Disclosure
Five companies represent 93% of Original Capital's deployed capital
“Despite the fact that we've written over 50 checks a day and made investments in 42 different companies, Five of those companies account for 93% of our capital today.”
Insight
Early founder secondaries misalign incentives and deter prospective investors
“Where I do get concerned is like when you have these early series BC runs and founders are taking large percentages of our ownership off the table. That can be quite concerning because I think that it's not a good formula for a long-term success, especially if…”
Insight
Compressed timelines lead founders to bypass dedicated seed funds
“I think what I am seeing though, is the time between those seed rounds in the series A's getting compressed. And as a result, I think founders are actually choosing to, in certain cases, bypass seed funds that can only diverse seed rounds and really go target,…”
Insight
Successful tech companies must become distribution-centric, not product-centric
“The general model for successful tech companies is that they become distribution centric rather than product centric.”
Insight
Enterprise search is solved by targeting specific interactions, not search bars
“Where in his opinion, if you really wanted to solve the problem of enterprise search, it was actually, you go narrow, not broad. Search isn't actually a text box anymore. It's the interactions that people internally or externally are having with the informatio…”
Insight
Narrative matters more than KPIs in successful fundraising
“For the best businesses ever, and also for the most successful fundraisers, what matters more is the narrative that you're able to tell, and then you have KPIs which are, you know, backing up the narrative that you're sharing with.”
Insight
Junior VC team members cannot select their own investments
“If you want to pick the people that you get to work with, you have to be more than a junior member of the investment team. Typically, if you want to pick the investments, you have to be a voting member of the IC.”
Insight
Top Silicon Valley investors are defined by founder preference
“Ultimately, at the end of the day, I think the common theme across the best investors in the Valley over time is that they're actually just people that founders want to work with based on the experiences that other founders over time have had in the great comp…”
Assertion Supported
Correlation Ventures study: Only 4% of startup investments return 10X+
“If you look at the work done by the folks over at correlation ventures, they published some research a couple of years ago, which looked at over 21,000 financings and their eventual exits over a decade. What they saw was four percent of investments yielded mor…”
Insight
Constrained early markets without expansion plans rarely yield 10x returns
“If you have a single product company and the market opportunity here is constrained, if the founder isn't able to eloquently tell you what's next if they win this market, it makes it difficult to put money in because then, you know, it's unlikely to hit a 10 X…”
Insight
Small initial markets let startups achieve early dominance before expanding
“Where it doesn't matter is where, you know, you have a company like Carta where, yeah, the initial market size is small, but that's actually a good feature of this because it means that you can dominate that small market very early, and when finders have clari…”
Disclosure
Gajri deploys the majority of his capital into known founders
“The places where I place the majority of my capital are not founders I met last week. The place where my capital goes is founders where, you know, I've already been spending time with them solving business problems, and we've already been working together befo…”
Disclosure
Carta grew its second product to $10M revenue in under 14 months
“But the product that we built, it went from zero to ten million dollars of revenue in under 14 months.”
Insight
Generational tech giants become distribution channels rather than relying on them
“Yeah, honestly, the biggest and best companies ever, you know, generational businesses today, the Cisco's, Facebook's, Apple's, Amazon's of the world, they don't rely on those channels very much. Like, in fact, they do become those channels.”
Insight
Multi-product cross-selling reduces customer acquisition cost close to zero
“And I think that's a reason a lot of these companies that you see today have uncontrollable burn rates, because the only way that they are growing is spending money on customer acquisition channels that they don't actually have a lot of control over. And as a …”
Insight
Launching new products requires pairing domain experts with company insiders
“There's a blend you need to have between finding the right domain experts wherever inside of the company or outside the company and bring them on board. And then also working with people that have been at the company and understand your existing customers, und…”
Insight
Founders should engage 6-12 VC firms regularly outside fundraising
“Being in the market and talking to a half dozen to a dozen investment firms in a regular cadence, I think actually can be quite helpful.”
Insight
Founders should set everything except valuation and target raise in stone
“When it comes to the fundraising process itself, I like to set everything in stone, except actually the final valuation and the final number that we're going to raise.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sequoia, a16z, and Founders Fund enforce strict partner investment discipline
“You look at the likes of Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia, our founder's fund, for example. They're pretty disciplined in terms of the absolute number of investments they make per person.”
Insight
Driving huge venture returns requires leaps of faith without supporting data
“A lot of these non-consensus outcomes which drive huge returns do require an aspect of courage or the ability to take a leap of faith where, you know, oftentimes data may not support your decision at all.”
Assertion Supported
Carta was not the first cap table management company
“And example, I'll use the Henry where he didn't start the first cap table company and nor was he actually building a cap table company from day one. And there, there'd been a dozen or so companies over the last two decades that had been started to go after thi…”
Disclosure
Carta is adding 1% of the US venture ecosystem monthly
“And we're adding, call it a percent of the ecosystem a month to Carta at this point in the US.”
