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.
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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: 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: 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 …”
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: 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: 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: 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”
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.”
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.”
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.”