Jeff Bonforte
Managing Partner, Catapult Capital. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutivefounderoperator@bonforte ↗LinkedIn ↗catapultcap.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Bonforte is an operator and investor who led the turnaround and subsequent $2.1 billion public listing of Grindr as CEO. He previously served as Senior Vice President of Communications Products at Yahoo! after it acquired his startup Xobni, and earlier co-founded Gizmo5 and i-drive.com.
1shows
1appearances
11statements
4resolved
1supported
1contradicted
25%fully supported
3said about them ↓ Everything Jeff Bonforte said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Bonforte: Only naive beginners and 20-year veterans succeed in venture capital
“We say freshmen and seniors make all the money in, in the venture business, like in the entrepreneur business. So you either don't know the rules. So you go into your business and you break a bunch of rules without knowing, or you know all the rules and you bu…”
Bonforte: Ron Conway's SV Angel Fund I generated a multiple-hundred-x return
“Like Ron Conway's hit rate for SV Angel in, in one was unbelievable. He had like a multiple hundred X on SV Angel one.”
Bonforte: Founders must commit 20 years to overcome venture capital's luck variance
“If you want to be an entrepreneur, be successful, do it, commit yourself to 20 years. You know, be an entrepreneur for 20 years. Do four or five startups, because the amount of luck that has to overlap from externalities and internal things that have to cross …”
Bonforte: Negative emotions like anger drive customer behavior changes better than delight
“Instead people tended, entrepreneurs tend to focus on making customers Like, delighting customers, making customers happy, and I said, we really should focus more on pain and frustration and anger. It's the negative emotions that drive behavior changes, not th…”
Bonforte: Grindr was a rare retroactive CFIUS divestiture of a foreign buyer
“And this was one of the only cases ever where CFIUS had actually retroactively unwound a deal. CFIUS had denied deals with foreign buyers, but they had never, what they're trying to do with TikTok today over the years is TikTok would be the second one after Gr…”
Bonforte: Grindr faced privacy lawsuits from 13 state attorneys general upon acquisition
“We were being sued at that point by 13 attorney generals in the U.S. Over privacy and data leakage, something the company had not done, but it was everyone believed the company had done.”
Bonforte: 70% of Grindr hires under new management were minority or LGBTQ+
“By the time Rick and I left, 70% of the hires from the, in the company were minority hires, basically. We were hiring people from the LGBTQ community, or we were hiring people that were in, in the DEI, which is not something people like to talk about anymore, …”
Bonforte: Bending Spoons cuts acquired app operational costs by 70% to 80%
“Vending Spoons out of Italy has an amazing business of buying individual apps, but then using a common set of back-end pieces and engineers, Right. They can reduce the cost by 70%, 80% on a business, and grow it because they're really good at the game of how t…”
Bonforte: Consumer AI agents will replace direct website browsing for internet commerce
“I assume that the world will instead end up with a smaller number of agents that act on behalf of consumers going out and doing work. That changes fundamentally the internet. It just means that if you have a website today that sells tickets or bicycles or what…”
Bonforte: Yahoo attempted to acquire Twitter for $19M during its early struggles
“And Jack Dorsey, I knew him when it was Odeo and spent time with him, and Twitter was failing, and we were, I was trying to buy it for nineteen million dollars at Yahoo, like, so we've met all these people.”
The other half of the tape: Jeff Bonforte's own voice is left out of every number here. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Jeff Bonforte, by other people (3)
Marini: Grindr revenue doubled from $100M to $200M before its $2B IPO
“And in two and a half years, we took Grindr from a hundred million of revenue to two hundred million of revenue when we took it public.”
Marini: Investors bought Grindr for $600M at 12x to 13x EBITDA
“So we bought it for about six hundred million. It was doing less than fifty million, about forty five million of EBITDA when we bought the company, so, you know, call that kind of 12, 13 X EBITDA, and the market was probably trading at more like 20, the public…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jeff's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Managing Partner, Catapult Capital | 1 | 11 | 25% 1/4 | full record on My First Million → |