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 59 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
Vasavada: Early-Stage Startups Should Not Be Run Remotely
“I don't think startups should be run remotely. Like, you can't build culture when, you know, people are, you know, all on Zoom all day. Like, you build culture at those water cooler moments and in the team”
Rabois: COVID-era Zoom speed-dating in venture capital was a disaster
“Speed dating during COVID was a disaster for everybody. It wasn't good for founders to do Zoom-based investing. It wasn't good for investors”
Pearl: Every major PLG company must add direct sales
“Every iconic PLG company, whether it's Slack or Dropbox or Asana or Zoom, you know, at some point they have to add on that sort of direct selling motion to complement the PLG business.”
Brian Singerman has stopped investing in startup founders over Zoom
“I can't do it on Zoom, and I, therefore, I'm not really doing Zoom investing anymore, period.”
Kunst: Flat growth during a sector tailwind signals poor startup execution
“If Zoom's daily average users went from ten million to two hundred million, right, which is a twenty-x increase, I don't expect you to be at two hundred million daily active users if you are a seed stage startup, but if you are a startup in a similar space and…”
DHH: Zoom's Hidden Web Server Forced Apple to Issue Emergency Patch
“All the shit that they've done that's kind of on the sly, whether it was last year when they installed this uninstallable web server, just because they wanted to save a click, right? And then Apple all of a sudden had to release this emergency fix to remove th…”
Schalit: Pure SaaS margins beat tech-enabled physical businesses on profitability
“When you think about some of the very large public or non-public companies like, you know, ride sharing and office space sharing, these are tech-enabled companies for which technology is somewhat important, but that structurally have very low gross margins bec…”
Browder: Pitching VCs on Zoom is a mistake; founders should meet in person
“Yeah, well, Zoom is the first mistake. They should fly to London. In person, I say you should reject Zoom and always do in person where impossible, where possible.”
Cannon-Brookes: Only four public CEOs remain from 2020 SaaS peer group
“In COVID in 2020, we formed a group of SaaS CEOs. I think there were 16 of us that got together, we'd meet on Zoom every single week, right? At one stage, 10, 11 of us were public, maybe more, we all had earnings calls, and you know, it was a really good thera…”
Degnan: Nothing replaces in-person field visits for managing regional sales
“Zoom does not tell you what's happening in an office. You don't know if you have a tyrant running a country for you unless you're there. And you're going and having coffee with someone, you're having breakfast with someone, you're having dinner with them, a be…”
Obrecht: Canva is actively gearing up to be IPO-ready
“I mean, we're gearing up to be ready to IPO. We want to be an IPO ready company. We recently, you mentioned Zoom. We brought in Kelly, who led their IPO, and she's been a fantastic addition to the team. She was their CFO. So, so our goal is to be ready. When w…”
Lemkin: Public SaaS companies are re-accelerating growth through AI
“I'm glad to see that just literally this week, we were seeing Mongo even Okta, which had been struggling, Box last, the other day, Zoom, which is, you know, which is not exactly a rocket ship anywhere, but seeing growth re-accelerate because of AI, it's like, …”
Emergence Invested in Zoom at a 100x Revenue Multiple in 2014
“It would have been, it was going to be priced at two hundred million dollar post money valuation, and this, again, remember the company was at around two million in revenue, And this was a hundred X revenue in 2014, right?”
Zoom Founder Eric Yuan Originally Miscalculated Churn by Counting Upgrades
“Eric himself was miscalculating churn. Specifically, he was counting upgrades from, you know, low tier to high tier as churn. He was counting pausing as a churn. And so he was unnecessarily burdening the business with churn.”
Saper: Emergence Capital's Fund III Is Top Decile Even Without Zoom
“The cool thing about that fund, though, is even if you took Zoom out, it would still be a top to sell fund.”
Emergence Capital's Fund III Has Reached a 16x DPI
“That fund, I believe was fund three, which is the same fund that has Zoom. It's the same fund that has some other really large outcomes. And so that fund is already at a, I think it's a 16 times DPI.”
Blomfield: Weekly Zoom calls with founders feel transactional and empty
“But overall, the in-person experience is dramatically better. Having in-person office hours, group office hours, even cooking for people, like the act of cooking dinner for a group of people you've invested in, and then serving them with your own hands. It's j…”
Blond: Remote-only Zoom sales models are becoming obsolete
“And so like the days of working from home, doing Zooms only to meet with customers, not meeting customers and developing personal relationships those days, I think are going to be a thing of the past, if not already.”
Tarica: Keeping founders involved in sales is better than excluding them
“Giving away the Zoom secret sauce here a bit, I think as long as the founder knows how to properly Delegate and the founder can truly trust their team. I think keeping the founder in more than keeping them out is more beneficial.”
CrowdStrike was the third fastest-growing enterprise software company to IPO
“I think we were the third fastest growth company to ever IPO behind like Zoom and Salesforce.”
Leone: Zoom took Sequoia's investment specifically to get partner Carl Eschenbach
“So why were we invested in Zoom? I can tell you that Eric Wan didn't need money, but he needed a Carl Leschenbach.”
Erickson: Google and Zoom succeeded by building faster horses
“Sometimes users want a faster horse. Google and Zoom are both great examples of that.”
Back-to-Back Zoom Meetings Destroy Remote Creative Time, Says Wayne Chang
“It's really important that everyone doesn't have just zoom meetings just blocked out throughout the day. That's the worst way to work. That means you're basically replacing The best of remote, which is your ability to form around the objectives, with the worst…”
DHH: Zoom's Mission Statement to 'Deliver Happiness' Is Vapid
“Before we hit record, we were talking briefly about Zoom, and I just fell over this yesterday, and I think the Zoom mission statement is deliver happiness or some bland shit like that, and you're like, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Any organization t…”
Stebbings refuses to conduct introductory founder meetings over Zoom
“I don't even do first calls via zoom. I just can't get the full measure of someone by zoom, even in the first meeting where I still think it's like crucial.”
The biggest sin in venture investing is missing outlier winners
“The biggest sin is missing that 10% deal that's the huge winner, right? Because no amount of mediocre kind of deals can make up for missing Uber or whatever, Zoom or Arista or whatever you want to say. No amount of things can make up for missing something that…”
Dan Scheinman wrote a seed check to Eric Yuan before seeing a pitch
“And so at that moment, to be honest, I didn't even care what he was doing. I said, I'm going to write you a check. I'm in because you're the kind of leader that it almost doesn't matter what you're building. I believe in you. And I did write him a check”
Forquer: On-Site Sales Pilots Are Critical As Buyers Tune Out Zoom
“Getting on site is super critical because people don't pay attention on Zoom.”
Lemkin: Zoom is currently experiencing zero percent revenue growth
“But Zoom isn't, Zoom is growing zero percent now, right?”
Green: Zoom went public primarily to counter competitors' claims about its size
“I do think like a company like Zoom went public because there, you know, it's a very profitable business growing fast. They went public because private, public companies they compete with were constantly like, well, Zoom, it's a tiny business. Like, why do you…”
Zoom was profitable when Emergence Capital invested in 2014
“It was competitive both because the, there was early growth, but also because the company was profitable. And so we didn't have to raise capital.”
Saper: Zoom Returned Emergence Capital's Fund III Over 10x
“Zoom returned it, you know, more than 10.”
Saper: Top Emergence investments like Zoom were expensive, but Veeva wasn't
“They are not always expensive, but they are often expensive. So if I look back at our portfolio, Gusto was expensive. Zoom was expensive. Yammer was expensive. A lot of the good ones, Ironclad was expensive. But some of them weren't. Viva wasn't expensive beca…”
Michael Eisenberg Refused to Make Venture Investments Over Zoom During Pandemic
“You know, I didn't invest over Zoom. During, during the pandemic. I just, I met people out of a farm.”
Lemkin: Zoom and ZoomInfo are still cutting tech spend to the bone
“Tech companies are just continuing app layoffs. We thought it would be over. They're still cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting to the bone, right? We see it at Zoom Info. We see it at Zoom. We see it at so many others. They're still cutting, a…”
Delangue: VC Interest in AI Lags Behind Years of Massive Usage
“The VC and the mainstream interest is kind of like a catch up on the reality. Because if you look at usage of AI, it's been massive and it's been growing massively for the past, you know, three years, right? Even before, before ChatGPT, even before like, you k…”
Wood: Zoom and Microsoft lead enterprise comms cloud rip-and-replace cycle
“It and Microsoft are the two beneficiaries of the first rip and replace cycle that we've seen in the enterprise communication space since the early nineties when Cisco was building out the internet now, but that was on-prem and hardware oriented. Now we're mov…”
Calendar invites represent an underappreciated viral growth vector in B2B SaaS
“It really is like a fundamental viral mechanism of like meeting people through calendar entries and one-to-one meetings, especially in this remote work world. So I think it's kind of under reflected on viral opportunity that's still really prescient today.”
Tarica: Tiered compensation multipliers drive sales reps to push past quotas
“Sales reps are going to feel like if I'm just doing everything I can, I'm coming to the end of a closing period And I just don't see the finish line. There is an innate feeling emotion that will say, you know what, I'm going to give up and I'm going to go atta…”
Tarica: Zoom doubled overall headcount and sales team size during pandemic
“Our company has doubled in size, and you know, our sales team has doubled in size.”
Tarica: Setting sales quotas too high causes reps to delay deals
“You're going to make a bet that people are going to go overachieve against that, but if you set it too high, people will give up and wait till the next period close.”
Frankel: Remote VC work makes rigorous investment discipline tougher
“Doing all of this on Zoom, in some ways, I would say there's this kind of convenience over connection. So if you like getting stuff done, it's very convenient. But if you miss people, the connection stuff's difficult. And wrestling stuff to the ground, which i…”
Thrive Capital invests across pre-IPO, public equity, take-privates, and incubations
“We do pre-IPO rounds like Zoom or Zillow in the public markets, or spinning Vimeo out of I see you're taking Collector's Universe private, took that company private, and we actually build companies as well.”
Clark: Phone calls build more intimacy with founders than Zoom
“Something about Zoom, while you get some visual cues, it also kind of creates this sense of, like, we have to be, like, working on this topic and whatever, yeah, and something about being on the phone puts people more concentrated, more focused on that person,…”
Zoom grew from 10M to 200M daily active users in three months
“I mean, look at zoom going from. Ten million monthly actives to two hundred million or daily actives, two hundred million in three months time.”
Subotovsky: Zoom founder Eric Yuan prioritized fit over maximizing valuation
“Eric has always been this incredible human being focused on the right thing and not focused on, oh, I want to get the best customer or the best deal or the best valuation or the best pricing. He's always focused on finding the right customer, the right valuati…”