The Ledger
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Coogan: Founders Fund's SpaceX bet may become greatest VC investment ever
“Well, we should read through some of the history about Founders Fund's investment in SpaceX, because it might be one of the greatest, it might be, it might become the greatest venture capital investment of all time.”
Hays: Founders Fund's SpaceX stake will reach around $150B
“Again, it's still, like, gonna be a hundred and fifty-ish billion dollar position.”
Asparouhov: Europe Has Few Highly Competent Defense Tech Founders
“There aren't a ton of like super competent players. And so, you know, I wouldn't say that like the quality of what we get, you know, sort of inbound at least at founders fund is, you know, something, you know, super high in Europe.”
Harris: Most AI crypto projects are copy-paste AI with a token
“Most of the AI crypto projects we had seen had been just like not really interesting. It was more like copy paste from existing AI companies, and then they would like slap a token on top. So it would be like character AI with a token, like Langchain, but with …”
Coogan: Founders Fund Exclusively Underwrites Potential Trillion-Dollar Monopolies
“The Founders Fund Teal model is, Very, very narrowly selected for monopoly power, power law outcomes. Can this be a trillion dollar company?”
Coogan: Founders Fund and Valor to make $60B+ on SpaceX IPO
“Founders Fund and Valor are set to make more than sixty billion in gains on the SpaceX IPO. Sequoia, more than twenty billion.”
Coogan: Spotify's early memo predicted 2025 user metrics within 10%
“They're like in the investment memo, it's like in 20, 25, we'll have three hundred million DAUs and they got it within like 10% or something. It was like a 20 year projection and they nailed it.”
Hays: Non-top five VCs must win deals on partner likability
“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…”
Hays: The 'forward deployed GP' venture model will become widespread
“I expect forward deployed GPs to come back, right? Because like it needs to, I mean, Founders Fund basically already does this.
[1535] John Coogan: I mean, it exists.
[1536] John Coogan: Yeah.
[1536] John Coogan: Trey is that.
[1538] Jordy Hays: And Delian.
…”
Coogan: Tech firms benefit from manufacturing public enemies to stay underdogs
“You always want to be the underdog, and so even if you have to pay someone to talk trash about you, it's totally worth it.”
Founders Fund Deploying $36M First Check Into European Defense Startup
“The thing that I will say though, is at least the biggest check that I've ever, you know, sort of led is like a net new, you know, portfolio company investment. So not just like follow ons, obviously we like we've deployed mega checks in a ramp, but that was a…”
Founders Fund requires production usage before writing concentrated GovTech checks
“Now, what that means for founders fund, practically speaking, and gov tech is that we tend to want to write more concentrated checks. Once you see production usage of the technology working because it demonstrates that the founder has figured out how to get th…”
Harris: Founders Fund has paused new deals amid high crypto valuations
“The sentiment isn't amazing, but I would say prices on new deals that we've been seeing have been, like, asymmetrically high. Like, we, the last deal we did was Prime Intellect, and that was in, I want to say October or November. So we haven't done, like, a ne…”
Harris: Regulatory risk drove many Founders Fund DeFi founders out of US
“DeFi founders had it the worst. I think the past four years, like, many of our founders just fully moved out of the United States because the risk was just, like, You know, way too high.”
Hays: Founders Fund Generally Avoids Taking Board Seats
“This is why founders fund doesn't take board seats. Generally doesn't.”
Founders Fund's first deal post-ChatGPT was OpenAI's late 2022 round
“When I joined Founders Fund the very first deal that I saw in motion at Founders Fund was the post ChatGPT round in OpenAI in late twenty-twenty-two, early twenty-twenty-three.”
Asparouhov: Portfolio company Sword Health is valued at $4 billion
“We have this mutual portfolio company, you know, sort of Sword Health that has gotten really deep. They're now like, you know, four billion dollar company.”
Harris: Founders Fund received roughly 50 stablecoin pitches post-Bridge deal
“I think after the bridge acquisition, we genuinely got like. Probably, like, 50 stable coin pitches. Like, it was legitimately, like, insane.”
Rabois: Ramp was a non-standard investment for Founders Fund
“When I was working at founders fund at the time, There's a very non-standard Founders Fund investment in many, many ways. The most acute one being, if you have all these vendors that are doing well, what's the monopoly story?”
Hays: Anduril raised its seed round at around $97M post-money
“The Andrew Seed Round was done at like, 97 post or something like that.”
Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund invest $10M Series A in Lava
“Coastal Ventures, led by none other than Keith Raboi, has teamed up with Founders Fund to throw a ten million dollar Series A pass to Lava, a Bitcoin lending platform out of New York.”