Charlie O'Donnell
Founder & Partner, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderauthor@ceonyc ↗LinkedIn ↗charlieodonnell.com ↗
Charlie O'Donnell is the founder and partner at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund based in New York. He previously worked at Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital, and is the author of Founder Unfriendly.
1shows
2appearances
26statements
10resolved
8supported
1contradicted
80%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Charlie O'Donnell said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
O'Donnell: Brooklyn Bridge Ventures rejects startups that have raised over $750,000
“So basically, I have a rule that if you've already raised 750,000 dollars in a previous round, It's actually too late for me, and so, you know, we did napkins, and prototypes, and ideas, and founders, you know, all sorts of various versions of early, and you k…”
O'Donnell: Assuming billion-dollar exits in venture fund modeling is poor analysis
“To me, it's not a good analysis and not a good plan if I expect my winners to be billion dollar outcome.”
O'Donnell: Seed funds deploy 60% of their capital in Series B or later
“I think a lot of people don't realize that most of their funds are actually much later Right. So if you have a seed fund that makes its initial 200,000 to 500,000 dollar bet and seed round, and then follows on all the way through, if you do that math, probably…”
O'Donnell: Brooklyn Bridge Ventures allocates 80-90% of capital to initial rounds
“I will follow on, and anybody who's able to raise an outside round. If you can get somebody else, I will not lead an extra round, but if you can get somebody else to participate, you know, I will do a small amount of follow on across the board, and it's not go…”
O'Donnell: VC personal branding is essential in SF due to extreme deal competition
“So in San Francisco, where I happen to be visiting right now, I think personal brands and marketing that comes from sort of being public as a VC, it is important because it is extremely competitive here to get into deals.”
O'Donnell: Venture fundraising and company execution require separate skill sets
“There's a little bit of a separation between being good at venture fundraising, and being good at running a company, and it's over and above just being a good advocate for your company.”
Crowdfunding pre-sales make early-stage hardware VC investments economically viable
“All these various pre-sale platforms are really making it economically viable for VCs to make early stage investments, because you're not funding the manufacturing, the customers are funding the manufacturing, and so, you know, you, it's a lot easier to swallo…”
No hardware startup on crowdfunding platforms has ever delivered on time
“Well, no one's delivered on time yet in the hardware space, as far as I know”
O'Donnell: Venture investors must separate decision quality from outcome control
“It's important to separate decisions and outcomes. Hopefully, you make all good decisions, but you can't control the outcome, and that's sort of the humbling thing, is that you can check off every which box you come up with in terms of decision making and scre…”
O'Donnell: A $15M fund needs $1B in portfolio value for 3x returns
“You have to create roughly about a billion dollars of total enterprise value to make a small fund like mine about a three-x fund”
O'Donnell: The average tech M&A exit is $250 million, not $1 billion
“When you look at the average tech M&A transaction, the average is not a billion dollar exit. The average is something like more like two 50.”
O'Donnell: Pre-Series A investors heavily weight internal participation from seed backers
“Where I do think it plays is in the round, whether you call it institutional seed, or seed plus, or just seed, and maybe what I'm doing is pre-seed, whatever the case, this two to three million dollar round that sometimes happens before a series A, I think tha…”
O'Donnell: Bob Iger brought Ample Hills Creamery to Disney after ordering online
“I was having a conversation with Brian from Ample Hills Creamery, and he was sort of telling the story of how they wound up in, in Disney World, and they launched a retail location in Disney largely because the CEO of Disney, Bob Iger, Found them in a Wall Str…”
O'Donnell: Waste processing has greater addressable scale than phone-based software
“Not every human being on the face of the earth has a phone yet, but every single human being on the face of the earth produces organic waste.”
Short VC internships fail because deal vetting requires thousands of hours
“Being able to vet deals, I think, requires some amount of experience and just, you know, getting your 10,000 hours in looking at looking at startups. So I think it's really hard to just pop in somewhere for a couple of months and expect to be productive.”
Aspiring VCs should master recruiting, PR, or customer acquisition
“Anybody who mastered the skill of either recruiting or PR or customer acquisition for startups can leverage that skill at a firm, especially as more and more firms are looking to build platforms that add value.”
Brooklyn Bridge Ventures funds pre-seed founders at the PowerPoint stage
“I'm very early, so I'm often the first money in. I've funded Founders with ideas. I've funded PowerPoints. I've funded things coming out of hackathons things before their Indiegogo pre-sale takes off, so.”
Raising a venture fund under $40M is difficult due to LP constraints
“Most of the people who are sophisticated enough to invest in venture at any kind of scale are writing checks of ten million dollars. They're not investing in eight or 15 or twenty million dollar funds, and so it's really hard to raise a fund that is less than,…”
USV partners do 1-2 deals yearly versus First Round's 4-5
“And then also they're two different types of firms, too, so the likelihood that you'd get a deal done at USV when each partner's doing one or two deals a year was, Very different than first round when they're doing four or five because they're seed deals.”
Most of O'Donnell's hardware portfolio raised VC before launching pre-sales
“Three of the four hardware related companies I did raised VC before they went to pre-sale.”
O'Donnell: Brooklyn Bridge Ventures targets eight to ten deals annually
“Basically, we do eight to 10 deals a year.”
GM Pension Fund has invested in every Accel fund since Accel I
“GM had been an investor in venture funds since the late seventies. They're invested in Excel, for example, all the way on from Excel number one all the way on through.”
Brooklyn Bridge Ventures is currently investing out of an $8M fund
“The fund that I'm investing in now is a little over eight million dollars.”
The other half of the tape: Charlie O'Donnell's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 4 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 7
Statements about Charlie O'Donnell, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 7
2017 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: SaaStr's Jason Lemkin on The 3 Things You Want From Your LPs, Why Most VCs Do Not Add Value & Why The Best VCs Know How To Package Startups For The Next Round
- 20VC: AngelList's Naval Ravikant on The Secrets To Success At Seed, Why Micro VC Is The Return of Traditional Series A & Why We Will See The Unbundling Of Traditional VC Brands
- 20VC: Betaworks' John Borthwick on Why The VC Model Is So Inefficient, Why Venture Fund Cycles Are Too Short & Why Frontier Tech Could Only Have Been Disappointing Over The Last Year
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Charlie's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Partner, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures | 2 | 26 | 80% 8/10 | full record on 20VC → |