The Ledger
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Vasavada: Vise Leadership Meetings Were Consumed by DEI and Infrastructure
“When we went into our leadership meetings, we weren't talking about we weren't talking about that. We were talking about making infrastructure decisions that will matter in 2026 and rewriting our code to better position ourselves four or five years down the li…”
Vasavada: 99% of Startup Advice Given to Founders Is Bad
“You don't get enough advice, and then you start getting capital, and you have stakeholders, and you get too much advice, and the problem is a lot of this advice is either bad advice, 99% of the advice is bad advice, and then the rest of the advice is contradic…”
Vasavada: All Asset Managers Will Transition to Personalized Software Platforms
“All asset managers will have to become platform companies, right? Investment advice will no longer be delivered through people and investment products. It will be delivered through platform in a personalized way at scale for Every single investor.”
Vasavada: Businesses Built Overnight Lack Defensible Competitive Moats
“If a billion dollar business is built overnight, it means someone else can go build that same billion dollar business overnight, and you don't actually have a moat.”
Vasavada: Incumbent Asset Managers Lack the DNA to Build Great Software
“The DNA of these incumbent asset managers is not to build technology. It's not to build great product. It's not to build great software. And I know that because I spent times with these senior leadership teams at every single large asset management company. Th…”
Vasavada: Premature Unicorn Status Attracts Corporate Recruits Over Builders
“The type of people you recruit when they see that you're a billion dollar business aren't focused on, we have a value advice called burn the boats. They're not focused on burning the boats. They're focused on a stable career and growing within an organization …”
Vasavada: Vise Skipped Interviewing Early Execs and Only Pitched Them
“And we weren't, we didn't even interview them. Like, we were just in sell mode the whole time. We got We got our investors in sell mode. We were just trying to convince them to join.”
Vasavada: Raising $130M in 18 Months Was Bad for Vise
“So we raised something like a 120, hundred and thirty million dollars in an 18 month period. And that was a bad thing.”
Vasavada: Investors Pretended to Be Friends Until Vise Stopped Being Hot
“Some investors, I think, pretended to be our friends. And, you know, when incentives were flipped or we weren't as hot, I think they weren't our friends anymore, and I think that hurt because I thought those people were truly our friends.”
Vasavada: Vise's Entire Executive Team Turned Over Within 12 Months
“And we did this, like, five, six, seven times over with the executive team that fully turned over in, like, 12 months.”
Vasavada: Scaling Headcount From 6 to 100 Slows Startups Down
“We had gone from, like, six people to, like, a hundred people overnight, basically, and A hundred people don't actually make your business move faster. It actually slows you down.”
Vasavada: Concentrating Board Ownership in One VC Suppresses Healthy Debate
“You want multiple voices in the boardroom, and I think the challenge is when you have One investor that owns 30% of the company and, you know, has piled in, you know, close to fifty million bucks, then you're going to have that investor's perspective as, you k…”
Vasavada: A Startup's Preference Stack Matters More Than Its Valuation
“What matters more than your valuation is your preference stack, right?”
Vasavada: Having $10 Million in the Bank Makes It Hard to Stay Hungry
“And I think if you have ten million bucks in the bank, like, it's just hard to be, it's hard to be miserable.”
Vasavada: Vise Burned $3 Million a Month at Its Peak
“We were probably burning three million a month.”
Vasavada: Became Youngest Founder of $1B Business at Age 20
“I was like the youngest person in history to have a billion dollar business. I think I just turned 20 when our company was valued at a billion dollars.”
Vasavada: Firing an Employee Was the Right Decision 99.9% of the Time
“Like, I've never once, actually one exception, but I've, most of the, 99.9% of the time, never regretted letting someone go. It was almost always the right decision.”
Vasavada: Parents Hired a Therapist to Stop Him From Running Vise
“There's a point in time where they had hired a therapist To talk me out of running the business and just be a normal kid.”
Vasavada: Investors Who Give Up Hurt More Than Initial Rejectors
“I think it's not necessarily the people that gave me no's, it's not the people that, like, didn't believe on me in the beginning. I think it's the people that gave up on me.”
Vise Was Sequoia's Last Investment Before the COVID-19 Shutdown
“We were the last investment at Sequoia before everything shut down for the pandemic, like day before the global shutdown.”
Vasavada: Founders Should Underwrite Stakeholders' Incentives, Not Their Emotions
“The mistake I made was underwriting people's emotions, not their incentives. And I was like, oh, this person is saying this particular thing to me. They feel this particular way. I don't want them to feel this particular way. I'm going to say this particular t…”
Vasavada: Vise Was Among the First Tech Startups to Execute a Reset
“And I ended up being right because when, before the market really took a turn, we were one of the first companies to do a major reset. And it was more painful because other companies weren't doing it, but it ended up positioning ourselves so significantly bett…”
Vasavada: VC Board Member Sean Acted as a Shadow Co-Founder
“Sean rolled up his sleeves, worked super hard. That guy is a total, like, just grinds. Like, I think he was like a shadow third co-founder.”
Vasavada: Keith Rabois Would Not Have Responded to Cold Outreach
“I don't think Keith would have responded to a cold message. Maybe he would have, but that was really helpful, having them on board.”
Vasavada: Selling More Secondary Stock Would Have Been the Smart Financial Move
“I think it would have been a smart personal financial decision, and it's clear that a lot of other founders took, you know, sometimes a hundred million dollars of secondary. But so maybe from a personal financial decision, it would have been the risk-adjusted …”
Vise Raised Seed Extension, Series A, and Series B in Seven Months
“The seed extension was done in October of 2019. Our A was done in March, and our B was done in May.”
Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg Were Vise's First Investors
“And the first investors that actually said yes were these guys, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, who started a company called Flatiron Health and sold it For a bunch of money to Roche and they actually went to Penn, and they're like, look, we had a similar story …”
Vise Co-Founders Paid Themselves $20K Annually Before Sequoia's Investment
“My co-founder and I were paying ourselves, like, 20 grand a year”
Vasavada Admits He Was Overly Optimistic With Early Investors Due to Naivety
“I think it was too optimistic early on, and I think now I see a deep sense of reality. And part of why I was very optimistic is just because I didn't know any other way to be. Like, I was just very, like, I was naive, and as a result of being naive, I was very…”