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Sarah Kunst

Founder & Managing Director, Cleo Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

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

investorfounderjournalistoperator@sarahkunst ↗LinkedIn ↗cleocap.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Sarah Kunst is the founder and Managing Director of Cleo Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm. She previously founded the fitness app Proday and served as a senior advisor at Bumble.

15statements → 7claims → 3claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 3.8/5average certainty → 2.13/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →

2 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 6 assertions · 6 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 4 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 Sarah 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
Kunst: LP defaults on venture capital calls are extremely rare during crises
“It's incredibly, incredibly rare, even during the 2008 financial crisis that investors refuse to allocate to their venture funds, unless they have actually gone bankrupt themselves, right?”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 6:14 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
50% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
100% 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

How they sound: speaking style how? →

255 words/min while actually speaking · 0 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Sarah Kunst: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 15 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 6,320 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Sarah Kunst is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 3/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 3/10
setup questions received 60%

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

Disclosure
Kunst: Cleo Capital targets US pre-seed valuations between $5M and $10M
“Anything much lower than five million in the US for even a very early round, it's a little bit hard for me to understand and get excited about unless it's an accelerator, which is a very different way of giving away equity, because I worry that you're not goin…”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 13:14 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Insight
Kunst: Flat growth during a sector tailwind signals poor startup execution
“If Zoom's daily average users went from ten million to two hundred million, right, which is a twenty-x increase, I don't expect you to be at two hundred million daily active users if you are a seed stage startup, but if you are a startup in a similar space and…”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 20:50 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Insight
Kunst: Elite graduates increasingly view startup founding as a resume box check
“Entrepreneurship used to be perceived as a massive risk, and now I think for a certain segment of people, they see it as just another box you check, and if you happen to be really good at it, great, but it's just something you have to do the same way that you …”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 17:19 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kunst: The vast majority of early VC scout investors were men
“I was seeing all these scout investors across a bunch of different funds, and the vast, vast, vast majority were men”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 4:29 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Assertion Supported
Kunst: LP defaults on venture capital calls are extremely rare during crises
“It's incredibly, incredibly rare, even during the 2008 financial crisis that investors refuse to allocate to their venture funds, unless they have actually gone bankrupt themselves, right?”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 6:14 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Insight
Kunst: Founders risk pricing out investors who rarely circle back after passing
“If you set the price, you have no idea if that price is going to be attractive to a buyer, right, to an investor, and you might find out too late that everybody loves your deal, but they feel like it's too expensive, so they all pass, and once investors pass, …”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 14:10 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Assertion Partly supported
Kunst: Female founders receive under 10% of venture capital
“When women are still getting like, 10% of all invested capital or something, and I think it's a lower number than that, it's hard to have an argument that like, oh, women, it's been so easy.”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 15:38 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Insight
Kunst: Economic downturns weed out non-masochists from the startup founder pool
“Being a founder is a little bit of a masochistic career path. And so if you're not a masochist, this is a great time to go do a job that like feels a thousand times better on a day-by-day basis.”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 17:44 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kunst predicted in May 2020 that startup markets would normalize by 2022
“And then assuming that in two years for startups that we will be Relatively close to back to normal, 24 months from now.”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 22:36 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kunst: Sidelined investors view the 2020 downturn as a necessary market right-sizing
“And there's a lot of money that had been sitting on the sidelines for the last Six, 1218 months, maybe still investing a little bit here or there, but their general feeling was the market's overheated, and now they're seeing a right sizing of that, and they're…”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 24:00 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Insight
Kunst: Market disruptions make elite talent significantly more receptive to direct recruitment
“And I think, especially right now, there's a lot of people who are just like, great, I'll do a 20 minute call. Why not? Great. I hate my job. Great. I just got laid off. Great. I've secretly hated my business partner for 10 years, and I think this is a good si…”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 26:54 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kunst: Greater diversity in VC fund managers drives higher financial returns
“I'd like to see more diversity in fund managers, and the reason for that is simple. It drives better returns”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 28:01 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Disclosure
Kunst: Upfront transparency prevents LPs from demanding a traditional GP commit
“Almost every LP that I've ever talked to, I'm incredibly upfront about that. I'm like, look, yeah, I'm super broke. And they're like, okay, that makes sense. I'm like, okay, great. And no one's ever pushed me on an LP commit, right?”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 29:14 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Insight
Kunst: Angel investors should not demand ten meetings for a $25,000 check
“You want to be an easy check and easy doesn't mean you're stupid. It doesn't mean that you write checks for everybody, but it means that you're not trying to take 10 meetings to write a 25,000 dollar check.”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 32:36 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
Assertion Supported
Kunst: A bidet startup hit $500,000 in daily sales during 2020 shortages
“One of the bidet companies was doing a 500,000 dollars A day in sales for a while during that, right?”
Sarah Kunst May 15, 2020 ▶ 19:28 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Mark May 15, 2020 28m
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