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 98 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Deeter: Anthropic will be valued over $1 trillion within three years
“I mean, we put our money where our mouth is. We've been a buyer. So over, and that's again, like we a year ago when we were buyers, we still wouldn't have didn't conceive of that.”
Deeter: Epic Has Maintained a State-Endorsed Monopoly in Healthcare
“Epic has had this wonderful state-endorsed monopoly for a long time.”
Deeter: Tiger Global Created Reckless Overfunding and Poor Governance
“There was a lot of happy disruption and big thinking and creativity that, that I applaud. And there was a lot of reckless overfunding and deal work and non-governance that that we're gonna have to clean up for quite a while.”
Deeter: AI Will Produce Multiple Trillion-Dollar Companies
“I think there's going to be a lot of trillion dollar businesses that are created from this.”
Deeter: Bessemer invested in Anthropic believing it could be a 30x return
“You know, 3.8 X will keep you in business for a long time, but the reason to do it is because you believe it could be a 30 X. And that's the basis of our anthropic investment is we believe that it is a generational company.”
Deeter: Top three LLM companies will raise $100B in six months
“I think the numbers right now, the top three LLMs, if you include you know, Anthropoc, OpenAI, and X in there, ah, are gonna raise a hundred billion dollars in this six month period”
Deeter: AI Will Double Vertical SaaS TAM and Valuation Just Like Payments Did
“I think AI is going to do the same thing, that what it can do you know, with Service Titan, as they talk about automating the technician experience and the ability to go out there and have a co-pilot alongside of you.”
Deeter: AI Solutions Are Already Tapping Into Labor and Services Budgets
“That question's already being answered. It's not even a debate anymore, Harry. It's over. These tech solutions are absolutely addressing, you know, software, hardware, and services budgets comprehensively, and they're doing it in a very successful way.”
Deeter: 10-Person Micro-Businesses Will Reach Billion-Dollar Valuations
“I think we're going to see the era of the micro business. I think that we're going to have, you know, 10 person companies that are crossing billion dollar valuations and, you know, kids in schools are going to be able to launch businesses in real time in, in w…”
Deeter: Top AI Startups Hit $100M ARR in 1.5 Years
“We're seeing businesses go from zero to a hundred million in 1.5 years. That's the supernova profile.”
Deeter: Economics for Anthropic, Perplexity, and Canva Pencil Out
“And I assure you, one of the coolest things about the profile of anthropic and perplexity and Canvan, these businesses is the math actually pencils out.”
Deeter: AI will mirror top scientists' reasoning within 18 months
“The curve is still up into the right, without a doubt, and I do believe that we will cross over this term. You know, people use you know various different terms about you know, levels of reasoning and awareness and AGI and the like. I have no doubt we're, if w…”
Deeter: Tesla wouldn't have survived without DOE loan
“Without the, you know, the DOE bailout loan and things, Tesla wouldn't have existed, but what I missed was that Elon's a force of nature, a generational entrepreneur, and he put that company on his back and powered through so many subsequent layers that the ne…”
Deeter: VC deals get done when partners champion high-end upside
“By the end of the day, the deals that get done, it's the ones where the partner sitting there saying, I'm pounding the table that the high end and more as possible. And that's, that really is the qualitative overlay that has massive quantitative implications.”
Deeter: Maturing venture market will crush mid-sized generalist VC firms
“This maturation is going to make it tough in the middle.”
Deeter: Bessemer refuses to hire sector-specific investors or protect cooling sectors
“This is very much why we don't hire sector-specific investors, and we don't give you air cover if your sector goes out of favor, meaning our job's to make RLPs money, and if you're in a sector that's cooling off, you better get the hell out and go somewhere el…”
Deeter: Sector-dedicated VC funds force capital deployment regardless of market quality
“The risk of having a semiconductor fund or a semiconductor team is that, you know, you carve out, pick a number, five hundred million to invest there. Like, you bet your ass they're going to invest five hundred million in semi, whether the right answer was two…”
Deeter: 2019-2020 peak entry valuations washed out many promising venture investors
“Cycles matter a lot. I really feel bad for great potential investors who joined our industry with checkbooks in 2000, you know, two, 2020, 2019. And they did great deals, but at market prices, which were way too high. And many of those people got washed out of…”
Deeter: VC is one of few asset classes where past performance predicts success
“It is one of the few asset cycles where past performance is an indicator of future success.”
Deeter: Vast majority of mature private software companies won't go public
“Vast majority are not going to get public and consolidation will make sense because at the core, a lot of these businesses are very high gross margin and are run pretty inefficiently because we've got a growth mindset and we're certainly not optimizing for cos…”
Deeter: Venture Capital Index Will Underperform S&P 500 Again
“Historically, it has underperformed the S&P and probably will again in this case but you'll make money.”
Deeter: Anthropic's revenue growth trajectory is unprecedented in tech history
“Like, when you actually see the anthropic numbers that he's now sharing, and like, this is real, and, you know, their path to billions and billions in revenue, and, you know, really compelling unit economics, I just, we have never seen this in the history of o…”
PaaS Customers Graduate to In-House Infrastructure Far Less Than Feared
“Whereas I think the market and the investors, and frankly, even the teams were very worried about this graduation phenomenon, it's happening way less than anyone feared. And it's really just very specific cases where people go narrower, not broader.”
Mega-Checks Fail in Enterprise Cloud Because Growth Isn't Paid Acquisition
“They haven't done much in the enterprise cloud world, but I think there's a reason why, which is it's hard to put hundreds of millions of dollars into mid-stage companies. You run the risk of overfunding them, and it's not a paid acquisition game in the way th…”
Cloud Valuations Over 20x Revenue and Snowflake at 80x Are Unsustainable
“The average multiple is trading north of twenty-x revenue, and you look at a snowflake that's trading at 80 times revenue. That's not sustainable.”
IBM acquired Red Hat because AWS was crushing them in public cloud
“This record acquisition by IBM of Red Hat is really all about Amazon Web Services crushing them in public cloud, them trying to make a play for hybrid cloud more aggressively and essentially draw a buffer line where they can be relevant and aspirationally they…”
High cloud valuation multiples today will look cheap in the long term
“Whatever rich prices we're paying today, We will get rewarded many times over if we pick the winners and hold onto them long term, and so we're certainly anxious as everyone else is around the multiples. They are rich, but at the end of the day, I absolutely b…”
Deeter: Consumer delivery startups face shut downs as funding dries up
“A number of these delivery businesses, as an example, have been targeted. And I suspect several of those will have unfortunate outcomes and will not have further capital available.”
Byron Deeter: AWS is the best business in software history
“And by the way, the best business in the history of software is sitting there with AWS in, in what people refer to as a commodity.”
Deeter: Bessemer invested over $100M each in Anthropic, Perplexity, and Canva
“You know, you look at an Anthropic or a Perplexity or a Canva and we, you know, we have, you know, nine figures into each of these companies and yet we are still, you know, well below historical venture standards where you aspire to own 20% or something in the…”
Deeter: Canva and Intercom AI products generate hundreds of millions
“I look at a company like a Canva, or I look at a company like Intercom that's at a scale where in some ways they're already becoming an incumbent in those markets, and yet they're disrupting themselves at awesome rates and have AI products that are already, yo…”
Deeter: Bessemer portfolio company hit 90% automated support with higher NPS via Fin
“I was at one of our portfolio company board meetings the other day, and they mentioned that they had switched from, you know, human-based interventions to the FIN product from Intercom, And they showed the stats of deflections went up, I forget to, you know, 9…”
Deeter: Bessemer is evaluating nuclear fusion investments accelerated by AI
“We're looking at, you know, fusion investments now that I think will be supported and accelerated by AI.”
Deeter: Marketing and Sales Matter Less in the AI Economy Than PLG
“Marketing and sales have less of a role in this new economy than they did before, and that these products in many ways are selling themselves, and product-led growth and innovation is the unlock for This, you know, supernova and shooting star aspirational grow…”
Deeter: Mark Leslie's Sales Learning Curve Model Is Obsolete in AI
“The sales learning curve that Mark Leslie talks about when we backed him, you know, decades ago in Veritas is no longer applicable because you just can't possibly throw the bodies at a zero to 100 growth curve inside of two years.”
Deeter: Passed on Tesla Over Roadster Unit Economics
“One of the most famous and most painful for me was Tesla early on. It's on my anti-portfolio. If you go to the Bessemer website, we have a page dedicated to our screw ups, and that's one of mine. And it was because I couldn't fundamentally see how the unit eco…”
Deeter: Secondary liquidity for venture investors is healthy as companies stay private longer
“This is a change in my view. I'll confess that I was pretty hard lined against this, not for founders and teams. I always feel that taking some pressure off of them is good, but I didn't love it when our co-investors were looking for liquidity. Early in busine…”
Bessemer Cloud 100 List Reaches $1 Trillion Aggregate Private Value
“We're over a trillion dollars In private market cap now among just the top 100 cloud AI companies right now which is just a astronomical number to consider.”
Deeter: Bessemer created 'Century Team' to re-underwrite top portfolio companies
“And we've actually added people and processes to make sure that we don't get subject to this kind of mental inertia where we invite in, you know, another partner to look at it and our best deals were constantly saying, You know, okay, we have the century team,…”
Bessemer unlikely to pursue evergreen structures or asset management roll-ups
“We're seeing, you know, other firms adding asset management businesses and debt products and roll-ups and doing all sorts of things. You know, there's some kernels in there that we agree with. There's a lot in there we probably aren't going to pursue.”
Tech Incumbents Face an Incumbent Disadvantage Against Lean Startups
“When realizing that this notion of an incumbent advantage, I firmly believe now is an incumbent disadvantage. It is really hard to beat a focused, you know, lean team with their head down going after a problem set.”
Shopify Remains One of Stripe's Largest Customers Instead of Building In-House
“They're certainly one of Stripe's largest customers, if not the largest, and yet it's a great relationship. And at any point, of course, Shopify could have brought that in house.”
New Communication Channels Layer on Older Ones Rather Than Replacing Them
“What you find is that these new channels don't replace each other. So Video and push notifications and things. They don't replace SMS, so you don't have the situation where the SMS market plateaus, or the email market with the synchronization, you know, where …”
Hiring a Big-Company CRO Too Early Disadvantages Early-Stage Startups
“And so hiring the big company CRO at that point is not only overkill, but it probably sets you up at a disadvantage because they're going to be disconnected. They're going to be layering in other execs. They're going to be working on process when really you ne…”
Venture Capital Will Bifurcate Into Regional Seed Firms and Global Platforms
“I do believe that the world is going to skew to a bimodal curve where there's going to be Super stage or regional firms. I put you in that bucket where you are going to be a fantastic early stage European partner for seed stage firms, and we look forward to co…”
Cloud Companies Will Absorb Multiple Compression Through Strong Revenue Growth
“These companies are growing at north of 40% on the public side, and on the private side, usually growing 80 to a hundred percent plus for the best companies, and so you can absorb some multiple compression and still compound value and be a win for everyone inv…”
Twilio Built Software Layers to Avoid Becoming a Commoditized Infrastructure Pipe
“The commoditization of communications or the migration of their larger customers. So I think you asked a very insightful question along the way, which I probably didn't give enough due to, which is we worried about that very heavily. And so part of our Preempt…”