Venture Backed Startups

“Venture backed startups are less than one 10th of one percent, maybe even 100th of one percent. Of the total number of startups in this country. 99.99% of the economy is non-venture backed.”

“The secondary markets for private shares right now are totally anemic. Maybe a hundred late stage companies Stock trades. The primary reason that's the case is because the buy side on these markets just don't know anything about the other 30,000 venture backed…”

“There's no one right way to do it. And there's no one. Better finish line than another in the sense that you don't have to build the next venture backed startup. You don't have to have your company bought by X or Z. You don't have to grow at a 200% per year. Y…”

“People should consider bringing on a talent person if you're venture-backed really early on.”

“My experience is that the bootstrappers tend to be market insiders who have identified a problem, go out, hire a dev team, and they already have their go-to-market figured out. That's how they're able to bootstrap. They can get cash flow from day one, do it on…”

“In total I think about two dozen of our venture-backed startups are listed in the country today.”

“When a startup runs out of cash, everybody kind of runs for the hills. The founders are like in a broken cap table where they have no upside, so like, hey, I'm out of here. The investor is like, well, hey, there's no one to run it, and there's no money, so we'…”

“Most of these companies don't get bought with just a big check cash on the barrel head.”

“The first three quarters of 20, 23 saw What is it? Around a 180, a quarter of shutdowns. And so our run rate, let's assume the run rate's like 200, we're like 800 a year shutdown.”

“This is the year that the shit's hitting the fan because, you know, you can only extend runway so much and it doesn't mean much if you're not growing.”

“If the wild success is the best outcome, the second best outcome. I would argue is quick failure.”

“And then as a founding engineer, you're probably one of the first one, two or three engineers. So you might get a percent or three percent or five, you know, some number. It's usually pretty small. Probably in a venture backed company, you'll probably be like …”

“A lot of companies made a lot of mistakes about their own assessment of risk. In addition to just, you know, the powder keg that happened the moment people realized that SVB might be a challenge.”

“Silicon Valley Bank is used by 50% of venture backed startups.”

“There's been about a billion dollars of capital crashed into the ground really in this one industry in terms of venture backed startups. That have been better funded, better, you know, smarter teams, more experienced teams that have chased kind of this same op…”

“And then the other thing I'm looking for is I'm waiting for that like company that raised 30, forty million dollars and now burned through it all, but built an amazing piece of tech to go and micro acquire and sell for a million or two. Like, It's inevitable. …”

“Like the whole idea behind venture capital is we are going to take a bunch of mostly already wealthy people because that's who starts venture backed startups, right? The overwhelming majority, I think something like 90% come from family wealth.”

“A lot of these firms are coming in not only to invest as minority growth investors, but also to buy our companies, which is a very new vein of exits for a lot of these venture-backed startups. It's really emerged, I'd say, in the last decade”

“I think a lot of the protocol level innovation is moving away from venture backed startups and moving into blockchain based protocols.”

“Make sure you start a company with someone that's done, like if you're going to go into venture backed startups, right? Do it with someone who's done that before.”