Neil Mehta
Founder and Managing Partner, Greenoaks Capital. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderLinkedIn ↗greenoaks.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Mehta founded Greenoaks Capital in 2012, operating a concentrated venture and growth investment firm managing around $15 billion in assets. He is known for high-conviction technology investments, including leading rounds in Coupang, Wiz, Figma, Stripe, and Toast.
1shows
1appearances
35statements
5resolved
3supported
1contradicted
60%fully supported
3said about them ↓ Everything Neil Mehta said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Mehta: Factory-style venture capital fails the top 10 to 15 elite founders
“I think that's actually the right end state for a vast majority of our industry. I think, like, 90 something plus percent of our industry should work that way. But I think for, like, the 10 to 15 best founders each year, that's precisely the wrong way to work.”
Mehta: Greenoaks actively seeks founders who micromanage, stay in weeds, fire fast
“Some of those characteristics are exactly what we look for in a founder. We like micromanagers. We like people that are in the weeds. We like people that fire fast.”
Mehta: Top-tier venture capital has become less competitive despite excess industry capital
“Two things are allowed to be true at the same time, which is our space has too much capital and it's allowed to be, and it's actually less competitive for great companies.”
Mehta: No venture capital firm has more than a few good investors
“I've never met a firm that's had more than a few good investors.”
Mehta: DST Global founder Yuri Milner is the greatest investor of all time
“I think it's Yuri Milner.”
Mehta: A company's most critical metric is employee optimism about the future
“If you pulled everybody at this company and you asked them, are your best days ahead of you or behind you? What would the proportion of people say? And especially the most important people. It's not like year over year growth. It's not margins. It's not like s…”
Mehta: Frontier AI model companies are poor businesses due to recurring capex
“So when we talk about the model companies, my feeling has been, and by the way, I've been wrong. If you look at the valuations of these businesses but the investment that you have to make versus the payoff you get, and then the fact that you have to make that …”
Mehta: The best and worst Series A startups trade at similar multiples
“The best companies and the worst companies at the Series B or Series A kind of trade at approximately the same multiples. There's exceptions here and there, but by and large, very few people could actually tell the difference between the two.”
Mehta's non-profit buys SF commercial properties and leases them below market
“I'm buying buildings in one street called Fillmore Street. It's in Pacific Heights. It's a street I grew up on. And I'm buying stuff at, like, a five and a quarter cap, which, you know, treasuries were five and a quarter when I was buying this stuff. Buying, l…”
Mehta: In tech, fundamentally good businesses often hide inside bad P&Ls
“Oftentimes in internet and technology, good businesses are hidden in bad P&Ls.”
Mehta: Carvana lost $5,000 per unit in EBITDA and interest during 2022
“He was losing like 3000 dollars a unit on an EBITDA basis. And then he, and you know, if that wasn't enough, he had about 2000 dollars of interest payments per unit. So so he had like 5000 dollars per unit of costs.”
Mehta: Greenoaks heavily bought Carvana stock as it crashed from $50 to $5
“And so the stock went from a hundred to 50. We started to buy around then. Of course, you know, we started by all the way down to about five. But my partner Ben, it doesn't feel great when you start to buy at 50 and then at 30 and then at 20 and then the 20 go…”
Mehta: Launching an insurance holding company was Greenoaks' single biggest mistake
“By the way, the punchline here is, like, went terribly. It was, like, one of the, it's the single biggest mistake we've made at Green Oaks, I think.”
Mehta: Greenoaks maintains high internal intensity and fires quickly when hires fail
“We can't always hire while we can fire fast. We run a very tight team. We're reasonably intense in the way we run that team.”
Mehta: Silicon Valley's insular culture has treated SoftBank's Masayoshi Son poorly
“Silicon Valley is a fairly insular culture and has never really been that nice to Masa.”
Mehta: Masayoshi Son has achieved $100 billion returns multiple times
“The guy's multiple times made, you know, hundred billion dollar returns, and he's done it.”
Mehta: San Francisco uniquely harnesses aspirational company building better than anywhere else
“I think there's something about tech and the aspirational nature of company building that San Francisco harnesses uniquely well. I don't think there's anywhere else on earth That's anywhere like it. Tel Aviv may be getting close, but, like, it's really San Fra…”
Mehta: Coupang Rocket Delivery customer retention stayed in the 60 percent range
“Coupon for rocket, which was eventually called rocket through one P capability was in the sixties on a court retention basis.”
Mehta: Greenoaks led 5 of 8 Coupang rounds, investing nearly $1 billion
“We invested a little bit under a billion in total capital across 10 years. We invested led five of the eight rounds. We invested almost every other year, if not every year, in the company for 10 years until it went public.”
Mehta: One percent of S&P 500 companies generate 90 percent of value
“I think one percent of the S and P 500 make up like 90% of the value. And most of those were growth companies. All of those were really growth companies.”
Mehta: Passing on Elon Musk's SpaceX was Greenoaks' single biggest mistake
“It's actually the biggest mistake we've ever made at Green Oaks. It's a mistake I'm about to tell you. Which as we had heard, he fires people quickly. He's hyper aggressive. He's a, he's, he manages down to like the nth layer. You know, he micromanages people …”
Mehta: Greenoaks micromanages internal operations down to the office lighting
“We talk about every, everything at Green Oaks. I mean, we, down to, like, when you walk in, what the lighting is in our office. I mean, there's no, we are micromanagers to the max, and when we talk about investments, you know, Green Oaks, it's not atypical for…”
Mehta: DeepSeek achieved a 35x token cost reduction versus OpenAI reasoning models
“Deep seek, figure out a way to deploy a model at like a 35 X reduction for input output tokens on a comparative basis to open a eyes reasoning models.”
Mehta: Greenoaks previously aimed to track 92 percent of Series B deals
“There's a version of Green Oaks two or three years ago where, not just me, everybody at Green Oaks would do 12, 15, 20, 30 meetings a week. We used to show this slide to our investors. Here's how many Series B's happened, and we had 92% coverage.”
The other half of the tape: Neil Mehta's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Neil's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INVEST LIKE THE BESTLEDGER | Founder and Managing Partner, Greenoaks Capital | 1 | 35 | 60% 3/5 | full record on Invest Like the Best → |