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.
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Kupor: Founders Are Often Relieved When VCs Suggest Winding Down
“When I started this business, when we started, we thought these would be incredibly difficult conversations, and there's no doubt sometimes they are, but oftentimes we find actually exactly the opposite, which is sometimes the founders are relieved after those…”
Kupor: VCs cannot achieve success through conservative investing
“I think it's very hard to kind of conservative your way to success in this business.”
Kupor: Startup evaluations shift 80% toward team after market qualification
“So I agree with Freddie, which is, you have to at least believe the market is big, but I would kind of flip his percentages, and I would say, once you get to market being attractive, then I think most of the evaluation shifts to team. So I don't know if it's 8…”
Kupor: $750M venture funds require multi-billion dollar outcomes to move the needle
“So I think you're right, which is you gotta have to do the backward math, which is, okay, if you've got, call it a, we have a seven hundred and fifty million dollar early stage fund that we just raised in the, for consumer enterprise, and so for something to k…”
Kupor: Distressed startups cannot sell themselves without pre-existing inbound interest
“At the end of the day, companies are bought, not sold, meaning that if you don't have that inherent interest already from other companies, it's very hard when you're facing a bridge situation to assume you're going to go out and market yourself to somebody els…”
Kupor: Venture capital firms are purely customer service businesses
“We don't build anything. We don't make any products. All we are, quite frankly, is a customer service business. And day-to-day, we've got to make sure that we deliver on that customer service.”
Kupor: Reliance on paid acquisition degrades startup unit economics over time
“So if this is a heavy paid marketing business, it's probably the case that those economists are going to degrade over time because, you know, your cost of acquisition, you know, through Google and Facebook and other paid channels may be difficult.”
Kupor: Founders focus too much on pitching products that will inevitably change
“And I think what happens a lot of times in pitches is people immediately want to kind of talk about product, which is wonderful. And of course we love product, but you know, the product we know is going to change. That's just the nature of this business.”
Kupor: VCs must engage entrepreneurs 12 to 18 months before fundraising
“I think that what that means is the onus is really on us as venture capitalists to get to know entrepreneurs way earlier in the cycle. And so I think the biggest thing that we've got to do to kind of try and address that problem is we need to be talking to ent…”
Kupor: Compelling pitches inspire people to make irrational career moves
“The most compelling pitches that we see are those individuals who can really create a vision and distill that vision and tell it in a way that will cause people, as I said, to do maybe even irrational things, right?”
Kupor: Founders raising Series A should work backward from Series B pitch
“The best advice we always give is when you're raising your A round of financing, what's the pitch that you're going to give at the B round and work backwards and say, okay, based on that, if I'm raising A today and I'm targeting 18 to 24 months to raise my B, …”
Kupor: Target fundraising ranges are fine if objectives scale with capital
“I think it's okay with ranges as long as you can articulate, if I have eight, this is what I'm going to do with that money, but if we're lucky enough to be able to raise 12, this is the incremental, you know, set of financials or company objectives we're going…”
Kupor: Venture capital is fundamentally a network-effects business
“I think the biggest one has been that this is fundamentally a network effects business. If you do things right, if you respect the entrepreneurial process, if you know, handle yourself professionally, you get tremendous lift from that.”
Kupor: Startups must act on partial information and make new mistakes
“I love the phrase, make new mistakes, because to me, it implies exactly what you need to do in a startup, which is you can't be great, cannot be the enemy of good. Sometimes you have to just move forward with the information you have and be willing to make mis…”
Kupor: Building external networks is more valuable than extra working hours
“Working fewer hours and spending more time on external relationship development, I think it's one of the most undervalued skills that we all kind of fall into, that trap, because that's the way the educational system works, particularly in the U.S., But making…”