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 164 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 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
Randle: Founders Fund's 'never fire founders' policy is rooted in laziness
“I think it's actually a convenience for Delian and some of the Founders Fund folks to absolve themselves of that weight and that responsibility just by being like, oh, it's not part of our, it's not part of our thing. But I think, you know, it's almost out of …”
Stebbings: Menlo to make $10B carry on Anthropic, Founders Fund more on SpaceX
“Menlo will make ten billion dollars in carry Spot will too, plus Founders Fund will make more than that from SpaceX.”
Browder: Accept Sequoia or Founders Fund Over Double Valuation Term Sheets
“There's like the kingmaker firms that you should accept at any price. One example would be Founders Fund or Sequoia or people like that. And so if you get an offer from them at X and the offer from someone else is at two X, you should take their offer because …”
Asparouhov: Founders Fund outperformed Sequoia, a16z, and Benchmark with fewer debacles
“If I were to look over the past sort of five years, I think generally the Founders Fund decision making has led to Generally superior returns and also less gaffes in various ways, whether it's the, you know, sort of FTX type, you know, sort of fraud debacles, …”
Stephens: Top Startups Excel at Every Stage Without Late Unlocks
“If you go back and you look at the best companies in any portfolio, they were kind of the best companies at every stage. Like they were incredibly awesome at A, they were incredibly awesome at B, they were incredibly awesome at C. Very rarely do you see a comp…”
Stephens: Deal Memos Force VCs to Intentionally Underestimate Winners
“Having like pushing your team to do things like deal memos, for example, forces them to like put down a number that they're later going to be judged by. So the investment team is going to go back and they're going to look at that investment memo and they're go…”
Lacaillade: Founders Fund, a16z, Greenoaks, and Thrive proactively marked down valuations
“In my core relationships Founders Fund's the most extreme, because Peter Thiel's very contrarian and he wants to reset the mindset of his team. Which I think is great. But Andreessen Horowitz, Green Oaks Thrive, they've all proactively marked down their compan…”
Rabois: Founders Fund will not invest in remote-first startups
“We at Founders Fund have pretty much put a light in the sand that we won't invest in remote companies because we've just watched 50 years that there's almost no examples of people building companies that way.”
Singerman: Founders Fund never plans or calculates capital reserves for follow-ons
“I don't think about reserves ever. Period. Like, I literally never think, I never think a second about reserves.”
Singerman: Loss ratios do not matter for multi-billion dollar venture funds
“Loss ratios don't matter. Losing, I can't, you know, you don't want to lose a five hundred million dollar check, right? Because it's going to be then ridiculously hard for you to return that, to return multiples on that fund. Whereas, like, if you lose, in a f…”
Singerman predicts Founders Fund's $200M Anduril check will turn into $2B
“Enduro is going to be an extremely valuable company. I am, there's, yes, quite sure of that. We are not going to lose that two hundred million dollar check. That two hundred million dollars will turn into, you know, two billion.”
VanDevender: Defensive data moats are oversold and mostly noise
“Most of the data sets out there or the defensibility data sets out there I think are oversold. There is this very, it's a very compelling, very tantalizing notion that, oh, I just have so much data, and nobody else has it, and therefore it must be special, but…”
Stebbings: Top talent joins startups based heavily on VC brand signaling
“The amount of great operators who you're like, well, they wouldn't be, I'm so, I don't mean this rudely, dumb or naive enough to just join a company because of a VC. Do just join a company because of a VC. They'll go, oh, it's a Sequoia-backed company, oh, it'…”
O'Driscoll: Founders Fund's SpaceX deal will return $50B–$100B
“There's no doubt in a world where one investment might return 50 to a hundred Billion dollars. Everyone else has to feel just a teeny tiny tad irrelevant compared to that return for founders fund and good on them. It's a 20 year compounder at 50% plus or minus…”
Stebbings: Capital concentration limits destroy top venture returns
“Capital concentration limits are the enemy of great venture returns, and that's why they have 33% of their fund in Airbnb.”
Stebbings: Recent top breakout VC firms are all single-person led
“When you look at, Bundly, the best performing managers, or the breakout managers the last few years, I think you put probably Thrive, Green Oaks, Founders Fund, and Eli Gill definitely up there. And all four of them are one person led.”
Lemkin: Founders Fund intentionally avoids investing in B2B software
“Founders Fund doesn't do B to B intentionally. They make exceptions, but they don't believe in B to B. They don't believe the outcomes justify it. It's explicitly, they don't do it.”
O'Driscoll: Founders Fund leads large-scale VCs in generating 8-9x returns
“Based on observed data at scale, in other words, not including seed funds, but in terms of turning industrial quantity of money into eight and nine X's, let's put founders fund at the top.”
O'Driscoll: Founders Fund is to a rounding error the best VC fund
“They may be, to a rounding error, the best fund, so no surprise to get the most amount. I mean, you know, it was great to see the leak now. They're astonishingly good.”
O'Driscoll: LPs cannot replicate Founders Fund's returns with other managers
“An LP saying I'll do founders fund because they got these returns and 10 other funds, they'll be just like founders fund. That sentence doesn't make sense. They won't be just like founders' funds because They're not the same people with the same approach.”
Bookman: Founders Fund and Peter Thiel mocked his formal attire during pitch
“I pitched Peter Thiel, and I was so green, and I'd just gotten back from Afghanistan, and I literally would go to work in slacks and leather shoes, like a business lawyer-looking type person, and the Founders Fund guys, at least in those days, did not respect …”
Asparouhov: Brian Singerman pulled me aside six times over controversial tweets
“Oh, a multitude of times. I mean, I probably had at least, you know, sort of six, you know you know Singerman, you know, sort of one-on-ones where he has to be like telling what the fuck.”
Asparouhov: Founders Fund partners Singerman and Stephens offer no post-investment help
“Obviously there are people within Founders Fund that explicitly choose to not work on the fifth one, you know, sort of whatsoever, right? You know, Brian and Trey's, you know, sort of strategy is we believe the best founders, you know, sort of need no help, an…”
Hartz favors Sequoia's hands-on VC model over Founders Fund's hands-off approach
“Given those two extremes, I actually lean more towards, ah, the role of Sequoia's side, because I've just seen that kind of help and oversight and having that kind of star chamber of great talent cut so many corners of mistakes that would be made.”
Vasavada: Top VC Backing Can Attract Employees Seeking Quick Exits
“So it's a double-edged sword. And the reason why it's a double-edged sword is because on one hand, you've got all this great credibility by association. You have all of this social capital and that social capital allows you to hire people. It allows you to get…”
Lehmann: Founders Fund believes board seats offer all downside, no upside
“So at Founders Fund, they obviously believe in this very deeply. We just saw this obviously with Keys leaving there and being somewhere else, they, the belief is that there is very little you can do to actually move the needle, other than writing the check. An…”
Stephens: Hard Tech Startups Require Business Co-Founders Equal to Technical Founders
“One of the most important things that I've learned about hard jack in the 10 years I've been at Founders Fund is that you have to have someone on the founding team who's as good at business as the technical founder is at the tech. There's just no way around it…”
Stephens: 10x Potential Bets Fail to Return Large VC Funds
“The biggest lesson that I've learned from these is that there are times where I've gone in and I've said, this has 10 X potential from where it is right now, and therefore it's probably worth making a bet. And I look back on some of those investments that I've…”
Stephens: Only $10B+ Winners Move the Needle for Founders Fund
“All upsize maximization. No downside protection silly. Like I think if you go back and you look at our portfolio, like whether or not we got our money back has never impacted fund performance. Like the only thing that moves the needle for a venture fund of our…”
Stephens: Category-Thesis VCs Arrive Too Late to Back the Monopoly
“It turns out that the core monopoly investment that won is the only one that mattered in the rest of the category matters a lot less. So if you have some vision for what the future looks like and you're looking for a company to invest in that's doing it rather…”
Stephens: Founders Fund Operates Without Monday Partner Meetings
“We all run our own strategy. We don't have Monday partner meetings.”
Rabois: Khosla, Founders Fund, and Sequoia historically led VC price discipline
“KB and Founders Fund may be the two most disciplined. I think Sequoia has also historically been very price disciplined to their credit. They've also relaxed that a bit but they're, I think, very top down and consciously, but I think historically, those three …”
Rabois: Khosla historically lacked analytical rigor on late-stage follow-on decisions
“And I don't think back in my day at KB that we had a lot of analytical rigor to those late stage parada decisions. Whereas the founders fund, the growth team is very dialed in to evaluating those opportunities.”
Rabois: Khosla systematically matches founders to partners, unlike Founders Fund
“Founders fund, we do, we did it too, but more on an ad hoc basis, not systematic, but at KVU is very systematic, like top down.”
Rabois: Founders Fund partners operated like independent PMs without collective debate
“Founders Fund, especially when I joined, was very much people running their own investment strategies. Think of it as like a PM running their own investment strategies, and there's a way of syncing and getting a certain number of critical mass and votes to sup…”
Founders Fund is the multi-billion fund most likely to return 3x
“I said founders fund, and I said it because of something that Brian Singerman told me, which is like, we are unparalleled in the willingness to have extreme revenue, extreme capital concentration on a per company basis, which means we could lose a lot. But if …”
Rabois: Spotting Great Investors Is Harder Than Finding Great Founders
“Projecting who's likely to be a great investor is even harder than figuring out who's going to be a world-class founder.”
Founders Fund was the only VC to proactively halve its fund size
“Also, they're the only ones that Cut their fund size in half proactively when the macro changed. So they went from, I don't know, 1.8 to nine hundred million in two funds, right?”
Singerman: Deal sourcing grows harder as venture capitalists age and networks decay
“The part that's just harder and harder over the years as you do this longer and quite frankly get older is the seeing. You've got to keep your networks fresh. You've got to like make sure that you're somehow still connected, right? Cause your networks get stal…”
Founders Fund refuses to pay peak 2021 valuations for top startups
“If even the best companies want You know, end of 2021, beginning of 2022 prices where other comps in their market have gone down by 80%, then we're just, we're also just not going to play that game. Like, we don't have any pressure to invest capital.”
Singerman: Venture capital is about backing top companies, not cheap deals
“With venture being about upside maximization, Are you really just looking for, like, a good deal, or do you just want to invest in the best companies? And I would argue it's all the latter.”
Singerman: Even Peter Thiel cannot accurately predict macroeconomic trends
“My partner, Peter Thiel is. Brilliant macroeconomist and probably the best in the business at this, and he can't even predict this, right? Like predicting macro is extremely hard.”
Singerman: Venture capitalists should optimize for upside, not downside protection structures
“You're trying to maximize your upside. You're not trying to minimize your downside. This is why I've never understood these like, oh, we're going to do a round with three X participating preferred and around with a whole bunch of structure. I mean, like I get …”
Stebbings: Raising a $2B fund is easier than raising $200M
“It gets to a stage with also fund sizes, Kyle, where it's almost easier to raise two billion than it is two hundred million, and the reason I say that is because there is a pool of LPs, as you know, the pension funds of the world, Who need to move a hundred mi…”
Rabois: Thiel and I saw market crash coming in summer 2021
“Both Peter and I figured out this market was crashing last summer, and we really tried to stop people from investing at ridiculous prices, but even a founder's fund, we weren't totally successful.”
Rabois: Tech valuation multiples have normalized to 30-year historical average
“We analyzed it recently at Founders Fund, and it's definitely not an overreaction, even with the corrections of the last, we'll call it six, seven months, we're only at the thirty-year normal average. Like, if you look at multiples, we're exactly at the averag…”
Rabois: Founders Fund never replaces founders or forces management changes
“Founders fund, there's only one real answer because we don't replace founders. Most VCs would probably try to change the management team, including the CEO. We, you know, ideologically, philosophically, and effectively, legally just don't do that.”