venture capital

“There's so much tied up here, but one of them is this is kind of the first venture capital business. Like we talked a lot on the TSMC episode about these massive fixed costs... And then it's all a volume game. Like how much can you get the plants at full capac…”

“And so it turns out if you look at venture capital in particular by the way, in public equity markets, very limited persistence, right? So if you did really well last year, your expected value is closer to the average the following year. Buyouts. They used to …”

“Most of these startups, most of these artists are going to fail. And the record labels or the book publishers or the VCs are gonna have sunk all this money in to get to a point where we can even see if it's gonna work, and when 90 plus percent, I don't know wh…”

“The top 10, 15% of venture is going to take 80 to 90% of the returns, ok?”

“Like, what do I expect that, you know, will happen over the full arc of time in venture, right? We're going to compete away returns. We've already witnessed it over the course of the last couple years, right? But that just means the returns that go to the prem…”

“In venture capital, if you fail, the risk is largely on the venture capitalist. I mean, in Silicon Valley, failure is on the part of the founder, so long as you conduct yourself in a way that's honorable, it's a badge of courage that you gave it a go. And we h…”

“Getting a reference from the CEO of a portfolio company is a really good way to come in with a venture capitalist already leaning toward investing. Especially if you're referred by the top performing company of all time in their portfolio.”

“Private equity and venture capital as a category could not be more different from what they are doing. Venture capital is creating new things from nothing, and it is creating more jobs, it is Pouring money into companies so that they can grow, expand, and solv…”

“Education and housing are, you know, two areas that I think venture capital hasn't touched as much as say healthcare. Like if you look at like the last 10 years, digital health has just grown tremendously and we have, you know, we have a separate bio and healt…”

“Really, venture capital in the early stage is not at all cash flow-based investing. It's actually options investing, and as you sort of think about it that way, the world starts to make more sense, because how do you value an option? Well, you look at the rang…”

“First of all, I think you'd be hard pressed to say that venture is super inefficient. It's not a market where everyone can transact, and it's actually hard to get in the place where you can invest in seemingly great companies, but the competition to invest in …”

“The hardest thing to do in venture capital is create those massive outsized returns that only come from investing in one of the five or so truly important companies each decade. Then, once you've done that, the next hardest thing is to keep doing it with an en…”

“Benchmark famously believes that venture capital doesn't scale. They have zigged when others have zagged. They have not grown their fun size. They haven't tried junior partners. They don't have a platform team. They are not multi-stage. And I've heard they don…”

“The split of the carry in any individual fund, while it tends to reflect ownership in the management company, these are two wholly different entities. And so what you often had and what you had with all these firms, these old firms back at this point in time, …”

“And as a venture investor, you want to be buying all that risk. You don't really want to be making these sort of risk mitigated bets and have a port. No, that is why you have a portfolio of 30 companies. Go get all the risk you can.”

“It takes seven years or it takes fifty million dollars to make a VC, which I think are all quite reasonable because your first several investments, you're like, it's like, you're getting the crap out.”

“I would say the memo. Is a crutch often because yes, it can force you into clarity of thought, but it also allows you to fill in blanks that the entrepreneur themselves are not saying. And it pushes a sort of bias and perspective that maybe the firm has, or ma…”

“We have faith that every year, some number above zero companies will be founded that are going to be worth more than ten billion dollars, and then about every two or three years, a company's going to be found out it's going to be worth more than a hundred bill…”

“I think the aggregate brand and reputation of the venture industry has taken a massive hit. Massive hit over the last Several years. And it just keeps going down.”

“The idea that your core competency is just distributing someone else's product among a geographic area where you have a relationship with customers, that might have actually been a pretty good plan and much more defensible in a way that it's much harder to bui…”

“Well, I think most of the time it is negatively correlated, except for the most extreme outlier successful outcomes, it is required.”

“The people who made the most money out of venture capital are a lot like investment bankers deciding which hot new area they're going to get in. They're not great investors or great at anything.”

“It's very difficult to invest money well, and I think it's all but impossible to do time after time after time in venture capital.”

“I think a lot of people think it is a analytical industry. You're learning all about the company. You're doing diligence. It's not that you're not. You are doing that. But that's the commodity. It's an access business.”

“You're really just making a founder bet, and then you're trying to support it with all this like structural information that is a very imprecise. You're acting like you know the third or fourth decimal place, when in reality you barely know the first one.”

“Venture capital and private equity is an access business. And it's not like you can just call up your broker and say, hey, I want some shares of Anthropic today and execute an order. Like, you need to pay for access, and that's what venture capital is doing, a…”