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 21 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
Basu Trivedi: Massive AI foundation model seed rounds make no sense
“We don't think that the foundational model investments that, for example, they're raising hundreds of millions of dollars in a seed make any sense. They don't make sense for sure for our firm, but we don't think they actually make much sense for the big funds …”
Basu Trivedi: Exercising pro-rata in rapid markup rounds was my biggest mistake
“I think it was doing our pro-rata In companies that quickly raised another round at a huge step up from where we first invested. Fundamentally, there was very little de-risked, and we saw this happen where a company had raised a series A from us, and two month…”
Basu Trivedi: Market size is the hardest startup variable to predict
“I weight market third on the three that you asked me about because I just think it's the hardest one to assess and predict for myself, and I think when you look at the investments you just described and some of the very great ones, that was true for those inve…”
Basu Trivedi: Larger VC fund sizes cause laziness in investment decisions
“You know, in a strange way, I really like the constraint of our fund size. I actually think it forces us to make better decisions. And I think there's a laziness and a lack of great decision making that can come from having a bigger fund in the same way that i…”
Basu Trivedi: Early traction matters more than team and market size
“I've always been a sort of traction, early signs of product market fit first investor. Then people, and then market.”
Footwork caps single LP concentration at 20% to prevent governance risk
“We don't have a single LP who's more than 20% of our fund and I think in general we thought we don't want one, two, three LPs having the majority of our fund and having therefore outsized control in our thinking or our decision making in some way.”
Footwork plans to add only one or two equal general partners
“We perhaps add one or two equal general partners to our group. Who are re-founders and co-owners of the firm with Mike and me”
Basu Trivedi: Fundraising ability differs sharply from business building ability
“And so I have been sucked in and seduced by founders that can tell a great story, that are great in a handful of one hour sessions and in person for the first time, who feel like they're magnets for talent, who know their business inside and out, it seems, and…”
Basu Trivedi: VCs must spend over 50% of time sourcing new investments
“The single metric that we're focused on there is, are we spending more than 50% of our time on meeting new companies and sourcing new investments? I firmly believe you have to spend the majority of your time on those things. To be able to find the next great o…”
Footwork requires one partner's top vote and no partner veto to invest
“One of us has to be a four. One of us has to be strongly supportive to make an investment. And the other cannot be a one strongly unsupportive.”
Footwork co-founders attend all board meetings together during year one
“Well, look, we actually, for the first year after we invest, both go to all the board meetings together.”
Footwork does not track deal attribution between its partners
“We actually don't even do attribution at the firm. We've never talked about which are Mike's investments versus my investments.”
Basu Trivedi: Startups requiring no immediate follow-up rarely become massive winners
“And I've gone back to try to study this, like, if I'm thinking about it that evening, if I'm reaching out to people to sort of suss it out better, and you know, I'm just researching on my own about it, you know, hours after the first meeting, there's something…”
Basu Trivedi: Personalized founder support requires limiting investments to a handful yearly
“When you only make a handful of investments every year, when each one really matters to you because you're leading those rounds, you can deliver that type of really personalized support, and that's So much of why we've built this firm.”
Footwork received $450M in commitments for its $175M debut fund
“We had about four hundred and fifty million of commitments for a hundred and fifty million dollar fund. And we ended up raising one hundred and seventy five million”
Basu Trivedi: Investments require deep personal conviction on spending time
“I have to believe in my bones when we make an investment decision that this is something I really want to spend time on. Perhaps it used to be much more just about the capital and the economics, and now it's about both that and time.”
Footwork only leads Seed and Series A rounds with checks up to $9M
“At Footwork we do, we only lead rounds, we only do early stage we lead seeds and A's. So we've made 11 investments so far. We've done five series A's and six seeds. I think our average initial check is about four and a half million, and the range has been two …”
Footwork expects to make 20 Fund I investments averaging $4M to $5M
“Our total fund size is about a hundred and seventy five million, right? We think we'll make about 20 investments out of that fund, an average check of four to five million dollars, so let's call it sort of 80 to a hundred million dollars on initial investments…”
Basu Trivedi: Footwork Fund I was fully committed before finishing pitch deck
“We had two slides in our fund one fundraising deck, which actually, sadly, we barely got to present. We only had it properly designed in February of, and by then we already had the whole fund committed.”
Footwork LPs performed 30 to 40 references on each partner
“We had LPs who did, I don't know, 30, 40 references that we heard about on, on us each.”
Footwork has roughly 15 institutional LPs, including six university endowments
“We wanted some diversity, and I think we have about 15 institutional LPs, we have six university endowments you know, I think Three other foundations. So we're a little bit weighted towards endowments and foundations, but we have a bunch of fund of funds, and …”