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 19 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
VCs Who Claim to Always Exercise Pro-Rata Rights Are Lying
“Anybody that says they do pro rata always, I think, is lying. I just, I don't believe that to be the case, and I've seen enough, I've been in venture long enough to know that that's total bullshit.”
Larger Early-Stage Venture Funds Consistently Yield Lower Returns Over Time
“Larger early stage funds always lead to lesser returns over time.”
Investors Prefer Re-Backing Founders Who Shut Down Failing Startups Gracefully
“The investors are That are in your cap table today are infinitely more likely to back you again, watching you make that kind of mature decision as an entrepreneur, rather than watching you piss that money down the drain over the next two years, and actually, i…”
The VC Industry Faces a Reckoning With Many Firms Shutting Down
“I think there will be a lot of folks that go away in this cycle. I watched it in the last go round. You know, Spark and USV and all these firms didn't exist before the last cycle. And they really made their names coming out of the O eight crisis. And on the ot…”
Bijan Sabet's Twitter Series B Catapulted Spark Capital Into Top Tier
“As I was joining Spark, Bijan Sabat at Spark led Twitter series B and that investment catapulted us into the upper echelon of VC firms.”
Durable VC Firms Require Clear Leadership Rather Than Equal Partnerships
“And while both can certainly work and there are certain, and there are notable exceptions here, like union square ventures, for instance, which works very well as a partnership structure, the more durable firms in my experience often have very clear leadership…”
Learning Lessons From Venture Successes Is Extremely Dangerous Due to Bias
“I've actually found that learning lessons from successes is extremely dangerous because of the risk of confirmation bias. We will convince ourselves Of whatever we want to convince ourselves is the proximal cause of the success, you know, because it was succes…”
Five-Year Employee Retention at Giant Multi-Stage VC Firms Is Zero
“These are people, these are businesses with hundreds of people working there. The odds that all of those same people are going to be there in five years are zero.”
Giant VC Funds Cannot Be Deeply Invested in Seed Startups
“When you take money from a very big firm, definitionally at the early stage, definitionally, they can only be so invested in your success because it is a tiny amount of overall capital for the firm.”
Excess Venture Capital Creates Bad Habits and Dampens Returns
“I think we should have fewer investors and some less capital in the system. I think we've pumped too much capital into the system and it's created a lot of bad habits. And I think it's going to dampen returns, frankly.”
Barry Diller Used Vivendi Cash to Roll Up Depressed Web 1.0 Assets
“We were flush with cash after the Vivendi universal entertainment transaction, and Barry decided to scoop up internet assets that had fallen out of favor. It was an incredibly prescient decision, and we ended up consolidating massive web one dot O categories t…”
Mo Koyfman Led Plaid's Seed Round and Was First Outside Director
“I led the seed round in Plaid and joined the founders, William and Zach, as their first outside board member.”
Barry Diller Ran Eight-Hour 'Dynamic Debate' Meetings at IAC
“And when I was at IAC, Barry used to call our Monday meetings, our office of the chairman meetings, the dynamic debate. And we would sometimes sit in there for eight hours yelling at each other and screaming at each other to get to the right answer.”
Shine Capital Reserves Follow-On Capital per Fund, Not per Company
“We don't actually reserve per company when we do a deal at all. I actually reserve a bucket for the entire fund”
Shine Capital Targets 10% Ownership Rather Than the Traditional 20%
“We're always looking to be pigs. Like we are trying to get double digit ownership where we can, and we will do a little bit less here and there. Like we're, we will sometimes build our way into positions. We'll buy five or six percent and then buy a little mor…”
Dara Khosrowshahi and Jeremy Liew Ran IAC's Strategy Team in 2001
“I joined the strategic planning team who, interestingly enough, we were just talking about this, was then being run by Dara Khosrowshahi, who's now the current CEO of Uber, who hired me into IAC, as well as a guy named Jeremy Liu, who you may also know who led…”
Shine Capital Manages $435 Million Across Core and Opportunity Funds
“We manage about four hundred and thirty five million dollars or so. Our first fund was a hundred and twenty five million dollar early stage fund. Our second fund is a two hundred million dollar early stage fund, and we have a hundred million dollar opportuniti…”