The Ledger
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Kevin Rose: GV deployed its entire $254M annual fund into Uber
“I definitely know that largest GVs ever done is Uber, where it was two hundred and fifty four million, I believe. So it was our entire fund into one of their rounds.”
Hulme: Absolute conviction in VC investments is irrational and unrealistic
“I don't understand in our industry how anyone can have complete conviction on anything. That makes no sense to me. Like I studied physics at university. We would go through a proof and I still didn't have complete conviction that I got it right. And then now w…”
Hulme: Premature scaling inflates costs and destroys startup adaptability
“And I think what you're talking about is when the money's used for premature scaling, it's really damaging because costs go up. When your costs go up, ironically, you actually become less adaptable. So your clock speed goes down. So if your primary job in a bu…”
Hutchins: Founders should never name-drop other VCs during fundraising
“Oh, I think none. If I'm a founder, and I tell someone at VC or at GV, oh, you know, I just had this great conversation with this other investor. I'm going to be like, great, I'll call them and see what's really happening. VCs all know each other. They all tal…”
Hulme: Stripe is not listing publicly anytime soon
“But some of our best portfolio companies like Stripe aren't listing anytime soon, and they're finding ways to deliver liquidity.”
Hulme: Company HQ, employees, and IP create more value than listing location
“Given the choice between Picking where a company's HQ is, or where the bulk of the employees are, or where the IP is generated, or where it's listed, I'm taking the first three. They're way more valuable.”
Hulme: Active startup founders raising side funds is concerning
“Now, when you start talking about raising funds, that worries me a lot because building a company is ridiculously hard. Like there's only a handful of people that have ever managed to kind of build multiple companies concurrently. And this idea of having a sid…”
Hulme: GV has avoided investing directly in foundation model startups
“Now we have made investments in Gen AI, but more in infrastructure, more in the application layer, more in the sort of picks and shovels to support, but we've not thus far invested in foundation models.”
Hulme: Investors underestimate winners by assuming single S-curve growth trajectories
“We have a sort of bias that whenever we're looking at businesses, we see them on an S curve. It's very difficult to imagine new S curves, but the best businesses will continuously put themselves on new S curves and create new opportunities.”
Wesley Chan Passed on Twilio's Seed Round Due to Expert Bias
“And I passed on it because, you know, I looked at it and, you know, talked to my team at Google voice and everybody looked at it. It's like, oh, this is easy to do. Like, you know, once the company gets big enough, they don't need toilet anymore. Boy, I didn't…”
Kevin Rose: GV operated on an annually refreshed $300M allocation
“GB was a little bit different than your typical fund that is invested over the course of two to three years, whereas ours was refreshed annually. So we had a brand new you know, three hundred million dollar checkbook come January first.”
Teten: Only a Handful of VC Firms Build Full Platform Teams
“Besides us and Google ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, first round capital OpenView does some work on this area. A lot of other firms talk about it, but they've hired one or two people, right? They don't have a whole set of resources”
Hulme: Stripe captured high-80s market share of online Series A startups in 2017
“We invested in Stripe in 2017, and one of the things that struck me is the Collinson brothers were tracking a KPI. They were tracking the number of series A companies that That transact online that they actually, you know, that are using Stripe and the number …”
Tom Hulme: Google Ventures avoids foundation models to focus on AI apps
“Now we have made investments in Gen AI, but more in infrastructure, more in the application layer, more in the sort of picks and shovels to support, but we've not thus far invested in foundation models.”
Hulme: Salesmanship is the essential fourth pillar of venture capital
“The fourth S that I increasingly think is important is actually selling salesmanship. Like, great VCs are selling to LPs, they're selling to founders to take their money, and then increasingly, they're also selling to, you know, exec hires to go into portfolio…”
Hulme: GV invested in Lemonade Series A despite zero insurance experience
“We invested in Lemonade, Series A, wonderful founders. One, Shai, had done Fiverr, product and design guy. Daniel, lawyer, had done hardware, and they were going into insurance. Combined insurance experience between those two? Zero.”
Hulme: GV invested $100M into Stripe's Series G in 2020
“We invested a hundred million bucks into Stripe in 2020. We extended the series G round”
Hulme: Active founders angel investing personal capital provides high-value empathy
“Yeah, so the former, I think is actually great for the portfolio companies they invest in, because I think they're in our category of smart, smart. Like, they will be specialists at something, and the founder will be able to ask them for advice, and there's no…”
Hulme: GV manages $10B with 10 to 20-year holding periods
“So our approach at GV is primarily be founder first, and we can take a very long time. You know, we have ten billion dollars under management. Alphabet does not put us under time pressure. We're less worried about IRR than we are absolute returns. And so we fo…”
Hulme: Ex-rocket ship employees make the best startup founders
“I think one of the best groups of founders are those that have come out of the rocket ship companies because actually they kind of instinctively know they need to aim at big opportunities and they know how to run a Fast growth business.”
Hulme: GV invested in Nothing, which has 7 million active devices
“This is one of the things, reasons we invested in nothing. We believe they've got seven million devices out there that are potentially conduits for their AI.”
Tom Hulme: GV has invested over $500M in the UK alone
“And so we've now done over 50 companies we've invested in 12 countries. We just break through half a billion dollars in the UK alone with our investment in isomorphic last week”
Robinhood raised $5.6 billion total, including a $2.4 billion emergency round
“To date, Vlad has raised over 5.6 billion dollars with Robin Hood, including a 2.4 billion dollar raise just this month, and some of their investors include the likes of Ribbit, Sequoia, Green Oaks, Index, IVP, Thrive, GV, and more incredible names.”
Clutter raises $64 million Series C led by Atomico
“In the last fortnight, they raised a whopping sixty-four million Series C, led by Atomico, with participation from Sequoia, Google Ventures, or GV, and the fantastic Brendan Wallace at Fifth Wall.”
Google Ventures grew to a $500M annual fund with 300 investments
“And today they've done over 300 investments and it's grown to be a five hundred million dollar a year fund.”
LendUp raised $150 million in January 2016
“LendUp raised an incredible hundred and fifty million dollars in January, 2016, according to the trusty PE Hub, from the likes of SV Angel, Yuri Milner, our friends at Sousa Ventures with Chad Byers, who I've got to thank for making the intro today, and then G…”
Stebbings: Warp raised over $70M from Sequoia, GV, and Marc Benioff
“They've raised over seventy million dollars from the likes of Sequoia, GV, Dylan Field, Elad Gill, and even the legend that is Mark Benioff.”
Digits Raised Over $32M From Benchmark, GV, and Angel Founders
“To date, Wayne and Jeff have raised over thirty-two million dollars for Digits, from some of the best in the business, including Peter Fenton at Benchmark, and Jess Verrilli at GV, and then also the most incredible base of angels, with the founders from Box, G…”