The Ledger
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Zaveri: Deal heat is often manufactured by early investors over-socializing rounds
“In many ways, actually, I've seen that if you kind of peel back the onion, you can kind of find The root node or sort of the creator, there's sort of individuals that, you know, may have feel sort of have put some early dollars into a financing and have a stro…”
Zaveri: Value in AI comes from vertical applications, not infrastructure
“I look at it from a vertical application standpoint, not from just Hey, we want to have the best models, the best sort of, you know, technology, and we're just going to sell enabling technology, you know. No one buys programming languages. And in the same way,…”
Zaveri: Outbound sourcing is how venture works, not inbound deal flow
“I fundamentally learned that outbound is the way venture works and inbound is rarely the way it should work.”
Zaveri: Out-raising competitors starves rivals and yields a distribution advantage
“Particularly sort of in sort of markets where there might be four or five competitors, if one can raise more than the others, you can suck out, suck the oxygen out of the room and have an advantage on customer acquisition and distribution in general.”
Zaveri: Seed capital excess mainly threatens undifferentiated new venture funds
“So I don't over worry about the excess of capital. I think it can be problem. It can be problematic if you are trying to start a new fund where what's your differentiation, right?”
Zaveri: Dismissing founders or ideas as just a feature is dangerous
“I'd say, like, huge market, and then the other pet, you know, pet peeve is, oh, this is a feature or something like that, right? It's like, you know, companies evolve and change, and I'd say there might be sort of folks that may sort of poorly phrase things, a…”
Zaveri: Capital is commoditized, making early relationship-building essential for VCs
“Capital is pretty commoditized today , and so, in essence, if you are selling something that's, like, partially a commodity, you should get to know, sort of, the founders, or the founders should get to know you also, particularly, sort of, if they have multipl…”
Zaveri: VC operational help works faster in enterprise than consumer startups
“On the enterprise side where you can do customer introductions, maybe add value to the top line revenue side. I'd say even on the consumer side, there's a lot one can do, but it's probably much more explicit or sort of much more, you know, you can realize it s…”
Zaveri: Most startup financings do not involve multiple competitive term sheets
“You know, not in reality is not most financings, the most financings are probably not, you know, sort of like 10, 50, 10 plus, like, you know, eight to 10 term sheets in, in motion. Most financings take time, you know, you want to get to know each other. There…”
Zaveri: Institutional seed investors target 7% to 15% startup equity
“There's a number of institutional seed investors and, you know, they're sort of positioned to want to take anywhere from like, I don't know, seven to 15%, right? With probably 15 being kind of the ceiling.”
Zaveri: Seed party rounds with dozens of investors have declined since 2013
“Anecdotally speaking, you're seeing less of these rounds from like, 2012, 2013, where there's like, 12, 13 people on a cap table, and you've thrown the financing together, and you might have two to three million bucks on a note where, and I mean, it could stil…”
Zaveri: Broad themes like frontier tech are marketing labels needing sub-themes
“Themes have sub-themes. So, you know, if you are sort of a, hey, we're frontier tech, You know, we're frontier tech investors, or, you know, we invest in machine intelligence. That's very broad at that point. Is it autonomous driving? Is it smarter application…”
Zaveri: Chinese-style native in-app commerce will expand to Western markets
“You're seeing, so, for instance, like there's news reading apps there, like Tatiao, which integrate sort of commerce-like functionality in the news app, and you can actually conduct commerce there natively, and I think you were going to see this theme sort of,…”
Kleiner Perkins leverages dual venture and growth funds to defer risky deals
“We're very fortunate where we have two funds within one firm, and, you know, we invest across the stages, so If we, on the venture side, feel something's just not clicking here, and we think there's an, you know, excess, you know, there is some weird form of r…”