Rob Lacher

Founding Partner, Visionaries Club · 1 appearance on the record.

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Robert Lacher is a European venture capital investor and the co-founder of Visionaries Club. He previously co-founded the venture fund La Famiglia and founded the fashion platform AMAZE, which was acquired by Zalando.

23statements → 9claims → 5claims resolved → 40%fully supported → 4.26/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → 4.2/5argument clarity · the sources →

2 supported 2 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 3 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 8 assertions · 1 opinion · 6 insights · 7 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 3 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 Rob 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
Lacher: La Famiglia Fund I Backed Deel, Personio, and Other Unicorns
“So we've invested in 30 companies. Many of them have turned unicorns or decacorns like Deal, Presonio, Shoko, Forto, where we've had the privilege to be seed investors.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 3:38 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Their most notable contradicted claim

Prediction Didn’t hold up
Lacher: Visionaries aims for 5 to 10 seed deals per year
“We want to rather have maybe five to 10 investments a year in a seed fund, spending time with the founders and then just having maybe 40 deals and just knowing maybe the name of one or two founders.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 18:54 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
0% certainty 3
50% certainty 4
83% 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? →

4.2 / 5 directness 4.2 · coherence 4.3 · precision 4.1 · compression 3.7

redirected or did not address 6 of 44 assessed questions (14%). 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? →

272 words/min while actually speaking · 9.9 um and uh per 1k words · 18.1 false starts per 1k · 38.5% of pauses land inside a clause

English is their second language (first language: German). These numbers measure fluency in English. They do not measure thought; the argument clarity score above is read from substance alone.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 10,044 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 →

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

Insight
Lacher: Poaching experienced VCs creates an average index fund
“If, you can do it super easy and say, look, I just poach from other funds. I hire people who have been three years in VC. They have the networks. They know how to look at deals. You just get An average index of all the other funds.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 13:34 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Lacher: European Series A venture market is a bloody red ocean
“So yeah, we think, you know, if you look at Europe when we started Visionaries, we thought Series A was pretty crowded. You have an incredible amount of funds with kind of a hundred to seven hundred million in fund size that typically enter Series A, but that …”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 22:06 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lacher: Two-thirds of European founders reject US multi-stage seed term sheets
“I see, to be honest, two thirds of the founders at seed stage that have those term sheets, rather going for European seed fund setup, because they want to keep the A-Round open to choose from those funds.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 33:24 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Lacher: Multi-stage funds always preempt Series A for top seed investments
“Everyone knows if the deal is amazing, they bloody preempt it.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 35:53 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Lacher: Venture Capital Is All-In, Part-Time VCs Fail Founders
“I think it's an either all in or not business because the moment you start hanging out maybe in southern France at your holiday home and tanning and only working three days a week, I think that moment you're not a good VC anymore because every founder will say…”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 1:07:39 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Lacher: European family businesses collectively represent Europe's Google
“If you take those family businesses together, I think this is our Google.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 52:45 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Lacher: La Famiglia's First Fund Achieved a 10x Return
“The fund is now at 10 times the money that we invested and it's doing well.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 5:05 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Lacher: VC candidates demanding high salaries lack entrepreneurial risk tolerance
“So if someone is asking for a high salary, that person is not willing to take risks. It's not willing to, it's not believing enough in the entrepreneurial spirit to really kind of build something essential”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 12:40 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Lacher: Visionaries Club trades low base salaries for higher carry
“We don't pay high salaries at Visionaries. I think if you go to some of the multi-stage funds in London, maybe you get twice the salary, but we're pretty generous with Kerry, and people know that they can build a career faster than at other funds if they perfo…”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 12:54 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Lacher: Visionaries targets 10–15% ownership in 80% of seed investments
“We say 80% of our seed portfolio is 10 to 15% ownership and 20% will leave room if they're exceptional teams”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 18:03 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lacher: Visionaries Club sources 60%-70% of deal flow via WhatsApp groups
“So the way we source deals, I'd say some 60, 70% are through our founder networks that we typically were operated in WhatsApp groups and that's kind of how they share deals”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 21:18 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Lacher: 90% of companies in Europe are family businesses
“What we have in Europe is, 90% of our companies are family businesses.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 52:29 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Lacher: La Famiglia Fund I Backed Deel, Personio, and Other Unicorns
“So we've invested in 30 companies. Many of them have turned unicorns or decacorns like Deal, Presonio, Shoko, Forto, where we've had the privilege to be seed investors.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 3:38 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Lacher: Never Compromise on Partnership Setup When Founding a VC Firm
“So the one thing you shouldn't do is compromise on the partnership setup, because it's a very, very long-term game.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 4:10 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Lacher: Visionaries Club Scaled to $600M AUM in Three Years
“We've built Visionaries within three years, a great fund, now six hundred million under management”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 5:44 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Lacher: Visionaries aims for 5 to 10 seed deals per year
“We want to rather have maybe five to 10 investments a year in a seed fund, spending time with the founders and then just having maybe 40 deals and just knowing maybe the name of one or two founders.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 18:54 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Lacher: Visionaries Club allocates 60% of seed fund to follow-on reserves
“We have 60% reserve in a seed fund to follow on.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 24:18 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Lacher: Visionaries Club Avoided Doing Many Secondaries During Market Peak
“We didn't do many secondaries, for example, in our portfolio, which would have been maybe attractive because we still believe those companies have such a great kind of journey ahead of them.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 43:54 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Lacher: BioNTech raised $130 million seed round led by Strüngmanns
“It was a hundred thirty million seed round led by the Strugmann brothers, who were basically farmer entrepreneurs.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 55:36 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Lacher: La Famiglia Started as a $40M Fund for 30 B2B Startups
“So that's how I started La Familia with a group of friends, which was a small, forty million angel fund back then that we invested into 30 B to B companies.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 2:05 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lacher: Visionaries Club's LPs are exclusively unicorn founders and family business owners
“Look, I think the main difference, if you look at visionaries, is that on, on our investor side, we only have successful entrepreneurs. On the one hand side, we have 30 unicorn founders that have built great digital companies, like the founders of Miro, UiPath…”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 20:03 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Lacher: Visionaries Club early growth fund enters rounds at ~$100M valuation
“The average entry price point for our early growth fund, it's really early, it's not growth, right? So it's, I would call early series B or late series A, it's around a hundred million.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 27:55 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Lacher: Visionaries Club Co-Invests With Multi-Stage Funds in 20% of Deals
“We team up a lot with multi-stage funds at seed. I'd say 20% of our deals.”
Rob Lacher Apr 7, 2023 ▶ 34:33 Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs USA | E999 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Rob Lacher: How I Scaled to $600M AUM; Hiring Tips for VCs; Venture Capital in Europe vs U Apr 7, 2023 45m
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