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 26 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
Sonali De Rycker: Conflicting venture capital guidance to founders is almost psychotic
“And right now it's such a confusing time for these founders, right? We told them cut costs during COVID. It's a recession. Who knows? The demand is gone. Then there was money flowing through the system. Money had never been cheaper. It was all about growth. We…”
De Rycker: Erratic VC advice during COVID was deeply confusing for founders
“It's such a confusing time for these founders, right? They, we told them, Cut costs during COVID. It's a recession. Who knows? The demand is gone. Then there was money flowing through the system. Money had never been cheaper. It was all about growth. We said, …”
De Rycker: Outcome scenario planning is useless for early-stage venture capital
“You can do all your outcome analysis. It doesn't really matter, especially if you invest. As early as we do.”
De Rycker: Blindly exercising pro-rata rights severely damaged VC fund performance
“The biggest mistakes were people just putting a lot of pro rata money in or just following in and supporting companies. So you get your outliers, but then if a lot of your percentage of your fund goes into companies that actually don't return capital because y…”
De Rycker: Global venture capital expansion requires local on-the-ground presence
“How do you do global? Well, is that you have boots on the ground, you have local decision-making, you're investing in entrepreneurs. It's a relationship business. You need to be able to make that investment decisions sitting across the table and, you know, not…”
De Rycker: Backing struggling founders pays off in their next startup
“But I think the relationship with the founders matters a lot because that's what we're in the business of doing is backing them and, you know, backing repeat founders. Company number one didn't work, but company number two might be a blockbuster.”
De Rycker: Accel pays team-wide bonuses when junior investors source winning deals
“If one of the younger investment team members identifies a great company, A great founder that we actually end up investing in. Everybody gets a bonus because that's sort of a way to hard code collaboration”
De Rycker: VC outcomes are driven by missing winners, not backing losers
“We all know it's not about the type one mistakes, frankly, it's all about the type two mistakes.”
De Rycker: The venture market devolved into cheerleading and party rounds
“And by the way, there's very few of those discussions that happen. It's become a cheerleading market. And I hope that goes away with this current cycle, but it's pretty dis, it's pretty dismaying to see where the market had got to. It was like fragmented cap t…”
De Rycker misjudged bull market capital availability for strong fundraisers
“I think I personally just misjudged how much capital was available for the entrepreneurs who could fundraise really well. I really got that wrong, so it would have been better just to be early in some of these great businesses.”
Sonali De Rycker: Venture funds fail when they stop investing in downturns
“One is never stop investing. The minute you lose your confidence, you lose your right to exist. Because if you look at the funds that were around in 2000, so many of them disappeared exactly for that reason.”
De Rycker: 2022 tech downturn resembles 2000 dot-com bust, not 2008
“I think we're much more a version in a version of 2000 than we are in, in a version of 2008.”
De Rycker: VCs that stop investing during downturns lose right to exist
“Never stop investing. The minute you lose your confidence, you lose your right to exist. Because if you look at the funds that were around in 2000, so many of them disappeared exactly for that reason.”
De Rycker: Accel proactively marks down private portfolio valuations during downturns
“We're pretty proactive about taking down the valuations, but they're already sitting in pretty deep discounts.”
De Rycker: Portfolio markdowns will primarily trigger during new funding rounds
“I do think people will be proactive because you have to be, but it's going to take Time, and it's going to happen much more on the companies that have to have an outside mark, right, in terms of doing, doing around.”
De Rycker: Startups are avoiding priced rounds to prevent valuation down-marks
“And the challenge is that people are just not interested in going out and getting an outside mark right now. They much rather just put their head down and take the capital that they have and keep going.”
De Rycker: Managing internal VC firm talent cannot be a side hustle
“We thought that we needed a Wendy-like figure, you know, but because it's all about if you're telling your companies to focus on culture, you're telling your companies to focus on talent, why would you not want to do that? And of course you can do that yoursel…”
De Rycker: Accel operates globally without a CEO or top-down structure
“The fact that that exists without a CEO, some top-down instrumentation, any kind of top-down structure just shows how frankly authentic it is because it has to endure.”
De Rycker: Asking candidates about negative feedback shortcuts background reference checks
“When you ask someone, for example, you know, what was the most surprising negative feedback that you got, and why do you think you got it? The person will tell you something that you're never going to find out. So that was a really interesting question for me,…”
De Rycker: $200B to $400B in VC dry powder remains uninvested
“There is enough dry powder, Harry, right now. I think it's like the numbers are two, three, four hundred billion that is out there in venture capital at the moment in dry powder.”
De Rycker: Market downturns concentrate tech talent into the best startups
“The good news is I think you can maybe focus talent, concentrate talent again, In some of the really great businesses versus this fragmentation of talent that happened.”
De Rycker: Accel backed Spotify at $70M revenue and 1.5M subscribers
“When we invested, it was sort of seventy-ish million in gross revenue. I mean, it's ten billion now. And It was about a million and a half paying users”
De Rycker: Great founders expand initially small markets via product adjacencies
“The great founders, They just create adjacencies. They change user behavior with beautiful products, and I completely got that wrong because the markets, they look small.”
De Rycker: Accel's early hiring mistakes stemmed from ignoring emotional characteristics
“When we made mistakes, we were, what we were getting wrong was kind of the emotional characteristics, and really the who As opposed to the how or the what.”