The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 134 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Gandhi: Accel's pre-mortem downside for CrowdStrike was an incident response business
“I think the number one thing on this was like, man, we just whiffed on the cloud native concept, and nobody's willing to do it, you know, like, that was one where, if you got that wrong, you know, and I think you see in my memo, it's like, well, if we totally …”
Levine refuses to invest in unlikable founders despite potential financial returns
“There's a lot of ways to make money backing people you might not particularly like, and I effectively will forego those.”
Levine: Accel typically buys over 10% ownership in seed rounds
“So typically in our seeds, we're buying over 10% of a business.”
Levine: Accel bought 20% of Sentry at $6M, 25% of Scale
“The first investment I led in Century was at a six million dollar post money, and we purchased about 20% of the business. That was five years ago. Scale, the first deal was at a fifteen million dollar post money, and we bought 25% of the business.”
Destin: Data will not rapidly disrupt early-stage venture capital
“And so I think that the notion that data is going to disrupt early-stage venture fast to me is somewhat exaggerated because I mean, we did some of that work at Accel. It is insanely hard to derive signal from the very Fuzzy nature of the early stage data we ge…”
Flomenberg: Advising startups to raise whatever market allows drives risky overspending
“Raise what the market will bear. A lot of startups dig themselves into a lot of trouble by raising, and more importantly, behaving like They don't have to worry about the next round, and overspending can put you in very tricky situations.”
VCs must maintain price discipline in categories with bounded upside
“That said, I think there are other companies that the category or the nature of the competitive set, you have to have some amount of price discipline in order to achieve true good returns. And I think those are in categories that you, there's just simply not a…”
Non-Bay Area markets offer better deal signal-to-noise ratios
“If you actually spend your time in Salt Lake, in Austin, in Dallas, in Seattle, other markets, and then of course, internationally, whether it's Finland or Australia or other markets, there actually is less noise in those areas relative to the amount of intere…”
Most Silicon Valley startups make the mistake of scaling too quickly
“In general, I think most companies, especially in a capital rich VC environment in Silicon Valley, most of companies are largely make the mistake of stepping on the gas too quickly. And I think wasting precious capital or founder dilution, depending which way …”
Accel would back Deliveroo founder Will Shu on virtually any idea
“Will Shue over at Deliveroo. I mean, the guy could get anything off the ground. I think it's just a level of ambition and sheer bloody mindedness that makes you want to back him no matter what company. He could come in with Facebook for dogs and I think we'd p…”
Destin: Accel Won Deliveroo Deal Despite Below-Market Valuation Offer
“We dug into microeconomics fairly hard, and then it was an insane feeding frenzy, because I think they had five or six competing term sheets. We were in first, we were well below market valuation”
Destin: Detailed VC rejection emails systematically lead to founder arguments
“So I used to write these beautiful no emails that were very, very well grounded with a lot of feedback. You know what systematically happens is people come back and they're like, you didn't get this, you didn't get that. It's like, I'm actually not trying to b…”
Stebbings: Accel and Sequoia raised $4B and $7B AI growth funds
“Excel adds four billion leaders fund to follow into hot AI growth rounds. Sequoia four days ago raises seven billion dollar growth round growth fund.”
Clements: Rapid growth can obscure underlying structural problems within a business
“Growth can obscure and blind you to a lot of underlying ills in the business.”
Clements: Accel did not sell secondary shares in Miro at $17B valuation
“We didn't take liquidity out of Miro at seventeen billion”
Clements: No company has ever built a single platform for engineering
“There has never been a platform company for engineering as a vertical and engineers are like, I mean, this is the fastest growing, most dynamic vertical there is, and no one has ever owned that.”
Clements: Accel avoids major celebrations even after $14.9B exits
“There's a an appropriate congratulations and acknowledgement to Dan. There is a huge, loud, full-throated thank you to Alex, and then everybody gets the fuck back to work, you know, and like, it's a humbling industry, and you are only as good as the next thing…”
Clements: Losing a competitive deal stings more than missing it
“They're equally bad, but losing stings more. Having had the opportunity and failed, stings.”
Clements: Accel invested in CrowdStrike at $160M valuation with $1M ARR
“The example I would point to is, you know, CrowdStrike. Samir Gandhi and John Locke intersected CrowdStrike when it was, you know, there was like a million dollars of software revenue and there was a nine million dollar consulting business, and like, that was …”
Cannon-Brookes: Accel's $60M Atlassian investment in 2010 was 100% secondary
“When the Excel guys invested in Atlassian, right? It was all secondary. They put sixty million bucks in 2010. And they bid highest of the five VCs.”
Frankel: Founders will always prioritize brand-name VC firms like Sequoia
“I think some founders still see, you know, a name in lights, and they go, I want that name beyond anything. I, if it's Sequoia, A-sixting Z, Accel, you name it, I want that name, and I think there will always be a steady supply of founders who think that way.”
Sequoia and Accel are Index's primary consumer Series A competitors
“Clearly, clearly the folks at Sequoia are a big fierce competitor, and the folks at Acceler are fierce and, you know, I would say there are a number of different players, but those come to mind for consumer stuff. Certainly Sequoia comes to mind a lot. Benchma…”
Wagner: Balancing guardrails and autonomy accelerates VC investor learning
“And then you give that person both enough rope to hang themselves so that they're, you know, feeling tremendous accountability. You know, what will be called the sleepless night factor. But also guardrails that protect them from making, you know, really egregi…”
SCS Financial manages money for partners of Accel and Greylock
“And we manage money for the partners of founding partner of Excel and Greylock. So I knew that it was tough to get into those funds because I had it in and it still wasn't like”
Farquhar: Accel achieved roughly a 100x return on Atlassian
“I don't know how much Excel's made off us, like it's a hundred times, I think something like that when they distributed.”
Basu Trivedi: Accel's Vas Nadarajan is an underappreciated top board member
“In my peer group and sort of our generation, although you're younger than me and I'm younger than Vaz, I still think of us as sort of the same generation. I think he's one of the best and probably hasn't gotten the credit he deserves for that.”
Facebook Had Nine Employees When Accel Offered a $100 Million Valuation
“Facebook at this time was nine people. It was a nine person company. They were in a hundred different colleges and it was called the Facebook, not, it wasn't yet Facebook. And we met the day they got their term sheet from Excel you know, for the a hundred mill…”
Yanisse: Accel's Rich Wong is exceptional at coaching first-time founders
“Rich Wong from Excel is amazing. So he is really founder friendly really good at coaching, you know, first time founders and helping without imposing any vision or strategy, just helping the founders grow and learn.”
Sonali De Rycker: Venture funds fail when they stop investing in downturns
“One is never stop investing. The minute you lose your confidence, you lose your right to exist. Because if you look at the funds that were around in 2000, so many of them disappeared exactly for that reason.”
De Rycker: Accel proactively marks down private portfolio valuations during downturns
“We're pretty proactive about taking down the valuations, but they're already sitting in pretty deep discounts.”
De Rycker: Accel operates globally without a CEO or top-down structure
“The fact that that exists without a CEO, some top-down instrumentation, any kind of top-down structure just shows how frankly authentic it is because it has to endure.”
De Rycker: Managing internal VC firm talent cannot be a side hustle
“We thought that we needed a Wendy-like figure, you know, but because it's all about if you're telling your companies to focus on culture, you're telling your companies to focus on talent, why would you not want to do that? And of course you can do that yoursel…”
De Rycker: Accel backed Spotify at $70M revenue and 1.5M subscribers
“When we invested, it was sort of seventy-ish million in gross revenue. I mean, it's ten billion now. And It was about a million and a half paying users”
De Rycker: Asking candidates about negative feedback shortcuts background reference checks
“When you ask someone, for example, you know, what was the most surprising negative feedback that you got, and why do you think you got it? The person will tell you something that you're never going to find out. So that was a really interesting question for me,…”
Swartz: Accel's inaugural 1983 fund was the easiest it ever raised
“I mean, I think it was the easiest fund we ever raised. We raised it in the 90 days or so, and as Arthur points out, it was a particularly ebullient era.”
Patterson: Accel's international funds don't dilute focus due to decentralization
“The international funds actually don't affect focus because we decentralize all the investment decisions, which is about 99% of it to them.”
Patterson: Early-stage investments are more price-protected than growth deals
“Well, I think if you're in the early stage, particularly, you're more price protected. You can still have a good idea for a startup. Your exposure, when you're putting money into things at the four billion dollar valuation, or something like that, and large am…”
Patterson: Accel could not have raised its inaugural fund six months later
“If we'd waited another six months, I don't think we could have.”
Gandhi: Overcapitalized startups lose operational rigor and suffer downstream issues
“An overcapitalized business doesn't always have the same rigor in terms of how you run it as a company that's been capitalized thoughtfully. It's also getting ahead of yourself creates all these issues downstream potentially.”
Gandhi: High implementation services revenue signals underlying product issues
“If the percentage of that rises too much in the company, it really tells me that there are product issues at the root of what's happening there.”
Gandhi: Accel invested in CrowdStrike at a $150M post-money valuation
“So I never looked at it as a three to five X. I looked at it as we're investing in a company, you know, in the first round when we did it was a 150 posts or something like that.”
Gandhi: Go-to-market investments require market timing within a two-year window
“I think we really look at it and say like, it's gotta be, you know, within plus or minus a year or two. That's the right way to look at it. If you're later than that, you're too late. And I think if you're earlier than that, it's just a different kind of inves…”
Levine: 18 of 25 mature Accel seed deals successfully raised Series A
“So every deal we'd done at the seed stage in three years, we'd done about 40 deals, and we termed 25 of them at maturity. So 15 of them were still too new at the time we did this analysis. So they were like, you know, six months in, so they weren't looking to …”
Levine: Accel's Slack, Sentry, and Cloudera investments originated as seed deals
“Even at Excel, our first investment in Slack was a seed. Our investment in Sentry started as a seed. Our investment in Cloudera was an EIR.”
Levine: Liquid, Fast-Moving VC Markets Favor Established Market Leaders
“A very liquid market where things move quick tends to bias towards market leaders over periods of time”
Wilkinson: Tiny would raise VC if a portfolio company needed $100M burn
“So I would say that if we had a business that was obviously in need of a large amount of capital, And we needed somebody at the table who was willing to take a big risk where we knew that in order to grow it into a billion dollar business, we'd need to burn a …”
Diverse board syndicates with differing viewpoints drive long-term startup success
“Having a diverse syndicate that has different points of view to the board, even if you don't a hundred percent always agree with the other members of that board, can actually make a dramatic difference in helping the company be successful long-term.”
Startups need three to six months of repeatability before scaling growth
“Generally, I would say, you know, on median, it's a couple of quarters, three to six months of repeatability, and more important than just the time dimension is whether you can see the, you know, the atomic level of the unit economics working.”