The Ledger, every show

“A lot of very famous investors retire, and I don't blame them at all because the game on the field has definitely changed and it's far more competitive than it was in their day. And you're chasing around people trying to earn the opportunity to invest. And whe…”

“It is some level of delusion. If you actually believe That all of these companies are worth what they were worth six months ago, then and you're saying that with a straight face to your limited partners, and I think you're losing trust, right? A hundred percen…”

“I think we're going to see a lot of zeros pop out of the vintages of these crypto funds that we've seen recently.”

“Anyone that either doesn't have their existing track record of the last, whatever, 10 years attached to the name of their existing firm, or anyone that scaled well beyond what they had, you know, in the prior five years, in the last two years, I think anyone t…”

“I think people are going to be stuck in this state of paralysis a little bit of like, what do we actually do right now? And inherently, I think that becomes self-fulfilling in the way that it's going to lead to a recession for us. I hope, again, I hope I'm wro…”

“If you look Democrats have been very anti-growth and anti-capitalism in a meaningful way. And I think it was just kind of embarrassing in some ways to be extolling the virtues or pushing back too much over the course of the last couple months, because it was s…”

“I think if you talk to smart endowments or pension plans or stuff, they, they've definitely as fund sizes have gotten to three, four, five, six billion dollars. Like those people have raised eyebrows and maybe voted with their feet to either scale down or walk…”

“It feels like there wasn't A ton of reckoning for sins that were made in 2022 1021. It feels like people were able to get a mulligan and say, Hey, you know what? Like, yeah, we got a little crazy, but now we've really doubled down and focused on what it is tha…”

“Now we're at this prisoner's dilemma where it would be theoretically a great time for everyone to lean in if other people backed out because then prices would depress, but everyone's staying in. And so it's actually leading to prices staying elevated”

“If I were open AI, I would try to get out sooner rather than later. Right. Cause I think there's this demand both from Institutional and retail to have exposure to some of these things. And if you look, I mean Palantir's where they're trading, and obviously th…”

“I've probably seen more of Hey, this fund has a bunch of money and you might not be getting their number one person. It could be their, you know, whatever, their reliever out of the bullpen that's coming in to do the round. And those are the ones that they're …”

“And I think in large part, maybe with the exception of open AI, like the vast majority of the equity value will probably end up accumulating to the Facebooks and the Microsofts and the, you know, the Googles and I guess open AI as well.”

“We were this summer seeing businesses get done at 200 times, 300 times ARR. When the public markets were saying like at best you could trade at, I don't know, 20 times forward revenue or something.”

“And the ones that don't do it well are the ones that really view this as out of the money call options. And if the opportunity presents itself, we're going to try to get sharp elbowed and box out other groups. And I've yet to see that really work. It might wor…”

“Well, it's definitely informed my, if you wanna be in the company within the margin, just find a way to get into it and don't get too hung up on the ten million here, ten million there.”

“Because if you were good if you cared about marketing and you were really good, you would go into consumer because the budgets are much bigger and you get an opportunity to be much more Creative and come up with things like Superbowl advertising and all that.”

“I'm optimistic over the course of the next six months or so this drought that we've had over the last quarter in companies going public. I think we're going to see that short itself up,”

“I do think we probably need to take it literally at this point and assume that this is probably here to stay in some way, shape or form.”

“There's so many complicated pieces of the puzzle from an AI standpoint that that I think it's going to be hard to disassociate the aggregation that is what's being tariffed into AI. And in talking to people over the weekend that are exposed to these large mode…”

“But I do think it's interesting to see people like Dan Loeb, or Dan Loeb Bill Ackman break rank and start to come out and really be negative against these tariffs. I mean, we can joke and I have certainly on Twitter About him and changing his views and all thi…”

“That said, it does seem pretty uncorrelated what's going on at like a high level macro with the early stage funding environment.”

“I'm not sure it's totally socially acceptable, at least for the institutional funds to do it. I think it's far easier if you're an angel, people are a little bit more understanding of that”

“So if you're a private equity firm, if you're Apollo, or Blackstone, or BlackRock, or whoever it is, right, and you're this big entity the people within your firm can't really leave and compete with you, because there's so much institutional infrastructure aro…”

“In venture, it's so beholden, I think, at least to individuals and individuals can walk out the door and they can go raise a 102 103 104 hundred million dollars. And like, effectively compete with you in some way, shape or form.”

“But I still think we'll end up with hundreds of billions of dollars of equity value created for, you know, the derivative companies akin to the, Yeah. To the Ubers and the WhatsApps and whoever else.”

“But it just feels Antithetical to Apple's culture to execute on AI in the way that I think you need to they are very like measure measured 35 times and cut once and let's do this all secretively and let's like try to control the ecosystem and keep everything l…”

“What I've realized is like price very rarely within some zone has mattered. And when I find myself iterating a little too much on on like, oh, I'll do it at this price versus that price. It probably says something about what I think the ultimate outcome for th…”

“There aren't a ton of deals getting done right now. That's the Series C, Series D, maybe a little Series B stage. And so what you are seeing is there's a dearth of opportunities that even exist right now because those companies have raised so much capital and …”

“Just having a disciplined structure of how you're doing it, I think is more important than actually taking down the marks themselves.”

“At the time I was convinced that the most likely outcome was that it was going to be a 300 or four hundred million dollar acquisition by sales or Adobe or someone like that. And so I felt like I had to be really disciplined on the entry price because it just s…”

“If we had looked at the founding team and the infrastructure they built, I think we would have looked past the individual customer feedback, a data point here, a data point there, that said, hey, this is still not quite ready for prime time, and instead focuse…”

“If ever you're going to the votes and using your role as a board member to oust the CEO, something else is broken down along the way in the journey and the relationship you built with the founder and the rest of the board.”

“I think that the way that I want to be able to do it, I think it's probably eight to 10 is what the people I've admired have been able to scale up to something like that and still be active and pragmatic about their relationships with the people they work with…”

“The one that I've internalized the most from and that I just have infinite amounts of respect for is Eric Vishria from Benchmark. Eric and I worked together on the Amplitude board, and now we have a new company Acuity MD together. And Eric is just, A++ as a bo…”

“Even if it doesn't work, you're much better in-housing it than throwing it over to someone else and having them give a, you know, probably not their best performance and trying to get you placement.”

“For the first time, it seems like there is more celebrity there are celebrity VCs to some extent, where the personality is first and foremost, and then the investment is secondary to that.”

“At the end of the day, that kind of creates two different areas that are compressing into a single one. And so it does lead to a lot more funding of companies that maybe four or five years ago wouldn't have gotten funding.”

“At the end of the day, 2000 companies in a given year will get funded from venture investors and 200 of those will probably be done by firms that, that We would consider peers of ours and quality investors. And at the end of the day, 10, 10 of those will drive…”

“And so I do think with the war chest that a lot of the venture firms have right now, I think it's going to take a while before people actually stop dancing. I think everyone's going to convince themselves, at least in the near term, that this is a good buying …”

“And so my guess is it's probably going to take a couple quarters before anyone starts to capitulate that maybe this is the new normal, particularly given how manic the market has kind of been and the decision seems to have been.”

“If you leave a firm, then they don't let you back in the next fund. Like you don't get the cherry pick. Okay. I'm going to be a part of this vintage but not that vintage for the most part with the blue chip names.”

“What was interesting in that Wiz announcement when they announced that they were going their own and not going to be bought by Google, was like, everything that they said was then reported on the media in the media because of the leaked memo. And so they got t…”

“You know the big winner in tariffs right now is Pete Hegseth, man. I we were all, we were talking about last week. Signal this, signal that. Is he in? Is he out? And now that is a long since forgotten thing. So I if there's anyone that I think deserves credit …”

“And while it's not going to impact software companies or technology companies quite as much directly, like the end customers for a lot of these different businesses are going to be impacted in a meaningful way. And so until we get a little bit more clarity on …”

“I heard some Morgan Stanley equity research person said that coming out of their conference, which is a week ago, they said it was the most negative sentiment that he had heard. I think with the exception of the onset of COVID in the last 10 years from people …”

“If you look at the big software private equity folks, the Vistas and the Toma Bravos of the world, like they've been doing this for the last, It's 1015 years. I just think it wasn't something that people really tried to do in the public markets, and now we're …”

“There was really a triaging or kind of a hollowing out of the middle that occurred, or maybe the tier B if you will, a tier two funds where you saw a handful of those folks blow up or really struggle with their fundraisers in some way.”

“This is a common phenomenon at the, not the end, but at the peak of a lot of cycles is you end up with a lot of these SPVs getting Formed in a meaningful way. And you end up with managers trying to get write bigger checks for rounds than their funds can actual…”