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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Paley notes very few former-founder VCs achieved $250M exits themselves
“Very few of the VCs who were once entrepreneurs have had two hundred and fifty million dollar exits.”
Paley: Top Company Never Matched Its Founding Year's Hottest Theme
“Never, not the last 20 years, has the most valuable company born in any single year, right, valuable as of now, been this in the theme that was hot in that year. It has not happened.”
Paley: Most VCs Earn Money From Management Fees, Not Carry
“It's why most VCs get paid on management fees. They don't get paid on, on, on carried interest, because TVPI, TVPI in that case, doesn't actually translate to DPI.”
Eric Paley: Overvalued unicorns face one of three realistic fates
“One of three things are going to happen to those companies, right? They're either going to take the extraordinary amount of cash they got, cut their burn rates down and figure out how to build real companies. And by the way, many of those will still never rais…”
Paley: 2021 Was an Incredible Time to Sell Venture Investments
“2021 was an incredible time to be a seller, and anyone who didn't see that was completely playing momentum.”
Paley: TVPI vs DPI disconnect will be among largest in VC history
“I would bet the last few years will be one of the biggest disconnects between TVPI and DPI for venture funds in venture history.”
Paley's study of 71 IPOs shows capital raised doesn't drive startup success
“We looked at 71 IPOs over the last five years, the 71 tech IPOs over the last five years. To study whether venture capital in the outlier cases could be argued to have really driven greater success. And it turned out there was effectively no correlation betwee…”
Paley argues lightly capitalized startups outperform heavily funded competitors over time
“Over time, the lightly capitalized companies, the efficient entrepreneurs outperform.”
Paley predicts many of 2016's unicorns will never justify $1B valuations
“There's over 200 Companies that are considered these unicorns, many of them will probably never live up to their billion dollar valuations, but they've redefined for venture capitalists what their expectations are.”
Paley: The most valuable company founded in 2023 could be direct-to-consumer
“The most valuable company born in 2023 could very well be in direct to consumer Commerce, because that's not where anyone wants to play right now.”
Paley: Many unicorn startups will lose their unicorn valuations
“So I think this, some of this stuff is starting to shift a little bit, largely because so many of these unicorns are going to be, you know, un, unhorned, or whatever the right term is, unwinged, unhorned.”
Paley: Founder Collective's 2010 investment SeatGeek will deliver an amazing liquidity event
“Like, SeatGeek was a 2010 investment. I think it's a great company. Dave led that for us. I think it's gonna ultimately have an amazing liquidity event”
David Frankel and Eric Paley's angel portfolio quadrupled top-quartile VC returns
“We saw that that body of that portfolio, that body of work was performing way better. I mean, four times as well as these top quartile PCs”
Eric Paley says most peer seed funds allocate capital like Series B
“A lot of seed funds today, a lot of our peer group, a lot of whom I respect very much they really look like series B funds in terms of where their average dollar goes in. They may be starting very early, but their average dollar is weighted towards series B.”
Eric Paley claims Founder Collective is among the top funds globally
“I think our fund is performing you know, people like to say top quartile, top decibel I think we're, I mean, I think our fund's truly one of the very, you know, Count on your hands the number of funds performing as well right now. So I don't know if we're goin…”
Paley: The Trade Desk Burned Only $7 Million Before Its IPO
“The company burned seven million dollars before going public.”
Eric Paley calls dentistry the world's largest remaining cottage industry
“What later we learned or came to believe was the largest remaining cottage industry in the world, where every unit of production was a completely unique unit of production.”
Kelsey Wirth built Invisalign into a billion-dollar company in five years
“I was very lucky to have Kelsey Wirth on my board who was the founder of Invisalign, and we had gone after this industry that I never imagined we'd go after that was certainly very quirky to the venture community, and Kelsey had built a billion dollar company …”