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 38 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Gerstner (in 2022): Snowflake can reach a $500B valuation by 2029
“I think this company can be worth over five hundred billion dollars over the course of the next five to seven years.”
Gerstner: Venture capital over-earned, but competition will reduce founder dilution
“I might argue the venture market has over-earned for many years, right? And so the market's gonna become more efficient, it's gonna be more competition, with more competition, that means founders are gonna have better access to capital, they're gonna have more…”
Gerstner: Early-stage venture requires hands-on craftsmanship on startup boards
“Early stage venture, those first two to three years is craft building, and we like to partner with founders who are wise enough To put around that early board table, people who have been through the trenches, and so that increases our probability of success an…”
Gerstner: Competition in venture capital will compress average returns while concentrating elite gains
“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…”
Gerstner: Seeding investment accounts for every newborn would cost under $20B/year
“It doesn't cost a lot of money, right? In the scheme of things like this is less than twenty billion dollars a year for the federal government.”
Gerstner: VCs, not founders, bear the downside risk in startups
“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…”
Gerstner: High-burn, negative-unit-economic companies cease to exist when risk premiums shift
“If you are a high burn business with negative unit economics, and you fly into a world where risk premiums change, it doesn't matter how good you are, you cease to exist.”
Barton via Gerstner: Entrepreneurs focus on possibility, investors on probability
“Being an entrepreneur is the art of the possible. Right? You have to will things into existence. And he said, you know, you constantly think about what can go wrong. When you're an entrepreneur, oftentimes you have to suspend disbelief and just think about wha…”
Gerstner: The belief that companies cannot innovate in public markets is nonsense
“This idea that you can't innovate in the public markets is nonsense, right? Jeff Bezos innovated plenty in the public markets, Facebook in the public markets. You know, look at what Marc Benioff has done in the public markets. And so I think that that the publ…”
Gerstner: Altimeter deliberately avoids competing to lead Series A rounds
“First, I don't want to compete in that first round of institutional capital.”
Gerstner: Retail aggregators drive a growing share of crossover fund raises
“And if you look at the retail channel, The accredited investor retail channel, through Goldman, through Morgan Stanley, through these other aggregators, as a percentage of the fundraise for Tiger, for Kotu, for Altimeter, it's going up dramatically relative to…”
Gerstner: HBS students shunned McKinsey and Goldman interviews in 1999
“And, you know, McKinsey and Goldman couldn't get anybody to show up at their interviews at HBS in 1999.”
Gerstner: Value legends did crossover investing long before the term existed
“Paul Reeder, who started Park Capital, was doing private investments before Brad Gerstner showed up. Seth Klarman at Bellpost was doing private investments, you know, before we coined the term crossover, right? David Abrams in Boston. So I had a lot of legenda…”
Gerstner: TCV's crossover vision was ahead of its time
“TCV Had evolved into almost more of a later stage, you know, venture firm. Yeah. Right. That, that held some public positions, but didn't have a hedge fund per se. So I think I had a slightly different view, but credit where credit is due. Their vision for whe…”
Gerstner: Altimeter's first trade in 2008 was buying Priceline at $42
“We launched on November first, 2008. The first trade I made was into Priceline at 42 dollars a share.”
Gerstner: Altimeter held its initial $42 Priceline position to $2,000
“I still owned it when it hit 2000 dollars a share.”
Gerstner: Tech companies will stay private longer and scale faster
“The private markets are becoming way deeper, way more liquid. Companies are gonna scale faster because the internet provides a network upon which they can scale, and they're gonna stay private longer because they're deeper pools of private capital. And we've m…”
Gerstner: Altimeter led Snowflake's round at a ~$175M enterprise value
“I don't remember what the exact share price was. I think the enterprise value at the time was somewhere around a hundred and seventy five million dollars.”
Gerstner: Facebook became Altimeter's largest position when it hit $7 in 2012
“I remember Facebook became our largest investment in 2012 when it went on the cover of Barron's at seven,”
Gerstner: MongoDB struggled to raise its final private round at $1B
“When David Charia took over, you know, Mongo, I mean, it was famously hard for him to get that last private round of financing done at a billion dollars.”
Gerstner: Altimeter tested beta Snowflake on its own data before investing
“Over Christmas I'll replace our data warehouse with this, you know, with Snowflake, which was non-GA at the time, right? It was in beta with a couple companies. Wow. And so we did that, and he's like, this is gonna win. Like, this is the winning arc.”
Gerstner: Altimeter invested in ByteDance at a $10B valuation
“ByteDance we invested in at ten billion dollars, ok? Today it's marked, you know, somewhere between 350,000,000,500 billion, depending on which crossover fund, you know, you look at.”
Gerstner: Tiger Global did 70 to 80 early-stage rounds in H2 2021
“Tiger did, I don't know, 70 or 80 series A's, and You know, seeds in series A in the back half of last year.”
Gerstner: Top 10% to 15% of venture captures 80% to 90% of returns
“The top 10, 15% of venture is going to take 80 to 90% of the returns, ok?”
Gerstner: Product-led growth deserves higher multiples than sales-led revenue
“You show me a software company where
The product is flying off the shelves because the people on the other end really need and want the product and love the product, right? That company, even it has lower revenue, deserves a much higher multiple.”
Gerstner: Only 30% of Americans belong to the ownership society
“We only have 30% of people who belong to the ownership society.”
Gerstner predicts tech ideas over next decade will dwarf past 10 years
“I think when we look back at this system in 10 years, it's gonna be more vibrant, more capital, more access, more ideas, and I think the secular curve around creative destruction and innovation has never been steeper, and the ideas over the course of the next …”
Gerstner: I day traded a $25K inheritance to fund grad school
“Now, my grandfather, who I mentioned, left me 25,000 dollars when he passed away. And I day traded that 25,000 dollars to put myself through law school and business school.”
Gerstner: USA Networks acquired NLG and Expedia concurrently in 2000–2001
“Between October of 2000 and May of 2001 we put together a deal where USA Networks would be renamed IAC, bought both NLG and Expedia.”
Gerstner: Tech growth multiples crashed 50% in early 2022
“Just look at what's happened over the course of the last eight weeks, right? Growth multiples are down 50%. Risk premiums have changed dramatically.”
Gerstner: PAR invested $20M–$30M into Zillow Series B at ~$200M valuation
“I think, I'm trying to think the check size, we may have put in 20 to thirty million bucks, and if I recall, it was a couple hundred million dollar valuation.”
Gerstner: Bill Miller sold his private Zillow shares back in 2008
“Bill Miller of Lake Mason famously invested in Zillow in 2000 and six or 2007, and then in 2008 sold all those shares back to the company because everybody was unwinding their private positions”
Gerstner was the largest LP in Altimeter's debut private fund
“I was the biggest LP in that fund. By a long shot, because I wanted to get it, you know, upwards of a hundred million bucks. But that first fund, I think it had six investments.”
Gerstner: Database software market cap was roughly $1T in 2000
“In 2000, if you aggregate the total enterprise value of companies that were principally driving their revenue from databases, it's about a trillion dollars in market cap in 2000.”
Gerstner: Google desktop search turned negative year-over-year in late 2012
“Google's desktop search, I think, didn't go negative
Until 2012.
Maybe the fall of 2012.
That's when there were fewer people searching on desktop, you know, on a year-over-year basis because people were switching to their mobile devices, okay?”