Sieva Kozinsky
Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Enduring Ventures. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderexecutive@SievaKozinsky ↗LinkedIn ↗enduring.ventures ↗
Sieva Kozinsky is the co-founder of Enduring Ventures, a long-term holding company that buys and permanently holds profitable private businesses. Previously, he founded the peer-to-peer college learning marketplace StudySoup and co-founded The MBA Fund.
3shows
3appearances
21statements
2resolved
1supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
17said about them ↓ Everything Sieva Kozinsky said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kozinsky: More VC 'fallen angels' will seek soft landings within two years
“There's probably going to be more opportunities like up council and our other businesses. That's the VC fallen angels, the businesses that have raised a lot of capital, but maybe haven't grown into, haven't fully grown into the scale that they should be at. So…”
Kozinsky: Enduring Ventures targets 3x-5x cash flow multiples for acquisitions
“We really like to buy at valuations that are three to five times cashflow. So if a business does a million dollars of cashflow per year, We really want, don't want to pay more than three to five million dollars to acquire it, and you really can't get that in m…”
Enduring Ventures Targets Unprofitable Venture-Backed Tech Startups With Strong Revenue
“We've actually redirected our focus in tech to just focus on businesses like UpCouncil that have good revenue that don't quite have the profits to support it and that we can turn around and create a cashflow engine from them because in those situations we can …”
Kozinsky: Founders should start exit planning 3 to 5 years early
“I actually recommend, at the very least, thinking about your sale process three years before you plan to do it, and ideally even four or five years if you're not in a rush, right, because you can really optimize your business for the sale”
Kozinsky: Founders selling to PE must demonstrate profitability or clear profit levers
“If you're a year out or you're two years out and you've had zero profit this whole time, which many businesses do or negative profit, consider showing profit or considering structuring your business so that you can make it very clear to the buyer that these tw…”
StudySoup expects to generate a few million dollars in 2016 revenue
“Not quite, but we'll definitely do a few million in revenue this year.”
Kozinsky: Enduring Ventures is designed around a 20-to-40-year horizon
“The next thing we do, let's reverse engineer. What is the last business we would ever want to work on? Right? Like, What is something that we would want to work on for the next 2030 or 40 years, which is really different from our startup experience”
Kozinsky: Enduring Ventures will wait 3-6 months before aggressively deploying capital
“Xavier and I, you know, relative to maybe a year ago, we're still investing. We're still looking at opportunities, but we're happy to be patient for another three to six months to see where kind of the world lands, where everything resets and then pick up the …”
Kozinsky: Enduring Ventures evaluated a Midwestern scaffolding firm at 4x EBITDA
“And the one we looked at in, in in the Midwest was doing about Four million of EBITDA. We could have bought it at, what was it Xavier? Maybe four times EBITDA at the time?”
Kozinsky: Enduring Ventures Buys Cash-Flowing Businesses to Hold Forever
“So enduring is a long-term holding company. What we do is we buy cash flowing businesses at reasonable prices and we pair them with great operators and we run them and we hold them as a portfolio forever. That's our plan.”
Kozinsky: Clinical Trial Startup Charged Pharma $10k–$20k Per Patient
“So it was a marketplace model, and our customers were like Pfizer and Novartis and Inovoderm, and they would pay us 10 to 20,000 dollars per patient to recruit a patient. We would split that with the doctor.”
Kozinsky: Enduring Ventures owns 12 businesses, mostly from retiring owners
“We are now owners of 12 businesses two of them or three of them actually are tech companies. We also have a venture studio, so we've started a couple of businesses, but 90% of what we do is we buy businesses that are generating cash flow from retiring owners.”
Kozinsky: UpCounsel raised around $20M to $25M from VCs
“They had raised, you know, somewhere around 20, twenty-five million dollars from some really great VCs, but I think they didn't achieve the kind of escape velocity That maybe it would require to go on and continue raising capital after that.”
Enduring Ventures is Structured as a C-Corp for QSBS Tax Benefits
“We do have QSPS designation for enduring ventures, which is a C corp and a holding company, and we are pretty strategic about making sure we set it up in the right way. Such that we could get that designation”
StudySoup pays student note sellers a 70% revenue share
“So the sellers are making around 70% of everything that they're selling. We do a revenue share with the note takers and we also offer some Concentives upfront for them to participate just to get over the hurdle of, you know, taking that first step and doing a …”
StudySoup has over 5,000 active monthly subscribers
“We have over 5000 monthly subscribers that participate in our marketplace.”
StudySoup has nearly 1,000 note-takers earning money
“We have almost a thousand elite note takers nationwide that are making money on our platform.”
StudySoup sees monthly customer churn between 8% and 12%
“We're seeing churn anywhere between eight to 12% in a monthly period.”
StudySoup pays $100 to $150 to acquire each note seller
“It costs us, you know, let's say a hundred to a 150 dollars to acquire a seller that's going to be then generating some revenue for us.”
Enduring Ventures owns no California businesses despite founders living there
“We actually, we both live in California and we don't own any businesses in California yet. So they're all nationwide.”
The other half of the tape: Sieva Kozinsky's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 16 times in 3 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Joe Speiser 6Greg Isenberg 6Nathan Barry 3Michael Girdley 1
Statements about Sieva Kozinsky, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Startup Ideas Podcast 10
Startup Acquisition Stories 6
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 9 mentions in 1 episode
2022 6 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Sieva's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACQUISITION STORIESLEDGER | Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Enduring Ventures | 1 | 11 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Startup Acquisition Stories → |
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Enduring Ventures | 1 | 7 | 0% 0/1 | full record on Top Founders → |
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Enduring Ventures | 1 | 3 | — | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |