CircleUp
company on 5 shows · 21 statements across 6 episodes · said 86 times in 16 episodes since 2015
20VC 51 
Top Founders 27 
How I Built This 4 
Capital Allocators 3 
the a16z Podcast 1
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 51Top Founders 27How I Built This 4Capital Allocators 3the a16z Podcast 1
2024 4 mentions in 1 episode
2021 26 mentions in 3 episodes 9 per episode
2019 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- Patrick O'Shaughnessy – O'Shaughnessy Asset Management (First Meeting, EP.01)
- 20VC: What It Takes To Be The Most Effective Coach To Startup Founders, The Biggest Surprises and Challenges About Transitioning To Venture From Operations & 3 Trends Shaking The World of Consumer Today with Victoria Treyger, General Partner @ Felicis Ven
- a16z Podcast | Who's Down with CPG, DTC? (And Micro-Brands Too?)
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 17 mentions in 2 episodes 9 per episode
- 20VC: Ryan Caldbeck on Why The Business Model of VC is Broken, Who is To Blame, How The Best Funds Will Use Data Intelligently Moving Forward & Whether We Are In A Consumer Bubble Or Not?
- 20VC: The 2 Core Roles Played By The Best Seed Investors Today, What To Look For In Potential Co-Investors & Why Seed Funds Can Grow Ownership in Their Best Companies Across Rounds with Ron Bouganim, Founder @ Govtech Fund
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 2 mentions in 1 episode
2016 28 mentions in 5 episodes 6 per episode
- 20VC FF 035: Why Crowdfunding Is Not Right For Tech Startups with Ryan Caldbeck @ CircleUp
- 20VC: Binary's Justin Caldbeck on Specialisation Being Key To Success In VC, The Biggest Problem In VC Today and Why The Future Is A Moneyless Barter Economy
- 20VC: Why Adaptability Is Key To Fundraising, Why Supply Is Always The First Priority In Marketplaces & Why Sometimes You Have To Hire Fast & Fire Fast with Nav Athwal, Founder & CEO @ RealtyShares
- 20VC: USV's Albert Wenger on Automation Replacing Humans, The Universal Basic Income and The Instalment & The Deployment Phase
- EP 338: He's 28 Investing From $600 Million Fund, $4.2 Billion Under Management
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
21 statements about CircleUp, every show
Haydon: Nutpods Raised Its Series A via CircleUp Platform
“Circle Up out of San Francisco. And it would matchmake Investors, two vetted companies, and then these companies, you know, had a built-in angel network, and then in return, Circleup made a percentage off of what was raised, and so that really was our Series A…”
Caldbeck: Earned more in private equity than as CircleUp CEO
“More than I more, more, more than I make per year now, frankly.”
Caldbeck: The multi-year private market feedback loop limits repeat marketplace investing
“In the private markets, that feedback loop is much, much longer. You won't get your money back for years. And you can't really see the performance nearly as granularly, right? And it's just choppier. So that feedback loop leads investors to invest once or mayb…”
A CircleUp investor made a 109x return on Beyond Meat
“When Beyond Meat went public one of their investors had met Beyond Meat through us, and he responded to the original introduction that we facilitated. And he responded to that email when they went public and said, thanks for this intro... And he told us that h…”
Caldbeck: CircleUp had 14 straight record growth months before pivoting
“What I should mention is for 14 months or so in a row before we pivoted, ending two or three months before we pivoted, each month was a record month.”
Caldbeck: Consumer investors frequently ignore data in favor of personal taste
“Consumer investors would always like extrapolate their preferences on on, on the company or sorry, on the investment decision. And I don't like the taste of us. No one will like the taste regardless of the data. And what they miss is that the data was identify…”
Caldbeck believes CircleUp's equity fund achieved top decile venture returns
“I think it was a top decile fund amongst all venture, by the way, not just consumer.”
CircleUp's top-decile equity team had zero prior deal-lead experience
“I think the most exciting thing about that technology or sorry, the fund is that no one on that team ever led a deal before joining circle up.”
Caldbeck hid his cancer diagnosis from the CircleUp team until 2021
“I didn't feel like I could do that with the team. I felt like that team didn't know that I had cancer. They found out earlier this year when I told them before the blog post. But they, the board knew that I had cancer and they let me just be myself.”
Caldbeck: Web data covers 30-50x more CPG brands than legacy sources
“Covers 30 to 50 times as many companies as your existing data source does.”
Hampton Creek will suffer a massive down round
“From tech VC firms, and we're seeing, you know, the mayonnaise company with a nine hundred million dollar valuation and fifteen million dollars revenue. That math doesn't make any sense. It's offensive. They're not going to have a successful exit. They will ha…”
Consumer VC requires $1M to $5M checks across many startups
“In consumer, you need to find a way to deploy one to five million dollars into each of a lot of companies. That's the answer. You can't be looking to invest in 50, seventy-five million dollars into an early stage consumer product company, you're going to get j…”
Quant fund models are the future of private consumer VC
“We think it's a different model, candidly. We think it's a model of developing systematic approach to private investing. So if you're familiar at all in the public markets with AQR, Two Sigma, Renaissance Technologies, any of the public quant funds, We think t…”
Cultural fit is a bad predictor of employee success
“I tend to find the concept of, oh, that person's just not a cultural fit to be a really bad estimate of whether or not that'll be successful.”
USV has invested in quantitative funding models like CircleUp and Numerai
“We have made investments in other sectors where we believe the answer to that question may be yes. We've done that in consumer products with CircleUp. We've done it in quantitative hedge type financing with Numeri.”
Title III of the JOBS Act will not impact marketplace investing
“Our view is that it won't be it won't have a major impact, and we believe it will not have a major impact in part because of the costs to the companies.”
CircleUp's average check size grew from $12K to over $100K
“In 2012 when we first started the average check on circle up was 12,000 dollars and it was all from individual investors accredited investors in 2015 the average individual check was over a 100,000 dollars into a single deal on circle up and half the capital c…”
CircleUp portfolio companies average over 100% annual growth and 50% IRR
“The average company is growing at more than a hundred percent per year since raising on CircleUp, or the unrealized average IRR on CircleUp is over 50%, five zero.”
CircleUp's 2012 seed round was rejected by over 60 investors
“And raised our seed round, which Maveron and Clayton Christensen wrote the book called the innovators dilemma through his hedge fund, Rose Park. They led that back in in 2012. That was a very hard round for us to raise, to be frank with you. And I think we wen…”
Union Square Ventures reversed its anti-crowdfunding stance to invest in CircleUp
“Union Square had said very energetically that they would never invest into an online equity investing platform. And they met us, and they changed the Their view because they realized that we were filling a need”