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Ezra Galston

Founding Partner, Starting Line · 1 appearance on the record.

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

investorfounderauthor@EzraMoGee ↗startingline.vc ↗

Ezra Galston is the founder and Partner at Starting Line, a seed and early-stage venture capital firm. Prior to launching Starting Line, he spent over five years as a Principal at Chicago Ventures and has backed companies such as Cameo, Factor, SpotHero, and BloomNation.

15statements → 4claims → 3claims resolved → 33%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 1.53/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 10said about them ↓

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

1 prediction · 3 assertions · 2 opinions · 2 insights · 7 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction 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 Ezra 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
Galston predicts in 2015 that Bitcoin will succeed long-term
“I love Bitcoin. I've spent a lot of time looking into it. You know, I'll take Ben Horowitz's side of the Felix Salmon bet. I think it'll fly long term.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 21:56 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Galston: One-third of the Fortune 500 is headquartered in the Midwest
“A third of the entire Fortune 500 is right here in the Midwest.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 7:29 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
25% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

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

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

4.4 / 5 directness 4.8 · coherence 4.7 · precision 4 · compression 3.7

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? →

265 words/min while actually speaking · 32.9 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,712 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 85%

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

Prediction Held up
Galston predicts in 2015 that Bitcoin will succeed long-term
“I love Bitcoin. I've spent a lot of time looking into it. You know, I'll take Ben Horowitz's side of the Felix Salmon bet. I think it'll fly long term.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 21:56 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Assertion Contradicted
Galston: One-third of the Fortune 500 is headquartered in the Midwest
“A third of the entire Fortune 500 is right here in the Midwest.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 7:29 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Galston: Chicago is Uber and Instacart's second or third largest market
“If you ask Uber or Instacart, what, you know, their second or third most important market is, it's almost inevitably Chicago.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 8:15 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Disclosure
Chicago Ventures avoids leading SF and LA rounds without local proximity
“For kind of our investments in SF for LA, we're traditionally not the lead investor because we do like to lead that, leave that to someone who is a little bit closer, can be a little bit more hands-on.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 9:09 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Insight
Galston: B2B marketplaces offer massive transaction frequency from enterprise client hosting
“If you think about, like, Deloitte or BCG or Google, like, they're throwing, you know, they're hosting clients every single night, 365 days of the year, right? So there's actually a huge amount of frequency potential even in B to B marketplaces”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 11:13 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Insight
Galston: Marketplace supply becomes sticky when workers double their traditional earnings
“And if they're making double, then that's great news, and that starts to really excite me, because then I just know they're going to be sticky.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 12:03 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Opinion
Galston rates Etsy stock between a sell and hold at $1.6B
“So I actually just looked it up. It's basically at 1.6 billion, which is where it kind of went out. I'd say somewhere between a sell and a hold.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 22:53 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Disclosure
Galston: Poker startup CardRunners grew to 15,000 customers in 18 months
“When I joined him, I think I was, like, the second employee. He had maybe 500 customers and, like, 500,000 dollars a year in revenue. Like a very small startup. And 18 months later, we had 15,000 paying customers.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 4:08 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Disclosure
Galston funded his first angel investments using professional poker earnings
“I'd taken a lot of the money that I had from the poker world, and a lot of my friends, as they kind of churned out from the world of professional poker, they would start up companies, and I invested in some of them.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 6:04 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Disclosure
Chicago Ventures' $40M first fund made 39 investments averaging $500K
“The first fund was forty million dollars. We made 39 investments out of that fund. Average ticket size, like first check-in, around 500,000 dollars, maybe slightly under that.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 7:12 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Opinion
Galston: Bill Gurley's 10 marketplace drivers essay is the absolute Bible
“The Bible here which I'm sure you've read the Bible here is, is Bill Gurley's kind of 10 marketplace drivers blog posts that he wrote in like, it's the absolute Bible. And if you want to even, you know, have like a working knowledge of digital marketplace busi…”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 10:11 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Disclosure
Galston broke into venture capital without a network or sending resumes
“I never sent a resume to a single VC and I had no network.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 19:18 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Disclosure
Galston cold-emailed VCs a mapped relationship graph of his gaming network
“What I did is I created like this interest or this relationship graph where I put myself in the middle and I put all the different players in the gaming world around me and showed who I knew, like what executive level, how like the relationships developed. And…”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 19:34 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Disclosure
Chicago Ventures invested in Attendant, a death and funeral tech startup
“And the other is a company called attendant. So I guess the latter was probably more recent. So attendant is a company that's building a suite of tools for the death and funeral industry. So we spoke about differentiation earlier. So I invested in that one bec…”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 25:28 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures
Assertion Partly supported
Galston: The global frozen food market is worth $200 billion
“Frozen foods is a much smaller space than delivery, but it's still a two hundred billion dollar space.”
Ezra Galston Aug 17, 2015 ▶ 17:16 20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventures

The other half of the tape: Ezra Galston's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 10 times in 2 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 6Steven Galanis 2Samir Kaji 2

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00418120152016201720182019episodesmentions
01120152016201720182019episodes it came up in
0040.58120152016201720182019episodesmentions per episode
2019 8 mentions in 1 episode
2015 2 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC 063: What It Takes To Standout In A Crowded Market with Ezra Galston @ Chicago Ventu Aug 17, 2015 20m
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