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 33 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
Levine: Competition Is the Most Destructive Force in Capitalism
“Competition is tough. It motivates all of us, but it's the most destructive force in capitalism, no doubt about it.”
Levine: Claims that operational VCs add superior value are bogus
“So I think this whole idea of VC being better or adding a lot of value to their operational experience, I think it's bogus. And I think it's sort of a, it's a new idea that's been perpetrated by folks who are competing as VCs who happen to have a lot of operat…”
Levine: Bessemer Would Have Missed Pinterest Without Partner Sarah Tavel
“Had we not had, at least on a gender basis, A diverse duo of people looking at the investment. I think we would have missed it, too.”
Levine: Media Startups Need 5M-10M Users Before Earning Ad Revenue
“And critical mass in the U.S. Is probably around between five and ten million users. You need to get there before you can get the first dollar of advertising revenue.”
Levine: Publicizing Early VC Funding Rounds Hurts Long-Term Startup Prospects
“A lot of people, particularly around their early financings, like to go tell the world about it. It's validation. If nothing else, it's nice to have your mom read about you in TechCrunch. But the truth is, that does almost no value. It adds no value to your co…”
Levine: Put operational experts in independent board seats, not VC seats
“If you're a founder, you want to have phenomenal operational experience on your board, but you don't want to have it in the seat that's controlled by a VC because now you've made a contractual commitment to have someone on your board who for most of his or her…”
Levine: Great consumer tech startups will drop to one every three years
“And so my prediction is that the quantity of great new consumer applications, consumer tech companies that will become household names, went from a couple a year to one every three years, which is depressing because it's a really fun place to invest.”
Levine: High startup entry valuations will drag down overall VC returns
“And so if you're making much lower returns on your rate investments, you won't be able to afford to cover the bad investments. And basically that just means the returns of the industry are going to get dragged down.”
Levine: Publicly announcing startup funding rounds is counterproductive for VCs
“Announcing investments was a bad strategy. Because the only people who read about new VC investments are other VCs, And entrepreneurs and other VCs, if they see you've invested in a company, they either, if they think it was a good investment, will start doggi…”
Levine: Pinterest's $1M Seed Stock Buyback Was Its Best Capital Use
“The company actually bought back some of the stock from those very early investors. It wasn't a large amount, but it might've been another million dollars. And so it was probably the best use of capital the company ever could have come up with, given what that…”
Levine: Bessemer's Pinterest Memo Assigned 25-30% Chance of Total Failure
“And the chance of it being a big zero for a company at that stage is at least 25 or 30%, which means that the chance of it working is also not going to be huge.”
Levine: Pinterest Generated $40M Revenue in Its First Year of Monetization
“I think in the first year they tried to monetize, I think they made forty million dollars of revenue. That was extraordinary. I'd never seen anything like that before, to go from zero to forty million of revenue. Now, there are many other companies that have d…”
Levine: Experienced VCs must exercise caution; words carry unearned weight
“Once you've been part of a few successful companies, your opinions tend to carry a little bit more weight, and so in some sense, you have to be more careful once you've been doing it for 10 or 15 years, because you might say something in passing based on sort …”
Levine: Board members should counterbalance founders' emotional highs and lows
“For me, though, I think my own style has always been to sort of try to identify whether an entrepreneur with whom I'm working is currently on a high or a low, and I kind of try to take more or less the opposite, and so when things are going unbelievably well, …”
Levine: Consumer distribution is controlled entirely by Facebook, Apple, and Google
“And today, virtually all consumer distribution is controlled by only three companies, Facebook, Apple, and Google.”
Levine: Evaluating consumer apps via DAU/MAU ratios is a backward-looking strategy
“Everyone's looking for the next consumer application that has a high DAU over MAU ratio, which I think is sort of, is very much a rearview mirror way of looking at things.”
Levine: User-Generated Content Creates Highly Profitable Media Businesses
“If you build a media business with all the content generated by users or consumers, you can end up with a really powerful company because media businesses in general are pretty profitable because they make content once and then they sell it over and over again…”
Levine: Bessemer Invested $9M in Pinterest's Series A at $40M Pre-Money
“The first step was a simple ten million dollar investment. It was a forty million dollar pre-money valuation, fifty million dollar post-money valuation. I think Bessemer was eight and a half or nine million of the 10 existing investors put up the balance.”
Levine: E-Commerce Transactions Are Not Required for Pinterest to Monetize
“I thought that would be necessary to monetize. It turns out that it's not. I think it's necessary, important for consumers to have a great experience, but has been less critical to monetization.”
Levine: Pinterest Had No Technical Founder When Bessemer Invested
“Young internet founding teams included a highly technical founder, and Pinterest had no technical founder.”
Levine: Pinterest Grew 50% to 70% Monthly After Bessemer's Investment
“I think in that first year or so after we invested, the business was growing like 50 or 70% in a month.”
Levine: Compounding 5-6% Monthly Growth Over 10 Years Creates Massive Startups
“It's not about growing really fast, really quickly. It's about building an engine that will compound over time and sustain. And so if you can grow at five or six percent a month, but for 10 years, you're going to be massive.”
Levine: 40% of Early Pinterest Sign-Ups Stayed Active Month Over Month
“And I think in the early years of Pinterest, seeing that something like 40% of the users who had ever signed up were using it month on month on month, relative to most consumer services, was unbelievably impressive.”
Levine: Operators try to overcome obstacles; great investors pivot away
“When an operator approaches a mountain in his path, his immediate thought is like, how do I scale it or tunnel through it or walk around it? But the presence of the mountain is an immediate challenge that an operator's mind starts spinning on how to solve that…”
Levine requires immediate bad news alerts in exchange for unvarnished feedback
“I, when I invest in companies or as I'm about to invest in companies, I have sort of two golden rules that I will often discuss with an entrepreneur before we consummate a, an investment. The first one is I always say, You have one obligation to me if you take…”
Levine: Direct-monetization consumer businesses will outperform ad-supported apps
“When you can get a consumer to open up his wallet, the consumer's worth so much more to you that you can afford to spend money on marketing. That's the category of business that's more likely to be interesting from a consumer standpoint. Tech perspective over …”
Levine: Bessemer's LinkedIn investment generated a 100x return despite others passing
“Invested in LinkedIn, the two existing VCs thought the price we were paying was so crazy that they invested nothing in the round. I think that round ended up at something like a hundred X return.”
Levine: Narrow vertical B2B software is wildly underhyped
“I think there's still a lot of grubby business software, particularly software focused on really narrow verticals. That's wildly underhyped, but you can build unbelievably successful companies with 80% market share if you focus on the right verticals.”
Levine: Junior VCs must pursue non-consensus deals to avoid veteran competition
“As a junior VC, it's virtually impossible to be successful fishing in a pond that lots of experienced VCs are fishing in, because you've got no way to win those opportunities. But if you can come up with your own ideas that turn out to be right, that other peo…”
Levine: Bessemer Passed on Minted Series A Due to Revenue Seasonality
“We decided we were not going to pursue an investment in Minted.”
Levine: ePinions Was a Genius Concept Launched 15 Years Too Early
“And I actually think ePinions was a genius idea, but it might have been 15 years too early for the internet to be ready for it.”
Levine: Pinterest's User Base Was 90% Female at 2011 Series A
“The product was used at that time, probably by women in 90% of all cases. The male user base was tiny.”
Levine: Bessemer Kept Its 2011 Pinterest Investment Secret for Nine Months
“Our initial investment in Pinterest was maybe in March or April of 2011. You can't find anything on the internet about our involvement with the company for at least six or nine months. In fact, it was the subsequent financing That somehow got leaked to the pre…”