The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
Papa: Institutional allocators never reach out for backdoor VC references
“What surprises me is I have yet to have an allocator reach out as a backdoor reference. It's never happened. They basically take the references that the firm offers, and that's who they call.”
Toast laid off half its workforce eight weeks after February 2020 funding
“They just closed the financing in February. They were gearing up to double the size of the company, double the team, And by the end of March, probably eight weeks after that closed, instead we were announcing we had to let go half the company because we couldn…”
Papa: Endeca's Founding Was the Birth of Modern Faceted Search
“And that was the birth of guided navigation or faceted search, which is everywhere on the internet today. You use it all the time and you don't even realize it.”
Papa: Post-2000 VCs Shifted Completely from Backing Inexperience to Seasoned Operators
“In 99, the temporal wisdom was back folks without experience because they'll see new ways of solving problems. So it became an asset to be inexperienced. Once we got through 2000, the pendulum swung all the way back hard. All investors wanted to see is that yo…”
Papa: IBM spent $20M on Endeca software it couldn't build internally
“They spent twenty million dollars on us over the years and were using us for very important internal applications that they could not power with their own software.”
Papa: SAP Invested in Endeca but Refused to Discuss Acquiring It
“One of them was SAP. They were an investor in the company, and I couldn't get their corporate development team to even talk to us.”
Toast had only two VC firms competing to invest in fall 2015
“In fact, the only two firms that were competing to back it at a reasonable valuation were my two lead investors at Indeca that fall.”
Papa: Silicon Valley refused to fund Kiva Systems' hardware before Boston backed it
“My favorite example is Kiva Systems, the robot company that Amazon bought. No one would back hardware in Silicon Valley when they were being founded. Came to Boston, found folks interested in backing what today we call hard tech.”
Papa: 2001 saw first year-over-year decline in global IT spending
“And the world of IT spend froze in 2001. It was the first year over year decline.”
Papa: Endeca counted half of the top 100 e-commerce sites as customers
“We had half of the top 100 e-commerce sites.”
Papa: Oracle Finalized the $1.1B Endeca Deal in Six Weeks
“From first email to announcement with Oracle was six weeks, a testament to how fast Oracle can align their teams and make something happen.”
Papa: 2012 silicon spinout generates over $1M weekly, tracks 2023 IPO
“And sure enough, I spun a silicon company out of a university in Europe in 2012. And they're on track to go public next year. They're now up over a million a week.”
Toast founders built second commerce app on Apple App Store
“In fact, they were the second mobile app in the Apple App Store for commerce after Amazon.”
Papa: Walmart's 1993 10TB Data Warehouse Cost $80M with 10,000 Disks
“So when we talk about big data back in 1993 was the 10 terabyte Walmart data warehouse that cost eighty million dollars. That's how far things have come. That system had close to 10,000 hard disks to make it go.”