John Borthwick

Founder & CEO, Betaworks · 1 appearance on the record.

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

John Borthwick is the founder and CEO of Betaworks, a New York startup studio, venture fund, and accelerator. He has incubated companies including Bitly and Giphy, while investing in platforms like Tumblr and Twitter.

11statements → 5claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.45/5average certainty → 2.64/5average debate potential → 3.9/5argument clarity · the sources → 10said about them ↓

3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 4 assertions · 4 opinions · 2 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are 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 John 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

Borthwick: Under 40% of YC and Techstars startups raise $750k within one year

“I believe the exact numbers are, is 36 for Techstars and 38 for YC.”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 32:29 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

100% certainty 3

100% 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? →

3.9 / 5 directness 3.9 · coherence 4 · precision 3.6 · compression 3.2

redirected or did not address 4 of 24 assessed questions (17%). Watch them ▸

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? →

221 words/min while actually speaking · 8 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 5,220 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 ▾ 3/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 3/10

setup questions received 65%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 6:26“And why are you skeptical of the current VC model?” “how would you then position then a Betaworks fund, and how would it solve the inherent problems in the archaic structure that we presented there?” ▶ 14:44“What are the inherent challenges of scaling balance sheet capital to the extent that you'd like?”

when John pushed back ▶ 3:29“so you've got to call it Betaworks, ok?” ▶ 29:22“Yeah, I don't think, I don't think you should read that. I disagree there with the headline, and I haven't read the post, so maybe Fred fleshed out differently in the post, but I d…”

What they said11 What others said10 Episodes1

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

Opinion

Borthwick: Venture capital industry suffers from widespread mediocrity

“There are extraordinary VCs out there. But there's also, I think, a lot of mediocrity in the business, and I think the returns overall in the VC business are indicative of a business that's going through change.”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 10:22 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

Insight

Borthwick: Tech startup power is shifting from product back to distribution

“I think in the last five to eight years, because of many of the reasons we discussed earlier, is distribution has been available through the app store, and so a lot of power has moved to product. I think it is now moving back to distribution,”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 30:00 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

Assertion Supported

Borthwick: Under 40% of YC and Techstars startups raise $750k within one year

“I believe the exact numbers are, is 36 for Techstars and 38 for YC.”

Opinion

Borthwick: Time Warner Has Failed to Adapt to Evolving Digital Video Distribution

“They are not a technology company, and they've really struggled, you know, over the years to understand how they interface with new forms of distribution, new technology, and how they integrate that both into their business to make their business run better, b…”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 5:29 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Borthwick: Traditional VC has failed to adapt to market shifts

“And so I think that what we have today is that the market is actually changing and I can talk about that in detail, but I think that generally the market is changing and has changed over the last five, 10 years. And I think the VC hasn't adapted to that becaus…”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 7:05 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

Opinion

Borthwick: Venture capital fund cycles must be longer than 10 to 12 years

“I think that they have to be longer. I think so. I do. Because I think that the fundamental trends that we are working, you know, the transformation that technology is driving in our society is much longer than that.”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 18:41 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Borthwick: Conversational AI and frontier tech will take 5 to 10 years to mature

“Well, you know what? Is that I wouldn't have expected them to be anything but disappointing, because they are going to take, it is going to take five to 10 years for us to figure out how to talk to machines.”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 20:20 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

Opinion

Borthwick: The Washington Post succeeded under Jeff Bezos rather than becoming a plaything

“And then you match with that what he's done personally with the Washington Post. I mean, I think that the Post is, you know, was one of the single best sources of journalism in And, you know, most people expected after he acquired it that it would become sort …”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 29:01 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

Assertion Supported

Borthwick: Giphy reaches over 100 million daily users

“Because last year, you know, we raised a lot of money for Givy, and Givy's tapping more than a hundred million people every day.”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 12:11 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

Insight

Borthwick: Balance sheet capital does not scale effectively for VC

“That said is, is that it doesn't scale very effectively. And so balance sheet based capital because for a whole series of reasons I can dig into. So funds are really good at that.”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 13:15 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

Assertion Supported

Borthwick: Time Warner's Corporate HQ Is a Thin Holding Company of Lawyers

“Time Warner is a big company. It's in essence a holding company. Most people don't realize that, but it's, you know, the corporate entity is, is fairly thin, and it's mostly inhabited by lawyers and accountants, the corporate headquarters, and all of the sort …”

John Borthwick Mar 6, 2017 ▶ 4:58 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year

The other half of the tape: John Borthwick's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 10 times in 7 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4 Peter Rojas 3 Nicholas Chirls 1 Gary Liu 1 Adam Leibsohn 1