The Ledger, every show

“If you think about the twenty-twenty-one vintage, I think a one X fund will be top quartile. I think returning your money is, I think returning your LP's money on almost any timeframe will be top quartile. So in that sense, probably 70, I would guess 75% of th…”

“Your junior partner at these big firms, sort of like a VP at Goldman, they are compensated and promoted based on money velocity, not money returns.”

“Basically all the same people from Lehman showed up. Highly transactional, all about the money. There was no real art or creativity to it. It was very private equity, like finding the company, dressing it up a little bit, handing it off to the next guy. And I …”

“The venture Ponzi is you raise a fund, you take two percent management fees for 10 years guaranteed, it does not matter how well that fund does, and you've taken 20% of that fund and put it in your pocket.”

“There's a few in every fund that really matter, at least matter from a financial performance perspective. And when they really matter, the common is, is exactly the same as the preferred, is exactly the same as the preferred two, the series A, they're all wort…”

“My experience over the last 10 years, there's the legal agreements don't matter. There are always ways for an investor to quote unquote screw over a founder or for a founder to screw over an investor. It goes both ways. And the legal, the illegal agreements do…”

“Now there's many folks that I will never work with again. And maybe that doesn't matter to them, but like I think it will. There will be a company, there will be an opportunity where someone wants to work with a company that we work with we'll never work with …”

“I believe that the big venture firms, defense tech is great, right? Defense tech, those companies are going to be insanely capital inefficient. They're going to require insane amounts of money. My view is like American dynamism and defense tech as a theme. It'…”

“The returns need to just look like about the NASDAQ. It just needs to be, it just needs to be roughly in line with the NASDAQ for them to continue to raise. And by the way, that's true for all of venture. That's true for all of venture, which again is why, lik…”

“I have never found that any investment we've made ever, or really any, I've never seen any VC Be truly the difference between success and failure of a company. Period.”

“Would Coinbase not have been successful? If they hadn't take money from Andreessen Horowitz and USV. No, I think they would have been just as successful.”

“VCs are obviously incentivized for founders to think that or to be scared of that. Some ways it's a threat and there's all sorts of weird incentives in the middle, right? It's I'm raising my fund. I need to show some markups or I'm a trying to get a promotion …”

“Building a startup is truly awful. It's like a truly, truly bad experience. And it will ruin your life basically in various different ways. And by the way, that's if it goes well or if it doesn't go well.”

“Many of the best VCs in New York have moved up the stack. And what that means is they've raised dramatically larger funds in the last two years. And so, Folks like Thrive Capital, and Lyra Ventures, and First Ground, and folks that you might consider as tradit…”

“I personally, I don't go to demo days. I'm just kind of, I'm, you know, I'm kind of burnt out by them. I think it's a, it's actually it's kind of a shitty way to get to know a founder, you know, is to listen to them pitch on a stage amongst hundreds of other f…”

“Like the foundation models are like a big, big VC firm's dream. They literally require billions and billions of dollars to go buy effectively NVIDIA GPUs.”

“The private equity scam is like, we probably all know this is like, you can invest in a company. It doesn't actually matter how well that company does. You can take a lot of money out of that company, and if it goes bankrupt, it doesn't matter.”

“I don't pay myself at a silo. I'm putting every single dollar into the, into hiring people and building the firm.”

“I think for the most part, stage, sector, geo-focuses these things get arbitraged away. They are not sustainable positions in venture, in my view. The only sustainable position is actually standing for something meaningful.”

“If I've learned, I don't know, one thing over the last 12 years or 13 years investing is that the only way that I personally have ever made money, and I think this is probably true for most of early stage investing, is to invest in something that no one cares …”

“The top quartile, the best 25% of venture firms from the twenty-fifteen vintage have not returned their investors all their money. We're nine years in. The top quartile has not given their investors their money back.”

“There's one that comes to mind around Aquihire that we that you kind of talked about many years ago where we actually introduced the portfolio company to the acquirer. It was understood that the cap table would sort of get Taken care of. Like not, again, not m…”

“I would argue that over time, even wealthy folks that have made a lot of money in this business or venture don't put any money into their firms.”

“I'm actually grateful for the big banks in venture. I actually don't want them to go away because that they actually provide our opportunity. They provide us an opportunity to provide an alternative to founders to that system.”

“18 months later, they were doing almost thirty million in revenue, and they were a monopoly on the market.”

“So like what I think I'm, what I said, what I don't think has, what I don't think moves the needle is services. I don't think that services, you know, a business development team, a recruiter, et cetera, are actually going to be the difference between success …”

“In my experience, actually, it's a smaller percentage that actually destroy, like, when I think about lots of VCs in the community that we work with, like, there's not a long list of folks where I'm like, oh, this person is gonna be, like, dangerous to the com…”

“I believe actually the less institutional and banker-like you can look to founders over the next decade, the more likely you are to win. So I think that the most of venture is deeply focused on becoming institutional. It feels more professional. I think the mo…”

“I think if you look at some of the biggest, most important companies over the last 10 years, they're first time founders, you know including Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. So, you know, I don't I don't think repeat founders are always the best founders.”

“I think that what we've seen in terms of seed and pre-seed and even Series A in New York is is much more much more practical valuations. I mean, I don't think it's super crazy here, here in New York. Certainly out in the valley, I think you're seeing I think y…”

“We invested in the Solana Series A. So that's kind of similar. No one cared.”

“We will only do that when the founder is selling. At, but I will say when the founder is selling, we almost always do it.”

“Eight to 10.”

“This has changed over time, but right now probably Andy Weissman and Bryce Roberts. I think they represent many of the things that I just described about being the alternative to the big AUM firms. They think independently, and they have the guts to be themsel…”

“I miss both hugging face and runway at pre-seed which is painful that both, both New York companies absolutely represent the thing I'm describing, which is they were building things before anyone actually cared.”

“Yeah, so at least today we're on New York, very much a New York City focused fund. The, so, so every single one of our companies that we work with will be primarily based in New York.”

“Fifty-five million dollar fund. We write 500 K to two million dollar checks.”

“These folks were not just mentors in the sense that they helped me learn the business, but actually they helped us raise Notations First Fund in many ways, and so Andy Weissman has been has been a mentor to us, who's a partner at Union Square Ventures.”

“New York, we believe, has now shown that it consistently can produce billion plus dollar exits, and so that's companies like Etsy and Mongo and Tumblr and a bunch of others, you know, a bunch of e-commerce companies as well.”

“We write on average, 150,000 dollar checks into what we, Consider pre-seed rounds, so that is typically rounds of 500 K or less”

“Yeah, so it's just under eight million dollars.”

“We're focusing on having initially relatively high ownership in the companies that we work with. That's usually high single-digit percentage.”

“So we have about 30 LPs. Half of those are, or I'd say, you know, in terms of dollar amounts, about half the fund is individuals many of whom are founders and partners that are at other VC firms and folks that, you know, we've worked with in the community for …”