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 63 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
Lemkin: Benchmark's flat partnership model is optimized for profit, not discipline
“This is one of these things we manufacture, like how wonderful it is. Benchmark has a flat partnership. I mean, who cares, right? It's not disciplined. It's optimized to make the most money.”
Roger Dickey compares LPing in Sequoia or Andreessen to a mutual fund
“Like if you can LP with Sequoia Greylock, Kleiner, Andreessen, you're probably going to get your money back. You know, that's almost like a mutual fund.”
Motamedi: Moving up the application stack protects focused AI models
“If you can start with a better focused model and then very quickly move up the stack into the application layer, it's actually a very good strategy.”
Motamedi: VCs shouldn't pass on elite founding teams over early-stage valuations
“So when you find one of those teams, I really don't believe you should be passing on price in those ranges. Because whether you do it at 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, if that company goes on to get to a hundred million plus of ARR with high growth, you're going to be ve…”
Motamedi: Sales reps won't use Salesforce's interface in 10 years
“And I would argue in 10 years, sales reps won't even know what the Salesforce UI looks like because the interface to the underlying system of record has changed.”
Motamedi: Greylock's Biggest Seed Misses Came From Disliking Iconic Founders' Ideas
“Our biggest mistakes where we have not, you know, pursued the investment has been where we've met someone truly iconic and we did not like the idea. And by the way, Harry, often we're right. Often two years later, the founder is working on something different,…”
Greylock refuses to invest in fast-growing startups lacking retention
“And if we don't like the answers to those questions, it doesn't matter if the company's gone zero to twenty million in six months, we're not going to invest.”
Motamedi: Foundation models with tightly coupled applications will generate strong venture returns
“On the other hand, we do think there are some applications where you need to own the model because the model needs to be tied to the application. Whether it's a personal agent, as an example, you referenced inflection. And for those, we actually do believe mon…”
Salguero: Greylock offered funding only if founders accepted a replacement CEO
“We went out to Greylock to convince them to invest in custom made, which they said they would if we moved out to California and worked for the CEO that they were going to place into the business.”
Greylock's $500M Facebook valuation check faced intense internal and external criticism
“Facebook was very controversial, both internally and externally at Greylock when it was announced, because we invested at a five hundred million plus pre and wrote one of the biggest Checks that Gerlach had ever written at that time, and that was considered in…”
Senior venture capital partners must actively aim to become obsolete
“And the partners who are senior, one of their biggest goals is to get out of the way, to become obsolete, because that is the definition of success for the next generation, and it'll be the definition of success for Greylock in the long run.”
Meerkat realized live video was unsustainable three months after raising $14M
“Within three months after raising fourteen million dollars from Greylock and other investors, we were like, guys, there's no broadcaster attention in the average person, in the 99% who are not celebs, media and news. And because of this, we cannot build an ind…”
Kim: Top VCs maximize ownership and squeeze LPs out of Series A
“If there is, at the earliest stages, a company that is High quality with high quality investors coming in. LPs are probably the last in line in terms of getting access to that. So imagine a seed funded company by one of our fund managers, a high quality firm l…”
Multi-Billion Dollar Consumer Businesses Must Be Free or Better and Cheaper
“If you want to build a truly mid-market, kind of, you know, I'm focused on businesses that will become large, enduring, multi-billion dollar businesses, and I think in order to build one of those, You either have to figure out how to give something away for fr…”
Stebbings: Top VC brands give startups extra runway to achieve product-market fit
“Because Sequoia and Greylock have such great brands, they will generally, 90% of the time, always get more money, and because they get more money, they have more time to get product market fit.”
Motamedi: Young VCs focus too much on personal metrics over firm success
“I think most young investors make a big mistake, which is they think too about too much about themselves and not enough about the firm.”
Saam Motamedi: Founders cannot overcome poor market dynamics late in growth
“Markets have gravity. And I don't think even the best founder can overcome a market that has the wrong dynamics when it's too late.”
Motamedi: 80% of Greylock investments start before company inception
“In this case, we got to know these people when they were still full-time employees elsewhere, and we're helping them before the company even existed, and that actually, I think something like 80% of our investments, they're of that flavor, where we met the per…”
Motamedi: VC reference checks do not correlate with founder quality
“I would say in my experience, it's not correlated. Like I have backed great founders who did 12 references on me and I've backed great founders who did zero references on me. And so for what it's worth in my data set, it hasn't been correlated”
Sarah Tavel names passing on Ethereum as her biggest investment miss
“Without question, Ethereum. I, you weren't expecting that. I can see, you know, what, well, Ethereum, I mean, I remember I was at Greylock. And the ICO had just happened, I believe, or just closed. And I was reading more about what's possible with smart contra…”
Greylock passed on Baidu at a $14M valuation over travel requirements
“I looked at Baidu at fourteen million pre. And because we had this rule of thumb that said we had to be boots on the ground all the time at that time, it was that narrow a definition again back in those days, I was told that I was going to be going to China ev…”
Sze: Walking away after conditional deal approval builds maximum partnership trust
“The most powerful moment is when the partnership gives the conditional yes. And when the partner who owns the deal goes away and thinks about it, when they come back in those cases, when they come back and they go, you know what? I took the feedback. I did som…”
David Sze: Founder-friendliness isn't blindly backing whatever founders say
“I came in early on, like I said, believing that founder-friendly meant you backed the founder, whatever they said you did and whatever they said you backed. And what I learned is that's not always the case, that you need to help founders be better. You need to…”
Sze: Valuation flexibility is justified for winner-take-all markets with great leadership
“So I do think that you need to have price discipline, and so you need to think about, does this have the ability to run to a huge outcome? Does this Show the potential to be a winner takes most or winner takes all kind of business. If that's the case, and you …”
David Sze warned Reid Hoffman that Airbnb could be his learning failure
“David turned to me and said, look, every venture capitalist Has to have a deal that they cratered, and it is a disastrous amount of work, and that doesn't work in order to learn, and Airbnb can be yours.”
VC portfolio support quality depends on network design, not team size
“So it actually, in fact, is your operational throwaway, your strength of how you deploy the network, not necessarily the size of the operation, but you have to design it with that in mind, right? So like, for example, as I understand it, the Andreessen pattern…”
Chen: Venture risk divides into quantifiable probabilities and unquantifiable uncertainties
“There's really two or three categories of risk to think about. There's probabilities and uncertainties. I think probabilities are quantifiable risks, right? So the execution risk, the market risk, and you and I as investors can make an educated bet or guess on…”
Bussgang: Prior operating experience is not required to become a top VC partner
“I don't. I never believe there's one path to the final journey. Great examples of VCs who never have any operating experience, and I have one of them sitting next to me in my office, and Chip Hazard, who's an incredibly successful investor, was my co-founder h…”
Founders Need VCs to Be Truth-Seekers, Not Just Founder Friendly
“Oftime, what a founder really needs, I believe is for someone else to be a truth seeker and ask the hard questions or show a blind spot that they might have or push them in some way. And, Sometimes when I hear founder friendly, I hear, I think of like, oh, jus…”
Motamedi: No new horizontal system of record SaaS company launched in 5-6 years
“Now, why has there not been a new deep horizontal system of record SaaS company built over the last five or six years? I can't think of one.”
Motamedi: Greylock regularly leads defensive inside rounds when startups hit air pockets
“Reserves aren't just for when things are going great. It's also for when like companies hit an air pocket. And many of the great companies we've been a part of have been Have hit those air pockets and we've had to step up and we have gladly done that and let i…”
Motamedi: Series A valuations range from $80M to $200M post-money
“For series A, based on what we're saying, again, for that kind of cohort of companies, If you have a little bit of product market fit, again, we're seeing pricing between 80 and maybe a 152 hundred post on the high end.”
Motamedi: Greylock Backs Flawed Ideas if General Market 'Zip Code' Is Right
“I think we are more likely to do it if we think the general zip code is good, right? So, like, if you're in a good zip code, but the street you've picked to build your house on is a bad street, like that we're more willing to get behind because we're like, hey…”
Motamedi: Greylock led a $26M seed round in cybersecurity startup Upwind
“We backed a team coming out of NetApp, where they had previously built and scaled a business and they sold it to NetApp for half a billion dollars, and they're building a new cybersecurity company called Upwind that's off to the races, and we led a really larg…”
Motamedi predicts SaaS will shift to hybrid seat and work-based pricing
“I think we're going to see hybrid pricing models. Where you're going to layer on to seats the type of work that you're doing for the end user, and you're going to monetize that separately, and that will allow these companies to continue growing inside accounts…”
Abnormal Security reached $100M ARR growing over 100% year-over-year
“We were fortunate at Greylock to initiate a company called Abnormal Security, which recently announced they've crossed a hundred million of ARR growing north of a hundred percent.”
Cresta Study Shows Entry-Level Workers Benefit Most From AI
“Like one of Greylock's portfolio companies, Cresta, did a study of which people in the customer service were most benefited by early AI, and it was the entry level people. It was the people coming in, right, and learning the job much more quickly.”
SCS Financial manages money for partners of Accel and Greylock
“And we manage money for the partners of founding partner of Excel and Greylock. So I knew that it was tough to get into those funds because I had it in and it still wasn't like”
Duboe: A startup's capacity and speed are constrained by its number of 'barrels'
“If you only have five barrels, you can only do five things simultaneously, right? And so as you're hiring people, just keep an eye out for who those barrels are. And when you find one, do everything in your power to keep them engaged, throw more responsibility…”
Sze: Greylock partners can pass almost any deal if they push hard
“The reality is, at Greylock, if you do your work, you can get most deals through the partnership if you really believe in it, and the way we are. You'll get challenged, but if you do the work, and you push, and you believe in it, most of the cases, and the vas…”
Sze: Ignoring team feedback is a fast failure mode for VC partners
“I mean, we've had folks fail because they didn't understand how to navigate the dialectic between team and individual. Usually more too individual in the sense of like running over people or not listening to feedback or not learning. That's something that I th…”
David Sze: Domain-focused VC investors must be stage-agnostic
“The business was becoming very specialized and much more focused, and so I was pushing to say, we need to have people that have expertise in a domain, and as a result, if you're going to narrow down your domain focus, we need to have to give them the freedom t…”
David Sze: VCs only truly control investment journeys and team selection
“The two things you do control are what journeys you go on and who you go on them with. So make sure that the journeys you go on are ones that you really want to be on through the bad times and the good times, whether it works out or not, that you don't say, oh…”
Sze: Bonding with Reid Hoffman in China led to LinkedIn investment
“We sat at the back of the bus each time on every stop on this tour through China, and we just mind melded. It was great. We got along so well. We were fast friends, and that led to the investment in LinkedIn and me inviting him to come to Greylock”
David Sze: Venture investment decisions require a three-step heart-head-heart process
“I tend to start with the heart, which is, I have to, like, sort of fall in love with the idea, or fall in love with the founder, or some combination of that, and what it could be. Then you go to the head, and you do all your work, and you crunch all the number…”
Greylock recruited three key engineers for Instagram within four days
“And to give you an example, when we were talking to Kevin Systrom about investing in Instagram, and they were 13 employees, and they said, well, what's their major pain point in terms of how they operated? We said, okay, great. Because we have this network of …”
Hoffman discloses confidential portfolio info to select partners to maintain trust
“And so, for example, some of the things that I do within kind of the venture partnership is I will sometimes say, okay, because by the way, you always have to second guess yourself on these things. I go, all right, this is something that's super secret that th…”