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 15 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
Kunst: Cleo Capital targets US pre-seed valuations between $5M and $10M
“Anything much lower than five million in the US for even a very early round, it's a little bit hard for me to understand and get excited about unless it's an accelerator, which is a very different way of giving away equity, because I worry that you're not goin…”
Kunst: Flat growth during a sector tailwind signals poor startup execution
“If Zoom's daily average users went from ten million to two hundred million, right, which is a twenty-x increase, I don't expect you to be at two hundred million daily active users if you are a seed stage startup, but if you are a startup in a similar space and…”
Kunst: Elite graduates increasingly view startup founding as a resume box check
“Entrepreneurship used to be perceived as a massive risk, and now I think for a certain segment of people, they see it as just another box you check, and if you happen to be really good at it, great, but it's just something you have to do the same way that you …”
Kunst: The vast majority of early VC scout investors were men
“I was seeing all these scout investors across a bunch of different funds, and the vast, vast, vast majority were men”
Kunst: LP defaults on venture capital calls are extremely rare during crises
“It's incredibly, incredibly rare, even during the 2008 financial crisis that investors refuse to allocate to their venture funds, unless they have actually gone bankrupt themselves, right?”
Kunst: Founders risk pricing out investors who rarely circle back after passing
“If you set the price, you have no idea if that price is going to be attractive to a buyer, right, to an investor, and you might find out too late that everybody loves your deal, but they feel like it's too expensive, so they all pass, and once investors pass, …”
Kunst: Female founders receive under 10% of venture capital
“When women are still getting like, 10% of all invested capital or something, and I think it's a lower number than that, it's hard to have an argument that like, oh, women, it's been so easy.”
Kunst: Economic downturns weed out non-masochists from the startup founder pool
“Being a founder is a little bit of a masochistic career path. And so if you're not a masochist, this is a great time to go do a job that like feels a thousand times better on a day-by-day basis.”
Kunst predicted in May 2020 that startup markets would normalize by 2022
“And then assuming that in two years for startups that we will be Relatively close to back to normal, 24 months from now.”
Kunst: Sidelined investors view the 2020 downturn as a necessary market right-sizing
“And there's a lot of money that had been sitting on the sidelines for the last Six, 1218 months, maybe still investing a little bit here or there, but their general feeling was the market's overheated, and now they're seeing a right sizing of that, and they're…”
Kunst: Market disruptions make elite talent significantly more receptive to direct recruitment
“And I think, especially right now, there's a lot of people who are just like, great, I'll do a 20 minute call. Why not? Great. I hate my job. Great. I just got laid off. Great. I've secretly hated my business partner for 10 years, and I think this is a good si…”
Kunst: Greater diversity in VC fund managers drives higher financial returns
“I'd like to see more diversity in fund managers, and the reason for that is simple. It drives better returns”
Kunst: Upfront transparency prevents LPs from demanding a traditional GP commit
“Almost every LP that I've ever talked to, I'm incredibly upfront about that. I'm like, look, yeah, I'm super broke. And they're like, okay, that makes sense. I'm like, okay, great. And no one's ever pushed me on an LP commit, right?”