Matt Mazzeo

Managing Director, Lowercase Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

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

Matt Mazzeo is a Managing Director at Lowercase Capital, where he leads seed and Series A investments. He manages a portfolio that includes companies such as Uber, Twitter, Stripe, and Optimizely.

14statements → 6claims → 4claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 3.93/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 28said about them ↓

3 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 4 assertions · 1 opinion · 4 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 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 Matt 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

Mazzeo: Y Combinator shares detailed background notes on investors with founders

“I think one of the fantastic things about YC and what Paul and Sam have built is that they, ah, they expose entrepreneurs to more information than ever before. That's not just the deal making terms. That's background on the investors that they're getting into …”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 10:46 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

50% 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? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 4.4 · precision 3.9 · compression 3.7

answered every one of 25 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? →

270 words/min while actually speaking · 32.6 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 5,920 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 ▾ 2/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10

setup questions received 85%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 17:25“Do you ever get the feeling that just by filling a diary, it is potentially busy, but not productive?” ▶ 11:49“So where do you stand on your location then, being in LA? Do you sometimes feel that you potentially miss out?” ▶ 19:50“How do you deal with that long feedback loop?”

when Matt pushed back ▶ 3:01“Which is frightening, which is frightening, Harry.” ▶ 6:43“You're not wearing a suit right now, Harry?”

What they said14 What others said28 Episodes1

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

Assertion Supported

Mazzeo: Y Combinator shares detailed background notes on investors with founders

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 10:46 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Insight

Mazzeo: Cheap capital has muddled follow-on funding as a startup success signal

“Follow on funding is something that today because of the fundraising environment and cheap and cheap access to capital, You're seeing perhaps a little too much exuberance in terms of like the fall on financing. So that, that signal has gotten a little bit mudd…”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 19:59 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Opinion

Mazzeo: Venture Capital Firms Can No Longer Rely Solely On Sand Hill Road

“I don't think the VC of today can hang behind a Sand Hill Road address anymore, and pretend like that brand will become, or maintain its supremacy In this ecosystem.”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 9:44 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Mazzeo: Chris Sacca walked away from tens of millions over 'icky' deals

“Watched him walk away from tens of millions of dollars repeatedly because he didn't feel right about, and it felt icky to him in that investment. Actually, that's the only, like, that's the only red flag no black ball that we have is if an investment makes us …”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 32:14 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Insight

Mazzeo: Venture capital is shifting toward public personality and thought leadership

“Increasingly, I think we're seeing, we've been talking a little bit about this, Harry, like that shift in venture towards being more of a personality and expressing yourself and not being you know, a wilting lily and sort of going out there. And being more fro…”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 7:42 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Insight

Mazzeo: Product Hunt Is a Critical Ecosystem for Seed VC

“Product Hunt is a community I've been a huge supporter of, like you, and sort of it's a, it's an ecosystem that I love, and it turned out to be a really important one for early stage venture, because that's where you find a bunch of really interesting companie…”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 15:11 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Assertion Supported

Mazzeo: Andreessen Horowitz modeled its VC platform team on CAA

“As you've seen firms build out and scale up, And hire a lot of people to sort of better help, largely based on the CAA model in Andreessen's case to better help service clients by surrounding them with experts in hiring and marketing and distribution and busin…”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 25:21 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Prediction Partly held up

Mazzeo: Lowercase will build software to source portfolio beta testers

“What you're going to see us try to do over the next few years is build out scalable versions of that, that help, help portfolio companies from like, how do we get a first few thousand beta testers on our platform playing with a product prior to release?”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 25:38 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Insight

Mazzeo: Venture capital is a lonely career built on defending non-consensus deals

“This career is the venture career, even if you're part of a partnership, can be a lonely one. You're often standing out on a ledge defending investments when people still think they're crazy, and often the best ones are and you sort of have to defend that”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 28:10 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Disclosure

Mazzeo: Lowercase Capital evaluates pro-rata follow-ons as brand new deals

“Mob Crush, live streaming, mobile games. We did the seed there, but we followed on into another round of funding. We treat all of those following and pro rata opportunities. As a, as separate investments in, in terms of our thinking of whether to do them or no…”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 33:35 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Prediction Held up

Mazzeo in 2016: Interactive live streaming integrated with mobile games will explode

“I think people really underestimate layering video content in context around games and apps, and I think of those mobile games that people spend so much time in as the formats of the future, and so we really don't think about them as, like, as a format, but it…”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 34:13 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Mazzeo: Lowercase's best deal flow comes from portfolio and passed founders

“That's where we see most of our high profile, our most successful deal flow comes from the existing portfolio and entrepreneurs that even entrepreneurs that we pass on that that send us deals.”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 21:24 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Disclosure

Mazzeo: Lowercase launched text-based beta testing platform Lowercase Alpha

“The product called lowercase apple, which is just a text message group that anybody can subscribe to, and get products every week or two. That are still in early test flight mode that are generally alphas or betas of products.”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 26:12 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

Disclosure

Mazzeo: Lowercase Capital operates without an office with three remote employees

“We don't have an office. I work from home. I had three people a foot away from me at CA, and today we have three people spread across you know, a few cities in in lowercase”

Matt Mazzeo Mar 14, 2016 ▶ 29:06 20VC: Lowercase's Matt Mazzeo on Being Chris Sacca's Partner and The 3 KPIs to Successful Investing

The other half of the tape: Matt Mazzeo's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 27 times in 13 episodes on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 20 Joe Thomas 2 Jonathan Abrams 1 Emil Michael 1 David Tisch 1 Clinton Foy 1 Charles Hudson 1