venture capital

“The, you could raise a whole fund dedicated to funding posters. Right. It's just the poster index. And I think it would outperform.”

“And so it's like, there's all this, almost like this misclassification of like, the thing that solves the problem might not even look like it's in that category.”

“Next week I'm going to like MC a whole like nuclear conference and it's like the least heretical thing. It's all like government people and like companies and DCs and like, There's whole funds around this and stuff.”

“Hollywood is almost more like venture capital, where there's going to be some dogs, even the best, and you can't have everything be guaranteed because it's art, not engineering.”

“Five, six million of ARR growing 30, 30% a year. That is a good business under most evaluations, but it's not a venture scale opportunity anymore.”

“If you're 28 and you want to make fifty million dollars now, you raise a five hundred million dollar fund with your absolute boy, and you take, you know, that's how, that's the only way to do it. You can't just go do the right deals because the fees will get e…”

“I think that if I see a portfolio company CEO's name four times in the timeline per day, and they're not selling to venture backed startups. Risky. It's a big, it's kind of a bit of a red flag.”

“Venture's all about likability and access, right? And like, likability, likability plus attention gets you that access. And founders want to take money from people that they like. So if you're a likable person, you should be doing more media, more posting, mor…”

“I, the positive thing from that study though, is that it seemed like the more venture capital the founders raised, the higher their T levels were.”

“I think that posting about politics is actually great for VCs because you want to know what you're getting yourself into at the board dinner.”

“I think that you're, it's okay as a VC to position yourself as an expert in a certain sector, but branding your venture fund as a specific industry is, is almost like committing seppuku because They're just simple. Almost always is not quite enough opportuniti…”

“A lot of the best, really, really amazing VCs are on Bloomberg regularly, actually understanding what's happening in the public markets. And they're tracking that almost as much as what's happening in the venture portfolio.”

“Venture means, it needs to be, there's a 90%, there's a five percent chance this is a trillion dollar company, 90% chance it goes to zero, five percent chance the founder goes to jail, and I'm, Disgraced, and I never work again.”

“And the reason, so the reason that, that, that, that is important is it increases the performance of the fund, right? So if you call the billion dollars, if you have a billion dollar fund, you call that capital on day one but then you deploy it over four to fi…”

“My serious advice, go somewhere where you can do a high volume of deals. It's even, you know, less about like object, it's certainly, it's not going to matter about title because like going and being an associate Add a big fund that also you don't get a lot of…”

“This is a good example of, like, where Silicon Valley could go down, like, kind of a dark path where VCs are like, yeah, just meet me in the sweaty spa. Like, if you say, like, meet me at the sweaty spa, there's, like, a big aversion to that, but for some reas…”

“In 2023, VCs returned the lowest level of capital to their investors since 20 11.”

“You know, like jokes aside, there is something very valuable about being a young founder and interacting with an extremely high ego investor, because at least there is some alignment there most of the time. So you can kind of get some reps in, deal with some s…”

“YC has become essentially a union for startups. Because if you are a VC and you fuck over one YC company, you go in their database, every YC company hears about you, and instantly you're ostracized from the entire community”

“Everyone wants a pattern or a playbook that they can, and that's the stuff that normally does really well on social media, is like, just do this checklist, just build this model, and this will deliver results, but as soon as you can concretize it, You lose all…”

“Most of the returns generated from venture are like 10 companies.”

“That it led to a sort of capital incineration where VCs invested billions of dollars into the creator economy, and we haven't had much to show for it.”

“I'm like short any VC that doesn't understand that they're in the likability game, because if you're not one of the Holy Trinity or a top five firm, you have this sort of adverse selection problem where all the best founders want to work with a select group of…”

“All VCs need to exist because how can you outperform if everybody's, you know, a top performer, right? You want to be able to benchmark yourself against the bottom 80%, even if you're in the top”

“My favorite investors are generalists. They look For opportunity and talent. Yep. And they bet big when they find those two things in the same place.”

“The goal of Doge is retooling the balance sheet, right-sizing the income statement, getting, like, the, getting out of the red and just shrinking bloat, and that's what private equity does best, not venture capital.”

“Don't try to reference check a VC before you're in an active conversation. It's a bad look.”

“I think he knows that you're not supposed to ask for an NDA before you pitch somebody something. At least in the venture world. Cause at this point it's like, you know, you asked for an NDA and then what if we already had that idea? And then it becomes this so…”

“In the last, like, six months, we've seen venture-funded pool service clean roll-up. We've seen venture-funded auto body shop roll-ups. We've seen venture-funded accounting CPA roll-ups.”

“If you're doing anything in startups and venture and you start asking for people to sign NDAs, it's like a very negative signal.”

“I mean, it goes on the, it goes on book face. Like Gary built that thing. And like, there's a whole database of, VCs and with ratings, like how, how'd, how'd they do what they do to you? All this stuff.”

“I do think that if a VC calls their portfolio founder bud, they should be diluted to zero. Like, there should be, like, some type of new round with structure done to just dilute them to zero, because it's so condescending and should be taken out of the vocabul…”

“No VC can write you off as a founder because you're a Christian, because there are now enough people who are serious that you won't be, you can wear it on your sleeve, whereas before people used to hide it, clearly.”

“I do think if you're, if it's funny, ideas guys, you know, monetize well through through just building companies. But there's a lot of VCs that are ideas guys, and they basically just sit on this buck, you know, this like basket of really good ideas for years …”

“The next category that I think will be really, like, maybe retconned into The defense and industrial tech will be energy and data center build out. And because I think they're capital intensive, high dilution, similar skill sets. So I think a lot of the VCs th…”

“The number of GPs that are secretly taking multiple trips a year to hunt elephants, elk, lions, really exotic.”

“Web three, the average web three fund has done better than the average venture funds.”

“I think as a VC right now, it's really hard to invest in a sector, given the proliferation of startups, all with high potential, the prices you'd have to invest that money.”

“The other thing is I have more than a billion dollars a year in capital that's basically just, like, hard allocated to YC companies, ah, not from us, from, like, you know, Hundreds of VCs who now are all coming back to Demo Day in droves.”

“I mean, right now you're seeing The venturification of middle America and like, as all these venture co's start to buy up, you know, vets and med spas and all these things like venture capital. I'm in like, I'm in the rural Midwest right now. And like, you're …”

“There's a lot of these, a lot of businesses, a lot of great businesses out there, and a lot of, like, stock founders, and there's more and more of them, and increasingly a lot more VCs who realize that, like, you know there is a severe lack of DPI, especially …”

“There, there's a hurdle in private equity, and there's no hurdle in venture capital, which makes the whole thing even sweeter.”

“My business is picking up the roadkill of the venture industry. The startups, the founders that have triumphantly built Heroic and wonderful businesses and have gained 1,000,010 of millions of revenue and built incredible teams and have a wonderful product and…”

“I think like oftentimes the best outcome is just returning capital, which used to kind of be a norm in venture.”

“It's really hard to invest in seed creator businesses because the equity and the value of the community is held outside the company.”

“One of the dirty secrets, which, you know, it sounds like is in the venture capital world, entrepreneurs all day long will pitch you about how their CAC is very high, but the CAC will come down. Here's a secret CAC always goes up, right? It always goes up. Lik…”

“Don't confuse The fact that LLMs are powerful technology, like there's stuff you're going to do with them that are going to be great for all sorts of businesses with the disruption itself being a good business.”

“I think we are in a super cycle of mimetic venture capital money lighting on fire. In AI right now because, and there's a bunch of structural reasons for it.”

“This is a common phenomenon at the, not the end, but at the peak of a lot of cycles is you end up with a lot of these SPVs getting Formed in a meaningful way. And you end up with managers trying to get write bigger checks for rounds than their funds can actual…”

“What I've realized is like price very rarely within some zone has mattered. And when I find myself iterating a little too much on on like, oh, I'll do it at this price versus that price. It probably says something about what I think the ultimate outcome for th…”

“The problem with AI in general, and I think the entire AI discussion is I always like to point out, it's like the average of infinity and zero is infinity, right? And so VCs aren't very good at math, but they can do that one. And so the problem is you say, oka…”

“There's seed rounds at 70 with nothing and like four 19 year olds. Like this is insane. And because Ventures Power Law, that individual deal can make sense if it's the right one. But as an industry, it's going to be a huge waste of capital.”

“There's going to be this Cameron explosion of. Like micro S and B and midsize company creation that AI enables that maybe shouldn't be venture backed”

“I think there's this General thing in venture, but it's true of the whole world, right? You get a little bit of success, start to think you're, you know, you're onto something, and then you get feature creep. And so feature creep in venture is like, oh, maybe …”

“In a world where companies are more efficient, early stage is really like the place to, Do this business. It'll be the last entrenched Alamo of venture.”

“I'm a, you know, obviously mega bull on like the team at Andrewl. Cause like they have the like bench, the capability, the, you know, set of different products, suite, different programs going, like they will navigate this, but like, I don't know if there's go…”

“It sort of doesn't matter at all what you did before, because nothing you do before joining a venture capital firm prepares you for how truly, like, multifaceted long-term success is in venture.”

“The reality is it's extremely capital intensive. It operates on a different set of both physical and legal laws than SAS. And that, that actually makes it, you know, significantly less efficient, I think in terms of, The health and functionality of a typical V…”

“So really there's going to be more leverage to the best investors. So I shouldn't, the power law is going to get even more concentrated.”

“That feels like the place to build an indie company is in the wrapper layer that's overlooked by VCs. Maybe it's not PowerLaw company, but you can build a fantastic business delivering amazing stuff.”

“Counting on either support from your existing investors or a next round materializing over the next 18 months if you aren't just like absolutely crushing it and putting up insane numbers like I'm sure most of your audience does. But in that case, unless you're…”

“I think that denominator effect is probably more pronounced than I've ever seen it in my venture career, and that's going to cause the longer term liquidity issues you're talking about, Jordy, in terms of kind of how, what the funding cycles look like over the…”

“As venture kind of becomes more, more institutionalized we're gonna see a lot more of them, for sure.”

“People, friends of mine were like, oh, we're gonna see this mass extinction of these unicorns. They're all gonna die because, you know, they're gonna run out of money. No one's gonna fund them. The liquidation preferences are huge. They can't go public. They a…”

“And so there's this interesting thing where AI is actually leading, making venture capital, I would argue more insular, right. Than it was before, not less insular.”

“Private to private transactions are going to happen way more. Right. Like you're going to look just as it happened in private equity, like funds will sell the funds.”

“This is just all cyclical, right? Like, we're gonna be in a world, I bet in 24 months, I hope that I'm on the show, and we're talking about this, and everyone's gonna be like, wow, we, like, tripled our exposure in venture, and everything's going fantastic, an…”

“I see a lot of VCs piling into it, I think for the wrong reasons and are going to make some mistakes. I think there's a real alchemy that it takes to get it right.”

“That investor or that angel investor is going to place who knows how many bets, and you're gonna place one during this period of time. You are an investor of your time, and that is one thing that you can do during this period, and you have to take that really …”

“You know, I do think that there are, you know, sort of junior research jobs that, you know, probably got a lot harder to, you know, sort of justify both in like the land of like, you know, sort of venture all the way to like, you know, sort of grad school labs…”

“Some of the, you know, some of the losers out of this talent war are just VCs because how do you compete? How do you compete when? You know, historically you could have gone to some of these and really overpaid to invest. You could have come to them with a rid…”

“That's why I generally, as a rule, don't have VCs on to do the introductory interviews. Because it's kind of hard to get, like, a real take, because that, that, that is, you know, such a motivation.”

“The best way to do it is to have a track record early as somebody who is like in the loop specifically on new product development. And so somebody who, you know, be like deeply in the trenches at one of these new companies in one of these spaces you know, part…”

“The best way to do it is to have a track record early as somebody who is like in the loop specifically on new product development. And so somebody who, you know, be like deeply in the trenches at one of these new companies in one of these spaces you know, part…”

“The nature of the, of Hollywood is like venture capital. Like it is a hits driven business. If you don't accept that you're going to have massive flops and egg on your face and embarrassing moments, you will not make it.”

“They don't come to us as often as you think, because they know, well they probably go to private equity or venture capital or these fancy hedge funds before they come to us, because I want to make sure that I'm I care about cash flow and the price that I pay, …”

“That's a different calculus than the world of private equity, or venture capital, or any money managers, where They're incentivized to deploy capital because they get management fees.”

“Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin if he had raised Series A, even if best investors in the world, you know, sickest cap table ever, still, still would, I would say that would not, Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin.”

“If there are insiders from day one, it doesn't matter how much dispersion of supply, mindshare, talent, et cetera. There is the sort of like the big bang moment will always be there and will always sort of like a scar on the record of the thing.”

“Investing is a emotional test disguised as an intellectual test. Meaning one of the things I've learned over the years is just like sticking with it in venture capital, whether it's crypto sort of more extreme, I think it's true of public markets. If you read …”

“Like a lot of venture capital and startups is, is vibe based, right? Is qualitative.”

“It's like, if you're a passive investor at the late stage, there's no alpha today in VC or very little, but that's just not the game we play.”

“AUM weighted brain rot or AUM weighted slop is not an excuse for slop and controversial investments. If you put one percent of your fund into something that is just going to go all over the internet and be like, we are the most degenerate. We're the craziest. …”

“Like when I look at across, you know, 60, 70 different investments at this point, if you take out like two or three of these founders, it's just like, okay, you're not good.”

“Every time venture cap, every time venture capital gets easy, people take or take risk with companies that are less of a great fit for the venture capital model. And when I say a great fit, like they're either heavy capex or they have low gross margins. They r…”

“If any venture capital fund is putting that in their venture bucket at this point, it feels, feels ridiculous compared to growth scale. I mean, you're bigger than probably 90% of the S and P like it's a completely different business.”

“Right now a lot of easy money everywhere, right? There's teams that have built nothing that can raise between 50 to a billion dollars at times.”

“And so, if you even have a team of three people that are just relentless, and you guys know from, like, what you guys do, it's like, you can't compete with that. I don't care how much money you have, or what incubator you're in, or what VC's, you know, startin…”

“And that was an industry that was really done in Word, and we were Excel thinkers. So that was kind of a very different kind of mindset that we were bringing to the table.”

“90% of the alpha for Chicago-based venture firms is created on the coasts, right? And 90% of the capital that the leading Chicago companies raise is from the coasts.”

“With 61% of all venture capital last year going to AI.”

“It's really hard to fire your VCs. It's hard for your VCs to fire you. And so as a result, like actually it's kind of dysfunctional. Whereas public market, like I love our investors because if I do something stupid, they call me up and they say, that was stupi…”

“This is going to move the data center game out of the VCs and into the big leagues.”