The Ledger
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Sacks criticizes SoftBank for $500M seed checks into overvalued companies
“SoftBank is engaged in a style of investing that we would never engage in. It's absolutely Pathetical to the way that we invest, right? They're making five hundred million dollar seed investments in massively overvalued companies.”
David Sachs: Craft's policy now is to be price takers on valuations
“Our philosophy now is just to be price takers and just to pick the companies that we want to be in and then the market sets the price.”
Sacks: Craft Ventures holds indirect exposure to $1B in Solana
“Kraft is the beneficiary because we invest, we're the first investors in multi coin. We were kind of like their seed investor invested in there. We put in something like 40% of the money for their special opportunity fund. They were one of the first investors …”
Sacks: Craft's Solana exposure will yield around $1B in returns
“It will end up being about, you know, a billion dollars of, I think Solana for us in terms of returns, but it's the multi-coin guys determine the trading decisions on that.”
Sacks: Craft Ventures sold $200M in crypto, including $85M personal stake
“So we basically sold, I think it was around two hundred million dollars of crypto, of which around eighty-five million dollars was personally attributable to myself. And we cleared that before day one, paid taxes on it, and basically so there wouldn't be a con…”
Sacks confirms his firm does not run CrowdStrike, citing lack of trust
“Similarly, I had my IT department check and make sure that we didn't have it running anywhere. We don't. I'm just gonna be frank. I don't trust this company.”
Sacks: Craft Ventures swept $45M from SVB right before its collapse
“We had about forty-five million dollars that we were about to distribute to LPs. And I'm like, whoa, that's crazy. So we were able to sweep that to an account we used to make in-kind distributions.”
Sacks denies leaving Craft Ventures for a permanent role at Twitter
“I've gotten all sorts of inbound from people asking me if I'm like leaving craft ventures to do something at Twitter. No, it's not true. We're just, Jason and I are just pitching in and helping out while Elon establishes his permanent team at that company.”
Sacks: Almost all Craft Ventures portfolio companies are now re-forecasting
“So after Q one board meetings, I would say about two thirds of portfolio companies We're hitting their numbers, and one-third were missing, and it still appeared to be, like, problems related to those specific companies, not a macro trend. I would say after Q-…”
Sacks: Craft Ventures advises portfolio companies to maintain 2.5 years of runway
“So now what we're telling our portfolio companies is you want to have two and a half years of runway right now because you got to go raise six months before you run out of cash, and you really want to have two years of cushion because things could be choppy fo…”
Sacks: Craft requires $1M ARR and 15% MoM growth for Series A
“It really does start with a company hitting the metrics hurdle that we need to see for example, series a you know, it's a call it, you're roughly more or less a million dollars of ARR. You want to be growing 15% month over month, certain net dollar retention, …”
Sacks: Craft's $100M mistake was holding Affirm stock post-IPO
“In our second fund, we had about a hundred and twenty million of a firm stock, and we were sitting on it because we believe in the company and still do, and we're still sitting on it. And that was like a hundred million dollar mistake.”
Sachs: Bolt had great metrics when Craft evaluated the company
“When we looked at this company, they had great numbers. It's just, the valuation was ahead of those numbers, but the numbers were always great.”
David Sacks signs lease for Craft Ventures office in Austin
“I signed a lease for an Austin office for craft.”
Sacks: Craft Ventures makes a specific portfolio allocation for Elon Musk
“No, in our portfolio allocation, we say this much early stage, this much late stage, this much Elon.”
David Sacks: Craft Ventures is deploying capital slowly despite heavy dry powder
“We do have a lot of dry powder and we're going really slow. I mean, there's no feeling that we have to rush out and deploy this capital.”
David Sacks: Fewer software startups are meeting Craft's investment criteria
“That bar hasn't changed for us, but the number of companies meeting that bar has gone down considerably.”
Sacks: Craft Ventures requires revenue before writing $10M to $15M Series A checks
“When you get to series A and you want us to write a 10, 12, fifteen million dollar check, we kind of want to see some revenue.”
Sacks: Founders must cut costs before asking existing VCs for capital
“The most important thing to me, like what would make it a partnership is for me to know that the founders have done everything in their power to reduce costs and put the company on the right trajectory before Going out and basically issuing capital calls to th…”
Sacks: Personal angel portfolio company issued pay-to-play financing notification
“So I got my first notification from a portfolio company. This is a company I invested in before craft. It's not a craft investment, but my personal investments, and they're doing a pay to play round.”
Sacks: Craft Ventures will never accept capital from Russia or China
“We would never consider taking money from Russia or China.”
Sacks: Craft Ventures 2017-2018 fund has fully returned capital
“Yeah, we have a vintage, 2017, 2018 fund that's actually fully returned at this point.”
Sacks: Craft Ventures never had SVB as LP or directed startups there
“We never had SVB as a limited partner, and we also never directed our startups to bank at SVB.”
Sacks: Craft Ventures voluntarily halved a portfolio company's valuation
“We voluntarily slashed the valuation in half and reissued options to the employees to keep them motivated.”
Sacks: Crossover investor pullback creates growth opportunity for smaller VC firms
“I think the fact that Tiger and the other kind of crossover investors, the fact they've pulled back way back from venture markets gives smaller firms like us an opportunity to do growth deals.”
Sacks: Craft calculates runway using trailing burn, not projections
“We don't like looking at projections for runway. We just look at how much you burned last month and how much money you got in the bank.”
Sacks time-limits his venture board commitments to one or two years
“The only reason I'll ever take a board seat is because I have to do it because the founder insists that otherwise they won't go with... I always time limit it now because I just can't, I mean, I can't make a tenure obligation. You know, it's typically like one…”
Sacks: Craft Ventures has not sold its Solana holdings
“I can tell you right now, like this second, we are sitting on Solana that we have not sold.”
Sacks: Craft Ventures marks fund assets using preferred financing rounds
“So we have a written policy, and there's a process for amending it if it ever needs to be amended. And what our policy does is it just uses the most recent preferred round to give us the value of the shares.”
Sacks: Craft invested $1M at a $20M valuation to seed Multicoin
“We actually invested, we gave them a million bucks at a 20 cap to help set up their firm, and then we invested in their, they had both a venture fund and a hedge fund, and they were, like, the first money into Solana”
Sacks: Craft Ventures insists on product demos over PowerPoint presentations
“Our motto is, show me the product, not a PowerPoint, because the same PowerPoint can describe 10 or a hundred different products.”
David Sacks: Craft Ventures requires revenue before funding Series A rounds
“One of the reasons why we like SaaS and marketplace at Kraft is they're very milestone based. I mean, we, you know, if we invest before you have a functional product, it's going to be at a seed valuation, you know, like a 10 cap, ten million dollar valuation, …”
Sacks: A Craft Ventures partner built LobsterTank to secure OpenClaw for enterprises
“One of my partners at craft actually created a new tool called lobster tank. Which is a version of Open Claw that's got some enterprise security wrapped around it.”
Sacks: Cannot take full-time government role due to Craft key-person status
“No, I mean, I've already said before, I'm the key man at craft. I can't do that. But, you know, look, I would do something part time, meaning if it wasn't a full time job, if I didn't have to leave my current job, if it was just serving on some Advisory commit…”
Sacks: Craft Ventures instructed portfolio founders to cut burn in early 2022
“We started doing portfolio updates with our entire portfolio of founders in February last year saying this is a regime change. You gotta cut costs. We did another one in May. You can watch them both on YouTube. Okay. And we were telling founders, cut your burn…”
Sacks: Craft Ventures signed growth term sheets as mega-funds retreated
“We actually have signed to growth term sheets recently, and it was much harder for us to do growth rounds last year, just because you had these huge mega funds come in at crazy valuations, but now they're kind of licking their wounds and we're starting to see …”
Sacks: Craft Ventures invested in BitGo prior to $1.2B Galaxy deal
“Back in 2017, we invested in BitGo. Actually, Bill Lee helped found that company many years ago. And then that became last year Galaxy announced a deal to acquire them for, I think, 1.2 billion dollars. Largest crypto acquisition to date.”
Sacks: Craft lets third-party investors lead funding rounds for Craft-incubated startups
“Now I think what we might do in that case, because we incubated it is we'd let somebody else lead the round and then we would participate. So you have some third party setting the price because we incubated the company.”