Early Stage

“Like, it's just virtually impossible to have this sort of mid-stage business effectively without having the early stage and then also the late stage to come behind it as well.”

“In the early stage, you're taking uncorrelated business risk, and in the late stage, you're taking a hundred percent correlated valuation risk.”

“No, I like the early stage, guys. I don't have publicly traded stocks. It doesn't stir my cocoa.”

“When it comes to early stage, especially seed or pre-seed, nobody knows, like nobody knows who's going to be the big hit. People have different conviction levels, but like, there's no real way to know. And so all the signaling becomes so important.”

“It's probably 30, maybe 35% of the early stage on Carta.”

“The second, it's impossible to work with people who don't answer texts within 24 hours. Now this is a bit spicy. I think that especially at the early stages, you want to have people that are going to respond to you. And of course people have weekends and, you …”

“Hiring to senior. They tell me, yes, I'm excited going back early stage and getting my hands dirty. That has never came out to be true.”

“The North Star metric is not a panacea. Just defining, finding the perfect metric as your NSM is actually not necessary, right? Like you when you're, especially when you're early stage what you're mainly looking for is, is my product resonating, right?”

“Because at those early stages, it's not about stay in your lane. It's like own accountability for your lane, but how do you flex and help the business grow?”

“I think ultimately the correction will trickle down to the early stages. It's just going to take time. I mean, it's just going to be a delayed reaction at the end of the day, the micro always needs to dominate.”

“The biggest problem with the big firms that have had these additions of growth and later stage things, they're the tension between early stage I think Doug said, you know, if you, once you get out of early stage, you have private equity. He's absolutely right.…”

“Doing that, and then you're going to see a lot of spin-outs from a lot of the big firms with guys focusing on early stage.”

“Anybody who's like hyper focused on a specific job likely wouldn't be a good fit in an early stage because they're optimizing for being the very greatest at a very specific thing, and that's not what you need in those sort of early small team days.”

“So we think that the ability to generate venture returns, quote unquote, you have the greatest chance at the early stage.”

“At the early stage, it's really much more heavily geared towards entrepreneur. The reason for that, I think, is that we know that the product's gonna change, right?”

“And if it's early stage, PR can be very helpful because it makes everything else easier. Right. So it makes hiring easier. It makes fundraising easier. It makes everything easier, but there's almost never a direct correlation where it's like, I did this, the i…”

“Early, by definition, you don't know the companies that you're going to see because they, you know, they were just born, you know, maybe a few weeks ago, sometimes a few months ago. So you always discover. So that's all about getting as many leads in your pipe…”