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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Grefenstette: 80% of founders pitching a16z use cheap open-source Chinese LLMs
“I think Andreessen came out recently and said, 80% of the founders that come to them are using open source Chinese LLMs, because it might be 70, 80% as effective, efficient, but it's a 10th the cost.”
Unconstrained mean-variance optimization pushes institutional portfolios entirely into private assets
“And anytime you use the mean variance optimization model, unconstrained, it pushes you entirely into privates, because that's the historical return profile.”
Grefenstette: VC capital calls exceeded distributions by $200B since 2022
“Since 2022, liquidity has been negative cash to LPs of about two hundred billion capital calls in excess of distributions.”
Grefenstette: 40% of US unicorns have not raised capital since 2021
“It's 40% of the, call it 1000, Private unicorns in the U.S. Have not raised capital since 2021, I think, or 22.”
U.S. public equity market concentration is at a 100-year high
“If you take the top decile relative to the remainder public securities in the U.S., it's at three X. It's the highest ratio Market cap in a hundred years.”
India's demographic profile is far superior to China's
“It's hard to compare India to China for many reasons, but the demographics are far superior. I think 50% of Indians are under 30 years old. I think it's 32% of Chinese.”
Grefenstette: SaaS valuation multiples have dropped 50% since the 2021 peak
“The SAS multiples have gone down by 50% since they were last priced in a price round.”
Hillman Company anchored Kleiner Perkins Fund 1 and KKR Fund 1
“The 19 seventies venture finally began to take form, and Henry Hillman and my father were anchor investors in Kleiner Perkins Fund One, and a few years later in KKR Fund One.”
Bill Dietrich funded The Dietrich Foundation with $170M in 1997
“So before he sold the company, he put all the stock of Dietrich Industries into a trust. So he had made the commitment there that the proceeds would go into the trust designed to fund the foundation upon his death And that's what he did. So he started with a h…”
Energy companies made up 24% of the S&P 500 in the 1970s
“Energy stocks, six of the top 10 market cap companies in the world in the seventies were energy stocks, and they were 24% of the S&P 500 versus four percent today.”
Carnegie Mellon transitioned its endowment from Cambridge Associates to internal staff
“It was a great opportunity because they wanted to move the program from consultant-centric to staff-centric. So we were relying on Cambridge. We moved away from them. I hired Chuck Kennedy, who is now the current CIO at CMU, as my number two, and we built out …”