Posted on 23rd August 2023 by Harry

Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product.

Rick Zullo is the Co-Founder and General Partner at Equal Ventures. Prior to co-founding Equal Ventures, Rick was an investor at Lightbank, Prior to Lightbank, Rick worked with investment firms Foundation Capital, Bowery Capital, and Lightview Capital.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

1. Why Venture Capital Needs It’s Jerry Maguire Moment:

• Why does Rick believe that VC needs it’s “Jerry Maguire” moment?
• What needs to change? What needs to stay the same?
• Why does Jason believe we will see even more mega funds in 2024 and 2025?

2. Unicorns are So 2019:

• Why does Jason believe that “unicorn investing is mostly dead for bigger funds and none of them are looking for a $1BN outcome anymore?”
• Why does Rick believe that multi-stage fund investing at seed simply does not make sense?
• What does Rick believe many founders need to know when they take multi-stage money at seed?
• Of the over 1,000 unicorns created over the last few years, how many of them do Rick and Jason feel are actually unicorns today?

3. Efficiency and Growth: We Need it All:

• Why does Jason believe, as a founder you should be embarrassed if you ever had a RIF (reduction in force)?
• Last year many founders got a pass on growth as they were more efficient. Is that pass over? Do they need to get back to growth?
• What is the single biggest reason that companies do not scale from seed to Series A?
• What happens to the many companies with years of runway but no product-market-fit?
• Are we entering a new age of efficient company building or will we go back to high burn environments and excessive spending?

4. Entering the World of LPs:

• If Jason and Rick were to advise LPs today on how much to discount the value of their venture books, what advice would they give?
• How have markups completely corrupted the venture ecosystem?
• How does LPs being incentivized by paper-marks make the industry even more screwed?
• What are the single biggest misalignments between GP and LP?