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 177 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Rabois: No $100 billion European tech company has been created since 1990
“There hasn't been a hundred billion dollar European company created since 1990.”
Rabois: LinkedIn developed a mediocre culture because early engineers wanted 35-hour weeks
“Yeah, we didn't have an Olympic work ethic. We had a bunch of French engineers that wanted to work 35 hours a week. At the time, In 2003 to five, when the company was really founded, most people thought the internet was dead, so we didn't, Reid Hoffman, who fo…”
Rabois: Building a tech company in Silicon Valley is an active disadvantage
“And I now believe Silicon Valley is a disadvantage not even neutral, it's an actual disadvantage.”
Rabois: Ramp is the best-run private company on the planet
“I think we just finished a board meeting where it's pretty clear that this is the best run private company on the planet.”
Rabois: Ramp will beat Brex and become 10x more valuable
“Ramp is absolutely going to be the winner. Probably will be two, three, four, five, 10 times more valuable.”
Rabois: Most growth VC funds are dead or dying from chasing momentum
“Chasing momentum, not really understanding fundamental company building, thinking spreadsheets dictate results, like, you know, not understanding the inputs versus the outputs, that these companies are built by people, not by math. At the end of the day, still…”
Rabois: Donald Trump will not win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination
“You know, as you've probably seen on Twitter, I don't even believe he's gonna be the Republican nominee for president.”
Rabois: Most technology startups are better off going public early
“I'm going to get, I believe that most companies, you know, and I have a chapter in Eli Gill's high growth handbook on the topic in a fairly lengthy core answer as well on, I believe most companies are better Off going public early period.”
Rabois: LinkedIn should have been more valuable than Facebook
“LinkedIn by any measure was Yeah, pretty successful. Certainly impact, you know, acquisition, twenty four billion or so. Truthfully, probably hit somewhere between five and 20% of its, you know, potential because it didn't do some of these things. Like, I, in …”
Rabois: First-time founders are on average better than repeat founders
“I think first time founders are actually better on average. Most of the best companies I've invested in are first time founders, not all.”
Rabois: Google's 20% time policy is catastrophic for non-monopoly startups
“If you have a monopoly, for example, Google has this 20%, you know, side project bullshit where they used to. If you have a monopoly business with 99% gross margins or 90% margins, maybe letting your employees waste time once in a while maybe isn't catastrophi…”
Rabois: Founders Fund will not invest in remote-first startups
“We at Founders Fund have pretty much put a light in the sand that we won't invest in remote companies because we've just watched 50 years that there's almost no examples of people building companies that way.”
Rabois will now exclusively invest in in-person startups
“I really want to invest in only companies that are in person. So I think there's a lot of alpha there. I think in-person companies will be the successful startups. I only want to find founders who are working in person and that's my new investment filter.”
Rabois: Only 5 to 10 VCs actually add value at scale
“There's probably only five to 10 VCs that actually add value at scale.”
Rabois: Seed investing skills are incompatible with growth investing
“The skill set required to invest at seed is utterly different, different and probably completely incompatible with the idea of being a good growth or public market investor. The reason why is at the end of the day, Seed companies have no financial metrics.”
Rabois: Success is learned from winning teams, not analyzing failure
“I think you can learn from failure what not to do again, and that's probably worth learning, like repeating the same mistakes makes no sense, but you can't learn how to be successful just by avoiding mistakes. The way you learn how to be successful is just You…”
Rabois: Startups should avoid general managers in favor of functional experts
“Some management lessons about avoiding general managers. We didn't really subscribe to the view that someone was a quote unquote good manager versus someone who was excellent in a particular discipline. And I think there's a lot of truth to that.”
Rabois: Ramp possesses unique AI capabilities in finance that competitors lack
“They understood immediately why RAMP had a lot of the secret sauce to be successful in using AI in finance and that nobody else on the planet does. And so they were really excited to meet with actually Eric and Kareem, almost independent of investing. It was m…”
Rabois: Most of my successful investment decisions took under three minutes
“On, on almost all the really good investments I've touched, I kind of knew in the 1:03 minutes.”
Rabois: Founders Fund partners operated like independent PMs without collective debate
“Founders Fund, especially when I joined, was very much people running their own investment strategies. Think of it as like a PM running their own investment strategies, and there's a way of syncing and getting a certain number of critical mass and votes to sup…”
Rabois: Hid Faire seed board seat from Khosla partners for a year
“Fair came back and said, Max said to me, you know, we chatted, I chatted with my co-founders, and, you know, we'll say yes, but you have to join the board, and having learned and been burned by the Robinhood experience, I never really told my partners that I w…”
Rabois: Khosla, Founders Fund, and Sequoia historically led VC price discipline
“KB and Founders Fund may be the two most disciplined. I think Sequoia has also historically been very price disciplined to their credit. They've also relaxed that a bit but they're, I think, very top down and consciously, but I think historically, those three …”
Rabois: Walking away over seed price signals weak conviction, not discipline
“When at a seed round or a series A round, when you're walking away at price, it is a bit of lack of conviction, and you really should be looking at the mirror and say, why don't I have conviction? Because if you call, if you make the right call at seed, you're…”
Rabois: Invested in Ramp's seed round at over $30M post-money
“It probably, it might have been 40 posts, but it was more than 30.”
Rabois: Venture funds should make ad hoc follow-on decisions, not reserve
“You're probably better off not reserving, and then making ad hoc decisions based upon the quality of that particular opportunity, which includes who's the investor, what's the traction of the company, what do we believe about the founder, what have we learned …”
Rabois: I can win 100% of the seed deals I target
“At seed, I can probably close a hundred percent of the things I want to invest in if I want to.”
Rabois: Khosla historically lacked analytical rigor on late-stage follow-on decisions
“And I don't think back in my day at KB that we had a lot of analytical rigor to those late stage parada decisions. Whereas the founders fund, the growth team is very dialed in to evaluating those opportunities.”
Rabois: COVID-era Zoom speed-dating in venture capital was a disaster
“Speed dating during COVID was a disaster for everybody. It wasn't good for founders to do Zoom-based investing. It wasn't good for investors”
Rabois: Venture capital returns outside the top funds are horrific
“The general returns in venture are not strong at all. The general returns in 7580, and if you normalize against, like, the two hot periods of the last 50 years, like, 1996, 99, and take out, like, I 2019 and 21. The returns are horrific except in maybe the top…”
Rabois: Khosla systematically matches founders to partners, unlike Founders Fund
“Founders fund, we do, we did it too, but more on an ad hoc basis, not systematic, but at KVU is very systematic, like top down.”
Rabois: IPO windows do not close; market success criteria shift
“So I don't believe that IPA windows really close or open. I think just the criteria for success is different in that, you know, what the bar is on, let's say revenue or what the bar is on your unit economics.”
Rabois: I have never passed on a multi-billion dollar founder
“Once you get me in the room with founders, I've made those calls really, really well. Like I was mentioning the other day that I'm not sure I've ever passed on somebody that's turned out to be building a multi-billion dollar company, but I have definitely decl…”
Rabois: Europe is economically stagnant and functions as a museum
“You know, Larry Stummer's quote is still pretty good that Europe's a museum. I think that's probably pretty apt.”
Rabois: Network effects offset the inevitable regression of employee quality at scale
“I think you definitely do past X thousand employees see some regression to the mean, and the art is constructing some accumulating advantages, let's say a network effect before that happens, because the momentum of a network effect can offset some of the slipp…”
Rabois: World-class Series A venture capitalists are only right 40% of the time
“If you're world-class, you're right, 40% of the time. And I define venture as heat stage investing, series A investing. 40%, Hall of Fame, Ted Williams, tech category. So, my definition, 40% right is going to lead to 60% not being right.”
Rabois: Structural inflation will keep interest rates high for a decade
“They're not going much down. I mean, I think we have sustained inflation for structural reasons for a decade. Yeah. Plus or minus, they might be slightly alleviated, but there's a lot of very strong reasons why this zero interest rate or low interest rate envi…”
Rabois: There are currently very few great startups worth investing in
“Well, I'm optimistic. I just don't believe there's a lot of great startups to invest in as a VC. Those are two different things. Like generally you have to be a technology optimist is, you know, Mark adjacent pointed out to be a successful investor. You always…”
Rabois: Spotting Great Investors Is Harder Than Finding Great Founders
“Projecting who's likely to be a great investor is even harder than figuring out who's going to be a world-class founder.”
Rabois: Venture capitalists know within 12 months if an investment is successful
“So, I actually think within 12 months, 90%, 99% of the time, you know whether you've made a good investment, even if the external world doesn't know.”
Rabois: Thiel and I saw market crash coming in summer 2021
“Both Peter and I figured out this market was crashing last summer, and we really tried to stop people from investing at ridiculous prices, but even a founder's fund, we weren't totally successful.”
Rabois: VC paper gains are fake returns unless distributed
“The problem for younger VCs over the last three or four, maybe even five years, is with everything inflated, most of that inflation is paper, not real. So unless you were also savvy enough to sell, those are fake returns. Depends on whether you distribute it.”
Rabois: Series C and late-stage VCs lack asymmetric information
“Typically people who are leading these series C and later rounds have no asymmetry of information. They may have asymmetry of closing. Asymmetry of deal flow, but there's no asymmetry of information.”
Rabois: Compressed benchmark comps break mid-stage venture valuation math
“I think you do need to think through the market comps. So I think one of the mistakes people have been making over the last shoot, three years is let's say if Shopify is trading at one hundred sixty billion, let's say, then the upside case for things that coul…”
Rabois: Founders Fund generated top global LP liquidity from 2020 to 2022
“I think we produced the most liquidity for LPs or one of the two most liquid, most distributions over the last two years of any fund on the planet.”
Rabois: Merely getting money back via liquidation preference is a VC failure
“Like every time you get your money back as a VC, it means you made a mistake in some ways.”
Rabois: Spending time on failing startups will not drive VC returns
“In venture it's really tricky because actually in some ways you should rationally allocate your time to your best performing companies. It turned, if you're not careful though, the worst performing companies will, it will require the most of your time. And whi…”
Rabois: Founders Fund never replaces founders or forces management changes
“Founders fund, there's only one real answer because we don't replace founders. Most VCs would probably try to change the management team, including the CEO. We, you know, ideologically, philosophically, and effectively, legally just don't do that.”
Rabois: Tech valuation multiples have normalized to 30-year historical average
“We analyzed it recently at Founders Fund, and it's definitely not an overreaction, even with the corrections of the last, we'll call it six, seven months, we're only at the thirty-year normal average. Like, if you look at multiples, we're exactly at the averag…”