Insight
Coelius: Work-life balance gives founders a near-zero chance of outsized success
“Just know that if you do that, your chance of basically, like, having outsized, non-normal success is almost zero. Like, at the end of the day, if you really want to achieve more than anyone else, if you want to be not normal, you have to work not normal.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Coelius: VCs who cut my pro-rata will never see my deals again
“I've seen a number of funds who basically have come in and wiped out my pro rata or my follow-on, and those funds will never see another deal from me if I can help it.”
Opinion
Coelius: VCs make a mistake by not leading follow-on rounds
“The venture capital industry generally makes a mistake by not taking advantage of that. Why is it that we get an inside position and then we let somebody else lead the round and take all the opportunity to deploy capital in subsequent rounds?”
Insight
Coelius: Entry price is the only thing that matters in venture capital
“At the end of the day, the only thing that matters in this business is price.”
Insight
Coelius: A startup pitch must work on a cold call at 9 PM
“I like to say, if you can't cold call a customer at nine o'clock at night, On their cell phone, while they're putting their kid to bed and describe what you're doing in one sentence, forget about it. You have no hope of them basically of selling a product unle…”
Prediction Held up
Coelius: Mega VC firms are taking platform bundling to a higher level
“If you look at what Andreessen is doing and you look at what the number of the other big platforms are doing, they're taking venture to a whole even higher level of bundling where they're saying, look, we're going to basically use the sort of returns that come…”
Opinion
Coelius: Venture capital remains static and conformist due to LP relationships
“The industry, in my opinion, is really, really static. It doesn't Adapt and evolve very well because of the nature of the LP relationships. It's pretty sort of conservative, and it's very conformist,”
Insight
Coelius: Deal flow and access are the only hard things in venture capital
“The only two hard things that I can see in this business are basically deal flow and access. So if you don't have basically good deal flow and you don't have access, you're out of luck. You're not going to be successful.”
Opinion
Coelius: Theoretical portfolio construction creates market inefficiencies in venture
“Portfolio construction leads to a bunch of inefficiencies that are great in a sort of theoretical world, but not in the sort of reality of this business.”
Disclosure
Coelius claims zero failures across his first 40 angel investments
“So far I haven't, I've got 40 companies in the portfolio. We haven't lost one yet.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Coelius: Tier-1 VCs entering seed will fail if they avoid the work
“If they do the work, they're going to be great. And if they don't do the work, they're going to fail.”
Assertion Partly supported
Coelius: Individual allocators outperform committees across almost every asset class
“In almost every single other asset class, individual decision makers have proven to be the most effective way of basically deploying capital.”
Opinion
Coelius: Ad tech is one of the toughest startup battlegrounds
“The crucible that is ad tech, I mean, it is literally one of the hardest industries to compete in, is an amazing learning ground for entrepreneurs because you just get the crap beat out of you constantly.”
Disclosure
Coelius scaled his Branch Metrics investment from $200K to $5M
“Like with branch, my first check was 200. My second was seven 50. My third was a million and my fourth was five million.”
Insight
Coelius: Treat prior checks as sunk costs during follow-on rounds
“I basically like to think of every investment decision as an isolated event where I have, I like my sort of sunk cost is deployed capital, but it's the sunk cost. I don't think about that relative to the decision to participate.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Coelius projects a one-third failure rate for his venture portfolio
“My assumption is, is that we'll probably have about a third of our portfolio will be losers.”
Insight
Coelius: Product-market fit is when customers start saying yes to your pitch
“Between those two points, I think there's a point where the entrepreneur finds product market fit. They find that sentence that they can describe to the customer at nine o'clock at night. The customer starts saying yes. And you go from this sort of very amorph…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Coelius: Triggit grew from $1M to $30M in revenue in 12 months
“For my company, Trigger, it was like, we basically went from being a very broad sort of demand-side platform, and all those things we could do, to like, hey, we give you retargeting on Facebook. And the moment we did that, suddenly, Walmart, Best Buy, HomeDevo…”
Insight
Coelius: Entrepreneurship is a rocket ship ride into your own incompetence
“At the end of the day, I believe that being an entrepreneur is a rocket ship ride into the walls of your incompetence.”
Disclosure
Coelius led Mud Wtr's note while it grew 100% month-over-month
“I participated in a note, or I actually led the note, now it's like, 10 times bigger. It's still growing a hundred percent month over month.”
Disclosure
Coelius filled his first $200K AngelList syndicate in 24 hours
“So I put up a 200 K allocation on AngelList and emailed some of my friends, and 24 hours later, it was filled.”
Disclosure
Coelius's first three angel investments were Branch, OneSignal, and Cruise
“Branch was the first one. A company called OneSignal, which is doing really well, was my second. Cruise Automation was my third”
Disclosure
Coelius manages $100 million in assets under management
“I mean, at this point, there's a hundred million AUM that I'm responsible for.”
Disclosure
Coelius: 700 AngelList backers have invested their own money in my deals
“So at this point, I have almost 1300 people who sign up to basically get emails from me and participate in my deals. 700 of them have put their own money at risk into deals with me”
