Arjun Sethi

“So I invested in Square when they first started, like the black small square of credit card processing, but I didn't invest in Instagram.”

“So, so if a company goes public or the been acquired and the company that acquired them has is a public company, I tend to just stick around for a long time.”

“We have a goal of hitting a net five X return profile for all of our funds over a 10 year period. And we've always been on track for them. That's kind of our historical record.”

“So one of the reasons why you've seen me not invest in, you know, quick commerce or any of the delivery companies that were there, they, A, they didn't have unit economics. They still don't today. They're trying to do growth at all costs. I think that can make…”

“At the early stage, they don't work because their product doesn't work. At the mid stage, you might have the product, but their go to market doesn't work. And at the late stage, it's because the management team decides to do something extreme, and then the com…”

“We invest in a company at its, what I want to call, early-esque to mid-stage, series A, B, and C. So I basically think of it as fifty million enterprise, 30 to fifty million enterprise value, all the way to two 50 to three hundred million enterprise value. Tha…”

“Where at the time that we had measured and quantified it, there were about a billion in revenue, about six hundred million in EBIT.”

“If I went through all of the companies that we have in our portfolio, I would say that 50, 60% plus are what I call average teams, but they have amazing products and product market fit.”

“So if you're, in my opinion, a good asset allocator, you're reducing your loss ratio and you're concentrating your capital and the products that are working. So you're not bridging companies. You're not reserving companies just because they got a series B or a…”

“In about a year, I think we went from zero to over a hundred million in a month of active uniques for these apps.”

“We would spend upwards of 50 to sixty million dollars a month in advertising across mobile and social platforms.”

“I think at its peak, 15 to twenty million monthly activity, it got there.”

“Part of the asset sale and team acquisition, interestingly enough, was that we ended up selling a small portion of our designs and products to Telegram, and so you see a lot of that today. So we're probably one of the only outside shareholders that own parts o…”

“We did growth in data science consulting for Snapchat, for Uber, for Airbnb, all these companies. And when I say that, I don't mean it to be facetious. Like we actually sent and built teams for them. We would do multiple offsites with them. We would actually b…”

“Social Capital was the only firm that I had met that had built out a growth and data science team at the time.”

“I don't think we successfully did that, but I think we did successfully marketed it ahead of what we could do, but we did bring some of the brightest minds around the table.”

“90% of the time, companies do not have product market fit. That's a really hard statement. Even companies that have raised upwards of 25, 50, a hundred million dollars, sometimes they don't have product market fit.”

“If you ask me about any of our top 12 concentrated positions where we spent upwards of a billion dollars just in like a very concentrated way, there's probably 20 to 30% of the companies that say, I think they could do it better, they could do it faster.”

“Like I'm not looking at a data room. I don't look at their deck. I don't care about any of that.”

“The moment I get it on average, if we prioritize it, let's call it a P zero at the firm, it's 20 minutes to get a 50 to a hundred page report.”

“The earlier we invest, the more hands-on work. The later we invest, the less. There's more governance. But the much more later the company becomes in their life cycle, let's call it five, 10, fifteen billion these days that you see for a lot of our companies, …”

“We don't rely on the last board meeting didn't feel good. So I don't want to do my pro rata. Or I didn't have a good conversation with the founder. We look very, very purely at the metrics and say, okay, great. If we were to upsize, what do we need to see?”

“One thing that never changes, and we've seen that across every company, we've been a part of Uber, Facebook, Airbnb, Lyft, et cetera. The list goes on where we built a lot of these growth and data science frameworks is that their product market fit and how the…”

“A lot of the reasons why people focus on ownership, it's a hard thing to say is that they're just bad pickers. So if you say I can focus on 20, I want 10, 15, 20% ownership in this company. It's because they believe that if they make failure somewhere else tha…”

“If on average, let's just say I have a hundred million dollar fund we had, I think it was roughly 15 companies, but probably concentrated to about seven. Fund two, same thing. It's about 12 companies. And you're not as ownership sensitive.”

“And so if we can, we trade, we'll trade spots sometimes to say like this company is now at a stage where we think this is the right person or vice versa. I'll come in at different stages or I'll let go.”

“I think a part of it is we don't care about board seats, at least again, aspirationally, we have, some of us have a ton, some of us have none.”