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 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Galston predicts in 2015 that Bitcoin will succeed long-term
“I love Bitcoin. I've spent a lot of time looking into it. You know, I'll take Ben Horowitz's side of the Felix Salmon bet. I think it'll fly long term.”
Galston: One-third of the Fortune 500 is headquartered in the Midwest
“A third of the entire Fortune 500 is right here in the Midwest.”
Galston: Chicago is Uber and Instacart's second or third largest market
“If you ask Uber or Instacart, what, you know, their second or third most important market is, it's almost inevitably Chicago.”
Chicago Ventures avoids leading SF and LA rounds without local proximity
“For kind of our investments in SF for LA, we're traditionally not the lead investor because we do like to lead that, leave that to someone who is a little bit closer, can be a little bit more hands-on.”
Galston: B2B marketplaces offer massive transaction frequency from enterprise client hosting
“If you think about, like, Deloitte or BCG or Google, like, they're throwing, you know, they're hosting clients every single night, 365 days of the year, right? So there's actually a huge amount of frequency potential even in B to B marketplaces”
Galston: Marketplace supply becomes sticky when workers double their traditional earnings
“And if they're making double, then that's great news, and that starts to really excite me, because then I just know they're going to be sticky.”
Galston rates Etsy stock between a sell and hold at $1.6B
“So I actually just looked it up. It's basically at 1.6 billion, which is where it kind of went out. I'd say somewhere between a sell and a hold.”
Galston: Poker startup CardRunners grew to 15,000 customers in 18 months
“When I joined him, I think I was, like, the second employee. He had maybe 500 customers and, like, 500,000 dollars a year in revenue. Like a very small startup. And 18 months later, we had 15,000 paying customers.”
Galston funded his first angel investments using professional poker earnings
“I'd taken a lot of the money that I had from the poker world, and a lot of my friends, as they kind of churned out from the world of professional poker, they would start up companies, and I invested in some of them.”
Chicago Ventures' $40M first fund made 39 investments averaging $500K
“The first fund was forty million dollars. We made 39 investments out of that fund. Average ticket size, like first check-in, around 500,000 dollars, maybe slightly under that.”
Galston: Bill Gurley's 10 marketplace drivers essay is the absolute Bible
“The Bible here which I'm sure you've read the Bible here is, is Bill Gurley's kind of 10 marketplace drivers blog posts that he wrote in like, it's the absolute Bible. And if you want to even, you know, have like a working knowledge of digital marketplace busi…”
Galston broke into venture capital without a network or sending resumes
“I never sent a resume to a single VC and I had no network.”
Galston cold-emailed VCs a mapped relationship graph of his gaming network
“What I did is I created like this interest or this relationship graph where I put myself in the middle and I put all the different players in the gaming world around me and showed who I knew, like what executive level, how like the relationships developed. And…”
Chicago Ventures invested in Attendant, a death and funeral tech startup
“And the other is a company called attendant. So I guess the latter was probably more recent. So attendant is a company that's building a suite of tools for the death and funeral industry. So we spoke about differentiation earlier. So I invested in that one bec…”