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 41 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Ehrenberg: Selling Trade Desk Early Was Undeniably The Right Decision
“Let me tell you, the downside regret versus the upside opportunity cost. Like, we made the right trade. It's not even a question.”
Ehrenberg: Peak market fear will cut seed valuation caps under $10M
“When the fear really hits, the really smart seed stage investors are going to go in hard. Because that's when you get the best opportunities. You get great founders, and you get great businesses at prices that are a half. Of what companies were getting, you kn…”
Ehrenberg: Seed investors should almost never join pay-to-play rounds
“What the data shows is that, and this is a hard thing to stomach, it almost never makes sense to participate in a pay-to-play as a very early investor. Almost never.”
Beyroutey: IA Ventures intentionally avoids growing fund size or scaling AUM
“We don't raise funds on a set and periodic cycle. And we've intentionally decided not to grow our fund size or assets under management”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures limits portfolios to 25 companies per fund
“Our adaptation of that is, you know, we're a very small firm taking an artisanal approach to venture investing where, you know, Brad, Jesse, and I, we have no junior people. We each do our own work. That by going deep in two to three companies a year each over…”
Ehrenberg: Concentrated seed portfolios best deliver 3x to 5x net returns
“What that really led me to believe when I looked at modeling portfolio construction around the time that I started IA was that a much more concentrated strategy than a more traditional strategy. 40, 50, 60 portfolio constituent approach was what I felt had the…”
Ehrenberg: Seed VC signaling risk is a red herring for Series A
“The notion of misalignment is somewhat of a red herring because smart investors will see what we're seeing and that if the company hasn't done well, Then they're not going to be able to raise anyway.”
Stebbings: Hopin, BeReal, and Clubhouse failed to be 20VC's top returners
“With my first fund, after 18 months, I predicted my top five fund returners, and you had your hop-ins, you had your B-reels, you had your clubhouse, and none of the five outperformers ended up being the outperformers, and the five outperformers I always had in…”
Ehrenberg: Holding The Trade Desk Longer Would Have Added 5x-10x Fund Return
“We could have held onto TTD and returned another five to 10 X of the fund.”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures Turned $5.2M in The Trade Desk into $300M DPI
“I think that we ended up returning five to six X net on that one trade. It was a two hundred and fifty million dollar fund. So 5000005.2 million turned into net two 50 to three hundred million DPI.”
Ehrenberg: Secondaries Are Now the Only Way to Recycle Capital
“Really, the only way to get that recycling now is through secondary.”
Ehrenberg: Great product and market cannot compensate for a mediocre founder
“The notion of a great Product in a great market does not compensate for a meh founder, and I think I fell into the trap of thinking the founder's good enough because market and product was so strong, and I got that wrong.”
Ehrenberg: Early-stage startups should maintain 30 months of cash runway
“We generally preach, you know, 30 months of burn on your balance sheet, and really not ramping up spend significantly until you've demonstrated real customer traction.”
IA Ventures invested over 10% of its $50M fund into The Trade Desk
“So we co-led seed, and then it leads into two small bridges. So when the dust settled, we ended up having 2.2 million out of a fifty million dollar fund in the company. So that was still, you know, under It wasn't until after they had taken off like a rocket s…”
IA Ventures funded The Trade Desk when outside investors refused
“Yet, you know, the insiders were confident that Jeff Green, Dave Pickles, and the team were on the right track, and that they were doing something truly differentiated, and they were executing well. It just was in an unsexy area at a really bad time, and we co…”
Tisch: Sitting between disciplined and adaptive VC strategies is dangerous
“So I think you see great firms with amazing returns just stay incredibly disciplined. Whether that's Harrison Metal or an IA Ventures, it feels like they don't change their playbook. And then there's other firms that are totally adaptive to a market condition …”
Beyroutey: Startups compete with Big Tech by attacking niche flanks
“I think that that's fair in a whole host of markets, and so I think of that as a strong default, and I might compare that sentiment to the strong defaults in the nineties and early 2000 that you can't compete with Microsoft. And that's a strong default because…”
Beyroutey: Early entry is the only strategy for outsized exit ownership
“Building ownership early is by and large, the only available strategy for having outsized ownership at exit.”
Ehrenberg: The Trade Desk raised multiple extensions before its Series A
“Some of our best companies have actually raised kind of extension rounds. The Trade Desk, you know, which is now, you know, trading at well over a billion dollars, they needed a few extensions before they were able to kind of raise their Series A.”
Ehrenberg: Seed follow-on funding avoids founder misalignment with upfront clarity
“We do not think there's misalignment As long as there is absolute clarity with the founder prior to investing as to what constitutes success for the series A.”
Ehrenberg: Enterprise product-market fit means selling software without heavy services
“So to us, product market fit at that point is where sales cycle has come way in, where there's not the need for heavy services in order to get somebody to buy, but where the product fit and finish is such that somebody is just willing to buy the product.”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures Retained 17% of TTD, 13% of Wise at IPO
“And we were 17% of TTD at IPO and we were 13% of wise at IPO out of a little shitty seed fund.”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures Funded Trade Desk Series B Using Simple Exit Liquidity
“We had a similar result From a very different situation in fund one, when we sold simple to BBVA, because that generated the liquidity that we then invested in the trade desk series B.”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures Returned Half of Fund II via Wise Pre-IPO Secondary
“We sold into one of those for the reasons I said, we ended up being able to return half of fund two and generate recycling capital. I mean, which, because remember fund two is a hundred and five billion, which obviously has done extremely well.”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures Co-Led The Trade Desk's Seed Deal Off a PowerPoint
“We literally committed on the basis of a PowerPoint. And we worked on that deal with Founder Collective. So Eric Paley and I both sat on the board. And so we literally co-led the seed round together and then IA breached them three times before raising their Se…”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures Held 17% Ownership in The Trade Desk at IPO
“There is nothing like taking a company public where we owned 17% on the day of IPO.”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures Refuses to Use SPVs to Fund Recycling
“Which is why a lot of firms try and solve the problem with SPBs. We never would do that. So we forced ourselves into finding solutions for recycling.”
Ehrenberg: Seed fund deployment timelines will extend beyond 18 months
“If you're talking about seed, I think that 12 to 18 month time horizons will be extended.”
Beyroutey: IA Ventures requires unanimous partner consensus despite individual lead autonomy
“Our model is that each one of us will lead an investment, and the person leading the investment is the ultimate decision-maker about whether or not we're going to pursue the investment. But in parallel, all of our investments are unanimous, so we don't do a vo…”
Beyroutey: Passing on Plaid was my biggest investment mistake
“The company Plaid, I would count as one of my absolute biggest misses, and the mistake that I made was I looked at the product that they were thinking about building in the very beginning, which was consumer financial management and playing with location at th…”
Beyroutey: IA Ventures turned TransferWise board decks into Google Docs for feedback
“I think the first company that I had the pleasure of working on at IA called TransferWise started doing this and we ended up doing it with a lot of our other portfolio companies. We made our board decks into a Google document”
Ehrenberg: Octane Lending raised $100M financing backed by proprietary credit models
“Both traditional data and alternative data were able to create their own credit curves and stress test them such that they could raise a hundred million dollars of financing from a large hedge fund and a bank as a senior lender based upon their proprietary dat…”
Ehrenberg: 24 months of runway is table stakes for development-stage startups
“In terms of having some extra cushion for companies that are really still very much in the developmental stage, I think, 24 months is table stakes.”
Ehrenberg: Early-stage VC success requires process-oriented founders and data iteration
“Especially, Harry, where we're investing in IA, which is so early, where there is such sparse data, that if we don't have a process, if we don't have founders that embrace experimentation, if we don't have a rigorous approach to data collection, analysis, iter…”
Uretsky: DigitalOcean grew revenue 66% in three weeks around its seed round
“We finally sent an update after we hit product market fit, said, hey, we hit 500 K in annual revenue, and then basically, at that At that point, it took him three weeks to get back to me, which was unusual. And by the time we came into the office, we said, yea…”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures Held 2.2% Stake in Datadog at IPO
“Datadog's a great example of one that ended up being A fund returner, but we had 2.2% at IPO because we were in there at pre-seed and then RTP led the seed and then index led the A.”
IA Ventures deployed Fund I in 21 months, Fund III in four years
“Our deployment For fund one, 21 months. For us, super quick. And then fund two, closer to three years. Three, three and a half years. And then fund three, three and a half, four years.”
IA Ventures partners make only 1 to 3 investments each per year
“We do One, two, three, each of the three of us at iVentures each year.”
IA Ventures provides outsourced CFOs to portfolio startups in year one
“We help companies with an outsourced CFO for their first year of life.”
IA Ventures raised $475M across four seed funds
“Roger is a founding partner at IA Ventures, one of the most successful seed funds of the last decade, with four hundred and seventy-five million dollars across their four funds.”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures does not set partner capital allocations
“Engage in hyper-transparent communication with our portfolio founders, and that's where we found there to be the greatest power, not that, oh, Brad gets 50, Jesse gets 50, Roger gets 60, or anything like that. We never even think of that, to be totally honest.”