The Ledger, every show

“I also think like LPs should spend more time talking to companies of portfolios that failed, like actually talk to the ones that didn't go well, or like were the one X's to find out what is the person really like to work with. Like the ones that work really we…”

“I mean, we bought it at like, The position at like five times earnings. And we've gotten 90% of our money back through dividends in the company.”

“If we could get a 30% drawdown, like I would buy Snowflake or buy, ah, Datadog and put it in, you know, put it in a drawer and let those compound for 10 plus years.”

“A lot of it comes down to like, there'll be like, oh, my revenues are this. You look at the chart, you start doing all the analysis and you're like, actually that was your total contract value.”

“There's a lot of ways to fudge gross profit numbers and through cogs and all that kind of stuff.”

“Either Iconic or Meritech, like, the returns of Iconic are freaking amazing.”

“If you need to own a large fund and write a fifty hundred million dollar plus check, like I think Bessemer is as good as any of the other big funds.”

“I think we questioned our existence in 20 and 21 as, like, we were just getting annihilated on prices.”

“What you tell your LP is, just make sure you stick to it and do it. That's actually the best advice I can give for any emerging fund manager. It's like, look, define what you're gonna do, and do exactly that, and don't go out, don't go, don't stray from it at …”

“You should interview all your employees. From admin to your other partners, and basically ask them for feedback. Just be like, hey, if you were running the place, what would you do differently? You know, like, tell me everything you do in your job, green, red,…”

“And all Insight was doing was replicating what Summit and TA Associates had done for the 20 years prior in software and internet.”

“And we said to people, listen, I'm going to raise a fifty million dollar vehicle. And I'm going to put 25% of the fund in Alibaba at twelve billion valuation, roughly.”

“We find the best analysts and associates are oftentimes college athletes or entrepreneurs.”

“So it actually caused us, in 19, we shifted the portfolio away a lot from Silicon Valley towards more bootstrapped entrepreneurs in Ames, Iowa, or Sarasota, Florida, or Niswa, Minnesota.”

“Every person who works at Lead Edge, once you've worked here six months, you can sit down with any LP.”

“We have a disposition committee that meets a couple of times a month. Most firms have investment committees. Very few firms have disposition committees.”

“Our loss ratios are very strong. We've only lost all of our money on one of two companies ever.”

“What gets the buyout fund in a lot of trouble is just leverage. The companies still survive. They just over lever the business.”

“And so our number one KPI that we run this place by is what is our gross dollar retention for LPs? We want like 95% gross dollar retention because the only way you can get that is one, have good investment returns. And great client services.”

“And the process for us starts with, you know, 18, 22, to twenty-four-year-olds that, you know, talk to about 9000 companies a year.”

“Probably like 800. 95% by number are these executives, yeah.”

“70% is special sets or, like, secondary.”

“We tend to hire people that are, like, former athletes.”

“We are in a control position about a third of the time.”

“I probably spend 60% of my time with LPs. Now, again, that could be getting somebody to help a company, though, too, or coordinating with the team of people with us, like, hey, let's figure out a way to get into Exxon. And then I would say a third of my, 25, 3…”

“So we have a team of 18 22 to 24 year olds, like pounding the phones, calling companies all day long,”

“The mainframe business is still a five and a half billion dollar market.”

“And this is after speaking to probably 70,000 companies over the last decade. It's about a 10% yield.”

“70% of the time, we're the first institutional investor.”

“Our stupidest mistakes were just, like, overpaying for a couple of companies. Assuming the exit multiple was going to be, like, higher than it actually is.”

“When we invested in I think it was in seven, no, 1615, 16 time-ish, 17 time frame. It was like 25 of revenue, growing 250% a year. Like, what would that, that would be a billion dollar plus exit, that would be a 1,000,000,001, billion and a half dollar multipl…”

“We've looked at stuff around the like we looked at chain analysis years and years ago, probably should have done it. Like the picks and shovels type stuff. Look, should have done Coinbase, like, years and years ago. By the way, I should have bought Bitcoin, to…”

“We were early investors in Alibaba. We bought out Goldman Steak in in 2004 when I launched the fund.”

“Today we have 18 people that speak zero to two years out of college, We talked to 10,000 plus companies a year, and if you said I needed to meet all eight criteria, It'd be one percent or a hundred companies meet all eight criteria. So we say we need five or m…”

“Almost 60 plus percent of our companies were the first institutional investor in them. They've raised less than ten million dollars.”

“So probably a third of our exits have actually come from secondary sales. We'll sell to another fund that's already an existing investor in the company.”

“I bet our average holds are three and a half to four years probably.”

“I've sent handwritten thank you notes every way I meet. Almost everybody. I meet, like, every entrepreneur, every company. Guess who also does now? The twenty-two-year-old analyst. And by the way, we track it and report on it.”