John Francis

Partner @stoutstreetvc , views are personal, invest in pre seed and seed stage startups in US and Canada, building the startup community @ @unmetconference

[John Francis @hermitvc]

I'm excited to share a whitepaper discussing a new framework to help startup founders and early stage investors and angels make sense of all the VC industry reports and drive actionable insights.

Read the full white paper here
https://t.co/9WXuIO83wZ

[John Francis @hermitvc]

Institutional LPs are the laziest

[Del Johnson @DelJohnsonVC]

"5 firms captured 73.1% of all LP commitments (vs. 12 firms capturing 75% in 2025). Those same 5 firms are putting 75% of their capital into 5 companies." 👀

[John Francis @hermitvc]

Compute access(session and weekly limits) would be greater hurdle for productivity improvements driven by AI! As a hobbyist, I've noticed that within just 20 minutes of starting my session on Claude(on the Max 20x), I'm already down 34%. After six sessions(last 36hrs), I'm at 65% of my weekly limits. Boot-strappers would have tough time building(looks like the compute subsidy era sponsored by the frontier labs is ending fast). Compute being a governed as Utliites (Energy, Water, Roads) could be a conversation we may need to have soon.

[John Francis @hermitvc]

AI fatigue is real

[John Francis @hermitvc]

@DelJohnsonVC One way to do this is to create a professional qualification like a bar exam to test one’s ability and hold them accountable.

[Darrel Frater ✝️ @DarrelFrater]

We're back at it again! February 8, 2024, Mark your calendars for VC Day - OKC!

For one day, co-work with VCs in the OKC ecosystem!

Location: Dayclub Modern Workspaces - Downtown OKC

Register below and join us to chat, work, and network!

https://t.co/2vnvlrHVKO

[Auren Hoffman @auren]

i love @cartainc but starting to see a lot of startups move off of Carta because they charge $$$$. anyone else seeing this?

[John Francis @hermitvc]

@GeoffLewisOrg Even fewer if you consider how many can articulate that in to a repeatable strategy

[Darrel Frater ✝️ @DarrelFrater]

Thank you everyone for making VC Day - Tulsa a huge success!

We appreciate our sponsors @regentbank, @GableGotwals, and @36degreesN for making this happen!

Huge shout-out to @hermitvc, the originator of VC Day. Thanks for allowing me to expand this concept to Oklahoma.

Thank you @AmadeuTolentino for the amazing networking experience with Preneur!

I hope to see you all at VC Day - OKC on January 17th! Save the Date!

[John Francis @hermitvc]

Agree! also in LI people are too politically correct to drive any real insight.

[Darrel Frater ✝️ @DarrelFrater]

I see a lot of people on my TL complaining about Twitter/X reach lately saying Linkedin has been better.

It doesn't seem like the case for me and I have more "Followers" in LI then I do on X.

Twitter is still the best platform to connect with founders IMO.

[John Francis @hermitvc]

@DelJohnsonVC Winning in the current system comes at the cost of your soul

[John Francis @hermitvc]

Most spray and pray investors I know write much smaller checks to alter outcomes one way or the other even as a collective. so the notion that an investment tactics altering probabilities of outcomes is false, probabilities of outcomes for startups are built-in to the nature of risk -varying continuously based on market conditions and reduction of risk factors.

[Jordan West @jordantwestecom]

Sorry... is this even legal?

You HAVE to book a call to cancel?

I love this company - we just aren't using the service anymore...

But this is crazy... or am I?

[John Francis @hermitvc]

@compulsivestart Seen it work when the startups have some baseline recurring revenues. It’s not just PE firms I’m seeing this activity being lead by later stage startups as well

[John Francis @hermitvc]

@compulsivestart Tru dat

[John Francis @hermitvc]

@wdstringer One way to look at this is that they have 99% probability of being wrong and missing the next big thing, the folks who didn’t get accepted don’t loose hope the YC badge means less today than it did even a few years ago.

[John Francis @hermitvc]

@DelJohnsonVC True, it is more of a gate keeping mechanism to keep new fund managers small

[John Francis @hermitvc]

@cory And most wouldn’t be able to get through their own company recruitment processes now

[John Francis @hermitvc]

@BexelInitiative @shriyanevatia @DelJohnsonVC Right, not everyone uses it, for a sanity check consider every year VCs invest in 25k-40k new startups, some of the biggest service providers only acquire high single digit market shares at best, it is a lot more fragmented than people assume it to be.

[John Francis @hermitvc]

Everyone wants to be an VC industry expert quoting datasets from angelist, carta and other services driven sources without acknowledging most of these datasets are a subset , incomplete and mostly just BS . Even the best data sources in VC are mostly self reported and lack predictive power unless it is parsed and cleaned by a data professional

[John Francis @hermitvc]

Dominant is relative -carta for example services 30k startups now but back in 2012 it had less than 2k startups , for meaningful analysis they either need to have the similar number or a representative dataset for the analysis period let’s say 10 years or 20 years. moreover the companies they service may not be representative of the total population of startups out there, which can distort reality. The best raw dataset I’ve seen is pitchbook which has over a million companies which means carta services and has access to less 3% of the private market data -assuming pitchbook still has gaps in their dataset

[John Francis @hermitvc]

Sure, they reflect the state of business from their point of view ( their customer base) and not the entirety of the industry. It’s surprising to see no skepticism or even questioning the validity or methodology of these reports. Especially since these reports and the underlying data aren’t exposed for any sort of scrutiny.