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
Soltero: Venture capital is an incestuous market where players collude on deals
“Venture capital is not a true market in the sense that it's a very limited number of players often colluding with and really incestuously sort of managing deal flow back and forth, and it works.”
Soltero: Sequoia wrongly called Hyperic a product in search of a market
“Maybe that comment from Sequoia had really left a mark, this idea that, that they thought that Hyperic was a product in search for a market, which of course hundreds of millions of dollars of years later, or hundreds of millions of dollars later, I'm happy to …”
Soltero: Open-source software cannot be sold via traditional top-down enterprise models
“They were doing a sort of typical top-down sales approach and the type of go to market dynamics usually reserved for the Siebels and you know, oracles of the world, and you couldn't do that then, you can't do it now.”
Soltero: Most current founders would fail in a sudden macro crash
“I'm certain that most people you know, that are building companies nowadays would have a very hard time in such a sudden and drastic adjustment to the way people look at cash and capital and barn rates and whatnot.”
Soltero: Painkiller products carry hidden churn risk when customer pain subsides
“Painkiller products fall under a class of product that is the name implies they take away pain. And the challenge with those products is yes, they're attractive and everybody needs them. However, you're always subject to the let's say the person metaphorically…”
Soltero: Ability to raise capital is a shallow founder metric
“That seems to be a really sort of shallow skill to cite. It's important, but it's not what makes a great entrepreneur, frankly.”
Soltero: Hyperic bootstrapped two years before Accel/Benchmark funding and $420M exit
“We ended up bootstrapping Hyperic actually for two years before we raised money ultimately from Excel and Benchmark who were great investors. And helped us take this thing to you know, ultimately a four hundred and twenty million dollar acquisition by VMware, …”
Soltero: Founders in 2015 haven't internalized lessons from 2008 crisis
“I, we thrived through the 2008 financial crisis. That was a really challenging time for me, and something that I think has sadly not been internalized enough, frankly, by most entrepreneurs today.”
Soltero acquired software costing $15 million to build for just $1
“All we had was this product that had cost about fifteen million dollars to build, and we had been lucky enough to buy it for a dollar”
Soltero: 'Viagra products' enable users to do what seemed impossible
“Viagra products are the simplest products. They help you do things you previously thought were not possible.”
Soltero: Microsoft will modernize email into a beloved medium within five years
“Over the next five years, we're here to make email awesome, and really take this incredibly powerful and pervasive medium that, that we often sort of complain about and hate and really turn it into something that people genuinely love and feel like it has adap…”
Hyperic reached nearly $10 million in revenue before 2009 exit
“We were at the time when we sold it in 2009, close to ten million in revenue thousands of customers, deeply, deeply adopted open source product and a pioneer in some new business model elements”
Soltero: Hyperic bootstrapped to over $1.5M in bookings before VC funding
“When we first started working with venture investors we had already bootstrapped the company for two years. We had taken it from a zero dollars to north of like 1.5 million in bookings strategic OEM relationships, all the, you know, two dozen customers, all of…”
Soltero: Hyperic was infinitely harder to build than Accompli
“I don't mean to suggest that, that one was actually, if anything, Hyperic was infinitely harder for many, many reasons.”
Accompli had millions in enterprise pipeline before Microsoft acquisition
“At the time, We were very, very, very fortunate to already have, like, multiple millions of dollars of sales pipeline, and customers actually two in Europe, one in the UK, and two in the US, who were working with us very closely to really sign up and craft wha…”