Jesse Beyroutey

General Partner, IA Ventures · 1 appearance on the record.

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

Jesse Beyroutey leads seed and early-stage investments at IA Ventures, which he joined in 2011 after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. His investments include technology and data-driven companies such as Ironclad, Komodo Health, Wise, and DigitalOcean.

15statements → 3claims → 1claims resolved → 4.07/5average certainty → 2.33/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 18said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 assertions · 8 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 2 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 Jesse 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

Assertion Supported

IA Ventures partners make only 1 to 3 investments each per year

“We do One, two, three, each of the three of us at iVentures each year.”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 15:48 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

How they sound: speaking style how? →

201 words/min while actually speaking · 2.7 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Jesse Beyroutey: 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 24 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 4,085 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Jesse Beyroutey 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

pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10

setup questions received 45%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 8:50“Is that fair, or is that slightly glib and short-sighted, do you think?” ▶ 17:03“Do you ever feel the pressure to deploy, given maybe our lower cadence of kind of check writing compared to higher frequency funds? And do you see that in markets?” ▶ 9:56“Do you think that's a fair assessment? I actually do. I've invested in very small markets with the belief that the founder will leverage that platform to move into adjacent markets…”

when Jesse pushed back ▶ 10:55“As far as investing in a founder with the belief that they'll move into adjacent markets, I tend not to invest on that thesis simply because it's a matter of probability.” ▶ 11:08“Achieving dominance in one market generally does not lead to enough extra advantage in the next market to then dominate that one too. So you're compounding probabilities more than …”

What they said15 What others said18 Episodes1

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

Insight

Beyroutey: Abundant capital breeds lazy thinking and flawed rapid expansion

“Having a ton of capital can also cause a form of Just sort of lazy thinking where, for example, companies that have credibly high access to cheap capital and not enough discipline or first principles thinking might end up choosing to vertically integrate or to…”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 13:02 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Disclosure

Beyroutey: IA Ventures intentionally avoids growing fund size or scaling AUM

“We don't raise funds on a set and periodic cycle. And we've intentionally decided not to grow our fund size or assets under management”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 17:31 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Insight

Beyroutey: Startups compete with Big Tech by attacking niche flanks

“I think that that's fair in a whole host of markets, and so I think of that as a strong default, and I might compare that sentiment to the strong defaults in the nineties and early 2000 that you can't compete with Microsoft. And that's a strong default because…”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 8:54 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Insight

Beyroutey: Dominating one market rarely provides enough advantage for adjacent markets

“Achieving dominance in one market generally does not lead to enough extra advantage in the next market to then dominate that one too.”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 11:08 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Insight

Beyroutey: Early entry is the only strategy for outsized exit ownership

“Building ownership early is by and large, the only available strategy for having outsized ownership at exit.”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 21:44 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Insight

Beyroutey: Following news cycles is entertainment, not productivity

“I definitely believe that keeping up with the news and news cycle is more of a form of entertainment than a form of productivity.”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 30:00 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Beyroutey: Most demand for crypto assets today is speculative

“Today, most demand for crypto assets is speculative, and what makes it viable for natural demand, people who would actually be using the crypto asset for some sort of productive activity, is primarily a strong guarantee, like we were talking about before, that…”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 32:22 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Insight

Beyroutey: Market dominance opportunity inversely correlates with market scale

“Generally, the opportunity to dominate a market is inversely correlated with its scale, and I say generally because there are always exceptions to this, but you can look at a smaller scale market, and especially a smaller scale market today that has the opport…”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 10:26 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Insight

Beyroutey: Many viable companies should not raise venture capital

“There are a ton of companies that are worth building that Are not necessarily with the present level of information that the founder has a great high volatility upside call option that makes it a good idea to raise a bunch of capital and to scale it.”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 14:52 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Disclosure

Beyroutey: IA Ventures requires unanimous partner consensus despite individual lead autonomy

“Our model is that each one of us will lead an investment, and the person leading the investment is the ultimate decision-maker about whether or not we're going to pursue the investment. But in parallel, all of our investments are unanimous, so we don't do a vo…”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 19:59 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Disclosure

Beyroutey: IA Ventures turned TransferWise board decks into Google Docs for feedback

“I think the first company that I had the pleasure of working on at IA called TransferWise started doing this and we ended up doing it with a lot of our other portfolio companies. We made our board decks into a Google document”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 26:16 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Disclosure

Beyroutey: Passing on Plaid was my biggest investment mistake

“The company Plaid, I would count as one of my absolute biggest misses, and the mistake that I made was I looked at the product that they were thinking about building in the very beginning, which was consumer financial management and playing with location at th…”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 30:12 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Insight

Beyroutey: Board members should write as much as they read

“I would say spend time writing as much as you spend time reading, and that will cause you to ramp up as a board member and understand and be effective at knowing what the company does much faster than not.”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 30:56 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

Assertion Supported

IA Ventures partners make only 1 to 3 investments each per year

“We do One, two, three, each of the three of us at iVentures each year.”

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Jesse Beyroutey blocks social media and news apps during the workweek

“First of all, I deleted off of my phone every app or thing that I would unconsciously open and refresh. And that included every bit of social media and news platform. So I don't read them on my phone. And further, I stopped reading them during the week. So I s…”

Jesse Beyroutey Jul 22, 2019 ▶ 28:04 20VC: IA Ventures' Jesse Beyroutey on Game Theory and How It Impacts Investor Mindset, How To Avoid "The Pressure To Deploy" Today In Venture & Why Ownership Is The Single Most Important Parameter When Investing

The other half of the tape: Jesse Beyroutey's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 18 times in 6 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Roger Ehrenberg 7 Jason Boehmig 4 Michael Eisenberg 3 Harry Stebbings 1