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 12 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
The VC adage that you never regret paying high prices is bullshit
“Some VCs say that you never regret paying a high price for getting into a good company, but I think that that is a bullshit. I think that you never regret paying a high price for an extraordinary company like Facebook, but there's only really one like that eve…”
SaaS startups with $10k to $100k annual contract values usually fail
“When you get caught in the middle, Somewhere between the 10 and a hundred K, you almost always end up on this slippery slope where your gross margins suck and you're upside down on your customer acquisition costs and the ultimate SAS model just doesn't work. A…”
Esports will draw a larger global audience than the NFL by 2022
“I do. Based on the underlying data today and how accessible it is to people, I do believe it will be larger, certainly, than the NFL.”
A robust IPO market inflates VC valuations and depresses overall returns
“There's just a good chance that With a robust public market, you'll see more dollars coming in to venture, and more dollars coming in means higher valuations at every round, and it just overall can drive returns down.”
IPOs for tech companies with 20% growth are a healthy market sign
“There are really good companies that grow at twenty-ish percent a year, and the fact that they are able to get public actually doesn't alarm me. I actually view it as a really healthy sign that good companies that are growing at reasonable rates, but not some …”
Early-stage VCs reacting to current public IPO markets is stupid
“What's going on in the public markets today has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what a liquidity market's going to look like when those companies are ready to either go public or be acquired. So I think it's really stupid, but it's quite commonplace”
Social networking innovation is not dead post-Snapchat IPO
“So I don't think social is dead. I think we'll continue to see really powerful applications of social, and we're absolutely continuing to look for them.”
VR is a next-generation platform that will blow everyone's mind
“It is an earth-shattering experience, and we're in the early innings of it. It is truly Extraordinary, life-changing, and it's a next-generation platform. Things that are going to, the amazing things that entrepreneurs are going to do in VR are going to blow e…”
Only 15 percent of software is delivered as SaaS
“Even today, only fifteen-ish percent of total software is delivered as SaaS, so we're still early in that transition”
Late-stage $50M to $200M mega-rounds dried up in 2015 and 2016
“The very late stage private market valuations and private rounds have largely gone away. So in 2013, 14, even early 15, there were very large rounds done fifty hundred, two hundred million dollars in late stage private companies. And a lot of those investors d…”
Strong institutional demand will keep the tech IPO market open long-term
“There's certainly demand, and we hear from the bankers and from institutional investors that there's tremendous pent-up demand right now, so I see no reason that the market's not going to stay open for quite a while and that the demand is going to be there.”
Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo delivered the most impressive Series A pitch
“I have to say the Series A pitch that Teen Sue, the CEO of Zawara, did. He is an amazing storyteller, and at the time, he painted a vision for the subscription economy and how Zawara was going to be the leader in that category, and he has executed against it b…”