Kunst: Economic downturns weed out non-masochists from the startup founder pool
Sarah Kunst · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · May 15, 2020 · at 17:44
Sarah Kunst, managing director of Cleo Capital, explains why economic downturns act as a natural filter for uncommitted entrepreneurs.
0:00 / 0:10exact quote · 10.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Being a founder is a little bit of a masochistic career path. And so if you're not a masochist, this is a great time to go do a job that like feels a thousand times better on a day-by-day basis.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sarah Kunst
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…”
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…”
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 …”
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”
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?”
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, …”