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 121 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Tisch: BoxGroup will invest in and catalyze uncapped SAFEs
“We will do an uncap safe. We will catalyze an uncap safe.”
BoxGroup will make check-size exceptions to fund math for promising startups
“We truly hold to the idea that we want to invest in companies we're excited about, and if what we're able to invest is not in perfect alignment with the math, we're willing and able to make exceptions.”
Tisch: VC ownership targets matter for the portfolio, not individual deals
“So I don't obsess over the ownership and the portfolio construction in a way that I think it matters on a deal by deal basis. I think it matters on a portfolio basis.”
Tisch: Macro shifts impact prior venture investments far more than future ones
“The macro change in the environment impacts our prior investments much more so than our future investments.”
Tisch: Venture capital is a collection of small businesses, not an asset class
“And that's the, like, venture gets viewed as an asset class, and it's not. These are all very small businesses with independent investment styles and independent investment beliefs.”
Tisch: Consumers are bored with today's software because none is fun
“The trend to me that's most interesting is that people are bored with today's consumer products. None of them are fun.”
Tisch: Startup location is overrated and geography does not matter
“I don't think geography matters for startups. And I think you know, we're based in New York because we live here and we want to live here. And just cause we're based in New York doesn't mean that we invest only in New York and Greg, our partner lives in San Fr…”
Tisch: VCs need price discipline on a portfolio level, not per deal
“It is important to be price aware on a portfolio basis, and I don't think on a deal-by-deal basis, price is a determinant of making a decision. Pretty simple. If you love a company, and you want to invest, and the deal is what the deal is, you make a decision …”
Tisch: Seed VCs can only build ownership if founders prioritize them
“Do I think the only way to buy up in a company is to start by investing in the company? Yes. And the only way to buy up in a company is if you are worthwhile of the founder prioritizing you going forward.”
Tisch: Founders should accept preemptive rounds if capital, valuation, and partner align
“So if I'm getting as much money as I want at a price that I want from a person that I want, it's a no brainer. You take the money.”
Tisch: BoxGroup will not lead seed or Series A rounds
“We don't want to lead seed rounds. We don't want to lead series A rounds. We want to be sort of second or third biggest check on a cap table.”
Tisch: Seed rounds should prioritize collaboration over ownership targets and board seats
“Our view is that seed should be a collaborative experience for both The founders and the investors in the sense of a founder wants to surround themselves with a group of people that can ideally create the right infrastructure for them to lean on as they go abo…”
Tisch: Company Success Depends on Founders, Not Venture Capitalists
“I generally think that, and your podcast is probably helping this in many ways, in a good and bad way, there's too much focus on the venture capitalists. There's too much focus on the investors. At the end of the day, why companies are successful is because a …”
Tisch: Sitting between disciplined and adaptive VC strategies is dangerous
“So I think you see great firms with amazing returns just stay incredibly disciplined. Whether that's Harrison Metal or an IA Ventures, it feels like they don't change their playbook. And then there's other firms that are totally adaptive to a market condition …”
David Tisch: The era of startup romanticism has officially ended
“And I think we've gotten to the point where the romanticism of startups is gone.”
Tisch: Rising startup valuations created hostile 'unicorn hunters' on social media
“So as the sort of word unicorn got spread, what to me has happened is we've seen the development of the unicorn hunter. And so as somebody gets deemed a unicorn, out come the claws and the people trying to kill that unicorn.”
Tisch: Digital ad channels on Instagram and Snapchat mature instantly without arbitrage opportunities
“When you see Instagram and Snapchat open up their advertising products, they're basically mature on day one.”
Tisch: No VCs considered dating an interesting category before Tinder
“If you had asked every single venture capitalist at the If dating was an interesting space, nobody would have raised their hand.”
Tisch: Gen Z is not using products built by Gen Z founders
“The youngest demographic that is active on technology, so call it the, like, 18 to 25 year old demo, is not using a product that's built by somebody of their generation.”
Tisch: Most early VC passes stem from concerns about the team
“I think very few founders want the radical transparency of why somebody passed, and at the end of the day, a lot of the early passes are around teams.”
Tisch: Tech industry criticism of Amazon ignores core consumer value
“I think that the big companies get punished and shit on by our industry just to sort of feel good. There are total negatives that The big companies are contributing to, but in reality, if you ask a normal consumer, do they love Amazon? Amazon will bring them w…”
NYC tech ecosystem lacks a mega-scale anchor company
“The negative of what's happened here in the past seven years is you haven't seen the true emergence of a destination company, right? We have incredible companies that are building incredible foundations here. Some have went, went public already. Some will go p…”
VCs claiming pattern recognition under 10 years experience are mistaken
“Trying to sort of assume you have it and have figured it out this soon I think is, is probably a mistake.”
A startup's 20th employee is exponentially more valuable than a seed investor
“The 20th employee at a company is exponentially more valuable than you know, a seed stage investor when a company's taking off.”
Smartphones will not remain the primary remote controls for technology
“I don't believe the phone is your remote control. I think there's other input methods that are going to allow you to interact with technology.”
BoxGroup recently closed a $212 million early-stage venture capital fund
“We are a, as of recently we just closed our sixth fund, so it's a two hundred and twelve million dollar early stage fund.”
Tisch: BoxGroup refuses to compete directly with multi-stage VC firms
“No, I, we don't try to compete. I think if we tried to compete, we would lose our ability to work well with others. And I don't think our value proposition is to say, pick us instead of somebody.”
Tisch: Investors won't last long without human alignment with founders
“And if you as the human investor Aren't aligned with that journey on the down and on the other side, aligned with the journey on the up as a human. I don't think you're going to be in this business for very long.”
Tisch: Seed rounds have shifted from $1M–$3M to $5M–$8M
“Seed has shifted, the word seed has shifted from a million to three million dollar round to a five to eight million dollar round.”
Tisch: Tech expanded from a vertical industry to a horizontal category
“Tech shifted from a vertical to a horizontal. So the places, the types of businesses that venture and early stage tech venture capitalists were funding fundamentally expanded at a huge level too.”
Tisch: Changing strategy every fund cycle prevents VC firms from improving
“If we, instead, every fund cycle changed our strategy, changed how we operate, where we invest, like the style of investing, you have no ability to actually get better and to try to find that zone of clarity To make investments.”
Tisch: BoxGroup has repeatedly missed great deals in their cold inbox
“If I looked back at the quality deals that showed up in our inbox that we missed in that, like, and sometimes we see it a year later and it comes through a warm source and we're like, oh my God, it was sitting there. Like, this is an interesting deal. Or like,…”
Tisch: Large VC firms will become larger and fewer by 2034
“I think 10 years from now, the bigger firms are bigger. There are In, in many ways, less big firms.”
Tisch: Evaluating seed venture capital year-to-year is fundamentally incorrect
“I just don't believe in evaluating venture, especially seed venture on a minute to minute, year to year basis. It is an incorrect use of energy and mind.”
Tisch: A Series A lead skipping pro rata in Series B is material
“If your series A lead is not doing their pro rata in your B, that is a material data point.”
Tisch: Crossover funds would have flooded seed without 2022 downturn
“I think if you didn't have the turn of the market in 22, you were going to see enormous amounts of capital pointed at seed.”
Tisch: BoxGroup will not expand into leading Series A rounds
“We are we are going to run whether you like it or not, the same model for a long time. And I think what that does is it aligns us with founders who are also going to build their business for a long time. We are consistent. We're not going to suddenly be a Seri…”
Tisch: Patrick and John Collison are tech's most underrated angel investors
“I think the Collison brothers have, you know, built a investment portfolio that's probably quite unique and doesn't get sort of discussed as much as some of the louder operator angels out there.”
Tisch: BoxGroup aims for 80 to 100 companies per fund
“Yeah, there'll be 80 to a hundred companies in a fund.”
Tisch: BoxGroup wrote Ro's entire pre-seed round and followed through growth
“And so if we look at Rowe, the men's health company that just raised a big growth round, we backed Zach Z in the pre-seed. We did that alone. We wrote a check in a round by ourselves. We've been backing that company from the pre-seed all the way up through thi…”
Tisch: Tech companies are now entering public markets at $100B+ liquid valuations
“Yet today there are a handful, not a lot, but a handful of companies that enter into a liquid public market At above a hundred billion dollars. That's not a private market overhyped valuation. That's now a public market with liquidity that you can actually tra…”
Tisch: BoxGroup passed on investing in Stitch and Check
“There's a company that we looked at called Stitch, which just raised a nice round. There's a company we looked at called Check, which just raised a nice round.”
Tisch: Requiring hard facts at the seed stage prevents good deals
“Cause if you're funding facts at the seed stage, you're going to be looking for facts all day.”
Tisch: Founder secondaries are positive if they remove personal stress
“Once the company is off the ground, the less a founder has to worry about their day-to-day life, the better. And if taking some money off the table enables their life to be easier to balance with their work, so they're not stressed about their living situation…”
Tisch: VCs selling Shopify at IPO missed 100x post-public upside
“If you had sold Shopify when they went public, you left like a hundred X on the table. So don't sell Shopify. If you own Shopify as a VC, when they go public that you missed the actual bigger set of upside in that company.”
Tisch: BoxGroup requires only one partner advocate to make an investment
“What it means is in a given deal, somebody has to want to do the deal, and our job is to help that person get to their conviction as best as we can, and so what is it that we can do to help them Do better with how they're thinking about it. You know, sometimes…”