Insight
Valuation does not matter for Series A venture investments
“I subscribe completely to the mentality that price does not matter at the Series A. At the Series A level, we as venture investors, anyone with more than a 25 or fifty million dollar fund should be looking for these outsized exits. They should be looking for c…”
Insight
Board members serve companies by empowering CEOs to make final decisions
“When I said we're there as a board to serve the CEO, I call that sort of one in the same as serving the company because the CEO is the ultimate leader of the company. Yes, you could say hierarchically, I guess the CEO works for the board, but the CEO is guidin…”
Opinion
Generalist venture capital investing is not dying
“I do not think we're seeing the end of the generalist investor.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
SaaS business models will transform the manufacturing industry
“So you can actually employ this software-like, SaaS software-like business model. As we know, totally transformed the software world over the past two decades, and I think can now have an effect on the manufacturing world.”
Insight
New VCs should maximize meeting volume to calibrate founder judgment
“I would say if you're just starting out in venture, and even if you're not Definitely take as many meetings as you can to really understand what great looks like, not in terms of the idea and the business necessarily, but in terms of the people.”
Opinion
Comparing venture capital fundraising and investing to dating is silly
“One saying that I really do not like in venture and in entrepreneurship is the idea that raising capital is like dating or investing in entrepreneurs is like dating. That's quite silly if you think about it. A VC and an entrepreneur should be quite up front”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
NEA's Scott Sandell decides on investments within 15 minutes
“I've seen some of the greatest investors Do just that. Meet with an entrepreneur. Within the 1:15 minutes, they're either excited or they're not. If they're excited, they're investing. Scott Sandell at NEA is a great example of that. It's very much his style.”
Insight
VCs must avoid letting expert references kill great disruptive ideas
“Beware of the expert reference. I got this advice early on, also from Scott Sandel at NEA, which is we're often, in our diligence, prone to go call around and make sure we're shoring up our assumptions, and those can be some of the most helpful diligence calls…”
Opinion
US data privacy failures are as severe as the opioid crisis
“I actually think privacy is Is an epidemic in this country as well, perhaps as big as the opioid crisis, that in plain sight over the past 10 or 20 years we let this problem occur, and we didn't know exactly what it meant until it was already out of the bag.”
Insight
Daily product work risks losing broad strategic context
“In product development, in product design, when you're sitting there day to day reprioritizing product priorities, trying to ship product, trying to get things out the door, sometimes you lose the overall context of where the company is going. Because you're m…”
Disclosure
Grayson spends most of her time proactively researching sectors
“Actually, I spend the majority of my time proactively researching spaces, researching sectors, and getting to know networks of people.”
Insight
Startups do not need product-market fit on day one
“It's not about, I've got this little thing, and I've got huge product market fit today. Yes, you need to accomplish that. Over, you know, the early days of the company's life, but you don't have to have it on day one.”
Disclosure
NEA uses partner sub-committees instead of consensus for deal approval
“The answer is no, but we don't also try to get those full 20 people to be aligned. We break up into smaller teams based on the experts around the table, the investors inside NEA who are prone to know something about that space. So if it's a robotics company, w…”
Insight
Unicorn-stage venture investments require a 3x to 5x minimum upside
“Now, if you're investing in, say, a unicorn-type valuation, price matters a lot more. It should be more Clear at that stage, whether this is going to be, you know, a unicorn being a billion dollar valuation, whether this is going to be a fifty billion dollar c…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
First Round Capital pioneered the institutional seed fund movement
“I credit Josh Koppelman and First Round Capital for really starting that movement, and that's gone from 20 to 50 to a hundred million dollar size funds, and then we've also seen the advent of the larger funds, such as NEA, and I think what you've really seen i…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Smaller venture funds will increasingly be expected to provide full-service support
“And I think it's incumbent, and it will be more and more incumbent on these funds and perhaps the size requirement will come down. Even as smaller funds, you really should be expected to be more full service.”
Insight
Board members should proactively resolve internal conflicts before advising CEOs
“I think it's incumbent on board members to really recognize when there are just little bits of conflict on the board or little bits of Differences in opinion. I won't even say conflict, and we should be proactively trying to help the CEO resolve those and get …”
Assertion Supported
Formlabs 3D printers cost $3,000 versus $100,000 legacy hardware
“You can buy a three D printer in the case of Formlabs for 3000 dollars that otherwise would have cost you almost a 100,000 dollars.”
Disclosure
Grayson's deal flow splits evenly between intros and proactive outreach
“So I'd say probably half the meetings I take are kind of opportunistic intros that they're sending to me. And the other half are really formed by the proactive outreach that I'm doing on my own.”
