The Ledger, every show

“I've always had this hypothesis that fund three is like the optimal fund. It's where, you know, hunger and experience intersect.”

“We shouldn't pick and choose among our managers. Once we decide to hire them, the bar is so high that we should hit them hard. We shouldn't take these, like, little, you know, hesitation marks, right? Like, I know a lot of people are like, oh, I'll throw a mil…”

“I think in the main, most venture capitalists today are price takers, not price makers.”

“So if your whole micro-cap public market has gone, where are you going to go for emerging growth companies? So it makes perfect sense for Fidelity and T. Rowe and all these guys to come in.”

“Rather than the venture capitalist being the hub in the middle of this kind of hub and spoke network, could you push, you know, he called it the Napster of venture, right? Could you push the interactions out to the frontier where entrepreneurs are interacting …”

“The way investors treat LPs gives us a lot of insight into how they treat entrepreneurs. And if they're being heavy handed and arrogant with us, their shareholders, how are they with their customers?”

“I think today it's the, you know, almost the opposite of a good time. I think there's just so much capital in the seed stage.”

“Or one of the things that I think is an endemic problem to the micro VC space is that funds are undercapitalized and own too little and are kind of subject to the vagaries of later stage financing rounds where they may get, the rounds might get structured in w…”

“I think the benchmark actually is like positive, like one point of seven percent or something for the 2000 vintage.”

“One thing that's interesting is I actually just saw some data that I think said that seed valuations were up year over year. And anecdotally, that's what I'm hearing as well. And I think that's actually just a data composition issue because the marginal ideas …”

“The material sciences guys, you know, none of their companies will ever sell for more than two hundred million dollars, but when you can own 35% of the company for 750 K, and you got a twenty-five million dollar fund, the arithmetic works in your favor.”

“We've got some managers that are really leaning into human computer interaction that really starts to look like web three. And yes, crypto becomes kind of the secure and identity driven data layer of that. And that's what I'm excited about. But I think that's …”

“Don't sub-optimize exits, but when you see an opportunity maybe to sell into around, if you're an early holder and can sell part of your position, put that moolah in the coolah.”

“And at the top end of the market, we've seen some non-traditional investors, the tigers and additions and global and such come in with huge sums of money and very quick cadence. And that's also contributed to the change in tempo.”

“And when they came into the venture business in 2005, They started tracking time from when they saw a deal to when that deal was done, whether or not they actually did that deal. And I think in 2005, it was a hundred days. In 2016 or 17, when they said, man, t…”

“Pessimists sound smart, but optimists make all the money.”

“One thing that we heard constantly from entrepreneurs in those days is it turns out that the Capital's not the scarce resource. It's the time and the engagement. And so surmounting that engagement hurdle, I think, is one thing that's really challenging, and I …”

“Paradoxically, I think the thing that's the biggest change in my career is it's gotten both cheaper and more expensive paradoxically to get a startup from inception to exit. Cheaper in the early days because the cost of inputs has gotten so much lower with AWS…”

“There's been so much noise and so little signal because all those trees have been growing to the sky. You're just like, I don't know who's a great all weather manager.”

“The number of firms that have failed in generational transition outnumbers by orders of magnitude the numbers of firms that have had successful generational transitions.”

“First Round has been historically a very size disciplined firm, whereas a lot of their peers have now grown to managing in each fund many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. They've still stayed pretty much only one and a half to two times their original si…”

“Today, by the way, there are about 350 firms in this space trying to do this. And I think, like, 80% of them have an institutional backer”

“Like, in my, in the fun that I spend most of my time on, my top four managers are 80% of the dollars.”

“They're so afraid of being wrong and alone and taking that career risk that they migrate from being alone and having conviction to being with the crowd. But when you migrate towards the crowd side, you take the right and alone box out of play. And that's where…”

“What I think most people are doing to deal with lengthening horizons. They're trying to shorten the duration of their portfolios by going to later stage.”

“And so I'm actually focusing my investing efforts on Earlier. And on, you know, even more nascent companies.”

“If I had for my fund, a tagline for my investors, it would be doing the stuff that your investment committee is too scared to let you do.”

“At the end of the day, we have to make sure that we are, you know, getting, you know, net outperformance, right? You know, over time, you'd imagine that, you know, some funds who have generated performance are then able to extract, you know, more of that surpl…”

“The level of fund formation is absolutely incredible. I don't see it slowing down immediately.”

“In terms of my area of the waterfront, it looks like the amount that's being raised in seed deals, like the medians, Has gone up by about two and a half X. The pre monies have gone up again, two and a half X.”

“August Capital, a longtime manager, well-established Sandhill firm, in what's otherwise a wasteland of 2000 vintages, They put up a monster fund because at the tail end of it, but they had Seagate in there. So there's the take private with a third of their fun…”

“You're always testing a joint hypothesis. Is this manager an outstanding manager with a sustainable competitive advantage is hypothesis one. The second is, am I sufficiently aware and educated that I can ascertain that?”

“I mean, there's 75 people working on Platform initiatives, investing, content production, et cetera.”

“He said, you know, it's the most amazing job. It's like the closest you'll ever come to managing your own multi-billion dollar fortune. You have incredible flexibility low liquidity needs, Long, if not infinite time horizon, few tax headaches, a single client,…”

“He goes, a young, charismatic, putatively smart guy like you should be able to get into railroads. You'll be CEO of Burlington Northern within 15 years and watch Warren Buffett will buy it.”

“For every hour I spent with a venture capitalist, I'd spend an hour with an entrepreneur.”

“It takes a lot of patience to invest in venture capital funds because the average venture partnership lasts twice as long as the average American marriage. Isn't that crazy? Average venture fund goes 10 years plus, you know, kind of three, four, five, one-year…”