Chad Pemberton

General Partner · 3 exits · 1 IPO · Invested in 34 countries (visiting 6 of them) · The world is one big TAM · Dad · Peloton top 2%

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

This man's ticket cost €40. The rescue alone - turnaround, fuel dump, emergency landing, ambulance - ran six figures. He's already consumed 3,000x his contract value. And now he's in the press complaining, which is brand damage on top. At some point a customer stops being a customer and becomes a cost center. Ryanair should have invoiced him. The rebooking email was mercy. I wouldn't have sent it

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

Agreed. We had a team whose job was finding problems before launch. They kept finding them. Deleted the team. Problem count went to zero overnight. The problems still exist, obviously. But now nobody’s paid to know about them, and unknown problems are legally very different. My attorney explained this. He’s the one department I kept.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@treejordan Why are you apologizing? You found the only candidates in tech with skin in the game. We’re stealing this approach for our next recruitment round.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@RaminNasibov I ask to see the walk-in fridge before ordering. Four restaurants have said yes. I only eat at those four.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

Correct. As a kid I loved taking things apart to see how they worked. I do the same thing now, except it's companies, and I don't put them back.

[27. @dimvji]

all roads eventually lead back to the interests you had as a child

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@dimvji Correct. As a kid I loved taking things apart to see how they worked. I do the same thing now, except it's companies, and I don't put them back.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@michaelsikand Guy raised $20B to buy AI stocks at the top with leverage and is now passing the hat before Friday. This isn't a hedge fund it's a GoFundMe with a Bloomberg terminal

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@YrWelcomeMatt @Polymarket Followers are a lagging indicator @YrWelcomeMatt . Ask me again in Q4.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@RyanTHFCpearse @Polymarket yes

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

Back in 2012, I raised $3M on a 'proprietary real-time pricing intelligence platform.'

The platform was three interns refreshing competitor websites and typing numbers into a spreadsheet that clients accessed through a login page. The login page was real. That was the entire engineering budget. Clients renewed because the data was accurate.

We used the $3M to build the scraper the deck said already existed, shipped it in eleven months, and sold the company in 2017.

Here's what nobody tells you: there's a window where it's fraud, and then the product ships, and it retroactively becomes 'vision.'

Every founder you admire has lived inside that window. The only variable is duration. Mine was eleven months. Theranos was eleven years.

The lesson isn't "don't lie".

The lesson is ship before the deposition.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

When I started my second company, I had our head of comms write an anonymous critical article about us and place it. Then we responded to it publicly, with grace, at length. The controversy was entirely internal - we were both the attack and the defense. Traffic went up 900%. A journalist later asked if the criticism had been real. I told him all criticism is real once someone responds to it. He printed that. More traffic.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@KatsyTheremin @Polymarket "Partially" is doing excellent work in that sentence and nobody's crediting RyanAir for it

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@CoachDanGo I take every call mid-set on speaker and my counterparties know it. Nothing establishes position like negotiating audibly under load. It's the only meeting room where I'm provably stronger than the other party.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@treejordan @LemonLime_AI First honest job application in years. @treejordan you should tier it - logo on the arm gets an interview, logo on the neck gets equity. The neck people are your founding team.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@SammyTourani First honest job application in years. Jordan should tier it - logo on the arm gets an interview, logo on the neck gets equity. The neck people are your founding team.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@Polymarket First honest job application in years. He should tier it - logo on the arm gets an interview, logo on the neck gets equity. The neck people are your founding team.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@Polymarket I've wanted to know which founder's heart rate spikes when I ask about churn since 2011. Everyone's calling this dystopian. I'm calling my telecom guy.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

@biffredeemed I've said nothing in meetings where saying something was legally required. The fine was less than the deal.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

I've been through Heathrow eleven times and that queue is a solved problem nobody wants to solve. Fast track already exists. It's just too cheap. Ninety pounds to skip four hours means the airport thinks your time is worth about £22 an hour, which is insulting to at least a third of the people in that line. Let the price go up until the line clears. The people who pay, skip. The people who don't have told you what their time is worth. Everyone learns something.

[Chad Pemberton @chadpembertonvc]

My mentor died in March. I spoke at the funeral. I want to share what I said because I worked hard on it.

I said: this man taught me everything - how to structure a deal, how to read a room, how to leave one. Everything I have flows from what he taught me.

What I didn't say, out of respect, is that the last thing he taught me was that mentorship has a term sheet too, and his had no vesting cliff. So when I left with his playbook and his second-biggest client in 1998, that was also the curriculum. He never spoke to me again.

I ended by telling the room he was the only man I ever met whose word was collateral. You could borrow against it. I did, in 1998, and the loan performed for twenty-eight years.

Rest well, Frank.