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 29 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
Rachleff: 90% of a VC's value creation comes purely from stock selection
“90% of the value added of a venture capitalist is finding and choosing the right investments.”
Rachleff: Early-stage angel investing in software is a sucker's bet
“It's a sucker's bet. It's a terrible risk reward because you have all of this market risk, and there's no way to evaluate it.”
Rachleff: Equal VC partners must step down if not giving 110%
“The only way to manage an always equal partnership is if you're not willing to go a 110%, you have to opt out.”
Rachleff: Software can replicate 80% of endowment strategies for retail investors
“With software, we could do an eighty-twenty on what the endowments do and deliver their capabilities to the masses”
Rachleff: Customer delight is the ultimate form of virality
“If you're overly paranoid, you're distracted from delighting your customer, and if you don't delight your customer, you don't create a viral effect because delight is the greatest form of virality.”
Rachleff: Tech companies cannot win from behind by reacting to competition
“Reacting to competition doesn't ever get you to be first. And you can't win from behind in technology.”
Rachleff: Netflix, Google, and Apple lack network effects
“There's no network effect to Netflix. There's no network effect to Google. There's no network effect to a lot of the, to Apple products, but you love them, and if you love them, you're going to tell all of your friends about them, and that's what defines viral…”
Rachleff: Consumer product-market fit requires exponential organic growth, not paid acquisition
“Consumer-related businesses, I think you know you found product market fit when you achieve exponential organic growth. Anyone can gain growth through paid acquisition. If you can achieve exponential organic growth, that's when you know you found product marke…”
Rachleff: Executive leadership skills do not translate to successful investment selection
“Being a CEO, the things that make you a very good leader have nothing to do with the things that make you very good at finding and choosing investments.”
Rachleff: Board work can double outcomes but doesn't drive VC fund economics
“I think being a really good board member can make the difference between a three X and a six X outcome, but that doesn't really move the needle on the economics of a venture capital firm.”
Rachleff: Professionals learn far more from success than from failure
“I think you learn far more from success than you do from failure. I think you learn more personally from failure. You learn more professionally from success.”
Rachleff: Premier university endowments are the world's best-managed capital pools
“I believe that the premier university endowments are the best managed pools of capital in the world”
Rachleff: People with $1M to $5M cannot access elite investment products
“Even though they had made Even on the order of one to five million dollars, they still couldn't afford access to the best investment products and services.”
Rachleff: Ivy League Endowments Are World's Best Managed Capital
“I think that the Ivy League University endowments are the best managed large pools of capital in the world”
Rachleff: Mutual fund quarterly reports do not reflect their actual holdings
“Mutual funds, for example, are completely opaque. The only information you have about their investments are what they publish at quarter end, and that does not reflect what they're actually invested in.”
Rachleff: Charles Schwab's automated service cannot match Wealthfront on net returns
“Great example of that is Charles Schwab. They introduced a service last year that's the equivalent to what we introduced in It is in no way comparable on a net-of-fee, after-tax, risk-adjusted basis to what our service has evolved to today.”
Rachleff: Premier VCs sustain returns because $5B companies replaced $500M companies
“Interestingly, there are about, just about as many companies worth five billion today as there were worth five hundred million 20 years ago, which is why the premier venture capitalists are generating the same phenomenal returns today that they did 20 years ag…”
Rachleff: Tech blogs and newsletters are seldom well-informed
“I don't read blogs or newsletters because they're seldom well-informed.”
Rachleff: Automated investment services are adopted twice as fast as ETFs
“And automated investment services, like Wealthfront, have been adopted at twice the rate that ETFs have.”
Rachleff: Executive transitions fail when CEOs are surprised or internal factions form
“I think the poor transitions were the result of the CEO being surprised with being fired. That usually created a lot of consternation. If there were two camps within the company where there were warring factions, where one camp wanted one person to run the com…”
Rachleff: Transparency without context leads employees to assume bad faith
“The challenge with transparency is if you let someone else set the agenda, it can work against you. So it's really, really important to provide context with transparency, because if you don't provide context, people will make up their own, and more times than …”
Rachleff: Great startup ideas find founders, founders do not find them
“Serendipitously, which I think is the way that most great ideas come to pass. I think that great ideas find you. You don't find them.”
Rachleff: Manager evaluation ability separates top Ivy League endowments
“They all actually pursue a very, very similar methodology. At its core, they use modern portfolio theory to do asset allocation. What really separates them is their ability to evaluate managers.”
Rachleff: A startup's initial idea rarely succeeds without iterating through value hypotheses
“It's very, very rare for anyone's initial idea to succeed, and the process of iterating through a series of value hypotheses is very, very difficult, and it can be very depressing if the hypotheses prove false.”
Rachleff: Great board members enforce intellectual honesty rather than directing management
“A great board member is one who focuses on a 100,000 foot level because they can't possibly know the details of the business. And I think being an outsider, they can hold the mirror up to management to make sure they're being intellectually honest about their …”
Rachleff: Automated investing lacks network effects and won't be winner-take-all
“I don't think it's a winner take all business because it's not a network effect based business, but I think that there's an opportunity to build a really big business if you can really do a great job serving your clients.”
Rachleff: Benchmark's Bruce Dunleavy is radically more capable as a business person
“He has unbelievable judgment and is the best influencer I've ever met, and people just adore Bruce, and I try to learn from him as best as I can. He's two years older than I am, but he's radically more capable than I am as a business person, and I have benefit…”
Rachleff: Exceptional CEOs continuously layer new growth businesses on legacy products
“I think a great CEO is someone who, over the long period of time, is able to continue to reinvent their business. Mark Leslie wrote a tremendous article about this that he published on the first round, excuse me, the first round review on the importance of rei…”