YouSaid · the spoken record

Bryan Kim

lines on the record: 43
first: 2025-12-11
most recent: 2025-12-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“University and the A16 speed run where we're collaborating on a lot of great startups where they come to our program and then go to theirs and it's worked out really well. But yeah, that would be great if people kept not hiring young people out of school and forced them to start companies and be resilient and be more entrepreneurial, which I think is happening. I think it's kind of happening. I'm hearing it anecdotally so.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense to me, the fact that you're able to sell an important company like Warner Brothers to the highest bidder, that's a very good sign. That's a sign of a functional capitalistic society. And for people who don't like consolidation and this kind of thing, it's actually what creates opportunity. The fact that Warner Brothers or some of these companies get bought and merge means that there's other opportunities that will come out for people who don't want to do business, let's say if Netflix buys Paramount. Third thing, I'm kind of here for young people not being able to get jobs. Not because I want to see young people suffer, because I want to see them to suffer and then become self-reliant and start companies and come to Founder University and then go to A16 Speedrun because we've been doing a big one-two game here, a little pick and roll, if you will, between our founder.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, David's got a really good one, and I think it's a 95% chance it happens. I think it's a 5% chance it doesn't happen. It's because we got a bigger problem like China invades Taiwan or some cataclysmic thing happens. I think we're on track to get a couple of these mega IPOs out the door. And yeah, if they're plus or minus 20% of their private market valuation, that's success. I do think we're going to have a golden age of M&A in the next year. Right now, people are feeling pretty frisky having seen some M&A transactions occur and some FTC cases fail. So the fact that Meta and Google got away or got through the system with either a speeding ticket or a slap on the wrist or the cases just got thrown out makes a lot of sense.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, I think we got time for one more lightning topic. Guys, thanks for giving us so much time. Alex, what do you think? Where should we go next?”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come back to me in year three. I'll tell you, man, when I started this podcast 15 years ago, people would start their own today in startups, this in startups, that in startups. And they would do 10 episodes. They would do 20 episodes. They go two years. They go two months. I never really indexed on it. I just said, oh, I just want to do the show I want to do. That's the most interesting to me after all in came out there were literally like five all-in knockoffs. And the people said we're doing this as like a tribute to it. And then, you know, most of them have just stopped moment of Zen, this, that, you know, four cartoon heads, whatever it was. They all just stopped because it's hard to do something in year three or four. That's when it gets hard. So for founders, it's a marathon at a, you know, very brisk. And all you have to do is keep running. Most people can't run a marathon. Just understand that and keep running.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is always defensible is the relentlessness of the founder, their ability to inspire the team, to ship products, and that product cadence. And a lot of times young founders get their idea copied early and they over-index on it. It freaks them out. And they get off their game.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just had to deal with and get comfortable with the fact that somebody in France might put the Moulin Rouge as the sponsor of Uber's new service and they might have topless women on an advertisement for said review, dance review in France, and then have Tuck Crunch write a story about your misogynist and in fact it was culturally What happens in France, right? Like it's just a different society. So the person who was French who was running was like, oh my God, this is incredible. The largest erotic review where, you know, people dance with their tops off, men and women. We're going to have this great partnership with them. And then the woke, you know, lunacy in San Francisco is like, we're going to just put these things on par with each other. But you would have people make mistakes. You would have them learn. And it was great. I think, you know.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founders always start for some reason. They want to start with the bottom end consumers and the lowest margin, and we're constantly reversing them saying, hey, this is going to be an uphill climb for you. You're going to look like a damaged business from day one. Go with the high-end consumers. And they're like, but I want to save the whales. And we talked about save the whale syndrome, I think, last week on the program. Founders have to be cutthroat. They should go for the highest margin business first.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We give entrepreneurs start at the high end and work your way down. So for your new investment, my best advice for them in the education space would be to charge for like and go after the highest end parents will pay any amount of money to educate their kids. And we had an education startup, or we do called Brilliant.org. And when they started selling to the top parents at the top high schools, it spread like wildfire and then it made its way down. top parents if they're paying 50 bucks a month to educate their kids with a tutor or 500 they that's the same price for somebody who makes a half million dollars a year it's literally the same price that's why when starbucks came out with four or five dollar coffee instead of 50 cent coffee or a dollar coffee like we used to get at bodegas in new york there was a group of people who are like that's insane and then there were a group of people who said oh that's delightful can i have more it's just they were they were working from different bank roles you know”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Month six, we're gonna get you the actual profitability in this market. And then some products were just tests. And in some ways, I think blockers in Travis's mind. So Uber Pool comes to mind. I don't know that they ever knew if that would work or not, having multiple destinations in the thing or not. I think they just thought somebody might try this. So let's just figure it out ourselves. And if we can get low-end consumers who wouldn't consider an Uber to try this, maybe they'll graduate to Uber X eventually or in a pinch they'll use Uber X when they're stretching. It might be a stretch for somebody who's a dishwasher to use Uber X regularly to go to work, but they might use it once in a while if they had to pick up their kids and it was an emergency situation. They didn't want to wait for the bus or they were feeling sick. So, you know, I often wonder, one of the fundamental pieces of advice.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course. Well, I will say actually in the first couple of cities, when they were going slow, they did buy supply, right? They had to buy supply of cars. So they would go and buy a bunch of supply from, you know, a local taxi company, a livery service. So, yeah, they could be underwater. What quickly happened was the product was so successful with certain demographics and the margin was so great on Lincoln Town cars that it showed the promise very quickly. So the time to getting to profitability in a market without paying drivers in a competition with Lyft before that started, it was spectacular. But then they realized, wait a second, we need to be taking like 20 new cities a week. And so then it was like, okay, we're going to need to hire 10 people. We're going to need to buy supply. And they had a playbook. And they just knew the playbook meant, hey.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't tell the difference. The customer can't tell the difference. The users can't tell the difference. Go for it. Now, that's a use, Brian, that they did not come up with. But I can tell you that Bill Simmons has brought that use up already a year ago, he said on his podcast, man, if I could read more ads, that's like a gating factor for me. Or if my ad reads here could be localized for Japan, the Middle East and I said, hey, and you're a local rep for LinkedIn is Susan in Australia and your rep in Japan is Hiroshi and your rep is Ahmed in India. That would be mind-blowing if you heard that in my voice in those regions. And just, yeah, another induced technology. I love this. This is a great chart. You sent that to who your LP is, David.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the quote, and that skew morphic thing where, you know, like your, you know, is another interesting corollary to it, which is people are taking this technology and they're coming up with ideas that the creators of the technology didn't, 11 labs being such a great example. You don't know this, Brian. One time I was on a ski slope somewhere in Japan and I had used a client had given us a promo code for an advertisement. You know, it's either used the promo code twist or use the promo code JSON or use the promo code startups. Anyway, it got mixed up. I'm not sure who made the era. They put my voice into 11 labs. They said, hey, boss, listen to this. And I said, okay, why are you sending me a clip of the ad read? And they said, anything wrong with it? I'm like, sounds right to me. And they're like, okay, we've replaced these two words with 11 labs doing those two words. Are you okay with it? I'm like, well, I.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if that was a five or ten billion dollar company, it wouldn't be bringing it up as an example. And it's an example that everybody's talking about when they go to have cocktails after the conference ends and they're having scotch at the bar in the room where it happens where that didn't make sense. And the reason that valuation got ahead of itself is because of retail. Retail in the form of high net worth individuals. And, you know, capital funding, weak or unproven businesses. Yeah, generally, I'm not seeing that. And the adoption one is a great one. Adoption lags far behind investment. And it says here in your note, David, adoption is outpacing investment. Demand is driving capital not the other way around. This is the one I think is the most salient that you nailed because, Brian, you pointed out people can't get enough of ChatGPT. And William Gibson said this, and I've quoted it many times here on the program, the street finds its use for technology or its own use for technology.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had this figure robotics was one that I think a lot of people said that doesn't make any sense for me. $39 billion, they don't have a customer. They said, oh, we have BMW. BMW said, oh, well, we're testing it. Then they became a customer. And you had that really good debate in the Wall Street Journal publicly and the founder coming out and showing the product to support the valuation. But that would be one where I would say, hey, maybe that valuation is supported by the revenue eventually, but it's not certainly not supported by it right now. So people taking a lot of risk there. And that was one that hits the mass retail participation. No mass retail speculation broadly correct. There isn't, hasn't been a ton of retail involved. But I will say SPVs were high net worth individuals are being sold on this kind of stuff. You can see bubbly moments, David, in my mind. And listen, I want to beat up on figure.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and people will find more to do. We could go down the entire rabbit hole for an hour about jobs. Let's put that aside. And I think what's very, really good. And David, it's great that your team took the time to put this together because when there is a technological wave, in this case feels like a tsunami, you know, if you look at a wave, there's bubbles and froth and foam. after the wave crashes you'll see a little bit of that as well so it's not bubble or no bubble. It's how bubbly is it, right? Is the way I tend to look at it, how much froth is in the cappuccino, you know? Or are we looking at a flat light? You know, there's not that much bubbles on it. I put us in like flat white territory right now where there's just a little bit of froth on the top, but it's not like a cappuccino where there's a lot of froth. And going through these, which is always really good for us as a mental exercise, speculative evaluations, you will see some, right?”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For him after 10 years of pushing a boulder up a hill, it might be really nice to start pushing him down the hill and just releasing the spring water down the hill. So I'm actually very happy for him and his team to be taking orders as opposed to what the last 10 years of suffering might be like.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, sometimes you have to go with the way water flows. Somebody told me salespeople when you hire them. If you have multiple products, it's like letting the water go down the side of the mountain. It'll find the most efficient way and then there'll be a stream and then eventually a river. Sometimes founders do that, at least the good ones. They're like, oh, this is the easiest path. I can just open the spring here and I'm going to have more and more customers. I'm sure after this announcement, 10 people called them and said, how do we get on the list? And so that's just going to be so nice for the founder. It's plague who's very smart. I've had him on the pod twice. I got to have him back on to talk about this. But Blake's very smart and very dogged. And I suspect he's going to crush it with this business. And it might be...”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smart for two. You can get this for $13,000 out in dripping springs with 20,000 miles on it. But that is the Tesla batteries in a smart little two-seat smart car. A lot of people have been wondering why don't they have that? And then here is the announcement from Toyota RAV4 EV jointly developed with Tesla back from Toyota City in Japan, May 8th, 2012, 13 years ago, zero to sixty times seven seconds and cruising range a hundred miles. So a lot has changed since then. This one, I'm not sure this one feels maybe more like the power wall as opposed to, you know, and that business inside of Tesla. But again, I guessing they couldn't get more funding for the... Supersonic jet, and they could easily get funding for this. So, what's a founder to do? You know, like make cuts at the company, scale back the MM.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know what a technology won't do to keep growing is a list of zero items. If we need nuclear power, if we need satellites in space for broadband, if we need better battery density, these major tech companies have enough capital to fund these projects. And so when people lament, oh, the government's not funding projects anymore, okay, sure, there is something to that, but you have people like Google or Facebook or now new entrants like Rock and OpenAI, as you point out, that'll go and underwrite some of this new technology or invest in it. And in fact, I believe a lot of boom success is based on United pre-ordering some of these and paying for them. No shame in the partnership game. You do what you do, got to do to do it. And just to take people down memory lane here, this is hilarious. Here is the 20.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Million to do the original vision, and then you can tap out a market. And when you tap out a market, sometimes you either need to do a pivot, you need to do some work for hire, you need to do some consulting to keep the lights on. I don't think there's any shame in this game having been a founder and seen it before. Sometimes money shows up for a better idea or for an idea that gets the original mission to land and the original mission was to be able to make a mass produce $30,000, $40,000 electric car. They had to make some compromises along the way. The roadster was one, and then the next was doing some of that work for higher stuff. So I suspect this was not done. This was done out of necessity and opportunity, but in that order.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what I'll say about this is one, he's a tremendous founder with a huge vision that's incredibly costly. That last part is the issue. We've got a lot of great founders, not enough, but we got a lot of great ones. And he's got a big vision. We need to see more big vision. But his vision was so big that funding it, I think, has turned out to be very challenging. And hardware takes longer than you think. There was another hardware company that was incredibly ambitious that then started to do side projects and side hustles like this to keep the lights on. It was called Tesla. And they did a smart car with Mercedes. Nobody remembers. And they had somebody who wanted to buy their motors, which I don't even remember. And I was there. So this happens often. You get attention that occurs when you go to market, you try to raise the next two or three hundred million.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of work. You have to. Focus on your fundraising. Then you got to hire. Perfect teams, product market fit. Finding your first But all of this means If you're not actually a real”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I hired three researchers at a time and I told the team I want one to get fired, one to quit, and then one to excel. And now we're keeping two out of three or in some cases three out of three because we tell them that when they get hired and they're opting out before they join the team. But we should talk about this boom supersonic pivot. It's kind of crazy.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Or break them and get them to quit. That's really my goal. And it's not working anymore because they're on to me.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, I'm going to give my team a note. I want this read by everybody by tonight's management team meeting. We're going to discuss it at the management team meeting. We have a management team dinner for the entire staff every Wednesday night, strictly because that's when my energy peaks and because I want these young millennials when Gen Z is working for me to experience working until 8 p.m. by forcing them to come have dinner. And I just drag the meeting on an extra half hour when it gets good and seeing who taps out.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Total addressable market. And so we'll put this in the notes, but it's had a miss by a mile, Bill Gurley, if you search with that, you'll find it immediately. Really important seminal blog post. I'm sure David, you've got that one. You've read it twice, right? Yeah?”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're all standing on the shoulder of giants. In this case, the giant being Bill Girly. This is the seminal blog post on the subject from his above the crowd. And he's got a new book coming out that's spectacular, but had to miss by a mile an alternative look at Uber's potential market size. This is in 2014. NYU business school professor, Aswath, who I think goes on CNBC a whole bunch, kind of respected, but he did his whole Uber is not worth $17 billion. And we kind of all laughed at this because he estimated the value of Uber at $5.9 billion. Now, we all the smart people who weren't in an Ivy League school or whatever in the Ivory Tower teaching the course we saw on the inside. And here is where he basically guesses here that, you know, he would settle on 10% of the $100 billion market for Lincoln Town cars, as we talked about. And then when you start going into the”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly, but you just to be able to pull people into something that the product is so good, they come up with a use for it. That deuces a market is really interesting. And I think for your education one, it might be people who are being displaced by AI realizing they need to provide more value to their employment opportunities. So therefore, they take professional development on as their own personal responsibility.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's incredibly low. But if it's low enough, you induce a market. And now people are like, hey, I'm going to build a product because this is so cheap and so good, which is the inducing of a market. That's beyond product market fit. That's like gravity, you know, like, I don't want to say a black hole because that's got a negative connotation to it.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the market for canvas? Like zero. These are people who don't want to learn Photoshop. Telis your answer to that or if I got those two correct as the tension in the conversation when you did the debate? It absolutely is, right? And luckily, I think we operate in an environment.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to add one thing to Brian's investment. I listed all the things I like, but there's always some things that are unknowns. And I'm curious for Brian, what's the bet here, the unknown? I suspect when I looked at this company, OB, OB OE, OB.com. I suspect that the two, the one question was, oh my God, is it defensible? What's the mode? Is it open AI going to do that? I think we all know as investors like great founders build defensible businesses. Okay, period. And they go faster, period. Full stop. But the second piece is somebody in the company, I don't know what the review process is at 1816 when somebody was asked to give the counter. It would be, well, is there any equivalent of a company like this becoming worth 10 billion? Is there a 10 billion dollar education company? And there is not. So then I guess that's the question and the opportunity, right? The same thing was said, Brian, about, say, Canva.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fund, you have some LLPs who want to sell, some who want to buy, and then other third parties start to interject and do all kinds of unnatural acts or funky behaviors. Have you seen it yet, Dave?”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when we think about that type of behavior, I think to David's point, when we understand and deeply know the opportunity set, the management team, the ability for them to gather talent and opportunities in the enterprise or consumers and continue to grow, if we have conviction, I think the right thing that I believe that we can do is continue to support the company that we have gotten to know so much better than someone else. Yeah, this happened at Sequoia when I did the Uber investment, the late state. I wanted to sell some of my shares to Masayoshi San. But then the late stage group at Sequoia, you know, they were accumulating a position in Uber. And this becomes like an interesting tension. We might also have this with our syndicates at times, David. Some people in the syndicate want to sell comm, other people in the syndicate want to buy more. And we're starting to see this in funds. I don't know if you've had it happen yet where, you know,”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does that work at a multi full service venture firm? Because you're in the seed fund or the Series A fund and then there's the late stage fund. How does that dynamic work? Yeah, of course. It's one of those interesting questions where I joke that as an investor we all joined a firm as a pre-trained model in a certain domain. So I come pre-trained on like consumer B2C element and like we have a bunch of experts gathered together, which is to say when it comes to questions in the companies or firm strategy, I know a little less. That said, what I do know is, look, we have companies that we consistently back from early stage. I'm part of the seed and series A fund AI applications fund. And just to take an example, you know, company based in London, 11 labs. We had the opportunity to back the company at Series A and we at this point quadrupled down in the company to every single round. We participated in co-”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you think about exits at this point in time and how seed funds, obviously Andresen Horowitz is playing a completely different game with a full stack, but how should seed funds that you invest in or sub $250 million funds, sub $100 million funds, sub $50 million funds, think about exiting some of these investments and locking in DPI? It's top of mind for me as I go out to raise my fifth fund next year. I've been like, where can we lock down some DPI here in the portfolio?”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Portfolio management is going to come into this, which means if I had to guess, the power law is going to define returns even more than it has previously. And I'm kind of interested in David Clark's opinion on this because my career was made by a handful of incredible bets and then a lot of singles and doubles. Now I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, wow, if I was an LP, I might have to start judging my investments on like bundles of three funds where I expect 1.5x, 1.5x, 10x, and then I just have to bundle the three of them together when my family office invests in funds because the outliers are so bizarre now. And then it's also, I think, the second conversation, David, that we can get into here after portfolio management is for early stage funds. When should we be exiting these investments? Because we're faced with this over and over again now. We've had a couple of these breakouts.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contend with, which is has this team done it before? Do they have what it takes? This team obviously has what it takes. So then you pay the premium for it. Brian was kind of grinding his teeth a little bit on the valuation I saw there. It was competitive. But that's what great founders do. They create a marketplace and then they wind up picking the investor they want anyway. So Brian probably gave them a term sheet. He created a marketplace. It got Brian to come up a little bit. Brian has to grind his teeth a little bit. But to David's point, We've never seen startups break the triple, triple, double, double SAS revenue ramp. Now we're in something that's start at a million, go to 20 and then hit 100. What is that 20x 5x? 25 and who knows how long this will go on for, but it does speak to the opportunity that we now are faced with.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, those are two of the factors we look for. Third, this is big and ambitious, right? Like the total addressable market is anybody who wants to learn. That's everybody, right? So it's not just for kids. It's not for high school kids. It's not just for biology. It's for anything you want to learn. Great. They had an exit before. They've worked together before. They're clearly competent. So you've removed a lot of the things that we at pre-seed stage.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question. It's, you know, this has changed over time for seed funds and Series A funds, but it's stayed pretty static for accelerators, which is 7%. And you assume you're going to get diluted 50%, maybe even 70% in a great investment. But 2% of a deck of corn or even a billion dollar company, those kind of returns can add up. And you should have pro rata, at least through a couple of rounds, and maybe in a breakout, you are smart enough to figure it out, hard to do. But for a seed or a series A fund, I can tell you in evaluating this type of deal, it's got a lot of the things we look for at our fund. Number one, you have a serial founder, which is great. I'm assuming that some members of his previous team, Brian joined him for this adventure, taking a guess. That's absolutely right. That would be a team that has worked together before.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's great to be on this week in startups. I'm a big fan. I've been listening to it for over 2,200 episodes. And boy, am I arms tired, but we've got a lot of news in the venture space. And, you know, I love to do these roundtables. Would love for you to moderate it just for the audience, since, you know, this is what I do all day. I'm going to move to the more commentator position and let Alex moderate episode 2.2 of twist.”
2025-12-11 · This Week in Startups · "The best founders find a way to make it happen": VC Roundtable with Bryan Kim and David Clark | E2222 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source