Founders Fund

“Founders fund cut their, you know, N minus two funds ago, they cut them because they couldn't think they could deploy enough fund in the, in that window.”

“Senra Systems officially closed our Series B fundraising for sixty-five million dollars. We had Lower Carbon, Interlagos leading the round with a lot of our existing investors coming into the mix, such as Sequoia, Founders Fund, General Catalyst Andreessen Hor…”

“I've never met anyone more tolerant, more open-minded. He gets such a bad rep for a lot of things, but he's just probably one of the most poorly understood people.”

“Best offer I got was two 75, but the firm wants board control. So if you'll just do it without taking the control of the board, you guys can have it. And Peter just offered 300 instead of two 75, which wasn't as good as my 500, but he didn't need to do that. I…”

“The amount of great operators who you're like, well, they wouldn't be, I'm so, I don't mean this rudely, dumb or naive enough to just join a company because of a VC. Do just join a company because of a VC. They'll go, oh, it's a Sequoia-backed company, oh, it'…”

“SpaceX is one of Founders Fund's biggest positions over multiple funds, and they're gonna have an unbelievable windfall with this IPO.”

“Back at Founders Fund, we did the deal in, in, in, in that was sort of the beginning because at that point, Elon had mostly funded it himself. And we were really the first outside institutional capital.”

“There's a reason why Peter Thiel is the greatest venture capitalist in history, right?”

“I didn't read a financial report ever. I still don't know how to read financial reports, right? The one time I ever had to do a spreadsheet, my wife had to do it for me, right?”

“Peter's usually pretty right on the macro things at the end of the day. Timing, timing does come into this stuff, and he's not always exactly right on timing, but at the end of the day, he's pretty good at being correct on, especially on, on macro Global macro…”

“Venture capital to me has put the most money into the best companies possible at the best price possible. Nowhere in that is like portfolio management and reserve calculations and ownership percentages and all that nonsense.”

“If SpaceX didn't work, Founders Fund would not exist. Like, we bet our careers, essentially, on SpaceX”

“You know, we put a lot of money into it. I think we put like 30 something percent of.”

“What I'm actually looking for is, hey, is there some chance this person could have beaten me in my prime? Right, as a game, like playing their game. Their game is not going to be the same as mine. You're not going to beat me at my game, but playing their game,…”

“Menlo will make ten billion dollars in carry Spot will too, plus Founders Fund will make more than that from SpaceX.”

“The first round I raised, Was impossibly hard, and I got caught in between a fight, in a fight in between Peter Thiel and Sequoia, and he had just started Founders Fund, and Sequoia didn't like that, and they were mad at each other, and Peter had said, I'm gon…”

“Anthropic and Anduril and SpaceX. These are phenomenal companies. They will be generation defining companies, and it is a good strategy to give money to ATVC and Founders Fund and Thrive to invest in these companies.”

“Founders Fund and Valor are set to make more than sixty billion in gains on the SpaceX IPO. Sequoia, more than twenty billion.”

“There's like the kingmaker firms that you should accept at any price. One example would be Founders Fund or Sequoia or people like that. And so if you get an offer from them at X and the offer from someone else is at two X, you should take their offer because …”

“Hey, I think there's a huge set of, you know, physical world companies, hardware companies that could be really valuable, and this could span biotech, computer chips, satellites, like space launch, transportation, infrastructure, almost anything that was not d…”

“And so if there's a trend inherently, you have many companies going after the same trend, you're going to have new entrance. It's become a thing. It's not about one company. It's about the theme. And if there's a theme, that's not about one company, then it's …”

“And so I think it's often just like a really deep interest in something that's of a personal interest to a founder. And they're just, they believe it should exist. They believe there should be some way to solve this and everyone's done it the wrong way. And he…”

“And in fact, you should just concentrate into the fewest number of companies possible and don't dilute your average returns by indexing.”

“If you've got a company that was like growing steadily, but then there's a big up round, it's probably the case that that up round is not even enough up. That if it's like a two X up round, maybe it should be a four X up.”

“I don't think you want to be in love with an idea. I think that's a risky thing because then you're going to try and find a way to express that by investing. And you're going to maybe make some compromises on the team because you know, this idea is just so goo…”

“Founders Fund recruits for people that want to be investors, that don't want to be entrepreneurs. If they want to be entrepreneurs, they should go be entrepreneurs. And the two roles are extremely different.”

“I met with hundreds of companies in the first three years that I was at Founders Fund. We may ended up making one investment in KDM, which was renamed Expanse and acquired by Palo Alto Networks.”

“When I joined Founders Fund the very first deal that I saw in motion at Founders Fund was the post ChatGPT round in OpenAI in late twenty-twenty-two, early twenty-twenty-three.”

“The way he saw things, if investments were chosen based on voting, the Founders Fund portfolio would consist of middle-of-the-road startups to which nobody objected. Given that all the profits in venture come from a few improbable moonshots, this sort of conse…”

“Founders fund wired 2.3 million to deep mine and they assumed ownership of a bit less than half the company. There was no other capital available. This is December, 2010.”

“If you look at Founders Fund, which I think is one of the best performing funds, a huge part of their success is basically doubling down on the companies that matter.”

“The unsung hero of Founder Fund is a guy called Napoleon Tha, who leads a growth practice. And Napoleon basically is the one who decides which of the companies should we double down on.”

“Founders Fund are closing in on six billion dollars of new funds. They invested the last 3.3 in 11 months in amazing businesses like SpaceX and Stripe and Anduril.”

“I think Founders Fund's strategy of being ultra concentrated in a few companies has just been this incredible strategy over time.”

“Founders Fund, deploying three billion in under 12 months, but deploying it into Stripe, SpaceX, and Anduril.”

“There's no doubt in a world where one investment might return 50 to a hundred Billion dollars. Everyone else has to feel just a teeny tiny tad irrelevant compared to that return for founders fund and good on them. It's a 20 year compounder at 50% plus or minus…”

“We have no build program, there's no incubation policy or anything like that at Founders Fund, but, you know, Peter started Palantir. I started Anderil. Scott Nolan started General Matter. Delia and Esperohov started Varda, and it's just kind of part of the cu…”

“Cognition, the AI coding company is a large position for us.”

“Concentration and venture is a really important one. This is like the idea that you don't want to have a thousand investments in a billion dollar fund. You want to have like a massive amount of concentration in the top few positions in that fund. That's someth…”

“Well, we should read through some of the history about Founders Fund's investment in SpaceX, because it might be one of the greatest, it might be, it might become the greatest venture capital investment of all time.”

“Again, it's still, like, gonna be a hundred and fifty-ish billion dollar position.”

“And, actually, there's a little bit of Silicon Valley DNA entering the space with General Matter, which is Scott Nolan's company out of Founders Fund, so he's getting into the enrichment space.”

“So there's a program, for example, at Founders Fund where anyone that works on an investment or if you're leading an investment, you can personally invest alongside the firm.”

“I think it's actually a convenience for Delian and some of the Founders Fund folks to absolve themselves of that weight and that responsibility just by being like, oh, it's not part of our, it's not part of our thing. But I think, you know, it's almost out of …”

“Dude, you sourced the seed of ramp.”

“I think a lot of people at Founders Fund have very underrated track records. I think Matthias van Tienen, I think he's the most underrated venture capitalist that exists today.”

“Topic number one, Everett Randall joins Benchmark. Benchmark don't add partners very often. It's a big news announcement that he's joining. Joins Benchmark as their latest GP. He was with Kleiner and he was with Founders Fund before.”

“Founders Fund leads DeepMind's seed round of about two million dollars.”

“Capital concentration limits are the enemy of great venture returns, and that's why they have 33% of their fund in Airbnb.”

“Kevin Hart's at A-Stars is, is, is a new partner of ours, and he was at Founders Funds for a few years.”

“When you look at, Bundly, the best performing managers, or the breakout managers the last few years, I think you put probably Thrive, Green Oaks, Founders Fund, and Eli Gill definitely up there. And all four of them are one person led.”

“We just raised another two hundred sixty million dollars equity and factory financing. So Founders Fund and Lux led the round. So a hundred and ten million in new equity dollars as well as new investors like Altimeter.”

“Specifically with regards to Amgrills raising two and a half billion Series G, I don't know if you guys knew this, they got a billion from Founders Fund in this latest round. A billion again, making it their largest ever check, and the Founders Fund's prior la…”

“They're putting a billion in, right? That's much more ambitious than throwing a growth fund throwing fifty million into the last round of Anthropic, right? Or throwing twenty million into Lovable. It's a big bet, right?”

“Our situation was a little bit unique because our lead investor, FF, are based in New York, and so we actually got a New York or East Coast style term sheet, which was very long, a lot of terms, and you contrast that to maybe the West Coast term sheet, which i…”

“We have this mutual portfolio company, you know, sort of Sword Health that has gotten really deep. They're now like, you know, four billion dollar company.”

“I've never had such institutional demand for any single fund asset than I have for founders fund. Every single LP wanted Founders Fund, and wanted Founders Fund gross, which is even more rare.”

“They may be, to a rounding error, the best fund, so no surprise to get the most amount. I mean, you know, it was great to see the leak now. They're astonishingly good.”

“And it is the, and it is exactly right. But now again, to take both sides of that, it is the enemy of greatness and it is the protector of massive wipeouts, right? And it just boils down to the personal choice of where in that dimension you want to be.”

“Got a five X, get money off the table. We're pointing out three years later, the acquirer canceled the program. You know, huge amount of risk. Made, I mean, you know, made it work, but never forget the risk was there.”