John Francis

I'm excited to share a whitepaper discussing a new framework to help startup founders and early stage investors and angels make sense of all the VC industry reports and drive actionable insights. Read the full white paper here lnkd.in/gk7RZAtD

AI fatigue is real

@DelJohnsonVC One way to do this is to create a professional qualification like a bar exam to test one’s ability and hold them accountable.

7. Professional rules of conduct & a board to adjudicate professional malfeasance. VCs hold hundreds on millions of dollars and weigh in on every social issue under the sun. The profession should finally be treated like a real profession. Address the widespread abuse of founders.

The idea that tech authoritarians are motivated by ideology and not profit is the hardest true idea for outsiders to accept.

We're back at it again! February 8, 2024, Mark your calendars for VC Day - OKC! For one day, co-work with VCs in the OKC ecosystem! Location: Dayclub Modern Workspaces - Downtown OKC Register below and join us to chat, work, and network! lu.ma/vcdayokc

i love @cartainc but starting to see a lot of startups move off of Carta because they charge $$$$. anyone else seeing this?

@GeoffLewisOrg Even fewer if you consider how many can articulate that in to a repeatable strategy

Adjusting for luck, there are approx 15 individual VCs who understand how to consistently make money for LPs at any given time. This number doesn’t change.

Thank you everyone for making VC Day - Tulsa a huge success! We appreciate our sponsors @regentbank, @GableGotwals, and @36degreesN for making this happen! Huge shout-out to @hermitvc, the originator of VC Day. Thanks for allowing me to expand this concept to Oklahoma. Thank you @AmadeuTolentino for the amazing networking experience with Preneur! I hope to see you all at VC Day - OKC on January 17th! Save the Date!

Agree! also in LI people are too politically correct to drive any real insight.

@DelJohnsonVC Winning in the current system comes at the cost of your soul

The problem I'm solving in VC is that competence and performance are not rewarded, only network, and this system leads to financial underperformance and outright graft. This is not a problem for me as I could win in the current system too. I'm just not interested in it.

Most spray and pray investors I know write much smaller checks to alter outcomes one way or the other even as a collective. so the notion that an investment tactics altering probabilities of outcomes is false, probabilities of outcomes for startups are built-in to the nature of risk -varying continuously based on market conditions and reduction of risk factors.

🤔 "Startup returns are distributed according to a power law" A fundamental property of nature? OR The result of a market flooded by light due-diligence, spray-and-pray VCs 👀 Which came first: the data or the data generating process?

Sorry... is this even legal? You HAVE to book a call to cancel? I love this company - we just aren't using the service anymore... But this is crazy... or am I?

@compulsivestart Seen it work when the startups have some baseline recurring revenues. It’s not just PE firms I’m seeing this activity being lead by later stage startups as well

@hermitvc Does that ever really work in startups though? Turnaround is really more of a PE thing

@compulsivestart Tru dat

"No one ever got fired for buying IBM." As a startup (and emerging manager), anyone that believes this isn't a prospect. Your customers are the ones that actually want to achieve new outcomes, not just keep their job.

@wdstringer One way to look at this is that they have 99% probability of being wrong and missing the next big thing, the folks who didn’t get accepted don’t loose hope the YC badge means less today than it did even a few years ago.

YC received 24,000 applications for this last batch. They accepted 240. That’s a lot of talent without the YC halo 😇 out there trying to solve the worlds problems. 🐂🐂🐂

@DelJohnsonVC True, it is more of a gate keeping mechanism to keep new fund managers small

If it's true that venture capital performance declines with time, and that a manager's strongest fund is likely to be their first fund, then the conventional wisdom that new VCs' should raise a proof of concept fund I to show "track record" is completely wrong To the contrary...

@cory And most wouldn’t be able to get through their own company recruitment processes now

Interesting that big tech founders (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, etc.) did **not** work in big tech prior to founding their companies.

@BexelInitiative @shriyanevatia @DelJohnsonVC Right, not everyone uses it, for a sanity check consider every year VCs invest in 25k-40k new startups, some of the biggest service providers only acquire high single digit market shares at best, it is a lot more fragmented than people assume it to be.

@shriyanevatia @hermitvc @DelJohnsonVC Enh not "everyone" uses it. Its a good data point but 100% not exhaustive. You could just take PB/CBI and compare and will see variances... All to be expected in private mkts tho

Everyone wants to be an VC industry expert quoting datasets from angelist, carta and other services driven sources without acknowledging most of these datasets are a subset , incomplete and mostly just BS . Even the best data sources in VC are mostly self reported and lack predictive power unless it is parsed and cleaned by a data professional

Dominant is relative -carta for example services 30k startups now but back in 2012 it had less than 2k startups , for meaningful analysis they either need to have the similar number or a representative dataset for the analysis period let’s say 10 years or 20 years. moreover the companies they service may not be representative of the total population of startups out there, which can distort reality. The best raw dataset I’ve seen is pitchbook which has over a million companies which means carta services and has access to less 3% of the private market data -assuming pitchbook still has gaps in their dataset

@hermitvc @DelJohnsonVC both platforms are the dominant player for diff products that the whole industry uses; why wouldnt their data would be a useful estimate? cap table management, spvs — not super fragmented

Sure, they reflect the state of business from their point of view ( their customer base) and not the entirety of the industry. It’s surprising to see no skepticism or even questioning the validity or methodology of these reports. Especially since these reports and the underlying data aren’t exposed for any sort of scrutiny.

@hermitvc These outfits can be valuable in aggregate and also throughout time spotting rate of change.

@DSox Not many even know what that means, forget how much it disadvantages them

The biggest challenge for family offices investing in VC: Adverse deal selection 💯