Frank Rotman
Co-Founder and Partner Emeritus, QED Investors. On 1 show, 2 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderexecutiveoperatorauthor@fintechjunkie ↗LinkedIn ↗qedinvestors.com ↗
After spending 13 years helping architect early data-driven underwriting and credit strategies at Capital One, Rotman co-founded QED Investors in 2007. He has backed major fintech companies such as Credit Karma, Nubank, and SoFi, and authored the book Arrowproof.
1shows
2appearances
42statements
6resolved
6supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
15said about them ↓ Everything Frank Rotman said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Rotman: YC encourages artificial growth for Demo Day, causing VCs to overpay
“A lot of the growth trajectory was in unscalable things in order to get the up and to the right, 45 degree chart so that you can package it for demo day. You know, so there are a lot of artificial things done in order to package it, like you know, to Sam's poi…”
Frank Rotman predicts 20-30% failure rates between early venture stages
“You will have 20 to 30% failure between seed and A. You will have 20 to 30% failure between A and B.”
Rotman: Venture pricing has corrected across stages, except at seed
“Pricing has slowly started to correct, but it still hasn't corrected at the seed stage.”
Rotman: VCs prefer no-bids over down rounds for overvalued seed startups
“And if pricing doesn't correct at the earliest stage you're going to have a lot of no bids, you know, at the Series A because they wouldn't have gone far enough, fast enough for a Series A investor to come in and say they've earned their way into a significant…”
Frank Rotman: Non-Unlimited TAM Startups Must Achieve Low-Scale Profitability
“Companies need to learn to make money at low levels of scale, right? Either you're in an unlimited TAM market where you can justify putting capital into the business and continuing to pour capital into the business. I think some SaaS companies Like, the TAMs a…”
Rotman: Doubling revenue at higher cost generates anti-proof for startups
“But if it was harder to get that doubling than you thought, or it costs you more to get that doubling than you thought, or your manufacturing costs went up, or the margins weren't there, you know, in that doubling, you're actually generating anti-proof of the …”
Rotman: Middling VC funds and emerging managers will struggle to raise capital
“For a number of years, like if you were a Middling fund, you know, or an emerging manager, you're going to have problems raising capital.”
Rotman: Startups can no longer raise Series A rounds on narrative alone
“Narrative is going to stop at the seed when it used to flow through to the series A and even into the series B. So I think the trend is you can raise on narrative at seed, and then it's results starting in series A.”
Rotman: EPS and stock prices show 95%+ historical correlation
“The last I checked, there's a 95 plus percent correlation between earnings per share and share price of companies throughout the history of the stock exchange.”
Rotman: Venture price discipline has collapsed to math
“The price discipline has disappeared from the market, and I think it's collapsed to math.”
Rotman: Founder financial plans presented to VCs never come true
“The one truism in, in venture is whatever the financial plan is that a founder puts in front of you just isn't going to come true.”
Rotman: Dismissing founder financial plans as useless is lazy venture underwriting
“I find it lazy underwriting when they say, well, the plan isn't going to happen, so why should I spend time on it? But there's a lot of embedded information that you can pull out of plans by having conversations with the founders and understanding what they ex…”
Rotman: Initial check size determines long-term VC fund ownership
“The challenge in venture today is that that initial check that you write almost sets the stage. For how much ownership you're going to have in the future, unless you are an extreme value added venture capitalist, a player where the founders, the other investor…”
Rotman: More bullish on fintech for the next decade than the last
“So I'm actually more bullish on the next 10 years than I have been on the last 10 years”
Rotman: Next wave of fintech will build bigger companies than the first
“So I actually think we're going to see bigger companies built in this next wave than you saw in the first wave.”
Rotman: QED's 100x+ wins de-risked their business models on minimal capital
“If I look at the history of our 20 X pluses and we have a few hundred X pluses, like these were businesses that for very limited amounts of money were able to de-risk the business so that you knew that you were on, on a path to something very big.”
Rotman: Generating 12x early investor returns on $300M exit requires under $30M raised
“In order to do that with a three hundred million dollar outcome, it means you have to have invested less than thirty million dollars of capital to get to that point.”
Rotman: Tech IPO window will reopen late 2024 or 2025
“I don't think it's going to be one a week in the back half of next year. I think it will open up in the half of next year and maybe the year after.”
Rotman: QED Has Another 6 to 12 Potential IPOs in Portfolio
“We see the potential in our own portfolio for, you know, another half dozen or dozen like IPOs that are kind of orienting themselves and getting ready when they get to sufficient scale”
Rotman: QED offers intended as top bids were outbid by 2x
“We've done it with a number of companies over the past year where the environment has just shifted so quickly, where I thought we were offering the highest price that we could, and it was the lowest by a factor of two.”
Rotman: At big companies, saying no yields 80-90% bonus
“You can actually earn 80 to 90% of your bonus saying no to everything. That's new, right? If you literally say no to everything, you have the power to optimize what's in your control so that you could hit 80 or 90% of your bonus saying no to everything new.”
Rotman: Venture capital is about learning speed per dollar spent
“Because again, I think about the venture asset class is very simple. It's about asking and answering the question, how much can you learn for how much money, how quickly?”
Rotman: Under 1% of venture-backed founders shut down before running out of cash
“I would be surprised if you did an analysis of them, if it was more than one percent of the companies, probably even a fraction of one percent where the founder shuts the door on the business for any reason other than they ran out of cash, right?”
The other half of the tape: Frank Rotman's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 15 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 8Nigel Morris 3Nick Shalek 2Mike Chalfen 1Bill Cillufo 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 15
2022 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: How Today's Market Changes How Companies Should Approach Burn and Runway, Are Financing Markets Closing? How To Know When To Pay Up vs Stay Price Disciplined & Why The Most Important Thing in Venture is Generating Positive Selection with Bill Cilluf
- Mike Chalfen: How to Build Anti-Fragile Venture Portfolios Today | 20VC #904 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 12 mentions in 2 episodes 6 per episode
- 20VC: Why Bundling Does Not Work, How The Best Founders Analyse Unit Economics, Why The Way We Approach Mental Health in Venture and Startups is Wrong with Nigel Morris, Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ QED Investors
- 20VC: Ribbit Capital's Nick Shalek on How To Think Through Ownership and Price Sensitivity, When More Money and Pre-Emptive Rounds are Good vs Bad & Investing Lessons from Yale's David Swensen
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Frank'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 Partner Emeritus, QED Investors | 2 +1 | 42 | 100% 6/6 | full record on 20VC → |