Mantis VC

“It's a power log in music. Like, you build a career off of, like, a couple of huge songs, hopefully, and then there's lots of hopefully other, lots of great music, but, you know, only very few artists will, like a Drake, you know, will just constantly deliver …”

“The relationship between an artist and a record label is It's basically the same as a founder and their investor.”

“Our goal at Mantis is to be, like, the sixth man on every championship team. Like, I want to work with the best investors who are investing in the best founders, and I want to absorb the things that both those parties are doing to, like, understand how to make…”

“When we started, we were writing 25, fifty-k checks into companies. That was all we could get, you know, and it was about proving ourselves and building a reputation.”

“This is a new space and there's a lot riding on this and it's very live or die for us to make this work.”

“We've spoken to enough incredibly successful people over the last three months. That, like, everyone begins to contradict themselves. Funny way. You know, in the beginning, you're like, alright, alright, I'm thinking about this the right way, and then, like, t…”

“We actually are pretty bearish on investing in music tech companies, which I feel like we see probably most of them that are out there as of our profile, but we haven't made an investment in the music space yet.”

“So obviously there's the press element and things like that, but to us, it's a red flag when a company's like, hey, can you just like post us on social media?”

“Due to the size of our fund and the check size that we write, we're not leading rounds. Typically, we're not taking up the lion's share of a lot of these rounds.”

“Alex's superpower, too, is he's the world's greatest haggler, and he'll just hassle people. Like, if you say you're like, yeah, we're interested in having you in this round, you're not gonna not hear from Alex once or twice a day until you, like, officially pa…”

“Just narrowing our thesis to the point where like the investments we make, the businesses that we have access to, We'll have great synergy with all of the other things that we do and who we are as people.”