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 9 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
Suster: Seed funds take 15 years to yield most profits
“A seed fund has a 10 to 12 year maturity, and it's really more like 15 years, and that's just the truth about venture capital. It takes longer for your fund to mature, and you might return your fund in year seven, eight, or nine, but you're yielding most of th…”
Suster: Going public without analyst coverage and institutional support is worse than staying private
“Going public, if you don't have coverage, and you don't have an institutional base that wants to invest in you, like, is worse than being private. Because you now have a fixed market cap that doesn't go up. You don't really have liquidity.”
Suster: Roughly six deals drive 80% of returns in a venture fund
“Empirically, about six deals in any fund drive 80% of the returns.”
Suster: Investor advice from non-operators is often not actionable
“You often get input from investors who have never done what you've done before. And so it's like, well, meaning smart people saying smart things, but it's not actionable.”
Suster: Disciplined valuations leave startups a much larger pool of potential acquirers
“There's a ton of companies that can acquire businesses for 100 to five hundred million dollars. There's not so many who can acquire it for two billion or five billion. So if you're disciplined as an investor, if you're disciplined as a founder, and you're fund…”
Suster: Most tech markets are winner-take-most with weak returns for third place
“Most markets are winner take most. Number one takes the majority. Number two takes the rest. And number three is a set of steak knives. And If you back three, four or five, you're just not going to make a lot of money. You need extreme success in the category.”
Suster: A VC's job is to be a sparring partner, not the decider
“I view it as our job to like be a sparring partner and it's lonely being CEO. I was CEO twice is very lonely and you don't get a lot of advice. And when you get advice, most of it is not applicable. And so I view it as our job to have an opinion and to state t…”
Mark Suster says VCs must time trends for five-year horizons
“So it's our job to invest in something that we believe is going to happen in five years and being correct. If it's going to happen in a year, you probably missed the trend and there's probably 10 other VCs that were investing four years ago. And if you invest …”
Suster: Hardware anchoring significantly increases consumer willingness to pay subscription fees
“If I tried to sell you a product on your iPhone, download it and pay 20 dollars a month, It's so hard to get someone to pay 20 dollars a month for anything on their iPhone. If I sell you a 200 dollar piece of hardware, but then you need a 20 dollar a month sub…”