The Ledger
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Stebbings: Menlo to make $10B carry on Anthropic, Founders Fund more on SpaceX
“Menlo will make ten billion dollars in carry Spot will too, plus Founders Fund will make more than that from SpaceX.”
Browder: Large VCs selling secondary shares creates fatal signaling risk
“If Menlo Ventures sell secondary in a company, the company is dead because the signaling risk is, is huge or any firm.”
Menlo Ventures' Anthropic position is worth over $10 billion
“No, our position is, is north of that, but that's not that you can do the math on what carry usually is.”
Lovable scaled from zero to $300M ARR within one year
“Where you see a company go from zero to something like three hundred million in a year. I think we intercepted them around, well, we kind of got, tried to get in when they were around 30, 30 of error, but we around, we did was around one 50.”
Lemkin: Anthropic publicly warned Menlo Ventures against SPVs last year
“Anthropic last year warned Menlo, one of its best investors and others, enough with the SPVs, they said publicly, enough with the damn SPVs.”
Anthropic matched ChatGPT performance pre-launch using 1/50th of the capital
“All the benchmarks you could see that they were kind of better or at the same level of performances as ChatGPT at the time. And they'd spent like, I don't know, A 50th of the capital.”
Outlier venture investments do not require internal partnership dissent
“I don't really ascribe to this point of view where you need like a bunch of no's and there's one person who's a yes, and that leads to an outlier. I know there are examples of that, but that's not really been my experience in the firms I've been part of or wit…”
VC funds should never sell early stakes in outlier winners
“Like I think if you're a believer, I think more than ever, we're in an environment where your outliers, your winners will compound and drive fund returns. So those are certainly not the ones you want to sell from.”
AI startups are reaching $100M revenue in one year
“When we look around and see these companies doing zero to a hundred in a year, never seen anything like it. And there's more examples of that than I can probably count right now.”
Menlo Ventures broke its standard investment criteria to back Anthropic
“And I'll, that's, I'll take you back to our investment in, in Anthropic. Like, same thing. It's like, This doesn't really fit. This isn't what we normally do, but wow, if this works, I mean, you got such a special founder in Dario and an amazing market.”
Menlo Ventures raised its instant seed check limit to $8M
“We've got the specific seed strategy where three partners can, you know, right up to an eight million dollar check, like on the spot that used to, that number used to be three.”
O'Driscoll: First venture rounds for OpenAI and Anthropic were $23B and $4B
“The first venture round at OpenAI was twenty-three billion pre with Thrive, and the first venture round at Entropic was four billion pre with Spark and Menlo, you know, right?”
Jason Lemkin: AI music startup Suno retains only 20% of customers annually
“They just said they have, they only retained 20% of their customers in a year”
Pishevar: Menlo's $26.5M Uber investment grew to nearly $6.7B
“For twenty million at the time, later I got another six and a half million through secondary for Menlo. So that investment at today's prices is worth almost seven billion dollars.”
Pishevar: Menlo Ventures passed on Snapchat seed and Series A rounds
“I, so, I brought Snapchat to Menlo. Evan and I hit it off. I really believe that. I was on it in the first 30 days, because my kids were on it, and so they showed it to me, and I was chasing it, and Evan and I hit it off and unfortunately Menlo passed on the, …”
AI developer stack startups are rapidly taking off after early struggles
“So there's so much more there, and I think we started off investing in that area two, three years ago. Nothing really came out of it. Now these companies are really taking off.”
Menlo Ventures invested $10M in Anthropic before raising $500M+ SPV
“The first check was a little over 10 and then, you know, the, so that was kind of the starter check because the average, like I said, you try to kind of, you know, venture fund kind of have this kind of narrow window of what you invest, but then the next round…”
Menlo Ventures does not aspire to raise a $10B+ fund
“We don't have a 10 or twenty billion dollar fund, nor do we aspire to have that.”
Menlo's $500M+ Anthropic SPV was the firm's first ever
“Menlo had never done an SPV before. It just happened to be over five hundred million.”
Menlo Anthology fund backed 50+ startups including OpenRouter and Whisper
“Like that's over 50 companies, somewhere between a hundred K and one million where you kind of get in a seed round and the companies that have graduated out of that have been open router, whisper, axiom math.”
VCs rarely lose deals on valuation alone for top companies
“It's rarely just, like, straight up, you know, valuation, stuff like that. Yes, valuation can be painful. But for the right companies, you know, you do what it takes to be in.”
Lacking a prior relationship is the main reason VCs lose deals
“The thing that's most often is that you were late to the party, right? Like, you know, you were not intentional enough that this was a company that you wanted to be tracking and building a relationship, so you're coming in, you know, a couple weeks or a month …”
Menlo Ventures signed Anthropic term sheet two weeks after LP meeting
“So we literally came out of that meeting and said, all right, we've got to do this. We've got to figure out a way to lead the round. And two weeks later, We signed a term sheet. We, you know, aggregated all the kind of demand from RLPs and folks we knew and, y…”
Lemkin: Menlo Ventures raised a $3B fund following its Anthropic bet
“Menlo just raised a three billion dollar fund after 50 years on the back of a crazy bed in Anthropik that, that, that went very well, right? When the margins were crazy”
Lemkin: Menlo Ventures will 10x to 15x its investment in Chime
“They said they did the Series B, right? So they did the Series B at 203 hundred. Maybe we can figure it out on the fly. They're going to, this will be a nine. There'll be some dilution. They'll 10 or 15 X their money, right? That'll be a fun returner or more t…”
Pishevar: Closed Uber, Warby Parker, Tumblr, and Machine Zone in 90 days
“In my first 90 days, I closed Uber, Warby Parker Tumblr, and Machine Zone.”
Pishevar: Deal-by-deal carry yielded higher returns than Menlo's fund carry
“I got more carry than I would have gotten in the fund by agreeing to do deal by deal carry.”
Menlo Ventures has invested in approximately seven AI labs
“We have very specific strategy around Neo labs too. We're in about seven of them.”
Menlo Ventures wrote a sub-$50M check for legal AI startup Legora
“The round that just happened, you know, about six months ago. It was like it was kind of sub-fifty, but in that range.”
Menlo Ventures pivoted its investment strategy to focus entirely on AI
“We've pivoted the firm to be all in AI.”
Menlo Ventures has backed about eight drug discovery AI models
“We have about eight of these models. I mentioned Chai, but we have a company I can go down the list of companies building specific models to do drug discovery.”
RealtyShares surpasses $200 million in funded deals with top VC backing
“RealtyShares recently announced an incredible two hundred million funded deals through the platform, so a huge congratulations to them. For that, and they've also raised funding from some of the world's best investors, including the one and only Union Square V…”