Redpoint Ventures

“The goal was not to raise. I didn't have a slide deck. A lot of my co-founders asked me, can you send me a slide A, series A slide deck? I said, I don't have it, man. So we got preempted. Even the ten million we raised in the, eleven million we raised in the s…”

“On the series C Jan had a handshake with the red point with red point and Redpoint just stopped returning his calls to the point where the Series C was led by us, who also led the Series A, and, ah, NEA who led the Series B, like we co-led the Series C, becaus…”

“We raised eighty million dollars led by Iconic and General Catalyst, and, you know, grateful for YC's continued participation, as well as Benchmark and Redpoint.”

“I turned to Redpoint and to Benchmark, and I said, we're not going to sell for the next four months, because if we sell and we start onboarding all these great attorneys, they're not going to have the best experience. And they're going to think that the produc…”

“As we think about things, we're super focused on what's the end use case, and how powerful is that with AI, and a lot less focused on what are the gross margins affected today because these models just get cheaper and cheaper over time.”

“We looked at data of all the kind of series B and C companies we'd looked at that were non AI and then AI. And as you can see, the AI companies, they're raising larger rounds. They're raising those rounds at higher prices.”

“A common trend is that in, in any category we look at, there's really two to three of them that, that ride to the top, and they're providing a better user experience, they're scaling faster, and I think the reason is there's not a ton of tooling that exists fo…”

“And so I'd say to date, the categories that feel like they've worked best are coding, customer support, legal, and healthcare.”

“The bar for what product market fit and what an effective wedge looks like has gone up in AI because you've just seen explosive growth for companies when they do have them.”

“I'm sure, over time, they'll replace plenty of what we do.”

“Some of the easiest things to sell AI products to today or automate are things that maybe have already been outsourced that business process organizations are doing already. And the interesting thing about that is they might actually have a real race to the bo…”

“Abridge, we co-led their Series C. They recently raised a Series E at 5.3 billion dollars.”

“Velocity is probably the most important thing we look for. The market just changes so fast, and it's both a race to build the sheer breadth of all the different things these models can do for end industries, but then also a race to, hey, a new model or new cap…”

“A lot of what differentiates these products is really the thousand little things that make one product delightful to use over another, so it's the UX that's way easier to use, it's latency that's way faster, so every time you're doing a review it comes back qu…”

“For a while in our CRM, we used to distinguish between we're like AI companies and this one's a SaaS company and we've now collapsed that distinction.”

“And apparently, and this is such a bummer cause I'm a CS major, but new grad CS majors have a larger unemployment rate than art history majors.”

“Tomas Tungus, who just already raised like seven hundred million.”

“I think if you talk to smart endowments or pension plans or stuff, they, they've definitely as fund sizes have gotten to three, four, five, six billion dollars. Like those people have raised eyebrows and maybe voted with their feet to either scale down or walk…”

“It feels like we've rotated a little bit more back to like, who is my individual board member? Who is going to be on the ground with me day to day? Like I'm going to solve for that person rather than the soul, like just the brain past a certain point, right? L…”

“I've probably seen more of Hey, this fund has a bunch of money and you might not be getting their number one person. It could be their, you know, whatever, their reliever out of the bullpen that's coming in to do the round. And those are the ones that they're …”

“That round that we ended up investing in at whatever, eight billion or eight and a half or whatever it was what's a couple hundred million among friends. But I that was like, December, 21 when we were talking about it, and then the round ultimately closed in J…”

“What I've realized is like price very rarely within some zone has mattered. And when I find myself iterating a little too much on on like, oh, I'll do it at this price versus that price. It probably says something about what I think the ultimate outcome for th…”

“For public companies, growth is still worth twice as much as profitability for startups. It's probably four to 10 times.”

“We have 20 folks on the dot. It's 16 in product and engineering, so very heavy on the build side. And that was intentional because we were fortunate to be able to raise a good amount of capital actually from two former Looker board members at a pair of VC firm…”

“The company was burning a ton of capital and couldn't raise money from the outside. And it was the insiders that stepped up and led that round because they believed in the business.”

“Battery gave me an offer. Redpoint did not. I went over to Battery. I was there for six years and the Redpoint folks kind of stay on, stayed on top of me and they wanted to correct the error of their ways and not making me an offer when I was associate. And so…”

“It's, I think the venture capital world that we live in today is is more akin, we went from a generation, and I, I've made this analogy, that we were in the generation of Broadcast television, right? Where there were only a handful of channels and what you wer…”

“I think it means that each individual at red point has to stand for something and be known in some way, shape, or form for what it is that they do to help rise above the noise.”

“Anyone that invested last year lost some level of price sensitivity.”

“Our simple underwriting framework for growth at Redpoint is three to five X with 10 X plus upside, right?”

“While I wish that I invested at today's prices last year, there isn't a single investment that I wish I had back, right?”

“Well, it's definitely informed my, if you wanna be in the company within the margin, just find a way to get into it and don't get too hung up on the ten million here, ten million there.”

“So we really focus on the outcomes more than the percentages at our stage.”

“If something just feels like an inevitability and you might be a little early on the tacker on the market, we're talking months or maybe years, not decades, then it's worth just getting on board. If you think the company is going to be the one to execute on it…”

“One of the companies, one of the first investments out of the fund is this business wander. QED and red point were leading the series a very cool short-term rental vertically integrated platform.”

“Prior to their IPO, they raised over four hundred and fifty million from the likes of Mike Volpe at Index, Satish at Redpoint, and eVentures to name a few.”

“The first week I was there was when Tomas closed the Looker Series A. They had 15 people there. I think now they have over 600, and they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“That's raised over forty-five million dollars in VC funding from some of the very best in the business, including Thrive Capital, Forerunner Ventures, IVP, Redpoint, and SV Angel, just to name a few.”

“We raised fifty million at this point. So, so basically the trajectory was it was the first 12,000 from Y Combinator. Then we raised 40,000 in angel money. And then at that point we got some tractions. We really quickly went to raise three and a half million f…”

“The big theme about machine learning is, it's going to change the world of SAS because all of a sudden, it's not just, The machine learning innovations will happen in the core categories that we've seen in the past. Those horizontal companies selling to custom…”

“The algorithms themselves are not that innovative. They're not that close source. So you, we're going, the company that's going to really innovate is going to need its own data set to be able to train its own models.”

“Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they will be releasing the APIs that lots of companies will be building on, competing with them. You may want to compete with them, but we will likely not invest in that because it's a very challenging go to market strategy.”

“A machine learning innovation, in, in and of itself, is not enough to generate substantial customer demand. It has to be able to change the go-to-market.”

“What it really comes down to in order to get people comfortable with UI, particularly interactive UI, is being able to set the expectation of the user appropriately, and then and that means much lower than you think it typically ought to be. And then the secon…”

“I think, you know, the first way I look at it is I think these companies are going after bigger opportunities than we ever have before as an industry. You know, as a result, they're in growth mode far longer than companies ever used to be.”

“Sometimes it allows a lack of discipline to creep into those businesses, and there's something about the bright lights of being a public company that forces discipline onto companies and ensures that they're making best use of their capital and behaving in the…”

“The second time that we see these things applied is, is really opportunistically where, you know, you're very excited about a company. It's doing very, very well. You just think there's an opportunity for the company to hit an additional set of milestones that…”

“We have found that unanimity is a bad thing in venture capital, that, you know, a lot of the best ideas are the ones that are the most controversial”

“You only need to convince one other partner at Redpoint that this is a good investment, and if you do, then it's an investment that we can do.”

“Once we invest in the company, we've signed a moral contract with that entrepreneur that we are going to support them, that we're going to be there for them.”

“We are not spreadsheet investors. You know, we don't try to The fit, all these numbers into a set of checkboxes, and then determine whether or not they're achieving these things, or they've met some minimum threshold, because every opportunity is different, an…”

“Red point strategy is to look at it almost as two totally from portfolios. And very, very rarely, I think there's probably, you know, one exception does our late stage fund invest from our early stage fund?”

“Famously, we had Andy Rubin as a IR here, and he actually founded Android out of our Menlo Park offices, and eventually helped them sell that into Google.”

“So we think of hardware as that kind of, that wedge into trying and going and beating these big guys.”

“But the main VCs that we work with are investor venture partners General Catalyst Andreessen Horowitz we work with Redpoint and We work with the end capital in Europe, and those would be the ones we spend, that we share the most deals with”