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 31 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
Scott Sandell: Free is the most powerful business model in the world
“This fit into our overarching theme, you know, that the most powerful model in the world is free, and they were going to be disruptive because they were offering something of real value, you know, stock trading where commissions were seven or eight dollars a t…”
Valuation does not matter for Series A venture investments
“I subscribe completely to the mentality that price does not matter at the Series A. At the Series A level, we as venture investors, anyone with more than a 25 or fifty million dollar fund should be looking for these outsized exits. They should be looking for c…”
NEA requires $800M+ exits to move the needle, unlike smaller funds
“I think one realization coming since joining Canvas a few years ago is a small exit, like, easily moves the needle for a fund like Canvas, whereas we used to joke when you don't have an exit more than eight hundred million, you know, it doesn't move the needle…”
Sandell: Software post-IPO growth accelerated from 18% to 50% over two decades
“But interestingly enough, in the seven quarters after the IPO, the average company grew 18%. And that was considered fantastic. You couldn't get funded today if all you were doing was growing 18%. In the decade that followed, they grew 28%, and the decade just…”
Sandell: NEA makes all firm decisions in a weekly three-hour meeting
“The only reason NEA could have scaled to the size it is, is because of the trust that we have in the partnership, which enables us to meet for three hours a week, make all the decisions necessary, and then have the confidence that they would be executed well.”
Sandell: 100%+ software growth justifies paying premium entry valuations
“If it's a software company growing over a hundred percent a year, and I really believe that that's going to continue to happen for some period of time. Then I can justify paying a price that not too far down the road, maybe 18 or 24 months, or maybe even a yea…”
NEA's Scott Sandell decides on investments within 15 minutes
“I've seen some of the greatest investors Do just that. Meet with an entrepreneur. Within the 1:15 minutes, they're either excited or they're not. If they're excited, they're investing. Scott Sandell at NEA is a great example of that. It's very much his style.”
Comparing venture capital fundraising and investing to dating is silly
“One saying that I really do not like in venture and in entrepreneurship is the idea that raising capital is like dating or investing in entrepreneurs is like dating. That's quite silly if you think about it. A VC and an entrepreneur should be quite up front”
Riparbelli: Synthesia raised $100M Series D led by NEA
“As we just raised a series D which is super exciting, big milestone for us. We raised a hundred million dollars led by NEA with participation from all of our existing investors.”
Siroker: NEA Buys Portfolio Stock at IPO Rather Than Selling
“They're often buyers at the IPO. They're not sellers.”
Ehrenberg: Insight Partners and NEA Have Formed Continuation Funds
“Honestly, that's what Insight's done. That's what NEA's done.”
Rick Yang: NEA calculated $70B in brokerage market cap ripe for disruption
“Because we did have that sort of straight line base case, hey, look, there's seventy billion dollars of market cap that is ripe for disruption, and we see that.”
Sandell: Robinhood's board pushed management to start spending on paid marketing
“In the board meetings, the board actually impressed upon the team that we should probably figure out How to spend some money on customer acquisition, because we could grow faster, and the payback on these customers was so high that you could afford to spend a …”
Robinhood had an 800,000-person waitlist during its closed beta
“We invested and led the series B and they were still in closed beta at the time, but there were some really Interesting signals at the time, right? They had built this amazing waiting list of over 800,000 people that wanted the product.”
Sandell: Board members build trust by showing kindness during tough quarters
“When an entrepreneur comes into a board meeting and they've had a tough Quarter or tough month or something hasn't gone right. You don't have to beat them up over that. Just be kind and they will always appreciate that.”
Sandell: NEA's top growth basket returned 36% annually over a decade
“This particular collection of companies has raised thirty-two billion dollars in total, and we've only been responsible for three billion of it. So that's kind of great. Our companies have had access to all this company. The problem is that that particular bas…”
Sandell: Cultural mismatch is the main reason people leave NEA early
“Once we've hired people, we're watching very carefully to see whether their behavior matches our values and our culture, and really that's the one thing that causes people to leave NEA on a relatively premature schedule.”
Viswanathan: NewView Capital invested in Plaid following NEA's early-stage backing
“Yeah, this is an easy one. It's Plaid, which I was part of the team that led the seed and Series A at NEA many, many years ago, so I know Zach has been on your show, and I think the world of him, so one of my top priority after founding NewView is figuring out…”
NewView Capital spun out from NEA in 2018 with 30 companies
“So that's what we did in 2018. We orchestrated a spin-out from NEA with thirty-odd companies, and that's how NuView was formed, which when we closed the fund in late 2018.”
Viswanathan: NewView and NEA support controlled secondary liquidity for founders
“On the one hand, if they want to sell a small percentage of their stock to get some liquidity, and it's more of a pressure release mechanism for them personally, we actually encourage it. And we've done that in the past, both at Newview as well as at NEA.”
NEA uses partner sub-committees instead of consensus for deal approval
“The answer is no, but we don't also try to get those full 20 people to be aligned. We break up into smaller teams based on the experts around the table, the investors inside NEA who are prone to know something about that space. So if it's a robotics company, w…”
Startups do not need product-market fit on day one
“It's not about, I've got this little thing, and I've got huge product market fit today. Yes, you need to accomplish that. Over, you know, the early days of the company's life, but you don't have to have it on day one.”
Grayson spends most of her time proactively researching sectors
“Actually, I spend the majority of my time proactively researching spaces, researching sectors, and getting to know networks of people.”
Unicorn-stage venture investments require a 3x to 5x minimum upside
“Now, if you're investing in, say, a unicorn-type valuation, price matters a lot more. It should be more Clear at that stage, whether this is going to be, you know, a unicorn being a billion dollar valuation, whether this is going to be a fifty billion dollar c…”
First Round Capital pioneered the institutional seed fund movement
“I credit Josh Koppelman and First Round Capital for really starting that movement, and that's gone from 20 to 50 to a hundred million dollar size funds, and then we've also seen the advent of the larger funds, such as NEA, and I think what you've really seen i…”
Sandell: NEA grew flagship fund size from $2.3B to $3.6B in 20 years
“We've been growing actually relatively slowly, Harry, 10 or 15% fund to fund. We started with the first big fund, NEA-TEN, in 2000, a 2.3 billion dollar fund, so we've been growing on a large base since then, and our latest fund is 3.6 1,000,000,020 years late…”
Sandell: NEA plans to raise bigger and different kinds of funds
“Well, I think there's certainly an opportunity to raise bigger and maybe different kinds of funds to meet these needs, and that's something we plan to do.”
Viswanathan: Workday's 2009 pitch was his most straightforward in 20 years
“When we heard the pitch, it was probably one of the most straightforward pitches I've ever heard in 20 years of venture, meaning we just had to fund that company, and the reason for that is there's the numbers, but you really have to see what is this company d…”
Grayson's deal flow splits evenly between intros and proactive outreach
“So I'd say probably half the meetings I take are kind of opportunistic intros that they're sending to me. And the other half are really formed by the proactive outreach that I'm doing on my own.”