YouSaid · the spoken record

Yuli O'Donnell

lines on the record: 84
first: 2025-09-04
most recent: 2025-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“A or B in those companies, but it's just, I think it's so different to invest at the seed where there's like a thousand X versus like the A at a billion, where now maybe there's still like a 10X or 20X, but just very different”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, at least on my side, for a lot of the preseeds and seeds I've done, I went back. I think over my top like 10 investments, maybe six or seven or eight took a month to raise a seed round. And like a lot of times, like a lot of passes, they were all, you know, down at the wire. But then they ended up doing better over time. I think that transition from like non-consensus to consensus ended up being really important because if you never transition, it's really hard, right? And if you're always, you know, if you're always consensus, that's great for you. One thing I noticed that was interesting is a lot of the companies that struggled, obviously some of them just go to zero, right? Because they struggled because of the business isn't that great and people recognize it. But the ones that did well, a lot of times the gap between like the seed and A or the A and B was literally like 20x or 50x, right? And so I think part of it's like as an investor, you can still get good returns at like the series.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the initial flurry of interest warranted or not because it turns out, like we were probably a month from going bankrupt. And we actually didn't know what we were doing. And the company definitely wasn't working. And actually what we had pitched at that time didn't make any sense. Like we were like, we're going to change switch hardware, which didn't make any sense. And so there's one view that's like the market was over-exuberant. You were lucky. There's another view that says, actually, the initial conditions were there to do it. I just feel like if you run the data, it just seems like the companies that have good outcomes did have sufficient interest along the way because there are enough signals to do it.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interested, and then we had a pretty hot round again. We went, and Dresden was actually over the market price, even though the business wasn't quite working, but it was signs of life. Then we had an incredibly hot round because beans started working. And then when we actually sold the company, I mean, it returned to fund, it was one of the highest acquisitions of multiples of revenue at the time in enterprise software. And so you kind of ask the question.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, we had so many term sheets before we had any idea what we were doing, and it was like the hottest thing ever, and it was great. And so we did a seed fund. Actually, Andy Radcliffe, you know, benchmark Andy Radcliffe, joined my board and we rose at the time, which would have been a super, super high price kind of seed round, which is 10 million post. This is in 2007. Then the market tanked in 2008, and we still didn't know what we were doing. And it was just a bunch of researchers. And so we couldn't raise any money at all. I mean, Sequoia very famously, you know, gave us a black eye and, you know, we couldn't raise. And then, you know, as we started to come out of the recession, Andreessen Horowitz NEA Light Speed, a few got very”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I'll just go through kind of my own startup just as kind of a single anecdote to friend the conversation a little bit, right? So, you know, I did my PhD at Stanford. I was a classic, you know, take the research, do a startup.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think part of it's like if you ever look at vintage year data for venture funds, it's probably a good way to see if how consensus and not consensus do over time. Because when you look at like the dot-com bubble years, like I think the median fund was terrible. And I think it's just like, hey, everyone overpaid and then the companies weren't worth that. And so like, you know, even though everything was hot, like it didn't do well and then a lot of the funds didn't do well. And if you look at like the Airbnb Uber like 2010-ish era, it's kind of the opposite. We're like, I think the top quartel funds like crush it. But it's because the market was pessimistic. And so if you're willing to invest in like you had a different opinion, you did really well. And now it's probably kind of somewhere in the middle.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the mean investment, I do feel like the market over time has gotten a lot more efficient, meaning, you know, we can deploy more dollars with more regularity and the prices converging on what will ultimately be a fair price. This is acknowledging both of these failure modes on either side of this. We're seeing one right now. I mean, it's the reality. I mean, AI, you know, there's AI companies that clearly are raising Speculative money where nobody even really understands the business model. And there's great companies that can't get invested. So we're seeing this right now. But I will still say the reality is Open AI has grown tremendously and anthropic has grown tremendously and cursor has grown tremendously. And so there is some underlying market signals to fuel the chaos”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a great question. I totally agree. This is a great question. So I think we can all acknowledge that there's a failure mode where the consensus gets bubbly and then companies raise too much capital and then there's a bunch of wipeouts, right? So that has always happened. That will always happen. So that's just part of the market. I think we can also all agree that there's parts of the market where there's probably unnecessary pessimism. Like so for example, right now during this AI craze, like, you know, in my area of traditional infra or of infra, a lot of the traditional companies that, you know, two years ago would be great, I can't even raise right now just because they're not in the sweet spot. And so I think that will always be an aspect of the market too. But in general,”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's what I'm saying, right? For founders, it's getting hyper efficient, or maybe there's such an imbalance for the really hot companies that maybe your price gets bit up way past where it should be. And similarly, for non-consensus companies, it's the opposite, right? Where like there's not enough investors, so your price is lower than it should be perhaps, right? But I think there's like there's for me those two are kind of opposite opposite ends of the spectrum.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that would be actually efficient, right? It's the price is actually approaching the return profile from a market standpoint, that'd be efficient. I mean, it sucks from an investor standpoint because prices go up. Yeah.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something I've been thinking about for a while. My take would be that for non consensus companies, it's getting more efficient because the more investors there are, the more likely you are to find at least one or two that like what you're doing. I think for the consensus companies, it's starting to get more inefficient, right? Which is like when you have 10 term sheets, you get 5x to markup like what the maybe the fair value should be. And then like it's great for the founder and maybe again a little bit more of a house of cards if things go south at all. But it's also like, it's not necessarily great for investors, right? Because you might have to pay two, three, fourx over like the actual intrinsic value of a company or like the future, like the likely future value of a company in order to get in.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a broad question as to the companies that do win, how many of them are sort of competitive rounds versus not competitive rounds? And sort of what is the duration between them being non-competitive rounds and then becoming not non-competitive? And what percentage are really able to? And one question I have is like, is the market getting more efficient over time? A lot more investors. We should be getting smarter as asset class on how to evaluate these companies, a lot more capital. Are we getting better? And if so, what does that mean?”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is a tremendously important and good point. I tend to believe now that most companies fail from indigestion, not starvation, which is they just raise too much money too easily. They don't listen to the actual market, which is the customer base. And as a result, they just have a bunch of bad practices and end up running out of money. And I think that there's a lot to that. I actually think in 2021, If you just did a study of that cohort, the companies that had these billion dollar bees, if you remember that time, was totally crazy. That's probably one of the biggest wipeouts of capital. So I definitely think like consensus investing is definitely very dangerous. And only leaning to this founder is definitely dangerous. But I also think the flip side is true, which is you're totally blinkered to it. I think your life is pretty tough.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think then, like, maybe you're overlooking is it actually a good business, like Sequoia and Andreessen, we all make good investments and bad investments. And so it's like maybe this is one of the bad ones and you're just marking it up because you want to be in the hot deal. And like that ends up not being good for anyone.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is probably one area where I differ a bit. I think there's benefits to being non consensus because from the company side, I think when the money is hard to raise, you tend to be more frugal with it. And then also if the next round is less certain, like I think there's less of a sort of like it could crumble at any moment aspect, right? Because I think when it is hot and you're raising Southako rounds very quickly, I know the assumption that things will go perfectly. If anything slows down, it's like now you can't raise any more capital all of a sudden, right? And I think if you're in the mentality of growing quickly and spending, I think that's pretty hard. On the flip side, if you're not consensus, it tends to be like you tend to be more cash efficient, tend to be more frugal out of necessity. I think the other side depends on the form of like consensus, but sometimes there's also like much softer diligence. Like I think the kind of the worst form of consensus I've seen is like a Sequoia Andreessen did this round. Like, let me just do a 2x markup in two weeks because I want to be in the same company. And then like, there's no diligence there, right? It's just like, oh, this is hot. Let me do it.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I got a bazillion DMs. We're like, You're totally right. So the founders clearly feel this tension that it's dangerous to be non-consensus because they have to cater to VCs and they know it and they see the pattern match responses. They deal with this all of the time. And so from a founder perspective, it's like you almost have to be non-consensus to have alpha in the actual product market, but you have to look consensus when you're raising. And I think that's actually probably right.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think the most interesting aspect of the tweet was like the sociological study that followed of how different people interpret it, right? Like the tweet itself was pretty banal, right? It's just kind of non-statement. It's almost tautological. But like different constituencies viewed it very differently. So like I would say relatively inexperienced investors kind of used it as an opportunity to be like, oh, Andreessen Hort's consensus invests, which anybody that knows anything about our investment knows that's just totally not true. Even my own portfolio, many of the top deals I've done, nobody else was in the deal, et cetera, right? So like this is a statement about consensus investing. So that was one cohort. There was another cohort like Leo and Keith who have a lot of data and they've had a lot of really interesting things to say and that ended up in great discussion. I think there's still a lot more to do there. But most of the founders”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One other part to your tweet, Martin, that I think was underappreciated was sort of the risks of founders of being seen as non-consensus in the same way that. Founders need to raise money and they need to raise follow on funding within 18 to 24 months, sometimes even sooner. And so if everyone's passing on you, people are bragging about how other investors don't want to do your deal. That's not going to be super helpful to you in your next round.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I've been in the venture for like 12, 13 years now. I've definitely seen this in sectors where sectors fallen in out of favor, right? Where you have like e-commerce was hot and then it was dead and then like dollar shape club got acquired and it was hot again. And it's like e-commerce. I think the fundamentals didn't change that much year to year, but like the valuations and the like appetite for investing and maybe starting companies changed a lot year to year. And so that to me sort of an indicator like it's not just the fundamentals. There are all these other like forces as you mentioned.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good. And so you're almost like playing to the human perception of the company independent of the other lying business. And I would say, again, anecdotally until we run the numbers we want to know, that also seems to be a bit true.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are even cases in my portfolio where a super hot company from an investor standpoint, so many term sheets, the business didn't work out at the level that you would kind of expect, but the outcome was still really good. And so in some level, even independent of the productive asset, human opinion about it matters. So there's almost two ways you can slice this conversation. One of them is like the asset is what's productive and produces the value, right? And the market will determine if that's valuable or not. So that's kind of this productive asset view. And that's kind of the one that I hold, which I think that actually investors are very smart. I think that they know which companies are good and then they pay for those. That's kind of my view, but that's a productive asset view. But there's another view, which is independent of whether the company is good or not, there are things that people think.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the basket analysis is probably the most interesting one of like how did this one company do, but how did this portfolio of companies that raise a really quick follow-on or had like 10 term sheets at the Series A, like how did those end up doing over time?”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess my sense is until we run the numbers, we're not going to quite know the answer, but I think a lot of these theories prove out pretty anecdotally. And I think maybe that's the problem. Is it kind of an anecdote for every theory?”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the question comes down to is it easier to spot the company nobody sees or get into the company that's obviously good. And maybe even further than that, which is to what extent do even high price rounds underpriced hot deals? Because if I'm right, if the view is correct that Hot deals are hot because they're good companies, not like actually the market is very efficient. And that drives the most of returns, then I think Well, if that's the case, then the market isn't that efficient because it's underpriced the company, right? If the majority of returns are in high priced rounds and the market has underpriced it, but I think risk adjusted, that's not necessarily true, which is it could be still price right because there's still chances it goes to zero.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I do agree with that. I think the question for me is where is there more opportunity? Right. Because if the five hockey companies keep having great rounds and then there's like 10,000 not hot companies, but 100 of them will become hot over time. Even though the odds of becoming hot or low, most of the hot companies end up coming from the not hot batch, right?”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would love to do a correlation analysis. Actually, Leo and I had, I thought, a very interesting discussion on trying to figure out how you'd actually measure this, how you'd actually throw some data at it. And we actually have an analyst working on it now. Like the data isn't ready yet. So I have a new one. Actually, I want to test this with you, Leo, on a good thing to test. So I'll bet the best prediction of the best correlate of a high up round outside of the business is the fact that the previous round was hot”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is interesting because there's also sort of, you know, there are rounds that are maybe non consensus at 10 million or something, but then become super hot rounds at 50 or 100 and then become $10 billion companies or $100 billion companies. And even if you invested at that consensus round, or 100x. And so it's sort of in the face of, hey, if it's a hot deal, that must mean it's not good. Peter Thiel once had a line which was like the faster and higher the up round, the more you should invest because it's like working.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, second time founder, billion dollar exit Trey, who's phenomenal, you know, this is in the shadow of Elon who shows that you can already create these defense tech companies. I mean, if that's our definition of non-consensus, it just shows how insular we are as a community. I mean, it's almost an indictment of us that we even make this list.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tough raise when that's definitely not within the spirit of what I was trying to say, which is markets are actually quite efficient. If the market's efficient and it's a good company, the price is going to be high. And if you don't recognize that, then you're probably beating yourself as opposed to the market, right? And so like it really comes down to you shouldn't be looking for good deals with respect to other investors. You should be looking for good companies. And price shouldn't sway you from that. I mean, that's really at the heart of this. And so I just don't think that list, unless you actually run the numbers, which we haven't done, I just don't think it demonstrates that the idea that consensus is important is wrong at all.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, listen, I mean, again, it wasn't meant to be a technical tweet where like the wording was exact. And so like on the face of it, it's almost like an ill-defined statement because we don't know what consensus means, right? And so then everybody picks apart the consensus. But here's my reaction to the list of like the Airbnbs and this and that, which is I think we need to be very careful not to conflate a company having a hard round with market consensus, right? Like if you look at the list like Keith Rabois put out, which is great and I love Keith. I mean, these are like MIT founders known spaces like I'll bet if you took like the median value of their raises over the life cycle of the company. I'll bet they're way above market. Many of the companies were YC companies. And so I just think it's so easy to like come up with these anecdotal, oh, this one company had a”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I actually agree with a lot of what Martin just said, which is eventually you have to get to consensus, whether it's when you're investing or later, because otherwise if you're dependent on capital markets, it's very hard to keep the company alive if nobody wants to fund it. I would say like for me and maybe we invest like a tick earlier more like towards pre-setum seed, but for me, a lot of my best investments have been more on the non-consensus side, not in terms of I had some crazy good insight and nobody else had it and like I'm just brilliant, but more like these companies often struggled in the early days because before there's proof points, it's not obvious that it'll be a good idea. And then once they get good, the valuation skyrockets so fast that like you could still get good multiples, but they're just much lower than at early stages.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say consensus investing is a good idea. I'm just saying not being aware of consensus is a bad idea. And I think the last thing I'll say on this, I think that my underlying belief is early markets are actually pretty darn efficient, a lot more efficient than people realize. And so if you're alone in your view, you may just be missing something.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me paraphrase the tweet. The paraphrased version of the tweet is it's dangerous to do non-consensus investing. Like that's a dangerous idea. The impetus of the tweet, which, by the way, wasn't well thought out, which I think a lot of the viral tweets happen to be not well thought out, is I've been an investor for 10 years. I've done almost 200 investments, either as like running the fund or being directly involved. It seems being blinkered to how VCs view companies is actually quite dangerous because you're so dependent on follow on capital. And actually, it reminds me a lot of being an academic. I used to write a lot of papers. And like you do all of this great research, but when you wrote the paper, if you didn't actually think about how the program committee would view it, like it wouldn't get accepted, right? It felt very similar to that. And so that was the origins. But I want to be very clear. I did not say it would never.”
2025-09-04 · a16z Podcast · Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source