The Ledger, every show

“So this is contrarian, but I actually don't think that TAM is very important. The greatest consumer companies of our time have been created in very small markets.”

“If OpenAI really do the, like, app store of AI, then that's gonna be, like, a new search.”

“I would much rather take a significant down round than having structure on that. And so that's what I'm really encouraging our portfolio companies to do.”

“Companies die from indigestion rather than starvation.”

“I think we spent far too many years with the multi-stage funds and then suddenly realizing, wow, now I'm the only one on the cap table. There's no one else to turn to. There's no one else around to like help support this company with me. And so I think we're g…”

“I certainly believe that brand is a key network effect. And yes, user economics, TAM are important, but at the end of the day, your margins and the size of the market, not quite as important if no one's buying your product.”

“And I am regularly meeting these digitally native vertical brands which have SaaS type margins. You look at cosmetics, for example, and a lot of these cosmetics brands have 95% margins, and so they are just as attractive, if not more attractive, than the margi…”

“My view is always that Amazon is not your friend. They are maybe increasing the size of the overall pie. They are making companies' lives very, very difficult, and anything that's working, they see, and they decide to go after.”

“The valuations are gonna be slightly higher, but honestly, that's worth paying for.”

“Like the valuations in Seed have not dropped. And we've looked at this data really over like 10 plus years.”

“I think Klan is a good example in Europe, right? And they do a 90% down round rather than taking like a lot of structure because that structure then sticks with you for multiple rounds.”

“Clearly all birds have just raised around to focus on retail expansion, and you can see that these retail stores are profitable in a matter of months. Often they're cost-neutral marketing channels.”

“My belief is actually that the next platform will be voice first,”

“If you look at the beauty brands, Estee Lauder and L'Oreal are acquiring these companies on seven times forward year revenue multiples.”

“Estee Lauder will publicly say, we think that 95% of our growth for the next 10 years is going to come through acquisitions.”

“So we like to think about DAU divided by MAU. If you're A social media app , then we want it to be over a third. If it can be over 50%, then it really is a daily use case, and that's exactly what we saw from Snapchat back in the day, but we definitely need for…”

“When I started a decade ago, we were raising seven hundred million dollar funds. They're now seven billion dollar funds.”

“Was it worth 10% of Facebook's market cap to buy WhatsApp? Absolutely.”

“We've invested at lightspeed in 54 companies in AI. We've spent, we've invested over a billion dollars in AI, but big, but that was not all this year. That is not all generative AI, right? That's been over the few years, over the last few years”

“I would say AI is akin to winning the lottery. And what I mean by that is it is the lottery of time. So in your, like, say, 10 hour working day, you spend maybe an hour writing a newsletter. Well, that could get compressed down to 10 minutes, right? You have B…”

“There is a crunch in terms of valuation. Definitely that is coming down, but I do still believe the best teams and the ones that are growing, you know, two, three, four, five X year on year, they will continue to get funded.”

“The IPO market is looking miserable. That window is not exactly wide open to say the least.”

“So if we're bringing a 30% gross margin e-commerce company to the table, then that to us is not going to quite hit the bill or cut the mustard.”

“We definitely need billion dollar plus acquisition to move the needle for our funders at 1.2 billion dollars.”

“It's not the VC's job to grab the wheel at the end of the day. It is your job to have the periphery vision. So if the founder's the driver, it's your job to have the periphery vision and say, hey, there's this thing happening over here. I just want to make sur…”

“We've invested in Rothy's and Zola, and if you speak to Zola for every customer that has their wedding on Zola, they refer to point to other couples to also have their registry on Zola, the online wedding registry business.”