The Ledger
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Kolicich: Expect an AI crash and market retrenchment within two years
“I believe in two years where everyone's gonna say, oh, you know, we thought it would solve everything and it's all a very limited number of use cases. It's complete hype. And, you know, we'll probably see a bit of a crash and we'll see a retrenchment in AI.”
Oetting: Growth Hardtech Needs Risk-Tolerant Infrastructure Project Financing
“There's a big gap between using venture capital and the private credit markets that are more traditional and sort of profit oriented. And there really needs to be an basically infrastructure financing or project financing for growth stage businesses. That's a …”
AI startups should aggressively raise capital every three to four months
“If you are in AI or AI adjacent, you should be raising every three to four months, in my opinion, and you should be doing it aggressively.”
AI acqui-hires are specifically designed to bypass Lina Khan's antitrust scrutiny
“On the M&A side, I do think it has a lot to do with regulation and Lena Kahn, you know, threatening to block most mergers and acquisitions, and that's why you see these acqui-hire inflection character AI adept type acquisitions where it seems like they're doin…”
Oetting: 'Build It And They Will Come' Is Bad Hardtech Strategy
“Well, like with resilience, one thing we learned, which is going to sound very obvious, but you know, early on, we took a little bit of like, if we build it, they'll come strategy. That's a bad idea. It's much better to buy or invest in a facility alongside a …”
Oetting: Sutter Hill has done venture incubation better than anyone
“I mean, Sutter Hill has done this better than anyone.”
Oetting: 30% of 8VC's deployed capital goes to internally co-founded companies
“It's now 30% of what we do. All of our capital employees and, you know, 30% of it goes into companies we co-founded.”
8VC partners initially feared office protests and reputational ruin for funding Anduril
“We literally had conversations internal at AVC with our partners where we were worried about our offices getting protested. And we gave a like small chance that, you know, actually maybe our reputation is completely ruined because at that time, everyone was ag…”
Kolicich: Crossover funds exerted a 20x leverage effect on venture cap tables
“When A tiny girl or somebody else deploys money onto a cap table. They might say own five percent of that cap table, and they'll have, their dollars will have a leverage effect on the ecosystem as a whole. Because while they buy five percent of the company, th…”
Kolicich: 8VC is not interested in investing in model inference hosting startups
“Most major inference players, for example, i.e. People who help you host open source models or train new open source models are growing incredibly quickly. We're not particularly interested in investing in that. Aaron at the stack.”
Kolicich: Enterprise 1.0 software like Salesforce is just database wrappers
“If you look at enterprise software, we call it one. And they're very simple systems. In many ways, they're wrappers over a database. If you look at Salesforce, Salesforce doesn't help you make a decision, really. Maybe there's only for the product I do today, …”
Oetting: Combining investing and incubation fails without intentional culture and incentives
“I think the thing that's underappreciated is how much your organization has to be designed intentionally to make to balance this sort of dichotomy of starting companies and investing in them. There, there's definitely some overlap, but I think if you don't int…”
Oetting: Over-refining startup concepts makes them less appealing to top founders
“I think also top founders, like, they want to have They want an idea to be theirs, at least to some extent. And so if you over refine the idea, then it can become less interesting to a founder who wants to, you know, take it, you know, put their own, kind of p…”
8VC is buying traditional services firms to automate them into software businesses
“We're very excited about AI enabled services. And so can you pair the traditional private equity rollup model with sort of a software development team? Buy traditional services businesses, use an engineering team to automate a lot of the work, and turn what us…”
Institutional buyers will emerge for $500M single-position venture fund secondaries
“I think there's a big opportunity for someone to come in and say, Hey, I'll take this position. I know it's good. I'll, you know, buy half a billion dollars worth of it at some slight discount. That's a gap that doesn't exist in the market today, but I think s…”
Kolicich: More VCs are active today than in 2019
“I think the trend of headcount is lowered, but there's still way more venture calculus today than there were in 2019.”
Hello Patient seed investors exercised full pro-rata in its Series A
“All of our original investors did. So the seed round was ABC, Bling Capital, Max Ventures. The extension was, or like the top up, whatever you want to call it, was also all three of them. Like they all kept wanting to do more. And then this round, like scale w…”
Oetting: 8VC has co-founded over two dozen companies over past decade
“And I think Joe and I and the rest of the EPC crew have probably done over two dozen at this point over the last, you know, decade or so.”
Oetting: 8VC employs three to six full-time EIRs to incubate startups
“The predominant way now is that we have a group of three or six EIRs at any time that are, you know, they're full-time employees at APC, but they're working only on sort of the process of either coming to an idea or getting it ready to kind of launch.”
Oetting: 8VC Writes Initial Incubation Checks Between $3M and $40M
“The initial check size for us is like, it's probably three to four million on the small side and maybe 25 to 30 or 40 the bigger side.”
Public software multiples have normalized to roughly 6.5x forward revenue
“I publish our internal software benchmark and you see forward revenue on a software company six and a half times. That's about where it was for the last I don't know before five years ago, the last decade. So, you know, five years back, it's the 10 year averag…”
Kolicich: 8VC allocates 50% to software, 20% biotech, 10% defense
“Half of what we do is software between vertical, horizontal, infrastructure, AI infrastructure, data infrastructure. 20% ends up being biotechnology because we think there's key innovations that are a lot enabled by computation, but a lot, you know, with gener…”