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Suranga Chandratilake

General Partner, Balderton Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

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

Suranga Chandratilake is a General Partner at Balderton Capital. He previously founded blinkx and served as its CEO.

14statements → 5claims → 0claims resolved → 3.71/5average certainty → 2.43/5average debate potential → 4.5/5argument clarity · the sources →

1 not yet assessed 4 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 2 assertions · 2 opinions · 6 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, 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 Suranga argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.5 / 5 directness 4.8 · coherence 4.8 · precision 4.2 · compression 3.9

redirected or did not address 1 of 18 assessed questions (6%). 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? →

301 words/min while actually speaking · 37.9 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,773 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 ▾ 1/10
setup questions received 60%

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

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Balderton partners receive equal compensation, voting rights, and deal allocations
“Boston is an equal partnership. There are very few venture capital firms that are equal partnerships certainly over time. And what equal partnership means is that you know, there are six partners at Boston today, and all of those six partners are entirely equa…”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 18:00 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Prediction Open · timeframe Nov 2020
In the future, all programmers will write code in the cloud
“In the future, all programmers will write code in the cloud and Cloud Nine is the premier option for that today.”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 24:28 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Insight
Replacing technical founders with MBA CEOs persists in Europe
“I think that idea has well and truly been replaced in the U S where it's okay to do that if you want to do that, but it's also okay to stay in charge. So you have, you know, very, very prominent cases like someone like Mark Zuckerberg, for example, or Jack Dor…”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 6:15 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Insight
Great tech CEOs need visceral product understanding over data analysis
“Certainly in technology, if we just sort of focus in on that, one thing that's key is someone who is viscerally understands the product that they're building and the marketplace that product lives in. You know, if you look at someone like Steve Jobs, that's wh…”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 8:37 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Insight
Equal partnership models eliminate destructive VC firm politics
“I think it works a lot, lot better because it destroys a lot of the politics that exists in a lot of venture capital firms.”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 18:37 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Disclosure
Balderton has no clear partner promotion track for analysts
“We're pretty open about the fact that our policy is that there isn't a clear track from, you know, analyst to principal to partnership.”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 21:40 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Insight
Venture capital is too random for a traditional career ladder
“I'm not sure that venture is really supposed to be a career that you sort of join at 21 and sort of slowly progress yourself through. It's a little bit too random and a little bit too you know, too much of it is, is a little bit too much of a random walk to be…”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 22:09 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Opinion
European startup landscape dramatically improved over ten years
“Realized that there was a lot of interesting stuff going on with venture and entrepreneurship and, you know, way more interesting companies being set up in Europe than there ever were before I'd left, you know, 10 years earlier.”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 5:16 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Insight
Startup CEOs can only maintain two major life priorities simultaneously
“Most CEOs can pull off sort of two things in their life. So, you know, maybe they have a family and they have a job, you know, you can probably pull off that, you know, certainly when I was CEO, I felt like I had a family and I had my job and didn't really hav…”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 7:23 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Twitter and Square have no operational or business conflicts
“The good news is the companies are not conflicting in any way, so there's no chance of him having some kind of awkward situation where he feels he's on the fence because he sort of has two different companies to deliver value to.”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 7:46 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Insight
CEOs should intervene primarily during inter-departmental conflicts
“I think where you step in is in the areas in between these, you know, when things contradict, when there are topics that are sort of owned by multiple departments at the same time, or where you just know you have a weak team.”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 10:37 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Opinion
Mark Zuckerberg is an excellent role model for technical CEOs
“The other more recent CEO that I'll pick out is Mark Zuckerberg, who I think is absolutely phenomenal. You know, two things about him. One is the confidence that he had particularly around maintaining that CEO role. I think he's become an excellent role model …”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 12:04 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Tech gig economy is causing Industrial Revolution-scale labor shifts
“I think we're going through a similar shift right now. Where, you know, new technology has enabled a new class of workers, you know, the gig economy, the part-time economy, the multi, you know, the multi-job economy, whatever you want to call it, and people ar…”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 15:50 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Future generations will manage pensions individually rather than through states
“20 years ago, if you look at our parents or our parents' parents' generations, pensions were generally handled entirely by the state or by large employers. That won't be the case for this generation and certainly not for the next generation.”
Suranga Chandratilake Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 17:26 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Nov 23, 2015 18m
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