The Ledger
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why aren't all 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Byers: Early stage will be the last entrenched Alamo of venture
“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.”
Byers: $70M pre-product seed rounds will be a huge waste of capital
“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.”
Byers: Early success leads venture capital firms into destructive feature creep
“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 …”
Byers: Vivek Ramaswamy co-founded Chapter; Vance and Thiel on board
“Up until two years ago, Kobe had a very interesting board and a very interesting co-founder. So his co-founder was Vivek. And his board was JD and Peter Thiel.”
Byers: Apple will face innovator's dilemma against personal AI copilot startups
“We think the apples and others are going to have a little bit of innovators dilemma on this stuff.”
Byers: Market sizing diligence is bad work at seed stage
“I don't ever search how big a market is. That's what you're already wrong. I've never done that work. I actually think it's bad work to do at seed.”
Byers: Susa Ventures launches $175M Fund V for pre-seed and seed
“Fifth fund, hundred and seventy-five million, and it's a return to what we did at the very start. So only pre-seed and seed.”
Byers: Susa Ventures resisted pivoting entirely to crypto or AI
“We have. Yet to go all in on something, but that is not to say we haven't had a risk of potentially falling into that a hundred times in the last decade. We talked about going all in on crypto. We talked about going all in on AI.”
Byers: 2021 venture capital vintage will be historically poor
“Like that vintage is going to be historically shitty.”
Byers: AI will spark a Cambrian explosion of non-venture-scale SMBs
“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”
Byers: Each Susa Ventures partner only completes two to three deals annually
“We do relatively low volume. Each partner will only do two or three deal of the year.”
Byers: Flexport is the only deal Susa ever committed to on a phone call
“We committed to Ryan on the phone. It's the only time we've ever done that in SUSE history. We committed to the deal on the phone call.”
Byers: Susa quietly began deploying Fund V in December, completing four deals
“We soft secretly started writing checks out of it in December. So we're actually four in, which is a little hot for us.”