Sarah Kunst of Cleo Capital offers a timeframe for tech market recovery during the early COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020.
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…”
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…”
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 …”
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”
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?”
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, …”