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Mark Peter Davis

Founder & Managing Partner, Interplay · 1 appearance on the record.

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investorfounderauthorhost@mpd ↗LinkedIn ↗mpd.me ↗

Mark Peter Davis is the founder and managing partner of Interplay, an early-stage venture firm and startup platform based in New York City. He authored the guide The Fundraising Rules and hosts the podcast Innovation with Mark Peter Davis.

14statements → 2claims → 1claims resolved → 3.79/5average certainty → 2.21/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 2said about them ↓

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

2 assertions · 11 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is 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 Mark 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
Davis: Standard venture capital equity target is 20 percent per round
“I think in the kind of well-developed venture markets, the fat part of the bell curve is sitting around a 20% buy at every round. And, you know, for very hot deals, you're looking at something as low as five percent, and for less attractive deals, as high as 3…”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 19:58 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis

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

4.3 / 5 directness 4.4 · coherence 4.8 · precision 3.9 · compression 3.6

answered every one of 8 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? →

266 words/min while actually speaking · 24.7 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,889 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 ▾ 1/10
pushed back at the host 1/10
setup questions received 85%

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

Disclosure
Davis: Interplay prioritizes investing in founders he wants to hang out with
“I am very much focused on people I want to hang out with, right? Taking it to a new level, a personal relationship,”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 8:58 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: Founder-VC personal relationships are a high-beta strategy favoring high EQ
“I think it's a dangerous zone. It's a higher beta scenario. It's either going to make you worse off or far better off. If you've got high emotional IQ, integrity and pretty good social skills, you're almost always going to be better off.”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 9:56 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: VCs calculate valuation backward from runway needs and target ownership
“We ask ourselves, how much of the company are we gonna be able to buy, ah, for the investment that they need? And the investment they need is 12, is 18 to 24 months of runway. So, you do the financial model, you say, we need a million dollars to take this 18 m…”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 18:12 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Assertion Supported
Davis: Standard venture capital equity target is 20 percent per round
“I think in the kind of well-developed venture markets, the fat part of the bell curve is sitting around a 20% buy at every round. And, you know, for very hot deals, you're looking at something as low as five percent, and for less attractive deals, as high as 3…”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 19:58 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: Raising VC for small businesses destroys founder returns
“There are a lot of companies out there, founders who could build very small, successful businesses but take venture capital because thinking it's the only option, and basically destroy their return.”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 22:58 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: Entrepreneurship is a mentorship sport requiring key advisors
“There's a tremendous amount of knowledge required to be a successful entrepreneur. It is truly a mentorship sport. And if you don't have the right advisors around you, the right people to support you can fail for things that are very avoidable.”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 2:09 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: Startup success requires high decision accuracy on small choices
“In my perspective, it's not a marathon. It's And each step represents one simple, small, usually easy decision. The key is being able to make a pretty high, have a pretty high hit rate of making a good set of decisions against those small decisions. And if you…”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 2:35 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: Startup ecosystems are uniquely non-zero-sum and collaborative
“Uniquely the startup community, unlike most of the other business worlds I have experienced, people benefit, are actually motivated and incentivized to help each other. In the startup world, we're not fighting over zero-sum games, like, you know, three compani…”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 3:52 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: Founders can hack mentorship networks using top-tier service providers
“I think the way to hack all of it, if you don't have either of those available to you, is to surround yourself by Tier A service providers.”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 5:09 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: Founders fighting during pitch meetings is a frequent red flag
“So I'll add one thing that's an easy one that you'd be surprised how often it happens, is founders fighting during the meeting.”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 10:36 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: Basic organizational skills separate the best startup operators from the worst
“Increasingly in my career I'm finding that to be a pretty high bar that filters out a lot of folks. And it's shocking because it's some of the easiest stuff to get right, but it's separating a lot of the best operators from the worst.”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 12:09 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Davis: Large VC firms average 10 people and hire existing contacts
“The VCs don't always have extensive recruiting departments like a big company. You know, a big VC is usually a 10 person firm. So when they decide they're going to need another person, they're going to usually, especially the smaller firms, just look for someo…”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 15:22 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: Aggressive valuation asks reduce competitive bidding in startup fundraising
“So I think starting with aggressive asks can get people turned off pretty quickly and you can reduce the, you can change the dynamic and take bidders away. Whereas if you get a whole bunch of people bidding at an average valuation You may end up with a very hi…”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 19:28 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis
Insight
Davis: Venture capital is best for large market land grabs
“If you've got a big opportunity and you need a lot of capital to land grab, you have to take the capital and go for it. The key is to get alignment.”
Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 ▶ 23:51 20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis

The other half of the tape: Mark Peter Davis's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 2

Every mention by year

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2015 2 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC 008: Startup 101 with Mark Peter Davis Jan 28, 2015 17m
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