The Ledger, every show

“If you fund a generational company and the outcome is insanely enormous, you should say yes to whatever that number is at the seed stage.”

“I think the second The third tier VCs are uninteresting, and I think the third tier VCs are harmful, but I think the best ex-firms at each stage are good enough to not need to overly rank them. But I think the second and third tier VCs suck.”

“I don't believe in signaling. I think it's a fake word and I don't think it exists in this market.”

“I don't think outside of the top five to 25 VCs, individuals, that VCs can magically impact a company. I think most of those investors join your board at series A or B, and they, those five to 25, whatever the number is, and the rest of the investment Sort of …”

“The company's either going to work or not work. And you are not the reason for either of those two things. If anything, you're the reason it's not going to work.”

“The valuation to me is the investor's problem. And I just don't like, I don't believe that my sympathy sits for all the VCs that overpaid on things that they did. Like, everybody could, again, back to this, like, you could have said no. If you thought somethin…”

“The signaling risk, I feel like is the single most overstated part of the ecosystem.”

“Telling founders, like, put your head down, build a product. Don't worry about fundraising. It's like distracting and annoying. The CEO specifically, their job is to become great at fundraising, and they need to be, like, view that as a core competency that th…”

“I saw a VC try to personally bankrupt a founder.”

“Every VC's math works if you fund great companies. And so it's not about this, like, ownership threshold.”

“I think that the myth of sort of you take a seed check from a multi-stage firm, especially in this market, that you are going to struggle to raise your next round if that firm doesn't sort of write the term sheet. I think that's been proven to not be a materia…”

“And so the idea that a diverse portfolio is amongst the VC can deploy this value add and company building at scale. I just haven't seen that happen over my 10 years doing this.”

“I think there are too many companies. So I think the idea that every company is going to succeed and every company deserves to be funded through a series C, that's a risk to me. So there's a massive dilution of talent in our industry in that when everybody sta…”

“When entrepreneurs in a meeting ask us, you know, what value do we add? My initial response is always, investors don't add value, and that's what we'll promise you.”

“Plaid sold, right? Plaid sold and the government stopped it. And I think that that was you know, to me, a interesting moment in The government getting involved in something that was debatable, and I think it also tells big companies, like, don't waste your tim…”

“Every VC's math works if you fund great companies. And so it's not about This, like, ownership threshold. If anybody owned one percent of Facebook, one percent of Uber.1% of Coinbase, your math works. Your math works really well, and it scales.”

“I think at the end of the day, for the most part, all VCs offer the same product. We are giving money and we are taking equity. What comes after that is obfuscated in a sales pitch.”

“I don't think you can index seed, and I don't think you can aggregate seed into a low margin product.”

“I think venture is two different jobs. There's the pre-series B job, and there's the post-series B job, and I don't think they have any relation to each other. I think at pre-series B, you are doing more art, and at post-series B, you are doing more math.”

“So we're a team of nine. Everyone on our team can say yes in an individual meeting. We don't need, we don't vote. We don't try to find groupthink.”

“We structurally push our group to not allow that. We have vocabulary internally. We say, like, throwing a grenade. You're not allowed to throw a grenade on some deal. It doesn't help.”

“The best firms in venture have the highest probability of being the best firms in the future, because brand matters, the quality of investors at that brand matter, and they're going to see and win better than the challengers are.”

“The path from zero to one billion Is impossible. The path from one billion to five billion is more predictable, and it's more easy to see at a given moment”

“I think the space I have conviction that there will never be efficiency in is the seed market. Because starting something is not efficient. Starting something is messy.”

“And over that 19 or 18 to 22 period, you went to basically a hundred. Hundred percent of companies that raised the seed got an A. Maybe it was 90, 95.”

“I think it is important to be price aware on a portfolio basis, and I don't think on a deal-by-deal basis, price is a determinant of making a decision. Pretty simple. If you love a company and you want to invest, and the deal is what the deal is, you make a de…”

“So if I'm going to take a three million dollar check from you know that you're in the bottom quartile of money allocated from that fund. So assuming that you're going to get this magical attention allocation from the fund is a mistake.”

“Don't pass on a deal because it's overpriced. If it's going to be a great company, that's the cheapest it will ever be. So you should probably invest.”

“If you pass on something and it works and you pass because of market size, they have expanded and created the market that you thought was too small.”

“The best companies will make all the math work, no matter what your check size, no matter what your entry point. And obviously that sort of stops at some scale, but if you are an early investor in one of the sort of unique once in a decade, once every five yea…”

“I think building ownership after your first check is probably hard as a seed investor because series A, series B is just so competitive and the idea of increasing ownership in those rounds feels like a false hope most of the time or adverse selection.”

“There is no free customer acquisition channel, there's no arbitrageable channel on the internet, probably for the first time since the internet was born”

“All the big companies from the West Coast have set up product offices here over the past five years, and I think that that might on one hand prevent the emergence of a standalone New York A monster, but it also brings more talent here, and so you've seen what …”

“The barrier, I think, to be successful is you need to be great from the minute somebody gets you, and that could be either this magical utility, could be this magical happiness you bring to a user, or it could be an incredibly polished product with a clear pat…”

“And I think you'll see new companies emerge. Is it going to happen this year? Is it going to happen next year? It's going to happen soon. It hasn't happened since Snapchat, right? They're the Snapchat, Tinder are the last big consumer companies to emerge. Thos…”

“The easy guess is like American manufacturing windfall, but that feels Like a big stretch, like no one's building a factory overnight. I feel like that happens in other parts of the world, not here.”

“And I think if you look at the next wave of startups, a dramatic decrease in M&A, because instead of buy, you built and the aqua hire didn't prove out to be the best use of equity. A lot of the decision of buy versus build became easier as you thought about wh…”

“Time for liquidity in early stage venture has gotten pushed significantly from where it was more predictable a decade or two decades ago. You could say seven to 10 years on an early stage fund and mean it. Today, I think you say seven to 10 years, and you're l…”

“We're now like three years past that you're early to the game. And so if you haven't figured out how to take your stale product or your product that's maxed out and begin to re-energize it feels like you're a little late.”

“It is important to be price aware on a portfolio basis. And I don't think on a deal by deal basis, price is a determinant of making a decision.”

“I think best is this, what did they do? What, like, name the things that they did for you. Favorite is, I would work with them in a heartbeat because I like them, and they are a friend. They are somebody that we go to when we want to talk to an investor withou…”

“I think speed was an advantage before 2019 for early stage investors that has been sort of equalized by all firms across the entire spectrum.”

“That's been around for over six, seven years now at a, like, infrastructure level across the entire seed market. That isn't new.”

“I don't think there's a seed investor that you can find who is figured out how to be right 10 times more often than another seed investor.”

“And the cost of omission at seed is so much more expensive than the cost of commission. And if you say no to the wrong company, you blow your returns. If you say yes to the wrong company, it's a rounding error in your model.”

“And so the more that you allow for negativity to creep into conversations amongst the firm, I think less variance you will have in outcomes and the safer you will play, and I don't think that that model works at Seed.”

“I don't think all founders are inherently great pickers. And I don't think all founders are inherently great investors. I do think all founders see better than investors.”

“I truly don't believe in pattern recognition at scale. I think there's nuanced pattern recognition, but I view each one of those companies as an individual relationship, as an individual journey”