The Ledger, every show

“We ended up, and we don't normally do this terminating 70% of the employees, because it just, they were C players, and we wanted at least A minus players, if not A players, right?”

“Now, because Grindr is focused on LGBTQ, it was really interesting. A lot of the traditional buyers were not there in the process. There was always like someone conservative on the investment committee that was like, we can't touch that. We went to try to rais…”

“I remember early days, Bitcoin, you know, was trading under a thousand dollars, and I said to Naval, so how big does this get? And he said, I said, what's the price of Bitcoin? He said, a million. And I said, a million? It's only at like, you know, 800. And I …”

“They raised, like, a forty million dollar Series A, and Silicon Valley turned on them before they even launched.”

“There's only five people that had equity.”

“And in that last year, we were able to double the revenue to two hundred million, double the EBITDA to about ninety two million, and then take it public for two billion.”

“Jeff and I were insistent with the other PE firm that everyone is going to have stock that will, you know, it will reflect their level in the company, of course, but we wanted everyone to have stock.”

“When I started protocol ventures, which was again, the first fund of funds in crypto”

“So we bought it for about six hundred million. It was doing less than fifty million, about forty five million of EBITDA when we bought the company, so, you know, call that kind of 12, 13 X EBITDA, and the market was probably trading at more like 20, the public…”

“We took Grindr public, and we'll talk about how we got there, but we took it public for two billion on the New York Stock Exchange two and a half years after we bought the company. And as I mentioned, as part of the deal structure that earned out, the first tw…”

“And in two and a half years, we took Grindr from a hundred million of revenue to two hundred million of revenue when we took it public.”

“Most, you know, 85% of startups fail, and you can't say yes every time, or you'll go bankrupt.”

“Typically, the VC is going to require a 10 to 15% option pool for the employees, which makes sense, but usually the angel investor is getting squeezed by that as well.”

“I've tried to stay disciplined for seed investing. I'm almost always going to be single digit millions for the valuation.”

“Tickle became a top-twenty site in the entire world. At one point, we had a lot of traffic, and we sold that company to Monster which was a big company back then for a hundred million. So that was a great outcome. We had only raised one round of capital,”

“The financials are doing a hundred million of revenue and about forty five million of EBITDA, incredible margins at scale, yet the ratings are so low.”

“Grindr, we bought for six hundred million dollars, and of that six hundred million, we put two hundred million of debt. So call that roughly four terms of debt. I said they were doing about 45 of EBITDA. So about four terms of debt, which is again, pretty indu…”

“Joel sold it for, I wanna say, two hundred and sixty million. So it was a great sale and he owned 90% of the company.”

“It came down to three buyers in the end that put in, you know, legitimate bids, and we were lucky enough to partner with the other PE firm and buy it.”

“She was our head of marketing at Tickle. ... Milt was our, like, director of marketing in 1999.”

“If you were an angel in Lyft, you're still very happy if they're worth, you know, roughly five billion. But you really want to be an Uber who's worth over sixty billion. Right. And that math actually, you know, kind of works out to that kind of 85, 10, and fiv…”

“A partner in a series A firm typically sees between six and 700 deals a year. And a series A partner typically does one to two deals per year.”

“The NYSE is, is kind of an old school organization. They had rainbow flags everywhere. I mean, they went all out for Grindr.”