The Ledger, every show

“Not only are they going to do it, but so is Claude. I guarantee it. You know, they might figure out something clever and do the thing, but like, there's no, there's just not a universe unless Claude get bought by Apple or something. That, that Claude aren't go…”

“Most of the like public SaaS companies are reporting, like, you know, they're coming like, we're not seeing any disruption whatsoever from AI, no additional churn, but in the public markets, the sky is falling.”

“It's probably overhyped at the moment. It usually tends to be, there'll be like a trough of sorrow in like, 18 months when everything is in the crapper. But I think like two, three years from now, we'll look back and we'll be like, oh yeah, this underlying tec…”

“Last I heard now, pre-product launch on demo day, it's like 12 to twenty million pre.”

“Realistically, it's not like we're going to be in lockdown for 18 months to two years. Like, that doesn't, that just won't happen. Like, there are too many things that are likely to work out in one way, shape, or form.”

“Yeah, there's a reason my book is, and Discretion Capital focuses on, like, two to 20. It's because, like, right now, yeah, it's probably more like two million than it is like one million.”

“Despite growing significantly faster and being, you know, significantly higher profits, the sort of price to revenue multiples of SaaS companies is actually less than industrials now”

“The fact of the matter is, like, in this revenue range, about 70% of the deals are done by private equity, either directly, like, they are buying it because they want to use what, build it around it, which is basically what's called a platform acquisition, or …”

“No. I think it's just a hissy fit to a degree. Like, and I feel like, you know, it's been that, like there's been threads was kind of the same.”

“And the answer is apparently that they're going to require all Australians to provide identification, to go, to access the internet.”

“Do I think it's likely to outcompete Twitter? No. I think Elon is more likely to ruin Twitter himself than Threads is to outcompete.”

“I think that much in terms of success for founders, I think a lot more of those successes will come from the companies that are able to steer in a more sustainable path, get to break even at, you know, at best, something like that, maybe with a small bridge ro…”

“And so I think the moat that exists from building out and managing and quality assurance on a team of people in the Philippines say, I think that's going to go away.”

“I don't think the stock market will be worse off.”

“I think B to B SaaS will be relatively, relatively insulated. And I think, and honestly, I think most of the pain that Payton in that sphere is done.”

“18 months. That's a lifetime. I still think they're around. They raised so much money. I mean, I think they raised, didn't they raise like a hundred million or something insane? So I still think they're, they'll be around. Yeah, I do.”

“I sort of somehow doubt that a Shopify plugin will become, will IPO as a billion dollar business.”

“At least last year or two, it's been the case that like a B to B SaaS business Which usually selling for some sort of an ARR multiple gets discounted if it's a service, it's a business that serves WordPress clients, you know, exclusively.”

“I do think there'll be a fundamental shift in sort of the expectation. I think probably mostly from the employee side and it'll probably start with like tech companies and things and then trickle down where it's like, okay, Maybe they'll be there a portion of …”

“I think it'll get even, I think it most likely it'll get to the point where now the Fed's buying equities of companies just to prop things up.”

“We had a business that we were selling. A company was called Zyra Talk. It was basically a AI voice agent, like a receptionist for like HVAC and all this stuff. This business had great metrics on every measure, on growth, on retention, integrations, they had e…”

“I just saw there was a stat out about Carta where it says like, you know, basically on, on, and DPI is the term distributions to paid in. And basically says like, you know, over 12 years in only about half the funds have returned one X DPI.”

“In fact, the actual math is more like two X. I think it's 2.1 six or something. If you as a venture fund in that decade, which was a good decade for venture funds, returned 2.1 X, then you were in the top quartile of funds.”

“There's a good number that, that returned less than one X. It's probably 40% of funds. You don't even get your money back. That's pretty common.”

“What is amazing performance, like world-class looked like, and that's actually in that quartile, it was just over five X. So if you five X, if you were a venture fund at five X, then you were in the top five percent of funds in that timeframe.”

“I remember looking, I was like, oh, about 30% of the companies have raised money, and that's what I used to say, like, about a third, and then I was coming around the fundraising again, I was like, okay, let's look at this, and actually, it's like, it's eight …”

“You know, it's not quite apples to apples, but certainly like, you know, CARTA came out with a venture benchmark report here earlier, earlier this year. And like, we're basically in the top five to 15% of most metrics of venture funds.”

“I actually think probably more businesses make more money on Instagram and on Pinterest than on Twitter. Like, I never think they managed to really in a meaningful way monetize that.”

“I think a lot of people, not a lot of people, but some people are going to get out competed by this low hanging fruit. But the flip side is like you say, The low hanging fruit isn't in itself a moat.”

“I see that enterprise sales cycles are lengthening and I see that the churn is increasing increasing in the smaller accounts.”

“I think consumers are being cushioned by the pain of inflation by their savings still. And I think that'll, that'll run out sometime in the near and that'll then impact earnings. On the consumer facing company side.”

“Most investors, and this is not true for us, will make the founders pay for their legal fees.”

“It's just, they see that it's like, you know, people are selling for four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 times ARR at two, three million, and that becomes a viable, you know, a viable thing to back at that point.”

“One of the issues with like Upwork and whatever is like, if someone is terrible, they can be great for a little bit and then they can be terrible. And then yeah, If they're really bad, you can sort of burn their ratings or whatever, but they could just start u…”

“My view is that that's sort of a symptom of, like, how complicated and how long it's taking for all these companies to go public. And so I think we'll start to see more and more of that trend.”

“There's been a small handful that gone from doing great to 95% drop in revenue pretty much overnight.”

“So what we did and during the financial crisis over eight months, We've been pumping out every week or so for the last several weeks.”

“And in fact, I think the math, if I remember correctly now, is like, only about seven percent of actual acquisitions get any kind of, like, even tech, mainstream tech press mentions.”

“I mean, like, you even see this in some of the, like, go public companies, like Zoom, and I think Zoom actually is the sort of poster boy for this, you know, the Zoom, I think they went public with more money in the bank than they raised.”

“They didn't raise that 32.5 million. They raised 32.5 million. The valuation was even higher than that.”

“I think he's doing, he's open about his numbers. I think he's doing twenty-two million ARR right now.”

“I accidentally blew that. It was quite substantial. I think it was a 100,000 or something. And I accidentally blew that by having like a cluster of huge instances, databases that I forgot to shut down. And then I didn't notice cause it was just eating through …”

“Typically if you're selling a software company, you have to warrant that you're not in violation of open source licenses. And so basically what that means is that if you do that and they get sued, the acquirer gets sued because of GPL violations that you did, …”

“So at Angel List, the SPV fees are about eight grand.”