English
Turner Novak 🍌🧢
Report

Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓

@TurnerNovak

investing @BananaCap_ podcasting @ThePeelPod (sign-up for emails below)

3.5K Following214K Followers53.1K Posts
  1. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    Insane how viral this went! My brother texted me saying it was the first topic on the Morning Brew Daily podcast (#4 business pod). Someone also mentioned it was on their local news this morning. Kicked off 300+ customer conversations for @BananaCap_ portfolio company Hamlet.
    Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak
    Someone made a site that tracks what people are talking about at public city council meetings across the US. The only thing discussed more than data centers? Pickleball courts.
    63191.8K
  2. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    Someone made a site that tracks what people are talking about at public city council meetings across the US. The only thing discussed more than data centers? Pickleball courts.
    Download
    803464.2K391K
  3. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    Posts @TurnerNovak
    @BananaCap_ Good time to remind the timeline I'm investing up to $500k checks into super early stage startups! DM me if you're working on something where I can tweet and get you 300+ leads.
    000448
  4. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    Turner Novak 🍌🧢
    RT @ThePeelPod: Anthropic's S-1 just revealed only 250 customers are spending over $10M on AI: Early Anthropic investor @mmurph at @MenloVentures on why we're at the "very tip of the spear" of enterprise AI adoption: "It shows you the value of the technology. If that happens at some large company, you're like, 'Why isn't that happening at more large companies?' Probably because they haven't tried it out enough. They haven't enabled their organization to do it. They haven't re-platformed all their existing applications. Think about this market and how big these companies have become in such a short period of time. Then you look and you're like, 'Wait a minute. How penetrated is the technology in the Fortune 5000?' Almost none. Okay, so they're doing some coding and some productivity. How many of them have really re-platformed their whole application stack? Nobody. We're at the very tip of the spear on all the re-platforming, all the new internal productivity apps these companies are going to build, and their comfort level and understanding of AI. The whole next leg of this wave will be spectacular."
    030231
  5. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    BREAKING: Cam Skattebo reveals how he feels about investing on uncapped SAFE's
    Phil Bak @philbak1
    30203.6K
  7. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    Turner Novak 🍌🧢
    RT @ThePeelPod: SoFi just posted a record Q3. $1.37B revenue, up 44%, with 17.1M members. A couple months ago, @Figure CEO @MBTannenbaum, who joined SoFi at ~75 people, told me why it worked when the other fintechs didn't: "SoFi was one of the unique fintechs at the time, focused on a mass affluent customer. Almost all the fintechs of the 2010 era, LendingClub and Prosper, a lot of these emerging online lenders, were focused on a down-market customer. But here's SoFi, refinancing the student loans of people who had graduated and were less risky. People miss this, but if you're trying to do financial services for consumers who don't have a lot of money, you're capping the amount of money you can make. If someone only has $20,000 to spend for the year, you have to capture all of it to make $20,000, which is impossible. If someone is making $120,000, that becomes six times easier."
    010239
  8. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    From cooked to cooking
    The Peel @ThePeelPod
    Navan is a $7B public company today. I asked @orenzeev about watching it go from a $90M run rate to zero the month COVID hit: "That never happened to me in my career. In February 2020 they were about a $90M run rate, growing like a rocket ship. By April it was zero. Business travel went to zero, and it took much longer to come back than consumer travel. One of the reasons I have so much confidence in Navan is that they survived this. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I've never seen a business go from a rocket ship to zero with no visibility on when it comes back."
    1092.7K
  9. The Peel✓@ThePeelPod
    Navan is a $7B public company today. I asked @orenzeev about watching it go from a $90M run rate to zero the month COVID hit: "That never happened to me in my career. In February 2020 they were about a $90M run rate, growing like a rocket ship. By April it was zero. Business travel went to zero, and it took much longer to come back than consumer travel. One of the reasons I have so much confidence in Navan is that they survived this. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I've never seen a business go from a rocket ship to zero with no visibility on when it comes back."
    Download
    1063.2K
  10. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    Turner Novak 🍌🧢
    RT @alexandre_dewez: Some datapoints from @orenzeev on running a solo GP with $2.7b AUM & investing in @Navan, @DecartAI and @nextInsurance1: • 11 funds, no partners, no employees, no LP slides ever • Oren is the biggest LP in every fund (c.15%) plus 30% carry, so 40%+ of the economics • Close most deals within 48 hours • 80-90% of deals come from portfolio CEOs
    Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak
    New @ThePeelPod with @orenzeev He manages $2.7B across 11 funds with no team. He has no meetings, doesn't write investment memos, and has never shown an LP a single slide from a deck. We get in to the 30-minute conversation that turned into his first fund, why most partners add negative value, the days his calendar is empty enough to surf on a Tuesday, his fund that had only five companies (and why diversification is a lie), how Navan went from a $90M run rate to zero in a month (and survived), why he does cross-fund investing, refusing DPI when LP's want it, and the 30-year history of Israel's startup economy. Full episode here + links below. Timestamps: 0:00 Running $2.7B with no team or partners 1:58 How one person can beat a team 4:43 Omission beats commission: why committees miss 7:13 What really fills a partnership's day 9:23 The returns business, not the production business 10:58 A week in his nearly empty calendar 16:49 The mistakes new solo GP's make 19:34 Eleven funds, zero slides 22:09 No thesis 24:28 Why diversification doesn't work 27:14 The fund with only five companies 30:44 TripActions insight: everyone hates their travel software 34:59 Paying employees to spend less 37:34 COVID: $90M run rate to zero 39:24 How Navan survived 41:34 A $100M round with no way to price it 44:29 Keeping the team: the real test of leadership 46:04 What Oren looks for in founders 50:39 Cross-fund investing, and "trust me, bro" 53:59 Always his own biggest LP 55:14 The DPI stand that cost him LP's 58:54 Decart, and the Anthropic deal 1:03:54 Inside the 30-year rise of Israel's tech ecosystem 1:07:19 The Yozma program that built an industry 1:11:59 Why Israelis build now instead of selling early 1:14:39 Moving to the Valley in the 2002 nuclear winter 1:17:19 Audible, and why the first home run matters 1:19:29 Leaving Apax, and going solo 1:22:04 Peter Thiel and a fund raised in 30 minutes 1:24:24 The second fund: 48 hours, still no deck 1:25:49 ICON: helping Israeli founders crack the Valley 1:30:29 The leader he admires most: Anwar Sadat
    010344
  11. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    New @ThePeelPod with @orenzeev He manages $2.7B across 11 funds with no team. He has no meetings, doesn't write investment memos, and has never shown an LP a single slide from a deck. We get in to the 30-minute conversation that turned into his first fund, why most partners add negative value, the days his calendar is empty enough to surf on a Tuesday, his fund that had only five companies (and why diversification is a lie), how Navan went from a $90M run rate to zero in a month (and survived), why he does cross-fund investing, refusing DPI when LP's want it, and the 30-year history of Israel's startup economy. Full episode here + links below. Timestamps: 0:00 Running $2.7B with no team or partners 1:58 How one person can beat a team 4:43 Omission beats commission: why committees miss 7:13 What really fills a partnership's day 9:23 The returns business, not the production business 10:58 A week in his nearly empty calendar 16:49 The mistakes new solo GP's make 19:34 Eleven funds, zero slides 22:09 No thesis 24:28 Why diversification doesn't work 27:14 The fund with only five companies 30:44 TripActions insight: everyone hates their travel software 34:59 Paying employees to spend less 37:34 COVID: $90M run rate to zero 39:24 How Navan survived 41:34 A $100M round with no way to price it 44:29 Keeping the team: the real test of leadership 46:04 What Oren looks for in founders 50:39 Cross-fund investing, and "trust me, bro" 53:59 Always his own biggest LP 55:14 The DPI stand that cost him LP's 58:54 Decart, and the Anthropic deal 1:03:54 Inside the 30-year rise of Israel's tech ecosystem 1:07:19 The Yozma program that built an industry 1:11:59 Why Israelis build now instead of selling early 1:14:39 Moving to the Valley in the 2002 nuclear winter 1:17:19 Audible, and why the first home run matters 1:19:29 Leaving Apax, and going solo 1:22:04 Peter Thiel and a fund raised in 30 minutes 1:24:24 The second fund: 48 hours, still no deck 1:25:49 ICON: helping Israeli founders crack the Valley 1:30:29 The leader he admires most: Anwar Sadat
    Download
    944244K
  12. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    .@mmurph reveals how @MenloVentures figured out Anthropic had built frontier models at a much lower cost before it even launched: "Venture can often feel like an individual sport. We've always tried to practice it as a team sport, because it's more fun that way. It's more helpful to entrepreneurs, because you get the whole team. Different people who can provide different things. Joff Redfern, former CPO. Tim Tully, former CTO. We've got a lot of people who can help in any situation. And not just help the portfolio companies. They help me. Even on the Anthropic investment, I personally felt highly, highly convicted. But it was Tim who went and spent a lot of time with Tom Brown to say, 'Okay, I understand this compute multiplier thing. What they're doing. Why they've been able to build these really powerful models at a much lower cost. And why we think that can compound and be an advantage over time.' Otherwise I would've been making it more of an intuitive people decision. 'I just feel like this is the one.' When you can back that up with the former CTO of a $20 billion company saying, 'No, this is special technology,' that made my life a lot easier. And made sure I'd done my homework as much as one could."
    Download
    Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak
    New @ThePeelPod with Matt Murphy @mmurph at @MenloVentures We go inside Menlo's pre-revenue, pre-launch Anthropic investment and how they emerged as a top AI firm. Matt might be the only person who invested pre-revenue in both Google and Anthropic, and we talk through when to break the rules in venture, the three LP's that made over $1B each on the $500M Anthropic SPV Menlo raised without being able to show a single financial, Menlo's barbell investing approach, and why today isn't like 1999. Full episode here + links below. Timestamps: 0:00 How to read Anthropic's S-1 1:21 Do AI companies actually make money? 2:23 Google didn't want ads. Anthropic didn't plan on enterprise. 4:51 Bending the rules to back Anthropic pre-revenue, pre-launch 9:50 You can't be a leading AI firm without a top model company 12:00 Leading the Series D at $18B six months later 14:22 Why the best researchers chose Dario 15:25 Menlo's first-ever SPV, nearly the size of the fund 16:44 The LP meeting that sparked a $500M SPV 19:18 Raising at $18B without showing financials 20:04 Three LP's made $1B+ each 24:23 Why Matt joined Menlo in 2015 26:00 Rebuilding Menlo over the past decade 32:49 Venture as a team sport 35:45 How to keep a challenger mentality 38:15 Why VC firms decay 41:31 The Anthology Fund: OpenRouter, Wispr, Goodfire 42:27 Ownership vs. backing the best 46:10 Why this isn't 1999 48:06 Frontier vs. open weight models 51:29 The barbell portfolio strategy 53:54 Avoiding the messy middle between early and growth 55:07 How to spot a category leader 57:18 Fortune 5000 AI adoption: "almost none" 59:06 Menlo is in 10 of 70+ neolabs: Skild, Chai, Axiom 1:02:13 Where $1B AI startup raises actually go 1:04:18 Phase 1 vs. Phase 2 of AI 1:06:26 What the AI IPOs mean for venture 1:09:11 What Matt does differently after 25 years 1:10:52 The Alex Smith lesson
    43256.1K
  13. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    New @ThePeelPod with Matt Murphy @mmurph at @MenloVentures We go inside Menlo's pre-revenue, pre-launch Anthropic investment and how they emerged as a top AI firm. Matt might be the only person who invested pre-revenue in both Google and Anthropic, and we talk through when to break the rules in venture, the three LP's that made over $1B each on the $500M Anthropic SPV Menlo raised without being able to show a single financial, Menlo's barbell investing approach, and why today isn't like 1999. Full episode here + links below. Timestamps: 0:00 How to read Anthropic's S-1 1:21 Do AI companies actually make money? 2:23 Google didn't want ads. Anthropic didn't plan on enterprise. 4:51 Bending the rules to back Anthropic pre-revenue, pre-launch 9:50 You can't be a leading AI firm without a top model company 12:00 Leading the Series D at $18B six months later 14:22 Why the best researchers chose Dario 15:25 Menlo's first-ever SPV, nearly the size of the fund 16:44 The LP meeting that sparked a $500M SPV 19:18 Raising at $18B without showing financials 20:04 Three LP's made $1B+ each 24:23 Why Matt joined Menlo in 2015 26:00 Rebuilding Menlo over the past decade 32:49 Venture as a team sport 35:45 How to keep a challenger mentality 38:15 Why VC firms decay 41:31 The Anthology Fund: OpenRouter, Wispr, Goodfire 42:27 Ownership vs. backing the best 46:10 Why this isn't 1999 48:06 Frontier vs. open weight models 51:29 The barbell portfolio strategy 53:54 Avoiding the messy middle between early and growth 55:07 How to spot a category leader 57:18 Fortune 5000 AI adoption: "almost none" 59:06 Menlo is in 10 of 70+ neolabs: Skild, Chai, Axiom 1:02:13 Where $1B AI startup raises actually go 1:04:18 Phase 1 vs. Phase 2 of AI 1:06:26 What the AI IPOs mean for venture 1:09:11 What Matt does differently after 25 years 1:10:52 The Alex Smith lesson
    Download
    1063653.7K
  14. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    Three @MenloVentures LPs are set to make $1B+ each from the Anthropic IPO. @mmurph explains how they raised a $500M+ SPV at a $18B valuation without being allowed to show a single financial: "Out of that LP meeting, a bunch of our LPs said, 'This is fabulous that you're in this company. Can we co-invest with you?' Before you knew it, there was a couple hundred million of interest. We'd never done an SPV before. But this was a special company, and we wanted to lead the round. We couldn't do it out of our $750 million fund. We could do $50 or $100. But we couldn't do the rest. So we said, 'How about we take capital from our fund and our LPs, put this whole thing together, and make a proposal to lead the round?' As history would have it, we were definitely a little over our skis. You get a lot of people interested. But when you shake the trees, some things fall out and some don't. There was a scary period for about 30, 45 days where I was like, 'Oh my God. I think we've over-committed here, and we may not pull this off.' What I didn't realize up front: Anthropic was supportive, but they said we couldn't share any financial information. You're asking people to invest at an $18 billion valuation, and you can't show any financials. We could say what last year's revenue was. But we couldn't do any forward projections. That's a tall ask for big state pension funds. A bunch of them said, 'Look, we just can't responsibly do that as a state pension fund.' But I can tell you that three did. And they've all made well over a billion dollars at the last round valuation. Fortune favors the brave."
    Download
    Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak
    New @ThePeelPod with Matt Murphy @mmurph at @MenloVentures We go inside Menlo's pre-revenue, pre-launch Anthropic investment and how they emerged as a top AI firm. Matt might be the only person who invested pre-revenue in both Google and Anthropic, and we talk through when to break the rules in venture, the three LP's that made over $1B each on the $500M Anthropic SPV Menlo raised without being able to show a single financial, Menlo's barbell investing approach, and why today isn't like 1999. Full episode here + links below. Timestamps: 0:00 How to read Anthropic's S-1 1:21 Do AI companies actually make money? 2:23 Google didn't want ads. Anthropic didn't plan on enterprise. 4:51 Bending the rules to back Anthropic pre-revenue, pre-launch 9:50 You can't be a leading AI firm without a top model company 12:00 Leading the Series D at $18B six months later 14:22 Why the best researchers chose Dario 15:25 Menlo's first-ever SPV, nearly the size of the fund 16:44 The LP meeting that sparked a $500M SPV 19:18 Raising at $18B without showing financials 20:04 Three LP's made $1B+ each 24:23 Why Matt joined Menlo in 2015 26:00 Rebuilding Menlo over the past decade 32:49 Venture as a team sport 35:45 How to keep a challenger mentality 38:15 Why VC firms decay 41:31 The Anthology Fund: OpenRouter, Wispr, Goodfire 42:27 Ownership vs. backing the best 46:10 Why this isn't 1999 48:06 Frontier vs. open weight models 51:29 The barbell portfolio strategy 53:54 Avoiding the messy middle between early and growth 55:07 How to spot a category leader 57:18 Fortune 5000 AI adoption: "almost none" 59:06 Menlo is in 10 of 70+ neolabs: Skild, Chai, Axiom 1:02:13 Where $1B AI startup raises actually go 1:04:18 Phase 1 vs. Phase 2 of AI 1:06:26 What the AI IPOs mean for venture 1:09:11 What Matt does differently after 25 years 1:10:52 The Alex Smith lesson
    172427147.8K
  15. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    From @mmurph on bending the rules to back Anthropic pre-launch at $4 billion: "I know a lot of people today it's like, oh, $4 billion, isn't that kinda common? But if you roll the clocks back to '22, '23, there were no companies like that. Exiting at $4B was literally a spectacular exit in the entire history of venture. And now that was the entry point. Then you've got issues like, well, what fund does that go in? How does a venture fund do that? And because it's pre-revenue and pre-launch, how does a growth fund do that? So we were caught in the middle. I'm glad we had a partnership that was all in on AI. This was at least the second best company in the category, with the best technical team. The models were benchmarking really well, and it was a massive market. So we bent the rules a little bit to say, 'Let's participate in this round with a goal to lead the next round.' That worked out fabulously. As soon as we invested, we had a different type of relationship with the company. We worked with them on recruiting, talking to customers, and a lot of strategic issues that come up early in a company. Then we saw them put together the deals with AWS and Google, and the revenue flywheel started to spin. The company went from zero when they launched in April to, it's been reported, something like $85 million at the end of the year. We saw that happening in September, October, and jumped on it to lead the round. Unless we had made that small initial investment, we wouldn't have had the relationship to see all of this. Or earned the trust with the team to lead that round."
    Download
    Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak
    New @ThePeelPod with Matt Murphy @mmurph at @MenloVentures We go inside Menlo's pre-revenue, pre-launch Anthropic investment and how they emerged as a top AI firm. Matt might be the only person who invested pre-revenue in both Google and Anthropic, and we talk through when to break the rules in venture, the three LP's that made over $1B each on the $500M Anthropic SPV Menlo raised without being able to show a single financial, Menlo's barbell investing approach, and why today isn't like 1999. Full episode here + links below. Timestamps: 0:00 How to read Anthropic's S-1 1:21 Do AI companies actually make money? 2:23 Google didn't want ads. Anthropic didn't plan on enterprise. 4:51 Bending the rules to back Anthropic pre-revenue, pre-launch 9:50 You can't be a leading AI firm without a top model company 12:00 Leading the Series D at $18B six months later 14:22 Why the best researchers chose Dario 15:25 Menlo's first-ever SPV, nearly the size of the fund 16:44 The LP meeting that sparked a $500M SPV 19:18 Raising at $18B without showing financials 20:04 Three LP's made $1B+ each 24:23 Why Matt joined Menlo in 2015 26:00 Rebuilding Menlo over the past decade 32:49 Venture as a team sport 35:45 How to keep a challenger mentality 38:15 Why VC firms decay 41:31 The Anthology Fund: OpenRouter, Wispr, Goodfire 42:27 Ownership vs. backing the best 46:10 Why this isn't 1999 48:06 Frontier vs. open weight models 51:29 The barbell portfolio strategy 53:54 Avoiding the messy middle between early and growth 55:07 How to spot a category leader 57:18 Fortune 5000 AI adoption: "almost none" 59:06 Menlo is in 10 of 70+ neolabs: Skild, Chai, Axiom 1:02:13 Where $1B AI startup raises actually go 1:04:18 Phase 1 vs. Phase 2 of AI 1:06:26 What the AI IPOs mean for venture 1:09:11 What Matt does differently after 25 years 1:10:52 The Alex Smith lesson
    25206K
  18. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    Posts @TurnerNovak
    For people asking, chart is from here. Has lots of other interesting data pulled from local city council meetings.
    265211.7K
  19. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    Posts @TurnerNovak
    This is what people think about data centers. Very against it on average, and significantly more people chiming in with negative views vs positive
    Download
    23227.6K
  20. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    One difference this time around is there's practically zero marginal cost of adoption. Meta hit a 10-figure run rate of AI code usage within a few months. Couldn't really do that in the Railroad and Telecom eras. (Still need to make sure the spend is productive and has ROI.)
    Venky Ganesan @venkyganesan
    This is a good point. In traditional boom cycles, there is an installation phase and then a deployment phase. The people in the installation phase build in the hope that if they build, people will come. Eventually, people come a little too late, and then leverage hits the players in the installation phase. I think in this case, the demand far outstrips the supply, and so the people who are doing the installation are going to be guaranteed to get paid.
    6594.1K
  21. Venky Ganesan✓@venkyganesan
    This is a good point. In traditional boom cycles, there is an installation phase and then a deployment phase. The people in the installation phase build in the hope that if they build, people will come. Eventually, people come a little too late, and then leverage hits the players in the installation phase. I think in this case, the demand far outstrips the supply, and so the people who are doing the installation are going to be guaranteed to get paid.
    863313.8K
  22. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    Turner Novak 🍌🧢
    RT @KarthikDur: @Garyking's paper "AI Article Reviews Dominate Human Peer Reviews at Their Best.." is worth a read: - The "baseline humans" are quite strong and AI still "won" 100% of decided pairs under the AI judge and 87% under the human editors. - The human editors agreed with the AI judge (87%) more often than they agreed with each other (80%). With the growth in submissions overwhelming journals, we're well on our way to a situation where human reviewers get reserved for the hard cases/top papers which is where we were always most valuable and least replaceable anyway. That said, peer review is a small part of the bigger issue. The only thing standing between a [theoretical] claim and its acceptance is other humans understanding the argument. As machines do more and more, there is thus a risk of losing control of human understanding of science. Some thoughts here... Training future generations of scientists is another matter. Attached is a "code red" snippet from a podcast 6 months ago with @TurnerNovak
    010384
  23. Turner Novak 🍌🧢✓@TurnerNovak
    This is where I post from
    marisa @meshtimes_
    everyone has an apple phone but no one has a banana phone :( we are so technologically advanced yet so spiritually behind nana phone by @ by.laurence on ig
    43246.5K
  24. marisa✓@meshtimes_
    everyone has an apple phone but no one has a banana phone :( we are so technologically advanced yet so spiritually behind nana phone by @ by.laurence on ig
    Download
    1628910.4K
  25. Show more posts