The Ledger, every show

“Frankly, I think the advice is dangerous, and I'd go one step further, which is, it has become the conventional wisdom of the industry. Which is go faster.”

“So I just think there's another problem outside of, it's a different form of risk, which is the likelihood of success, in my opinion, goes way down for those companies, which is super counterintuitive because you're like, well, but they have more money at a hi…”

“We do not focus on ownership. We actually think that's a very problematic mindset. There's a whole bunch of downstream issues, including, first of all, our missions about alignment with the founder, and the whole ownership mentality. You can twist yourself in …”

“Very few of the VCs who were once entrepreneurs have had two hundred and fifty million dollar exits.”

“We don't do a lot of Parada for a bunch of reasons, including we don't think In most cases, in many cases, Parada's aligned to the founder, because the problem with Parada is you're always a net buyer of the founder's company, and they're always a net seller.”

“The other thing you're doing when you're exercising parada over and over again is Is your dollar averaging down your returns, or otherwise you could say your dollar averaging up your cost basis?”

“I actually think being overpriced at seed is actually a bigger problem than most entrepreneurs realize, particularly as the market's adjusting, right? It's a very hard time To raise Series A in general, and it's a harder time if you're already priced where som…”

“Never, not the last 20 years, has the most valuable company born in any single year, right, valuable as of now, been this in the theme that was hot in that year. It has not happened.”

“It's why most VCs get paid on management fees. They don't get paid on, on, on carried interest, because TVPI, TVPI in that case, doesn't actually translate to DPI.”

“If you're describing bubble as the asset prices related to that general idea, I think we're in a very extreme bubble. I also want to throw out there, and I think this is very relevant to Oh, yeah, I mean, I think we're not quite at NFT level, but we're probabl…”

“The easy access to money at a accelerated stage that the company is not ready for usually will destroy the company's value.”

“Besides product market fit, the biggest risk to a venture-backed company is bad capitalization. And we don't mean undercapitalization. We mean overcapitalization”

“I think blitzscaling is this beautiful, beautiful idea of exactly what Mike said applied wrong in all, almost every context, right?”

“I don't think the founders often appreciate two things is how much they're turning off investors that might've been good investors for them, but even bigger, how much risk they're actually taking on their next round. What this round does in terms of creating r…”

“One of three things are going to happen to those companies, right? They're either going to take the extraordinary amount of cash they got, cut their burn rates down and figure out how to build real companies. And by the way, many of those will still never rais…”

“If you're recapping a hundred million dollar revenue company at a billion dollar valuation, but it really should be recapped. People will do that work, but if you're recapping a three million dollar run rate revenue company with a billion dollar valuation, the…”

“I actually think that if you want to maintain your integrity, you want to maintain your integrity, and you don't have product market fit, and you raise money at a crazy valuation, and you don't want to have this burden on your back for possibly years, and by t…”

“2021 was an incredible time to be a seller, and anyone who didn't see that was completely playing momentum.”

“Private companies are more volatile than public companies, in truth, we, like, pretend they're not at all volatile, and somehow their valuations are whatever happened in the last round some months ago.”

“Valuation is all the sideshow. The dilution isn't even your financing. The dilution is how you use your burn rate. That is where all the dilution lives.”

“I would bet the last few years will be one of the biggest disconnects between TVPI and DPI for venture funds in venture history.”

“We looked at 71 IPOs over the last five years, the 71 tech IPOs over the last five years. To study whether venture capital in the outlier cases could be argued to have really driven greater success. And it turned out there was effectively no correlation betwee…”

“Over time, the lightly capitalized companies, the efficient entrepreneurs outperform.”

“There's over 200 Companies that are considered these unicorns, many of them will probably never live up to their billion dollar valuations, but they've redefined for venture capitalists what their expectations are.”

“You have to put that alongside the fact that venture funds have been growing, and the rule of thumb we use there is we say any exit that isn't at least equivalent to the size of the fund is not really material to a fund.”

“If we had invested in every single round we still wouldn't, I don't think, come close to doubling what our current value is.”

“Struggling through how hard it is to build companies in 90% of our portfolio. And then there's the 10% that just does amazingly well, and it's really fun to help those companies, and we do get involved, and we do contribute to those, too, but they don't really…”

“The most valuable company born in 2023 could very well be in direct to consumer Commerce, because that's not where anyone wants to play right now.”

“And I'll tell you another story, you know, with Trade Desk, one of the reasons we didn't raise a lot of money was, we were the last ones in, and people just thought it was played already in the programmatic advertising market. But one of the reasons we didn't …”

“So I think this, some of this stuff is starting to shift a little bit, largely because so many of these unicorns are going to be, you know, un, unhorned, or whatever the right term is, unwinged, unhorned.”

“It's like when a founder wants to sell their company, you say, yes, you should probably sell your company. VCs standing in the way are, I think are nuts.”

“I think the truth of the big firms is they barely care. ... I think it is completely, in most cases, quite disengaged capital.”

“I think the SPAC craze was just a waste of everyone's energy and a bad idea, and I'm not saying there weren't any good SPACs, but generally speaking, it was a path, generally, there were exceptions, but it was a path for companies that were not ready to be pub…”

“I think if you're a strong company, you can go public in almost any period of time, as long as the market volatility is not insane, like the great financial crisis. If you are strong, if you're really ready, you probably can go out in almost any environment, r…”

“I actually think the IPO inflation of those periods really has long-term detrimental effects. It's very hard to work for a company that went public at ten billion, that today is worth one and a half billion very hard that's right very hard destroying for the w…”

“Like, SeatGeek was a 2010 investment. I think it's a great company. Dave led that for us. I think it's gonna ultimately have an amazing liquidity event”

“Ultimately, your customers validate your business. Venture capital doesn't.”

“So, so at Founder Collective, we've been actively talking about what we call efficient entrepreneurship, the efficient use of capital, which ultimately leads to much more founder ownership, much more founder control, and actually, believe it or not, much less …”

“I think at the early stage, rough rule of thumb, there's no perfect definition here. You should at least be tripling every two years. Some people would argue you should be doubling every year, which would mean Forex in two years. But just to sort of put a more…”

“Actually, the expectations come as a result of a tough negotiation where, Not just VCs, but founders typically want more capital and higher price. And so it's on both sides, the intention of the VC to get more capital in and incentives to do so, and the desire…”

“I've never believed that go big or go home is a requirement to building a big company.”

“I would love to see more funds focus on specific stage instead of being life cycle funds. I actually think that would be extremely healthy for the ecosystem broadly.”

“I think in really good times, you feel extremely, you know, probably People feel a little overconfident. Right now, it's probably one of those times”

“We saw that that body of that portfolio, that body of work was performing way better. I mean, four times as well as these top quartile PCs”

“A lot of seed funds today, a lot of our peer group, a lot of whom I respect very much they really look like series B funds in terms of where their average dollar goes in. They may be starting very early, but their average dollar is weighted towards series B.”

“I think our fund is performing you know, people like to say top quartile, top decibel I think we're, I mean, I think our fund's truly one of the very, you know, Count on your hands the number of funds performing as well right now. So I don't know if we're goin…”

“If you're coming into a company as a senior executive and you have a CEO is bragging to you about how big their last round was in dollars and how big the post money was, ask to see the financials and compare those financials to what they're claiming in the van…”

“Almost every one of our best companies, almost every single one, the founder founded something before that wasn't a success or a big success.”