The Ledger, every show

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“We will do an uncap safe. We will catalyze an uncap safe.”

“We truly hold to the idea that we want to invest in companies we're excited about, and if what we're able to invest is not in perfect alignment with the math, we're willing and able to make exceptions.”

“We don't want to lead seed rounds. We don't want to lead series A rounds. We want to be sort of second or third biggest check on a cap table.”

“The youngest demographic that is active on technology, so call it the, like, 18 to 25 year old demo, is not using a product that's built by somebody of their generation.”

“The negative of what's happened here in the past seven years is you haven't seen the true emergence of a destination company, right? We have incredible companies that are building incredible foundations here. Some have went, went public already. Some will go p…”

“I don't believe the phone is your remote control. I think there's other input methods that are going to allow you to interact with technology.”

“I think two years ago we were saying like, 30 to 40% of the companies we see talk about AI or are oriented around AI. Last year was like 90, and this year it's a 170%. You don't meet non AI companies right now.”

“We are a, as of recently we just closed our sixth fund, so it's a two hundred and twelve million dollar early stage fund.”

“No, I, we don't try to compete. I think if we tried to compete, we would lose our ability to work well with others. And I don't think our value proposition is to say, pick us instead of somebody.”

“Seed has shifted, the word seed has shifted from a million to three million dollar round to a five to eight million dollar round.”

“Tech shifted from a vertical to a horizontal. So the places, the types of businesses that venture and early stage tech venture capitalists were funding fundamentally expanded at a huge level too.”

“I think 10 years from now, the bigger firms are bigger. There are In, in many ways, less big firms.”

“We are we are going to run whether you like it or not, the same model for a long time. And I think what that does is it aligns us with founders who are also going to build their business for a long time. We are consistent. We're not going to suddenly be a Seri…”

“Yeah, there'll be 80 to a hundred companies in a fund.”

“Yet today there are a handful, not a lot, but a handful of companies that enter into a liquid public market At above a hundred billion dollars. That's not a private market overhyped valuation. That's now a public market with liquidity that you can actually tra…”

“If you had sold Shopify when they went public, you left like a hundred X on the table. So don't sell Shopify. If you own Shopify as a VC, when they go public that you missed the actual bigger set of upside in that company.”

“And so in this business where the feedback loop is somewhere between, they used to say seven to 10 years, but it's really 10 to 15 years, only 10 years in did I get comfortable that we might have a clue what we're doing.”

“Glossier is able to scale what they've done, not just through paid. Paid amplifies the community that they've built, this core community that is rabid about their products.”

“Hugging face is the winner. They were in a bootcamp for chatbots. And pivoted from a chatbot into hugging face. So that's your answer.”

“And so seed A, B were happening in hours to days versus weeks and months.”

“DoorDash is an example. We're going to be the 12th player in this market. The market is big enough for multiple players, but it didn't mean that just entering the market Enables you to be a big outcome. They had to figure out their wedge.”

“And so our check size typically ranges from basically 200,000 to 500,000. We're typically not the lead of a traditional seed round. We will lead a pre-seed round.”