The Ledger
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Lanman holds his personal wealth entirely in cash and early-stage tech
“So, I'm basically all cash or Hyper speculative early stage technology equities.”
Angel investors never solve startup problems or drive company success
“An angel, at least, has never solved, as far as I know, solved the business's problems or been responsible for a startup success. It's always about the operators figuring it out on their own with some guidance and some coaching and feedback”
Startups should celebrate venture financings as lagging indicators of performance
“And this industry always says we shouldn't celebrate financings, and I say bullshit to that. The reason is that a financing is a lagging indicator of whatever you've done over the last six, 1218 months, and so it's a reflection that you did something good, tha…”
Steve Ballmer asked Lanman to bet his career on Facebook's $10B valuation
“I remember Steve Ballmer asked me if I'd bet my career on Facebook being worth ten billion, which is what my team and I had kind of come up with, and we didn't have much downside, so we were willing to take the bet”
Thesis-driven angel investing fails because modeling world opportunities is too hard
“I used to be a thesis driven angel investor where I would come in and I had a thesis about a given sector and I'd look for a company that fits that thesis and then I'd invest in it. But I very quickly learned that it's too hard to model the world and all of th…”
Lanman invested in Square without understanding the payments industry
“I mean, my first one was square and I had looked into payments a bit for Microsoft because, you know, we had so much cash in the balance sheet that one of the things we could have done was become a bank. And we could have gone after digital currencies and stuf…”
Doppler Labs attracted massive acquirer interest before ultimately shutting down
“Doppler labs, not working out a company, which we raised a lot of money. We developed really incredible IP and a product we were super proud of. You know, we thought that that thing was going to be one of the biggest companies in tech. And we had acquirer inte…”
QSBS tax exemptions drive supernormal IRRs unique to early-stage tech
“Beating taxes can lead to supernormal ROI or IRRs, and so that just feels like an advantage that I can get that makes it hard for me to win in other asset classes.”
Gates and Ballmer initially saw Linux as a bigger threat than Google
“We had done the early work that got Gates and Bomber focused on Google as a threat to the business, and at the time, back then, they were more focused on the enterprise side and on the threat that Linux kind of represented, and so we had gotten the company pre…”
Lanman invested in Pinterest after seeing his wife use it for weddings
“Pinterest is another example where I had never been using catalogs and stuff. I'd collected butterflies as a kid and done some of these things that I think work well in terms of this digital form of Pinterest, but really it was only until I went to my wife and…”