The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: The Truth About Multi-Stage Firms; Why Portfolio Services are for VCs not Founders | Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | Why Reserves are Bad for Founders & How Boutique Firms Will Win with Mark Goldberg @ Chemistry
25 Oct 2024
Full Episode
I think one of the dirty secrets of multistage investing is that portfolio services teams are not for founders. They're for the VCs. They are a way to make something unscalable scale. So we have a very light reserve model. Peanut buttering all of your reserves in every pro rata round that gets done is not a good thing for the founder.
The biggest mistake is when you try to make consensus decisions at the early stage, I think you end up with consensus funds.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today we have a very special show for you. On Wednesday this week, we saw a new fund announcement in the form of Chemistry, a new $350 million seed and series A firm from Mark Goldberg, Ethan Kurzweil, and Christina Shen. Today, I sit down with Mark to unpack it all.
For those that do not know, prior to Chemistry, Mark was a partner at Index Ventures, where he led early stage investments in Plaid, Bridge, Pilot, Anrock, and Persona, to name a few. But before we dive in, what do Henry Ford and AI have in common? Neither could change the world without automation.
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