The Ledger
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Ehrenberg: Y Combinator's adversarial founder-investor ethos is 'really shitty'
“It's against, like, the YC ethos. Like, I don't think in many ways that that attitude of it, you know, founder, it's founders versus investors, keep investors at arm's length is really healthy. I actually think that's really shitty. And does founders agree to …”
IA Ventures requires every prospective investment to have multi-billion-dollar potential
“Each of us make two to three investments in a given year. Every investment that we are making, we think has the potential to be a multi-billion dollar outcome. Every single one. That, that is the bar.”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures flatly refuses to invest in crypto or tokens
“We will not do anything in crypto or tokens.”
Ehrenberg: Early marketplace startups like Uber and Airbnb are not super tech-intensive
“Those businesses themselves are not super tech intensive, right? They're just leveraging very basic building blocks”
Ehrenberg: 'Big data' label lost meaning as AI became ubiquitous
“But I think it's just now it's so ingrained in pretty much every single thing that you look at or I look at, it's kind of doesn't mean anything anymore.”
IA Ventures targets 24 deals per fund to find two returners
“We found in our, kind of, the power law reality of venture that we would much rather take 24 gigantic swings in a portfolio over a four-year period and work Hopefully that two will be multiple fund returners and that the next six, so call it two super performe…”
Ehrenberg: Permissive 'founder friendly' VCs are actually doing founders a disservice
“Founder friendly has Become identified or associated with being permissive and being loose as it relates to documentation, as it relates to founder expectations, as it relates to founder egos. I think that is actually being very founder unfriendly”
IA Ventures found zero investable D2C fintechs after reviewing hundreds
“I would say we've looked at hundreds since the days that we did those two investments and have not found anything that has really met that threshold. So is it possible? Yes. Is it probable? Not based on what I've seen.”
Ehrenberg: Regulated enterprises will not buy pure cloud software
“There are a lot of places that unless you can give them an appliance, or you can load it on their servers inside their firewall, they're not going to buy it. They are not going to put their data in the cloud.”
Ehrenberg: Graduate schools fail to teach practical data hacking skills
“You need someone who's applied and skilled and who can hack code and try a bunch of things to actually see signal in data, and that is a very specific competency, and they do not teach that in graduate school.”
Ehrenberg: Querying domain experts often beats large crowdsourced datasets
“Wisdom of crowds and large data don't give you better answers. In fact, it's much more valuable to go to a few extremely knowledgeable people to get a particular answer.”
Ehrenberg: Content creation business models do not scale well
“A business like Veri, where the actual, actually creating content to deliver to customers is a core part of their original value prop, that's, that just does not, that does not scale well.”
IA Ventures expanded beyond big data due to restrictive investment thesis
“Those guardrails were overly restrictive relative to where we felt we could really both source and invest intelligently and to achieve the returns that we were shooting for.”
Ehrenberg: Enterprise sales got easier as companies created test sandboxes
“Even three years ago it was much, much harder to sell to the enterprise because it had to be right. It had to be full production ready. It really couldn't be In beta, because the stakes were so high. Now, I think a lot of companies have environments that are j…”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures considers vehicle hardware startups for their data
“Even though we're really not a hardware oriented fund, we look pretty seriously at some of these companies because of the data that these devices are capturing”
Ehrenberg: Social graph data and alternative scoring can transform insurance pricing
“Using things like social graph and other, other kind of non-conventional behaviors to score somebody and to more accurately price insurance. So whether, you know, you look at things like LendUp, or Wonga, or Betfair, you know, similar, or Prosper, similar prin…”
Ehrenberg: Contributory databases trigger non-linear network effects
“There's a whole new wave of businesses around this notion of, ah, contributory databases, where users will actually put their data in, so they, let's say they contribute X, but then they actually get X plus one back because they receive back intelligence from …”
Ehrenberg: Data cleansing and normalization are valuable, non-commodity skills
“The sheer act of pulling together these disparate data sets and then putting the data in a form where they can play nicely with one another is really, really hard. I mean, that itself is not a commodity. The skills and efforts to do that are very valuable”
Ehrenberg: Most tech startups rely on heavy services initially
“I think almost every tech company that I've been involved with has a heavy service, service component at the beginning, because the bottom line is you're engaging in hand-to-hand combat with that customer, and you're trying to get as much feedback as you possi…”
IA Ventures held 19% ownership in The Trade Desk at its IPO
“We actually co-led the seed round with Founder Collective, and then we bridged the company three times, participated in the A, participated in the B, and by the time the company IPO'd in September of 16, we own 19% at IPO”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures invested in The Trade Desk at PowerPoint stage
“Sometimes we invest, you know, again, Trade Desk was a PowerPoint.”
Ehrenberg: AWS and modern CPUs eliminate need for big iron architecture
“On the one hand, you've got, you know, things like, you know, EC-II and AWS, which facilitate, you know, the storage of massive amounts of data without your own your own big iron architecture, and at the same time, the CPUs to be able to process that magnitude…”