Kevin Hartz
Co-Founder & General Partner, A*. On 1 show, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorexecutive@kevinhartz ↗LinkedIn ↗a-star.co ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Kevin Hartz is an entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Eventbrite, serving as CEO for 11 years, and co-founded Xoom. As an angel and venture investor, he made notable early investments in breakout tech companies including PayPal, Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, SpaceX, and Ramp.
1shows
3appearances
60statements
10resolved
8supported
1contradicted
80%fully supported
75said about them ↓ Everything Kevin Hartz said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hartz: Nvidia's valuation is a precursor to the bubble of all bubbles
“NVIDIA becoming the most valuable company on the planet is just the precursor towards the bubble of all bubbles.”
Hartz: Current SPAC fee structures are egregious and require market-wide reform
“At the current time, SPAC fees are egregious. I'll just say that outright, and they need to be reformed.”
Pierre Lamond made Kevin Hartz force-rank direct reports and fire the lowest
“In the very first meeting, I'll always remember, he said, Kevin, I want you to go up to the whiteboard, and I want you to write your direct reports down, but I want you to force rank them, you know, one to seven, or how many it was, and so I go and I write the…”
Hartz: Seed startups spend $10M to hit the same milestones as $1M
“I feel there's like Boyle's Law as applied to capital. So if you raise a million dollar round for your seed company, you'll spend it and build a company with that million. But if you raise five million or ten million, you'll spend it just the same and get to t…”
Hartz favors Sequoia's hands-on VC model over Founders Fund's hands-off approach
“Given those two extremes, I actually lean more towards, ah, the role of Sequoia's side, because I've just seen that kind of help and oversight and having that kind of star chamber of great talent cut so many corners of mistakes that would be made.”
Hartz: Paul Graham rejected his exploding term sheet for Airbnb's seed round
“Little known secret is Keith, Javed and I gave an exploding term sheet to Airbnb, and Paul Graham said no bueno, and teed off on us.”
Founders Fund sold Spotify at $8B to double down on Airbnb
“It was Peter and Brian Zingerman and Napoleon that took what did they take? I think they sold Spotify at the eight billion dollar price, pissed off, what's his name? Daniel. Daniel Ek, and rolled it all into Airbnb at the two and a half billion.”
Hartz: SPACs will be an enduring listing vehicle, not a passing trend
“We see this SPAC phenomenon, not as a flash in the pan, not as a quick up and down. That'll be a passing fancy of the 20 twenties, but really an enduring vehicle to bring our innovation companies to market.”
Hartz: Speculative SPAC deals will collapse like the dot-com bubble
“What we do see, and what we do predict, unfortunately, is something akin to perhaps the dot-com bubble in 99 and 2000, where you saw a lot of bright, shiny objects, and big flash in the pan market seeming successes, and then you'll see a lot of these coming do…”
Hartz commits to holding his venture portfolio investments for life
“I'm not in the practice of selling, I'm in the practice of finding and building companies and sitting on these things for life.”
Hartz: Most successful founders felt an inevitability of success early on
“Most people I talk to that are founders that have gone on always knew from the very beginning.”
Kevin Hartz prefers investing in first-time founders over serial entrepreneurs
“Well, I should be, you know, statistically focused on Serial, and we back a lot of Serial founders, you know, like Chad Hurley, and you know, we've, however, I just have a soft spot for first, first time founders.”
Sequoia outbid Hartz on Airbnb's seed round, but founders included him anyway
“I was angel investing with Keith Rubois and Javid Karim, and Javid is the co-founder of YouTube. And, you know, we just fell in love with those guys and made them an offer. And Sequoia out, out did us and got the lead, but they cut us in nicely because, you kn…”
Hartz: Jason Calacanis screamed at him over ticketing TechCrunch events
“He used to call me up at Eventbrite and scream at me, like, for, you know, he had a big rivalry with TechCrunch, And when we would ticket things for TechCrunch, he would get really angry and like, just call me up and scream at me for doing that.”
Hartz: Brute TAM analysis is overdone; great teams expand small markets
“Brute TAM analysis is maybe overdone. I'd focus more on the teams. You know, great teams always find their way to kind of slingshot from a market, from the small market to the big market, or it takes the small market to become a big, to get into a big market.”
Hartz: Venture capital has entered an era of less cooperation between funds
“It does feel like a period of less cooperation and there needs to be a very specific reason why funds would work together.”
Hartz: Prior Operator Experience Is No Longer Required for Success in VC
“There used to be a vibe in the valley that said, oh, you've got to be an operator to be an investor, a venture investor. You've had to walk in the shoes, and that's changed”
Hartz: Investors Should Heavily Canvas Sectors Consensus Considers 'Dead'
“Whenever somebody tells you that an area is dead, make sure you, Like, heavily, like, canvas that area and go after it hard, because there's great stuff happening there.”
Hartz: Michael Moritz faked a phone call to avoid founders
“I always remember seeing Michael Moritz speak, give a talk about Google in the early 2000, and there were all these founders there, and he puts his phone up to his face and pretends to talk, and then, like, walks out of the building, you know, and so nobody wo…”
Hartz: Exploding term sheet deadlines are artificial because VCs still want in
“Well, look, the issue is, is that you put a term sheet out in, in it, like, explodes on Friday at five PM, but does that mean? No, but does that mean that you, at five 15, you no longer want to invest? No, like the investor will always be there.”
Hartz argues OpenSea retains significant long-term value despite the NFT crash
“You know, I think the jury's still out. There's still a lot of value there in OpenSea.”
Hartz regrets turning down Peter Thiel's invitation to join Palantir at inception
“The day that acquisition of PayPal by eBay was announced Peter had resigned, and I met him up at the Sundeck restaurant in up on Sand Hill Road, and he said, you know, Kevin, I'm working on this business, and, you know, we're taking kind of the fraud algorithm…”
Hartz: VCs should offer calm support in crises, tough love during success
“Tough love is needed when it's doing extraordinarily well. Like, when things are going terribly wrong, And there are the, you know, butterflies, and stomach, you know, is, like, seized up, and teammates are quitting, and somebody's hacked the site, or whatever…”
The other half of the tape: Kevin Hartz's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 67 times in 15 episodes across the shows. 8 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 45Miles Dieffenbach 7Julia Hartz 7Maggie Hott 2Dylan Serota 2Joe Lonsdale 1Elad Gil 1Andrew Dudum 1
Statements about Kevin Hartz, by other people (8)
Newfront accepted Kevin Hartz's investment offer despite it being 30% lower
“When Kevin invested, we had some other offers that were materially higher than his. I think his was 30% lower than the next offer.”
Julia Hartz killed the "What Would Kevin Do" mindset upon becoming CEO
“I had to actively tell myself that on January first of this year, I was actually never, I was going to stop saying what would Kevin do? So I killed WWKD and I had to start making my own decisions.”
Kevin Hartz and A-Stars Are the Most Underrated Emerging Managers
“If I say his name, he'll probably raise a bigger fund, but I'll say, I think Kevin Hart's in A-Stars. I think they've done fabulously well as a partner.”
Carnegie Mellon's Endowment Backed Kevin Hartz's A-Star
“Kevin Hart's at A-Stars is, is, is a new partner of ours, and he was at Founders Funds for a few years.”
Spike Lipkin: Newfront met weekly with Kevin Hartz for years during scaling
“We were lucky enough to work with Kevin Hartz and met with him once a week for a number of years to think through some of the common challenges of scaling.”
Eventbrite's co-founders worked the door at the first TechCrunch Disrupt
“Kevin and I actually printed out the guest list for the first TechCrunch Disrupt, and we worked the door.”
Eventbrite was bootstrapped using all of Julia and Kevin Hartz's savings
“Why don't we try to do something together and you can make no money and we could put all of our money, all of our savings into bootstrapping a company.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 67
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
2024 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 2 mentions in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Sequoia's Roelof Botha on His Biggest Lessons Working Alongside Don Valentine, Mike Moritz and Doug Leone, Leading Sequoia's US Business and What Sequoia Do To Retain Their Edge at the Top & The Crucible Moments That Define Startup Success
- 20VC: Cyan Banister on Her Relationship To Money, Risk, Her Investment Decision-Making Process, Why We Will See A Reckoning in the Early Stage Market, Her Biggest Takeaways from HQ Trivia & The Future of Silicon Valley
- 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2018 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: Why Founders Must Use VCs as a Barometer, How to Make Distributed Teams Work Successfully & The Biggest Mistake People Make Early In Their Career with Dylan Serota, Founder @ Terminal
- 20VC: Hims' Andrew Dudum on The Scaling Playbook of The Fastest Growing Mens Wellness Brand, How To Be Truly Innovative In Today's World of Online Marketing & Raising at a $200m Valuation within Year 1
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 39 mentions in 3 episodes 13 per episode
- 20VC: Eventbrite Founder, Julia Hartz on The Lessons Learned Scaling Eventbrite to Unicorn Valuation & $3Bn in Gross Ticket Sales
- 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender
- 20VC: Elad Gil on Becoming One of Silicon Valleys Top Angels, Why Most People Get Market Sizing Wrong & Should VC Services Always Be Bundled Together?
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Kevin'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 & General Partner, A* | 3 | 60 | 80% 8/10 | full record on 20VC → |