Ryan Caldbeck
Founder & CEO, Waystation AI. On 3 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorauthor@ryan_caldbeck ↗LinkedIn ↗ryancaldbeck.co ↗
Ryan Caldbeck is the co-founder and former CEO of CircleUp, an investment platform for consumer brands he led from 2011 to 2020. He currently serves as the founder and CEO of Waystation AI, a procurement intelligence platform for food and beverage companies.
3shows
4appearances
76statements
18resolved
13supported
0contradicted
72%fully supported
13said about them ↓ Everything Ryan Caldbeck said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Caldbeck: Early fintech startups were marketing companies relying purely on FICO
“First I think an issue with a lot of the kind of FinTech one point O companies was there actually isn't any technology behind them. They're marketing companies. And so like how, without talking about any one company and specifically like how many of them would…”
Caldbeck claims VCs profit by convincing founders to sacrifice everything
“VCs in general, as a macro point tend to make money by convincing entrepreneurs to give up everything.”
Solely heuristic-based private investing will die off over time
“Over time, we do think that the concept of private investing, based solely on human heuristics, that will die off over time.”
VC managers raise larger funds because management fees outweigh carry
“And the reason they move up market is that the fees for larger funds always outweigh the performance of smaller funds. The people running these funds have incentives to raise larger funds.”
Hampton Creek will suffer a massive down round
“From tech VC firms, and we're seeing, you know, the mayonnaise company with a nine hundred million dollar valuation and fifteen million dollars revenue. That math doesn't make any sense. It's offensive. They're not going to have a successful exit. They will ha…”
Direct-to-consumer is for product testing, not scaling efficiently
“Most tech VC firms look at D to C, direct-to-consumer, as a way to scale a business efficiently. That is completely wrong. It is not a channel to scale a business. It isn't certainly not a channel to scale a business efficiently. DTC is a great channel to test…”
Consumer companies have higher net margins than tech companies
“At the end of the day, consumer companies have higher net margins and are more profitable than tech companies.”
Title III crowdfunding will suffer from severe adverse selection
“I think what's more likely, to be frank with you, is that companies will fail in trying to raise from accredited investors and then turn to unaccredited investors. That's adverse selection, and that concerns me.”
Caldbeck: Consumer investors frequently ignore data in favor of personal taste
“Consumer investors would always like extrapolate their preferences on on, on the company or sorry, on the investment decision. And I don't like the taste of us. No one will like the taste regardless of the data. And what they miss is that the data was identify…”
Caldbeck: Investors backing negative-margin lending fintechs are making massive mistakes
“But you're kind of pricing it to perfection at that point where, you know, if the core product is zero margin and I, by the way, you're right, technically negative margin. It is negative margin. Then like, you really got to believe a lot from those ancillary p…”
VCs warned Caldbeck his burnout post would make him 'dead to Sequoia'
“And there were three VCs who I did not mention. I love these people, but I did not mention them. And the three VCs said Hey, look, love it. It's very emotional. You should know you will be dead to Sequoia. When you write this, you'll be dead to a VC”
Caldbeck: Future CPG brands won't reach multi-billion-dollar scale
“There will be more of them, but they will get to a smaller level. So what I mean is it lasts 10 or 15 years, the brands that won, Chobani, et cetera, you can build multi-billion dollar businesses. I'm skeptical if that's true in CPG going forward.”
Caldbeck: Quantitative VC will emerge in CPG, but is impossible in tech
“In CPG specifically, there will be quantitative VC firms... We think that that is possible in some industries in the private markets. We don't think it's possible in tech.”
VC firms operate with 30% to 50% EBITDA margins
“Think of these firms, these VC firms as little companies that effectively have EBITDA margins of 30 to 50%.”
Data-driven private investing will start outside Silicon Valley
“I think that that trend will start outside of early stage tech and outside of Silicon Valley. So it'll start first in an industry where there's a ton of data and where business models are largely the same.”
Quantitative VC models lack historical training data for early tech
“There weren't a thousand other examples where there's enough training data to train models to understand what success looks like. There might be two or four. That's a reason why I really struggle to understand how this could be successful in tech, but in other…”
Venture capital fund returns decline as fund sizes increase
“There's a lot of studies that suggest that returns go down as funds get larger in AUM. There's a ton of studies that show that.”
Consumer startups reach profitability on $4M to $8M
“These companies in the consumer space, they tend to get to profitability by raising four to eight million dollars. Not 50 to eighty million dollars, as they do in the tech space.”
Honest Company entered recapitalization due to overvaluation
“Where Honest Company is a good company, it just got stuck in a post-money trap. It got passed over for acquisition, and now it was in a little bit of recapitalization mode with Catterton because it raised too much at far too high of a valuation.”
Consumer VC requires $1M to $5M checks across many startups
“In consumer, you need to find a way to deploy one to five million dollars into each of a lot of companies. That's the answer. You can't be looking to invest in 50, seventy-five million dollars into an early stage consumer product company, you're going to get j…”
Quant fund models are the future of private consumer VC
“We think it's a different model, candidly. We think it's a model of developing systematic approach to private investing. So if you're familiar at all in the public markets with AQR, Two Sigma, Renaissance Technologies, any of the public quant funds, We think t…”
Almost all DTC brands must eventually sell offline
“It turns out that almost every DTC company eventually realizes when they get to a We got to start building our own stores or, you know, selling these products offline because the online channels are just too expensive”
Most funded consumer startups will sell below their last valuation
“Consumer companies typically it'll be a graveyard. There'll be some exceptions. Unilever bots, Dollar Shave Club, because they needed the capabilities of DTC. That'll happen a few more times, but many times they will be sold for half of the last round valuatio…”
The other half of the tape: Ryan Caldbeck's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 13 times in 6 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 9Nathan Latka 2Fred Destin 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 11
Top Founders 2
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: What It Takes To Be The Most Effective Coach To Startup Founders, The Biggest Surprises and Challenges About Transitioning To Venture From Operations & 3 Trends Shaking The World of Consumer Today with Victoria Treyger, General Partner @ Felicis Ven
- 20VC: Stride's Fred Destin on The Acceptable vs Non-Acceptable Risks When Investing, How Startup Founders Can Improve The Quality of Their Decision-Making and Must Play for Batting Average & Why Plans Do Not Matter and No Board Member Should Bash An Entre
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Binary's Justin Caldbeck on Specialisation Being Key To Success In VC, The Biggest Problem In VC Today and Why The Future Is A Moneyless Barter Economy
- 20VC: Why Adaptability Is Key To Fundraising, Why Supply Is Always The First Priority In Marketplaces & Why Sometimes You Have To Hire Fast & Fire Fast with Nav Athwal, Founder & CEO @ RealtyShares
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ryan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Waystation AI | 2 | 39 | 67% 8/12 | full record on 20VC → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Waystation AI | 1 | 22 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Top Founders → |
 a16zLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Waystation AI | 1 | 15 | 80% 4/5 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |