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 35 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
Brad Feld: There is zero correlation between achieving milestones and happiness
“There is no correlation. Zero. Between happiness and achieving a milestone.”
Brad Feld: Constant entrepreneurial striving is bullshit and causes struggle
“Stopping striving is pretty enlightening, because our programming as people, as entrepreneurs especially, Is that you must constantly be striving to achieve the next goal or the next outcome. What a load of bullshit. And the words themselves kind of make me sh…”
Brad Feld: Mega-cap valuations require underlying long-term profitability
“The idea that you'd be one of the world's most valuable businesses and your fundamental economic characteristics don't generate a long-term profit cycle, well, that's not going to work.”
Feld: 20x forward revenue B2B SaaS valuations will normalize
“Like, does anybody really believe that a B to B SaaS company should be valued at 20 times forward revenue? Maybe, I suppose, and the public markets value some that way, but that's not a logical construct long term. That's going to normalize.”
Feld: Founders and VCs waste time on performative 'fake' work
“CEOs spend a lot of time having fake CEO days, and I think VCs spend a lot of time having fake VC days. And if you really want to be successful, by the way, that translates to everybody on the leadership team, everywhere throughout a company, don't have fake f…”
Feld: A board's only real decision is whether to support the CEO
“I and my partners at Foundry like to carry around Sort of one decision we have to make at a board level. And we talk about it as the only decision we want to make is whether or not we support the CEO. And if we support her, our job is to work for her.”
Founder passion is ephemeral; investments require palpable obsession
“It's ephemeral. You know, my throwaway line is it belongs in the bedroom. Obsession, you know, obsession is a different thing and not an unhealthy obsession, but an obsession that's palpable.”
Brad Feld: Tech industry has long suffered from systemic substance abuse
“There has long been a drug and alcohol problem in tech, not just in tech, but in lots of different parts of business and society, acknowledging it and then understanding what's at the root cause of it, and then some set of people deciding to change, change the…”
Brad Feld: Early-stage TAM metrics are not helpful for VC investing
“And it was one of these things where the venture cliche of total available market, especially at the early stages is really not that helpful, especially when you're coming into a world with a product obsession, even if you're to Displacing an existing incumben…”
Feld: Individual macroeconomic forecasts are almost guaranteed to be wrong
“The interesting thing about where we are is it's very easy to prognosticate about what's going to happen with certainty, and it's almost guaranteed that those prognostications are going to be incorrect, and any one individual prognostication will be incorrect.”
Feld: 'Let's do a deal together' is a hollow VC cliché
“Hey, let's do a deal together someday is one of the most hollow statements in the world of VC, because that's so different than, Hey, I'm working on this thing that I'd really love to get you other VC involved in to help.”
Brad Feld: VCs excel at self-promotion, but crisis behavior reveals true quality
“Most VCs are really good at selling themselves. That's not where it matters. Where it matters is when things get all screwed up or when you're having tension or when there's exogenous pressures on the other person that have nothing to do with you or the compan…”
Brad Feld: VCs cannot have purely professional relationships with founders
“I don't actually think you can have a solely professional relationship with an entrepreneur in a startup”
Foundry Group will never add junior staff or expand team
“When we started Foundry, a deeply held belief was that we would never grow. It would just be, you know, the initial partners. We'd never add any junior people, and that we would be the ones that were doing all the work with the founders versus, you know, havin…”
Every fund raised by Foundry Group is capped at $225M
“Another corollary to that is that every fund we raised would be the same size. So we've raised multiple funds. Every one of them is two hundred and twenty-five million dollars.”
Subtractive laser printing is more versatile than 3D printing
“This is a product that does basically the same, but I think it's actually a much more versatile long-term technology than three D printing in terms of what it can do.”
Brad Feld: Mental health stigma creates a personal doom loop for founders
“Realized that there was an incredible stigma around issues of mental health in our society broadly, but especially in the context of entrepreneurship. And that stigma that existed actually made things much, much worse for somebody who was Depressed, and that o…”
Brad Feld: Pressure to present perfection inhibits personal effectiveness and success
“And this idealized state that our culture Has created where you have to carry yourself and present yourself in a certain way is actually a massive inhibitor of people being effective and successful.”
Brad Feld: Processing emotional issues comfortably makes him a more effective investor
“I think the ability to process that stuff in a way that is comfortable for me makes me a much more effective investor.”
Brad Feld: Tying your entire identity to your work is unhealthy
“Linking some of my identity, my work, totally healthy. But my entire identity, not healthy for me at all.”
Brad Feld: Great founding CEOs treat the company itself as the product
“The interesting trajectory of that is that early in the life of a company, the product does matter a ton. As the company starts to grow and develop, the great founding CEOs start to view the company itself as the product. So they evolved from being product foc…”
Feld: VCs who react fearfully in downturns harm portfolio companies
“When things change, you have to be pragmatic. If you're reactionary and fearful, and, you know, all of a sudden, everybody says, oh, my God, the world is ending. You know, you must do these things. As a VC, that's not that helpful. It's more helpful to have a …”
Brad Feld: The only way to know business partners is to work together
“The only real way to get to know someone is to do something with them. So the first of your evaluative criteria is a decision that you want to work with somebody else based on whatever external information you have. And then the second piece of evaluative crit…”
Brad Feld: Leaders practicing radical self-inquiry improve; others hit ceilings
“Great leaders who do their work get better over time, and leaders who don't do that work hit ceilings”
Brad Feld: Venture capital is currently at a moment of peak noise
“I feel like we're in a moment of peak noise. There's just an enormous amount of noise in the system, and the noise does start to grate on me over time.”
Brad Feld: Declarative advice is counterproductive for founders and VCs
“I think declarative advice is really difficult to process if you're an entrepreneur, and it's also very difficult to process if you're a VC, especially in real time.”
Every successful startup suffers near-death experiences requiring durability
“Every success I've ever been in involved in has had multiple points of failure, some of them near-death experiences for the company, and the great founders and the great companies and I think the great investors are the ones that have a lot of durability throu…”
Brad Feld: First major depressive episode lasted two years in mid-twenties
“I had my first major depressive episode when I was running my first company in my mid-twenties, and it was triggered by three things happening at the same time. The first was I ended up getting divorced from my first wife. Our relationship blew up. The second …”
Feld: Record holiday retail orders vanished overnight in 2008 crisis
“There's a whole bunch of companies that have already forgotten that in 2008 Christmas literally didn't happen. And it didn't happen because of the global downturn, recession, whatever, financial crisis. And the interesting thing was, I think like two months be…”
Foundry Group averages ten investments per year since 2007
“At Foundry Group, we've had a strategy of always invest at roughly the same cadence all the time. So we make about 10 new investments a year, and we've been making about 10 new investments a year since 2007 when we started Foundry.”
Foundry Group initially passed on Fitbit before investing
“In the case of Fitbit it, like a number of other companies that we were investors in, you know, several which are very successful, are good examples of companies that we initially passed on, and then, you know, six or 12 months later made an investment.”
Fitbit CEO James Park is calm, deliberate, and substantive
“If you've ever seen James speak, he's an incredibly calm, deliberate direct, thoughtful person. But he doesn't have, you know, a wide emotional range, but he's incredibly substantive.”
Foundry Group restricts investments to US startups under $3M raised
“So if you've raised less than three million bucks, we're a potential target. And then we only invest in the US.”
Foundry Group averages 10 new investments per year
“Because we've constrained the size of our funds, we make 10 new investments a year, and approximately, some years we do eight, some years we do 12, but it's approximately 10 a year”
Brad Feld's first startup returned 70 cents on the dollar
“Very first company was a company called Martingale software, which I started with a handful of fraternity brothers to write software for the Mac when the Apple Mac was just coming out, 1983, 1984, and the end result was we made almost no progress building any …”