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 23 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
Lessin: Slow Ventures avoids Y Combinator deals because they lack signal
“As an investor, you know, we've stayed away from it for a long time, partially because there's no signal in it because everything comes off the factory line looking exactly the same, packaged properly.”
Lessin: Slow Ventures made a 1,000x return on its Solana seed
“Like, I made a thousand X on our Solana seed, right?”
Lessin: Slow Ventures will target sub-$5M valuation, self-sustaining seed deals
“I am very excited to fund a bunch of companies at five and under in weird things that are coming to you because no one else will give them money that are going to be highly profitable on the way up and create option value down the line. Right. So it's kind of …”
Lessin: Slow Ventures' top seed returns came from non-consensus, cheap deals
“When I look at our seed portfolio over a long period of time now, my own personal investing longer, you know, the seed deals that have mattered have always been the ones that were hardest to package. They were not on the factory line. The places we've made ser…”
Quist: Accumulating top companies beats holding a diversified venture portfolio
“You're almost always better off accumulating stock in those companies over the first eight years of their life than you are in any diversified venture portfolio.”
Morin: Slow Ventures Targets 2% to 5% Ownership Over Traditional 20%
“At the size of funds that, that we are at today you know, we think we can create performance at the two to five percent level of ownership. Do that across many companies rather than needing to just be at the 20, 30% your traditional fund might target along wit…”
Lessin: Venture allocators must never sell their top-performing assets
“The number one rule as a fund out an allocator is you cannot sell the things that matter.”
Lessin: Future of VC is $3M capital-efficient, profitable startups
“I think the future is in these companies. There are a lot of companies you can put three million dollars into and get to a place where like, you're pretty sure it's profitable. It's going to be worth, it's worth a 102 hundred, and you have an option on somethi…”
Quist: Underwriting startups with multiple novel theories is exponentially riskier
“Being novel, having a novel theory and being correct, having one of them in your life is a low odds proposition. There just aren't that many. Having two isn't linear risk or the odds of being right on two vectors is exponentially lower. And I think that there'…”
Quist: Slow Ventures passed on leading Deel's seed round over valuation
“We were negotiating to be the lead of the seed, and I literally were like this far apart and decided that was too far apart.”
Operating and investing simultaneously makes you better at both
“I'm a huge believer in investing and operating at the same time. I think being an investor who makes you a much Better operator and being an operator makes you a better investor. You know, investors can't go deep on anything, and they really don't understand w…”
Lessin: VCs take longer to master selling than buying
“As an early stage investor, you get hundreds of shots to buy. You get really good at buying. You have so fewer shots at learning to sell that it actually takes much longer to learn to sell well. Right. But it's still as important as learning to buy well.”
Lessin: I personally invest in deals Slow Ventures deems too expensive
“There are places like, you know, in history, there have been a few instances, my partners are like, we like the deal, it's too expensive. I'm like, ah, fuck it. I'll put in a few personal dollars because like, who cares? It's so little money, right?”
Lessin: TeamShares reached nearly $1B valuation after $4M post seed check
“I have a company called TeamShares, which we put in our first check at four posts that is now touching a billion and is a real company with hundreds of millions of revenue.”
Quist: Slow Ventures avoids consensus seed deals to back non-consensus ideas
“I think we would say we concede the consensus game at the earliest stages. We think our job is to go a click out further on a belief system than in other people.”
Quist: Slow Ventures will not pursue a multi-stage fund strategy
“I think the amount of human capital and what it means on a daily basis to be a competitive multi-stage firm is not what we do. It's not our strength. It's not our DNA.”
Investors systematically underestimate the scale of global niche markets
“I think people systematically under appreciate how large the world is, and therefore, especially in a globalized environment, how big niche markets actually can be when you blow them up and scale them up.”
Slow Ventures avoids dApp investments to focus on crypto protocols
“First, we, I generally don't invest in dApps. Again, like we're much more focused on protocols. There are very few exceptions we would make to that.”
Morin: Slow Ventures Averages $250K to $1M Checks and Avoids Board Seats
“You'll see that we today, you know, average between 250 K to one million dollars going into most companies. However, we don't take board seats unless it's something that we're extremely passionate about.”
Morin: Venture Partnerships Are Like Marriages Requiring Collective Decision-Making
“I think of it as building out a marriage more than anything, you know, it requires really honest and open communication and, An eye towards the collective rather than, you know, a single person benevolent dictatorship.”
Morin: The First Two Slow Ventures Funds Were $1M Each
“The first two slow funds were only a million US dollars, you know, enabled a lot of 25 K, 50 K, a hundred K kind of investing”