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 42 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Calacanis: Standalone marketing software will disappear by 2026
“In 2026 26, there will be no such thing as marketing software that got Klaviyo public. Marketing sales support have already converged to one agent.”
Lemkin: Almost every SaaS company in venture markets is overpriced
“This is why almost every SaaS company is overpriced in the venture markets because of Klaviyo. If Klaviyo was worth twenty billion, then all these deals we're doing make sense.”
Lemkin: Klaviyo is undervalued and should be worth at least $12B
“This is still a top five percent public company, and it's only worth 6.9 billion. These are the kind of stories that whiz obscures. In my mind, should be 12 to thirteen billion dollar company at minimum.”
Lemkin: IPO markets evaluate efficiency at listing, ignoring capital raised history
“The IPO markets don't care. They actually don't care whether you raise nothing right in primary like Atlassian or whether you raised a crap load like rubric. Or whether you raised almost nothing like Klaviyo and then a bunch and then all, and then burn nothing…”
Lemkin predicts Klaviyo will surpass Shopify in SaaS revenue in years
“They will cross, they will be doing more SaaS revenue than Shopify in a couple years.”
Lemkin predicts Klaviyo will surpass HubSpot in marketing revenue soon
“They will be soon be doing more marketing revenue than HubSpot.”
Lemkin: Klaviyo will be worth close to $10 billion
“Klaviyo is going to be worth, I think, close to ten billion.”
Rajaram: Shopify will not build a competing product to Klaviyo
“I don't think Shopify will build it. Shopify is an investor, and Shopify, I think, has decided, at least in my opinion, that this is, Shopify has these things called missions, and I think they've decided this is not part of their mission to build this product.…”
Torres convinced Klaviyo founder Andrew Bialecki to take VC funding
“I convinced him to take VC money.”
Bialecki: Klaviyo has at least 10x expansion potential remaining
“So when we think about, you know, all the people that we can help plus the other applications, plus the fact we can make them better at using each of those applications, That trifecta, I think there's, you know, at least a 10 X, probably a lot more in there.”
Bialecki: High-Margin Software Startups Should Be Profitable From Day One
“I think software it's high margin. You know, if we're really good at building, if we get close to customers, you ought to be able to build a profitable business, you know, from the start.”
Klaviyo Seed Round Was Raised at a 20x ARR Valuation
“So, you know, I remember asking, I was like, hey, look, I know 10 X is the normal thing. Can we do 20 X? And again, we wasn't really scientific and yeah, I mean, this seed investor we were working with just said, yeah, sure. That sounds good.”
Lemkin: Only two SaaS companies have gone public since late 2021
“I'm concerned that we've only had two SaaS-ish IPOs since twenty-twenty-one. We've only had two since HashiCorp was the last one of the bubble of December of twenty-twenty-one, right? Just got bought for IBM. If only had two, we've only had Klaviyo and Rubrik.”
Lemkin wagers $2,000 that recent tech IPOs stay above IPO price
“I'll say all three are up. I'll go two grand on this one.”
Frankel: Founder Collective passed on Klaviyo due to its valuation framework
“So Klaviyo loved Andrew, loved Ed, came to me first, came through Hugo van Furen, who also sent us Suno, and didn't do it because of the framework. And the framework allowed me to easily say no.”
Lemkin: 80% of Klaviyo's revenue is generated through the Shopify ecosystem
“80% of Klaviyo's revenue is off Shopify”
Torres was the first investor in Klaviyo
“That Klaviyo, you know, I'm a first investor, good friends with Andrew, right?”
Lemkin: Klaviyo generates more marketing revenue than HubSpot
“In fact, they are bigger in marketing revenue than HubSpot. They're actually bigger.”
Bialecki: Mailchimp's Exit From Shopify Was Not a Step-Change for Klaviyo
“I think that event, you know, we ran some analytics on this, I think, you know, a while, while ago, and there was definitely there was a bump, but I think people were surprised at how much there was kind of already these big, huge tailwinds and that, you know,…”
Bialecki: Marketing media no longer follows a strict power law
“I used to unabashedly think that, hey, when it comes to marketing, there's only a couple of there's only a couple of mediums media types that matter. I've definitely changed how I think about that now. I mean, we added SMS as part of our product set, and now w…”
Klaviyo uses identical underlying technology for SMB and enterprise customers
“The funny part is the technology isn't, you know, for us, I mean, it obviously just kind of scales, It's not really all that different. The product and technology, it's really just matching up with what are the things that matter most to those folks.”
Klaviyo Was Rejected by Every $20K Accelerator Grant Program It Applied To
“We'd applied to all these venture firms Had these kind of, you know, we'll give you 20,000 dollars and it's like, you know, no strings attached, no equity you know, for the summer. And so we applied to a bunch of these when we were about six months in, and at …”
Bialecki: Future software will run autonomously without human operators
“I think so much of soft, the software of the future, it's gonna be able to, you know, play itself. We think about software that is actually, you use it better because you don't have to be the user.”
Bialecki: Single-Brand Strategy Beats Maintaining Multiple Sub-Brands for SaaS
“It's easier to just have one brand for everybody. And then to your point of product marketing, you just have to make sure, you know, whether it's digital experiences or even the, you know, the events and the things that we do for customers that you know, bifur…”
Bialecki: Klaviyo Waited 10 Years Before Making Its First Price Change
“We did our first price increase, like, basically since we, or first price change you know what was it? I guess last year and that was, like, the first one in, like, 10 years.”
Bialecki: Going public gives larger enterprise customers confidence in long-term stability
“As we were working with larger businesses, larger customers we knew there was some value in folks knowing that like, Hey, we were in it for the long run.”
Bialecki: Software will sell direct outputs over tools within 10-20 years
“I think that's generally the right direction. I'm maybe a little skeptical of how fast, you know, we get there. But I do think if you fast forward, you know, 1020 years, I think there's a lot of processes where, yeah, hey, I just need the output.”
Klaviyo used balance sheet cash for employee secondary tender offers
“I think that was our series B. I think we did ran a couple of others. Some were coordinated around like about fundraisings and some, I think were just, we had cash on the balance sheet.”
Bialecki: A Well-Executed IPO Roadshow Should Feel Anticlimactic
“I make the analogy that like so one, everybody talks about a road show, but the reality is, is you meet everybody, you know, three or four times leading up to that. So it's more like you're seeing people that you already know. So in some sense, the road show s…”
Lemkin: Klaviyo Is Growing 50% at $750M ARR
“Look at Klaviyo for a minute. They're growing. I mean, the growth's come down a little bit, but they're growing, I think, 50% at seven hundred fifty million in ARR.”
Hoffman: Recent tech IPOs will not hold IPO prices by Halloween 2024
“If you're saying, are they all up? I would say, I will say no. I say the chance that they're all up would be very, very would be very low.”
Jason Lemkin bets $10,000 that Klaviyo stock will rise 20% within 12 months
“I'll bet 10 grand to anyone that takes it that Klaviyo, 12 months from when this episode goes out or today, whatever Harry says, trades at 20% or higher from where it is today. I'll bet 10 grand it's 20% or higher.”
Deven Parekh: High-quality private SaaS deals will command multiples above Klaviyo's
“What I would say is that deals will get done at even north of that multiple for a high quality company that has a lot of runway in a big market.”
Torres is holding his Klaviyo stock because it remains underappreciated
“A thousand percent, so that's why I'm not selling my stock.”
Klaviyo Took 36 Months to Reach $1M in ARR
“For us, we started on January first of 20 12. In year one, we got to a couple thousand dollars in MRR. So say maybe 20,000 dollars in ARR. In year two, we got to a quarter of a million dollars in ARR, which was a huge jump, but we were still, you know, I think…”
Klaviyo Raised a $1.5 Million Seed Round Around $1M ARR
“We raised a million and a half dollars and we weren't super, you know formulaic about it.”
Klaviyo Scaled to $50M–$60M ARR Before Raising Post-Seed Funding
“We went like a bunch of years where we probably scaled to about, I think it was around 50,000,060 million in ARR before we raised our next rounds.”
Bialecki: Klaviyo Raised Series A, B, and C Rounds From Single Investors
“When we did our series A, B, C, it was all one investor. By the time you get to the roadshow, you're kind of back to like these party rounds where there's going to be lots of people you're raising from.”
Klaviyo expands its Shopify partnership template into new industry verticals
“And we've actually started to take that to, you know, other verticals and other industries and use a little bit of the template.”
Klaviyo previously experimented with a separate enterprise brand called Klaviyo One
“Where we ended up, we actually experimented with this a couple of years ago. We had this concept of, well, Klaviyo as a brand would be for our, you know for, you know, entrepreneurs, founders, you know businesses that we're scaling up. And then we'd have a sep…”
Bialecki: Early capital would have accelerated Klaviyo's product engineering team
“We probably would have grew our product engineering team faster. I mean, it was, I kind of enjoyed Writing, you know, writing a lot of the code, building, you know, building and designing features, you know, in the early days. But I think there was a point at …”