why aren't all 15 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
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Paley: Founder Collective's 2010 investment SeatGeek will deliver an amazing liquidity event
“Like, SeatGeek was a 2010 investment. I think it's a great company. Dave led that for us. I think it's gonna ultimately have an amazing liquidity event”
Disclosure
SeatGeek prefers PhDs and quant traders over bootcamp data science grads
“The biggest challenge sort of sorting through the data science pool is filtering the people who are sort of very serious quantitative professionals versus folks who did a boot camp. For three months and are now trying to become a data scientist. And there's ab…”
Disclosure
SeatGeek raised nearly $100M before hiring its first finance employee
“We waited forever to hire a full-time finance person. I think we'd raised almost a hundred million dollars before we hired anyone full-time in finance”
Insight
Technical skill is the most important factor for startup founders
“Being technical is far and away the most important criterion that sort of drives success. Basically, you can't have too many technical people On a founding team.”
Opinion
SeatGeek can realistically be NYC's top employer brand, unlike in SF
“If we want to build a differentiated brand as we want to be the best place for an engineer to work in New York, that would be sort of a ludicrous, probably overambitious thing for us to say if we were based in San Francisco. There's just so many iconic technol…”
Disclosure
Frankel: Founder Collective still holds every share in 2010 investment SeatGeek
“Harry, we still own every last share in SeatGeek. That was an investment I made in 2010.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Frankel: SeatGeek has been IPO-ready for two years
“SeatGeek's been IPO ready for two years.”
Insight
Blogging and open-sourcing code act as force multipliers in recruiting
“I think people tend to be a little bit myopic and not invest in sort of employer brand building stuff that can actually be really impactful. So, you know, a few examples of that are blogging about the things that you're doing, open sourcing software, Both of t…”
Insight
Startups face at most two or three major strategic decisions yearly
“Each company maybe has two to three sort of major strategic moments per year at most, but they're incredibly important to get right and can be company champion.”
Assertion Supported
SeatGeek acquired TopTix for $56M using an equal-sized funding round
“So we acquired a company called Toptics. For fifty six million dollars last year, and we raised a, around, it was almost exactly that amount to finance the deal.”
Disclosure
SeatGeek delayed fundraising until unit economics proved highly favorable
“We waited a long time to raise money until we were really sort of irrefutable and controvertible evidence that the CAC LTV math was heavily in our favor and would be idiots not to raise more money.”
Insight
Board seats are immutable commitments requiring extensive founder diligence
“When you agree to take someone out of your board and raise a bunch of money from someone, just how long-term sort of immutable the commitment is. I think if a lot of founders realized that fully, they would do more work and more diligence and spend more, more …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Twitter fell from SeatGeek's top acquisition channel to tenth
“For us, for example, the channel that was our very biggest driver back in 2013, Twitter, mobile acquisition has become probably number 10 on the list right now.”
Disclosure
SeatGeek spent $5M-$10M yearly on marketing before rebranding
“For us, there was a point where we were spending multiple millions of dollars a year, five to ten million dollars a year in marketing, and we felt like our brand was an inhibitor success rather than an accelerant.”
Insight
Ticket buyers wanted actionable recommendations over raw data
“Pretty early on, we realized, thanks to user feedback, that people didn't just want data. They actually wanted us to help them suggest what tickets to buy and sort of push them through that process.”