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 44 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 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
Sim: 2024 is the year zero-interest-rate startups face severe market fallout
“This is the year that the shit's hitting the fan because, you know, you can only extend runway so much and it doesn't mean much if you're not growing.”
Sim: 25% of tech company revenue previously came from selling to startups
“Probably 25% of all this revenue from all these tech companies was selling to other startups. That shit vaporized, dude.”
Sim: The 2024 venture capital vintage will produce incredible returns in five years
“But the firms that are making capital calls in 20, 24, putting dollars to work. I think this is going to be an amazing vintage because people are valuation adjusted. I think founders have the religion of the ones starting from now. And I think this is going to…”
Sim: Great opportunities persist for investing in Israeli security and infrastructure startups
“I think that as people back away from Israel, cause they fearful of kind of what's happening there, I'm still seeing amazing teams there. And I think there'll be great opportunities to keep putting dollars to work in security and infrastructure deals in Israel…”
Ed Sim: Billion-dollar multi-stage VC funds stopped growth investing in 2022
“The spigot dried out last year, all the big multi-stage firms with a billion dollar plus funds stopped investing in growth.”
Sim: Boldstart will never fund AI startups spending mostly on Nvidia
“You will never find both start, for example, finding companies where, you know, they're raising 20 or thirty million dollars, and two thirds of that money goes to NVIDIA.”
Ed Sim: Boldstart will not fund AI seed rounds at $100M post-money
“Chasing anything with a dot AI in their domain or an AI thing, I think is insane. However, I do think there's some opportunities there, but I'm not going to be funding these things at a hundred posts.”
Ed Sim: AI hype mirrors dot-com bubble and $100M seed portfolios will fail
“I just think that this is just like I saw in the internet bubble. Everything had a .com on it back in it, because I saw that. I lived through that shit. And we're gonna see the same thing. There are gonna be some massive companies built, no doubt, but it's not…”
Ed Sim: Growth funds returning 1x on peak deals will outperform peers
“So I guess what I'm trying to say is I think those growth kind of funds that put the money at the peak I think the ones that deliver one X or slightly above will probably do very well. We'll be above, you know, cause there'll be a lot of ones that are underwat…”
Ed Sim: Venture money chasing LLMs will be vaporized
“Let's just say the money chasing all these LLMs, there'll be a lot of money vaporized for sure.”
Ed Sim: High-growth tech companies will never see 35x-40x multiples again
“So do I think we're going to move back to one of 35 to 40 for companies greater, going greater than 40%? Never again.”
Sim: The era of late-stage tech startups growing 100% YoY is over
“The years of companies at the later stages going 100% year over year are over.”
Sim: Seed valuations were the only startup stage to increase since 2021
“There's data from Carta that shows you that if you look at priced rounds from Q one of 20, 21 compared to, let's say Q four of last year, the only round that increased in valuation Was the seed round”
Sim: Loom sold for under $1B after a $1.5B peak 2021 valuation
“At the end of last year, I'm not in the room with Loom, but that last round valuation was at 1.5 billion dollars, right? That was led in 20, 21, and they sold for nine 99 or something, nine 50, right?”
Sim: Palo Alto Networks paid $200M to $400M for startups with $2M ARR
“Look at all the stuff that Palo Alto bought. A lot of those companies had two to three million dollars of AR getting sold for two, three, four hundred million dollars, right?”
Sim: Docker is positioned to go public in the next three years
“Docker is, is, is from what you see out there is a company that can go public the next two years, two to three years.”
Sim: Apple edge AI developments will not generate meaningful revenue in 2024
“My short would probably be, I mean, just what everyone's looking at now is just Apple right now. I think Apple, You know, you've got an iPhone growth issue over there at Apple, but the one thing that gets me excited about Apple is the idea of machine learning …”
Sim: Boldstart's fastest-growing 2021 vintage startups are Israeli infrastructure companies
“We have over a dozen Israeli founding teams right now, and two of my fastest growing companies in fund five vintage 20, 21, which had, you know, funded inception to now from zero to about two million of ARR were both Israeli infrastructure companies.”
Ed Sim: Enterprise IT spending is re-accelerating
“Enterprise IT spending is re-fucking accelerating right now.”
Ed Sim: Tech M&A volume will increase as investors seek liquidity
“I think we're going to see a lot more M and A's kind of coming ahead right now.”
Sim: Snyk took nearly three years to reach $1M in ARR
“It took him two and a half years to kind of get out there and get his first, you know, two and a half to three to get his first million of ARR.”
Ed Sim: Tech IPO window won't reopen until Fed cuts interest rates
“I think it's very simple. Mr. Jerome Powell signaling to the world that interest rates are under control now. And the air has been taken out of the balloon and the interest rates have to go down.”
New York seed valuations are consistently lower than Silicon Valley
“I think that the New York valuations tend to be a little lower than the Valley.”
AI will infiltrate every enterprise software category within five years
“I think I'm seeing a lot of kind of AI, not AI platforms, but AI being infiltrated across every segment of enterprise software. And I'm also seeing a lot of stuff where messaging is going from consumers to the enterprise as well. Messaging meaning you know, al…”
Sim: Third-time founders raise $10M at inception versus $1M for first-timers
“A third time founder is going to raise ten million dollars out of the gate and they may very well deserve it. Whereas a first time founder may get one.”
Sim: SecurityScorecard surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue in 2023
“Security scorecard. The market's not big enough. It's not, this is not that they did over a hundred million of error last year.”
Sim: Cybersecurity will be exempt from the tech antitrust M&A freeze
“Very few, huge M and A's because of antitrust, maybe save cybersecurity, which has national security interests and those things tend to go a little bit faster.”
Sim: Unicorns will acquire private startups to build platforms before IPO
“You're going to see more private to private as well. And the reason why that makes sense for a private company is because if you're a one product company, going back to the platform play, you're going to go, you're going to have to buy another product or two a…”
Sim: Most 2024 tech IPOs will be down rounds from the ZIRP era
“Look, the margin majority of companies that go do go public this year will be down rounds from the prior rounds, especially if they're raised towards the Zerp era.”
Sim: Software net dollar retention will normalize to 110% to 115%
“From there, you know, this new cohort of customers, I think that retention is going to get back to a place where it's more like one, 10. So that can be one, 31, 40, but maybe healthy numbers like one, 10, one, 15.”
Sim: Microsoft's AI leadership will drive cloud market share and H2 revenue
“Because of their lead on everything AI that they're taking market share on the cloud side. So I think that that's going to drive a lot of their business. And I'm hoping that by the back half of the year, you know, you start seeing some of the revenue numbers r…”
Sim prefers structuring Boldstart inception rounds at $3M to $4M
“I would prefer Your classic structure of three to four million dollars, to be honest with you.”
Sim: Boldstart funded Snyk through three pre-Series A capital rounds
“You know, guy from sneak, Harry, do you know how many rounds he raised before? He raised his A three rounds of capital before his A. Guess who gave him all three rounds?”
Ed Sim: Only 25% of cloud migration is complete
“We're still only 25% of the way of migration from on-prem to Cloud right now”
Ed Sim: Top Infrastructure Startups Still Raising Growth Rounds at $250M-$400M Valuations
“There's still pockets Of opportunity where people are going from one to three to four million in the infrastructure space that I see to 10 to 12 kind of on the forecast and they're still raising at two 50 to 400 now.”
Pre-cloud enterprise startups required $4M to $5M Series A rounds
“A traditional way of building an enterprise startup would usually require at least four or five million dollars in an A round up, up until the point that, The newer entrepreneurs took advantage of the cloud and open source.”
Legacy enterprise IT will be replaced by micro-enterprise architectures
“I think the whole monolithic IT infrastructure is getting turned upside down. I like to think of the world as becoming You know, I almost call it the micro enterprise, right? Instead of kind of buying these monolithic, five million dollar, ten million dollar s…”
Sim: Meta's acquisition of Kustomer took 16 months due to antitrust regulations
“I sat through the customer thing. It took us 16 months from signing to sell to Meta because of antitrust regulations, right?”
Sim: Median pre-seed company age is 1.2 years, seed is 2.7
“The median age of a company that raises a pre-seed round is 1.2 years of age now. And the median age of a company that raises a seed round is 2.7.”
Ed Sim: Global quarterly VC funding dropped from $200B to $73B
“If you look at the peak, I think the peak was Q four, 20, 21, that about two hundred billion dollars was invested. Most recently it was seventy three billion in the last quarter.”
Ed Sim: JPMorgan Chase spends $1 billion annually on cybersecurity
“And JP Morgan, for example, spent a billion dollars a year in cybersecurity.”
Sim: 80% of Boldstart portfolio will offer AI within 12 months
“Within the next 12 months, okay, 80% of the portfolio will have an AI offering.”
LivePerson spent $20M of its $30M raised building proprietary infrastructure
“A company like LivePerson, we probably raised, you know, over thirty million dollars in about 12 months. And 20 of that went to build our infrastructure because we wanted to build for success, and you needed to build a platform that could scale.”