YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Rampell

lines on the record: 68
first: 2026-01-12
most recent: 2026-01-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I love vertical sass, right? But imagine that you're Chris at Toast, you start this company, you go to a restaurant and say, hey, I want you to use my product. And the restaurant asks some very good questions like, okay, well, how much cash do you have left? It's like, I have a week. Okay, interesting. How many other customers do you have? Zero. That's impossible. How can you pull that off if you are this rare breed of person that can materialize labor, capital, and customers? And then I have kind of two sub appendages after that. I really, really like people that have studied the history of the space. And I say this because the best entrepreneurs that I've met, they have learned everything about the space to show what a great investor I am when I was running my company trial pay. I met with, I think Patrick Callison. I know a lot about payments. I've been doing like payment stuff since 1997 on the intraday, which is kind of early stages for intranet online acceptance of credit cards. Meet Patrick, and obviously I passed on doing the seed round of Stripe because I'm a genius. It was called Dev Payments at the time.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty magical. Like, that doesn't happen every day. So that's the materializing labor. You also want to make sure this kind of goes into the consensus non-consensus part. Like, is this person really good at fundraising? Like, are they telling a good story? Can they convince people like me to give them money? Oh, wow, they really can. That means hopefully that n plus one, n plus two, n plus three rounds will be a little bit easier. They will converge on reality in terms of numbers for sure, but they have the thing around raising money. And then this is more of an enterprise focused thing, but can they get their first five customers, which is as hard, if not harder than getting their first five employees? Because imagine this company Toast, you know, Toast, it's the restaurant POS company.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the seed, it's like, okay, out of the money call option, this guy or gal is very, very smart. I want to buy 20% of whatever they're doing. And hopefully it expires in the money. And like they're the smartest person I've ever met. Like we did these deals a hundred times a day. We will do them 100% of the time. Consensus, non-consensus. Like there isn't really anything to be consensus or non-consensus on, right? It's just like this is a very, very smart person. It only becomes non-consensus to your point when the price goes up high enough. Because I think most people have this same viewpoint of this is a very, very high agency person who has studied history. Like there's a memo that I wrote internally for our firm about how to invest in people. And I think you want to invest in people that can materialize labor, capital, and customers, especially today where people get paid a fortune to stay at OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta or any of these companies. If you quit your job to start a company and you can snap your fingers and five people follow you tomorrow for a 50% pay cut, that's”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree. Like at some point, reality converges with reality. And my kids and I have been watching Silicon Valley of the show. And there's that famous scene where it's like, wait, you know, they got the Mark Cubid character is on the phone and he hears revenues. No, no, you can't do revenue. You have to be pre-revenue because then you're a pure play. So there is this element. I mean, the way to explain this financially is we buy out of the money call options. You know what a call option is, right? We were buying out of the money call options and we hope they expire in the money because this is how I explain to people like why it is that a series A that has a million dollars in revenue and is losing $10 million a year is worth $100 million. Of course it isn't worth $100 million. What you're doing is you're buying 15 or 20% of the company and hoping that eventually your call option expires in the money. That's the thing that you're doing. So eventually that value converges on like the equity value. It's like, oh, what's the discounted cash flow? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like once it gets closer there and it's not a binary thing.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like what you did is not normal. You had agency and said, I am going to not do the normal thing. I'm going to go like email every famous VC to death and get them to talk to me. And like, you know, it's pretty incredible what you've done. That's a very rare trait. You find people like that that are hopefully experts in their domain. And I think that this is why the specialty thing that I mentioned is very, very important. I believe that there is a certain level of confidence.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I think our job, tell me if you agree with me, is we find the smartest people in the world. Have very high agency. Like there's been this thing going around about agency. Agency, how do you define it? It's like people will, they're not going to be told what to do. They just take matters into their own hands. And this is a very rare trait, right? Like you obviously have this trait when you could have just done the normal thing for a 19-year-old to do or however you were younger than that when you started this trait.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think, but if you look at 11, the entrepreneur was pretty consensus, like it's like, all right, Maddy's super, like that whole team is incredibly talented.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money in funds that have kind of the small specialist or the big generalist, because I think that's where the best returns will be.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody wanted to invest in Facebook. Like, it was self evident that these were very, very interesting companies. Maybe when the price gets high enough, there come some doubts in people's minds like, oh, I don't know if I want to invest at 87 million pre for the Series A of Facebook, but everybody wanted to do it at 20 million pre. There are a lot of companies that people don't want to do at any price. But the reason why I'm saying this is I don't necessarily think you could take it as a given that a small fund will outperform a large fund. Now, I think it has the capability mathematically. Like, again, if you're Mickey and you invest in the Series A of Coinbase and you have a very, very, very small fund, of course, you can generate a bigger multiple of that fund. That's just algebraically true. But the best deals in FinTech, like Mickey gets to do them because he's a great firm. And he has a much, much bigger fund right now. So that's the thing that I think it's hard to know. I mean, it's like, again, I agree with you algebraically. I would put my own personal money, and I do, right? It's like I invest in our funds. Like, I would put my own personal.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A large generalist, but who wins the best consensus deals? Every now and then there will pop up a non-consensus deal that everybody thinks is terrible. Nobody wants Sequoia doesn't want to do it. We don't want to do it. You don't want to do it. Nobody wants to do it. And then it ends up being a thousand X and then somebody who is not the best known venture firm ended up winning that deal or being sold that deal, I should say. And then it ends up with a great return. But a lot of the best deals will go to the best firms. Like that's what's very different about venture capital than like private equity. Like if you and I are trying to take a public company private, KKR and on Blackstone, we're both trying to take over Arch AR and Obisco or something like that, they're just going to sell to whoever offers them the highest price per share. I mean, they have to, whereas inventure capital, as you know, you have to win the hearts and minds of the entrepreneur and win that deal. And a lot of the best deals are somewhat obvious. Like it's not surprising, like everybody wanted to invest in.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but I think it's obviously you can't disprove an unknown future, but I would posit to say that if you were trying to find, pick and win the best deals, and maybe you disagree with me on like the kind of the small specialist.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good investments, the winning is very, very hard, and the winning therefore goes to the person that is like the best, like you have to sell. This is a sales job. You know this, right? You have an entrepreneur. They're amazing. They don't come along very often. This is the best entrepreneur you've ever met. You have to convince them to take your money. And how do you do that? You have to say, I am the greatest person in the world to help you, which means I have this amazing specialty. And or I have all these things that I can do for you. I'm connected to everybody on the planet given the scope and scale of my kind of general generalization, right? Like on the big side. If I'm just like, hey, I kind of do a little bit of everything and I don't really know that much about your business and I'm not that big and can't help you that much, you're going to lose. That's why the death of the middle is what tends to happen for a lot of these asset classes. And then LPs, they want to chase returns. It's also sometimes hard to reach LPs. So like, you know, the big general has kind of gobble them up or the small specialists that generate very, very good returns will gobble.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was $8 million. But this is the thing. It's like that's incredible. Your point is very valid. Like, can you get $120x on a $2 billion fund? Probably not. I'm willing to bet you that you can't get $120x on that. But you can return far more dollars if you're very, very good. This is the question that you originally asked was, and this is why I called it the death of the middle. Like, my view is most asset classes, you either have to be a large generalist or a small specialist. And the hard thing is to be like a mid-sized generalist because then you're largely going to lose to like the big generalists or the small specialists. So like, you know, Ribbit, as an example, like they really focus on fintech. That's how I know them well. Like that's a specialty. They're not trying to do everything or Kazakh in Latin America. Like they are focused on a specialty and they can be small. They're not trying to do everything across the entire planet. The entire job of venture capital is to find, pick, and win investments.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the difference though is that imagine that you're an LP and you have a billion dollars to invest. Would you rather get $50 million and get a Get a 3x on a billion than a 5x on 5 million. Or one of my good friends is this guy, Mickey Malka at Ribbit. I was lucky to be an investor in his fund one personally. And it's like, that was like a 55x fund. I think it was like an $85 million fund, but 55x. Like that's insane. But at some point, you could ask maybe this too. It's like you're better off with like a 5x on like a very, very large fund. Like the harder thing to do is to just return gross dollars period. Like that's what LPs actually want. It's amazing to get 100. I've had two funds that I've invested in. One is Mickey. This other one is this fund called AngelPad, which was kind of like a third rate competitor. I don't want to call it third rate, but it was like, it was not, you know, there was Y Combinator and that it's like there was AngelPad. It was just like this small little experiment. That was 120x. I got 120 times the capital that I get. DPI.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, exactly. But this is the point. It's like if companies went public after the series B back in like the 1990s and like the average IPO was 50 to $100 million of capital raised, the strategy would be a little bit different, but the world has changed dramatically. And the opportunity size is so much bigger. And now you have technology companies that kind of pervade everything. It's like you're either if you are a large company today and you don't use software at your core, you're going to get eaten by somebody who does use software at their core and then kind of reverse engineers into whatever product or service that you promote.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Raised series B, raise series C, then go public, and consequently venture firms back then were very, very small, but also the exits tended to be quite small as well. If a very, very good scenario is you have a company that goes public at a sub billion dollar market cap, it's like, and you get five of those a year, like you can't raise lots of money, but now the opportunity is so much bigger. The five biggest companies on earth are all technology companies. If you rewind twenty years, I think they were all banks. If you rewind ten years before that, there were all oil companies. If you rewind 10 years before that, there were all Japanese companies during like the Japanese stock market bubble. But the opportunity in technology is so much bigger, especially because these companies, you could keep investing venture capital dollars later. Like I think that's one of the main, if you look at the money that we just raised, you know, almost $7 billion of that is for the growth fund.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think this sounds like a bad word when I say death, but there is this kind of death of the middle that happens to a lot of asset classes in general. And venture Apple, it was a tiny, tiny asset class at the beginning. Right now, it's gotten bigger, but it's really more of the end state of a lot of these companies is huge. I mean, Sequoia used to brag about, I think it was like 20% of the market cap of the Nasdaq was Sequoia companies, millions of Apple and Oracle and all of these amazing names. They're very, very big. And companies go public much, much later today. So the ability to deploy more capital, more money into kind of venture capital, which is no longer kind of sidetrack here, series D didn't exist in like 1992, right? It's like that was an IPO. Like, companies would go public. I think Amazon went public at like a $600 million market cap or something. Like that was the norm. There was no series I, series K, series, you know, W. You would just go, you'd raise Series A.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you want to invest in people that can materialize labor, capital, and customers. The way that I do it, just kind of, to be pithy about it, is like we either want to buy any percent, any percent of something that is absolutely working or high ownership of something that could work. The best companies have hostages, not customers. So probably of the unicorn class, I would bet that maybe 5% will ever be able to go public. We were buying out-of-the-money call options, and we hoped they expire in the money. I don't necessarily think you could take it as a given that a small fund will outperform a large fund.”
2026-01-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source