Zach Coelius
Managing Partner, Coelius Capital. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderexecutiveoperator@zachcoelius ↗LinkedIn ↗coelius.vc ↗
Zach Coelius is an early-stage technology investor who leads Coelius Capital, backing seed-stage B2B and software startups via institutional funds and AngelList syndicates. A multi-time founder who previously built and led adtech company Triggit as CEO, he is best known for early investments in companies such as Cruise Automation and Branch Metrics.
2shows
2appearances
36statements
2resolved
1supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Zach Coelius said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Coelius: Work-life balance gives founders a near-zero chance of outsized success
“Just know that if you do that, your chance of basically, like, having outsized, non-normal success is almost zero. Like, at the end of the day, if you really want to achieve more than anyone else, if you want to be not normal, you have to work not normal.”
Coelius: VCs who cut my pro-rata will never see my deals again
“I've seen a number of funds who basically have come in and wiped out my pro rata or my follow-on, and those funds will never see another deal from me if I can help it.”
Zach Coelius: Hedge fund reneged on a $50M term sheet before closing
“We went out to all the VC firms, hedge funds, the usual late stage check writers, and a hedge fund came in. They're gonna put in fifty million dollars at a four hundred million dollar post... It's supposed to close on a Friday. On Thursday, the hedge fund's li…”
Zach Coelius: Venture fundraising difficulty is returning to 2008 levels
“And 12 months ago, you could have gotten a term sheet a week after you got, you walked in that door. Now it's going to be a much longer, much harder, much more arduous fundraising process, more similar to what we saw two or three years ago. Certainly what we s…”
Zach Coelius: Untrustworthy syndicate leads make founder pitches dead on arrival
“Because if you work with one of those folks, and they have a bad reputation in the industry, they can absolutely sink, sink your fundraise on the spot. Because there are people in the business who are not trustworthy, who run around with shitty deals, who gene…”
Coelius: VCs make a mistake by not leading follow-on rounds
“The venture capital industry generally makes a mistake by not taking advantage of that. Why is it that we get an inside position and then we let somebody else lead the round and take all the opportunity to deploy capital in subsequent rounds?”
Coelius: Entry price is the only thing that matters in venture capital
“At the end of the day, the only thing that matters in this business is price.”
Zach Coelius: Founders should choose unaffiliated angel money over venture scouts
“Because if I had to choose between taking scout money Versus taking unaffiliated money. I would always take the unaffiliated money rather than taking the unnecessary signaling risk when you work with one of these firms, but without having them deeply involved.”
Coelius: A startup pitch must work on a cold call at 9 PM
“I like to say, if you can't cold call a customer at nine o'clock at night, On their cell phone, while they're putting their kid to bed and describe what you're doing in one sentence, forget about it. You have no hope of them basically of selling a product unle…”
Coelius: Mega VC firms are taking platform bundling to a higher level
“If you look at what Andreessen is doing and you look at what the number of the other big platforms are doing, they're taking venture to a whole even higher level of bundling where they're saying, look, we're going to basically use the sort of returns that come…”
Coelius: Venture capital remains static and conformist due to LP relationships
“The industry, in my opinion, is really, really static. It doesn't Adapt and evolve very well because of the nature of the LP relationships. It's pretty sort of conservative, and it's very conformist,”
Coelius: Deal flow and access are the only hard things in venture capital
“The only two hard things that I can see in this business are basically deal flow and access. So if you don't have basically good deal flow and you don't have access, you're out of luck. You're not going to be successful.”
Coelius: Theoretical portfolio construction creates market inefficiencies in venture
“Portfolio construction leads to a bunch of inefficiencies that are great in a sort of theoretical world, but not in the sort of reality of this business.”
Coelius claims zero failures across his first 40 angel investments
“So far I haven't, I've got 40 companies in the portfolio. We haven't lost one yet.”
Coelius: Tier-1 VCs entering seed will fail if they avoid the work
“If they do the work, they're going to be great. And if they don't do the work, they're going to fail.”
Coelius: Individual allocators outperform committees across almost every asset class
“In almost every single other asset class, individual decision makers have proven to be the most effective way of basically deploying capital.”
Zach Coelius: VC associates cannot close deals, but they can kill them
“One thing that I always like to tell the, my companies that I work with is that the associate can't necessarily get the deal done themselves. They're your advocate, but they can absolutely kill it. So if you don't make friends with your associate or whatever a…”
Zach Coelius: Founders should avoid venture partners lacking deep domain expertise
“Whenever I think about a venture partner, it's all about the expertise. If they have a deep expertise, super powerful, awesome. But if they don't, I wouldn't waste your time. They just, they're, it's going to be very challenging for them to get a deal through …”
Zach Coelius: Investor back-channeling is as important as the founder pitch
“And so you'll often find that like the back channel that happens behind the scenes where different investors and different angels and different
It spins in your cap table.
Talk to the next round investors is just as important as what you say when you're at the…”
Zach Coelius: The best portfolio companies consistently write the best investor updates
“There's this weird thing that I've seen is that my best companies always have the best investor updates and my worst companies always have the worst updates. I don't know what it is, but it always seems to work out to be true.”
Coelius: Ad tech is one of the toughest startup battlegrounds
“The crucible that is ad tech, I mean, it is literally one of the hardest industries to compete in, is an amazing learning ground for entrepreneurs because you just get the crap beat out of you constantly.”
Coelius scaled his Branch Metrics investment from $200K to $5M
“Like with branch, my first check was 200. My second was seven 50. My third was a million and my fourth was five million.”
Coelius: Treat prior checks as sunk costs during follow-on rounds
“I basically like to think of every investment decision as an isolated event where I have, I like my sort of sunk cost is deployed capital, but it's the sunk cost. I don't think about that relative to the decision to participate.”
The other half of the tape: Zach Coelius's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Jason Lemkin 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Official SaaStr Podcast 2
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Zach's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Managing Partner, Coelius Capital | 1 | 26 | 50% 1/2 | full record on 20VC → |
| SAASTRLEDGER | Managing Partner, Coelius Capital | 1 | 10 | — | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |