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 16 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
Hsu: Valuation variances up to 50% do not alter early-stage venture returns
“The probability distributions that we're dealing with at the very earliest stage are such that if you're plus or -20, 30, even 40, 50%, it's not going to make or break the result. Either you're going to lose all your money, or you're going to make multiple tim…”
Hsu: Tribe Capital will sacrifice ownership percentage to recruit top growth co-investors
“We don't necessarily think that we're the best growth investors out there. So part of our job is to help our portfolios get the best possible growth investors in their later rounds. So even if that means that we have to give up some ownership for it, because, …”
Hsu: Data science is no silver bullet for venture sourcing
“By and large, that there's no one silver bullet in sourcing, right? Sourcing is one of these things where good old ground game, just raw networking and being out there is a really important piece of it. Building brand is an important piece of it and having an …”
Jonathan Hsu: Data is unbiased; humans introduce bias through inference
“Data is actually totally unbiased. When you infer something from data, then you do something biased, right? That's where you introduce bias.”
Hsu: Slack and Carta didn't build dedicated data teams until Series C
“I just want to think back to Slack and Carter, two companies that we've worked with, you know, in the last couple of years, you know, both of them didn't really start investing in this Full bore, you know, well into about the series C, if I remember correctly.…”
Hsu: Historical Loss Ratios in Venture Capital Are Too High
“We believe that historical loss ratios are too high in venture to some extent.”
Hsu: Data becomes the primary evaluation factor as startups mature beyond Series A
“When you're in the earliest stage, Data is one of many things. You know, the interesting thing about a Series A is that there is no one most important thing. There are many, many important things. And then the further and further you get along, the more and mo…”
Jonathan Hsu: Tech giants dominate by creating superior products, not choking supply
“These companies are dominant, not because they choke off supply, but because they actually provide the best product for customers. That's true of Google. It's true for Facebook.”
Hsu: Nothing in tech is defensible in the long term
“I think in the long term, you're absolutely right. Nothing is defensible in the long term, right? The question is like, are you in an era where you can defend it for a while and give yourself enough breathing room to possibly innovate something else, build som…”
Hsu: A PhD in string theory is the most useless degree
“It's really sort of the most useless topic you can probably get your PhD in.”
Hsu: Seed stage focuses on founders, while late stage focuses on business metrics
“If you think about the seed stage, right, they're really buying the founder when the investor invests. And when you think about the late stage, they're buying mostly a business, right? And then it's definitely some founder, but mostly a business.”
Hsu: Growth is fast, data-informed iteration, not growth hacking
“And when you use the word growth, we don't really mean growth hacking, but it's more like product development through the philosophy of growth, which is really about being fast, being very data, being highly data informed. You know, it's not necessarily data d…”
Hsu: Startups need quantitative data once reaching hundreds of users
“I think anecdote works really well, you know, when you're dealing with the first couple of customers, when you're dealing with only maybe a dozen users, maybe two dozen users. But once things start pushing into dozens of customers, possibly hundreds of users, …”
Hsu: Industry Venture Capital Loss Ratios Sit at 30% to 40%
“So historical loss ratios for venture at large tends to be in this 30 to 40% range”
Hsu: Network effects are the primary source of medium-term defensibility
“You know, when we think about defensibility right now, the most obvious pattern that we've seen in the last 15 years now is really the concept of a network effect, right? The concept of a network effect seems to really be able to put in a chunk of defensibilit…”
Hsu: Accounting was the original form of data science
“I think the biggest misconception here is that the only way to use data is like the way that machine learning or AI works. You know, people overlook things like good old-fashioned accounting. You know, accounting was sort of the very first data science.”