Eric Paley
Secretary, Massachusetts Executive Office of Economic Development. On 1 show, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderexecutive@epaley ↗epaley.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Eric Paley is the Secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Economic Development and a co-founder of Founder Collective. He previously co-founded Brontes Technologies and led early-stage venture investments in companies such as Uber, The Trade Desk, and Airtable.
1shows
3appearances
58statements
6resolved
4supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
102said about them ↓ Everything Eric Paley said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Paley: Conventional VC advice urging startups to go faster is dangerous
“Frankly, I think the advice is dangerous, and I'd go one step further, which is, it has become the conventional wisdom of the industry. Which is go faster.”
Paley: High seed valuations lower a startup's chances of ultimate success
“So I just think there's another problem outside of, it's a different form of risk, which is the likelihood of success, in my opinion, goes way down for those companies, which is super counterintuitive because you're like, well, but they have more money at a hi…”
Paley: VC obsession with ownership targets hurts founder alignment and returns
“We do not focus on ownership. We actually think that's a very problematic mindset. There's a whole bunch of downstream issues, including, first of all, our missions about alignment with the founder, and the whole ownership mentality. You can twist yourself in …”
Paley notes very few former-founder VCs achieved $250M exits themselves
“Very few of the VCs who were once entrepreneurs have had two hundred and fifty million dollar exits.”
Founder Collective avoids pro rata rights due to founder misalignment
“We don't do a lot of Parada for a bunch of reasons, including we don't think In most cases, in many cases, Parada's aligned to the founder, because the problem with Parada is you're always a net buyer of the founder's company, and they're always a net seller.”
Exercising pro rata rights repeatedly dilutes seed fund returns
“The other thing you're doing when you're exercising parada over and over again is Is your dollar averaging down your returns, or otherwise you could say your dollar averaging up your cost basis?”
Paley: High seed valuations make Series A fundraising significantly harder
“I actually think being overpriced at seed is actually a bigger problem than most entrepreneurs realize, particularly as the market's adjusting, right? It's a very hard time To raise Series A in general, and it's a harder time if you're already priced where som…”
Paley: Top Company Never Matched Its Founding Year's Hottest Theme
“Never, not the last 20 years, has the most valuable company born in any single year, right, valuable as of now, been this in the theme that was hot in that year. It has not happened.”
Paley: Most VCs Earn Money From Management Fees, Not Carry
“It's why most VCs get paid on management fees. They don't get paid on, on, on carried interest, because TVPI, TVPI in that case, doesn't actually translate to DPI.”
Paley: AI Startup Valuations Are in an 8 or 9 Out of 10 Bubble
“If you're describing bubble as the asset prices related to that general idea, I think we're in a very extreme bubble. I also want to throw out there, and I think this is very relevant to Oh, yeah, I mean, I think we're not quite at NFT level, but we're probabl…”
Paley: Easy access to early capital usually destroys startup value
“The easy access to money at a accelerated stage that the company is not ready for usually will destroy the company's value.”
Paley: Overcapitalization Is the Biggest Risk to Startups Beside Lacking PMF
“Besides product market fit, the biggest risk to a venture-backed company is bad capitalization. And we don't mean undercapitalization. We mean overcapitalization”
Paley: Blitzscaling is applied incorrectly in almost every startup context
“I think blitzscaling is this beautiful, beautiful idea of exactly what Mike said applied wrong in all, almost every context, right?”
Paley: High valuations turn off good investors and increase next-round risk
“I don't think the founders often appreciate two things is how much they're turning off investors that might've been good investors for them, but even bigger, how much risk they're actually taking on their next round. What this round does in terms of creating r…”
Eric Paley: Overvalued unicorns face one of three realistic fates
“One of three things are going to happen to those companies, right? They're either going to take the extraordinary amount of cash they got, cut their burn rates down and figure out how to build real companies. And by the way, many of those will still never rais…”
Paley: Investors won't recapitalize overvalued startups with low revenue
“If you're recapping a hundred million dollar revenue company at a billion dollar valuation, but it really should be recapped. People will do that work, but if you're recapping a three million dollar run rate revenue company with a billion dollar valuation, the…”
Paley: Struggling founders should return unspent capital to investors
“I actually think that if you want to maintain your integrity, you want to maintain your integrity, and you don't have product market fit, and you raise money at a crazy valuation, and you don't want to have this burden on your back for possibly years, and by t…”
Paley: 2021 Was an Incredible Time to Sell Venture Investments
“2021 was an incredible time to be a seller, and anyone who didn't see that was completely playing momentum.”
Paley: Private companies are actually more volatile than public companies
“Private companies are more volatile than public companies, in truth, we, like, pretend they're not at all volatile, and somehow their valuations are whatever happened in the last round some months ago.”
Paley: True Startup Dilution Comes From Burn Rate, Not Financing
“Valuation is all the sideshow. The dilution isn't even your financing. The dilution is how you use your burn rate. That is where all the dilution lives.”
Paley: TVPI vs DPI disconnect will be among largest in VC history
“I would bet the last few years will be one of the biggest disconnects between TVPI and DPI for venture funds in venture history.”
Paley's study of 71 IPOs shows capital raised doesn't drive startup success
“We looked at 71 IPOs over the last five years, the 71 tech IPOs over the last five years. To study whether venture capital in the outlier cases could be argued to have really driven greater success. And it turned out there was effectively no correlation betwee…”
Paley argues lightly capitalized startups outperform heavily funded competitors over time
“Over time, the lightly capitalized companies, the efficient entrepreneurs outperform.”
The other half of the tape: Eric Paley's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 97 times in 18 episodes across the shows. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most David Frankel 58Harry Stebbings 29Micah Rosenbloom 4Chris Dixon 4Roger Ehrenberg 1Beezer Clarkson 1
Statements about Eric Paley, by other people (5)
Clarkson: Absolute TVPI-to-DPI gap is likely largest since dot-com crash
“The only other time that would be equivalent would be about 99 and 2000, and I don't know if there is the volume of funds in the market then, so, and absolute numbers, he's probably right.”
Frankel: Founder Collective funded The Trade Desk when nobody else would
“Eric invests in Trade Desk as a follow on because nobody else was going to give them money.”
Maples: Seed venture capital is about micro 'bird spotting' for novel startups
“Yeah, for me, the job is sort of like, you know, when you're in the Galapagos Islands and you spot some, Finch with a weird looking beak that nobody's ever seen before. Like, I think that's kind of what Eric and I try to do, right? We're trying to, but like, i…”
Frankel: Nobody could have predicted Uber's market size at seed stage
“Uber, which Eric participated in at the get-go, looked like a better way of calling limos. No one in their mind could have known how big that was going to be.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 97
2026 5 mentions in 1 episode
2024 23 mentions in 3 episodes 8 per episode
- David Frankel, MP @Founder Collective: Investing Lessons from Seeding Coupang, Pillpack & Suno|E1214 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Chris Dixon: Who Will Win the Next Generation of Venture? | E1132 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Roger Ehrenberg: Why VC Returns Will Get Worse & Why LP Incentive Structures are so Broken | E1117 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 3 mentions in 1 episode
2022 19 mentions in 2 episodes 10 per episode
- 20VC: Biggest Lessons and Challenges Building One of the Most Successful Seed Funds, How To Manage Investor Psychology, Self-Doubt and Insecurity & The Secret to Truly Successful Venture Partnerships with David Frankel, Co-Founder @ Founder Collective
- 20VC: Whoop Founder, Will Ahmed on How CEOs Can Perform at their Highest Level, Why There is Value in Struggle Early On, Why Realism is Overrated in Startups and How To Create a Culture of Delegated Decision-Making
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 15 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: Lessons Learned Scaling PillPack from Seed to Amazon Acquisition, Why Investors Should Spend More Time Assessing Human Capital Risk Taken by Founders & The Right Way To Think About Capital Efficiency in Scaling with David Frankel, Managing Partner @
- 20VC: Why Your Board Are Right 50% of The Time, Biggest Lessons From Being Mentored By Reed Hastings & Raising $130m in Funding and The Balance Between Growth and Capital Efficiency with James Reinhart, Founder & CEO @ ThredUp
- 20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams
- 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 14 mentions in 2 episodes 7 per episode
- 20VC: Why Founders Should Not Focus On Top Line Valuation, Why Capital Efficiency Is Key To Returns And Investment Success & Why Despite Popular Thought, $100m Is An Exciting Exit For VC with Micah Rosenbloom, Managing Partner @ Founder Collective
- 20VC: The Power Of A Concentrated Seed Portfolio, Why Operational Value Add Models At Seed Do Not Make Sense & Why We Will See A Shakeout Of Growth Stage Investors with Roger Ehrenberg, Founder & Managing Partner @ IA Ventures
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Eric's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Secretary, Massachusetts Executive Office of Economic Development | 3 | 58 | 67% 4/6 | full record on 20VC → |