The Ledger, every show

“And then we had a weird scenario in that particular company where our pro rata rights got taken away from us, and in the legal documents, they changed the definition of who would get the pro rata, To basically, I mean, basically singling us out.”

“Yes, I'm really terrified that the German car industry is going to get wiped out by China. Like, by the EVs in China. I think they're asleep at the wheel.”

“There are some great women who are very capable. It is hard for me to poach them because they're very well taken care of in their existing funds for very good reasons, because there's a shortage of them.”

“And the biggest structural problem that we have in the UK and Europe, the conversion rate between series, between seed and series A to series B to series C, is basically these days on par with the US. But the capitalization of our companies from seed to series…”

“And there is a statistical, like, correlation between if a seed round raises, like, a hundred K, the probability of it becoming an outlier is very, very, very, very small. Kind of makes sense. If that seed round goes up to, like, ten million, the odds between …”

“When you look at what's happening in AI, you got DeepMind down the road in London, you got Meta running its AI stuff in Paris, like we are for the first time ever in European history on par from the company creation or technology creation as the US in not a ni…”

“I think it was trading at huge, a huge multiple discount. Seven hundred thirty-two million of revenue, like I said, trailing, trailing, got privatized at five billion.”

“There is a correlation between how much money goes in to a company and what the probability of success is.”

“The average is about like three hundred million to get to a unicorn status”

“The company, when it got privatized, did seven hundred thirty two million of revenue. I mean, we, but when we invested, it was doing like 10 K.”

“If you look at the public markets today, and you go look at all the SaaS companies, between the first decile all the way up to the 10th decile, if you break it up, everything other than the first decile is both growing and profitable.”

“Article 50 got invoked, and everyone who had a check or a commitment from EIF at that point felt it. Seedcamp got one of the first calls, they tore up the document, and all of us lost the EIF commitment because they were no longer able to invest in the UK.”

“So the pension funds in the UK, so the defined contribution scheme, about 10% of the capital in the pension funds is invested in the top tech names in America. 10%. And about five percent of the pension funds is invested in UK equities.”

“The jumbo seeds, like, up six to seven times in volume than they were a couple of years ago, and the seed rounds that are five million plus are a fifth of the industry right now.”

“Yes, because I think JD Vance has made that very clear, that sub-five hundred million dollar deals, the FTC has no business trying to block transactions.”

“We're out of the J curve, which means we're kind of, you know, in the money now on, on the fund, you know, for a fund that's just going to become two years old in two weeks.”

“They're saying two thirds of all the money in, in, in London, at least in the tech community at the series B stage is, is now funded by American VCs. And when I say American VCs, I don't mean Accel in the UK. I mean, guys who are in the U S who are flying over…”

“New York in an entire financial quarter raises as much money as London does in a year.”

“In fact, the seed funds of record here, you won't even remember the names. They were Eden and Pond. They're like a bygone, right? The people raised money in the dot-com boom, mismanaged their capital all the way through the collapse, and kind of left.”

“And the, and he was growing five, seven percent, week on week.”

“So if we see early traction in any one of our companies, we will figure out a way to put more capital in, and these days for our best companies, and our best companies are much higher concentrations than our average company. We're getting closer to like 15, 20…”

“No not an uncap note.”

“So in the run-up to the Darktrace IPO, we did a bunch of SPVs with our investors. We put more money to work in Darktrace than the fund size of Fund One. And we think the lowest performing IRR for us was net 66%. This is all realized, by the way. Net 66%. And t…”

“And, but you know, going back to that Darktrace round that KKR did, four million a month, so forty-eight million annualized, four hundred million dollar post, not pre-post.”

“By the way, the Delta was, they'd gone from about a million a month at that point to about four million a month. So it was like super exponential growth in those early days.”

“The probability at seed of picking something that becomes a unicorn is three percent.”

“When we first started, there was about a billion that went into European venture. These days, about thirty billion that goes into European venture.”

“The bar for an IPO today in the US is north of 200 to three hundred million.”

“One of the biggest impediments to housing in the United Kingdom, and housing is a big deal in the United Kingdom, we don't have enough houses, is we did not build reservoirs 30 years ago.”

“Once you get to that kind of size, you end up having to comply with all the SEC stuff. So you may not be publicly traded, but you're complying and doing, you have all the infrastructure to actually go public at any time that you want because you've had to buil…”

“Apex became much more of a private equity firm than it became a venture firm. And three I became much more of a growth equity firm.”

“We're always going to be a small firm, but I think we can be a little bit bigger so that we can support our entrepreneurs the best way. But, you know, we want to be, I don't think we want to be a big firm. I don't think we want to be and doing growth deals. We…”

“Fun one was 39 months for us to get going. Like three nine, like over three years.”

“I would love for us to have built a partnership, and I'm thinking actively about this, and I can hand the reins over where I'm just one of a few, and someone else is running the firm. If I can do that successfully over the next decade, I know I have a durable …”

“Axel's more than half a million, half a billion per fund, so 500 something plus Per fund.”

“It took us 39 months to do this.”

“For us, we go there every, like, six to eight weeks, you know, you get back into the flow of information”