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 16 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
Kimball: GP advocacy is more valuable than VC platform support teams
“No matter how good the associate or the BV person or the BV team even, you know, in a much bigger VC, those guys are good, and they can do great work, and they can actually probably do more work in terms of volume, but I'd rather have Peter Fenton on the phone…”
Kimball: Lowball VC negotiation tactics damage founder trust and board relationships
“So, you know, like you establish that trust early and I'm sorry, but like the, a very chaotic and unpleasant negotiation phase is not a good way to, you know, have then, you know, have that person transition onto your board. I know I think that there's a much …”
Kimball: VCs win competitive deals when decision-makers lead founder outreach
“For the initial deal, the best way to get in is to have the true decision maker be the main point of contact for the company.”
Spencer Kimball: Google's 20% time was a failed policy
“What happened at Google was that nobody really took the 20% time. It was a little bit of a failed policy.”
Kimball: Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman's macroeconomic forecasts blow everyone else away
“I'd say that their track record in terms of, you know, prognostications is incredibly good. I mean, it just blows everyone else out of the water.”
Kimball: Databases consistently fail to keep up with evolving business requirements
“Databases actually suck for the most part. They never let you do what you really want to do for your business use cases, and that's, it's always been a game of sort of leapfrog.”
Kimball: Google's Bigtable spawned the entire NoSQL movement
“They built first big table, which really spawned the entire NoSQL movement that's with us today.”
Kimball: Proactive VCs with clear theses are the most helpful
“I actually happen to find the venture capitalists that find me to be the most helpful because they already have a thesis that they're working from.”
Kimball: Pitching new VCs provides valuable test-audience feedback
“It's kind of like a test audience where you can give the pitch, you can talk about the vision, and you can either have crickets on the other end, or you can have someone that's very enthusiastic, and that's often a very good signal I've found.”
Kimball: Benchmark operates with equal partner ownership and no support staff
“There's no more opposite approach in the industry than the one that Benchmark takes, for example. And this is a very small VC fund, you know, not necessarily in dollars, although it's not, it's by far not the largest. But, you know, it's a small number of part…”
Kimball: Top VCs Win Allocations by Staying Proactively Engaged Between Rounds
“But I think that what separates the wheat from the shaft there is that the really good VCs, the ones that really want to land the deal, assuming that is their priority, you know, these guys will, and gals, will stay in touch, and they'll be proactive about it.”
Kimball: Cockroach Labs Rejects Late-Arriving VCs Who Skipped Between-Round Touchpoints
“And then many of the VCs that I talked to in the previous round, they start to hear about it through the grapevine, and then they pop up, and they want to be involved, and no matter how much I like them, it's often pretty far along at that point, usually past …”
Kimball: Dedicated Free Fridays yield higher worker satisfaction than traditional weeks
“I think that ultimately leads to a much happier work environment in the sense that you're able to balance the sort of grind of those four days, which honestly people put a little bit more effort into those four days, but then you still have that fifth day wher…”
Kimball: Data sovereignty laws will not become less strict globally
“Pretty sure that they're not going to get less strict given what's going on geopolitically.”
Kimball: Google replaced all sharded MySQL with Spanner and Bigtable
“Spanner is the database technology that Google has used to consolidate all of their various applications on top of. So they no longer use Sharded MySQL. Everything's on Spanner or on Bigtable.”
Kimball: Recruited VC associate as Cockroach Labs product manager
“There's somebody that I met with in exactly this capacity at one of the really big funds, and she was working in Palo Alto for them, and she was the one that I was interacting with, and I actually really liked her. I thought she was incredibly intelligent, rea…”