Eric Paley

“Eric invests in Trade Desk as a follow on because nobody else was going to give them money.”

“The only other time that would be equivalent would be about 99 and 2000, and I don't know if there is the volume of funds in the market then, so, and absolute numbers, he's probably right.”

“If you're coming into a company as a senior executive and you have a CEO is bragging to you about how big their last round was in dollars and how big the post money was, ask to see the financials and compare those financials to what they're claiming in the van…”

“It's why most VCs get paid on management fees. They don't get paid on, on, on carried interest, because TVPI, TVPI in that case, doesn't actually translate to DPI.”

“If you're describing bubble as the asset prices related to that general idea, I think we're in a very extreme bubble. I also want to throw out there, and I think this is very relevant to Oh, yeah, I mean, I think we're not quite at NFT level, but we're probabl…”

“Frankly, I think the advice is dangerous, and I'd go one step further, which is, it has become the conventional wisdom of the industry. Which is go faster.”

“I think blitzscaling is this beautiful, beautiful idea of exactly what Mike said applied wrong in all, almost every context, right?”

“And I'll tell you another story, you know, with Trade Desk, one of the reasons we didn't raise a lot of money was, we were the last ones in, and people just thought it was played already in the programmatic advertising market. But one of the reasons we didn't …”

“So I just think there's another problem outside of, it's a different form of risk, which is the likelihood of success, in my opinion, goes way down for those companies, which is super counterintuitive because you're like, well, but they have more money at a hi…”

“One of three things are going to happen to those companies, right? They're either going to take the extraordinary amount of cash they got, cut their burn rates down and figure out how to build real companies. And by the way, many of those will still never rais…”

“If you're recapping a hundred million dollar revenue company at a billion dollar valuation, but it really should be recapped. People will do that work, but if you're recapping a three million dollar run rate revenue company with a billion dollar valuation, the…”

“I actually think that if you want to maintain your integrity, you want to maintain your integrity, and you don't have product market fit, and you raise money at a crazy valuation, and you don't want to have this burden on your back for possibly years, and by t…”

“It's like when a founder wants to sell their company, you say, yes, you should probably sell your company. VCs standing in the way are, I think are nuts.”

“I think the truth of the big firms is they barely care. ... I think it is completely, in most cases, quite disengaged capital.”

“Almost every one of our best companies, almost every single one, the founder founded something before that wasn't a success or a big success.”

“2021 was an incredible time to be a seller, and anyone who didn't see that was completely playing momentum.”

“Valuation is all the sideshow. The dilution isn't even your financing. The dilution is how you use your burn rate. That is where all the dilution lives.”

“I would bet the last few years will be one of the biggest disconnects between TVPI and DPI for venture funds in venture history.”

“Yeah, for me, the job is sort of like, you know, when you're in the Galapagos Islands and you spot some, Finch with a weird looking beak that nobody's ever seen before. Like, I think that's kind of what Eric and I try to do, right? We're trying to, but like, i…”

“Like, SeatGeek was a 2010 investment. I think it's a great company. Dave led that for us. I think it's gonna ultimately have an amazing liquidity event”

“Uber, which Eric participated in at the get-go, looked like a better way of calling limos. No one in their mind could have known how big that was going to be.”

“In venture, investing in helping companies is the only A activity. Everything else is a B activity.”

“Ultimately, your customers validate your business. Venture capital doesn't.”

“So, so at Founder Collective, we've been actively talking about what we call efficient entrepreneurship, the efficient use of capital, which ultimately leads to much more founder ownership, much more founder control, and actually, believe it or not, much less …”

“It's using capital to accelerate those things that are working as opposed to using capital to find things that work.”

“Yeah, I think the healthiest thing that founders could do with more capital is drive a longer runway.”

“I think at the early stage, rough rule of thumb, there's no perfect definition here. You should at least be tripling every two years. Some people would argue you should be doubling every year, which would mean Forex in two years. But just to sort of put a more…”

“Actually, the expectations come as a result of a tough negotiation where, Not just VCs, but founders typically want more capital and higher price. And so it's on both sides, the intention of the VC to get more capital in and incentives to do so, and the desire…”

“There's over 200 Companies that are considered these unicorns, many of them will probably never live up to their billion dollar valuations, but they've redefined for venture capitalists what their expectations are.”

“You have to put that alongside the fact that venture funds have been growing, and the rule of thumb we use there is we say any exit that isn't at least equivalent to the size of the fund is not really material to a fund.”

“I've never believed that go big or go home is a requirement to building a big company.”

“I would love to see more funds focus on specific stage instead of being life cycle funds. I actually think that would be extremely healthy for the ecosystem broadly.”

“I think in really good times, you feel extremely, you know, probably People feel a little overconfident. Right now, it's probably one of those times”

“We saw that that body of that portfolio, that body of work was performing way better. I mean, four times as well as these top quartile PCs”