Chad Byers
Co-Founder and General Partner, Susa Ventures. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Chad Byers co-founded Susa Ventures in 2013, an early-stage venture firm investing in fintech, healthcare, enterprise software, and logistics. He is best known as an early seed-stage backer of Robinhood, alongside investments in companies such as Andela, Mux, Stord, and Newfront Insurance.
2shows
2appearances
35statements
5resolved
0supported
4contradicted
0%fully supported
21said about them ↓ Everything Chad Byers said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Byers: Early stage will be the last entrenched Alamo of venture
“In a world where companies are more efficient, early stage is really like the place to, Do this business. It'll be the last entrenched Alamo of venture.”
Byers: $70M pre-product seed rounds will be a huge waste of capital
“There's seed rounds at 70 with nothing and like four 19 year olds. Like this is insane. And because Ventures Power Law, that individual deal can make sense if it's the right one. But as an industry, it's going to be a huge waste of capital.”
Chad Byers: Susa Ventures Will Permanently Cap Fund Size at $150M
“The end state for us is 125, one hundred and fifty million dollar fund capped at that size, never getting bigger. Focus exclusively at early stage.”
Chad Byers Predicts Facebook or Amazon Will Hit $1 Trillion First
“So I think it's Facebook. You know, my second answer, although this is kind of cheating, would probably be Amazon. So Facebook or Amazon, I don't think it's Apple. I don't think it's Google. I think it's going to be one of those two.”
Byers: Early success leads venture capital firms into destructive feature creep
“I think there's this
General thing in venture, but it's true of the whole world, right?
You get a little bit of success, start to think you're, you know, you're onto something, and then you get feature creep.
And so feature creep in venture is like, oh, maybe …”
Byers: Vivek Ramaswamy co-founded Chapter; Vance and Thiel on board
“Up until two years ago, Kobe had a very interesting board and a very interesting co-founder. So his co-founder was Vivek. And his board was JD and Peter Thiel.”
Byers: Apple will face innovator's dilemma against personal AI copilot startups
“We think the apples and others are going to have a little bit of innovators dilemma on this stuff.”
Byers: Market sizing diligence is bad work at seed stage
“I don't ever search how big a market is. That's what you're already wrong. I've never done that work. I actually think it's bad work to do at seed.”
Susa Ventures Seeded Fund I With Marked-Up Angel Deals at Cost
“One of the things we did when we raised the first fund, I think that helped in a tremendous way, is we pulled some of our angel investments into FundOne at cost. So we took some investments we had made the year before, put them in the fund at cost, even though…”
Chad Byers: Early-Stage Funds Over $100M Must Lead Investment Rounds
“Because you're going to have to be leading deals if you have a fund of over a hundred million.”
Byers: Susa Ventures launches $175M Fund V for pre-seed and seed
“Fifth fund, hundred and seventy-five million, and it's a return to what we did at the very start. So only pre-seed and seed.”
Byers: Susa Ventures resisted pivoting entirely to crypto or AI
“We have. Yet to go all in on something, but that is not to say we haven't had a risk of potentially falling into that a hundred times in the last decade. We talked about going all in on crypto. We talked about going all in on AI.”
Byers: 2021 venture capital vintage will be historically poor
“Like that vintage is going to be historically shitty.”
Byers: AI will spark a Cambrian explosion of non-venture-scale SMBs
“There's going to be this Cameron explosion of. Like micro S and B and midsize company creation that AI enables that maybe shouldn't be venture backed”
Byers: Each Susa Ventures partner only completes two to three deals annually
“We do relatively low volume. Each partner will only do two or three deal of the year.”
Chad Byers: Institutional LPs Rarely Back First-Time Venture Funds
“So when you start talking about fund to funds or endowments or institutions, they typically aren't funding first, first funds, unless there's a rare circumstance with the GP.”
Susa Ventures Raised $50M for Fund II After Targeting $40M
“We were targeting forty million. All the existings came in for about 30 of that. We landed one of the big institutions I'd kept warm for three and a half years. They kind of anchored the fund with ten million. And then We went up to the hard cap relatively qui…”
Chad Byers: Institutional LPs Reject First-Time Distributed Venture Teams
“At the time we were in LA, SF and New York, literally the team was distributed. Most big institutions, that was an immediate no. Felt the team had to be in the same place.”
Chad Byers: The best modern moats rely on data and network effects
“So we strongly believe that for businesses to create long-term value today, you have to have some form of strong defensibility or moat. And we think the best moats today are built with data network effects or economies of scale.”
Susa Ventures Limits Portfolio Companies to 6-8 Per Partner
“And so we'll always maintain in a really low partner to company ratio, ideally long-term kind of six to eight companies per partner, which is very unique at seed because we want to be so operationally involved.”
Chad Byers: Susa Ventures Avoids Investing Based on Brand Defensibility
“I think in our opinion, we'd rather see one of those other three than just a strong brand. So I think, you know, a good example of this is in the commerce space. There's some companies I think where their most defensible aspect is brand. There's examples of ma…”
Robinhood Scaled to a $50M Series B in 18 Months
“What we learned in fund one, which is really important to inform what we did in fund two was that these companies that grow really quickly for us, it was companies like Robin hood where we invested at seed and a year and a half later they had raised a fifty mi…”
Chad Byers: LP Sentiment on Opportunity Funds Is Mixed
“The feeling in the LP community is pretty mixed on them. And so we haven't, you know, gone there yet, but it's something we've thought about and we've seen quite a bit of.”
The other half of the tape: Chad Byers's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 21 times in 12 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 15Matt Murphy 3John Coogan 2Ted Blosser 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 19
TBPN 2
2026 3 mentions in 1 episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Investing; A Game Of Access Or Picking, Why Technical DD At Seed Is Irrelevant & Why A Contrarian Mindset Does Not Always Lead To Optimal Returns with Leo Polovets, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Susa Ventures
- 20VC: Why I Do Not Regret Taking 'Peter Thiel Money', What Is The Difference Between Leadership & Management & What Conversations Are For The Founding Team Only with Tim Junio, Founder & CEO @ Qadium
- 20VC: Why You Should Build Your Investor Team Like A Sports Team & How To Leverage The Abilities Of Your Investors Effectively with Ted Blosser, Founder & CEO @ WorkRamp
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 7 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: The 3 Things LPs Want To See From VCs & Why The Table Stakes For VCs Is Higher Than Ever with Judith Elsea, Co-Founder @ Weathergage Capital
- 20VC: What It Takes To Raise A VC Fund & Investing in First Time Fund Managers with Michael Kim @ Cendana Capital
- 20VC: Flexport's Ryan Petersen on Why Investor Relations Are Overrated, Why Boards Have To Be Rethought & Why MBAs Do Not Make Bad Entrepreneurs
- 20VC: Why There Is A Revolution In VC, Why Boards Are Inherently Inefficient & Why Data Will Be Central To VC In The Future with Chris Farmer, General Partner @ SignalFire
- 20VC: Upfront Ventures' Greg Bettinelli on Testing For Founder 'Grit' & What It Takes To Build A Successful Consumer Brand Today
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Chad's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder and General Partner, Susa Ventures | 1 | 20 | 0% 0/4 | full record on 20VC → |
| TBPNLEDGER | Co-Founder and General Partner, Susa Ventures | 1 | 15 | 0% 0/1 | full record on TBPN → |