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.
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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.”
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.”
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…”
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: 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.”
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…”
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…”