Opinion
Legacy VCs retired rather than adjust to higher market competition
“A lot of very famous investors retire, and I don't blame them at all because the game on the field has definitely changed and it's far more competitive than it was in their day. And you're chasing around people trying to earn the opportunity to invest. And whe…”
Opinion
VCs maintaining unadjusted peak valuations are delusional and lose LP trust
“It is some level of delusion. If you actually believe That all of these companies are worth what they were worth six months ago, then and you're saying that with a straight face to your limited partners, and I think you're losing trust, right? A hundred percen…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Recent crypto fund vintages will produce a high number of zeros
“I think we're going to see a lot of zeros pop out of the vintages of these crypto funds that we've seen recently.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Newer crossover funds that scaled rapidly face an imminent market reckoning
“Anyone that either doesn't have their existing track record of the last, whatever, 10 years attached to the name of their existing firm, or anyone that scaled well beyond what they had, you know, in the prior five years, in the last two years, I think anyone t…”
Assertion Supported
Private growth deals hit 300x ARR while public markets peaked at 20x
“We were this summer seeing businesses get done at 200 times, 300 times ARR. When the public markets were saying like at best you could trade at, I don't know, 20 times forward revenue or something.”
Insight
Using sharp elbows to box out co-investors alienates founders long-term
“And the ones that don't do it well are the ones that really view this as out of the money call options. And if the opportunity presents itself, we're going to try to get sharp elbowed and box out other groups. And I've yet to see that really work. It might wor…”
Insight
VCs should not haggle over $10 million valuation differences to win deals
“Well, it's definitely informed my, if you wanna be in the company within the margin, just find a way to get into it and don't get too hung up on the ten million here, ten million there.”
Opinion
Top marketing talent chooses consumer over B2B due to larger budgets
“Because if you were good if you cared about marketing and you were really good, you would go into consumer because the budgets are much bigger and you get an opportunity to be much more Creative and come up with things like Superbowl advertising and all that.”
Prediction Held up
Bartlett predicts the tech IPO drought will end by late 2016
“I'm optimistic over the course of the next six months or so this drought that we've had over the last quarter in companies going public. I think we're going to see that short itself up,”
Assertion Supported
High past valuations stall Series B through Series D deal flow
“There aren't a ton of deals getting done right now. That's the Series C, Series D, maybe a little Series B stage. And so what you are seeing is there's a dearth of opportunities that even exist right now because those companies have raised so much capital and …”
Insight
A disciplined valuation process matters more than the markdowns themselves
“Just having a disciplined structure of how you're doing it, I think is more important than actually taking down the marks themselves.”
Disclosure
Logan Bartlett initially expected Braze to be acquired for $300M-$400M
“At the time I was convinced that the most likely outcome was that it was going to be a 300 or four hundred million dollar acquisition by sales or Adobe or someone like that. And so I felt like I had to be really disciplined on the entry price because it just s…”
What-if
Battery missed Snowflake by over-indexing on early customer complaints
“If we had looked at the founding team and the infrastructure they built, I think we would have looked past the individual customer feedback, a data point here, a data point there, that said, hey, this is still not quite ready for prime time, and instead focuse…”
Insight
Ousting a CEO via board vote signals failed venture capital governance
“If ever you're going to the votes and using your role as a board member to oust the CEO, something else is broken down along the way in the journey and the relationship you built with the founder and the rest of the board.”
Insight
VCs can effectively handle at most eight to ten board seats
“I think that the way that I want to be able to do it, I think it's probably eight to 10 is what the people I've admired have been able to scale up to something like that and still be active and pragmatic about their relationships with the people they work with…”
Opinion
Logan Bartlett names Benchmark's Eric Vishria as an A++ board member
“The one that I've internalized the most from and that I just have infinite amounts of respect for is Eric Vishria from Benchmark. Eric and I worked together on the Amplitude board, and now we have a new company Acuity MD together. And Eric is just, A++ as a bo…”
Insight
Early-stage startups should keep PR in-house rather than hiring external agencies
“Even if it doesn't work, you're much better in-housing it than throwing it over to someone else and having them give a, you know, probably not their best performance and trying to get you placement.”
Opinion
Bartlett: Celebrity VCs prioritize personal brand over actual investing
“For the first time, it seems like there is more celebrity there are celebrity VCs to some extent, where the personality is first and foremost, and then the investment is secondary to that.”
Insight
Bartlett: Market compression is funding startups that were previously unfundable
“At the end of the day, that kind of creates two different areas that are compressing into a single one. And so it does lead to a lot more funding of companies that maybe four or five years ago wouldn't have gotten funding.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bartlett: Just 10 deals drive 97% of annual venture capital returns
“At the end of the day, 2000 companies in a given year will get funded from venture investors and 200 of those will probably be done by firms that, that We would consider peers of ours and quality investors. And at the end of the day, 10, 10 of those will drive…”
Opinion
Sequoia and Founders Fund excel at building deep ownership in winners
“I think Sequoia has always done a good job of this. I think Founders Fund has done a good job of this.”
Opinion
Venture capital institutionalized more in the past five years than previous 25
“Venture has been a pretty cottage asset class, right, for the last, whatever, 30 years, and it's been institutionalized more in the last, you know, five than it had in the previous 25, in my opinion”
Insight
Venture capital has evolved into hyper-personalized offerings for founders
“It's, I think the venture capital world that we live in today is is more akin, we went from a generation, and I, I've made this analogy, that we were in the generation of Broadcast television, right? Where there were only a handful of channels and what you wer…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Redpoint partners must build distinct individual brands to stand out
“I think it means that each individual at red point has to stand for something and be known in some way, shape, or form for what it is that they do to help rise above the noise.”
