The Ledger, every show

“You probably should tax carried interest like income tax. That would write, that would like break that structurally different incentive mechanism, and then it would defuse talent elsewhere.”

“If everything that a company is doing and building can really be accurately described in a single sentence, it's probably too one dimensional. It's probably not Ambitious enough.”

“This is, like, probably contentious but one of my frameworks is, I think that the, like, virtuousness of a company is inversely related to its enterprise value.”

“I would say the vast majority of direct-to-consumer brands, not suitable venture investments.”

“I mean, like, the distance between a 51 49 split is way more than two percent. Like, it might as well be like 80%.”

“We think that venture isn't an asset that is meant to scale. It's pretty hands-on.”

“The genius behind Instacart and DoorDash and other companies like that is that they, Perfectly price discriminate laziness and the value of like a leisure hour.”

“The social graph works and worked because of the idea that who people select for in their social graph is a proxy for their interest. And so in some ways you are using somebody's social graph as spark notes for the integral, the fully like, you know, my new in…”

“I tend to agree. I think that markets are significantly more markets are huge, huge, huge input into outcomes, particularly in venture.”

“With the glut of venture capital and dollars chasing returns, I think that venture capital Perhaps intentionally, maybe unintentionally subsidizes business building of companies that should never have been venture capital targets.”

“I think that is almost certainly like if the company Literally could not exist without venture capital. That probably is the area where venture capital is a suitable, like, spitballing this in real time. That's probably a good criteria to suggest that it is wi…”

“I don't think all, I almost, like, definitionally, I don't think all of them make it. I think we're gonna see over the next, here's the thing, like, it's gonna take a long time, it's gonna take a decade plus for this stuff to unwind, but they're gonna get lost…”

“On navigating competitive environments, I think seeing Twitch firsthand gave me one of my mental frameworks, which is, are like companies or platforms that start with the explicit strategy of poaching, like economically incentivizing supply from another platfo…”

“And I would expect that business model to have a leaky bucket at the top or at best get margin compressed at the top. So you have the best, like the people that have the most distribution that are the best for the platform from marketing perspective, dramatica…”

“I think that great founders are incredible at putting themselves in the position to surf waves, but I don't think anybody can make waves themselves.”

“I feel like in startups, right, like senior hires at best, Is a coin toss of whether or not it works out and that's okay.”

“The highest conviction things that you get comfort with are the ones that you break the most number of rules on.”

“I actually think the seven deadly sins are really core motivators. They describe why people do things. And I would go far as far to say, like, honestly, They're the only reasons why people do things. I think it's possible to distill down any individual behavio…”

“So if you were to look at the system design behind companies that ultimately developed modes at scale, it's not something that like happens magically overnight once the company's up and running. It's like embedded in the core product from day one. And so I thi…”

“There's a very clear reason why the order of founding went from Twitter first, to Instagram, to Snapchat, to TikTok. And it is because mobile as infrastructure and bandwidth in its earliest stages, supported the lowest packet size, text. And then next compress…”

“I think the Mac, the areas of maximum misalignment are when it feels like the reputation does not carry over in between iterations of the game, or that's the final iteration of the game that any one participant is playing for. Because then people are incentivi…”

“One of the things that Thrive does really, really, really well In my opinion, maybe even better than anyone else in the industry is it leans into people's potential regardless of their age, regardless of their credentials.”

“We've been successful at hitting our ownership target in 70% of the companies we invested in.”

“If you are trying to create structurally new value, one, I think the best way and has proven in the success of user and content networks is to, you have to empower a previously disenfranchised set of creators.”

“I think timing, like, being too early is just as bad as being too late. In many ways, it's kind of like rock, paper, scissors, where you kind of have to be just one step ahead. If you're multiple steps ahead, you lose.”

“We had kind of a mantra, which is optimized for alignment, not outcomes. I think in many situations, people, companies can optimize for outcomes rather than alignment. And that over rotation ultimately over time leads to misalignment.”

“One of the biggest areas of misalignment between founders and investors is probably management incentive in an acquisition. So management incentive in acquisition is basically when the acquiring company says you, the management team will have this compensation…”

“At Thrive Capital at the time, it was a ten million dollar fund.”

“The first board I ever sat on was Twitch. I was 2005 or 26.”