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 48 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: 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: 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: Maturing venture market will crush mid-sized generalist VC firms
“This maturation is going to make it tough in the middle.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Bessemer data shows tech foundings are evenly spread while exits cluster
“And we've actually empirically modeled this. If you look at founding dates of the great companies that we think of across tech, and it's amazingly even across cycles, what you tend to see those that exits do cluster.”
Cloud macro battle will result in fatalities among legacy tech vendors
“And so there's this macro battle of risk going on with the legacy vendors, and there will be some fatalities there, but it's enabling the infrastructure service layer that now the pure place can continue to benefit from.”
Multiple $10B+ private cloud companies will soon transition to public markets
“You're going to see these Ten billion dollar plus caliber companies starting to flip from private to public, and the lights will turn on on this segment in a way that public market investors and, frankly, the community more broadly doesn't yet fully appreciate”
Deeter predicts automated bookkeeping startup ScaleFactor will become a household name
“So the most recently announced one is a small company in Austin That people probably haven't heard of yet called scale factor, which I firmly believe will be a household name in the coming years.”
Deeter: Late-stage private SaaS companies face the hardest squeeze ahead
“It's really the late stage private companies that are going to get squeezed the hardest in the coming months because they've had this reality distortion field in the jobs in the sense of valuations and operations in some cases. That were, that was really fuele…”
Deeter: Late-stage private SaaS traded at 3-4x public multiples
“At the end of the day, these businesses traded at, you know, three or four times the multiples of their public peers, and that isn't sustainable long-term.”
Deeter: Each 1% monthly churn reduction equals $100M market value
“We quantified that to roughly a hundred million dollars of market value for every one percent of monthly churn you can change.”
Byron Deeter: Snowflake had negative gross margins late in its life cycle
“And so you can look at a business like a snowflake that had negative gross margins very late in their life cycle.”
Deeter: Ecosystem startups around top LLMs will produce 100x VC returns
“However, there are hundreds of other Really compelling venture businesses that will be created in and around those ecosystems. And I do believe there will be great venture outcomes by from a number of companies in and around those businesses. And so the power …”
Deeter: Adding Payments Doubled TAM and Market Caps for Vertical SaaS
“And as I think back on our vertical SaaS investments, you know, like a Shopify or a Service Titan or a Toast, when they added payments, it became that big Next Horizon unlock for them and really doubled the TAM and the market caps for these businesses.”
Deeter: Growth Is Valued at 2x to 2.5x Efficiency at $50M ARR
“The rule of X mathematically shows it's about a two to two and a half X multiplier value of growth over efficiency at mid-stage scale. Call it fifty million ARR or so.”
Deeter: Amazon, Google, and AMD chipsets are challenging Nvidia's market dominance
“I do think that we're also getting many more hardware approaches and solutions out there. So that it's not as wonderful as NVIDIA is. It's not just an NVIDIA world anymore. And the chip sets from Amazon and Google and AMD and others are becoming quite capable.”
Deeter: Canva, Anthropic, and Perplexity will not go public anytime soon
“Now you look at, you know, Canva, you know, forty billion plus, and Anthropica with seventy billion plus, and perplexity, you know deep into DekuKorn status, and like, these businesses, you know, aren't going public anytime soon.”
Deeter: First three VC investments failed before next two hit billion-dollar IPOs
“I had my first three investments were all very bad. My next two ended up being, you know, billion dollar IPOs.”
Twilio Is Bessemer's Largest Investment in Total Dollars and Returns
“The initial investment started with David Callen leading a 125,000 dollar seed investment as part of this seed extension round that Mitch Kapoor led, and Ethan Kurzweil, who's now one of our great partners, was a senior associate at the time, and Ethan slid a …”
Twilio Went Through Multiple CROs Trying to Crack Enterprise Sales
“We went through several chief revenue officers who were quite capable, and yet couldn't fully crack it.”
Home Run IPO Valuations Expanded 100x to $50B+ Over 15 Years
“What used to be a home run at a half billion dollars for an IPO, is now a fifty billion dollar and above IPO. I mean, literally two orders of magnitude bigger than”
Microsoft is aggressively gaining market share in enterprise public cloud
“They are several years into this transition and as Microsoft generally does, they're doing a great job of being a fast follower. And are very aggressively gaining share and making strides on the enterprise segment of public cloud specifically.”
Enterprise software valuations in 2019 are at 20-year highs
“These valuations are certainly the highest we've seen for an enterprise company in the last probably two decades.”
Adaptive Insights took a $1.6B Workday acquisition three days pre-IPO
“Including Adaptive Insights, by the way, last year, who was three days away from going public, and then instead chose to take the Workday offered a 1,000,000,006 instead.”
AI and China will disrupt the tech sector over the next decade
“The first talks about AI and China specifically, two of the macro forces that will totally disrupt tech in the next decade”
Twilio Allocated 1% of Pre-IPO Equity to Charity, Not Founding Equity
“He early on came to the board and said, I want to allocate one percent of Twilio's equity and not in like a marketing way where it's one percent of when we founded it, but like one percent now immediately pre IPO, which by the way is now worth hundreds of mill…”
Bessemer is tracking 53 private cloud unicorns globally as of 2019
“I think that the floodgates are about to burst wide open, and as we look at the private cloud landscape, we do the cloud 100 event every year with Forbes, and it'll be in the September issue this year from the cloud 100 list, but right now we're tracking 53 pr…”