Paul Martino
Co-Founder and Managing General Partner, Bullpen Capital. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounder@ahpah ↗LinkedIn ↗bullpencap.com ↗
Paul Martino pioneered post-seed venture investing at Bullpen Capital, where he led investments in companies including FanDuel, Ipsy, and SpotHero. Before founding Bullpen in 2010, he launched several startups and made early angel investments in Zynga, Udemy, and TubeMogul.
1shows
1appearances
22statements
3resolved
1supported
1contradicted
33%fully supported
17said about them ↓ Everything Paul Martino said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Accel's returns were not top-tier prior to its Facebook investment
“Excel's returns prior to the Facebook fund weren't the best in the industry, and so some analyst types in the LP community were like, well, you know, should I stay in Excel or not?”
VCs relying on gut instinct miss breakout companies like FanDuel
“If you're not looking at the spreadsheet and only looking at kind of these softer, subjective, gut-oriented factors, you're going to miss FanDuel. You're going to miss Namely. You're going to miss Ipsy. You're going to miss some of the absolute best performing…”
Seed investors categorically refuse internal bridge funding for portfolio companies
“And it turns out many seed investors, if you ask them, if they come on your show and say, hey, seed investor, do you inside bridge your companies? Almost every one of them is going to tell you categorically, no, that's something we don't do.”
Venture capitalists fail to recognize disruption within their own industry
“It is amazing that for a group of people that fund disruption to be so oblivious to disruption happening to their own business, it is It has been fascinating to me to see people who fund disruption, not understand that an iceberg hit this business over the las…”
Targeting older incubator cohorts yields superior venture deal flow
“What if we said, let's go look at not what the cool kids are in YC's graduating class, but let's go look at those companies that have great metrics from three classes ago that nobody's paying attention to. You know, we sat down with some of the incubators, for…”
Fear of missing outliers traps LP capital in underperforming legacy funds
“This has now trained a generation of LPs to be scared to death to cut off funds that aren't performing well, because they could be just around the corner from Facebook. And as a result, a lot of that money that should be going to new and innovative funds gets …”
Josh Koppelman's seed model was venture's most innovative move in 60 years
“Josh truly innovated, and his For lack of a better word, early stage option buying model. I don't know exactly the right phrase to use it, but to basically say, I'm going to let these companies fail fast and write small checks to them. It was perhaps the singl…”
The largest venture outcomes require pivots and extra discovery time
“And so the more we looked, the more we found that the biggest outcomes of the vintage were companies that had either pivoted once or on their second or third business model, or took a little bit more Time and that learning and discovery phrase to use Mike Mapl…”
18 to 24 months is optimal startup runway; 36 breeds complacency
“And so I think 24 months is about the most I'd ever advise a startup company taking in an early stage. I think 36 is too much. But you know what? 12 is probably too little now, given that the depths of the crunch is as bad as it is.”
Bullpen Capital ignores founder pedigree and screens purely on metrics
“We ignore a lot of that stuff at the front of the screen and just look at the numbers. And what it allows us to do is it allows us to spot a lot of things other people are just missing. Categories, founding teams, and geographies that nobody's paying attention…”
Bullpen Capital averages a 20% valuation step-up over prior seed rounds
“We're now 54 deals in across three funds, and on average, the valuation we pay is about 20% higher than the post money of the round in front of us. This is a very interesting statistic, and by the way, let me give you the variance. Our rounds are between flat …”
Pitching non-traditional VC strategies to LPs is extremely difficult
“When you do something different, especially for the limited partner community, it is very difficult to get that funded because they're just used to buying IBM.”
Fewer than 10% of new VC funds have unique strategies
“I would say no more than 25 of them have a truly different strategy other than I'm better in this category. I'm better in this geography than these other people. And so it's crazy to me that less than 10% of all of the newly created funds have a different stra…”
Incompatible seed and late-stage VC models create a startup funding gap
“These portfolio constructions are incompatible. If you're an investor, you're going to end up having a lot of companies that need a little bit more money to hit the milestone. And if you're an entrepreneur, what happens if you raise just a little bit too littl…”
Late-stage VC funds shrank from 900 in 2000 to 90 by 2016
“And guess what? The Series A and later funds, they were consolidating through this period. You know, they had gone from 900 funds back in the bubble, 99, 2000 down to 90. So they had taken a full zero off. So you got one group going from 25 funds to three 25. …”
Founders are raising rolling seed tranches with increasing valuation caps
“And another thing that the smart entrepreneurs are doing is some of them are figuring out that they can do it a little bit at a time. I get my first six months on a cap note, and I get my next six months on another note, and I get my next six months on another…”
Bullpen Capital rarely backs startups burning over $200k net monthly
“We've done very few deals with burn rates over a 200 net as the result of the math that I just outlined.”
Bullpen Capital never offers six-month bridge loans to portfolio companies
“Bullpen never does bridges. If you need a bridge for six more months, I'm not your fund.”
Venture fund mechanics leave very little room for structural innovation
“It's a fair question, and I wish I had a better answer, but once you get into the mechanics of how a venture fund works in terms of the way limited partners give you money, the way that you deal with taxes, etc., it is very difficult to innovate at all on the …”
Target sectors that were popular two years ago but are now ignored
“But the way I find my new favorite one is what was cool two years ago that's out of favor now, that's what I'm going to be looking at.”
Public CEO coach interviews bear no similarity to private guidance
“It is the difference between the public version of the CEO coach, which is what you see in a little taped interview and the private version of the person giving you the one-on-one guidance. There's no way to explain what the difference is other than to say the…”
The other half of the tape: Paul Martino's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 17 times in 6 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 12Semil Shah 4Jon Dishotsky 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 17
2022 4 mentions in 1 episode
2019 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: The Framework LPs Use To Assess Emerging Managers, What Concerns and Excites LPs in Potential Opportunities & The Current State of Seed Today with Hunter Somerville, Partner @ Greenspring Associates
- 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2017 2 mentions in 1 episode
2016 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever?
- 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Paul'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 Managing General Partner, Bullpen Capital | 1 | 22 | 33% 1/3 | full record on 20VC → |