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 121 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Tisch: Investors should pay any valuation for generational seed companies
“If you fund a generational company and the outcome is insanely enormous, you should say yes to whatever that number is at the seed stage.”
Tisch: Second and third-tier venture capital firms suck and are harmful
“I think the second The third tier VCs are uninteresting, and I think the third tier VCs are harmful, but I think the best ex-firms at each stage are good enough to not need to overly rank them. But I think the second and third tier VCs suck.”
Tisch: VC signaling is a fake concept that does not exist
“I don't believe in signaling. I think it's a fake word and I don't think it exists in this market.”
Tisch: Outside the top 25 VCs, investors are commodities or net negatives
“I don't think outside of the top five to 25 VCs, individuals, that VCs can magically impact a company. I think most of those investors join your board at series A or B, and they, those five to 25, whatever the number is, and the rest of the investment Sort of …”
Tisch: VCs never cause startup success, only failure
“The company's either going to work or not work. And you are not the reason for either of those two things. If anything, you're the reason it's not going to work.”
Tisch: VCs who overpaid deserve no sympathy; valuation is their problem
“The valuation to me is the investor's problem. And I just don't like, I don't believe that my sympathy sits for all the VCs that overpaid on things that they did. Like, everybody could, again, back to this, like, you could have said no. If you thought somethin…”
Tisch: Signaling risk is the single most overstated concept in startup financing
“The signaling risk, I feel like is the single most overstated part of the ecosystem.”
Tisch: A startup CEO's core job is becoming world-class at fundraising
“Telling founders, like, put your head down, build a product. Don't worry about fundraising. It's like distracting and annoying. The CEO specifically, their job is to become great at fundraising, and they need to be, like, view that as a core competency that th…”
Tisch: A tier-three VC attempted to personally bankrupt a startup founder
“I saw a VC try to personally bankrupt a founder.”
Tisch: VC returns depend on outlier companies, not rigid ownership targets
“Every VC's math works if you fund great companies. And so it's not about this, like, ownership threshold.”
Tisch: Signaling risk from multi-stage seed investments is an overrated myth
“I think that the myth of sort of you take a seed check from a multi-stage firm, especially in this market, that you are going to struggle to raise your next round if that firm doesn't sort of write the term sheet. I think that's been proven to not be a materia…”
Tisch: VCs cannot deploy 'company building' value at scale across portfolios
“And so the idea that a diverse portfolio is amongst the VC can deploy this value add and company building at scale. I just haven't seen that happen over my 10 years doing this.”
Tisch: The market has too many companies, diluting top startup talent
“I think there are too many companies. So I think the idea that every company is going to succeed and every company deserves to be funded through a series C, that's a risk to me. So there's a massive dilution of talent in our industry in that when everybody sta…”
Venture capital investors do not add value to startups
“When entrepreneurs in a meeting ask us, you know, what value do we add? My initial response is always, investors don't add value, and that's what we'll promise you.”
Tisch: Small stakes in outlier companies outperform strict ownership targets
“Every VC's math works if you fund great companies. And so it's not about This, like, ownership threshold. If anybody owned one percent of Facebook, one percent of Uber.1% of Coinbase, your math works. Your math works really well, and it scales.”
Tisch: All VC firms offer the same commoditized product
“I think at the end of the day, for the most part, all VCs offer the same product. We are giving money and we are taking equity. What comes after that is obfuscated in a sales pitch.”
Tisch: Seed investing cannot be indexed or made low-margin
“I don't think you can index seed, and I don't think you can aggregate seed into a low margin product.”
Tisch: Pre-Series B investing is art, post-Series B is math
“I think venture is two different jobs. There's the pre-series B job, and there's the post-series B job, and I don't think they have any relation to each other. I think at pre-series B, you are doing more art, and at post-series B, you are doing more math.”
Tisch: Any BoxGroup team member can individually approve an investment
“So we're a team of nine. Everyone on our team can say yes in an individual meeting. We don't need, we don't vote. We don't try to find groupthink.”
Tisch: BoxGroup forbids team members from 'throwing grenades' on deals
“We structurally push our group to not allow that. We have vocabulary internally. We say, like, throwing a grenade. You're not allowed to throw a grenade on some deal. It doesn't help.”
Tisch: Venture power law ensures top incumbent firms stay dominant
“The best firms in venture have the highest probability of being the best firms in the future, because brand matters, the quality of investors at that brand matter, and they're going to see and win better than the challengers are.”
Tisch: Scaling $1B to $5B is more predictable than $0 to $1B
“The path from zero to one billion Is impossible. The path from one billion to five billion is more predictable, and it's more easy to see at a given moment”
Tisch: The seed investment market will never become efficient
“I think the space I have conviction that there will never be efficiency in is the seed market. Because starting something is not efficient. Starting something is messy.”
Tisch: Seed-to-Series A graduation rates hit 90-100% between 2018 and 2022
“And over that 19 or 18 to 22 period, you went to basically a hundred. Hundred percent of companies that raised the seed got an A. Maybe it was 90, 95.”
Tisch: VCs should judge price at the portfolio level, not per deal
“I think it is important to be price aware on a portfolio basis, and I don't think on a deal-by-deal basis, price is a determinant of making a decision. Pretty simple. If you love a company and you want to invest, and the deal is what the deal is, you make a de…”
Tisch: Small checks from large funds yield minimal partner attention
“So if I'm going to take a three million dollar check from you know that you're in the bottom quartile of money allocated from that fund. So assuming that you're going to get this magical attention allocation from the fund is a mistake.”
Tisch: Never pass on a great seed deal due to high valuation
“Don't pass on a deal because it's overpriced. If it's going to be a great company, that's the cheapest it will ever be. So you should probably invest.”
Tisch: Breakout startups expand markets beyond initial size estimates
“If you pass on something and it works and you pass because of market size, they have expanded and created the market that you thought was too small.”
Tisch: Outlier returns solve VC fund economics regardless of entry valuation
“The best companies will make all the math work, no matter what your check size, no matter what your entry point. And obviously that sort of stops at some scale, but if you are an early investor in one of the sort of unique once in a decade, once every five yea…”
Tisch: Increasing seed ownership in later rounds is usually false hope
“I think building ownership after your first check is probably hard as a seed investor because series A, series B is just so competitive and the idea of increasing ownership in those rounds feels like a false hope most of the time or adverse selection.”
Tisch: The internet has no remaining free customer acquisition channels
“There is no free customer acquisition channel, there's no arbitrageable channel on the internet, probably for the first time since the internet was born”
West Coast tech hubs in NYC risk stifling local giants
“All the big companies from the West Coast have set up product offices here over the past five years, and I think that that might on one hand prevent the emergence of a standalone New York A monster, but it also brings more talent here, and so you've seen what …”
Mobile startups must launch finished, polished products to succeed today
“The barrier, I think, to be successful is you need to be great from the minute somebody gets you, and that could be either this magical utility, could be this magical happiness you bring to a user, or it could be an incredibly polished product with a clear pat…”
New breakout consumer mobile companies will emerge soon
“And I think you'll see new companies emerge. Is it going to happen this year? Is it going to happen next year? It's going to happen soon. It hasn't happened since Snapchat, right? They're the Snapchat, Tinder are the last big consumer companies to emerge. Thos…”
Tisch: Price should not dictate individual venture deal decisions
“It is important to be price aware on a portfolio basis. And I don't think on a deal by deal basis, price is a determinant of making a decision.”
Tisch: Founders prefer 'favorite' VCs over transactional 'best' VCs
“I think best is this, what did they do? What, like, name the things that they did for you. Favorite is, I would work with them in a heartbeat because I like them, and they are a friend. They are somebody that we go to when we want to talk to an investor withou…”
Tisch: Early-stage speed advantage has been equalized across VC
“I think speed was an advantage before 2019 for early stage investors that has been sort of equalized by all firms across the entire spectrum.”
Tisch: Multi-stage funds writing seed checks has existed for years
“That's been around for over six, seven years now at a, like, infrastructure level across the entire seed market. That isn't new.”
Tisch: No seed investor is ten times more accurate than peers
“I don't think there's a seed investor that you can find who is figured out how to be right 10 times more often than another seed investor.”
Tisch: The cost of omission at seed is far more expensive than commission
“And the cost of omission at seed is so much more expensive than the cost of commission. And if you say no to the wrong company, you blow your returns. If you say yes to the wrong company, it's a rounding error in your model.”
Tisch: Internal negativity leads to safe play that fails at seed
“And so the more that you allow for negativity to creep into conversations amongst the firm, I think less variance you will have in outcomes and the safer you will play, and I don't think that that model works at Seed.”
Tisch: All founders see seed deals better than VC investors
“I don't think all founders are inherently great pickers. And I don't think all founders are inherently great investors. I do think all founders see better than investors.”
Tisch: Scaled pattern recognition does not work in seed investing
“I truly don't believe in pattern recognition at scale. I think there's nuanced pattern recognition, but I view each one of those companies as an individual relationship, as an individual journey”
Tisch: Over-reserving capital in seed funds is worse than under-reserving
“So when I think about reserves, I would say over-reserving is the bigger mistake than under-reserving.”
Tisch: Investors should give founders capital and stay out of their way
“Our job is to say yes, not to say no. And our job is to communicate that decision to a founder in a transparent and quick way. And our job isn't to waste people's time and our job isn't to mislead people. And I think as I've looked at this business for years, …”
Tisch: Top venture firms retain dominance until destroyed by self-inflicted errors
“I think there's a power law dynamic in venture that is very hard to break. And I think the best firms will continue to be the best firms until they are suddenly not, mostly on internal errors and unforced errors.”
Tisch: Outside VCs rarely wait to see if insider funds follow on
“If you have a multi-stage firm on your cap table that can lead your next round, and a new multi-stage firm shows up to explore your next round, very rarely are they like, will you get the answer from the other firm?”
Tisch: Company success depends entirely on founders and early employees
“The success of a company is dependent upon employees one through 10, 10 through a hundred, and the founders. Like, that is what will make or break a company. The investors, the outsiders, the advisors, the mentors, the coaches, that part of a company building …”