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 230 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Eric Vishria details Benchmark's unique 1-to-10 investment voting system
“Our voting system is you vote one to 10. You can't vote five. Six and above is yes. Four and below is no.”
Vishria: Benchmark has written $50M checks despite boutique fund size
“Through, through 30 years of performance, I think we have Unprecedented flexibility in what we do, and so if we want to write a fifty million dollar check, we can write a fifty million dollar check, and we have in cases.”
Benchmark AI startups achieve years of SaaS scale in under a year
“The quickness of the scale is, is, is unlike, it's like three, four, five years of what SAS company, like your traditional SAS companies were doing. We're seeing in under a year and we have a whole portfolio of companies that are like this.”
Vishria: Benchmark holds no investments in foundational AI model companies
“In terms of value accrual, like, you know, I think for Benchmark, like, we have a, we have no foundational model investments thus far anyway.”
Benchmark made only three new investments during 2021 SaaS boom
“I think in 20, 21, we made like three new investments as a firm. Three.”
Asparouhov: Tier-one VC firms Benchmark, a16z, and Sequoia ousted founders recently
“There are firms, tier ones that I mentioned, Benchmark, A-sixteen Z, Sequoia, et cetera, all have examples of sort of founder oustings in the past sort of decade.”
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 …”
Grimshaw: Venture investments are only complete upon LP distribution
“It's only a great investment in some sense when the, you know, shares are distributed to a broader shareholder base in terms of distribution or the like. I think people forget about, you know, in, in, in the push for forever funds and forever, you know, people…”
Grimshaw: Rapid market shifts can be dangerous for early-stage startups
“First of all, you don't need, as a startup, too much market or too much market changing hands really fast can be dangerous. As a startup, you could only take on so much.”
Grimshaw: Benchmark is first institutional capital in 50-60% of deals
“I think it's something like 50 to 60% of all the investments we make, we're the first partner. I might want to use the word real, right? But like first sort of institutional investor, so to speak.”
Grimshaw: LangChain Currently Has More Capital Than It Needs
“At LangChain, obviously, like we have more capital than we need right now.”
Grimshaw: Key VC gut check is whether you can recruit for startups
“And so the gut check, the real question I think about a lot which gets to that sort of holistic nature of it is how do I imagine recruiting for this?”
Grimshaw: A founder's rapid rate of learning beats knowing jargon
“The fact that they're willing to say, I don't know, and quickly learn, and grok it is really, I think, like the most important thing, that rate of learning, and in fact, I'd say most of us saw it as a strength.”
Grimshaw: Investing on normative worldviews without market dislocations is dangerous
“I think it's dangerous in many ways, and this is sort of To think, oh, the world should work this way. And now I'm looking for people who also think the world should work this way, but don't really have the strategy for cracking that open, or there's no disloc…”
Grimshaw: Roughly one-third of Benchmark investments occur at inception
“I think it's something like 30 odd percent. We're like literally the first investment. We don't use the term incubation. I'm sure there's a bunch of things we've done. People would call incubations. We don't use that term, but like, I think probably about a th…”
Grimshaw: The best entrepreneurs continuously make mistakes, but always new ones
“The very best entrepreneurs are always making mistakes. The really great ones are just making new mistakes each time, and I think there's a lot of truth to that, and so that slope and pace is is the most important.”
Grimshaw: Product and customer come before data, which should only validate
“We should always start from like product and customer, not data. And data should be in some sense validation, not learning.”
Basu Trivedi: USV belongs in the VC pantheon alongside Sequoia and Benchmark
“I think USV doesn't get the credit that it deserves. I think it should be in that pantheon of greatness that sort of Sequoia and Benchmark are typically put in.”
Benchmark turned a $33M Uber investment into $10B in four years
“Bill Gurley was on our board, lost her nerve. And the reality is there's another economic principle called loss aversion, right? If you invest thirty three million dollars in Uber and it looks like ten billion four years later, ten billion on a thirty three mi…”
Stebbings: Benchmark's ability to win founder deals is unparalleled
“Benchmark in particular are phenomenal. I'm sure you know a phenomenal list. When they all want to win a deal, their circulation around a founder and their convincing is unparalleled.”
Logan Bartlett names Benchmark's Eric Vishria as an A++ board member
“The one that I've internalized the most from and that I just have infinite amounts of respect for is Eric Vishria from Benchmark. Eric and I worked together on the Amplitude board, and now we have a new company Acuity MD together. And Eric is just, A++ as a bo…”
Gurley: Benchmark Studies Missed Breakout Deals More Than Portfolio Failures
“I personally, in our firm, we study the great breakouts that we miss the most. So that's not failure in our portfolio. That's failure of us to chase the deal that ends up outside of our portfolio. That's the thing we sweat the most.”
Fenton: Early Venture Converts Latent Demand Into Kinetic Product Traction
“I think so much of the art of early stage venture is to ask the question of, can you unlock consumption? Can you tap into a latent potential energy of demand that can be made kinetic through a product experience that's radically easier to engage with and more …”
Gurley: Benchmark portfolio companies with 100+ employees move engineering offshore
“Almost every company we back that gets over a hundred employees is looking to move some of their engineering talent pools somewhere else, and so that's pretty powerful that that can happen, and good for the globe. Maybe not good for the U.S., but good for the …”
Gurley: Top Benchmark companies get funding offers two months post-investment
“Our best companies will be approached two months after we put money in with people trying to put more money in.”
Summit Peak tracks follow-on investments from top VC brands like Benchmark
“Look, I would be bullshitting you to say that it's not important to us. Those brand names do matter, whether that's Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital. They are great funds, and they're great investors at various stages, and you want to se…”
Benchmark's Peter Fenton discloses a genuine personal weakness within five minutes
“The master of this is Peter Fenton at Benchmark. He, within five minutes of any conversation, he will tell you a weakness that he has, and it's not, he's not joking about it. He tells you a real weakness, and my God, it makes me love him, but I'm not unique in…”
Gurley: Benchmark Provides Equal Financial Economics to All Investment Partners
“Benchmark's structured in a very unique way where our investment partners all have equal economics, and I think that does an amazing job of speaking to the newer members of our team that their voice matters,”
Midha: Index, Benchmark, and First Round operate as service providers, not financiers
“And all three of these firms, index, benchmark, and first round operate as if they're being evaluated as a service provider. Not as financiers.”
Market physics ultimately dictate startup outcomes over founder quality, says Tavel
“I absolutely agree with Andy. You know, it's so frustrating when you meet a fantastic founder. Like I'm very much someone who my first link reaction to a company is first the founders. Like that is what gets me leaning in on a potential investment. And the har…”
Operating experience improves board governance but not deal picking, says Sarah Tavel
“But I think that most operating experience you know, the experience that you get as an executive, as a founder, as a product leader in a company, I think that experience is really timeless. You know, because what you're learning is how to hire great leaders, h…”
Startups raising massive capital struggle to yield positive returns, warns Tavel
“And I worry about what the effect is going to be on returns for our asset class. And also for, you know, the eventual outcomes of these companies that are raising a lot of capital. And it's not clear to me when you raise As much capital as many of these compan…”
Crypto investing in 2018 closely parallels the early days of ad tech
“So I think that crypto investing right now is in a tricky place, because it reminds me a lot, actually, of ad tech investing in the early days.”
Vishria: Contentful closed six-figure US deals remotely before hiring in the US
“It's a Berlin-based company at the time, but there wasn't a single employee in the US, and yet they had built this incredible enterprise customer base of US companies, and that's just something that doesn't happen very often at all. You don't see companies clo…”
Vishria: Context switching across investment stages hurts VC decision-making
“I think the context switching in terms of like, if you think about how you evaluate seeds or how you evaluate growth or evaluate some of these other things? Or how do you evaluate making a kind of quote unquote active investment where you take a board seat ver…”
Lasky: Small partnership model is essential for effective VC decision-making
“I think there's a sort of small is beautiful approach that really works. You know, we can have one conversation. There's an enormous amount of mutual respect and admiration, and so, you know, it allows, I think, for good decision-making. There's a lot of trust…”
Lasky: Benchmark held no champagne celebration following Snapchat's IPO
“I came back from New York after the Snapchat IPO. I was in New York for the pricing and to see the stock open on, on the New York stock exchange floor. And I flew back from, it was on a Thursday on, came back on, on Monday to the partners meeting. And our cele…”
Lasky: Benchmark partners will retire within the next decade
“Well, I think we have an opportunity as the current group of partners comes to the, in the next decade or so, comes to the end of their careers to really reinvigorate the firm with youth, and I think an increasing awareness of diversity.”
Fenton: Zenly's low-battery location tech enables a new social layer
“In the case of Zenly, we had a point of view that, you know, we now have ubiquity of smartphones, and there's a set of enabling features inside of those phones that could really change how we interact with people in the world. And in the case of Zenly, it's th…”
Fenton: VCs can no longer buy 25% of high-momentum early-stage startups
“I think that the notion that you could buy 25% of a early stage company that has some demonstrable momentum is, is gone.”
Fenton: Early VCs should refrain from giving founders product strategy
“A bulk of what we try and do at the early or Stages of a company is to not give product strategy, because I think that's something that's really best done by the product authors, but to ensure that the questions are being asked”
Belsky: Angel investing bets on potential; traditional VC demands momentum
“I think as an earlier stage angel seed investor, it's all about investing in the potential of a product or the potential of a team. When you start to do more traditional venture capital And certainly venture capital at the benchmark level level. It's a lot mor…”
Small VC funds succeed by avoiding direct competition with Tier-1 firms
“The nice thing I like about some of these small funds is that they don't compete in their sector, in their geography, in their states. They don't compete with Sequoia and Excel, benchmark, and increase. So they are dominant. They will never lose to them becaus…”
Enterprise AI Startup Town Valued at $1B by Index and Benchmark
“Consensus status as well in the B to B world, because town, which is kind of the B to B enterprise alternative has also been funded to the tune of a billion dollar price by index. And I think it was benchmark who co led that round.”
Stebbings: Benchmark returned roughly 640x on Uber versus 25x on WeWork
“Uber made benchmark roughly 640 X versus around 25 X with WeWork.”
Peter Fenton Used FOMO's App Throughout Benchmark's Pitch Meeting
“I remember Peter Fenton was actually on his phone most of it. And I was like, kind of bummed out because I was like, damn, he's not interested. He's focusing on other things. He's doing emails. And I remember as soon as we finished the pitch, the first thing h…”
Benchmark Did Not Offer the Highest Series A Valuation
“I think it was close, but not exactly the highest.”
Rory: Benchmark recruits proven GPs with equal partnership over internal promotion
“I think it was a clever move by a very shrewd firm. I think it's been their MO for 1520 years, which is we have a very compelling offering to make to NEGP. We'll make you broadly, we'll make you equal in a very successful partnership with a lot of autonomy. An…”