The Ledger
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Legacy VCs retired rather than adjust to higher market competition
“A lot of very famous investors retire, and I don't blame them at all because the game on the field has definitely changed and it's far more competitive than it was in their day. And you're chasing around people trying to earn the opportunity to invest. And whe…”
VCs maintaining unadjusted peak valuations are delusional and lose LP trust
“It is some level of delusion. If you actually believe That all of these companies are worth what they were worth six months ago, then and you're saying that with a straight face to your limited partners, and I think you're losing trust, right? A hundred percen…”
Recent crypto fund vintages will produce a high number of zeros
“I think we're going to see a lot of zeros pop out of the vintages of these crypto funds that we've seen recently.”
Newer crossover funds that scaled rapidly face an imminent market reckoning
“Anyone that either doesn't have their existing track record of the last, whatever, 10 years attached to the name of their existing firm, or anyone that scaled well beyond what they had, you know, in the prior five years, in the last two years, I think anyone t…”
Private growth deals hit 300x ARR while public markets peaked at 20x
“We were this summer seeing businesses get done at 200 times, 300 times ARR. When the public markets were saying like at best you could trade at, I don't know, 20 times forward revenue or something.”
Using sharp elbows to box out co-investors alienates founders long-term
“And the ones that don't do it well are the ones that really view this as out of the money call options. And if the opportunity presents itself, we're going to try to get sharp elbowed and box out other groups. And I've yet to see that really work. It might wor…”
VCs should not haggle over $10 million valuation differences to win deals
“Well, it's definitely informed my, if you wanna be in the company within the margin, just find a way to get into it and don't get too hung up on the ten million here, ten million there.”
Top marketing talent chooses consumer over B2B due to larger budgets
“Because if you were good if you cared about marketing and you were really good, you would go into consumer because the budgets are much bigger and you get an opportunity to be much more Creative and come up with things like Superbowl advertising and all that.”
Bartlett predicts the tech IPO drought will end by late 2016
“I'm optimistic over the course of the next six months or so this drought that we've had over the last quarter in companies going public. I think we're going to see that short itself up,”
High past valuations stall Series B through Series D deal flow
“There aren't a ton of deals getting done right now. That's the Series C, Series D, maybe a little Series B stage. And so what you are seeing is there's a dearth of opportunities that even exist right now because those companies have raised so much capital and …”
A disciplined valuation process matters more than the markdowns themselves
“Just having a disciplined structure of how you're doing it, I think is more important than actually taking down the marks themselves.”
Logan Bartlett initially expected Braze to be acquired for $300M-$400M
“At the time I was convinced that the most likely outcome was that it was going to be a 300 or four hundred million dollar acquisition by sales or Adobe or someone like that. And so I felt like I had to be really disciplined on the entry price because it just s…”
Battery missed Snowflake by over-indexing on early customer complaints
“If we had looked at the founding team and the infrastructure they built, I think we would have looked past the individual customer feedback, a data point here, a data point there, that said, hey, this is still not quite ready for prime time, and instead focuse…”
Ousting a CEO via board vote signals failed venture capital governance
“If ever you're going to the votes and using your role as a board member to oust the CEO, something else is broken down along the way in the journey and the relationship you built with the founder and the rest of the board.”
VCs can effectively handle at most eight to ten board seats
“I think that the way that I want to be able to do it, I think it's probably eight to 10 is what the people I've admired have been able to scale up to something like that and still be active and pragmatic about their relationships with the people they work with…”
Logan Bartlett names Benchmark's Eric Vishria as an A++ board member
“The one that I've internalized the most from and that I just have infinite amounts of respect for is Eric Vishria from Benchmark. Eric and I worked together on the Amplitude board, and now we have a new company Acuity MD together. And Eric is just, A++ as a bo…”
Early-stage startups should keep PR in-house rather than hiring external agencies
“Even if it doesn't work, you're much better in-housing it than throwing it over to someone else and having them give a, you know, probably not their best performance and trying to get you placement.”
Bartlett: Celebrity VCs prioritize personal brand over actual investing
“For the first time, it seems like there is more celebrity there are celebrity VCs to some extent, where the personality is first and foremost, and then the investment is secondary to that.”
Bartlett: Market compression is funding startups that were previously unfundable
“At the end of the day, that kind of creates two different areas that are compressing into a single one. And so it does lead to a lot more funding of companies that maybe four or five years ago wouldn't have gotten funding.”
Bartlett: Just 10 deals drive 97% of annual venture capital returns
“At the end of the day, 2000 companies in a given year will get funded from venture investors and 200 of those will probably be done by firms that, that We would consider peers of ours and quality investors. And at the end of the day, 10, 10 of those will drive…”
Sequoia and Founders Fund excel at building deep ownership in winners
“I think Sequoia has always done a good job of this. I think Founders Fund has done a good job of this.”
Venture capital institutionalized more in the past five years than previous 25
“Venture has been a pretty cottage asset class, right, for the last, whatever, 30 years, and it's been institutionalized more in the last, you know, five than it had in the previous 25, in my opinion”
Venture capital has evolved into hyper-personalized offerings for founders
“It's, I think the venture capital world that we live in today is is more akin, we went from a generation, and I, I've made this analogy, that we were in the generation of Broadcast television, right? Where there were only a handful of channels and what you wer…”
Redpoint partners must build distinct individual brands to stand out
“I think it means that each individual at red point has to stand for something and be known in some way, shape, or form for what it is that they do to help rise above the noise.”
Every venture capitalist lost price sensitivity during the 2021 market peak
“Anyone that invested last year lost some level of price sensitivity.”
Redpoint's growth framework targets 3x-5x returns with 10x upside
“Our simple underwriting framework for growth at Redpoint is three to five X with 10 X plus upside, right?”
Logan Bartlett has no regrets on investments made during 2021 market peak
“While I wish that I invested at today's prices last year, there isn't a single investment that I wish I had back, right?”
Redpoint's growth team prioritizes return multiples over ownership targets
“So we really focus on the outcomes more than the percentages at our stage.”
VCs should invest in market inevitabilities even if slightly early
“If something just feels like an inevitability and you might be a little early on the tacker on the market, we're talking months or maybe years, not decades, then it's worth just getting on board. If you think the company is going to be the one to execute on it…”
Investment memos must explicitly detail every potential failure risk beforehand
“What I'll always tell our team internally is, I really don't care if something goes wrong, ah, in an individual investment, that's gonna happen, but it can't be something that we didn't have written out in the investment memo before.”
Bartlett: VC branding is a tool for founder self-selection
“I sort of view the branding aspect of it as a means to have people kind of self-select into the right person to work with and the right partner that they want to have for their business. But it's not a means to an end in and of itself.”
Bartlett: The 'ones' framework for evaluating B2B startup growth stages
“I sort of think about it as the ones of stages, and so there's the one million in ARR standpoint, there's the one million that you're adding a quarter, and then there's the one million that you're adding a month, and so those are three different points in time…”
Bartlett: Pitching executive recruits is a VC's most important value add
“The board and the C-suite executives, you know, at the end of the day are kind of recruiting arms and chief evangelists for the company. And so I think the biggest value add that, that a VC can have is just being able to look either other independent board dir…”
Logan Bartlett has had zero portfolio bankruptcies in eight years of investing
“I haven't yet. Now we've been in a eight year bull run since I've been investing.”
Redpoint rejected Logan Bartlett as an associate before hiring him as partner
“Battery gave me an offer. Redpoint did not. I went over to Battery. I was there for six years and the Redpoint folks kind of stay on, stayed on top of me and they wanted to correct the error of their ways and not making me an offer when I was associate. And so…”