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 60 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
Hartz: Nvidia's valuation is a precursor to the bubble of all bubbles
“NVIDIA becoming the most valuable company on the planet is just the precursor towards the bubble of all bubbles.”
Hartz: Current SPAC fee structures are egregious and require market-wide reform
“At the current time, SPAC fees are egregious. I'll just say that outright, and they need to be reformed.”
Pierre Lamond made Kevin Hartz force-rank direct reports and fire the lowest
“In the very first meeting, I'll always remember, he said, Kevin, I want you to go up to the whiteboard, and I want you to write your direct reports down, but I want you to force rank them, you know, one to seven, or how many it was, and so I go and I write the…”
Hartz: Seed startups spend $10M to hit the same milestones as $1M
“I feel there's like Boyle's Law as applied to capital. So if you raise a million dollar round for your seed company, you'll spend it and build a company with that million. But if you raise five million or ten million, you'll spend it just the same and get to t…”
Hartz favors Sequoia's hands-on VC model over Founders Fund's hands-off approach
“Given those two extremes, I actually lean more towards, ah, the role of Sequoia's side, because I've just seen that kind of help and oversight and having that kind of star chamber of great talent cut so many corners of mistakes that would be made.”
Hartz: Paul Graham rejected his exploding term sheet for Airbnb's seed round
“Little known secret is Keith, Javed and I gave an exploding term sheet to Airbnb, and Paul Graham said no bueno, and teed off on us.”
Founders Fund sold Spotify at $8B to double down on Airbnb
“It was Peter and Brian Zingerman and Napoleon that took what did they take? I think they sold Spotify at the eight billion dollar price, pissed off, what's his name? Daniel. Daniel Ek, and rolled it all into Airbnb at the two and a half billion.”
Hartz: SPACs will be an enduring listing vehicle, not a passing trend
“We see this SPAC phenomenon, not as a flash in the pan, not as a quick up and down. That'll be a passing fancy of the 20 twenties, but really an enduring vehicle to bring our innovation companies to market.”
Hartz: Speculative SPAC deals will collapse like the dot-com bubble
“What we do see, and what we do predict, unfortunately, is something akin to perhaps the dot-com bubble in 99 and 2000, where you saw a lot of bright, shiny objects, and big flash in the pan market seeming successes, and then you'll see a lot of these coming do…”
Hartz commits to holding his venture portfolio investments for life
“I'm not in the practice of selling, I'm in the practice of finding and building companies and sitting on these things for life.”
Hartz: Most successful founders felt an inevitability of success early on
“Most people I talk to that are founders that have gone on always knew from the very beginning.”
Kevin Hartz prefers investing in first-time founders over serial entrepreneurs
“Well, I should be, you know, statistically focused on Serial, and we back a lot of Serial founders, you know, like Chad Hurley, and you know, we've, however, I just have a soft spot for first, first time founders.”
Sequoia outbid Hartz on Airbnb's seed round, but founders included him anyway
“I was angel investing with Keith Rubois and Javid Karim, and Javid is the co-founder of YouTube. And, you know, we just fell in love with those guys and made them an offer. And Sequoia out, out did us and got the lead, but they cut us in nicely because, you kn…”
Hartz: Jason Calacanis screamed at him over ticketing TechCrunch events
“He used to call me up at Eventbrite and scream at me, like, for, you know, he had a big rivalry with TechCrunch, And when we would ticket things for TechCrunch, he would get really angry and like, just call me up and scream at me for doing that.”
Hartz: Brute TAM analysis is overdone; great teams expand small markets
“Brute TAM analysis is maybe overdone. I'd focus more on the teams. You know, great teams always find their way to kind of slingshot from a market, from the small market to the big market, or it takes the small market to become a big, to get into a big market.”
Hartz: Venture capital has entered an era of less cooperation between funds
“It does feel like a period of less cooperation and there needs to be a very specific reason why funds would work together.”
Hartz: Prior Operator Experience Is No Longer Required for Success in VC
“There used to be a vibe in the valley that said, oh, you've got to be an operator to be an investor, a venture investor. You've had to walk in the shoes, and that's changed”
Hartz: Investors Should Heavily Canvas Sectors Consensus Considers 'Dead'
“Whenever somebody tells you that an area is dead, make sure you, Like, heavily, like, canvas that area and go after it hard, because there's great stuff happening there.”
Hartz: Michael Moritz faked a phone call to avoid founders
“I always remember seeing Michael Moritz speak, give a talk about Google in the early 2000, and there were all these founders there, and he puts his phone up to his face and pretends to talk, and then, like, walks out of the building, you know, and so nobody wo…”
Hartz: Exploding term sheet deadlines are artificial because VCs still want in
“Well, look, the issue is, is that you put a term sheet out in, in it, like, explodes on Friday at five PM, but does that mean? No, but does that mean that you, at five 15, you no longer want to invest? No, like the investor will always be there.”
Hartz argues OpenSea retains significant long-term value despite the NFT crash
“You know, I think the jury's still out. There's still a lot of value there in OpenSea.”
Hartz regrets turning down Peter Thiel's invitation to join Palantir at inception
“The day that acquisition of PayPal by eBay was announced Peter had resigned, and I met him up at the Sundeck restaurant in up on Sand Hill Road, and he said, you know, Kevin, I'm working on this business, and, you know, we're taking kind of the fraud algorithm…”
Hartz: VCs should offer calm support in crises, tough love during success
“Tough love is needed when it's doing extraordinarily well. Like, when things are going terribly wrong, And there are the, you know, butterflies, and stomach, you know, is, like, seized up, and teammates are quitting, and somebody's hacked the site, or whatever…”
Hartz: Staying private too long atrophies a startup's operational performance
“The muscles of really performing well can be atrophied in the darkness of the private markets.”
Hartz: SPACs free founders from relying on private preemptive bidders
“They're saying that it's time to get out in the public market sooner and have a much broader audience and a much broader reception to picking and choosing investors. So you don't see these decisions made in the darkness of a one or two preemptive Bidders on a …”
Hartz: The most enduring tech companies are always effectively overvalued
“The best companies, the most enduring companies are always effectively overvalued.”
Hartz: Eventbrite took Sequoia's Series A despite the lowest valuation
“In the case of Eventbrite, our Series A was actually the lowest price term sheet, but having that trust and knowing his brainpower and prowess in building companies, it became a very easy choice for us”
Kevin Hartz: Sector chasing is flawed; great founders create new segments
“I wouldn't say that I'm a segment investor. I don't kind of believe in chasing different sectors, but instead look for these phenomenal people that really create new segments.”
Hartz: Silicon Valley VC is overly segmented into niche, afterthought verticals
“And I think what's happened today is there's been this overly segmented kind of focused investing in, in areas that in many ways are just afterthoughts so there's funds that are just focused on AI or funds that are Just focus in other particular verticals, and…”
Hartz: The biotech sector remains significantly underinvested
“The area of investing in, in the biotech side is, is one that I feel is, is underinvested. And there's a whole series of massive industries inside of biotech that need to be developed.”
Hartz: Brian Singerman's Stemcentrx deal is a historic biotech outcome
“Brian Singerman is a computer science, you know, major from Stanford that worked at Google that led the STEM-centric steel, which was one of the best outcomes in biotech history, but even more so, it's done some groundbreaking work at curing cancer, and that's…”
Hartz: Holding venture investments long-term allows power-law winners to dwarf all losses
“If you look historically over the decades, that if you just sit on all the companies, you know, and most will go to zero, your power law winners will be so massive, they'll just dwarf everything else.”
Hartz would not have funded himself given his comfortable background
“I probably would have never given myself a check for, like, growing up in an easy, waspy, white, middle-class American town with, you know, no hard upbringing and a town full of lawyers and real estate people and doctors versus, you know, people like Max Levch…”
Hartz: Airbnb is distributed storage for people, mirroring enterprise cloud architecture
“I like to think about Airbnb as kind of distributed storage, but not for bits, or images, or sound, or video. It's distributed storage for people. You know, you can have a EMC big drive like on-prem in your enterprise, Or you can have things distributed, and i…”
Hartz: A* Uses 70/30 Barbell Strategy, Skipping Series A
“We are pre-seed and seed, and then some B, you know, kind of this 70, 30, mostly seed, but then when we see a great B, we love getting involved.”
Hartz: Days of VC Funds Requiring 30% Ownership Are Long Gone
“Without a doubt we're out of that era where, you know, a Active investments for certain traditional funds, you know, they had to own at least 30%, or they couldn't be actively involved, you know, like, those days are kind of long gone.”
Hartz dismissed and missed an early investment opportunity in YouTube
“I think of when I was stepping down as CEO of Zoom, Keith and Roloff held a lunch for me in the city, in San Francisco. What was the name of that place? And Keith was talking about this YouTube thing. I was just kind of Burnout of like, you know, it was like a…”
Hartz names Airbnb, Pinterest, and Bitcoin as his top investment drivers
“Airbnb, Pinterest Bitcoin.”
Hartz: Y Combinator maintains an ideal venture model despite constant industry criticism
“Y Combinator continues to have this, like, ideal venture model. Like, as much as, you know, in every class that comes around, Like, the whole valley says, oh, now they've really jumped the shark, they're no good anymore, but like, year after year after year, t…”
Hartz: Going public is a financing event, not an exit
“Well, our belief strongly is that there is no exit to a company. The most enduring companies are just going through a financing event and will continue to build on.”
Hartz: Fair SPAC deal terms are required to attract top-tier companies
“That if there is a fair deal for both sides, that if there's a fair deal that the partner companies really see out there, you're going to attract the best companies. You're not going to attract the B and C companies.”
Hartz: SPAC market structure is decades behind venture capital's evolution
“SPACs follow the same pattern, but they're really just a few decades behind.”
Hartz: Pre-deal SPAC evaluation depends entirely on the management team
“It's really only based on people, because there's no assets, there's no P and L, or there's a small, tiny L, but no P, because it's just amount of money held in trust.”
Hartz: SPACs target merger partners four to six times their capital size
“In general, and what the rule of thumb is that a vehicle based on the size of the capital really looks to partner with a company that's four to six times market cap. So that would be 800 to 1.2 billion, or really just going after that billion dollar sweet spot…”
Hartz: Quarter warrant coverage is unheard of for first-time SPACs
“A quarter warrants is something that's unheard of for a first-time SPAC.”
Hartz: A* Will Prioritize SPAC Quality Over Launch Volume
“So we don't want to get out 20 SPACs consecutively off the runway unless we can assure that there'll be 20 enduring businesses. So we'll move at the pace only that we can find the best companies to partner with.”
Kevin Hartz: Venture investing requires slowing down compared to fast startup operations
“In a startup, you know, you're trying to move really quickly. You're trying to make decisions and have things happening on the investing side. You really need to kind of tap the brakes or really be prudent about what you jump into.”
Hartz: Founders Fund stays sector-agnostic, enabling early investments like SpaceX
“We stay sector agnostic and instead look just at the individuals, and in doing that, that's enabled Founders Fund, and this is far before my time, to be at the ground floor of some very important companies. SpaceX is you know, a grand example of that.”