CoVenture

“We scrapped together 396,000 dollars. A thousand of it actually came from my little and my fraternity. That's why it was three 96 and not three 95, and he Venmo'd it to me.”

“And so what it's doing is it's essentially lending to the employee, but on the credit risk of the employer. And so instead of these employees who are often hourly workers going out and getting a payday loan, instead they can take an advance of three days. We k…”

“And again, you know, we were realizing that we could get mid to high teens yields, or even in some cases, low to mid twenties yields on stuff that was asset backed. It was low LTV. We could put it into an ABL structure that we felt comfortable with.”

“So now I've taken the practice of when we hire people or when we're even investing in a company, I try to read their favorite book. And the reason is people's favorite protagonists from a book is often someone they either aspire to be like or empathize with. A…”

“The way it started is an index fund. It's a basket of the top 15 crypto assets, weighted by their market cap, and rebalanced every two weeks with a flat fee, and we don't charge a carry.”

“At the end of the day, we sort of felt like a lot of VC firms were built to teach engineers how to become CEOs, but there weren't a lot of VC firms that were built to teach CEOs how to manage their product.”

“And so I think I was probably literally the first person to have the idea of rolling up Amazon sellers, which has obviously become this enormous business. I literally think I was the first person to talk about that publicly.”

“The foundation of Coventry in many ways, and the way that I used to invest was this idea that if you miss the big platform, you don't invest in Airbnb, you don't invest in Shopify, was to sort of draft off of their success and finding ways to build or invest i…”

“So often a lot of our diligence process is trying to help the company as if we were already invested and see if they can use our help well.”

“I always think of them as factors of zero. So if any of them are off, we just don't do it.”

“We don't ever do a good job lending on an LTV basis. We're more cash flow lenders. So the tokens and the crypto businesses that we understand why there might be future cash flows for, or where there's a real business model we'll pile into.”

“One other crazy stat about the first fund. We had multiple companies going into the deals where we had to do recapitalizations. We had multiple companies going through litigation. When we financed them, we had a company where I had to call all their payables a…”

“Managing a one billion dollar AUM firm is a really good business to be in unless you used to manage a six billion dollar AUM firm. And the challenge is it's really hard to go backwards in asset management. It's hard for morale. People want to make more and mor…”

“I think now we're probably investing closer to a hundred million dollars a month.”

“The average check that we've ever gotten from an LP took us 26 months of knowing the person to get it.”