Kyle Harrison
@kwharrison13
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Investor. // Building @contrary, @Contrary_Res // Former Index, Coatue, TCV // Husband, Father, Christian @ch_jesuschrist
Joined July 2013
"I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say." (Flannery O'Connor).
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If you find yourself arguing that your company will win just because your product is better, you should staple this chart to your shirt.
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Lock in, fellas. The B2B SaaS market just got a whole lot bigger.
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Breaking news: The scooter company, Bird, is up for sale for less than a pre-seed round.
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From 2002 to 2024, SpaceX has raised ~$10B. From 2002 to 2024, the total budget of NASA was $435B. If capital was the only mighty unlock needed, NASA would own the moon and we’d be celebrating the opening of the first McDonalds on Mars by now.
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In 2018 Figma did $4M of ARR. Soon after I had a VC job interview where I did a Figma case study. I built a model with Figma becoming a $19B company in 2025. I didn't get the job. They said my analysis was "unrealistic". A thread on how the best companies compound unexpectedly. .
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Mr Beast has published one video every 11 days for ten years. Majority of anything is just doing the thing.
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We gave it a try with the cute startup names, and dropping vowels to be unique. Time to go back to “American Computing Corporation” or “US Steel”.
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Marc Andreessen has grown a16z from their first fund of $300M in 2009 to over $25B+ in AUM as of 2022. His framework for understanding any business is simple. It comes down to unpacking what he calls "the onion theory of risk.". Here's what he means. .
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If you know what this picture is then you too know the unquenchable thirst of ambition.
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Gmail creator Paul Buchheit on how Bret Taylor once rewrote Google Maps in a single weekend. h/t @kevg1412
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Evidence would point to yes.
Is backing competitive companies allowed now in venture?.
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PayPal Mafia culture -- as explained by the people who lived it:. 1. Extreme Focus .2. Dedication to individual accomplishment .3. Refusal to accept constraints, external or internal .4. Radical transparency on metrics .5. Meritocratic opportunity .6. Vigorous Debate
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Opendoor has $8B in revenue. Their market cap has dropped from $19B at their peak to $1B today. Bird dropped from $2.4B to $115M. Twilio has ~$3.6B in revenue; they dropped from $70B to ~$8B. Here's why gross margins can kill a business.
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VC: "We don't invest in ChatGPT wrappers.".Founder: "Our ChatGPT wrapper has gone from $150K to $15M of ARR in 12 months.".VC: "Will a valuation of $1 billion suffice? You know what, I'll just leave the valuation line blank for you to fill in.".
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The biggest difference between a $50B company and a $1B company is the ability to own more of your addressable universe. You either die a point solution, or you live long enough to become a platform. Snowflake, Datadog, Crowdstrike. Here’s how some of the best platforms do it….
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I've met billionaires with less confidence than most 24-year old angel investors.
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We should build a monument of this image as a memory to an age of hubris and excess.
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What a f*cking ambitious slide. I love it. Put this right into my veins.
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This is an $8B company that started as “software for garage door repair people.”. TAM is almost always a terrible reason to pass.
Single biggest reason VCs miss mega outcomes: . They underestimate future market size of company.
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I quit drinking Diet Coke 6 months ago. Been deeply depressed and wildly unproductive ever since. Probably unrelated.
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Anduril 2026
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Name a more based afternoon than the one @PalmerLuckey is having today:. 11:45 AM: Dominate a troll.1:17 PM: Announce 25x improvement on rocket fuel.1:42 PM: Dominate the troll AGAIN. 2:09 PM: Announce a $250M pentagon contract
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Your answer to this Peter Thiel question says more about you than about the thing you're working on: . "What is your 10 year plan, and why can't you do it in 6 months?".
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This is the astrology for men we’ve always needed. Rome – Thinks roads and war solve everything. Owns a heavy watch. Eats steak aggressively. Greece – Won’t shut up about how Greeks invented everything. Drinks wine like it’s a personality trait. Egypt – Peaked in middle.
every man has his favorite ancient civilization and it says more about his personality/values than literally any other characteristic.
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VC: we only invest in businesses with defensible moats and competitive advantages. Founder: Isn't your only differentiation your brand?. VC: *hangs up zoom*.
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As Blackstone becomes the first PE fund to hit $1 trillion of AUM, I'm reminded of a quote from Stephen Schwarzman that explains how they did it. It also is a fascinating case study on the capital agglomeration game that a lot of VC funds are now playing. Here's the quote:
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People wonder why founders are so productive in San Francisco. But go walk around SF after 5 PM and you would also think coding a next-gen ERP alone in your apartment sounds exciting.
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Over the last 4 months I've written 32,000 words and talked to over 90 VCs across 70 different firms (seed, venture, growth, and crossover) about the future of venture capital. Here are the 5 things that came up again and again. .
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Here's your frequent reminder that WeWork raised $20B in funding, hit an all-time-high valuation of $47B and has a market cap of *checks notes* . $368M.
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When I got started in venture you could read Fortune Term Sheet, front page of Techcrunch, and HackerNews and be up to speed on 85%+ of the goings-on in startups. Super not true today. What are the must-reads / watch / listens to be fluent in tech startups today?.
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Recently, I got to attend Capital Camp (it's like summer camp for investors). Among this voraciously curious group, representing billions of AUM, I noticed that book recommendations are like a currency. Here are the 20 books recommendations (+2 bonus things) from camp.
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Anything that can be copied will be copied in consumer tech.
Anything that can be copied will be copied in consumer tech.
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Don’t sleep on cloud security. Wiz reaches $100M ARR in just 18 months. And things are just getting started.
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@jshieber Would be VERY curious to know what the world would look like today if we had given the $400B+ to SpaceX directly vs NASA as the passthrough.
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If I had a dollar for every time a friend in investment banking tells me they wish they hadn’t done investment banking I would have an investment banking VP’s bonus check.
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Mint dot com got acquired by Intuit for $170M in 2009 and later peaked at 20M users before getting shutdown in 2023. Since then, hundreds of founders have tried to reinvent that experience. Thus far, has been elusive. Why is it so hard to become the OS for people's money?.
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You either die a VC-subsidized commodity, or you live long enough to become an advertising business
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So happy for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez; finally tying the knot.
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I am not being dramatic when I say the 250 open tabs I just lost is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria. We'll never know what we lost.
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The face of VC is changing. It was a culture of "the firm" like law firms/consulting. More dynamic startup scene led to fiefdoms. Sequoia China. a16z Crypto. Now we're seeing the unbundling of VC. The renegades of venture are leaning into their own brands.
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For any founders struggling to understand the math VCs are doing, making them panic about huge valuations of the last few years:. Coupa is doing $700M+ in revenue and got bought for ~$6B. If you're a company with a <$3B valuation and less than $100M in revenue, the math gets hard.
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I've had over 25 Roam Tour's in the last 3 months. Not because I'm good at using Roam, but because I'm bad at it. I'm here to show you what a 2 / 10 can do with something as powerful as Roam. #RoamTour.
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I've seen PE investors do an ungodly amount of diligence that in no way helps them make better decisions. I've seen VCs do an ungodly small amount of work that indicates they have no idea what they're talking about. There is a healthy middle we all can find.
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It's also important to put this particular case into perspective. My favorite framing comes from @hunterwalk. How did Adobe decide to pay $20B? It was less about an excel model. "What percent of our market cap do we need to spend to protect the rest of it?".
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I know that everybody is groaning about the hype in AI right now. But OMG I would SO much rather be hyping generative AI and companies like OpenAI than I want to be selling shitcoins and monkey JPEGs. So much more substance here. But maybe that's just me.
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Has anyone ever heard of this firm “Tier-1 VC?” I don’t know who they are but whoever they are they’re giving out a lot of “verbal offers.”.
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I've never been more excited to be a VC than I am today. After months thinking about the big changes happening in VC I've found a renegade of my own. Excited to announce I'm joining @contrarycapital as a partner to build out a later stage practice 👇.
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In the last few months at Contrary Research, we've written over 100K words covering companies across software, gaming, crypto, climate, and more. Our mission is to break down the silos in private company research. Here are the 10 best research resources we rely on for our work. .
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The age of the MBA CEO is over. The age of the neurodivergent hand talker has begun. 👀 @2112Power @pitdesi @aphysicist @jasonjoyride @ADoricko @blader . h/t @ti_morse
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Pretty shocking that people on Twitter are silent about SVB. Like. does no one want to opine on what's going on? Is anyone going to explain the situation for the rest of us?.
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VCs exist because founders don't want to travel to Des Moines, Stamford, Charlotte, Cleveland, or Salt Lake to get money from the LPs. Otherwise they could just go get it themselves.
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.@zebulgar on capital intense businesses having more tangible moats compared to typical SaaS startups. "If you have zero marginal cost it also means you have zero moat."
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Alright you dweebs, listen up. Klarna’s going public, Stripe had an up round, and B*tcoin is back up. Free money comes next, so let’s not screw it up this time. Flying cars, cancer cures, and brain computers. No sh*tcoins, no pump and dumps.
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I'm quickly approaching the point where I search @RoamResearch before I google something because I'd rather start with seeing what I think about something before I see what everyone else thinks about something.
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"We're not public market investors." . - VCs, as they invest in companies that are bigger than 98% of public of companies
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General Catalyst raised a working capital lending fund and bought a hospital. a16z started a multi-family office and added private equity to their pool of exposure. As more firms focus on capital agglomeration, this quote from the founder of Blackstone is always instructive:
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“We don’t need more firms deploying $10B. We need lots of little venture firms deploying $100M. It results in more choice for entrepreneurs.” (@fredwilson).
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Feels like if you weren’t gonna have kids and then having $5K makes you decide to have kids, you may not be the ideal person to be having kids.
BREAKING: The Trump Administration has been mulling ways to get more Americans married and having kids — including a $5,000 “baby bonus” for every new mom after delivery, per NYP.
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"Someone dumber and lazier than you is making 10x the money because they are too dumb to doubt themselves." (Chris Hladczuk).
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The rule of thumb for revenue growth is for a good company to triple-triple-double-double-double in revenue over the course of ~5 years. Based on Figma's trajectory, that would get them to ~$135M ARR by 2022. My estimate? $200M ARR. I felt pretty dumb when they pointed that out.
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Couldn’t be more excited to be joining the @IndexVentures team. Looking forward to continuing to look for and work with the best companies in the world.
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So how did Figma actually do? . They smashed that forecast. Based on what I've read they're currently at ~$400M ARR and doubling.
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Some professional news! I recently had my last day @IndexVentures. Huge thanks to the team there!. As for what’s next I’ll be taking some time off to welcome a new baby. And then I’ll be working on something new in venture as the world continues to change.
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the more you learn about literally anything, the more shocked you become that anything works at all.
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In the end my interviewer was right. My analysis was unrealistic. Unrealistically conservative. Instead of $200M ARR in 2022? Figma would do $400M (and the year isn't over yet). Instead of $19.5B in 2025? They'd be acquired for $20B in 2022.
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Be very careful about taking advice from VCs about managing people. They’re generally some of the worst people managers around.
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Growing up, my Dad often called me “Boss.” It was one of the most endearing things in my life. When I got my first investing job there was a partner that I really respected so I called him “boss.” Immediately other junior folks told me it was too informal. I learned right.
Someone calls me ‘chief’ — I instantly wonder how I can serve them…. Someone calls me ‘buddy,’ I instantly think of 3 or 4 ways to ruin their life.
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Almost no one does the homework. When I mention something from a company's deck during a call, their eyes light up. "Someone actually read the deck?". That's true across tech, investing, journalism, consulting. If you just do the work, you're ahead of 90%+ of people.
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Outreach, after raising at a $4.4B valuation in 2021, has an implied valuation of <$1B in secondary markets. The de-horning of ZIRP unicorns continues.
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But it's important to recognize when a company has something special that allows them to defy gravity. Like AWS, just continuing to experience monster growth to $62B+ of revenue in 2021.
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In Feb 2019 Figma raised at a $440M post from Sequoia. I remember even folks at SoftBank thought that was crazy (and this was the Vision Fund at its most aggressive) . "Over 100x ARR? Insanity." . This was before the world got crazy in 2020 😉.
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What I think of every time someone announces a "dedicated AI fund."
VCs announcing dedicated “AI funds” will be justifying what’s an AI company just as hard as mutual funds justified Exxon into their ESG portfolios. Marketing is as marketing does.
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I’ve been investing personally in the stock market for a full month now and here are the lessons I’ve learned . 👇👇👇. Not a damn thing. These ain’t normal times my friends.
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No VC today remembers Arthur Rock. But the founding partners of Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia worshipped him. Who are the role models in venture today? And could there be some learnings from that in diagnosing some of the industry's biggest problems?.
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@buccocapital "Look at this absolute joke. In the arena, stumbling, all dusty and sweaty and bloody."
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I’m excited to announce that I’m officially going all in on kids 3.0. We may not get much sleep but wagmi
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I love unpacking investor thought processes like this, so if you enjoyed this thread follow me @kwharrison13 . Or subscribe to my writing:
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Always struck me as funny that (with a few exceptions) this is actually the worst section in a bookstore to learn about business.
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If you’re an investor (particularly public markets, tracking public equities, etc.) and you’re using @RoamResearch we need to talk. I’m gonna change your life. (@Conaw spread the word.) Lookin’ at you @LennyIce @borrowed_ideas @MazwoodCap - DMs are open.
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Hot take: @RoamResearch is uniquely perfect for investors. I'm working on a massive essay around my thoughts for all things Roam + Investing, but here's a sneak peek:. Checklists. Roam was made for investment frameworks.
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In my writing, I've frequently reflected on the excess and irresponsibility of venture capital. But few case studies better sum up my grievances with various aspect of the venture capital industrial complex than does the story of Hopin. The first thing I came back to is how
Hopin, once Europe’s fastest-growing startup, enters liquidation 👀.
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This puts so well into words the conversation I’ve had dozens of times in the last year. (1) Incumbents are positioned to succeed in AI broadly much more than startups because brand, data, distribution offer advantage . (2) The SaaS 1.0 playbook is uniquely bad for AI because.
6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years. With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case. Right now there are 2 clear winners, a.
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Peter Thiel is the world’s first trillionaire. But in interviews, it’s not questions about money or identifying MySpace early. Every question is about his hair. Pictured below with his golden brown locks that likely contributed to his fortune. Here’s his hair care routine 👇
@Yannick_Veys the fuck.
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Had 2 great founder calls today . - Founder was simultaneously crushing their company story while rocking their newborn baby. - My 6-year old broke in and refused to leave until he'd told the founder a knock-knock joke. Good reminder that everyone is human and kids are great.
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So what's the takeaway? . "Every company will crush it and deserves a 'crazy' multiple along the way?" No. There is a concept of financial gravity. It is REALLY difficult for companies to continue to grow at exponential rates. Eventually, financial gravity slows them down.
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One of the most un-dealt with ramifications of a 13-year bull market is the institutionalized belief in "the greater fool.". People make money, not because a business is good, but because there is always someone else down the line who will buy later. But venture capital, as a
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