FirstMark Capital

“We had a company, Evolution IQ and Insurance, there's Harvey and Legal, there's Henry and Commercial Real Estate, and they all have, A very discreet and sometimes private data set that enables them to build a better model, enables them to deliver a better end …”

“So we've found sadly, that, you know, we haven't seen this wave of startups that we believe are sustainable. So there's actually been a handful of startups that are Wrappers on ChatGPT that are maybe a little bit better at travel. They might be a little bit be…”

“Probably 80% of all legal work is, this is Rick, he needs a will. This is, you know, here is a first mark company that's going through a series A financing. Can you just reproduce documents given these are the founders, these are the issues, and here's the ter…”

“Two hundred million dollars.”

“We've seen a 30 to 50% faster throughput. We've seen a 12% increase in PR merges. This is a really important compounding stat here on the bottom left, which is a 17% increase in the amount of time folks are spending on roadmap versus maintenance and keeping th…”

“In many ways it feels like we are at risk of being like a copycat world where you see some success online and then you go copy it the next day, but it feels like marketing and distribution and the ability to communicate directly one-to-one with your audience h…”

“You can be a one-year-old or two-year-old company and actually be a lot more credible than a five, seven, ten-year-old company, which may be 10 X, hundred X your size, but because you're part of that you know, platform shift and you're like AI native, people t…”

“Most people will care, at least in our world, What the smartest buyer at Cursor thought about a given tool than what the smartest person at the, you know, eighty billion software business that IPO'd in, in 2012 might think.”

“Yes, current chairman of OpenAI as well which is more than quadrupling its valuation this year to four and a half billion. You know, on the other side of that equation is roughly twenty million of ARR.”

“And basically the kind of end, end all of the chart kind of proves the point that you have, let's say, roughly forty billion dollars in valuation across a number of these names but less than a hundred million dollars of revenue.”

“It's possible, perhaps likely, that this is going to be the same thing here, that the same thing is going to happen here, where, like, another few billion dollars are going to be incinerated in, in this moment.”

“And if you would have sat out then you would have, you know, maybe avoided a couple of busts, but you would have also missed on some of the most foundational companies of our lives.”

“And we saw, saw that in our portfolio with Ada, which is one of the leaders in AI chatbots for customer service, where, you know, not that long ago, they would sell on a per seat basis, and, you know, occasionally, you know, per conversation basis, sort of sel…”

“There's a whole range of companies that are somewhere between, call it, two hundred million NRR and five or six hundred million NRR that have been sitting on the sidelines waiting to go public.”

“We certainly gravitate towards companies where founders can do both, but certainly have the technical chops for going directly into the model and doing, you know, fine tuning rag, customizing with the data, like all sorts of different things one can do at the …”

“We announced last week that we raised twenty-one million co-led by Rick at FirstMark and Amir Dan Rubin from Healthier Capital.”

“At the same time, I realized distress was oftentimes a knife fight over a shrinking pie.”

“So if you get involved in the earliest stages in capital efficient businesses that you know really well in a geography that you think you could have some leadership in, that's a fine enough point and a focused enough strategy that you're able to raise some mon…”

“And it's probably been the best time to invest here that I've seen ever.”

“Most of what people call AI we consider not AI.”

“Because we aligned with the way the entrepreneur was thinking, we decided to do a seed investment in Pinterest.”

“So all three of those things were non-consensus and why we decided to do the first round of Riot Games.”

“If you're doing multiple non-consensus things and you're able to execute, that's how you create the Grand Slam home runs, the Shopify's, the Pinterest's, the Riot Games of the world.”

“So I think two thirds of all unicorns in the world have a member of the guild and most companies in New York, but there's companies in China and there's companies in Europe.”

“We look at our pro rata as our option to fund. So we don't view it as an obligation and therefore There's a negative signaling around that or some obligation that we have that unfairly biases our opportunity fund.”

“We're looking at some things in AI. We've been generally under impressed by some of those things recently.”

“Discord, which we think is going to continue to be a very large company in chat and community formation, originally around games, but now much broader.”

“Riot brought League of Legends, which again is a multi-billion dollar per year franchise today, to market with 6.7 million dollars of capital.”

“There's thousands of companies that are going to need capital between now and the end of 24. The investors at almost every stage have generally been hurt by the macroeconomic environment. The purse strings are pretty tight. But the amount of companies that may…”

“In the fourth quarter of 21, we were budgeting for 22, with still a consensus in the broader market that the top three things that matter for your company in twenty-twenty-two were going to be growth, growth, and growth. And we went back in January of 22 acros…”

“And it's really just a way not to increase a personal brand or a firm brand, but accelerate the matching process in this grand scheme of things.”

“I find saying, I don't know, an incredibly empowering thing to say, very disarming, where if people want your opinion or trying to push you for something, just saying, I don't know, gives them no way to really push anymore, and also invites them into a convers…”

“And this was the first version back in 2012, a 139 companies, which felt like a lot of companies at the time.”

“A lot more company, 1416.”

“That's going to be, in my opinion, some tokens is going to be a lot of like private on private kind of like merger to create You know, companies with a broader offering.”

“He was in our Series A, first market in our Series A back in, in 20, 20, 10. It was actually, it was a seven million Series A, I think on a twenty-five million dollar post valuation.”

“Yeah, today we are in discussion with Battery, Battery Venture and First Mars Capital.”

“If we're wrong by 20 or 30% on price in a seed in a series A company, it doesn't matter that much. If we're off by 50% on price, it does matter. And a hundred percent of price matters more.”

“Although you want to reserve some for downside protection, those dollars aren't really as valuable as opposed to making sure that your true winners, you're able to put dollars behind.”

“So we go through, and my partners and I think about on a biannual basis, where are you spending your time on boards, and how do you prioritize your boards, and how do you prioritize the companies in the portfolio, and that's not a purely quantitative exercise.”

“We were excited to be the lead investor in the seed round for Pinterest.”

“New York was not a venture leader. It's quickly become second biggest venture market in the world.”

“Our entire series A was seven million, right? And 1.3 million is from a great venture partner first mark capital in New York. But the remainder of 5.7 is all from individuals.”

“And x.ai is now one of the best funded AI startups, having raised over thirty million dollars from our friends at Firstmark, and a big thanks to Matt Turt for making the intro, and the likes of DCM, Lira Hippo, Crunch Fund, SoftBank, and many more incredible i…”

“As every company is becoming a technology company there's an ever increasing amount of data that's available to them that can be analyzed. So there's an opportunity to develop a very powerful data-driven culture and be much smarter about one's business. And Th…”

“I think that we actually just entering truly interesting part of big data. I think everything so far, and it's been years in the making, has been about the early stage of creation of tools, of creation of companies, startups, of experimentation, and we're just…”

“I haven't made investments in, in quite a while now, and that's you know, part of the reflection of broader concerns around the environment and finding the right opportunity, doing the right thing at the right price and all the things.”

“The most recent investment I made, which is in semi-stealth, but, you know, coming out of stealth very, very in a matter of days now, is A company called Hyperscience which is based here in New York, and that does precisely AI for the enterprise”