Dan Scholnick

Managing Partner, Four Rivers Group · 1 appearance on the record.

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Dan Scholnick is a Managing Partner at Four Rivers Group and previously spent over 13 years as a General Partner at Trinity Ventures. He co-founded Flurry and led early venture investments in companies including Docker and New Relic.

16statements → 8claims → 1claims resolved → 3.94/5average certainty → 2.19/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →

0 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 7 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 5 assertions · 1 opinion · 2 insights · 4 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Dan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

239 words/min while actually speaking · 55 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Dan Scholnick: only 4 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 4 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,054 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said16 Episodes1

Everything Dan Scholnick said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Disclosure

Scholnick: New York is not a focus area for Trinity Ventures

“To be, I mean, to be truly honest with you New York isn't a focus area for us.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 5:41 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Scholnick: Most tech industry value is still created in the Bay Area

“Still most of the value being created in the tech industry is in the Bay Area.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 6:11 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Scholnick: AI commercialization will replicate the massive enterprise boom of Big Data

“And to me it feels like, Big data. Maybe six or seven years ago where companies were real waking up and realizing we have all these data assets. We need to do something with them. And that led to the rise of Hadoop and the Hadoop vendors and then, you know, a …”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 9:19 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Scholnick: Vertical AI will be more successful near-term than horizontal platforms

“But that's, I think unless we see more crowd flowers, the vertical approach is going to be a lot more successful in the near term because it won't rely on the customer to have expertise in how to do things like tune models and tune training sets and things lik…”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 13:52 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Scholnick: Tech organization influence has shifted from IT groups to developers

“The power in, and the influence in technology organizations is, has moved, shifted dramatically away from the classic IT group to the developer.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 15:28 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Insight

Scholnick: Hard to build a business on undifferentiated horizontal data tools

“There are so many undifferentiated products and services out there. And I think the advice that was given by the earlier speakers of solving problems, specific problems for the customer, instead of just trying to be Horizontal in, you know, we have a better qu…”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 19:04 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Partly supported

Scholnick: New Relic hired zero sales reps during first four years

“And for the first Three or four years of the company, he refused to hire any sales reps.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 25:41 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Opinion

Scholnick: Docker is foundational tech for big data developers

“Yeah, it's less of a pure data company, but it's certainly a foundational technology that's making it easier for developers to work with big data systems.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 3:43 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Scholnick: Trinity GPs serve on no more than eight or nine boards

“We have more partners per dollars in our fund than any firm in Silicon Valley, and that means that no, no general partner at Trinity's on more than eight or nine boards, and that, so that means we do the work for our companies, and we don't rely on other peopl…”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 4:51 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

Scholnick: Trinity invested in InfluxDB and moved them to San Francisco

“I invested in InfluxDB, and I think it's a great company, but we moved them to we moved them to San Francisco.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 5:25 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Scholnick: Humans will remain heavily involved in ML for 5-10 years

“So, at least for you know, I think the next five to 10 years, there's going to be heavy involvement of humans in machine learning systems.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 12:11 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

Scholnick: Trinity prefers developer-focused software to traditional enterprise models

“So, so anyway, we love these businesses at Trinity. I'm looking for more and more of these businesses and businesses, and I like them a lot better than the traditional enterprise software business.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 18:02 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Insight

Scholnick: Data scientists dislike enterprise sales pitches as much as developers

“But I think you can build a similar business to The type of, to the direct to developer tool businesses. There's no reason why not. I don't think that data scientists enjoy being sold to any more than developers do.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 20:34 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Scholnick: Developer tool companies rely less on large enterprise customers

“I've been surprised at New Relic and looking at financial results of Atlassian and other companies that I've seen in the developer space in that, you know, the old, I think this is what you mean by power law, but I, you know, the assumption was always that 80%…”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 21:52 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

What-if

New Relic wouldn't have reached $100M without its early sales hires

“Those two guys you know, not single-handedly, but we would not have gotten to a hundred million in revenue without them.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 28:04 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

Scholnick: Trinity Ventures closed a $400M 12th fund

“We just closed our 12th fund, which is a four hundred million dollar fund.”

Dan Scholnick Jan 25, 2016 ▶ 4:07 Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
Investing in Data and A.I. // Dan Scholnick, Trinity Ventures (Hosted by FirstMark Capita	Jan 25, 2016	21m

Dan Scholnick

The record, in short

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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