The Ledger, every show

“It's, I believe, extremely unhelpful for founders to go out there with a message that says, we are open for business as usual, because nothing about this is usual.”

“In fact, I bet you benchmark gets discounted pricing on most of what it does because they're benchmarked.”

“We can take out 60 to 80% of white-collar jobs through smart workflow automation before we're even touching decisioning engines like AI.”

“Angels are sometimes the worst offenders, because angels are very afraid of losing their money in many cases, especially on the European side. Angels just hate writing shit off.”

“VCs are very often assholes because they're in a logic of control. Their viewpoint of the world is like, Hey, you work for me. You have to deliver results. Which is, of course, completely wrong, because the reality is we're only trying to enable a project call…”

“One day I was actually working at Goldman Sachs on hiding the Greek deficit through long dated swaps, and I decided I had enough of it, and I jumped into the world of entrepreneurship”

“And honestly, on top of that, I don't know of any fund that was ever returned on nasty terms. Funds are returned by backing the right entrepreneurs and exceptional outcomes.”

“Especially if you're an emerging manager and you're a first time fund, are you going to go sue one of your LPs because they don't pay? The reality is like, you kind of have no leverage. You're just a sitting duck. And if people decide not to pay you, then they…”

“But if you're a tier two VC running a five to eight hundred million dollar fund, you know, it's extremely hard to actually provide the kind of returns that really venture demands.”

“And this is where the Americans are so much better than anybody else because they've lived it.”

“We would never have funded Deliveroo. We would never have funded PillPack. You know, in fact, Kareem probably would never have taken in any capital because you have to project yourself into sometimes a three or four year cycle before these unit economics reall…”

“Because if you're not strategic, nobody has to buy you. If nobody has to buy you as a VC, I'm going to sit on that position for 12 years and end up selling it secondary to a horrible secondary buyer who's going to take a 40% discount on my book value.”

“The plan is a fiction. The plan is a framework for which to think about the future. You know, the moment you finish writing it, the conditions change, etc.”

“In fact, even worse, if you force a company to hit plan, and they're not hitting plan naturally, you're probably making the wrong decisions for the business long term.”

“Now, if you say no to a world-class deal because the pre-money is three million off what you thought it should be, you're an idiot. Because world-class deals don't come through your door every day.”

“But if they're trying to get you to climb up a tree and kind of make their ultimate selection based on a couple of million bucks of pre-money, that to me is usually a signal that you're a short-term optimizer and not somebody who's going to build an amazing bu…”

“If you're backing the CEO and he's running the company, It is your job to be behind the CEO. If at some point you make a decision to remove the CEO, make a decision to remove the CEO. What you're not allowed to do is be like a fucking carpenter ant that's like…”

“We have almost no overlap with Just Eat or Delivery Hero.”

“And I think very often, especially in Europe, Founders are being made to feel extremely guilty when things don't work, whereas in the US you find these attitudes very different, which is like, hey, we tried, it was a big ambitious problem, you know, turns out …”

“I have told a couple of founders, I'm putting some money in you because I believe in you, but I really want to back your next business. And in both cases, I haven't reinvested in either of them, but I can tell you in both cases I was probably right on the busi…”

“So I will engineer disagreement, just so we see, like, what are we like in conflict, right? Because you never know about people until they go and get stuff.”

“And there was definitely an aspect here of reacting to a market that was sort of pretending it was business as usual and sort of planting a flag and saying, hey, we're actually on pause for a month or two or three.”

“Samir Khadji from First Republic Bank in the US is an active observer of the early stage market, and he said that 70 or 80% of the seed funds that he spoke to had six to 12 months of life for most of their portfolio companies.”

“LP defaults have historically occurred, even to some tier one funds. They definitely occurred in oh nine”

“Nobody will train you, nobody will mentor you in a way that's really meaningful, and that from day one, what you have to do as a young person in venture capital is learn every aspect of the trade.”

“I'd much rather be on smaller funds that we keep constrained by design so that we can really hopefully deliver to our investors a return that are more attractive than I think what the larger funds are trying to do.”

“The reality is if you invest with a certain level of discipline across 25 companies, you own enough of them, you know, 10, 12, 15, 18%, you're actually really looking at a relatively spread risk and with odds of certainly returning a multiple of capital that a…”

“You can systematize your thinking around achieving large outcomes, and it's more a question of your own mental limitations than usually the businesses themselves.”

“When you replace founders, you lose the magic.”

“Find a disagreement with the founder before you invest, because your conflict resolution mode is important, and actually the person's reaction to conflict or to pushback is also important.”

“I think your ability to assess markets Either bottom up or top down at the beginning of a life of a new company or a new, new segment is extremely hard to do. And very often because the legacy industries are unattractive.”

“I mean, PillPack is a company that got acquired by Amazon for a billion dollars. Guess how many engineers they have? 45. This is a tiny engineering team that built a pharmacy operating system, which, you know, the incumbents have supposedly spent half a billio…”

“AngelList, the original vision of AngelList, because Naval hates VCs, was why don't I separate the skill set here between people who are good at investing and people who would be good advisors, and I'll break it open through a network.”

“YC goes almost a step further, which is, YC can operate without investing partners, because they plug you into a network of alumni, and the network is the value.”

“And so I think that the notion that data is going to disrupt early-stage venture fast to me is somewhat exaggerated because I mean, we did some of that work at Accel. It is insanely hard to derive signal from the very Fuzzy nature of the early stage data we ge…”

“My only recommendation, which I always tell entrepreneurs, is please don't ever take money from assholes. You cannot fire your board members. It is probably not worth it in your life in general. I'd rather not get funded than take money from people who are tox…”

“Founder friendly means I will leave my fear at the door of the boardroom because I will come in and do the right thing by the company. Not by my partners, you know, not whatever. I get roasted at the fund level because the company isn't doing well. Well, I wil…”

“And, you know, I've definitely gone into negotiations saying we are, in fact, deliver is a good example. We are not going to match the other prices. I'm sorry. I'm not going to go up to the level of people who are desperate to get in and are competing based on…”

“The best entrepreneur, like Alex Chesterman at Zoopla, for example, the best entrepreneur is someone you don't really need to help.”

“Part of the reason why founders get fired in the process of scaling is, is one of is the reason, the primary reason is a breakdown in trust at the board level.”

“There's nothing fundamentally difficult intellectually about being a venture capitalist. Like, it's not like you need to be a rocket scientist to do it. In fact, people sometimes who are too smart can be terrible investors.”

“The reason why VCs get a bad rap is because typically they'll be like, founder, supportive, founder, supportive, love the company, and then suddenly from one day to the next, they're like, actually we're not backing you. And entrepreneurs fucking hate that wit…”

“So I used to write these beautiful no emails that were very, very well grounded with a lot of feedback. You know what systematically happens is people come back and they're like, you didn't get this, you didn't get that. It's like, I'm actually not trying to b…”

“I think the US is still Faster, more transparent, more professional. I think there's a better, ah, there's a better VC landscape in the US. Just people understand, like I said before, you know, the more tolerant to people failing and losing money and so forth,…”

“I think Europe might be the most exciting venture opportunity on the planet right now.”

“We dug into microeconomics fairly hard, and then it was an insane feeding frenzy, because I think they had five or six competing term sheets. We were in first, we were well below market valuation”

“When the crisis hit, we actually accelerated our capital call. We kept it reasonable because we appreciate people want to limit liquidity at least, but we immediately issued a capital call, and it was a way to effectively flush out whether we'd have any LP iss…”

“I think we do have a risk is on duration. You know, when are the returns going to be realized? Because it's as we know, it's easy to invest. It's extremely hard to exit.”