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 72 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 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
O'Driscoll: Tiger Global and SoftBank are shadows of their former selves
“Tiger's the obvious example. Now, they're still around, but a shadow of their former selves. Their quote unquote relevance in 2021 meant that they saw every deal that year, but they picked badly, so they got sent home. Same thing with SoftBank.”
O'Driscoll: Scale's portfolio companies bypass VC preferences in acqui-hires
“When I'm on the other side of the table and my late stage companies are trying to buy early stage companies, I do exactly the same thing. I don't give a shit about Jason and his bloody preference. I want to hire those five great engineers. Let's just give them…”
O'Driscoll: AI increasing developer efficiency will lead companies to hire more engineers
“If automation, if 20% spend on tokens, three X's the effectiveness of your developer, then the ROI in developers goes up, so the number of developers will go up.”
O'Driscoll: SaaS companies ignoring AI will see multiples fall to 4x-5x
“If you don't get on top of this soon, That 10 X revenues is going to go on a five and four and where the other seven percent growth was are. Fast forward five years, there's really only one or two stories. They get on top of this, they get a third market share…”
O'Driscoll: $3B market cap is the effective cutoff for tech IPO liquidity
“The objective fact is, Three billion plus or minus appears to be the point at which you're, you know, it's easy to go public and it gets a lot easier the more you go up from there, right? Maybe three is a cutoff, right? And when you do something at two and the…”
O'Driscoll: Yann LeCun's $3B Non-LLM Venture Is A Scary, High-Risk Bet
“Now, Juan Lacoon raising, you know, money at three billion. And that's an example of I personally look at that and say, wow, that's a scary bet, because, you know, in somewhere between 2017 and 2022, we unlocked, collectively, the industry unlocked LLMs, and w…”
O'Driscoll: Public Tech and AI Companies Structurally Suppress Hiring
“But the interesting thing, when I lifted those three categories, the one thing they all have in common is they all don't need people. The big companies can't have people because they gotta be efficient. The model companies don't need people because they just n…”
O'Driscoll: Figma's $98 IPO pop only happened because it priced at $38
“The 98 price only happened because the IPO happened at 38.”
O'Driscoll: Initial startup growth quartile does not predict VC returns
“Very little correlation between great outcomes being top quartile or second quartile. In other words, they're almost as likely, they're growing quickly, but not astonishingly quickly, has just about the same probability of giving you a great outcome as the hyp…”
O'Driscoll: Core AI features will commodify within 3 to 5 years
“You got to pick your wedge AI entry point for that two or three years where there's kind of magic AI premium, but you got to operate on the assumption that three, five years from now, the core thing you do is going to be commodified. And what you got to do is …”
O'Driscoll: Investors should sell late-stage private stock 80% of the time
“Private late stage companies in 2025 are just the same asset class as IPOs in 95 to 2005. The same analysis applies. Most of the companies barely beat their IPO price a year later or ever again, and a small number of companies compound and do amazing, right? S…”
O'Driscoll: Mega-fund capital will make mid-tier venture investing difficult
“So my operating assumption as a mid-tier firm in terms of size is for the next three to five years, there's great big walls of capital that will make a lot of investing very difficult.”
O'Driscoll: Scale Venture Partners shifts focus from ARR to GAAP revenue
“I mean, we've started really focusing on GAAP revenue now because ARR is a made up number and GAAP numbers are fact.”
O'Driscoll Claims Salesforce Acquired Customer Service Startup Intercom
“Salesforce just bought Intercom where we were lucky enough to invest less than a year ago, and that's a very outcome-based product for customer support where they charge based on resolutions.”
O'Driscoll: AI compute token prices drop by 10x every 18 months
“Every turn of the crank on GPUs gives you a three X. Every turn of the crank on LLM optimization gives you another three X. You're looking at 10 X price falling every 18 months.”
O'Driscoll: Non-coding knowledge jobs have less than 10% task automation potential
“And I think in anything other than pure AGI, which is too arm wavy for me, most of the other jobs have a task automation potential, and my view that's sub-ten percent.”
O'Driscoll: Test VC partner hires on whether their deals beat existing partners
“One of the check questions we always ask when we're hiring someone and thinking about it, and in this case you are effectively hiring someone, is do you think the next check that they'll write will be better than a check that one of us will write?”
O'Driscoll: Non-AI SaaS Startups Growing 75%+ at $50M ARR Are Fine
“Like, I think the truth is, if you're going 75 to a hundred percent, you're fine. Stop. You know, like, this idea, like, because if you're going, look, if you're going a hundred percent at 50, you're going to be at a hundred, then your growth decays to 80, you…”
O'Driscoll: 40% of Q1 First-Time Unicorns Already Raised Follow-On Rounds
“40% of the unicorns that raised in Q-one as a unicorn for the first time have already had a follow on round.”
Rory O'Driscoll: Scale Venture Partners has marked down 2021 peak valuations
“I don't, it's very hard to imagine any 20, 21 mark that's been maintained that hasn't been validated or anywhere close to it, and we wouldn't and haven't.”
Scale Venture Partners targets 10-11% average equity ownership per deal
“It's hard with our stage, you know, our target would be 10 to 11% on average, you know, probably late A or B, some earlier, some later than that.”
O'Driscoll: Scale VC Will Expand Target Fund Size to 25 Companies
“We typically been at our stage under 20 deals per fund, and we kind of said, you probably need to aim to close it to 25. Just given this dynamic, just nothing's changing at the stage we're at, but success is further away, right?”
O'Driscoll: Hitting 2-Year Revenue Targets Boosts >5x VC Return Odds to ~75%
“If you get the first two years that we underwrote in terms of revenue from the moment of our investment, if you get the first two years correctly, your probability of getting greater than a five X goes from 30% to mid seventies.”
O'Driscoll: Sustained growth over 5-6 years rescues VC overvaluation
“In the end, the thing that bails out our incompetence is your growth rate, and that's the dirty little secret of the positive. If you get in these companies which can compound for five or six years, they can cover a multitude of cents.”
Every major Sand Hill Road VC rejected HubSpot's 2009 Series C
“It was in the throes of the recession back in and we went up and down Sand Hill road, like Darmesh and I get off the plane from Boston, landed in Sand Hill road. We're like, we got this. We're going to go up and down. It's like 20 meetings. And we go all 20 me…”
O'Driscoll: Hitting 2-year plans raises 5x return probability from 30% to 70%
“When I look back two years in, right, if they're at or within 25% of the on the right plan, you know, our probability of making a five X goes from 30% to 70%, right?”
O'Driscoll: Series A/B success probability jumps to 60-70% if targets met
“At the A and B stage, what we've observed is this. The going in probability of a five X plus winner, our mental model, remember I said it's 30, yeah, 20% chance of that outcome. If after two years the company has done what we said it would do roughly in terms …”
O'Driscoll: Non-generational Series A investments can still generate meaningful returns
“The overextrapolation of the only three deals make money, so therefore everything else at series A is burning money is just, I mean, it's true in that you prefer to be in Google, but it's not the only way to make money.”
O'Driscoll: Scale Venture Partners debated and passed on Decagon's $1.5B round
“And in a way, and you know, look, we had some internal discussions. Should we be one of the hundred people pleading to put money into Decagon at one and a half? And we had some interesting discussions.”
O'Driscoll: Scale's 2014 fund gained 1x purely from multiple expansion
“We have an excellent, 2014 fund that exit in 20, 21. And we always tell our piece one entire turn of that fund we don't deserve. It was multiple expansion.”
O'Driscoll: Selecting four winners out of twenty deals is 100% controllable
“There's, you know, picking. Picking out of, we do 20 deals, four of them have to be great deals. That's a hundred percent in your control. If you can't get that right, you should lose your job.”
O'Driscoll: Selling known winning portfolio companies escalates investment risk
“What you end up doing, it always amazes me when I end up selling the company that I know really well, where I've been on the board, I have a pretty good sense of what it's doing and I'm six years in, to reinvest at a slightly higher revenue multiple in a compa…”
Scale Passed on $100M Valuation For Startup With Sub-$1M Revenue
“We passed on a deal last week, very early stage company, they sell to businesses, they have less than a million dollars in revenue. They're going to raise a new series of investment at about a hundred million pre.”
O'Driscoll: Hypergrowth software startups decelerate gradually, never stopping suddenly
“Things in motion stay in motion. Things growing at 10 X year on year might decline to eight X or six X or four X, but they don't come to a grinding stop.”
O'Driscoll: Scale Survey Shows Average Developer AI Spend Is $1.3K Monthly
“We did a survey on, you know, 40 portfolio companies and external companies. What are you spending per year per month per developer? And the average was 1.3 K, and the median was lower, right?”
O'Driscoll: Large VC Funds Are Expanding Into Revenue Series A and B
“Given the fund size, all the large firms that were, you know, typically C to A are doing all those deals. So the competition set has stiffened, right? You're up against tougher, better firms, and you've got to bring up your A game, right?”
O'Driscoll: Almost no semiconductor VC exits have occurred since 2008
“We had one of the last monolithic power, which was a success about 2007 and eight since there's been almost no venture exits in venture land.”
O'Driscoll: Scale VP Verifies Bank Balances Directly Before Wiring Funds
“About 15 years back, we instituted the very obvious check the cash balance before you wire test. Because another firm had wired money on the basis of a certain balance sheet. And it sounds really obvious, but they will lie to. So every time we do that, now we …”
O'Driscoll: I passed on Box in 2010 before investing nine months later
“Same thing on Box. I passed at the start of 2010. The round didn't even get done, and nine months later, I literally woke up and said, what's the dumbest thing I did all year? I didn't do that deal, and I went down and did it.”
O'Driscoll: Standard Series A and B venture loss rates are 30%
“You know, your typical venture loss rate, you know, your 30% of your deals don't work out, and that's kind of where we play A's and B's. It's probably 50% plus in seed. So, you know, and I remember in 2001 and two, the loss rate spiked to 60.”
ScaleVP talked to n8n in 2022 but underestimated workflow AI potential
“We had talked to them in about 22 or 23, and you're right, it, you know, What we clearly underestimated was, you know, and kind of this whole, you know, workflow automation, it's a category pre AI.”
Scale Venture Partners invested in HubSpot, Box, DocuSign, and RingCentral in 2009
“Yes, I remember that was in O-Nine. We did HubSpot, Box, DocuSign, and I think RingCentral.”
Rory O'Driscoll: The best time to buy is when nobody else is buying
“The time to buy is when everyone else is not buying, especially when, let's put it out there, you're just little old scale, and you're not Sequoia who came in afterwards.”
O'Driscoll: Market relevance in VC is short-term; only being right matters
“Relevance is a short term thing. And in the end, as I can say about this job, the only thing that's true about this job over the medium term is you have to be right.”
O'Driscoll: Astronomer is worse off as CEO searches fail 33% of time
“I think they're worse off in the sense that they have to do a CEO search, which is always tricky and has a one in three chance of failing.”
O'Driscoll: Scale passed on Gusto after underestimating the founder and market
“I think I underestimated both the founder and the openness of the market to switch and I'll say something else, the willingness of investors to pay up quickly for that, such that it got outside my price range very quickly, right? Stuff happens, you know, and y…”
O'Driscoll: Scale invested in DocuSign at $1 and $2 per share
“We did the round at a buck and two bucks, right?”
O'Driscoll: AI startups face inevitable churn without mutual success metrics
“Step one on all these deals and every AI deal is do you, the vendor, and you, the customer, have a mutually agreed figure of merit on what success looks like that you can both track? If not, at some point, you're going to churn.”