Accel

“So like on the late stage in terms of investors, we've got about six investors that deploy most of that capital.”

“The thing that still kind of inspires us, you know, through the Facebook parallel was, it was like the first platform company that we saw. So all the companies As associates that we were building relationships with, we're figuring out how they could like build…”

“We, so we initially invested in Facebook in 2005. We led the series A out of our early stage fund, and we created this growth vehicle in 2008. Miles and I joined in 2008 and 2009, and one of the first opportunities was to buy some Facebook secondary that came …”

“And so I remember that partner meeting around the table saying, we actually think this could be a hundred billion dollar business or more that we could generate north of a five X. Lo and behold, that was way under shooting what the opportunity and the potentia…”

“Like, you have to have an outside-in viewpoint on which company is going to win before you even get the first meeting, and then you have to really show up and add some value and you know, Convince this entrepreneur that there's a compelling reason to work with…”

“Up until about five to seven years ago, it was almost a religion here to be the first institutional investor into a company. And as a result, you're almost organizationally introverted. You're spending your time going and finding something that someone hasn't …”

“So holistically, when we reflect on our work over the last couple of years, I think what we see is A seven billion dollar portfolio of really thoughtful, nuanced investments that we've selected very carefully.”

“Our first growth fund was four hundred and eighty million when we first joined. It is not unusual for us to invest five hundred million dollars into a company, actually to invest over a billion dollars into a company.”

“16 months ago, a hundred and fifty million dollar investment that I think is up 13 x today, and the world is now awakened to this company and how special it could potentially be.”

“So we can take Supabase, for example, which is the backend database to a lot of agent workflows and agent applications. That's growing 350% at hundreds of million dollars of scale, and they have virtually no salespeople. It's all inbound.”

“They just crossed nine million developers You know, last week when we first invested, it had under a million developers, and that was at the beginning of last year.”

“We were investors in cursor at the time, but we certainly saw a lot of, you know, cursor as a choke point for downstream workflow creation and downstream tool recommendation. That probably emboldened us to make our second investment in cursor.”

“We were admittedly slower than our peers on the application layer for AI because we were very worried about how fickle they were when the wakes of the models were getting wider and wider, and we spent a lot of time in infrastructure, and we're continuing to sp…”

“We are investing in pure play inference software providers like Ying and the team at Radix Arc that just came out of XAI. They're the inference team there.”

“We did this survey of developers, and we asked them how many of them had a CFO who was telling them to spend less on Consumption versus more, and we actually found that seven times more companies are being told to, like, let it rip and spin more.”

“So incidentally in 2021, early 20 21, we did a deal with Axel, Norwest and others only as a secondary transaction. We said, we don't need the money. So we didn't take any primary in the company at that point in time.”

“Excel adds four billion leaders fund to follow into hot AI growth rounds. Sequoia four days ago raises seven billion dollar growth round growth fund.”

“Growth can obscure and blind you to a lot of underlying ills in the business.”

“And one of the things that we're learning is like 50% of developers switch model families on a daily basis and 95% of developers switch models on a daily basis.”

“There has never been a platform company for engineering as a vertical and engineers are like, I mean, this is the fastest growing, most dynamic vertical there is, and no one has ever owned that.”

“Actually, this company is growing so quickly that on a multiples basis, you know, our first investment was at like four times, five times year-end ARR.”

“A decade ago, there were zero companies worth a trillion dollars. Five years later, there were six public companies worth a trillion dollars. Today, there's a dozen companies worth a trillion dollars in the public market.”

“We had fallen in love with our envy. We were chasing this round. It was going to happen in the two 50 or three hundred million dollar range. And, you know, we had these rigid rules about like, you definitely can't pay more than six times, six to eight times fo…”

“And I think like, I don't regret not breaking the rules in general, but you know, this would have been a time when it could have been worthwhile.”

“There have been investments where, you know, a company went from, they had a million dollars of ARR, and then in the period that you know, before they fundraise, they had like a four million dollar quarter, and it's like, they've got it. Like the product marke…”

“I think this is why, you know, the benchmarks that used to give us all comfort are largely obsolete now. And so, like, you have to be really clued into the usage intensity of your product and really understand how people are using it.”

“A lot of firms miss the model companies early, and we're guilty of it.”

“I mean, the greatest companies of three, four, five years ago, many have gotten totally beat up in the public markets. I believe many are oversold, but you know, that's a separate conversation.”

“There's a an appropriate congratulations and acknowledgement to Dan. There is a huge, loud, full-throated thank you to Alex, and then everybody gets the fuck back to work, you know, and like, it's a humbling industry, and you are only as good as the next thing…”

“We are not a part of Figma, but have a lot of respect for that company. But I know that Dylan is a generational founder, and it's a very important company with an incredible financial profile, and it just feels for a lot of ways, for a lot of reasons, oversold…”

“We didn't take liquidity out of Miro at seventeen billion”

“The example I would point to is, you know, CrowdStrike. Samir Gandhi and John Locke intersected CrowdStrike when it was, you know, there was like a million dollars of software revenue and there was a nine million dollar consulting business, and like, that was …”

“I think 11 Labs is a clear company that we wish we had been a part of. As you know, we haven't spent enough time with the founder, which is, you know, our loss. I think we really regret that one.”

“They're equally bad, but losing stings more. Having had the opportunity and failed, stings.”

“I don't know that I would characterize it as we lost, but the company that I, where I really, really loved the founder and we didn't get there was Shiv and a bridge. We actually hosted this AI dinner a couple of weeks ago and I was like, I'm going to manipulat…”

“When the Excel guys invested in Atlassian, right? It was all secondary. They put sixty million bucks in 2010. And they bid highest of the five VCs.”

“They're estimated in a hundred eighty four billion in venture capital invested this year by their definition. Okay. The peak was 20, 21 of a hundred eighty three billion. So one more billion this year. Okay. But four of those half of the hundred eighty four bi…”

“We've taken this money from Excel, this is the largest Series A raised in 2000, in 12, since 2008, in all of tech, it's outside of the Bay Area”

“And then, you know, we decided to go raise money from Sequoia and Excel. And at the time it was like taking money from the Red Sox and the Yankees.”

“When we sit and look at Series A, we don't sit and be frightened by Index or Excel or the big European players. We sit and be frightened of Andreessen coming into Europe. They're the ones who beat you.”

“So we raised a proper seed round from Excel. I actually think that was only possible because it was an incredibly frothy time. But it turned out to be crucial because we didn't really have traction yet.”

“I think we raised three million at that time on top of maybe like two and change we'd raised before that. So we're at around five or six total at this point.”

“They have massive funds. They have tons of customers. They're like, you tell us when you need us, but they were not, like, checking in regularly. And think of anything, they were cheerleaders. Like, They're like, wow, the product's getting so much better so fa…”

“So we ended up raising twelve million Series A from Excel, and that was, yeah, roughly December, twenty-twenty-three. And that's the last time we fundraised.”

“Usually the multi-stage firms think your perennial, like Excels, Or Sequoia. They're taking very aggressive discounts on, on basically all of their securities. Even if it's a great company that is maybe achieving even a higher price on the secondary market, th…”

“If Alexander Wang's highest and best use is as a senior employee at Meta, then isn't it wonderful that the free market system was able to pay everyone else, fifteen billion dollars, all power to excel who probably booked a two billion dollar gain here.”

“It wasn't until like we brought in a VC that we actually transitioned to the cloud. And that was actually, that was a huge part of the transformation that we did with Excel that was huge, hugely successful and allowed us to do everything we're doing now.”

“And that's where the first round of funding came from was how do we announce ourselves to the world per se so that I can hire world-class talent, world-class leaders. And that's what we did. So at the end of 2019, we announced the, you know, the first ever fun…”

“So if you look, we have a six hundred and fifty million fund, which we raise in January, we will probably do. Like majority of the companies will be the first investors, 80, 90% of the companies. And we do seed from let's say a hundred K all the way. We also w…”

“So we don't have voting. If one person thinks that we should invest in this team, we do. So even now I think for up to a certain amount of check sizes only one person can just invest if obviously at a risk management, if more larger check size, you know, like …”

“And at least what I have observed is a company which you give, let's say a half a million versus a company which you give a five million. Sometimes the half a million company scales much faster, better than the five million company, because the half a million …”

“I really like the space tech space, but I did not invest in Agni cool or pixel or sky route.”

“Actually Bluestone, one of our companies is also going public.”

“We invested two hundred million dollars as the first check in from our side into the company in the late stage growth round.”

“So Bizongo at last round valuation was around nine, ninety million or nine, eighty million.”

“So in the last two years we have invested in close to 35 watt generative AI companies in India. I think globally the number is even larger.”

“In India, we are essentially investing out of three funds, not just one. So we have the six 50 India fund. We have Axel growth fund, which is 1.3 billion, which was also raised in January. And then we have a four billion dollar leaders fund or a late stage fun…”

“So too much is growing amazingly fast. So I think they can be a very large company. They can be a ten billion plus kind of a company.”

“In for example, Axel Atoms, when we opened the first time AI cohort we got some 900 applications from AI, and I think 500 of them were marketing AI companies, which had already happened in the US in terms of actual original, very different ideas. Maybe there w…”

“Axel has been LP in jungle ventures in ideas from capital and in pie ventures.”