The Ledger, every show

“And so now there's a path where investors, GPs get rich, where the outcome of the founders and their companies is irrelevant. Not to say they are aligned in opposite directions, but they're no longer aligned. And now, as a rational actor, you could say, why no…”

“Every founder and every company and every board will tell you if we raise money, we're not going to spend it. We're going to stay frugal. That never happens. And instead of focusing on, you might ask a founder, what are the three things that matter most this y…”

“I think there's the vast majority of companies who raise these mega rounds in 2021. Will probably never be worth at any point in time, right? The valuation that they were given in the public markets.”

“The reality of the moment we live in today is a lot of these zerf rounds, they didn't have ratchets. It was the opposite. They were very light on terms and they were very light on structure. So you don't have this Dynamic of super heavy ratchets, anti-dilution…”

“I think kind of down rounds or down round IPOs will be the same thing. There'll be a taboo on them, but they'll be normal.”

“There are companies that could be sold for a 102 hundred million dollars that results in life-changing outcomes for founders and early employees. If you raised a hundred million dollars too early, that exit path is no longer on the table. You can't sell the bu…”

“From a regulation standpoint, it is really hard to see any large-scale M&A.”

“Really, twenty-twenty-one and probably the first half of twenty-twenty-two, and now in twenty-twenty-three, we're down 90% from where we were at the peak, but we're really just back to the 2016, 20 17 trend line, right?”

“To be a truly founder friendly investor and board member. It is about having those hard conversations. It's not about shying away from conflict.”

“And like the way that we talk about it internally is don't make the cap table a risk to your business, right? Build a business the old fashioned way, raise smaller amounts of money, right? More frequently that are more milestone based. Where, when you raise a …”

“And when I say public market type company, what does that mean? It's you are sustaining growth at a 102 hundred million plus of ARR, right? Sustaining, meaning you're growing, call it 30, 40, 50% plus. The universe of companies that can do that is Very small, …”

“The mistakes that I made right when I reflect back was that middle category, right? It was forecasting wrong. It was saying, Hey, I think I'm identifying a good market and a good business, but I had an expectation for growth durability. That just didn't happen…”

“Like that will force companies to get fit. That will force companies to talk about their path to profitability. It will force companies to think about why are we an enduring business over the next 10 years? And while it may seem scary, it's actually like a goo…”

“And I would say picking vintages from the LP side is, is really hard. The, you know, the, in my opinion, right? Like the right approach is pick a manager and pick managers and manager selection right now is more important than ever and invest across those kind…”

“I think the setup for this year for next year is that we're in the bottom half, or maybe the bottom third of the valuation reset, and in the first third of a massive technology shift that's going to create a ton of creative destruction.”

“The venture markets have transitioned from a high margin cottage industry to a institutionalized lower margin industry, and that has a lot of implications.”

“Services markets are usually 10 X bigger than software markets.”

“If I had to summarize that 20, 21 period, it really was, we crammed five years of fundraising into an 18 month period.”

“This is why these processes end up taking 12, 18 months is because it's not 12, 18 months of negotiating with an acquirer or figuring out how to do a dividend back to the preferred, right? It takes 18 months because these are really hard decisions that are oft…”

“You know, on average, software companies trade around seven and a half times forward revenue, right? You can ignore that 20, 20, 21 period when interest rates went to zero. And so companies on average are going to exit at seven to eight times forward revenue, …”

“In 20, 21, everyone was funded indiscriminately as you are going to be a public company. You're in a market that's big enough. You have a product that's differentiated enough to support a public market type company.”

“The market just wasn't that big, right? There were some early adopters, maybe in Silicon Valley, that were using your product But the reality is, is you never really broke into the enterprise, right? You never really broke into where the big dollars were, and …”

“And you see some of the most successful public companies today, the crowd strikes of the world, the data dogs of the world, right? And it's exactly what you just said. It's moving from a point solution to a platform. Like that's really hard.”

“And so I think what you do have is a lot of investors who are thinking now, Hey, Is that a good thing? Should we be doing that? And I think that can be a way of finding returns for investors in funds that were more challenging vintages. But I think the wrong a…”

“Palo Alto isn't going to go acquire 10 companies, right, in the next year. They might acquire a couple. Same with all these other, like, large acquirers.”

“The IPO markets are always open, right? You can always go public. It's just a question of, do you want to accept the market clearing price at that point in time?”

“Cool is the enemy of reality, right? There are a lot of products in venture companies that seem cool, but like at the end of the day, you need some, you need to solve a real tangible problem for someone. There's someone on the other end of the buying decision …”

“You don't have an AI strategy without a data strategy, right? And a lot of the AI value prop today really comes down to do you have your data house in order?”

“This was 2010, and they were doing a deal at ten million of ARR at 42 pre”