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 9 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
Accel told CrowdStrike founder George Kurtz to shop their term sheet
“Why don't you take my offer, my term sheet, you have it in your back pocket. So when you have these other conversations, Go in knowing that your deal done already, and if someone comes along and offers you something much better, or you think they're additive t…”
Gandhi: Accel's pre-mortem downside for CrowdStrike was an incident response business
“I think the number one thing on this was like, man, we just whiffed on the cloud native concept, and nobody's willing to do it, you know, like, that was one where, if you got that wrong, you know, and I think you see in my memo, it's like, well, if we totally …”
Gandhi: Good market timing temporarily hides startup execution and product deficits
“Market timing, if you get it right, it covers up a lot of other deficits in a business, right? If your team is incomplete, your product isn't quite there. If your execution is not stellar, you can cover all that stuff up. If you just hit the market at the righ…”
Gandhi: Go-to-market investments require market timing within a two-year window
“I think we really look at it and say like, it's gotta be, you know, within plus or minus a year or two. That's the right way to look at it. If you're later than that, you're too late. And I think if you're earlier than that, it's just a different kind of inves…”
CrowdStrike used incident response services to bridge slow early cloud adoption
“We could be pushing cloud and having a slower adoption cycle around the Falcon platform, which is really the endpoint product platform. And the way that was mitigated for us is that the company was doing really high-end incident response services, and so there…”
Gandhi: Accel invested in CrowdStrike at a $150M post-money valuation
“So I never looked at it as a three to five X. I looked at it as we're investing in a company, you know, in the first round when we did it was a 150 posts or something like that.”
Gandhi: High implementation services revenue signals underlying product issues
“If the percentage of that rises too much in the company, it really tells me that there are product issues at the root of what's happening there.”
Gandhi: Cybersecurity incident response services directly drive product sales
“In fact, it's an amazing business because once you make money on incident response services, it pulls through product afterwards.”
Gandhi: Overcapitalized startups lose operational rigor and suffer downstream issues
“An overcapitalized business doesn't always have the same rigor in terms of how you run it as a company that's been capitalized thoughtfully. It's also getting ahead of yourself creates all these issues downstream potentially.”