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: Scale Has Never Paid Double a Valuation Three Months Later
“Can you stomach paying, you know, twice as much as someone three months ago? We've never done that.”
O'Driscoll: Averaged two venture deals per year over 30-year career
“I do two deals a year. Shockingly, I've been in this business 30 years and I've done 60 deals.”
O'Driscoll: High-variance investment exceptions only work in single-leader firms
“It's no accident that the firms that have high, you know, position betting variants where they're willing to go anywhere are single leader dominated.”
O'Driscoll: Missing 5X–10X deals in a firm's sweet spot is far worse than missing outliers
“I'm far more worried about missing a five or like a five or a 10 X deal that was in the scale sweet spot of, you know, one to ten million in revenue, series A or B enterprise software. When you miss that, or even worse, when you turn it down, that's when you h…”
O'Driscoll: Lost a deal by refusing founder equity refresh concessions
“Yeah, I've lost a deal to not doing that, and you're right, I'm going to be sympathetic to the investor now. I've lost a deal to not doing that, because again, it sticks back to my comment, I tend to be perhaps stuck in the, we, it's not war, stuck in the mud …”
O'Driscoll: Scale Rejects Static $30 Million Markets but Accepts Fast-Growing Ones
“If someone says to me, it's a thirty million dollar market right now, expanding at a hundred percent, I'm intrigued. If someone says to me, it's always going to be a thirty million dollar marketplace, I got to turn it down.”
O'Driscoll: Scale accepts operational risk to avoid inflated valuation risk
“Instead, what I'm doing is taking on more operational risk in return for less Valuation risk, because I believe that right now that's the right trade-off to make.”
Scale Venture Partners Portfolio Averages 182% Growth Year After Investment
“The companies that we're investing in for the past couple of years have on average achieved a 182% growth in the year after we've invested.”
Wienbar: Existing Portfolio Support Always Trumps Evaluating New Deals
“So the, you know, money, the rule we have in here is money in the ground trumps new deal. So if you have a portfolio company issue, you know, you owe it to them. It's your fiduciary responsibility as a board member and to your existing investors that you've go…”
Scale Venture Partners Requires a Board Seat in Every Portfolio Deal
“And in fact, that's part of our strategy is that we always have a board seat with our companies. We're very flexible on price terms, amount of dollars invested, but we always have a board seat.”
Wienbar: Scale Has Most Female Partners Among $200M+ US VC Funds
“Scale Venture Partners has three female partners, which is, I am sorry to say, the most in the U.S. Of any firm that has more than two hundred million dollars under management.”
O'Driscoll: Scale Venture Partners maintains a 50% fund reserve ratio
“We, you know, over like six or seven funds, we've been 50% reserve.”
O'Driscoll: At most 50% to 60% of fund capital goes to follow-ons
“Most of my money goes in on my initial round. At most, 50, 60% comes in follow ons. So I can't afford to be wrong on two thirds of my money to be right on one third.”
O'Driscoll: Scale backed a 2x runner-up over a 15x market leader
“We did B. We got a two X. We didn't do A. We left a 15 X on the table.”
O'Driscoll: Every venture investment comes down to three sequential questions
“My mental model is always, we say this internally, is there a category that can support a big winner? Are these guys going to be one of the winners in the category? And are you getting paid for the risk? You could argue that's the kind of sequence of questions…”
O'Driscoll: Scale has deployed every fund over three years since 2010
“We've taken three years on every fund since 2010.”
Rory O'Driscoll: Bill.com was second-quartile growth when ScaleVP invested
“For example, build.com It compounded to a huge network, right? And obviously, it was an amazing outcome for us, but the growth rate was always, I think, you know, second quartile, right? There were companies always growing faster.”
O'Driscoll: Scale Venture Partners caps fund concentration at 10%
“We have a capital concentration limit of 10%.”
O'Driscoll: ScaleVP has targeted 10% to 11% deal ownership since 2009
“We typically get around 10, 11% ownership, and that's been pretty consistent across Actually, five, six months, so all the way back to 2009. It's a pretty typical median.”
O'Driscoll: DroneDeploy has 20,000+ free users and 1,000+ paying customers
“Nice deal growing quickly, you know, 20,000 plus free users, a thousand plus paying customers.”
O'Driscoll: Scale Venture Partners targets one to two deals per partner annually
“We aim to do one to two deals per partner per year, so there's not much difference. You're taking a board seat in every case, so you're very much time limited by what you can do anyway. So it's, you know, no different than, I would say, early stage, or even th…”
O'Driscoll: Scale Venture Partners deploys 75%+ of capital into mid-stage startups
“About 75% plus of our dollars go in that kind of mid-stage, which is, you know, fairly early on in the company's life cycle.”