delian Asparouhov 2
Statements about David Sacks, by other people (4)
Conrad: David Sacks made wrong decisions across product and strategy at Zenefits
“I got to this point where I was convinced that you know, David was not really interested in making Zenefits successful. And, you know, almost every decision he made at the company was wrong. You know, he the decisions he made from a product perspective, from a…”
Parker Conrad: David Sacks made wrong decisions across the board at Zenefits
“David was not really interested in making Zenefits successful. You know, almost every decision he made at the company was wrong. The decisions he made from a product perspective, from a strategy perspective, the people he. Fired the people he promoted, like al…”
Katz: ClickHouse extended its financing despite having $1B on its balance sheet
“And so we did a financing earlier this year, and then we extended it and brought in some strategic investors like yourself and David Sachs and Michael Dell and JP Morgan. We didn't need the capital. We had a billion dollars on the balance sheet.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- NVIDIA Predicts $1TRN in Revenue: Everything You Need to Know From GTC & Anduril Lands $20B Contract · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic's Fable Banned by US Government | Wix & Adobe Hit All-Time Lows | Mistral Raising at $20BN · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic's Raise & What It Means for Potential IPO? Mag7: Google & Amazon Up, Meta & Microsoft Down · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models | OpenRouter's Chance To Sell | Stripe Buying PayPal
- Groq’s $20BN NVIDIA Deal | Why Sam Altman Doesn’t Care About Dilution & Invisible Unemployment 2026 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 22 mentions in 12 episodes 2 per episode
- Navan Files to Go Public and Canva Pulls the Brakes: Why and What Happens? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- OpenAI, SBF & Perplexity: What VCs Know That You Don’t · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster
- Why Apple Needs a Management Overhaul & Why Google is Catching Up with Hyperscalers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Shervin Pishevar: What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick | E1245 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Will Cursor Kill Figma? Lightspeed Raises $9B & OpenAI’s $1B from Disney & #1 App in App Store · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- AI Fund’s GP, Andrew Ng: LLMs as the Next Geopolitical Weapon & Do Margins Still Matter in AI? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Is a $4.5BN Exit Enough in VC? & Harvey Raises $150M & Why Google is a Buy and Amazon is a Sell · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 12 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- Avi Eyal: Making $2.3BN on Monday, Stripe & PillPack from Entrée Capital MP | E1173 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Delian Asparouhov: Inside the Walls of Founders Fund: What the World Does Not See | E1183 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Reid Hoffman: The Future of TikTok and The Inflection AI Deal | E1163 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jason Lemkin: Why Pricing is Worse Than Ever and There is More Funding Than Ever | E1157 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Thomas Plantenga & Alex Taussig: Vinted CEO's Ultimate Guide to Scaling Marketplaces | E1114 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jason Lemkin: Predictions for 2024 - What Does a Trump Administration do for Startups? | E1099 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- Is the VC Model Broken? Jason Lemkin, Mike Maples, Eric Paley & Harry Stebbings Debate | E1062 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: What are the World's Tech Leaders Running From? Fear? Insecurity? Poverty? What Drives the Best with Orlando Bravo, Bill Ackman, Dara Khosrowshahi, Parker Conrad, Tobi Luttke, Brian Armstrong and more..
- Jason Lemkin: Every VC has a FRAUD in their portfolio; The IPO market is about to EXPLODE | E1046 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Homebrew’s Hunter Walk & Satya Patel: Why $100M is Not Enough to Execute a Seed Strategy | 20VC #972 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 16 mentions in 7 episodes 2 per episode
- Jason Lemkin: Cold Email Tips; Why Only 15% of Founders Listen to their VCs | 20VC #954 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Parker Conrad: How I Got Ousted from Zenefits and Came Back with a Vengence | 20VC #932 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Emil Michael: How I Negotiated the $4B Uber-China Deal, Why DoorDash Caught Up to Uber | 20VC #941 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Brad Gerstner: How I Pick Companies; Lessons from Warren Buffet; Chamath vs Gurley | E935 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Fabrice Grinda: The First Person to Predict the Collapse of Credit Suisse? | 20VC #886 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: WTF Is Going On? 3 Outcomes for What Could Happen From Here; What Needs to Happen To Avoid Recession? Why Stagnation is Most Likely and What This Means for Startups and Venture & Why Catastrophe is More Likely Than Ever and Switzerland Could Be a "H
- 20VC: David Friedberg on The Framework for Business Value Creation, The Bifurcation in Venture Today That No One Talks About, The Impact of Interest Rate Hikes on Venture and Step by Step; How TPB Incubates, Funds and Exits The Next Generation of Companie
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 3 mentions in 1 episode
2020 21 mentions in 4 episodes 5 per episode
- 20VC: CRV's George Zachary on His Relationship To Money and How it has Changed Over Time, Why The Best Founders Have Often Experienced Parental or Home Instability and The Stories Behind Investing in Unicorns; PillPack, Yammer and Udacity
- 20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric
- 20VC: Substack Founder Chris Best on The Future of Public Journalism, Why The Economics Of Attention Have Been Flipped & Why Micropayments For Content Will Not Work
- 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Oren Zeev on Why Diversification Does Not Work, Thesis Based Investing Is Sceptical & Partners Mostly Stay Together For LPs
- 20VC: Khosla's Keith Rabois on How To Create Sustainability Behind Growth, How To Assess The Potential Of Individuals & Teams & The Biggest Takeaways from LinkedIn, Paypal & Square
- 20VC: Eventbrite Founder, Julia Hartz on The Lessons Learned Scaling Eventbrite to Unicorn Valuation & $3Bn in Gross Ticket Sales
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: 500 Startups' Dave McClure on Whether Unicorns Are Necessary For Venture Returns & Why Ownership Is Not The Math To Think About When Investing
- 20VC: YC's Justin Kan on The 3 Qualities All Successful Investors Have & Why 'VCs Don't Really Do Any Real Work'?
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
2015 2 mentions in 1 episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| 20VC: Craft Ventures' David Sacks on How To Assess Founder Psychology, How To Accurately E | Jun 15, 2020 | 21m |