The Ledger, every show

“E-commerce, there's been probably net, you know, no value created in five years.”

“New York is killing it and will be the number one company clearly 15 years.”

“But I'm not seeing the tech talent in Miami, and I don't think it's going to get there.”

“The single thing that I'm concerned about is Trump winning on multiple dimensions, giving away Ukraine you know, Supreme Court justices, very, very, very poor execution of every aspect of government a level of corruption. That I think would follow.”

“Today, I don't know that many companies outside of AI that where people will give you a billion dollars to lose. But today, you know, that exists in AI. It doesn't exist in a lot of other areas.”

“We're big investors, for example, in the psychedelic industry. Is the psychedelic industry gonna be 20 times larger 10 years from now than today? Absolutely.”

“Same with media you know, with the exception of actually podcasts, hardly anything has worked. In the last five years in media.”

“I see it all the time when we have a company going out and we approach 10 VCs and three of them will say, I invested in this sector eight years ago and I lost all my money. They haven't even read the deck yet”

“I once looked through the top hundred consumer internet companies. And the one pattern was that most of the people Who are very successful, had actually not come from that vertical, but they had come from another startup.”

“We don't know five years from now if Google's gonna be the number one search engine. There's a chance that's a disruptive technology that allows it to change.”

“Pierpolo, starting a mobile bank in Argentina, guess what? We didn't have as much competition, but there was geopolitical risk, you know, all kinds of risk. And he's been remarkably successful, but that's why it's going to be a ten billion dollar company, beca…”

“So in, again, if we look back at consumer businesses, you know, out of the top 25 companies, how many were serial entrepreneurs? Almost zero. Almost zero.”

“I don't think there's a single example in the cabinet of Biden after four years that you can point to where we could point and say, I think that's actual corruption.”

“After four years, we're worth a billion dollars, and at the time, you know, everyone invested a billion because they thought it was worth two to three billion, and we ended up selling it for two hundred and fifty million dollars, despite having an incredible p…”

“The monetary answer is Mongo by far, you know, Mongo's worth twenty five billion dollars. There's only two companies started in the last 30 years in New York that are worth twenty five billion dollars.”

“Mongo, we lost a billion dollars before we had a profitable quarter. Over 10 years.”

“There's another characteristic in our business is there's actually a lot of VC money. You know, there's tons of cash sitting on the sidelines. That money is not going to be given back. That money is going to be spent. We're only debating whether people are goi…”

“Not a single one of those has worked in 10 years.”

“So I would say that a lot of the people we back are first time founders. We would never, almost never back someone who comes from Procter and Gamble, a large company and seems like a smart person, but they don't know startups.”

“Media and e-commerce are both sexy and accessible industries. So, 50,000 entrepreneurs have gone after them, and so the next guy right now just probably isn't gonna come up with a good idea.”

“Salesforce is going to incorporate that in and, you know, a large company with a thousand person Salesforce is not going to easily switch off. To a startup company. And so I have confidence that Salesforce will incorporate AI into their product. Maybe it's six…”

“There's, I think you're being misled by the 10 supposed hottest deals who get preempted. That's not where the industry is. The vast majority of things are not being preempted. They're going out. They're raising good rounds. They take a couple of years to be re…”

“New York has grown faster than any other city.”

“Five years ago, there was not one publicly traded company in New York City startup that was worth more than three billion.”

“No one, there's not a single economist that thought this was gonna happen.”

“The business we're in does not scale infinitely. We're not trying to accumulate assets, so I don't want to be a two billion dollar fund.”

“I mean, Mongo, between being a private and public company, raised and lost a billion dollars before they had a profitable quarter. And now already make three hundred million dollars a year in profits.”

“So that's why it's so valuable is because it's an, it's just an incredible company growing quickly, enormous market share, and is going to grow for the next 10 years. It'll be a fifty billion dollar company.”

“So double case, the perfect example, we expanded to 25 countries before our first country was profitable.”

“What I'm proudest of is that Business Insider is at three hundred million uniques today and never spent one dollar in advertising.”

“The real use of AI in the short term is going to be much more mundane. It's optimizing customer support, you know, making your coding more efficient, things like that. We're a long ways before, you know, true AI companies are coming”

“I started a company called Gilt, and Gilt, after four years, was doing five hundred million dollars in revenue. So, crazy success. We did a hundred and seventy-five million dollars in revenue in our second year, which I don't think anyone in New York City's ev…”

“And still growing, and I think we'll be a fifty billion dollar company someday.”

“We did, by the way, we did seven rounds of layoffs. We went from 2000 people back down to a thousand, ah, doing layoff after layoff. 70% of our clients went bankrupt.”

“I don't have any companies going out that have quadrupled their revenues in the last year that don't get funded.”

“You'll see in enterprise software more of a pattern of repeat entrepreneurs, also on average slightly older.”

“You don't, 24 year olds have trouble starting a database company and building up an enterprise sales force Meeting with the CEO of, or the CTO of Goldman Sachs to close that deal. It really doesn't happen that often.”

“We had no revenues after three years at Mongo.”

“We've never had a CEO resign.”

“My psychedelic company, I think, is one of the most valuable psychedelic companies started in the last four years in the United States. Transcend.”

“We generally don't put more than ten million, might go to fifteen million in any one company, and sometimes we'll leave some money on the table and other people will take it.”

“You know, when our companies are worth a billion, we're just not investing in them at that point.”

“In 2000, I had probably a hundred million dollars worth of double tick stock on paper, which ended up being ten million.”

“We were a year and a half, a year away from going public at Gilt, where Goldman Sachs said, Kevin, you've got about one hundred and sixty five million dollars. We're feeling really good about this. And that ended up being ten million.”

“Look, the reason one should be concerned about venture today Is that there are, there's probably four times as much money in funds today as there was in 2017.”

“So you'll see new funds being smaller, but that takes time to work through the system.”

“Many of the smartest people are doing AI, and it will distribute more.”

“The Wall Street Journal and Businessweek at the time did not, basically did not update their websites during the day.”