Kevin Rose

Venture Partner, True Ventures · 1 appearance on the record.

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

founderinvestorhostoperator@kevinrose ↗kevinrose.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

Kevin Rose is a technology entrepreneur and venture investor. He is best known as the founder of Digg and Revision3, and serves as a venture partner at True Ventures.

10statements → 3claims → 2claims resolved → 4.3/5average certainty → 2.2/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 42said about them ↓

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

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

Kevin Rose: GV deployed its entire $254M annual fund into Uber

“I definitely know that largest GVs ever done is Uber, where it was two hundred and fifty four million, I believe. So it was our entire fund into one of their rounds.”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 6:55 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

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

4.4 / 5 directness 4.8 · coherence 4.6 · precision 4.2 · compression 3.7

answered every one of 18 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? →

236 words/min while actually speaking · 8.4 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 5,137 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 ▾ 5/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 3/10

setup questions received 60%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 7:05“Does that not go contra kind of entire portfolio thesis when you think about it?” ▶ 21:55“Do you not think the pressure of failure is a truly fundamental element to drive forward?”

when Kevin pushed back ▶ 22:22“I think of it in a different way. I've, I've changed my opinion on this over the years.”

What they said10 What others said42 Episodes1

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

Assertion Supported

Kevin Rose: GV deployed its entire $254M annual fund into Uber

“I definitely know that largest GVs ever done is Uber, where it was two hundred and fifty four million, I believe. So it was our entire fund into one of their rounds.”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 6:55 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

Assertion Supported

Kevin Rose: GV operated on an annually refreshed $300M allocation

“GB was a little bit different than your typical fund that is invested over the course of two to three years, whereas ours was refreshed annually. So we had a brand new you know, three hundred million dollar checkbook come January first.”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 7:57 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Kevin Rose refuses to invest in cryptocurrencies that merely tweak Bitcoin

“I'm not going to buy into a cryptocurrency that is just a somewhat slightly version or somewhat slightly tweaked version of Bitcoin. It has to be something that is truly novel and unique”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 10:31 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

Opinion

Kevin Rose: Virtual reality is a passing fad

“I've always disliked virtual reality. I've never been a fan of it. I wrote a blog post on a medium here, I guess a year and a half, two years ago about just virtual reality being a fad.”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 11:41 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

Insight

Kevin Rose: 24/7 hustle causes founder burnout and hurts long-term success

“If you're burning the kind of midnight oil, and you're staying up, and you're pushing your entire team extremely hard, it's okay to do that in very small, small Sprints, but I don't believe that is taking the long-term view. I think that I want my founders not…”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 22:27 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

Disclosure

Kevin Rose pushes for super pro-rata rights in follow-on funding rounds

“When I'm getting into those markets, I'll place kind of smallish bets initially, and then as I see progress, continue to increase those over time. And that's part of the reason why I go for pro rata rights as an angel, and oftentimes push for kind of a super p…”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 10:49 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

Disclosure

Kevin Rose's free fasting app reached #1 and logged 700k fasts

“Yeah. So, you know, it was just a simple little free app and we were able to quickly kind of shoot up in the rankings inside of the app store for the word fasting. So now if you go into the app store and Apple and type in fasting, we're kind of the number one …”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 17:16 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

Insight

Kevin Rose: Struggling to admit ignorance is a major founder handicap

“I think that the hardest thing for anyone is really to admit that you know, you don't know something. I think that's really hard for brilliant founders, and it can be a big crutch”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 30:50 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

Disclosure

Kevin Rose is investing in former Google HR head Laszlo Bock's startup

“Laszlo Bach, who was basically ran human resources at Google for 10 years, 10 plus years. He recently left Google about a year ago, and he has a new startup that I'll be investing in as well.”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 32:36 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

Opinion

Kevin Rose: Pro-rata rights for angel investors are rarely contentious

“I mean, not everyone's going to want to give it to you, but you know, we're talking small dollars here, so it's not like you're kind of taking up a large round. Right, exactly. So it's not that big a deal.”

Kevin Rose Jun 12, 2017 ▶ 11:16 20VC: Kevin Rose on Putting The Entire Fund Into Uber, The Future For Mobile & Whether Angels Should Have Super Pro-Rata Rights?

The other half of the tape: Kevin Rose's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 40 times in 15 episodes on 20VC. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 30 Tony Conrad 2 David Sze 2 Mike Maples 1 John Callaghan 1 Jason Fried 1 Gary Vaynerchuk 1 Gary Liu 1

Statements about Kevin Rose, by other people (2)

Opinion

Digg failed because its community became toxic while Reddit successfully evolved

“That was part of his success, but I think that that group of individuals actually became pretty trollish, quite honestly, by the end of it, and navigating how to succeed through that was very hard for Digg and for Kevin, and you watched someone like a Reddit c…”

David Sze Apr 19, 2021 ▶ 29:36 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function

Assertion Partly supported

Maples: Kevin Rose launched Digg for $1,500 over a weekend

“Kevin Rose had started Digg for 1500 dollars over a weekend, and so there's no technical risk there.”

Mike Maples Mar 24, 2023 ▶ 39:15 Mike Maples: Lessons from SVB; Crisis Management Tips; USD's Status as the Reserve Currency | E993 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings