The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Jean-Baptiste: Traditional VC advisor networks overpromise and lack accessibility
“What we realized was a lot of VC networks overpromised. They're people with large caches who sound great on a page, but don't really have time or aren't even accessible for your ten million dollar investment.”
DeMeireles: Best venture outcomes combine consumer models with sticky B2B components
“The best outcomes tend to sit at the intersection of different business models. They're not just pure play direct to consumer businesses. They'll have a stickier B to B component.”
Jean-Baptiste: Firm scaling creates silos that miss interdisciplinary business models
“For one thing, as you grow your firm, you just start to silo your people. So instead of being more of a generalist or covering multiple sectors, you start to cover very specific end markets, and within those end markets, even more specific subsectors. And give…”
DeMeireles: The best way to win a deal process is to avoid it
“The best way to win a process is often for us to avoid the process.”
DeMeireles: Scaling mega-funds vacated the $10M to $30M growth check market
“Many of which have become five and six X in assets over a shorter amount of years. So they've left the part of the capital markets where partners, real partners and real owners are writing 10 to 20 to thirty million dollar investments in emerging growth compan…”
Jean-Baptiste: Ansa Capital Targets About a Dozen Companies for Fund One
“We're building a concentrated portfolio. We want fund one to be about a dozen companies because for all that time and for all that effort and research and thesis building, we want to invest deeply behind where we have conviction.”
Jean-Baptiste: Ansa uses GP-led thesis work to invest faster with deeper conviction
“And that's why our approach is to do GP-led thesis work in very specific spaces, and to build deep theses. So we're not running around chasing every idea, but we're chasing the theses where we feel like we have deep conviction and knowledge. And that allows us…”
Jean-Baptiste: Ansa uses a 1-to-9 scale without 5s for deal conviction
“We like to use a scale, one to nine, can't vote five, and that gives you a really good indication of how your partner and the rest of the team are feeling about an individual deal.”
DeMeireles: Investors cannot beat venture incumbents by playing their game
“And we've always felt that you don't beat Tom Brady by playing Tom Brady's game. And for us, the way that we built our careers was by playing our own game. And Ansah takes that game and really productizes our style of investing in a very focused way.”
Jean-Baptiste: Ansa Operator Network Is Majority Women and Ethnically Diverse
“And what we're proud of is these are a really diverse group of operators, majority women, Majority ethnically diverse”
DeMeireles: Minority investors only control capital sources, funding targets, and hiring
“There's not a lot of things you can control in our business in minority investing. There's a couple that you can try. Who you take money from, who you give money to, and who you hire are closer to those things that you can control.”