Trey Ward

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263 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 13 Jan

Trey Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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How I Invest with David Weisburd · E281:The Tsunami of Pain Facing Venture Capital · 13 Jan 2026 podcast

And maybe let's say the historical average is 30%.

You have 15% of companies that historically would have raised a Series B.

What is a Series B company, right?

Anyone can raise a pre-seed round.

Seed rounds are a little harder.

You get to a Series A, you're getting into institutional money.

By the time you get to a Series B, you're talking about companies that are underwritten to be worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars at a pretty high success rate.

And so the fact that 15% of those companies that would have received funding otherwise aren't

I mean, it's just a dramatic failure.

And so what we're going to do is we're going to find the companies that have a significant amount of R&D, right, that have real customers, proven products, defensible IP, and we're going to acquire those businesses for a fraction of historical R&D spend.

And then once we've acquired them, you then can't rely on the venture market, as we've talked about.

And so what we're going to do is we're going to take

The single best use case of that business, we're going to narrow the focus and we're going to push those companies to profitability in 24 months or less.

How do you structure these types of investments?

So we've actually done this twice.

The first business had raised $49 million or rather had $49 million of R&D.

We invested $2 million and for that $2 million, we received 53% ownership in the company in the first 44 million out there.

Well, the first calendar year after we made the investment, the company was profitable.

We're on the doorstep of the largest contract in the history of the company.

And in two years, we're up 17X, right?

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