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Seth Levine

Co-founder & Partner, Foundry · 1 appearance on the record.

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investorfounderauthor@sether ↗LinkedIn ↗sethlevine.com ↗

Seth Levine is a co-founder and partner at the venture capital firm Foundry. He is also a co-founder of the Pledge 1% movement and co-author of The New Builders.

13statements → 5claims → 3claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 4.08/5average certainty → 2.23/5average debate potential → 12said about them ↓

2 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 3 assertions · 3 opinions · 2 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 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 Seth 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
Levine: Foundry Group operates with zero analysts or associates
“We, all the partners do their own work. We don't have any analysts or associates.”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 13:36 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'

How they sound: speaking style how? →

248 words/min while actually speaking · 44.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Seth Levine: only 2 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.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,585 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 ▾ 0/10
pushed back at the host 1/10
setup questions received 70%

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

Insight
Levine: Venture capital is fundamentally an unscalable business
“Venture capital is not a scalable business by any stretch of the imagination.”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 13:23 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Prediction Partly held up
Levine: Foundry Group will cap all future funds at $225M
“We knew that that was going to be the number for the rest of our time as investors, because we'd always said in our fundraising process that we were going to raise a series of funds. They were all going to look exactly the same and in terms of dollar size. And…”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 17:57 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Opinion
Levine: Silicon Valley location is not required for top VC deal flow
“No, unequivocally no, and I think, I hope Foundry would serve as a case study that that's not the case.”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 10:01 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Opinion
Levine: Monthly board meetings chew up valuable time for startups
“When you have too much time on your hands and maybe a little bit too much proximity in some cases to your investments as a venture capitalist, you have a tendency to feel like you're doing a lot of good by, you know, swinging by for a day, for example, or hold…”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 13:57 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Insight
Levine: Financial independence makes founders more passionate, not less
“We sometimes talk about entrepreneurs who've had, you know, had their first win, and maybe they're not as worried about, you know, buying that house that they want, or, you know, the ability to send their kids to college. And in a lot of cases, they become eve…”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 20:26 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Opinion
Levine: AngelList syndicates enhance the traditional VC model
“No, I think that they enhance the traditional VC model, and it's great to see, I talked about the democratization of entrepreneurship, I'm equally excited and passionate about the democratization of capital.”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 25:19 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Disclosure
Levine: Foundry Group allocates only one-third of investments to California
“Only about a third of our investing has been in California. A third has been in, in Colorado, and a third has been spread really across the rest of the US which is our investment, you know, target market, the full US market.”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 12:44 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Assertion Supported
Levine: Foundry Group operates with zero analysts or associates
“We, all the partners do their own work. We don't have any analysts or associates.”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 13:36 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: Enterprise software will be rebuilt for small businesses
“There are a lot of technologies that can That have been built for larger businesses that now can be rebuilt for smaller businesses and really impact the U S economy and small businesses and the proprietors of those businesses, their lives in a positive way.”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 22:41 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Levine: Brad Feld was the top performer at Mobius Venture Capital
“Brad, of course, had been really the top performer at Mobius and so he was integral in that process”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 8:05 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Disclosure
Levine invested his entire life savings to launch Foundry Group
“I'd really, I mean, it truly had put up my entire life savings to back my portion of the startup cost for Foundry.”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 17:22 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Assertion Supported
Levine: Over 30% of web traffic is ad-blocked in some countries
“My most recent investment is a company called SourcePoint, which is helping publishers around the web deal with the fact that 30% or more in some countries that their traffic is ad blocked.”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 25:34 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'
Disclosure
Slack and Voxer are Foundry Group's top tools after email
“Slack and Voxer, for example, probably the two most used pieces of technology inside of Foundry after email.”
Seth Levine Aug 26, 2015 ▶ 14:47 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business'

The other half of the tape: Seth Levine's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 12 times in 4 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 8Ryan McIntyre 3Jason Mendelson 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0051102201520162017episodesmentions
012201520162017episodes it came up in
002.5152201520162017episodesmentions per episode
2017 10 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
2015 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' Aug 26, 2015 21m
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