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 11 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Dave Kellogg: AI sales tools will reduce sales support headcount by 30%
“Well, you know, battery came up with a famous slide well now famous slide, but they basically said, I'm going to get the, I think to support 30 sellers, they argued that today it takes a 110 personal organization and that tomorrow it'll take 75. So they're say…”
Bartlett predicts the tech IPO drought will end by late 2016
“I'm optimistic over the course of the next six months or so this drought that we've had over the last quarter in companies going public. I think we're going to see that short itself up,”
Agrawal: Deal structure and price terms do not matter for winning investments
“What I've learned through that deal and many others since then is you should really be willing to do a deal regardless of the exact terms that you get, the exact structure you get, because that's how you really test your conviction in an investment thesis. You…”
Battery missed Snowflake by over-indexing on early customer complaints
“If we had looked at the founding team and the infrastructure they built, I think we would have looked past the individual customer feedback, a data point here, a data point there, that said, hey, this is still not quite ready for prime time, and instead focuse…”
Bartlett: Just 10 deals drive 97% of annual venture capital returns
“At the end of the day, 2000 companies in a given year will get funded from venture investors and 200 of those will probably be done by firms that, that We would consider peers of ours and quality investors. And at the end of the day, 10, 10 of those will drive…”
Bartlett: Market compression is funding startups that were previously unfundable
“At the end of the day, that kind of creates two different areas that are compressing into a single one. And so it does lead to a lot more funding of companies that maybe four or five years ago wouldn't have gotten funding.”
Battery rejected $400M offer before selling Brighttree for $800M
“This is a SaaS software company in the healthcare space, and we had offers to sell the business for, say, a four hundred million dollar range. After a long conversation with the CEO, we collectively decided to turn that down and to keep going, and we were fort…”
Agrawal: Prior experience is not required for founder success
“Prior experience is not required for success.”
Bartlett: The 'ones' framework for evaluating B2B startup growth stages
“I sort of think about it as the ones of stages, and so there's the one million in ARR standpoint, there's the one million that you're adding a quarter, and then there's the one million that you're adding a month, and so those are three different points in time…”
Battery Ventures lost early social market lead with Friendster to Facebook
“Battery was an investor in Frencer way back in the day, and I think they were way ahead, but unfortunately grew too fast, they couldn't keep up, and Facebook ultimately won that market, which is unfortunate for us.”
Agrawal: Ideal target markets start near zero and inflect within 18 months
“In the ideal world, what you're looking for is actually a market that might be close to zero today. And that's going to be like 500,000,003 years from now. And it's really the new opportunity, however you want to define it. And there's a rapid and Rapid growth…”