YouSaid · the spoken record

David George

lines on the record: 74
first: 2025-12-15
most recent: 2025-12-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Of an originated growth fund investment. The thing that's important about that is when we invest, I don't know, two-thirds of the time, it's into a company that we have a pre-existing relationship with, either at the early stage or the growth fund. So the 50 is, you know, we did the 11 labs growth round and we, you know, thankfully Jennifer and Brian did the early stage round. The 15 would be we led two more rounds in flock safety or we led another round into Figma or we put more money into SpaceX. So something that was originated or Waymo, something that we originally did out of the growth fund.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is follow ons from existing venture companies. And then from a dollar standpoint, another 15% is follow-ons from existing growth stage companies. And then about a third or so is fully net new companies. And when we're doing the fully net new companies, we have a pre-existing relationship with those founders from the early stage every time. And so definitionally.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much so. But we do it in partnership with the early stage team. So this is like our whole model, right? We talk about mistakes we make all the time. And we have some very, I have very painful errors of omission at the growth stage too. If you think about what our business is, we're never going to have at the early stage 100% market share of all the best deals by having a growth fund. We can come later. We call it like the fix the mistake fund internally when we're joking around. But we do that in close partnership with our early stage teams. So we always join team meetings. We're always talking to each other. You know, what do you, you know, asking the early stage team, like, hey, what series A's do you wish you had done that you passed on? Which seeds do you feel like you passed on? And so when you have a situation like what you described with Maddie pulling your hair out that you didn't do the seed, you know, that's okay. Come back and come back and fix the mistake at the B or the C. And so it's a huge part of our charter. By the numbers about half of what we do.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we almost never make an investment saying, like, oh, we've got the liquidation preference. But there are certain situations like that where we feel like it's pretty asymmetric backing GNOME, you feel like there's a pretty safe downside. And there's an extremely high upside. The kinds of people, I say people because these, you know, some of these are like earlier stage people best, the kinds of people like that that warrant an investment decision, you know, a thought process like that, I think are extremely small. I mean, the list is five people.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are certain instances where it makes sense. I mean, I would agree with you that there are many instances in the market where that doesn't make sense. There are certain instances where some degree of likelihood of success is very, very, very high, despite a very early stage. And so as an example, my partner Sarah led around a character AI. And it was extremely early stage. And we invested at a what you would call a gross stage price. But we knew that the likelihood of some degree of success in backing GNOME was extremely high. It worked out that way. And so for extremely, extremely special people like that, we're comfortable to step into those situations.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite thing about DL, I mean, Alex is just absolutely relentless. So I recently, I had some post, I think it was, you know, an announcement of something that I posted on LinkedIn. Somebody had commented, a CFO of a gross stage company had commented on it. And I immediately get a screenshot from Alex circling the comment. And he said, can you introduce me to this guy? He looks like a great deal customer. And I'm like, man, this guy is always selling in a market like that, like that is exactly what you need. I love it.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all. I mean, there's great entrepreneurs in Europe, and we've backed a bunch, right? Like we backed Maddie from 11 labs, and he's doing an extraordinary job building what we think is a generational market leading company. You're shaking your head.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were to look, my compliance guy doesn't let us talk about returns. But if you were to look at our returns or the top performing venture funds, let's just call it that, relative to top performing PE funds, the top performing venture funds outperform. That's historical, but I think it's going to be more extreme in the future because I think AI and the effective implementation of AI is going to be the most important thing for companies over the next 10 years.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's sort of a newer asset class. And so that's one piece of it. My friends in private equity do an amazing job. They have incredible returns.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm heavily biased. And, you know, look, I recognize that many of the endowments have a starting position, which is, you know, I think many have probably find themselves a little bit overallocated to privates. And so I don't know how to assess that relative to the future outlook. But if I take the future outlook only, where do I think are the most attractive opportunities at? Like if you just start with where the 10 most valuable companies in the world are today versus 25 years ago, eight of the top 10 are US West Coast-based technology companies. And, you know, they were venture-backed. If you assume that the future is likely to be, you know, something similar to what's happened in the last 20 years, I think the most interesting place to be is this asset class, you know, which has exposure to what those next generational kind of dominant companies can be. The allocation should reflect this sort of melding of what used to be part of the public markets than no longer is.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company, it's gone from seven and a half percent steadily down to three percent, more than cut in half. And that's a pretty steady decline. I mean, it ebbs and flows with economic cycles. So I think the biggest thing that's missing, and it's probably a reality that we have to adapt to and how we run our business, but it's also a reality for institutional investors in the LP community that the asset class is no longer bespoke small thing. It's like the grown-up leagues. It's the big leagues. Like if you just look at the size of the private technology high quality companies, it dwarfs the size of private equity technology in the US. That's a major shift. And we've had to adapt our business to it in a big way, right? Like if the companies stay private longer, we got to give them new stuff. They have to be multi-product. They have to be multi-channel. They have to be international. And with AI, it's happening much, much faster. So we've changed our business as well. But I think the market reality is just historical views of what the asset classes are.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest thing that's missing is just the change in what that means for asset classes. So it used to be that you could get access to great companies in the public markets that are small cap. It turns out that's fewer and further between now. We just did an analysis on this. I mean, it turns out that the number of public companies has been cut in half over the last 20 years. You know, the companies that we're talking about, many of them would already be in the public markets and they're not. And so, you know, if you look at where the returns are getting generated, the returns are actually getting generated in the private markets before they go to the public markets. And now if you look at what remains in small cap land in the public markets, there are definitely some high quality companies, but the quality has deteriorated. A friend of mine just shared this analysis with me that showed the return on invested capital of the Russell 2500 over the last 30 years. And if you look at the ROIC, which to me is like the easiest measure of the quality of the”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for certain companies, like it's a huge benefit. For somebody like Stripe that can get a pretty liquid market in the private markets, I get it. For them, I think the biggest benefit is not so much that because I think in the fullness of time, if you're transparent, you tell a good story you share with the public markets, they'll kind of understand your business. I think the biggest advantage is the avoidance of volatility in your stock price and sort of employee management. You know, if you can kind of steadily grow or control your stock price in the private markets, even if it's a slight discount to where you would be in the public markets, I get the benefit of that for sure. We've seen some of our companies that have been able to do that, right? Stripe, SpaceX, Databricks, you know, it's worked to their advantage for sure.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, we're not close to those companies. I'm not close enough to know how they're valued relative to their performance. I can say in our portfolio, the companies that we have invested in over the last year or so, I'm pretty confident that if they were in the public markets, they'd probably have access to capital at a cheaper cost.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I don't think so. The companies that we've invested in, I'm very excited about them in the private market. And I think if they were”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's easier access to capital in some cases. So there are a select few private companies that have very easy access to capital in the private markets. I think there's a trade-off in the private markets where you actually have a more expensive cost of capital, even if you have access to a lot of it. I think you can get a cheaper cost of capital in the public markets. It's a little bit...”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, look, I think there's tremendous benefits to being public. Now, there's huge benefits for being private as well, which we can talk about. But you could look at many of the public companies that are out there that had difficult paths and they would say, you know, they wouldn't trade it, right?”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could, but we historically have not, you know, for the most part, for the companies that have decided to stay private, we've been really excited to stay in them, keep backing them. And that's probably the strategy that we'll continue to have. You know, I think this staying private dynamic is a little bit overblown because I think there's some idiosyncratic reasons why certain companies have stayed private. Many companies, many CEOs that I talk to, they are very happy to be public or they're excited to go public. You know, I tell our CEOs all the time, I've been fortunate to work with a bunch of public companies. Never one of them has said I regret going public. I think for most of the companies that we're talking about, they'll wait longer than they had historically, but they will still end up going public.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we, you know, we've led three rounds in flock safety. We led their last round too. And so we're still quite bullish about flock safety. You could talk about the increasing competition with Axon. The real story of that one is that the market is actually embracing technology now, finally. And so it used to be that historically selling into law enforcement was a terrible category. And now it turns out that it's a wonderful category. If you actually have the most compelling products, you can get tremendous amounts of market share. And so I don't worry about that dynamic at all. Frankly, I think the more some of those companies have stayed private, it's been to our benefit because we've been able to increase our ownership over time”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“$175 billion, or CrowdStrike, $130 billion. And if you look at what's happening in the private versus public markets now, the size of the winners from a new tech wave, that's going to happen in the private markets.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smaller. So the size of outcomes is huge. Again, we've got $5 trillion of private market cap. If you look at our LSV funds, the aggregate market cap in those funds has ranged between $700 billion to $1.5 trillion. So there's just large companies. And if you apply ownership assumptions to that relative to generating 3x or 5x returns, it's pretty manageable. So that's the private market and the conditions that have changed. And we can talk a bunch about that. Tech waves tend to create massively different value. I mean, this is very well covered, but the big story of mobile social, SaaS, cloudy, commerce all at once was 25 trillion of market cap creation. And if that started from scratch today, given the public private market dynamic that I just described, so much of that value creation would take place in the private markets. So we're inning one of this new big tech wave. I never would have expected in the last wave that companies like Salesforce would be worth $230 billion or ServiceNow would be worth”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, you can kind of see it in the data in our returns already. It's about the number of winners you capture. And if the big ones are great, that can really work out. So I think the idea that large funds can't have great returns is just not true in our experience. So private markets have changed. Tech waves create bigger opportunities. So let me just talk about each. The private markets have grown 10x over 10 years, right? It's over $5 trillion in market cap now in our market. We actually just looked at the 50 top IPOs from 2017 to 2025. And if you disaggregate where the dollars of return come from, 47% of the dollars of gain happens between the seed and the series B and 53% of the dollars of gain happen from Series C. I was actually surprised when we looked at this, but there's a tremendous amount of dollars of gain that happened at the later stage. And that 17 to 25 IPOs, that actually skews a little bit heavily toward when companies were still going public.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here it is great to be back with you. I love hanging out with you, so I'm glad we're diving right in. Yeah, as it relates to fun sizes, so our funds consistently beat small, large, diversified concentrated venture funds. So our larger funds have outperformed our smaller ones, and our larger ones actually have similar multiples of money to our smaller ones across strategy. I would start by just saying this. In Venture, we have two customers. We've got the LPs and we have founders. On the LP side, money is going to flow to where the highest returns and best worst reward are. And so I think our fund sizes are a reflection of that. Our best performing fund in the history of the firm is actually a $1 billion fund. So it's a large fund. In that fund, Databricks has returned 7x, the fund so far. Coinbase has returned already DPI'd 5x of the fund. In that fund, we also had GitHub, DigitalOcean, Lyft, and many other things.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our best performing fund in the history of the firm is actually a $1 billion fund. If you overweight the fear of future theoretical competition, you can always talk yourself out of making an investment. The number one way to measure a company is ultimately return on invested capital. On the gross margin point today, I'll say this. We give a little bit more of a pass than we used to.”
2025-12-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source