The Ledger
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Mignano: Fred Wilson's key VC lesson is to never pass on price
“I asked him, what are a couple of the biggest lessons? And one of them was, never pass on price. So Fred says, never pass on price.”
Mignano: Web3 platform take-rate focus solves the wrong creator economy problem
“The other thing I'll say is, and I think to your point, you know, there's a lot of talk about how web three, Will enable creators to increase their take rate because the platforms are, you know, the platforms are taking too much. I will be honest. I think this…”
Mignano: Humans will cede unprecedented control to AI agents
“We have never handed over so much of ourselves to a technology before than we're about to do with agents.”
Mignano: Startup CEOs must maximize AI token spend for competitive advantage
“If I were the CEO of a startup right now, I would actually still be pounding the table to maximize token spend.”
Mignano: Massive value creation is coming to AI application layer
“I think there is still value to be created and accrued to the infrastructure layer. We're not done. The build out's not done. But I also think now that we've got enough new toys at the technology that we will see massive value creation in the application layer…”
Mignano: AI agents will make engineering teams smaller and higher caliber
“I do think engineering organizations are going to evolve. I don't know exactly what it looks like yet, but I think you will increasingly have probably somewhat smaller teams of higher caliber and higher quality engineers, because I think a lot of the lower lev…”
Mignano: USV avoids enterprise investing to focus on market obliteration
“At USV, we like to bet on businesses that obliterate, that literally obliterate markets and existing business models. And so, you know, we're, we actually don't do a lot of enterprise investing for this exact reason.”
Mignano: Suno has unlimited upside potential like YouTube or TikTok
“So we believe that Suno has, you know, I'm using this term loosely, but unlimited upside potential. You know, if you look back at the history of media on the internet, and you think about the generational platforms that truly democratized a medium, right? YouT…”
Mignano: Defining startups create massive markets rather than fitting pre-existing TAM
“The reality is all of the biggest markets were never as big as they were until the defining companies made them that way.”
Mignano: Facebook's pivot to recommendation media creates room for new social giants
“And I think as a result, there's going to be sort of this vacuum of social experiences, true social experiences. And so I think if ever there was a time for a new startup to emerge, to create a great new groundbreaking social network or social experience, now …”
Mignano: Clubhouse failed due to a flawed format, not community neglect
“I see a lot of criticism on, of Clubhouse online that I don't fundamentally agree with, which is, oh, they didn't focus, focus enough on the community. They didn't nurture the community enough. I actually don't think that's the case. I think the format was fla…”
Mignano: Social graphs are commoditized and inefficient for content distribution
“The social graph, as I said, is completely commoditized. Now, every social product that comes out can instantly have a social graph just by ingesting your contacts list, right? So you and I meet on the street somewhere. You say, Hey, Mike, what's your phone nu…”
Mignano: Meta has equal chance to displace TikTok within 24 months
“I think Meta has just as good a chance as them or anyone else to displace them Over the next couple of years. So I think this battle sort of will be won over the next, let's call it, 24 months.”
Mignano: Consensus-Driven Venture Investing Has Been Extremely Lucrative Recently
“And by the way, there have been times in the market, including recently, where being consensus driven has been extremely valuable and extremely lucrative as a fund.”
Mignano: USV is investing heavily in open-source AI and agents
“At USV, we're really interested in the Rebel Alliance. This new universe of open weight models and open source harnesses and distributed compute and agents, right? Human aligned agents.”
Mignano: Incumbent AI labs will reach recursive self-improvement before startups
“I think it's probably done by one of the labs that already has all these advantages, these vast compute advantages. They already have models that are at the frontier. They have the infrastructure. They have the chip. So I think it's probably done by one of the…”
Mignano: Top dev talent will prefer startups over budget-constrained incumbents
“I think you're going to go to a startup, especially the startups right now that are mission driven.”
Mignano: 80% of non-coding enterprise tasks do not require frontier AI
“80% of non-coding tasks in the enterprise can be done with models that are not at the frontier.”
Mignano: An Underlying Energy Layer Will Be Required to Power AI
“No matter what model wins, if you believe in AI, and if you believe in intelligence, there's going to be an energy layer underneath That is gonna be needed to power these things.”
Mignano: AI labs will not take over all application-layer software
“So I hear you that the labs can kind of go into any application layer, but not only do I think that that's not true, I also just think it's not really fun. And what fun can we have as venture capitalists if we don't believe that startups can take down the Goli…”
Mignano: Market leaders typically capture only 30% of total market share
“There usually isn't a market winner that takes A hundred percent of the market or, you know, 80, 80% of the market. Usually what you see is that the market winner takes something like 30% of the market, right? Which means the 70% remaining is totally up for gr…”
Mignano: Enterprise startups must win with one focused product before expanding
“And I think when you want to get your foot in the door, you want to sell one thing. And once you're in, then you can You can expand horizontally to different categories, but I think if you come in, expanded really, really wide, now you have to convince the ent…”
Mignano: Accumulated context is the primary moat for AI application startups
“What I've also learned about AI products and Granola is that context is extremely valuable, right? If Granola gets inside of your organization and everyone in the organization starts using it and producing and accumulating all of this amazingly rich and valuab…”
USV Waives Ownership Target for Investment in FOMO Trading App
“We think it can be a lot bigger than it is now. And so, for this one, we're not gonna be ownership focused. We're just gonna, we're gonna put a check in.”
USV Will Always Impose Price Limits on Early-Stage Investments
“Just to bring it back to the USV strategy, I think for us, again, if we're investing a little bit later stage, we need to really believe that it's a market winner, and the multiple can be very, very, very high, and in that case, I think we can be a little bit …”
Mignano: Founders matter most in venture, followed by market and product
“When I first started this job, I would have said product, market, founder. I've completely flipped that. Now, founder, market, product. I think that the founder is the most important thing.”
Mignano: Music creation was never fully democratized before AI
“Music had never really been fully democratized before AI.”
Mignano: Lightspeed's biggest regret was passing on Substack over price
“So one company that I would have loved to invest in a long time ago, which we didn't at Lightspeed, we met them a few times and I think we could never really wrap our head around Kind of price. Also at the time where they fit in the market. Now I think with th…”
Mignano: No company except X has enabled self-publishers better than Substack
“And I think no company, maybe other than X, has done a better job of that than Substack.”
Mignano: BeReal's format is too easily copied by Meta's Instagram
“Yes, a hundred percent. I think it is a worry. And admittedly, I think it is a worry for B-Real. I think B-Real is a great product. The reality is I don't think their format is, is, is something that Instagram can't copy easily, right? It is a photo at a speci…”
Mignano: Social networks need novel toolsets to delay incumbent copycats
“And so I think the key for a new social network to break out is it has to do something different That is hard for another platform to travel to, and arguably no platform did this better than TikTok, right? They built a new tool set which ended up creating a ne…”
Mignano: Podcast listening habits are sticky and users rarely switch platforms
“The thing that we saw in the early days of anchor and still saw, you know, up until when I recently left Spotify was listening habits of podcasts are very, very hard to break. If you are an apple podcast listener, you're almost definitely never going to switch…”
Mignano: Unbundled creator tools will inevitably rebundle into new verticals
“So I think it has to get unbundled and then rebundled again. Like I think one of these companies will successfully take a strong position in say video or audio editing, and they will never inevitably need to ladder up into a new, you know, leverage that streng…”
Mignano: Angel investors should write identical check sizes for every deal
“So, so I wrote the same check size every single time, and the reason that I did this was You know, I think you can get into a trap of altering the check size based on your conviction, but the reality is like at this stage, the angel stage, they're all super ri…”
Mignano: Small angel investors should not waste money reviewing legal docs
“I, in the early days of writing checks, I wasted my time and money on reviewing the legal docs. Like I would hire lawyers and get them to review it. And then I pretty quickly learned that like, these are all pretty standard docs. And as a tiny check writer, I …”
Mignano: Social capital NFTs like profile pictures lack long-term value
“So I actually, the reason I like OpenSea and NFTs is not because of what you just said. I am not long-term bullish on the social capital aspect of the NFTs. I'm more bullish on sort of the creator based use case of it.”
Mignano: AI product success relies on speed and being first to market
“This era of building AI products is in many ways about being first and about moving really, really fast.”
Mignano: Great companies and products are born from constraints and failure
“I actually strongly believe that great, great things, great companies, great products, great people come from constraints, and I think that failure is the ultimate form of a constraint.”
Mignano: Anchor did its best work three months from running out of cash
“I believe I did my best work when we were three months out of cash. When we were about to run out of money and when we were about to fail is when we did our best work.”
Mignano: Podcasts need exceptional production and high insights per minute
“There's so much content, and the tools have gotten so much better that out of the box, you can have a really, really decently sounding or looking podcast with almost no effort. And so if you want to break out, you actually have to go above that. The baseline h…”
Mignano: AI companies will push users toward an always-on experience
“I do think that we're entering a world in which context is increasingly valuable for the labs and also for the application layer, right? And so I think we will see products and businesses increasingly try to push us further and further along the edge to an alw…”
Mignano: Enterprises will optimize AI spend via open source and routing
“In that world, enterprises and individuals are probably optimizing for a couple of things. I think they're probably optimizing for cost, right? They're starting to think about the trade-offs between intelligence and spend and how they can optimize their token …”
Mignano: Users will prefer AI agents aligned with personal incentives
“Having products, agents, harnesses that are huge, Human aligned and aligned with your own goals and incentives, I think is going to be really, really important. I think people are going to be a little more self-conscious about the incentives of the model they'…”
Mignano: Incumbent tech companies will constrain employee token spend budgets
“There's too many employees at a Salesforce or I don't know, a Microsoft such that every employee can just have an unlimited token spend budget. So I think we're going to see a lot of those companies start to constrain their spends.”
Mignano: Smart teams will increasingly shift toward open-source AI models
“We're going to see a lot of smart teams going more and more towards open.”
Mignano: Charging a margin on AI model routing is a poor business model
“I think a lot of companies right now are thinking about, you know, charging a small margin on top of it. And I think to your point, that might not be a great business model.”
Mignano: USV Did Not Invest in Major Foundation Model Companies
“So, USV, again, I think has never been afraid to take a position, and I think USV maybe, ah, did not invest in any of the big model layer companies.”
Mignano: Early-stage scientific energy startups are not capital intensive initial bets
“And where there's innovation, you can find early teams that are doing science experiments before anyone else is thinking about them. ... I think those are the best places to bet as a venture capitalist, because in the earliest days, they're actually not that c…”