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 4,115 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 53 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
Fenton: A VC's true customer is the founder's purpose, not the founder
“Our customer isn't, it's not the founder. We say it is, but it's really the purpose of the founder, and it turns out that purpose, if that's the customer, One of us may be deviating from that, and we can keep each other accountable, and that happens internally…”
Grimshaw: Avoiding growth funds prevents pricing conflicts with founders
“Our job, we're really focused on how do we scale the company, those companies, right? And how, as part of that, having a relationship that doesn't get sort of adulted by this question of the us making another commitment decision. It's like we're in and we're n…”
Fenton: Every 2–3 years a $100B company is founded regardless of cycles
“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…”
Fenton: Benchmark GPs pay standard LP fees and carry on personal commitments
“As an LP. And that's, well, that's crazy. And this is-... But for this, for the super majority of my investment in benchmark, I'm paying limited partner rates and management fees.”
Vishria: Benchmark portfolio founders retain more equity through exit
“I believe that the founders own more of their companies at exit at S one time, whatever it is, in this case, for those reasons.”
Fenton: A venture firm's quality is measured by how good its failures are
“One benchmark, no pun intended, I guess, one measure of quality for the firm will be how good our failures are. Webvan was a really good failure.”
Fenton: Well-executed bad ideas are dangerous because investors keep funding them
“It turns out that a bad idea well executed is a problem because then you give it more money. Or a good idea, poorly executed, well, that hurts because you think, oh, I mean, we can think of companies like Friendster and think, oh, but the bad idea of poorly ex…”
Fenton: Benchmark took equity in Tinder without investing cash
“There have been examples and we're, we don't, there's some awkwardness to talking about it publicly. One of the ones is probably a good example is Tinder. And, you know, Barry Diller said, what do you want? And it's like, well, we want equity in Tinder.”
Fenton: AI and crypto lack Big Tech incumbency barriers, unlike AR/VR
“I think that somewhere between AI, crypto, and
Not AR VR, sorry for the future AR VR.
But I think those areas don't have the incumbency of some of the traditional, you know, network effect giant trillion dollar market cap companies.”
Fenton: Benchmark will not expand to eight partners or launch a growth fund
“Now that doesn't mean we're going to have eight partners
And a growth fund.
And then there's some hard lines where you just say, but this is, you know, getting closer to people who are embody our values, but at a different stage in their career, that's okay wi…”
Fenton: Company culture is permanently set by its first few employees
“The founding two or three employees set the culture. And it doesn't change unless there's some catastrophic event where it has to get reborn, but good luck with Elon at Twitter. You know, that culture was set in motion, and its root system goes so deep.”
Calacanis: Bezos dunked on Sanders and Warren via Amazon's internal policies
“He took the platform that you could never actually enact. And he enacted it inside of Amazon. If it's not perfectly clear what just happened, literally he's dunking on you. You wanted free college and couldn't get it done, he gave it to Amazon employees. You w…”
Calacanis: My syndicate is the world's largest, deploying $50M annually
“The angel syndicate is now the largest syndicate in the world. I've deployed, like, one hundred eighty-five million dollars in my career as an angel investor. I'm doing fifty million a year now.”
Rosenthal: The best venture GPs over two decades all trade public stocks
“If you look at the very best People, the best GPs in venture over the past two decades, they all trade public stocks.”
Calacanis: The All-In podcast is worth $50M to $100M
“It's worth fifty million, to answer your question. 50 to a hundred million. I mean, as a top 40 podcast, it's worth at least fifty million.”
Benchmark refuses fund scaling, junior partners, platform teams, and CRM software
“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…”
Stanford's endowment blackballed Benchmark's Fund I over its 30% carry demand
“Literally almost all of these folks who are starting Benchmark, they get so angry that not only do they not invest in the fund, they start organizing against this young benchmark capital. They call up all of their peers, the other university endowments across …”
Benchmark structured $1.5 million in founder loans to win the eBay deal
“It was also reported by the Washington Post after the IPO of eBay that Benchmark had also structured Equity-backed loans to Pierre and Jeff in the amount of 750,000 dollars each as a way to, like, prevent them essentially, give them an incentive not to take th…”
Early secondary liquidity prevents premature startup acquisitions, enabling massive long-term outcomes
“Allow the entrepreneurs to take some money off the table so they don't sell the company for fifty million dollars and instead let everybody make fifty billion dollars.”
Backing a repeat entrepreneur in the enterprise sector is near risk-free
“Backing a repeat entrepreneur in the enterprise sector is near risk free.”
Benchmark almost assuredly could have won a slot in Google's Series A
“But could they have beaten one of those two firms to get one of the two primary VC slots in Google? Almost assuredly. I mean, at this point, this was Bench where they had just done eBay. You know, they were at the height of their powers. They were the internet…”
Suing Travis Kalanick did not directly harm Benchmark's investment business
“I think pretty unambiguously at this point, both in my opinion and just looking at what's happened in the intervening, god, it's been five years since then, the answer to that, like, does this meaningfully negatively impact benchmark is no. Directly, no.”
Venture investors should aim to quickly become consensus and right
“You want that to be true when you make the investment, but you don't want to be very non-consensus for long. You want to quickly be consensus and right. You just don't want anybody to see it until you make that bet. But like, you don't want to make that bet an…”
Rosenthal: AWS was built to scale, not to monetize excess seasonal capacity
“The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity. Actually, within two months after launch, AWS would have already burned through the excess amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itsel…”
Rosenthal: Amazon's engineering team in Cape Town built the original EC2
“That becomes EC two. It's that team in South Africa that builds EC two.”
Gilbert: Microsoft and Google initially missed the cloud wave via PaaS
“And the unfortunate thing for Microsoft and for Google, who really started at this platform as a service layer, was you basically didn't get the startups because you didn't have a mature platform yet that people were excited to build on and understood how to b…”
Gilbert: AWS generates over 90% gross margins on bandwidth charges
“AWS makes 90 plus percent gross margins on their bandwidth charges.”
Gilbert: Data gravity gives AWS an ML moat over Google's superior models
“What's becoming clearer to me is the machine learning capabilities that Amazon has need to be good, but they actually don't need to be as good as Google's. Because here's sort of the strategy with machine learning. You're gonna use whatever ML is available wit…”
Gilbert: Amazon's 100% ownership of AWS represents history's greatest venture return
“He just gets capital allocation, and that's why I think Amazon is effectively the highest performing venture returns in history. AWS is a venture bet in their portfolio that they own 100% of.”
Andrew Marks: Amazon proves great founders trump static business models
“And so he sort of talks about the primacy of business model over management, but I think Amazon's a great example of the opposite because You could have never dreamed that if you owned Amazon when the story was about growing as a retailer, you could have never…”
Howard Marks: The Value Versus Growth Dichotomy Should Not Be Hardwired
“And by the way, when I say the value investor does this and the growth investor does that, Probably the biggest single theme of the memo was that that dichotomy should not be so hardwired.”
Howard Marks: Internet information cannot provide an investing edge
“Human knowledge is cumulative, and lately it's been rushing forward at an incredible pace, so it's hard to imagine that there's a piece of information that I can get off the internet that's going to make me any money for the simple reason that everybody else c…”
Andrew Marks: Buffett avoided tech moats because they were outside his comfort zone
“I mean, one critique you could make of Buffett is he just totally ignored technology, and technology not only became much more pervasive, but I also think that, I mean, he's an incredibly smart guy, and he understands lots of different elements of business, an…”
Howard Marks: Computers cannot pick the next Amazon or Steve Jobs
“I always say that I don't think that a computer can sit down with five business plans and figure out which one is Amazon in advance, or meet five CEOs and know which one is Steve Jobs.”
Howard Marks: Teaching second-level thinking is like coaching height
“People say to me, can you teach somebody to be a second level thinker? And I said, I don't know. It's kind of like asking the basketball coach to coach height. All his efforts won't make his players any taller. Some people get it, some don't.”
Howard Marks: Trimming winning investments just to lock in profit is a mistake
“This idea that as soon as there's a profit, you should take some of it off the table, seems like a huge mistake.”
Howard Marks: Managers should raise smaller funds following strong performance
“Most firms, if they have a very successful fund, will follow it up with another fund which is larger on the back of that. But if you think about it, if you had a success in a given area, the good performance of that fund is synonymous with appreciation. In oth…”
Rosenthal: Google effectively killed eBay through superior search
“Honestly, I mean, I think this is drawing too broad of a brush, but I think Google killed eBay, right? You know, the best way to search eBay is Google. It's not eBay.”
Gilbert: Amazon's internal entrepreneurship was Seattle startup scene's biggest impediment
“The biggest impediment To the Seattle startup ecosystem was the fact that Amazon facilitated entrepreneurship over and over and over again for people at all stages in their career with all levels of ambition and is really, really impressive, but doesn't really…”
Rep. Gonzalez: Lawmakers should not invest in crypto while regulating it
“You know, I'm on the committee and I, there's no rule against this, but I don't necessarily think I should be, you know, investing in crypto assets while I'm thinking about regulating them.”
Rep. Gonzalez estimates 90% of Congress members do not understand cryptocurrency
“If you were just in Congress broadly, I would say 90% of members don't understand it at all. They've heard about it, but like they don't know it, right? Maybe their kids use it, grandkids, whatever, but they don't know much about it beyond that.”
Rep. Gonzalez: The World Bank and IMF are largely overrun by China
“Doing things to fix our international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, which had been largely overrun by China.”
Rep. Gonzalez: One-day settlement likely would have prevented Robinhood's trading halt
“The main thing we could have done is passed a bill to shorten the settlement time from two days to one day. That would reduce the risk in the system overall and probably would have prevented what Robin Hood ultimately had to do, which was halt trading.”
College athletics will go fully professional without congressional intervention
“To me, the model is in a place where if Congress doesn't step in and find some sort of way to stabilize this, the whole thing will probably just go professional”
Professionalized college sports will force schools to eliminate non-revenue sports
“In that world, the way most schools would react, I suspect, is they would cut every single sport that doesn't make money, except for the ones they would have to keep for Title IX purposes, and so these athletic departments would shrink dramatically.”
Rep. Gonzalez: Private enterprise cannot underwrite 50-year R&D projects
“No private enterprise can underwrite a fifty-year R&D project. The payoff's not there.”