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Lars Dalgaard

Founder and Investor, Luv Ventures · 4 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@LarsLuv ↗

Dalgaard founded the cloud human capital management company SuccessFactors, leading it through an IPO and sale to SAP. After serving as a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he launched the venture investment firm Luv Ventures.

36statements → 8claims → 3claims resolved → 33%fully supported → 4.39/5average certainty → 2.08/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 3said about them ↓

1 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

8 assertions · 2 opinions · 18 insights · 8 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Lars argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Dalgaard: SuccessFactors grew to 50 million users
“And so I had to see that come into fruition and at fifty million people using it, I began to believe that it was going to be a consistent and systemic change that would not go away.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:50 a16z Podcast | Scaling Companies and Culture

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
75% certainty 4
50% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

317 words/min while actually speaking · 11 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Lars Dalgaard: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 4 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,638 words across 2 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Lars Dalgaard said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Disclosure
No SuccessFactors employees sold company stock prior to the IPO
“Nobody in my company sold before we went public.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:29 a16z Podcast | Scaling Companies and Culture
Insight
Dalgaard: Board of directors only knows a fraction of company details
“The combined board will never know more than you can balance on a pin hat of the company, and they shouldn't. That's for the CEO to know.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:24 a16z Podcast | Scaling Companies and Culture
Insight
Dalgaard: Initial interviews set permanent emotional contracts with employees
“I think it's like 90% more important, that first interview, because you create an emotional contract with that person forever.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:26 a16z Podcast | Truth and Humanity in Leadership
Insight
Dalgaard: Wait 20 minutes into interviews before asking deep personal questions
“I don't ask it in the first minute, because then it's useless. I ask it like, 20 minutes in. Because you've built some rapport and they know who you are and how real you are.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:58 a16z Podcast | Truth and Humanity in Leadership
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dalgaard was rejected by 73 VCs when raising funding for SuccessFactors
“73.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:38 a16z Podcast | Truth and Humanity in Leadership
Insight
Dalgaard: Non-technical applicants should lead with leadership confidence, not apologies
“I would never be apologetic in an interview around, you know, like, I'm not a tech person, I'm not, like, I can just see it, because I've interviewed a bunch of people that had your background, and I saw some, you know, apologies, and then also this sort of li…”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:26 a16z Podcast | Truth and Humanity in Leadership
Insight
Dalgaard: Showing raw vulnerability forces CEOs to reciprocate authenticity
“And it's like we've trained ourselves to stay the fuck away from that place, but I go straight where it hurts the most, and I talk about that. And it never fails. All these CEOs, they're very, very successful, they're running public companies, they look in the…”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 14:42 a16z Podcast | Truth and Humanity in Leadership
Disclosure
Dalgaard: I rushed hiring an independent board member right before IPO
“It takes very long time to find a very good person for you, and so you don't want to rush that the way I did it right before the IPO.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:23 a16z Podcast | Independents on the Board
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lars Dalgaard personally hired his company's first 800 employees
“No, no, I never, I always do my own, yeah, including every single person I hired, and I hired the first 800 people personally.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:45 a16z Podcast | Independents on the Board
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dalgaard pitched 73 venture capital firms that all rejected SuccessFactors
“We had the opportunity, or I personally did, to pitch to a 73 venture capitalists who all said no.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:09 a16z Podcast | Scaling Companies and Culture
Assertion Supported
Dalgaard: SuccessFactors grew to 50 million users
“And so I had to see that come into fruition and at fifty million people using it, I began to believe that it was going to be a consistent and systemic change that would not go away.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:50 a16z Podcast | Scaling Companies and Culture
Assertion Partly supported
Lars Dalgaard became Unilever's youngest division CEO at age 26
“It was the third largest company in the world. They had 320,000 employees, and I was the youngest CEO at 26 there by 13 years.”
Lars Dalgaard Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 10:24 a16z Podcast | Truth and Humanity in Leadership

The other half of the tape: Lars Dalgaard's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 3 episodes on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 1Marc Andreessen 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0022332019episodesmentions
0232019episodes it came up in
000.51.5132019episodesmentions per episode
2019 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (4)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Independents on the Board Jan 2, 2019 7m
a16z Podcast | The Why, How, and When of Sales Jan 2, 2019 11m
a16z Podcast | Scaling Companies and Culture Jan 2, 2019 17m
a16z Podcast | Truth and Humanity in Leadership Jan 2, 2019 10m
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