8VC

“This tends to happen in every cycle where the infrastructure gets overdone at some point. So that, but I think this, well, this is again, speaking to our book is I think some of the apps and services layer companies are a lot safer when that happens”

“In this case, you either had large scale surveys, which were low fidelity, or manual interviews, which were lower scale, but higher fidelity. And now that you can have computers talk to people, you can have The scale of the survey with the fidelity of the manu…”

“You know, we have a weird version of this in investing, where our research is called expert calls, And we run into this all the time, where you're talking to this expert who's actually being paid money to teach you something about a product or an industry, and…”

“Someone has built these models in me. Have you seen these things? It's really weird, and they send them to me, And it's them having a conversation with me, and it's, like, kind of annoying to listen to yourself already, but it's even more annoying if it's, lik…”

“Obviously we have some bets in different parts of the stack. I'd say we're probably Most focus on level five.”

“A lot of our level five companies, whether they're doing healthcare billing or work, logistics workflows, or gosh, there's a whole lot of lists of them we can go through. Like they're using whatever models are best at the time, but they're swapping between mod…”

“This tends to happen in every cycle where the infrastructure gets overdone at some point. So that, but I think this is, again, speaking to our book, is I think some of the apps and services layer companies are a lot safer when that happens, but I don't know.”

“Well, Quince did two billion in revenue this year.”

“All of that, if you think of it as a, you know, co-pilot setting can be done automagically now to a large extent. Which is why we are seeing so many companies getting started in each of these areas in a very, very, you know, high demand-driven way because, you…”

“I had like, 200 different LPs giving me the money, so you think, I guess I'm not that controversial amongst the institutions, but I am amongst the media people.”

“All of our original investors did. So the seed round was ABC, Bling Capital, Max Ventures. The extension was, or like the top up, whatever you want to call it, was also all three of them. Like they all kept wanting to do more. And then this round, like scale w…”

“It's now 30% of what we do. All of our capital employees and, you know, 30% of it goes into companies we co-founded.”

“And I think Joe and I and the rest of the EPC crew have probably done over two dozen at this point over the last, you know, decade or so.”

“The predominant way now is that we have a group of three or six EIRs at any time that are, you know, they're full-time employees at APC, but they're working only on sort of the process of either coming to an idea or getting it ready to kind of launch.”

“I think also top founders, like, they want to have They want an idea to be theirs, at least to some extent. And so if you over refine the idea, then it can become less interesting to a founder who wants to, you know, take it, you know, put their own, kind of p…”

“I think the thing that's underappreciated is how much your organization has to be designed intentionally to make to balance this sort of dichotomy of starting companies and investing in them. There, there's definitely some overlap, but I think if you don't int…”

“I mean, Sutter Hill has done this better than anyone.”

“The initial check size for us is like, it's probably three to four million on the small side and maybe 25 to 30 or 40 the bigger side.”

“Well, like with resilience, one thing we learned, which is going to sound very obvious, but you know, early on, we took a little bit of like, if we build it, they'll come strategy. That's a bad idea. It's much better to buy or invest in a facility alongside a …”

“There's a big gap between using venture capital and the private credit markets that are more traditional and sort of profit oriented. And there really needs to be an basically infrastructure financing or project financing for growth stage businesses. That's a …”

“Members include Palantir, Eight VC, Y Combinator, Hadrian, Allen Control Systems, and many more.”

“We're very excited about AI enabled services. And so can you pair the traditional private equity rollup model with sort of a software development team? Buy traditional services businesses, use an engineering team to automate a lot of the work, and turn what us…”

“I publish our internal software benchmark and you see forward revenue on a software company six and a half times. That's about where it was for the last I don't know before five years ago, the last decade. So, you know, five years back, it's the 10 year averag…”

“If you are in AI or AI adjacent, you should be raising every three to four months, in my opinion, and you should be doing it aggressively.”

“On the M&A side, I do think it has a lot to do with regulation and Lena Kahn, you know, threatening to block most mergers and acquisitions, and that's why you see these acqui-hire inflection character AI adept type acquisitions where it seems like they're doin…”

“I think there's a big opportunity for someone to come in and say, Hey, I'll take this position. I know it's good. I'll, you know, buy half a billion dollars worth of it at some slight discount. That's a gap that doesn't exist in the market today, but I think s…”

“We literally had conversations internal at AVC with our partners where we were worried about our offices getting protested. And we gave a like small chance that, you know, actually maybe our reputation is completely ruined because at that time, everyone was ag…”

“Like when we start out the build program, our fund might take 20%, and our, and when my team and I might take 10%, so we might have 30 total, and like, maybe 35 or 40, but like, but we have something where it's less than half, and we're very generous with the …”

“I say the vast majority of what I think, as you could tell when you go and look at things that I've gotten in trouble for now, it hasn't stopped me from building many, many billion dollar companies. It hasn't stopped me from raising a lot of great funds becaus…”

“We've identified about 12 areas like this where we think there's gonna be more than a hundred billion dollars pulled out of those areas in terms of being able to go after them and create more efficient things.”

“If you look at enterprise software, we call it one. And they're very simple systems. In many ways, they're wrappers over a database. If you look at Salesforce, Salesforce doesn't help you make a decision, really. Maybe there's only for the product I do today, …”

“Half of what we do is software between vertical, horizontal, infrastructure, AI infrastructure, data infrastructure. 20% ends up being biotechnology because we think there's key innovations that are a lot enabled by computation, but a lot, you know, with gener…”

“When A tiny girl or somebody else deploys money onto a cap table. They might say own five percent of that cap table, and they'll have, their dollars will have a leverage effect on the ecosystem as a whole. Because while they buy five percent of the company, th…”

“I believe in two years where everyone's gonna say, oh, you know, we thought it would solve everything and it's all a very limited number of use cases. It's complete hype. And, you know, we'll probably see a bit of a crash and we'll see a retrenchment in AI.”

“Most major inference players, for example, i.e. People who help you host open source models or train new open source models are growing incredibly quickly. We're not particularly interested in investing in that. Aaron at the stack.”

“I think the trend of headcount is lowered, but there's still way more venture calculus today than there were in 2019.”

“The other part is our portfolio companies are majorly moving their engineering teams to India, as I mentioned. Large number in Bangalore, increasingly large number in Hyderabad, Chennai, and we see Pune as a hub that's growing very rapidly, and maybe someday G…”

“AVC is not doing India market right now.”

“We're seeing a lot of our companies, productivity is going up when you actually cut the bottom 20%, bottom 30%.”

“We were able to basically put together eight hundred million dollars in the span of like, what, five months.”

“For series B's and C's and D's, you have to have some really special unfair insider advantage where they're just willing to give you a much better deal or willing to work with you before going to market if you're going to be doing those types of investments. O…”

“So probably on the order of really only like a fifth of our capital will go towards it this time, give or take, and that's a very high IRR area.”

“It's hard to say whether or not it's outperforming the rest of it. It seems both sides look like they're in the thirties right now.”

“One of my rules is if McKinsey could have written this, that might be B or B plus work. It's not good enough for APC. It has to be something that's out there enough that McKinsey would have been maybe uncomfortable publishing it or writing about it.”

“On the investment side, I am not the single decision maker. We have a full investment committee. We vote. The only rule there is that if I vote against something, it requires like a super majority to overrule me. But in general, we go by majority vote.”

“Both our investing and our entrepreneurship, we're looking for conceptual gaps in the world, right? We're looking for areas where here's what it is now, and here's what it could be. And then very often times these gaps, you can think of them as opening up as n…”

“I think when I first started the firm almost a decade ago, we were like 90% investing around here. I think the number is somewhere around 60% now around here, maybe, maybe kind of mid, maybe 60 to mid-sixties, and I could very easily see it going down to 40 or…”

“We've told people, as much as you can, get 18 to 24 months of cash. As much as you can, just your business is slow. This is all about survival. Assume the worst and do your best to survive in twenty-twenty.”

“I've kept the fund the same size the last few times, just because it doesn't seem like I'd have time to do more than we're doing right now. So I think six 40 every two to three years to me is about right for what we do.”

“One thing we do at our firm that's probably different than a lot of other firms is we still use about 10% of the fund towards things we're building ourselves”

“I was just outbid last month for something I love by like 60% from a firm. I won't mention the name, but it's a firm that writes regularly the 102 hundred million dollar checks. They decided to come down and write a thirty million dollar check.”

“Our first firm's over 40% IRR, you know, it's 50,”

“Venture capital is a very interesting asset class is very high auto correlation for a lot of these different reasons. And so, so it's just a very big unfair advantage. Once you're winning, you kind of can keep winning if you do it right.”

“You can't just take a company and take 90% for yourself. And that actually means it's not really a venture company. It means it's something else that we wouldn't want to invest in.”

“So about 25% of what we're doing as a fund, I'd say, is within the Renaissance and biology area right now.”

“I think they are, but just barely. And I'm not sure that on the sort of for the best companies, they will be set up.”

“So ABC, we've done away with all that. We've incentivized collaboration. So there's no concept of this is my deal or your deal. I might have responsibility for certain aspects of it because of course there needs to be Delegation. But there's no concept of rewa…”

“ABC was excited to lead our series A.”