True Ventures

“The week that we were going to get a term sheet from True Ventures, Notion pivoted from website building to document collaboration, and so True Ventures was like, hey, sorry, we have a conflict, and we're like, yep, no, no worries.”

“I think VC is going to evolve dramatically over the next couple of years. Cause I believe that people don't need to raise capital and oftentimes most ideas, especially like just great lifestyle businesses that get to, you know, two, four or five, ten million i…”

“We invest in a company called Sandbar that's doing this AI ring. I don't know if you've seen the prototypes for it. But it's really cool. And you know, they, I can't remember what, how much you put in, it was close to ten million or something like that, but it…”

“We're definitely, we strive to be a non-attribution firm. Although everybody in internally certainly knows who does the deals and who's working on deals and founders definitely have a dedicated person, but We have a tendency just to think that, you know, one s…”

“Yes, your hustle does source deals, and you do have to make the call, but ultimately you win these deals often because of the body at work and the reputation of the most important brand, which is not The me brand, but the us brand.”

“We have one portfolio company that, and these are real numbers, not venture numbers... It's already unicorn status valuation that opened a new in December had zero revenue around this new product line. And this year ends at minimum one 50 AR are on that busine…”

“We don't do Midas lists. Like we don't, this is back to non-attribution.”

“And so I just think for us as a firm where we're not going to invest in the kind of the infrastructure, you know, kind of layer per se, right? That's just not, you know, the, those checks were already just way still beyond. That's what we talked about. Fifty m…”

“Like, I think it's just required us to just say, pause for a second on all things that are non AI, because we're going to have catch up like almost every firm, by the way.”

“You know, we were, he was one of our advisors at Hodinkee. And so he would show up all the time to our Hodinkee. Board stuff and whatnot. He's a great advocate.”

“In fact, I've had general catalyst, true ventures, tribe, lower carbon that have come in after me after I've said yes and have not altered the terms of those rounds.”

“In my opinion, the very first front revenue facing hire should be someone who can develop, produce content and messaging.”

“Even though my automatic experience is probably only a small part of my investment approach today, you know, maybe 25%, the rest is really based on being part of the team at True, and like I said before, we're a very collaborative group, and we're committed to…”

“It was actually eight years of doing both of those jobs.”

“I don't really feel like it's that compressed, to be honest. I mean, it does, you know, when a startup takes off, it does move quickly, but I feel like we get involved so early. We actually have a good amount of time on that first year or two when it's just pe…”

“So for example, we looked at Instagram really early and it was literally a different product with a different name and we passed on it and then they later pivoted to Instagram. But by then it was too late for us to invest.”

“If you look at the True Ventures portfolio, we had three very big exits over the last two years. Ring.com to Amazon, Duo Security to Cisco, and most recently, the Peloton IPO. Now, these three companies have one intriguing thing in common. They were all built …”

“Right now, I would say about a quarter of our investments are in Silicon Valley, about half are in the rest of the U S US, and then another Quarter or so in the rest of the world, primarily Europe and Africa”

“Right now, I'm learning or trying to learn about decarbonization to see if there's a seed stage investment opportunity in that space, and it's been challenging because it's a totally new area for me, and also the conventional wisdom is that it's not a good pla…”

“And so, you know, to dive in on True, we manage funds of roughly three hundred million, and really focus on leading the first round of institutional capital, usually pre-seed or seed, with investments of 500 K to three and a half million, targeting 20 to 25% i…”

“We've backed 28 people twice. We've backed eight people three times.”

“And so in some of our biggest companies, things like Ring or Peloton or Zymergen, we started with a small check and over time invested 50, sixty million dollars.”

“We have a meaningful bias towards priced equity rounds with a single lead who have really deep pockets. Somewhat self-serving, but we also think it's the best way to go build very important companies.”

“And so our, you know, call it 20 to 25% at the beginning. If we do everything right, we'll own between 17 and 20% at outcome. But I think it's very difficult over time with success to continue to buy ownership.”

“I would say in most of our successful companies over time, they were not perceived as successful in the beginning. Things like Ring or Splice are companies that Today, I think people are like, that's, those are really interesting businesses, but there were kin…”

“In each fund, we'll make between 45 and 50 initial investments in reserve really heavily.”

“In each fund, we've shown an ability to partner with one or two founders where our investment in the company over time will end up returning the entire fund. It, Duo Security, HashiCorp, Peloton.”

“At True, decisions are driven by an individual protagonist on the investment team, often with support of one or more others on the team, but are often made in a non-consensus way.”

“I have not yet had an experience where someone was surprised when we said it wasn't working. And often it's a conversation with them where they are aware before we are.”

“So when we invest at the seed stage, it tends to be 65% is at or near company inception, some are a little bit later, but it tends to be one to three founders.”

“When we invested, the doorbell market was zero dollars.”

“50% of their products at that point didn't work.”

“Included in their stellar fund portfolio is the likes of Index, Initialize, True Ventures, Andreessen, and some of my favorites in Ed and Elliot at Boldstart, just to name a”

“I do think it's what's going to separate the best firms in the next decades to come. I think IQ, if you want to call it, just Being smart, understanding industries. I do believe that's table stakes in a lot of ways. There's a lot of smart people around. A lot …”

“For example, we invest a very small portion of our fund to begin with. It's, you know, two million bucks, for example, maybe that's one half or one percent of the fund.”

“We are very open about the fact that 40 to 50% of the companies we invest in will probably lose or go to zero.”

“So when we make that one to three million initial check, we target around 20% ownership, and we have a big enough fund, so our latest fund's around three hundred fifty million, and we have an opportunity fund, which is about two hundred eighty million. That's …”

“We do about 45 to 50 investments per fund. That tends to be around the right number. It's higher than what you typically see in some of the later stage funds, obviously. But we think, you know, having, it's sort of the right number for us in terms of failure r…”

“So we don't have a consensus driven approach. We actually encourage dissension and we want dissension. We don't have attribution.”

“There's some dissension in the room, and those are the best investments that tend to go forward, and that, that we make, at least on that first check. We're trying to, as I said before, really maximize risk on that first check.”

“There was a company and I've been a little bit open about this, but there was a company that we put five million dollars into the company on the day of wiring. The CEO called me and said that he was diagnosed with colon cancer. And that he didn't have a long t…”

“Some of the time allocation statements that people make about, Hey, you need to spend more time with the winners are maybe a little bit off base because maybe you actually don't need to spend as much time because they're doing just fine.”

“Maximizing risk is such a core tenant tenet to what we do. It was the third bullet point on the first page of our investment deck that we've been pitching to LPs”

“Our average initial investment is, you know, somewhere between one and three million dollars. We're currently operating out of a three hundred million dollar fund. So our initial check is less than one percent of the fund.”

“You're not allowed in our partner meeting to say, I'm right about this, or even I think I'm right.”

“We have no attribution for one. So our, you know, in between our partnership, it's not my deal, yours. That's essential. You know, no one's worried about their own track record. No one's worried about that. It's all about how we support our founders across the…”

“If you're really, really good at early stage venture, that's where you want to be. You don't want to be at the Rosewood schmoozing with other VCs trying to figure out what they did and what, you know, what you can do to be a, you know, a little copy of that. Y…”

“I think that there's just incredible automation that's happening and it's backed up by software-based technologies, machine learning, and yeah, a little bit of AI and decision-making, that kind of thing, but in computer vision, but we're seeing a lot of very, …”

“We're never going to go after another fitness counter, a step counter kind of idea. That's old and in the market now.”

“I'm not thesis driven at all. I'm not trying to predict where the market is going or where the next great ideas are.”

“And I spent probably a disproportionate amount of time, I think maybe more time than any other investor, in digging in on that basic premise for why are they after this?”

“Blue bottle coffee is a bit of an atypical one for a tech investor to be doing, but it turns out that this is going to be, you know, one of the hallmark companies in our portfolio.”

“Our goal at True is always to be the anchor and to have the largest Shareholding in the company at that stage, because we think we're going to be able to impact the DNA of the company in a more profound way and help protect it more effectively.”

“We tried raising money from crazy egg from true ventures. True ventures said no to crazy egg. They love the idea of kiss. Eventually we raised money for kiss.”

“Yeah, very rare for its time, but I don't regret it at all. In fact, it was the smartest decision we ever made, because we didn't have to deal with all the pricing weirdness that happened in the years afterwards.”

“I think we did sell about 20% of it for 300 K.”

“The philosophy was actually, thanks to True given to me because of their philosophy, which was seeking founder-friendly venture capitalists, and that was really kind of their contribution to the ecosystem, was how do we find, how do we be the most founder-frie…”