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 55 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
Maples: VC follow-on returns are so bad LPs would revolt
“If the LPs knew, like if they tracked, what's the return on follow-on checks versus first checks, there'd be pitchforks and like, Revolts in the street. It's so bad.”
Maples: Venture outliers usually start at low seed valuations
“I believe that the outliers usually start out at a low price, because they're outliers. Because they're non-consensus and right. People tend to believe that the world is divided between low price deals with low upside and high price deals with high upside. I d…”
Maples: Most VC Funds Have at Most One Great Investor
“The problem with most firms is that they have less than or equal to one really good investor, and then they force the, what's called the limited partners or the LPs to buy the bundle of everybody else who's not a good investor.”
Maples: Fund size dictates VC strategy due to power law math
“Your fund size is your strategy, and I guess I'm kind of famous for saying that for a long time. I don't know if I've ever really expressed why that is, so here's why. The power law is real, and so people don't realize that Pareto is not just eighty-twenty, it…”
Maples: 3x and 10x VC funds have nearly identical loss ratios
“And so the loss ratio is about the same between a three X fund and a 10 X plus fund. What matters is the magnitude of your big winners”
Maples: Seed funds are better positioned for secondary sales than multi-stage funds
“You can make money on the buy, and you can make money on the sell. And what most people don't understand is that the seed funds are actually better positioned to make money on the sell than anybody. Better, better positioned than the multi-stage by a wide marg…”
Maples: $20M-$30M post-money seed rounds generate poor investor returns
“When a seed round is priced at 20 post, 30 post, it's not non-consensus. It's priced to perfection, and it's priced in a way that everybody believes it's gonna succeed, that it's a hot deal. And that's bad for two reasons. It's bad for the investor, Because ev…”
Maples: Blitzscaling is an edge case for rare market conditions
“It's really not. It's an edge case for a very rare condition where it's clear that the market is pulling these features out of the market massively quickly, and somebody has to fulfill that demand the first.”
Maples: VCs must prioritize LP fiduciary duty over bank loyalty
“Yeah, and I mean, like that's not the decision I would have made, right? I'm not gonna judge who made what decision, but my view is that it's not my money. And you know, if I was the Stanford Endowment, if I was you know, Sloan Kettering, what would I want Flo…”
Maples: Product-market fit is the sole requirement for startup success
“If we get product market fit, we will be successful almost no matter what else happens. And if we don't get product market fit, we can do everything else right. It won't matter.”
Maples: Skipping startup steps leads to fake growth
“I believe that you can't really skip a step. You got to have an insight before you do customer development, and you got to do customer development before you do smart growth. And so to the extent that raising too much too soon Causes people to skip those steps…”
Maples: Evaluating seed startups as businesses gives the wrong answers
“When I think about what is seed investing really, it's not investing in a business because it's not a business yet. In fact, evaluating it as a business will give you precisely the wrong answer most of the time.”
Maples: Startups should target at least three years of cash runway
“I like to assert it should be a minimum three years.”
Maples: Most VC Bridge Rounds Are Actually "Piers to Nowhere"
“Most bridges really aren't bridges. They're what I would call a pier. So, you know, sort of like, yeah, we need more money. I'm like, a bridge is like when somebody's come in and said, I'm going to put money in this company, but we're out of money until the de…”
Maples: Number One Reason Floodgate Passes Is Ideas Unworthy of Founders
“The number one reason I pass on companies is I don't think the idea is worthy of the founder's talent.”
Maples: Seed funds should assign dedicated partners for follow-on investing
“We had a dedicated partner, Iris Choi, do follow-ons and that's all, and she's accountable for follow-on returns, which more, more seed funds should do.”
Maples: 10x seed funds require 5% 100x hits and 15% 20x hits
“Five percent of our checks need to be a hundred X cash on cash on the first check, and about 10 to 15% need to be 20 X cash on cash on the first check. You achieve that, you're 10 X fund.”
Maples: Raising Big Rounds Before PMF Culturally Breaks Startups
“What usually happens that's even worse, is these companies raise a lot of money before they have legitimate product market fit, and they hire ahead of achieving it, and now all of a sudden they're doing a bunch of wacky nonsense that's not contributing to prod…”
Maples: Excess Startup Resources Allow Founders to Pursue Losing Ideas
“And to get product market fit, there's an advantage in being lean, and there's an advantage in having N minus one resources rather than N plus one, because, like, having too many resources lets you pursue losing ideas for too long.”
Maples: VCs' 2021 fund failures stemmed from fast 18-month deployment
“And so, you know, I think that part of why people want mulligans on their twenty-twenty-one funds is they were investing their funds in an eighteen-month cycle. And, you know, what they should have been doing is investing in a five-year cycle because the, ever…”
Maples: Don't underestimate strong product-market fit relative to other problems
“When a company has product market fit, that's a rare thing, and when they have strong product market fit, that's an extremely rare thing. It's like, don't underestimate how important that is relative to all other things.”
Maples: Fund size dictates VC strategy during market crises
“The multi-stage firms, like any firm, your fund size is your strategy. So if there's a crisis, you're going to tend to worry about the companies that move the needle in your large fund. Less so than, oh, I wrote a million dollar check to this company 18 months…”
Maples: Insight development requires getting out of the present
“If customer development is about getting out of the building, insight development is about getting out of the present, and it's about trying to put yourself into situations where you can live in the future and notice what's missing before other people notice”
Maples: Rejecting ideas because past attempts failed is terrible VC reasoning
“In fact, that's, I think, one of the least imaginative questions a VC can ask is, like, well, 10 people have tried this, and it hasn't happened, so I don't think it's going to happen.”
Maples: Great startups rely on exponential technology improvement curves
“I generally believe that most great startups are born of these exponential improvement curves that are beneath them. They're like gathering waves in an ocean that you surf back to the beach. And I think it's really hard without a gathering wave to really be gr…”
Maples: Founders without quantifiable technology inflections lack strong core insights
“And so I think if I'm a founder, if I cannot answer clearly what technology inflections are happening that can be calibrated that I'm taking advantage of, I should either evaluate whether my insights powerful enough in the first place, or if I've just thought …”
Maples: Non-consensus success comes from spotting unseen future probabilities
“Being non-consensus and right is not about living in the present and just saying, hey, the world is going right, so I'm going to go left. Being non-consensus and right is discovering something in the future that others don't see yet and making the bet that wha…”
Maples: The best long-term venture strategy requires focus
“If they want to be in every part of it, if they want to be in seed, if they want to be in series A in growth, and someday maybe be hedge funds, that's up to them, and I wish them well, but usually I tend to believe that the best long-term strategy is to be mor…”
Maples: Scaling acquisition before fixing retention creates more unhappy users
“If you have a customer engagement problem, acquiring more customers is counterproductive because then you just have more unhappy customers.”
Maples: Early-Stage Venture Requires Picking; Late-Stage Relies on Firm Branding
“The earlier you invest, the more important picking skills become, right? So if you're If you're investing later stage, branding obviously matters a lot because you're going to have a company that's becoming a more obvious breakout win, and you're going to be c…”
Maples: Marc Andreessen's advantage came from experiencing the future, not business skill
“Mark's advantage was not born of his experience in business. It was born of his experience with the future.”
Maples: Seed venture capital is about micro 'bird spotting' for novel startups
“Yeah, for me, the job is sort of like, you know, when you're in the Galapagos Islands and you spot some, Finch with a weird looking beak that nobody's ever seen before. Like, I think that's kind of what Eric and I try to do, right? We're trying to, but like, i…”
Maples: Founders in crisis cannot afford to assign blame or hope
“You want to be very sober, very matter of fact, very clear about what the options are. None of this, oh, woe is me. How did this happen? This isn't fair because you don't have the luxury to think those thoughts. You don't have the luxury to worry about who's t…”
Maples: Startups start dead and must focus solely on product-market fit
“Startups start out dead and have to prove they're alive. And they have one job to do, which is get product market fit, And that means answering one very specific question, which is, what can we uniquely do that people are desperate for? And anything that you d…”
Maples: Founder time spent managing corporate treasury subtracts from product-market fit
“Your time is the only thing that's zero sum. And so a decision to become a part-time hedge fund bond expert, it subtracts from your efforts to get product market fit.”
Maples: Startups should split cash across three non-correlated accounts with transfer rails
“Have money in an account that's not correlated to Brex and Mercury in two other places, and have the rails set up between those pools of capital, those deposit accounts, so that you can immediately move from one to the other very quickly. It's the discipline o…”
Maples: Deciding twice as fast lets leaders correct mistakes before competitors act
“Even if my first move is wrong, if I'm moving at twice the rate that you're moving, I can adjust and make my next move before you make your first move. And so, even though I was wrong, I end up being right because I'm getting feedback from your decisions, and …”
Maples: Hiding during a crisis is the worst mistake a leader can make
“The worst thing a leader can do in a crisis is hide. And not having information is not an excuse to hide. So you got to lead from the front and be visible.”
Maples: Effective crisis communications require zero spin and explicitly stating unknowns
“I think you gotta tell people what you know, you tell people what you don't know, and you tell people what you're doing to figure out what you don't know, specifically, and you wanna focus on facts and not happy talk, Zero spin, right?”
Maples: Hard technical startup problems require unambiguous market demand
“It's dumb to solve a hard technical problem that nobody wants if you solve it, right? That's just dumb. You want to solve a technical problem where people will unambiguously, desperately want it if you solve it, but it's hard to solve.”
Maples: Early-stage venture funds benefit from longer capital deployment horizons
“The riskier you are in terms of the stage that you invest, the better it is for you to have a longer time horizon.”
Maples: Overboarding limits an investor's ability to learn and stay present
“When you're on too many boards, sometimes you don't learn fast enough. You're not present and mentally awake enough, and you're not incorporating lessons quick enough.”
Maples: Startups begin dead and require three sequential breakthroughs to succeed
“A startup isn't a company because it starts out dead and has to prove it's alive. And so I like to say there's a sequence of breakthroughs. There's the insight breakthrough, and then there's the value proposition breakthrough, and then the growth breakthrough.”
Maples: Startups begin when founders bring future insights to the present
“A startup starts when someone living in the future comes back to the present with a new idea, a breakthrough insight, and the market becomes a movement.”
Maples: Startups wildly underestimate how much cash runway they need
“But I think that most startups right now wildly underestimate how much runway they need and have for quite some time.”
Maples: Anyone stating certainty about the future is confused
“If somebody's telling you they know where things are going, they don't know what they're talking about. You know, anybody who's telling you they have any degree of certainty about what's gonna happen is confused.”
Maples: VCs must accept missing deals to focus on essential partnerships
“And I think that the other extreme would be what I call the joy of finding greatness. And in the joy of finding greatness, you say, look, I'm going to be comfortable with the fact that I'm not going to see every great deal. I'm going to be comfortable with the…”