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 29 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Suster: SoftBank, Tiger, Coatue, and Insight marked 60% of 2021-2022 unicorns
“Of the 1260% were marked by four firms, ok? SoftBank, Tiger, Coachu, and Insight.”
Suster: Investors entering generative AI from 2023-2025 won't see strong returns
“So if you're betting on generative AI for the first time in 23, 24, 25, good luck making returns.”
Suster predicts party rounds will perform worst over the next three years
“And party rounds did incredibly well. For the last five years, but I suspect party rounds are going to do the worst for the next three years, because getting conviction across three or four small investors that each own seven, eight, nine, 10% of your company …”
Mark Suster: 2021 tech overvaluations were worse than dot-com bubble
“1998, 99, 2000 are nothing compared to the overvaluations of twenty-twenty-one.”
Mark Suster: Venture market correction will take another five years
“So we're two years into a correction. I think it's going to take another five.”
Suster: Tech industry will see many more startup frauds exposed
“You're already seeing it, you know, we're reading about it, like, almost monthly in the press. Yes, you're gonna see a lot more of it.”
Suster: Private equity buyouts and secondaries will drive future venture capital returns
“Where, where are returns going to come from? They're going to come from private equity. So private equity firms are going to step in and buy assets from venture capital funds. They will either buy A company or they will buy secondary.”
Suster: 1,000 startups funded in 2021-2022 will never exit at $1B+
“Of the 1221 and 22 that were funded, my guess is a thousand of them will never achieve an exit value of a billion dollars or more.”
Founders will need four times more VC meetings to raise capital
“It might take four times more VC meetings to get one check than it did only three months ago, but prepare for probably the hardest economic environment of any of our lifetimes, not just yours if you're a younger founder, but of anyone alive today.”
Mature startups facing cash crises will be hardest to refinance
“So when we're looking at companies, we're looking at bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, we're going to build this for the next 10 years, we're in the first six to 18 months of our journey, as opposed to a company been around for six years and suddenly finds itself in …”
VC fundraising will be harder from 2020 to 2025
“I suspect it's going to be harder to raise funds for the next five years than it was for the last five.”
Pay-to-play provisions have returned to venture capital deal structures
“It doesn't come back. It is back. It's back. Pay to play is on the table.”
Suster predicts lead VC ownership targets will rise above 20%
“Yes. In fact, I think it'll go up from 20%, not down.”
Suster warns fashionable tech market creates excess capital and non-entrepreneurs
“I think we've returned to a moment where startups and Silicon Valley and tech have become fashionable, and everyone wants to do it, which means you're gonna have too many companies, too much money, and too many people who aren't truly entrepreneurs, kind of cl…”
Suster: Generative AI seed deals carry a 44% valuation premium
“If you want to do generative AI in 20, 23, 24, you're paying 44% premium to do a generative AI deal.”
Suster: Series B generative AI deals command a 200% valuation premium
“At the B round, it's like 200% premium to an enterprise software company.”
Sustained unemployment will cause widespread spending declines outside grocery and pharma
“If seventeen million people are out of work for six months or more, Spending is going to go down everywhere across almost every category, maybe other than grocery and pharma.”
Ad spend saw a 40% quarter-over-quarter drop in Q2 2020
“40% decline right now in quarter over quarter for second quarter. And we're already seeing it in the data of people starting to cancel marketing orders that we know are being canceled.”
Mark Suster: Upfront's 2012 fund will return over 5x cash-on-cash
“That 2012 fund for us, I think is going to be a phenomenal success. By any measure, it'll, it should return north of five X capital cash on cash.”
Suster: Institutional LPs re-commit to future funds far more than friends and family
“Institutional money is way more likely to be in fund two and fund three and fund four. Whereas friends and family money's not as likely to repeat.”
Software revenue multiples hit 24.6x in late 2021 versus 9.6x average
“Public stock markets in November of 2021 software was trading at 24.6 times NTM next 12 month revenue, 24.6. If you look at the ten-year average, the ten-year average public market, 9.6. The twenty-year average, 6.2.”
Suster: Only 343 public US software and internet companies are worth $1B+
“So if I take all of software and all internet companies, there are 343. That's it. That's the whole universe. That includes Facebook, Google, that includes Amazon, all of them, 343.”
Suster: SpaceX spin-outs exceed 100 companies raising over $10B
“So there's been more than a hundred spin-outs now from SpaceX, more than a hundred. They've raised more than ten billion dollars, and the vast majority of them are in Los Angeles.”
Unprepared software startups face major revenue shock in Q4 2020
“So if you don't have a plan for that happening, both in terms of how you gracefully do it, what you're asking for in return, and how you size your cost base, you're going to be in for a huge shock, and that shock is going to come in Q four and Q one.”
Zoom grew from 10M to 200M daily active users in three months
“I mean, look at zoom going from. Ten million monthly actives to two hundred million or daily actives, two hundred million in three months time.”
Unrealistic valuation expectations will drive startup failures
“A lot of companies won't succeed because people hold on artificially to prices that are too high.”
Special Purpose Vehicles are much harder to raise during economic downturns
“SPVs are much harder to raise now, and so your ability to protect not just your winners, But also your companies that are struggling and need to get from point A to point B to maybe someday be a winner, it's going to be much harder.”
Venture capital industry average fund deployment cycle shortened to 2.2 years
“And the industry average right now is 2.2 years. And you have some firms coming back every 18 months.”
LP defaults won't be a major issue, but fund re-ups will
“So I don't think that's going to be a major problem. What'll be a major problem is people coming into your next fund, because if they find themselves in a bad economic situation, what they end up doing is cutting commitments to managers that they've had for a …”