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.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Rosenthal: Bad timing, not bad models, killed dot-com startups
“And the reality was that was all wrong. It was just timing and exogenous factors that made that not work at the moment.”
Rosenthal: Entry price does not matter in early-stage venture capital
“If you're just buying options at early stage venture, then price doesn't matter. Then you want to have as many shots on goal as possible. You want extreme volatility and long tails, right? All the stuff that you don't want when you're buying a series of cash f…”
Rosenthal: VCs must back high-profile failures to capture extreme upside winners
“I want to be in the big blow-ups because it means I'm chasing volatility, and that means I'm going to get into huge winners as well.”
Rosenthal: Y Combinator proves early-stage VC scales because founders avoid help
“Well, it turns out there's a whole class of entrepreneurs, a large percentage of them that don't need or want your help. So I would actually push back. I think it actually can scale quite well. Y Combinator's a perfect example of this. They've done thousands a…”
Rosenthal: Undifferentiated mid-tier venture capital firms will die a slow death
“If you're undifferentiated
You're not gonna get the best deals, and you're gonna die a slow death.”
Rosenthal: Silicon Valley probably needs its own native Goldman Sachs
“People are even talking in Silicon Valley about, like, why is there not a native Goldman Sachs of Silicon Valley, and that's a really good question. There probably should be.”
Rosenthal: Andreessen Horowitz made $11 billion on its Coinbase investment
“Well, it turns out they invested in Coinbase and made eleven billion dollars on it.”
Rosenthal: Braintrust reached an $11.5 billion market cap on $30 million raised
“Braintrust is a great example. Super, super interesting company. My fund invested a little bit in it. When they listed on Coinbase about a month ago, they shot up to about an 11 and a half billion dollar market cap. And this is a real company. They've got tens…”
Rosenthal: Crypto projects bootstrap resources by issuing tokens instead of cash
“Because in crypto, you can bootstrap resources. Like, you can incentivize players in your ecosystem to participate by rewarding them with the project itself, like tokens in the project itself. You don't need to go pay somebody to do something. And that applies…”
Rosenthal: Sequoia's Don Valentine valued industry perspective over financial acumen
“Don Valentine, who started Sequoia in the seventies, his big innovation in venture was this realization that, Hey, what mattered in early stage venture capital was not finance acumen. It was industry perspective.”
Rosenthal: Andreessen Horowitz reshaped venture capital through high-velocity seed investing
“And Andreessen was the firm that really got this. It started deploying tons of capital, doing lots of seed investments, high valuations, high capital velocity deployment, and really has reshaped the whole industry around it.”
Rosenthal: Solo investor Elad Gil has deployed over a billion dollars
“I don't know the exact figures, but I guess he's probably deployed hundreds of millions, if not billion plus of capital over the last few years, and it's just him.”
Rosenthal: I deploy as much angel capital in Series E as pre-seed
“Like, I deploy just as much capital in series C's and D's and E's As I do in pre-seeds.”
Rosenthal: Sequoia Capital bought 40% of Cisco for roughly $2 million
“You look at some of the rounds that they were doing, you know, they were putting like Two million bucks into Cisco for, like, 40% of the company.”