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 34 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
Taussig: Higher interest rates benefited Vinted against discounting competitors
“The end of zero interest rates benefited us a lot. I remember when, early when I joined the board, it was still, we're still in this era of like insane discounting by some of our competitors in various regions. And we had to make these hard choices. Like, do w…”
Taussig: High-margin eBay is losing market share yearly to Vinted
“Usually the highest EBITDA margin businesses have the lowest growth, right? And so it's this kind of funny thing where You know, the business like eBay has a great EBITDA margin. It hasn't really, it's not really growing and it's kind of losing market share ev…”
Taussig: Lightspeed risks losing most capital for small chance of unbounded upside
“Lightspeed is really a Silicon Valley firm founded in Silicon Valley, but we invest globally, but everywhere we invest, we bring that Silicon Valley mentality and technological optimism. And what I mean by that is we're definitely willing to take risk, perhaps…”
Taussig: U.S. retail saw more store openings than closings in 2017
“There were actually more store openings than closings across the retail sector in 2017.”
Taussig: Frozen food startups operationally outperform fresh delivery businesses like Blue Apron
“Frozen has some inherent advantages over fresh food. Namely, the operations of manufacturing are more similar to consumer packaged goods than the complex cooking operations you might find inside of a blue apron or freshly. Moreover, customers who don't consume…”
Taussig: Vinted is no longer raising venture capital
“We're not raising venture capital anymore. We're looking at our cash flow and saying, how do we want to invest that cash flow next year?”
Taussig: Post-COVID consumer cohort degradation caused 2022 cash burn spikes
“If you look at any consumer company, in 2020 and 20 21 their cohorts look fundamentally different than they did in 2022 and 20 23 they just performed different people were adopting new behaviors a lot of those behaviors did not stick and a lot of projections a…”
Taussig: Retail is not dying, only specific visible formats are failing
“It's not that retail is dying. It's that there's a few formats of retail that are no longer working, but those formats are highly visible.”
Alex Taussig: Digital brands need offline strategies at $100M-$200M revenue
“We typically start to see once you breach a 100,000,200 million in revenue, you need to start going and figuring out some offline strategy.”
Taussig: Google and Facebook capture ~90% of recent ad growth
“Something like 89 or 90% of growth in advertising dollars
In the last year or so was inside of Google and Facebook.”
Taussig: The average consumer downloads net zero new apps per month
“The average consumer downloads net zero apps each month.”
Taussig: MBAs created tens of billions in startup market cap since 2008
“The counter argument that an MBA disqualifies you from participating meaningfully in the startup ecosystem is just not true. And there's actually just in my class in business school, Harvard business school, 2009, you had rent the runway, thread up cloud flare…”
Taussig: Non-founder CEOs can drive critical refounding moments in startups
“And I believe that Companies can have these refounding moments where, where a really outstanding individual comes in with the right set of skills for a given moment in time and takes a company on a different trajectory.”
Taussig: Fashion resale projected to reach 20% of apparel market by 2030
“It's actually a lot of people think resale could be 20% of all apparel by 2030.”
Taussig: Vinted was already profitable in France during 2018 fundraising
“Because it was very clear they had won France at that point in time. And it was, and France was like, it was a profitable region, right?”
Taussig: Recommendations are more critical in resale than traditional retail
“Recommendations are even more critical in resale than they are in, in, in new.”
Taussig: Vinted achieved social media-like engagement levels in 2019
“When we looked at Vinted in 2019, it had social media like time spent. In the app.”
Taussig: Temu and Shein directly compete with H&M and Zara
“I mean, they're really competing against H and M and a lot of fast fashion Zara, like the fast fashion companies.”
Taussig: Marketplaces cannot grow arbitrarily fast without destroying equilibrium
“The tricky thing about marketplaces is that you cannot grow arbitrarily fast. There is an efficient frontier. That, that you want to hit where you can balance supply and demand and fulfill a high quality experience for both sides of the marketplace.”
Taussig: Marketplace inventory expansion faces diminishing returns per user session
“One of the fundamental things like never changes across all marketplaces is that more liquidity generates higher and more inventory generates higher conversion rates, but there's diminishing returns on that, right? Because the user can only see so much invento…”
Taussig: Lightspeed evaluates market opportunity by surface area, not dollar TAM
“At Lightspeed, when we think about addressable market, we don't really think about it in dollars first. We think of it as surface area. We think of it as like, how, what is the surface area we're gaining access to here uniquely in our strategic wedge? Because …”
Taussig: Silicon Valley VC culture incentivizes fair treatment as a repeat game
“Silicon Valley has this like weird risk loving kind of culture. And we also know that it's a repeat game. We know that we're going to be playing the game with these people for decades. And so we got to treat everyone right.”
Taussig: Return on capital deployed compounds businesses better than margin metrics
“What's your return on equity? Like what is your, when you make a hundred million dollars in investment, you know, in the coming year, well, what do we expect the return on that hundred million dollars to be over the ensuing five years? And that's a hard thing …”
Taussig: Highland and Lightspeed reject VC superstar culture for service mindset
“In both firms, both at Highland and Lightspeed, there's no superstar culture. Neither are firms where we really like to go in front and be the star of the show. We prefer to think of venture capital as a service business, and that it's our job to remain behind…”
Taussig: Product-channel fit never lasts, requiring backup channels early
“Even if you find that product channel fit, it's not going to last forever. And it's often the first thing you get right. And then you have to get a lot of other things, right? So it's almost always the case that when you hit product channel fit and you're scal…”
Taussig: Amazon burned only $3 million in cash before its 1997 IPO
“When Amazon went public in 1997, up until that time, it had only consumed about three million dollars of cash, and that's about half of what it would have burned without the negative working capital effect.”
Taussig: Market dominance pushes suppliers to give startups better terms
“If an incumbent is really dominant, the vendor actually may have a greater incentive to give you better terms because they want to eventually diversify their customer base.”
Taussig: Amazon Benefits Startups by Weakening Legacy Retailers
“I don't think it's because Amazon helps startups. They certainly don't really do much for startups, but they have weakened the traditional retailers. I think they've made it easier for startups to scale faster and take market share away from those legacy playe…”
Taussig: 90% of Vinted's GMV was in France when Lightspeed invested
“And at the time that it got resurfaced, 90% of the GMV was in France.”
Taussig: Airbnb spends 18% of revenue on marketing versus 30% for competitors
“Something like 18% of revenues on marketing, whereas bookings and Expedia spend 30%, and that's because they have unique inventory.”
Alex Taussig: US e-commerce accounts for only 10% of total retail
“E-commerce is still only about 10% of total retail in the United States.”
Taussig: Early startups should maintain an 80/20 marketing budget split
“So yes, you need to really lean into what's working because you only have a certain amount of resources. But you always also need to be testing. So it's somewhere in the middle. It's maybe something like an eighty-twenty split early on.”