venture capital

“If you build on someone's platform, or if you build on someone's roads, or if you build inside, you know, in someone's backyard, be prepared to be sued or screwed.”

“I don't think community is a VC fundable idea, much like media has been, in general, a terrible, these, we need community, we need media, is that, does that mean it should be VC funded? No”

“Sexual health has not been a VC category until about like two years ago.”

“All these VCs, we all talk about investing in startups, disrupting antiquated industries using software. That's what we love investing in. We do that all day long. Yet, most venture capital firms are run devoid of software.”

“Not only will VCs have to get comfortable having other folks on the cap table who are, let's say, individual investors, they'll have to get comfortable with, like, a bunch of random strangers on the internet who have just bought into the token. Who are totally…”

“What venture does a lot of the time is it takes you from being authentic to inauthentic. Because when you have the venture influences you to grow, grow at all costs. And when you grow at all costs, you have to Compromise. Sometimes.”

“VCs do a lot of performance art, right? Or they do this weird, like, power flex with other stage entrepreneurs, where they're like, oh, show me a business plan, like, calculate your TAM. I'm like, I don't fucking know what their TAM is, because nobody's ever b…”

“If you bring these people together, if you had the collective sway, Of a bunch of the biggest YouTubers, a bunch of the biggest Twitter, a bunch of the biggest TikTok a bunch of the biggest Instagram, et cetera, and you kind of brought it into a single fund, t…”

“And that's why I'm a big fan of, like, private equity versus venture capital because I think it's much more interesting to take businesses that are bad at the operations and that part and help them scale that because that part's repeatable versus the creative …”

“Starting a bootstrap business really allows the founder and founding team to intimately understand the business and all portions of it, unlike when you raise venture capital at, you know, the early stage. So I actually think that, and it was a great reminder t…”

“I feel like it's always negative signal if you go to a company's page, and it's followed by, like, old VCs, and you're just like, yeah, they, like, have, like, a hype round going, but, like, no kids actually fuck with them, you know?”

“How people think is a hundred percent of what matters in startups and in venture capital and in the stock market and whatnot.”

“The reality is the government has pulled away the ability for the average people to make a lot of different kinds of investments. The SEC basically blocks all kinds of different opportunities because they, you know, they scrutinize everything, right? So that's…”

“A manifestation of Lux itself is looking at all of these different disparate fields. Post facto, we can often find this, you know, nice connective narrative thread, but it's what I call randomness and optionality. So randomness and optionality is another, so, …”

“You set up these structures, you paid all this legal money because you knew you were going to dump. You knew you were going to clear these positions and you knew it was going to be lucrative. That's why you went through the expense instead of just raising mone…”

“And I feel like that's the new playbook in DTC is get the brand to scale in DTC. Open up wholesale relationships, thoughtfully, strategically, perhaps some brick and mortar, and raise less than twenty million dollars, certainly at the high end.”

“Five years ago, there was like a hundred million of venture capital that went into mental health tech. Last year, I heard that was five and a half billion.”

“No, I w I wouldn't have done it. If I could go back, I think there's so many Problems with raising money.”

“Just because you invest in a company doesn't mean it's your company. So a lot of VCs, what they'll say is, Oh, one of our companies. Oh, I am. So they invested out of their fund, which they invested from LPs. So not even their own money. They're going and they…”

“I know there's some, sometimes folk like VCs are a little, like, it's almost like they're claiming credit for the success of, like, singular credit. I mean, it's like, yeah, of course you help them, but, like, it's, yes, it's a little dirty when they, it's alm…”

“I've never been happier in my life. And I like you, I've done the venture back startup thing, but the personal holding company has been so fun for me and it's helped me live a happier, healthier and wealthier life.”

“I mean, you find a business that makes a lot of money and has a fax machine and the odds are competing with them will be a little bit easier than competing with the Stanford grads, you know, the VC backed firms, the smartest people that you know.”

“I could a hundred percent see that like 10 years from now, there's no way to make money in AI, right? Like basically nobody made any money on AI. All the returns basically just went to, you know, whoever like basically gets attention so that they can monetize …”

“Every time you raise more money, your success chances go down, not up. That's the big aha, is that every time you move the goalpost, You're the chances of you actually having a meaningful outcome go from, you know, 20% to 10% to five percent to one percent to …”

“I don't think VCs lean in enough on the community of their founders, and it's, like, so easy. They don't have to do anything, and they don't have to be the smart people or come up with the connection to Mark Zuckerberg, like, just introduce us to a few people …”

“There's a bunch of founders that right now that are worth a lot on paper that are going to have crazy headwinds, like within the next six to nine months. Because they're going to have to recap their companies and that the founders are, they're going to realize…”

“A lot of, like a lot of naive entrepreneurs feel like they've won. They pop a bottle right on the night that they, that the funds wire for their seed stage, not understanding that they're now obligated to a bunch of investors to work their ass off, to build so…”

“Whereas with a bootstrap company, you don't get that kind of feedback. So it's like, I think you make money faster. You can be personally wealthy faster and you get to help people directly. But you don't get that opportunity for scale unless you work on it for…”

“That's why I think that if you're starting a media business, bootstrap it. Bootstrap it. As long as you can, there's literally no excuse to start a media business in 2023 with venture capital unless you're using venture capital to, like, scale something like S…”

“And I think there's a big opportunity between the sort of, you know, lifestyle business and the venture funded business. There's a lot of businesses in between that I call bootstrap giants. There are these ambitious but self-funded profitable companies that ca…”

“I'm not a huge fan of venture capital and like venture funding communities, because I think what venture is, is I want to grow this as quick as possible, but the greatest communities, you know, it's oil and water with that.”

“Every time you raise money, your chances of success don't go up. They go down. You just kicked the goalpost way further, right?”

“In the field of venture capital, kind of important to Schmooze and network and mingle, but it's usually done with a lack of intention that I think is detrimental. I'll go so far as to say to your mental health, because you're kind of floating around your show …”

“I think there's something to be said about being constrained and building your own media. Building your own, you know, your own community and not being just like how you don't want to be dependent on VCs. You don't necessarily want to be dependent on creators.”

“Being in credit. It's like being a professional free throw shooter. You know, it's like, there's not, there's no glory or professional penalty kicker. Whenever I'm watching a soccer match, everybody loves PKs and I'm looking, I'm like, this reminds me of my jo…”

“Here's the cold harsh truth is that, you know, nine out of 10 startups go to zero. Like they can just completely fail. Right. And we see this at the VC level. It's like, we expect almost all of our startups that we invest in to go completely to zero and that's…”

“I really think crypto is the only real venture investable vertical that is taking place right now.”

“Also, every VC you talk to wants to be famous. Every single one of them. They all get envy on this shit.”

“That's why people forget, but in tech Twitter, in the beginning, the people who had the most amount of followers weren't entrepreneurs. It was the VCs. Like the Fred Wilson's and, you know, all those guys.”

“If you have a great product, you really shouldn't need venture capital unless it's a really capital heavy Business”

“There's so much opportunity for still today in 20, 24 to not go build the shiny, sexy thing with limitless, you know, market size and, Hone in and focus on one industry, you know, one type of business and build software tailored for them and build really great…”

“A few years ago, well, first of all, it wasn't, this wasn't even possible a few years ago, but you would need a large team to do that, raise venture capital.”

“I also don't want to become a VC because I'm too opinionated and too controversial, and I couldn't back someone who was a sociopath, which is kind of required in that, that field.”

“Like as a VC, you're going to be working on those deals, 10 or 12 years, sometimes 15 years after you make them and before they exit, right? And so like, I'm still working on a fund on a regular basis for deals that we did back in 2014.”

“I think to raise venture capital, the more you talk about your products and what you're working on, I actually think the harder it really is. Because I don't think any seed or lower investor gives the fuck about what you're working on. I think it's almost enti…”

“YC is a media company that sells venture capital.”

“Capital is basically a commodity at this point. So the only differentiation is going to be like you being, you know, a cult leader personality.”

“The prices of these things are gonna go up. They're gonna go up just because VCs subsidize the cost of a lot of these products.”

“This is basically what you're doing, because you're building a ton of You know, bunch of businesses with enterprise value, with cash flow. They're compounding each other, so I just think that you don't need outside investors.”

“I just think that, you know, by starting as a leveraged agency, by starting doing these manual tasks, creating the agents you can decide if you want to be a VC backed Leverage agency, but this is just the best way to start so you have leverage when you want to…”

“I think VC is going to evolve dramatically over the next couple of years. Cause I believe that people don't need to raise capital and oftentimes most ideas, especially like just great lifestyle businesses that get to, you know, two, four or five, ten million i…”

“Don't make the, don't make a mistake of trying to build something for a huge market because that's where the venture boys are playing. This is for the people who want to build a cash flowing startup that, you know, maybe they want, it could raise venture later…”

“A VC will pay 5000 dollars for a report that saves them from a bad 500 K bet all day long.”