The Ledger
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Stebbings: Andreessen Horowitz is Europe's biggest Series A threat
“When we sit and look at Series A, we don't sit and be frightened by Index or Excel or the big European players. We sit and be frightened of Andreessen coming into Europe. They're the ones who beat you.”
Sahil Lavingia regrets taking Accel's $400K seed check over super angels
“Frankly, if I could go back in time, I would have said no to them. I would have given that 400 K a hundred K to four different people, super angels or angels, or even split it further.”
Accel's returns were not top-tier prior to its Facebook investment
“Excel's returns prior to the Facebook fund weren't the best in the industry, and so some analyst types in the LP community were like, well, you know, should I stay in Excel or not?”
Clements: Breaking VC rules for Rippling would have been worthwhile
“And I think like, I don't regret not breaking the rules in general, but you know, this would have been a time when it could have been worthwhile.”
Clements: 95% of developers switch AI models daily
“And one of the things that we're learning is like 50% of developers switch model families on a daily basis and 95% of developers switch models on a daily basis.”
Clements: Accel's initial Cursor investment was priced at 4-5x year-end ARR
“Actually, this company is growing so quickly that on a multiples basis, you know, our first investment was at like four times, five times year-end ARR.”
Clements: Accel lost ServiceTitan over rigid valuation caps before $9B valuation
“We had fallen in love with our envy. We were chasing this round. It was going to happen in the two 50 or three hundred million dollar range. And, you know, we had these rigid rules about like, you definitely can't pay more than six times, six to eight times fo…”
Clements: Traditional VC startup benchmarks are now largely obsolete
“I think this is why, you know, the benchmarks that used to give us all comfort are largely obsolete now. And so, like, you have to be really clued into the usage intensity of your product and really understand how people are using it.”
Lemkin: Half of the $184B invested in VC in 2025 went to four companies
“They're estimated in a hundred eighty four billion in venture capital invested this year by their definition. Okay. The peak was 20, 21 of a hundred eighty three billion. So one more billion this year. Okay. But four of those half of the hundred eighty four bi…”
Accel and Sequoia Hold Portfolio Books at 20% to 30% Discounts
“Usually the multi-stage firms think your perennial, like Excels, Or Sequoia. They're taking very aggressive discounts on, on basically all of their securities. Even if it's a great company that is maybe achieving even a higher price on the secondary market, th…”
Dasilva: Public market leadership offers founders more independence than VC backing
“How it feels different from VC, and we've had really, we had some really great VCs with Inovia and with Excel and some pension funds. But you really feel like there's a couple of personalities that are your bosses or not your bosses, but your key partners was,…”
Daniel Dines Rejected Sequoia Capital's Investment Offer for UiPath's Series B
“So I said basically no to Sequoia to our Series B, and we, Series B was led by Excel US, and Capital G, Kleiner Perkins, and some other people participated in, but I said no to Sequoia.”
Farquhar: Accel won Atlassian's initial round at $405M valuation
“And the valuations we got back varied between, there was one sort of high hundreds. There was three of them ended up in the two to three hundred million dollar range. And Excel, who ended up you know, winning for us came back at four hundred and five million U…”
Swartz: Revenue Multiples Are 3x to 5x Above Historical Peaks
“If you do a careful analysis of the multiples here in the marketplace, we're at three to five X where we've ever been in our lifetime, price to revenue of companies, three to five X where we were at the peak ever before.”
De Rycker: Blindly exercising pro-rata rights severely damaged VC fund performance
“The biggest mistakes were people just putting a lot of pro rata money in or just following in and supporting companies. So you get your outliers, but then if a lot of your percentage of your fund goes into companies that actually don't return capital because y…”
De Rycker: Outcome scenario planning is useless for early-stage venture capital
“You can do all your outcome analysis. It doesn't really matter, especially if you invest. As early as we do.”
Swartz: Tech revenue multiples in 2021 are 3x to 5x historical peaks
“We're at three to five X where we've ever been in our lifetime in terms of price to revenue of companies, three to five X where we were at the peak ever before”
Swartz: Accel avoids Sand Hill Road offices to prevent groupthink
“In terms of culture, that's why we never, ever would have an office on Sand Hill Road. We want to be anti-Sand Hill Road. We want to be anti-culture, venture capital culture. We want our own culture, independent thought processes.”
Patterson: Deal-swapping politics ruin risk-taking culture in VC firms
“The most important thing to us is we don't have politics because what you can get into in these firms is, well, I approve your deal and you'll approve mine. That's not the way to create the right risk environment. We have to encourage risk, but we have to have…”
Swartz: Selling high-priced assets expecting an imminent market crash
“Personally, I'm behaving like There's a major crash coming. And so whatever opportunity I have to get out of very high priced assets, I do.”
Accel told CrowdStrike founder George Kurtz to shop their term sheet
“Why don't you take my offer, my term sheet, you have it in your back pocket. So when you have these other conversations, Go in knowing that your deal done already, and if someone comes along and offers you something much better, or you think they're additive t…”
Levine has never invested right around the $1M ARR threshold
“As far as I know, I have not once done a deal right before, right after hitting a million dollars of ARR.”
Wilkes: Galileo raised venture capital primarily to get press and analyst coverage
“When we did make a decision to raise, you know, we were profitable and had been profitable for quite some time. We had a large and scaling business, but it was hard to get analysts and press to pay attention to you or to consider you as an alternative. It's an…”
Flomenberg: AI startups must build workflow software before building models
“It comes back to this notion of workflow first, data capture, followed by model building and iterations.”
Flomenberg: AI startups cannot build durable differentiation solely through algorithms
“A lot of the companies that I meet, they come up to me and they picked a spot that's very close to that algorithm dot on the top, and my concern with that is it's very hard to imagine an algorithm that's durably differentiable.”
Flomenberg: Data feedback loops provide stronger moats than initial dataset size
“That's where I think a lot of this feedback loop and sort of supervised learning around the data is Actually becomes a little bit more of an advantage than the original data set itself.”
Investing just to 'have a play' in hot sectors is bad advice
“So whether that's cryptocurrency, or Google Glass, or whatever the hot category is of that year, of that couple of years, I think it's not good advice to quote-unquote have a play in X category. Because if you are able to pick the best, that may be the company…”
Qualtrics rejected Series A term sheets $100M-$150M higher in valuation
“We never optimized funding for economics. We had term sheets at a hundred and a hundred and fifty million dollars more than what we went with.”
Fear of missing outliers traps LP capital in underperforming legacy funds
“This has now trained a generation of LPs to be scared to death to cut off funds that aren't performing well, because they could be just around the corner from Facebook. And as a result, a lot of that money that should be going to new and innovative funds gets …”
Drury: Xero IPO'd first before raising from hedge funds and VCs
“We did our IPO first. Then we brought in the hedge funds, who, because of the compression in the US market with BC's doing most of the big deals, the private, the hedge fund guys, sorry, had to go out and find global deals. And then it's only really recently t…”
Clements: Extrapolating temporary ARR spikes as product-market fit is a trap
“There have been investments where, you know, a company went from, they had a million dollars of ARR, and then in the period that you know, before they fundraise, they had like a four million dollar quarter, and it's like, they've got it. Like the product marke…”
Clements: Top public software companies are currently oversold
“I mean, the greatest companies of three, four, five years ago, many have gotten totally beat up in the public markets. I believe many are oversold, but you know, that's a separate conversation.”
Clements: Abridge founder Shiv Rao is a generational talent
“I don't know that I would characterize it as we lost, but the company that I, where I really, really loved the founder and we didn't get there was Shiv and a bridge. We actually hosted this AI dinner a couple of weeks ago and I was like, I'm going to manipulat…”
Clements: Accel missed investing in early AI foundation model companies
“A lot of firms miss the model companies early, and we're guilty of it.”
Clements: Accel is not in Figma, calls company oversold
“We are not a part of Figma, but have a lot of respect for that company. But I know that Dylan is a generational founder, and it's a very important company with an incredible financial profile, and it just feels for a lot of ways, for a lot of reasons, oversold…”
Clements: Accel regrets missing out on investing in ElevenLabs
“I think 11 Labs is a clear company that we wish we had been a part of. As you know, we haven't spent enough time with the founder, which is, you know, our loss. I think we really regret that one.”
O'Driscoll: Accel likely generated a $2 billion gain on Scale AI
“If Alexander Wang's highest and best use is as a senior employee at Meta, then isn't it wonderful that the free market system was able to pay everyone else, fifteen billion dollars, all power to excel who probably booked a two billion dollar gain here.”
Wagner: My biggest cleantech contribution at Accel was avoiding bad deals
“Like, I devoted a substantial amount of my time to cleantech at one point you know, just because, and this was in like, 2006, 2007, 2008. And it was because, you know, no one else at the firm was spending any time on it, you know, I sort of felt like it was an…”
Farquhar: Benchmark declined splitting Atlassian's initial round with Accel
“And actually like we went back to Peter Fenton at Benchmark was, I think the runner up bidder. And we went back to Excel and said, Hey, look, all things considered, maybe we should get two VCs or, you know, in there, even though there was a huge difference in …”
De Rycker: Accel pays team-wide bonuses when junior investors source winning deals
“If one of the younger investment team members identifies a great company, A great founder that we actually end up investing in. Everybody gets a bonus because that's sort of a way to hard code collaboration”
De Rycker misjudged bull market capital availability for strong fundraisers
“I think I personally just misjudged how much capital was available for the entrepreneurs who could fundraise really well. I really got that wrong, so it would have been better just to be early in some of these great businesses.”
De Rycker: The venture market devolved into cheerleading and party rounds
“And by the way, there's very few of those discussions that happen. It's become a cheerleading market. And I hope that goes away with this current cycle, but it's pretty dis, it's pretty dismaying to see where the market had got to. It was like fragmented cap t…”
Swartz: Accel partners can invest without group support
“The decision-making process, there's no votes, but, you know, you go around the table, and at the end of the discussion, project, it's always a project manager, somebody who's making the call. He or she knows whether they have the support of the group or not b…”
Patterson: A venture firm's first fundraise is always its most difficult
“The first fundraise is always your most difficult”
Patterson: Kleiner Perkins invested in Accel's $40M telecom fund in the 1980s
“Jim had made a really strategic move in about 83, 85, where we raised that XL-II was actually a focused telecom fund of a smaller size, but I think it was about forty million, and I think KP even invested in it.”
Swartz: Accel maintains equal equity ownership with no partner hierarchy
“The single most important one is our philosophy of Equal ownership. You know, we've always had, you're either a full partner, or you're on your way to becoming a full partner as you grow. There are no gradations. There's no senior partners and junior partners …”
Swartz: Accel partners must handle withering criticism to survive
“In Excel, if you can't withstand withering criticism, you probably aren't going to last.”
Patterson: Modern SaaS startups are less vulnerable to economic cycles
“This time, almost all of the companies are continuing revenue service companies. The managements are planning, you know, multi-years ahead, and they're much easier businesses to run and build And they're much more sustainable and much less vulnerable to the ec…”