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 70 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
Lemkin: Kleiner Perkins' $100M Anthropic check is just a logo deal
“You got, you can't walk into the partners and not have anthropic or open AI on the website. It's not enough. Yeah. It's a low, I think it's a logo deal.”
Kleiner Perkins sold G Squared terrible early cleantech deals
“And there were some dogs in there, some cleantech shit that Kleiner Perkins sold me that was just a flaming bag of turds on your front porch.”
Hamid: Data-driven VC sourcing platforms are mostly BS
“I think it's mostly BS. Yeah. Yeah. I think many have tried and failed at using the very data oriented approach to investing in startups, when at the end of the day it's about the founders and-”
Gumroad reached $10M revenue years after Kleiner Perkins wrote it off
“Gumroad, it took me seven, eight, nine years to get to a place where Gumroad kind of is considered, like, you know, we're at ten million in revenue doubling every year, but that's because of a macroeconomic shift, namely COVID, that just happened out of the bl…”
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.”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins reserves a 'YOLO bucket' for rule-breaking deals
“And in some ways we have a, what we call like a Yolo bucket in our funds and where you just have this extreme conviction around the founder and the company where you're sort of willing to break the rules.”
Daniel Dines Rejected Sequoia Capital's Investment Offer for UiPath's Series B
“So I said basically no to Sequoia to our Series B, and we, Series B was led by Excel US, and Capital G, Kleiner Perkins, and some other people participated in, but I said no to Sequoia.”
Lemkin: Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins historically demanded 20% valuation discounts
“When I started in the old, old days, there were only two brands in venture. I knew of there was Sequoia and Kleiner, right? And you had to take a discount for both of them, right? You'd go out and you'd get your term sheet from somebody else, and then Kleiner …”
Doerr: Enphase gains covered Kleiner's losses across six failed solar investments
“We invested in seven solar companies. The Chinese crushed six of them, all six of which made solar panels. The seventh one made microinverters. It's name is Enphase, and the gains from Enphase made up for the losses across all the rest of the solar investments”
Venture Timing Is Wrong for VR and Autonomous Vehicles
“And I think for a lot of those big categories, the timing is likely not now in terms of making smart investments that deliver meaningful returns or LPs.”
Stebbings: Etched Raised $700M at a $21B Valuation
“Speaking of high IP businesses, literally, like, three weeks ago, Etched raised at ten billion. Today, they've announced they've raised seven hundred million at twenty-one billion from Jane Street, Kleiner, Sequoia, Andreessen.”
Altman: Mid-sized $700M VC funds face severe structural challenges
“I think it's really challenging to be like a seven hundred million dollar fund. Now I think you're either a really massive, powerful platform like an Andreessen or a GC Or you just have the legacy cachet, like a Sequoia or a Kleiner, or you have to be a boutiq…”
Randle: Passed on OpenAI at $32B valuation over structural concerns
“And then the thirty-two billion dollar round of OpenAI came around when I was at Kleiner Perkins, and all of a sudden I was like, oh man, this structure seems really gnarly. You know, they're gonna have to convert this somehow, it's a non-profit, they're selli…”
O'Driscoll: Kleiner Perkins made ~4x return on initial Windsurf round
“The round, the first round that Kleiner did was at four 50, probably 500 post, so four X plus or minus.”
Hamid discloses $30 million loss on shutdown startup Tally
“Thirty million or so, and that's multiples of the largest loss prior to that, so you know, I don't wear this badge of honor of, like, losing a lot.”
Hamid: KP's Figma deal was contentious at $500k ARR and $110M valuation
“You know, actually Figma was quite contentious. Yeah, it was, yeah. Because to your point, around like half a million of AR at a 110, 15 post, whatever it was at the time it was really like the same thing. There's Envision, there's Sketch. This company's been …”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins needs 15-20% ownership on $5M-$10M early-stage checks
“Because as you know, Harry, you know, we have to get our ownership at the early stages where you're investing five to ten million dollars for 15 to 20% for the math to work for our funds.”
Kleiner Perkins focuses AI investments on co-pilots for top-earning professions
“We've invested in a lot of application layer companies, and that are solving very specific pain points. And the way we've looked at it pretty simply is, if you think about, we took actually the top 20 jobs in the US, and who makes the most? Simple. And it's do…”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins will not expand into a massive capital accumulator
“I don't think we want that at all. I think we love where we are today. We really do, and I don't try to, I'm not BSing you. You're a long time friend, and I believe in venture, early stage venture being a beautiful asset class, especially if you can follow the…”
Hamid: AI SaaS startups command $300 to $500 monthly per seat
“What we're seeing right now is that you have seat-based pricing that was like, 30 dollars a month, 40 dollars a month, and now you're getting 300 dollars a month, 400 dollars a month, even 500 dollars a month for the software.”
Hamid: Early-stage VC firms should not use voting structures
“Yeah, I don't believe in voting structures for early stage venture capital. I think you have to have, allow every partner to put themselves on the line with their conviction that they've built up over a year sometimes weeks sometimes, but you have to give into…”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins co-led Glean's early round at $35M post-money
“We'll be back to Arvind Glean. We did it as a co-led it with Lightspeed at 35 post. And Arvind is a G. You know, he started Rubrik. He's like one of the, you know, Google fellow type of person. He raised a lot. He's like fifteen million at 35 post, so gave up …”
Doerr: Kleiner Perkins bought 12% of Google for $12 million
“Twelve million dollars bought 12% of Google, which is today as a company worth several trillion dollars.”
Doerr: Kleiner Perkins turned $1B in climate investments into $3B
“Over the course of three or four funds, we invested about a billion dollars in 70 or so climate-related investments. Those investments On an as-of-held basis today are worth about three billion dollars.”
Patterson: Kleiner Perkins invested in Accel's $40M telecom fund in the 1980s
“Jim had made a really strategic move in about 83, 85, where we raised that XL-II was actually a focused telecom fund of a smaller size, but I think it was about forty million, and I think KP even invested in it.”
Loom raised Series A from Kleiner after Index rejected their seed
“Now, we ended up fundraising from Ilya, who had moved over to Kleiner at that point from Index, but we were worried, even though he individually had a ton of conviction about Loom, we weren't able to get the seed round done with Index, and so there was no guar…”
Hamid: Series A valuations jumped from $10M to $30M in ten years
“Valuations at the Series A are banded, and I remember doing investments 10 years ago when a Series A was 10 pre, and now a Series A is 30 pre, and you just have to write bigger checks now to get to the same level of ownership, and that has a, has had a true im…”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins' $600M fund will strictly focus on Series A
“We want to focus on early stage, which is really truly series A and be the first partner to a great founder and then help them on that journey, which is typically a multi-year, if not a decade plus long journey.”
Hamid: Kleiner allocates over half of $600M fund to initial checks
“But yeah, in that six hundred million, there is a substantial amount that is reserved for following rounds. But I would say more than half of the dollars are allocated to the first check that we write.”
Midha: Kleiner Perkins' highest IRR investment was Juniper Networks, not Google
“When I was actually studying Kleiner Perkins' returns history, when I was at the firm in the year, the nineties and the 2000, I think one of the highest IR investments that Kleiner ended up ever making was not Google. It was not Amazon. It was Juniper networks…”
Motschwiller: Consumer VC landscape in 2018 is harder with fewer upside opportunities
“Relative to other time periods, take when I joined Kleiner in 2012, this feels like a harder time to be investing in consumer and that there are fewer high quality and super high upside opportunities in consumer.”
Venture Capital Decision-Making Does Not Scale Beyond Five Partners
“And so one of the learnings for myself was that I wasn't so sure that venture scaled well. Of making hard decisions. It's different when you have five people around a table versus 10 people around the table.”
Gordon: Controversial startup deals are better VC investments than obvious ones
“The other thing that we've discovered is we go around the table and it's controversial. That's often a good thing. And at that point, we depend on one person being a fervent champion on behalf of the company. But if it's really obvious to us, it's probably obv…”
Brown: Pitch Series A by isolating the key unproven deal assumptions
“When we raised our series a for my last company and client air funded us, the entire pitch was I walked in, I put it on a whiteboard, five assumptions. I said, These are the five assumptions you have to a hundred percent believe in in order for this to be an i…”
O'Driscoll: Kleiner and Sequoia paid nearly $100M post-money for pre-revenue Google
“The single most successful venture investment in the last probably 20 years was done in 1999, and it was done at an absurd valuation. That's Google. Kleiner and Sequoia paid almost a hundred posts for a pre-revenue company There was doing a search engine in 19…”
Stebbings: Chai Discovery raised $400M at $3.8B valuation
“Four hundred million at a 3.8 billion dollar valuation led by Index, Kleiner, Sequoia, Dimension.”
Bloom Energy's 2001 Kleiner Perkins Pitch Proposed Off-Grid Data Centers
“So if you look at my 2001 PowerPoint presentation, which was the pitch to Kleiner Perkins, who was my first investor, John Doerr, the summary page puts out a data center, it puts out a bloom box, powering the data center, the waste heat providing the cooling f…”
Randle: First deal back at Kleiner Perkins was SpaceX at $150B
“One of like the first investment that that I did at Kleiner Perkins when I came back in, was SpaceX at a hundred and fifty billion dollars.”
Randle: Mary Meeker is the most qualitative investor I've worked with
“Everyone thinks of her as this quantitative investor. You know, she had the, her time as an equity researcher at Morgan Stanley during the.com. Bubble. And then she came to Kleiner Perkins, obviously, and everyone talks about these DCF models she creates and a…”
Moore: Kleiner Perkins treated investing in competitors as a strict red line
“When we were at Kleiner Perkins, it was something that we, it was kind of a red line that we wouldn't cross. And the reason for that is because we invested in so few companies and we go so deep with each of those companies that In our mind, it was just too har…”
Hamid: Every major enterprise CIO is funding AI proofs of concept
“We're in this era of doing a bunch of proof of concepts. You're just trying out all this cool stuff that's come into existence in the last two years and seeing, what can I do with it? And every CIO at every large company is spending real money doing POCs.”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins deployed its 2019 venture fund in 15 months
“So there's a period of time in 2000 19, so we just raised our first fund as a team together, where we deployed that fund, like, within, like, 15 months.”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins backed Aleph at a $35M post-money valuation
“Or another example is Syed Ali at Aleph. You know, I think we did that also at, like, 35 post. And Syed had come off of a company just sold for six billion dollars.”
Grady: Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid is an exceptional deal picker
“Somebody who I really admire is Mamoon at Kleiner. I think Mamoon has an exceptional track record of investing in companies that are not at all obvious at the time. And I think about the series B in Figma, which is a round that we looked at and passed on. I th…”
Doerr: Kleiner Perkins turned a $29M Enphase investment into $1B
“We invested, Kleiner did, twenty-nine million dollars in Enphase. Ben Cordlang led the investment for our partnership. That 29 million dollar investment Today is worth a billion dollars, and it is the leading maker of microinverters.”
McCabe: Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman is his favorite board member
“I loved working with Ilya Fushman. He's with Kleiner Perkins these days. Ilya was always just real. I'm a stickler for integrity and authenticity, and Ilya was what he was and is what he is, and There was no games. It wasn't hard to figure out, and I admired t…”
Hamid: VCs must build relationships with founders a year before Series A
“So you have to have known the founder to have a true relation prior to that and way prior to that, not just like a couple of weeks prior to that, maybe a year prior to that. So part of our job is to actually identify and meet with people way, way, way before t…”