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.
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Eggers: Venture capital will consolidate as capital inflows slow
“And I think over time, we're going to have a consolidation that capital is not going to be as plentiful coming into our industry and the best funds will survive and some won't.”
Eggers: Failing to raise a new fund triggers rapid VC death spiral
“Well, it takes 10 years to be out of business, but I think once you're not able to raise a new fund, it's a slow death, and it's hard for you to be active in the market because entrepreneurs know that you're having trouble raising capital, so it's sort of a de…”
Eggers: Modern stage specialization in venture capital is unsustainable
“So there's a lot of specialization now, and so people are sort of cutting, slicing the pie of value creation based on time. I don't think it's sustainable, but that's sort of, I think, the phase that we're in right now.”
Eggers: Venture returns will suffer due to 2018 capital oversupply
“I do think, though, that we've got too much money coming in, and so I do think returns are going to suffer a bit. For these vintages, and that we probably need some kind of a correction to decrease the amount of capital that's coming into venture.”
Eggers: Three reasons venture capital firms fail at generational transitions
“I think there's three things that where a venture firm can fail. Number one, you got to have great performance. That's an obvious one. Number two is you got to make sure that the young people coming up get the opportunities to grow economically and sending the…”
Eggers: Startups, not big corporations, will solve climate change
“I do think that climate change is going to be solved by technology, largely, and by people changing their daily routines, but technology is key, and I don't think it's going to be necessarily solved by the big companies. I think the solutions are going to come…”
Eggers: Biden administration will raise general capital gains tax rates
“And then on tax policy, I think there's going to be increased taxes on capital gains.”
Eggers: Solo Capitalist Model Is Not Restricted to Top 1% of Investors
“I don't think it's just a game of the .one percent. I think if people have been successful as operators or as investors, and they want to go on their own, they can be solo capitalists, and they can raise funds from the outside, because there's a lot of LPs out…”
Eggers: VCs choose investing because they are notoriously poor people managers
“I think VCs are notorious for being poor people managers. That's why they become VCs and not operating people.”
Eggers: Lightspeed expanded its female investor team from one to ten
“We have one female investor four years ago. We have 10 now, which I think might be the highest in the industry.”
Eggers: Lightspeed allocated 100% of 2020 scout slots to racial minorities
“For twenty-twenty, we decided that our entire Lightspeed Scout program would be a hundred percent racial minorities, and so we put the word out in our network informally that we were going to do this. Within two weeks, we had 350 people apply for 25 spots, and…”
Eggers: Unhelpful investor introductions waste CEO time without adding value
“A lot of people like to make introductions to CEOs and CEOs oftentimes will have to take them because they feel obliged to do that, but the introductions don't lead anywhere.”
Eggers: Impact investing can outperform traditional venture capital investments
“Impact investing can produce even better returns than non-impact investing.”
Eggers: Cleantech investing will resurge in the 2020s under Biden
“Yeah, I think it will, especially if we end up with a Biden administration.”
Eggers: Maintaining 15% ownership in capital-intensive startups is nearly impossible
“Yeah, I think that it depends on some of these projects that require a ton of capital. It's really hard to get 15 or 20% of them over time. You look at the Ubers of the world, and some of the guys who are, you know, the electric bike companies and scooter comp…”
Eggers: Paper 'unicorns' are misleading; real $1B exits should be called 'narwhals'
“I just don't like the word unicorn, because it's sort of like unfinished business. It's like celebrating a touchdown before you know whether you've won the game or not. And so I like to use the term narwhal. Unicorns are not real. Narwhals are real. They also …”
Eggers: VC Partnerships Differ From Corporations Due to Lack of Hierarchy
“Partnerships are way different than corporations. Corporations at least have some formal hierarchy. Partnerships are supposed to be flat, and so there's sort of this unusual element of sort of lack of hierarchy, and it sort of finds its way over time, but the …”
Eggers: Buying high and selling higher in venture capital is unsustainable
“In some cases we're buying high and selling higher, but there's only a matter of time while that works.”
Eggers: SPACs are here to stay as permanent alternatives to IPOs
“I think SPACs are here to stay, and we're going to see a lot of companies using that as a alternative to IPOs and direct listings over the next several years.”
Eggers: Lightspeed's 2020 seed rounds resemble Series A rounds from 2010
“When we refer to seeds today within Lightspeed, they look a lot like what we used to call Series A's 10 years ago. We've just almost shifted everything to the right one.”
Eggers: Venture capital will see increased adoption of rolling funds
“I think we'll see more of rolling funds, and if you can do it, it's great.”
Eggers: Managing a VC firm requires more EQ than IQ
“It takes a lot more EQ than IQ to do that part of the job.”
Eggers: Diverse venture teams drive broader reach and superior fund performance
“You shouldn't do it just because it feels good and it gives you good PR. You should do it because it was a business reason for doing it. And we believe the business reason is by having a more inclusive team, we reach a broader set of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneu…”
Eggers: VC firms will collaborate on diversity rather than compete
“I think generally the industry wants to collaborate, and we want to learn from each other as peers to accelerate the industry faster versus treating this as an area of competitive differentiation between firms. So I expect to see a lot more collaboration among…”
Eggers: Board leverage accelerates CEOs while overhead slows them down
“Leverage is helping a founder or CEO get something done faster than they would have without you. And overhead is making them get it done slower than without you.”
Eggers: VC from 1980 to 1995 was a hands-on craftsman era
“If you start in 1980, starting 1980 to 1995, I like to call that the craftsman era of venture capital, and that was where venture investors Didn't make a lot of investments, but when they did, they got in very early, and they stayed all throughout the company'…”
Eggers: 2007 to 2009 VC fund vintages are among the best
“You go back and look at the venture funds that were raised around 2007, eight, nine. Those are some of the best vintages in the last two decades.”
Eggers: Lightspeed's Series A in Riverbed returned hundreds of millions
“The first big early stage outcome we had was Riverbed, where we were in the Series A with our friends at Excel, and that returned, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to our investors.”
Eggers: Snapchat had under 100,000 users when Lightspeed made seed investment
“They still had less, less than a, about a 100,000 users when we invested and they'd gone up from 10,002 months before. Really good engagement, and so we made the seed investment.”
Eggers: Boards function better when driven by the CEO
“You never really want any one person on the board to be able to block or hold up the board on a decision, and frankly, it's way better to have the CEO driving the board than the other way around.”
Eggers: Lightspeed delivered $1.8B in liquidity to LPs in 2017
“Last year we delivered about 1.8 billion dollars of liquidity to our LPs.”
Eggers: SPAC timeline is two to three months versus traditional IPOs
“You can put a SPAC together in two to three months in terms of the acquisition part and going public versus taking six, seven, eight months to really get a company ready for an IPO.”
Eggers: Jim Goetz excels on boards by balancing constructive praise and pushback
“I really appreciate the style of someone like Jim Getz. And he's obviously done quite well for himself as a venture investor of one of the best, but for nimble storage, I sat with him on the board and I got a chance to sort of see him. What makes him really go…”
Eggers: Lightspeed launched with four partners, no LPs, and no fees
“The four of us splintered off and started Lightspeed and started from scratch, really. We had no LPs. We had a track record, which was helpful, but we had no portfolio, no fees coming in, so we raised a fund and started from there and then started hiring out t…”