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 51 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
Rampell: Only 5% of current unicorns will ever go public
“So probably of the unicorn class, I would bet that maybe five percent will ever be able to go public.”
Rampell: Massive founder secondaries disconnect founders from employees and investors
“I will say on the record, I hate massive secondaries, because it kind of turns you from the count of Monte Cristo to, like, the, you know, whatever the opposite of that would be, like, the I, I'm now gonna go vacation in you know, Cote d'Azur or something. Lik…”
Rampell: AI could drive Zendesk's seat-based revenue down to zero
“On the other side, you have things like Zendesk, right? Where it's like, how many licenses per seat do you need of Zendesk? If now every customer support ticket can be answered automatically, you need zero license. Like their revenue could go down a hundred pe…”
Rampell: The best software companies have hostages, not customers
“The best companies have hostages, not customers.”
Alex Rampell: Asset classes require being a large generalist or small specialist
“My view is most asset classes, you either have to be a large generalist or a small specialist.”
Rampell: Wanting $50M Is Insufficient Motivation for Large VC Funds
“The motivation has to be beyond just, like, I want to make fifty million dollars, because if that's the motivation, that's great motivation. You know, I'm a capitalist. Like, we live in a capitalist society. If that's the only motivation, like, it's not going …”
Rampell: Startups fail in EHRs because new hospital creation is too slow
“If the rate of company creation is very low, like, if I build a better EHR, like, electronic health records company it's just not gonna work because the rate of new hospital creation is too slow.”
Rampell: AI software creation speed will massively increase application-layer competition
“I could build a software product in like two weeks. That would have taken me two years. So that's going to massively increase the pressure on the application layer.”
Rampell: Two AI geniuses running the IRS would beat 80,000 staff
“I would rather have two people at the IRS than 80,000 people, but have those two people be like, you know, Noam Shazir and some other like super genius. Because if Jeff Dean and Noam Shazir are running the IRS, like, oh my God, like that would be so much more …”
Rampell: Led Rillet's Series B just 60 days after its Series A
“I'm on the board of Rillet. I did the Series B, and it was 60 days after the Series A, and that's unfortunate.”
Rampell: Giving Founders $1B Results in Bad Outcomes 99% of Time
“If I give you a billion dollars, what will you do with it? And 99 times out of a hundred, the answer is going to be bad news.”
Rampell: Permanent systems of record outperform hyper-growth AI wrappers long term
“I would much rather have a slower growing, permanent system of record that will never get ripped out than the fastest growing thing on the planet that has 9000 competitors that are all built and lovable by 17 year olds.”
Rampell: Corporate development teams execute transactions, they don't buy companies
“You don't want to spend time with the corp dev people because most people are like, oh, corp dev buys companies. No, they don't. They execute transactions.”
Rampell: Wealth management will be the financial sector least disrupted by AI
“I actually gave a, I gave a talk to the exec team at JP Morgan about this, right? They're like, you know, what part of our business is going to be, you know, least touched by AI? And I said, you know, wealth management, right? Because what is wealth management…”
Startups Must Get Distribution Before Incumbents Get Innovation
“The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup can get the distribution before the incumbent can build the innovation.”
New Tech Platforms Will Emerge or Displace Incumbents Within Years
“I'd be surprised if we only have the large five incumbent technology platforms and there's not a sixth or a seventh or maybe there are only five because one of those gets displaced. Within a couple of years.”
Proprietary Data Gives Big Tech an Unbeatable AI Recruiting Advantage
“It's also an HR advantage, because if you are the smartest person from your PhD program at Stanford, and you like machine learning and AI, where do you want to work? Well, you could go work for some startup, where they also downloaded TensorFlow, but they have…”
Enterprise Blockchain Is a Meaningless Buzzword Compared to Centralized Databases
“A lot of people that say, I want a blockchain, the same people that a few years ago were saying, we want big data, which in a couple years were saying, like, oh, AI is very important to us. I think it's become a buzzword that almost means nothing. They mean so…”
Bitcoin Failed as a Currency but Works as a Store of Value
“Bitcoin has not worked as a currency, but I believe it has worked and will continue to work as a store of value.”
Inexperienced Teams Raising $100M Through ICOs Will Mostly Fail
“I'm just going to go tap into an ICO, and then they raise a hundred million dollars, and they don't know what to do with it, and they have no experience whatsoever. Like, sometimes that's not, I mean, maybe those will end well, but I would take the other side …”
Most ICOs Are Ridiculous, but Protocol Tokenization Is a Real Innovation
“The vast majority of ICOs are kind of ridiculous right now, But there are a few that are very, very interesting and represent a true innovation in a inherently kind of business model and computer science problem of the last 30 years, which is how do you moneti…”
a16z Optimizes for Ownership Percentage Rather Than Entry Valuation
“For us, it doesn't matter if we invest at twelve million pre or fifteen million pre or eighteen million pre. Like, there's really no difference. Like, we're optimizing for ownership, and that's what we really care about.”
Rampell: Startup versus incumbent battle is distribution versus innovation speed
“The battle of every startup versus incumbent is whether the startup gets the distribution before the incumbent gets the innovation, right?”
Rampell: AngelPad's early fund delivered a 120x DPI return
“This other one is this fund called AngelPad. Which was kind of like a third rate competitor. I don't want to call it third rate, but it was like, it was not, you know, there was Y Combinator and then it's like, there was AngelPad. It was just like this small l…”
Rampell: ElevenLabs was a consensus seed deal due to founder talent
“Well, I think, but if you look at 11, the entrepreneur was pretty consensus. Like, it's like, alright, Mahdi's super, like, that whole team is incredibly talented.”
Rampell: Recently led a Series A in a startup with $10M ARR
“I just did a Series A where the company had, like, ten million dollars of ARR when I invested in it.”
a16z Passed on Company That Later Reached $1B Valuation
“There was a deal that I guess we should have done, candidly, because, like, this company just raised it, like, a billion dollar plus valuation, but we turned it down. The company had, like, less than a million dollars in revenue, and they wanted, like, a two h…”
Rampell: NetSuite creates hostages rather than customers through extreme lock-in
“NetSuite has hostages, not customers. They're not going to leave.”
Rampell: Workday and NetSuite are impervious to AI disruption
“There are the ones that are almost impervious to everything that's happening with AI. And if anything, it's a huge tailwind because they're going to start being, they have the distribution, they're going to start adding features. And that's things like Workday…”
Rampell: Haggled over $5M on Plaid's Series B, later invested at $2.4B
“It probably was one of the first rounds of Plaid, which I subsequently corrected myself for by doing the Series C of Plaid. So I think we invested at 2.4 billion for the Series C, and I was debating a five million dollar difference with Zach for the Series B. …”
Corporate Incumbents Counter-Strike Startups More Effectively Than Silicon Valley Admits
“I actually do think that the ability of large incumbents to go mount a counter-revolutionary strike is Is actually not as atypical as a lot of people in Silicon Valley mock them for.”
Alex Rampell: Back founders who materialize labor, capital, and customers
“I think you want to invest in people that can materialize labor, capital, and customers.”
Rampell: a16z wants small stakes in proven winners or high ownership early
“We either want to buy any percent, right, of something that is absolutely working, or high ownership of something that could work.”
Rampell: Nearly $7 Billion of a16z's Latest Raise Is Growth Capital
“If you look at the money that we just raised, you know, almost seven billion of that is for the growth fund.”
Rampell: Ribbit Capital's $85M Fund 1 delivered a 55x return
“One of my good friends is this guy, Mickey Malka at Ribbit. I was lucky to be an investor in his fund one personally. And it's like, that was like a 55 X fund on, I think it was like an eighty five million dollar fund, but 55 X, like that's insane.”
Rampell: Winning Top VC Deals Makes Venture Capital Fundamentally a Sales Job
“The entire job of venture capital is to find, pick, and win investments. If they're good investments, the winning is very, very hard. And the winning therefore goes to the person that is, like, the best, like, you have to sell. Like, this is a sales job.”
Rampell: Top VC deals differ from PE because founders choose investors
“A lot of the best deals will go to the best firms. Like that's, what's very different about venture capital than like private equity. Like if you and I are trying to take a public company private, You know, you're KKR and I'm Blackstone. We're both trying to, …”
Rampell: One of his personal seed investments is marked up 200x
“For a single deal, there's a seed deal that I did that it's probably marked up at like, 200 X right now.”
Rampell: Passed on Stripe's seed round when it was called Dev Payments
“Obviously I passed on doing the seed round of Stripe, because I'm a genius. It was called Dev Payments at the time.”
Rampell: Upgrade Is Worth ~10x More Than Lending Club
“Upgrade has a multiple of the market cap. It's probably like worth 10 times more than Lending Club now.”
Rampell: Previous Valuation Is Always the First Question in M&A
“Because I will tell you a hundred percent of the time in every M&A conversation, in every fundraising conversation, the number one question, the first question is what was your last round price?”
Rampell: Big venture funds require high initial ownership due to dilution
“In order to make the math work for a big fund, you have to have high ownership, and you know that your ownership will get Depleted or will get diluted over time as option pool expansions happen, even if you take your pro rata in every single successive round.”
Rampell: a16z orchestrated the initial meeting between Plaid and Visa's CEOs
“We hosted a dinner for the CEO of Visa, and I sat Zach at Plaid right next to Alec Kelly at Visa.”
Modern Tech Incumbents Aggressively Acquire Disruptive Threats Early
“The newer companies are being much, much more aggressive about finding the potential disruptive threat and taking them out early.”
Data Network Effects Function Like Database Writes and Reads
“Think of it as a database with writes and reads. Those are the two actions that you typically perform in a database. As the number of writes goes up, the value of each read goes up as well, because the value of a read initially is close to nil, but as the numb…”
Point-of-Transaction Ads Outperform Facebook and Google Advertising
“What's the best place to advertise in the world? It's actually not when somebody's driving on the freeway and sees a big ad. It's not on Facebook. It's not on Google. It's often when people are in, they're actually buying something because, you know, the best …”
Overpricing TrialPay's Funding Round Impaired Subsequent Fundraising and M&A
“One of the things that I learned at trial pay was that we raised one of our rounds of funding at way too high of a price, and I paid for that because then, guess what, I couldn't, it was hard to sell the company. It was hard to raise money after that”
Alex Rampell Passes on Great Founders Solely Due to Overvaluation
“I've turned down a number of companies on valuation, not because I didn't believe in the team, not because I didn't believe in the founder, but I just didn't think that there was going to be a sucker that would pay an even higher price next time”