CoS @ Venture5 & angel investor. It’s not the size of the check but how you use it. ✨HERE TO SUPPORT FOUNDERS✨
Sacramento, CA
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In fact, the industry has been pulling back on spending for years, which is why the AAA talent roster today is 90% identical to what it looked like a decade ago.
A&R was replaced by YouTube 15 years ago.
Reaching superstardom has historically required an average of about 7 years of sustained investment and development. Major labels are not currently providing that to their rap artists. End of story.
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Jeff Greenfeld retweeted
"Lost in this conversation are the dramatic differences between a high priced private round and an IPO. Understanding these differences is crucial to understanding the true risks in this large private-round phenomenon."
Investors Beware: Today’s $100M+ Late-stage Private Rounds Are Very Different from an IPO
The discussion in the video below is geared at convincing founders to continue taking dilutive VC dollars, longer than necessary, to avoid scrutiny.
This is why rates of fraud and failure in post-IPO tech companies have risen. It's why returns of the largest IPO have been consistently poor.
If you are a mission-driven, you should want what is best for the long-term future of your company. That means embracing scrutiny, when you are ready, to lower your cost of capital.
Properly aligned investors should want this too, as the trend of raising larger and later rounds erodes value for early investors — as well as founders and employees.
The argument that public markets force founders into short-term thinking simply doesn't hold up anymore, versus the fervor for ever-faster ARR growth in private markets. Not to mention the pressure that some VCs are putting on founders to consider a sale.
In summary, if you have conviction in your company — if it is your life's work, you should want to compete in the most meritocratic market for capital.
And you should want to do that when the time is right for you, rather than bending to the incentives of rent-seeking investors.
Go public.
Quote from @bgurley (2015): abovethecrowd.com/2015/02/25…
Public vs. Private market myopia:
credistick.com/the-tyranny-o…
"The founder is the asset class... The IPO is another financing event."
a16z's David George and Santiago Rodriguez on why the biggest companies are staying private:
Santiago: "If you look at the top six companies today, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Waymo, and Revolut, by last round valuation, they add up to about $2.4 trillion."
"This is more than the combined market cap of IPOs we've seen in the last 10 years, excluding SpaceX, which adds up to $1.7 trillion."
David: "Especially for founder-led companies, one of the things that we've talked about and that I've written about is that the founder is the asset class at this point."
"The bet that we make, and part of the reason that it's been a benefit for some of these companies to remain private, is they can many times take bigger swings in the private markets that have longer duration paybacks."
"Zuck and Elon are kind of obvious exceptions to the rule in the public markets."
"You see it manifest in the numbers in companies like Databricks or Stripe: massive, massive new bets in new product areas, and you can see revenue acceleration that happens as a result."
"You can do that in the public markets, but it's gonna catch greater scrutiny. Meta's stock price at the nadir got below 100 bucks a share when people were very, very skeptical about their investments in AR/VR."
@DavidGeorge83 @santiago__rdz
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All my homies love space crystals
In under an hour, Varda will be launching W-8 and W-9 on the same rocket
This is a huge milestone for us. We're transitioning from single vehicle to a fleet mentality.
This is what allows us to scale our pharma manufacturing, gotta be able to operate multiple space factories!!
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Jeff Greenfeld retweeted
Selfless contribution to the analytical ecosystem
@DevinAI and I fixed this for good today. ☺️
Introducing logostoslides.com - the best way to find and download multiple logos at once with exclusively transparent backgrounds, high-res, etc.
Bankers, consultants, and other deck-builders of the world, salvation is here!
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Jeff Greenfeld retweeted
“Our LPs say they want coinvest but never do it.”
Are you delivering deals at their spec (stage, rev theshold, market terms)?
Still not biting?
Look within. You need to provide better materials. Full memo, simple model, target returns, clear closing timelines.
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Jeff Greenfeld retweeted
“Paying up" keeps getting conflated with conviction. Feeling really good about a team doesn't make the outcome bigger and it doesn't make the company more likely to succeed.
Conviction tells you whether to invest while price determines what you make when you're right.
🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯
My most active group chat by a mile is the @btv_vc WhatsApp w/ @iamjakestream, @pitdesi + @nbobba 😅
For the last 12-18 months it's been one long debate about the state of VC, the pre-seed + seed market, and what we should do about it
Sharing some of our thoughts below!
better-tomorrow-ventures.gho…
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It really feels like I’m cooking with Claude but im also acutely aware that I know just engouh to be dangerous
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Uncharacteristically I’ve got a spread for $MU earnings.
Nobody has any fucking compute
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This is innovation
The super running shoe arms race is out of control.
Two runners that broke 2-hour marathon mark wore the Adidas Adizero Pro Evo 3. Now, Adidas has made a running shoe with gear shifts…that change the foam from stiff to soft.
Controlled by a runner’s watch for adjustments based on terrain or fatigue. Stiff bounces more for sprints while soft for cruising speeds.
***
OP link: instagram.com/reel/Ddzvb5YsD…
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Jeff Greenfeld retweeted
the most active type of LP in emerging VC funds is the GP of another fund.
not by committed $, but by count. the number of GPs allocating to small funds right now (especially in ecosystems like SF) is insane.
large firms invest through dedicated fund-of-funds vehicles/programs inside the firm (e.g. bain, GC, felicis), through the family offices of their senior partners, or through GPs directly with a few goals: stay close to what's trending, get access to information, and build a diversified early-stage pipeline (that large firms simply can't cover efficiently).
even small/mid-sized firms use this as part of their strategy, sometimes right in the pitch ("we'd rather write a few small LP checks into sub-$20M funds than hire a team of associates").
yes, the value of these investments is high: they sit outside a standard LP allocation workflow, they act as a catalyst for first close, and they often send a strong signal for the entire fundraise ("Marc / Josh are LPs in my fund"), but they come with caveats like re-up risk, closed-loop capital circulation, priority deal access, etc.
imho, it's closer to a call option on deal flow than a classic LP position, but if you're raising your first fund, it makes sense to go to your VC peers before pitching the rest of the world.
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Jeff Greenfeld retweeted
remember that whole camp where they make ai safety content and they kept self congratulating themselves how good it is
all rekt by one teen with tiktok and reality
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I have young family members who got into pokemon recently, so I’ve been trying to find cards for them to open.
And guys, I found all the folks who went broke on NFTs.
They’re standing in line at 8am at Target and BestBuy .
You know where I find pokemon cards to buy at MSRP? In the furniture section at Target. Because that’s where these grown-ass men are hiding products so they can come back later and not violate the “2 per person” limit.
Deeply embarrassing.
Pokemon scalpers are pathetic 😭
People camped outside for 12+ hours to get a promo-card they sold for $50 on eBay minutes later.
That means they value their time at $4/hr.
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As a kid, I always tried to finish tests as quickly as possible because in my head, that was worth bonus points.
Thankfully it turns out I was a pretty smart kid.
Every single one of these people I know at 30+ doing this bit are just retconning fairly obvious and absolutely stupid decisions they made as adults, which derailed their lives during pivotal “build your life up” epochs. When people stop putting up with seeing it as socially acceptable, these folks go and bring up the “gifted kid/ADHD” thing. It’s like, no dude, you dropped out of college to do mushrooms in Colorado for six years. What you’re dealing with now “executive dysfunction” is not a real thing in 95% of cases (I’m being generous).
It’s insufferable because surface society, much like the ruination of the emotional support dog, have turned ADHD into a disease which demands accommodations which boil down to “Let me basically refuse to do anything correctly but prevent me from having to face the ramifications of failure on any scale”.
I guarantee for most of these people, who are mostly from the suburbs and mostly downwardly economically mobile from a comfortable childhood, what would fix their problems are their parents not bailing them out anymore
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