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 70 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 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
Randle: Financial models in VC only serve to test conviction
“And so I think beyond being like a yardstick to test your conviction, models aren't that useful, but for that, they're really, really good.”
Randle: Market is the least important investment factor because it is fungible
“The way you said it, honestly, people, product and market. I think the people, Define everything else. They are the upstream engine that makes everything go. They're the most important piece. Two, I think the product that the people build tell you a lot about,…”
Randle: Benchmark targets over 5x net returns for LPs
“This is one of the reasons why I'm extremely excited about benchmarks, competitive position in today's market, because we can go to LPs. We can say, Hey, we're shooting for higher than five X net. We have the historical track record to back it up. And we have …”
Randle: Initial investment failure relieves pressure for new VC partners
“There's going to be nothing better for you than if your first investment sucks. Because once you do one and it fails and you realize it's not the end of the world and like life goes on and like LP still love us and like you're not fired, then you feel really c…”
Randle: Matthias van Tienen Is the Most Underrated Venture Capitalist Today
“I think a lot of people at Founders Fund have very underrated track records. I think Matthias van Tienen, I think he's the most underrated venture capitalist that exists today.”
Randle: Benchmark constrains fund sizes to survive downturns and retain LPs
“We're like, let's constrain our fund sizes. Let's be careful about what we do. So we don't get too over our skis, where we can easily weather a crash, and LPs aren't going to go fleeing once there's a crash, because we've been very careful with our capital, an…”
Randle: Prediction markets show 70% odds of Tesla-SpaceX merger in two years
“If you look at the poly market Calci odds on a Tesla SpaceX merger, again, you know, not, not that those markets are so big that they're that indicative, but I think the probability that they have on there is something like 70% in the next two years or somethi…”
Randle: Cloud index down 44% over five years while semis rose 325%
“The Bessemer Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index over the last five years is down 44%, and the SOX, the iShare Semiconductor ETF is up 325%.”
Randle: Mary Meeker is the most qualitative investor I've worked with
“Everyone thinks of her as this quantitative investor. You know, she had the, her time as an equity researcher at Morgan Stanley during the.com. Bubble. And then she came to Kleiner Perkins, obviously, and everyone talks about these DCF models she creates and a…”
Randle: Growth investors should use quantitative metrics to shape narrative
“And so from her, I just learned that when you use numbers in venture growth and when you want to be quantitatively driven, don't get stuck into a quantitative lens with it. Actually use that to drive the narrative and drive the story of an investment.”
Founders Fund allows deal team members to personally co-invest
“So there's a program, for example, at Founders Fund where anyone that works on an investment or if you're leading an investment, you can personally invest alongside the firm.”
Thiel paid bonuses to PayPal employees living near the office
“He had, like, a bonus system for PayPal employees. If they lived within, like, a couple miles of the office, you'd give them more money.”
Randle: Mamoun Hamid's top wins combine B2B software with consumer engagement
“If you think about his huge, huge winners, whether it's Figma, Glean, Rippling, they all have like a common through line of the, you know, it's B to B software, but it's almost like consumer like software that, that demands really high user love and engagement…”
Randle: AWS would be worth $1 trillion if spun out of Amazon
“Which is why it's such an unbelievably large business, probably a trillion dollar business if it was spun out of Amazon.”
Randle: Conway's Law forces VC funds to invest based on fund size
“I'm a big believer in Conway's law and Conway's law is this programming concept that when it's super dumbed down for people like us, Harry says you ship your org. Yeah. You ship your org chart or the product you ship looks like your organizational structure. I…”
Randle: Bret Taylor is the godfather of AI applications
“You know, more than Brett Taylor, who represents this wave of AI applications. He's like the godfather of AI apps right now.”
Randle: Tech offers far more $100B opportunities today than 15 years ago
“The outcomes are much, much, much larger in today's in today's technology landscape than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago, there's more bites at, you know, potential hundred billion dollar, trillion dollar companies.”
Randle: Exceptional founders prefer challenging board members over sycophants
“The best founders, they don't want sycophants in the boardroom. Like, they don't want GPT-Foro in the boardroom telling them that everything that they do, they walk on water, And that they do nothing wrong. Like, they actually want other adults in the room tha…”
Randle: First deal back at Kleiner Perkins was SpaceX at $150B
“One of like the first investment that that I did at Kleiner Perkins when I came back in, was SpaceX at a hundred and fifty billion dollars.”
Randle: Delian Asparouhov Sourced the Seed Investment for Ramp
“Dude, you sourced the seed of ramp.”
Randle: I lost all my college savings shorting Tesla
“With all of my college savings, I shorted Tesla. And I feel like everyone has gone through this experience. If they were a value investor at some point in their life where it was like, you know, you just, oh my God, Tesla, maybe it's not a fraud, but it's so o…”