Alexander Niehenke

Surprised how many people, according to Twitter, are only in SF for the tech & networking. Seems like a gorgeous place to live. Call me biased, but not many places you get so much water, mountains, culture, agriculture, weather, wildlife all within a few hours. My heart is here.

Watching most VCs try to explain blockchain in a blog post is like asking a group of first graders what their parents do for a living.

Own stroller/dog? Bernal or Noe
30&U? Marina or Russian
Think Ur Hip? Hayes
Actually Hip? Dog patch
Rich? Pac Heights
Grew up in SF? Sunset
Like to run? Cole
Commute to south bay? Portrero
In Corp housing? Fidi/Soma
Foodie? Richmond
Hipster? Mission

1/ Privately I've been sharing that we'll see +25% of partners at VC funds exit the business in the next few years, and a similar shrinkage of funds. In the wake of the OpenView news, I am sharing my thoughts publicly based on what I've seen a cross a couple cycles.

In further Silicon Valley shaming, Wall Street has allowed a pita bread restaurant to IPO while our window is still closed

We’re seeing three zero-sum strategies concurrently tested in venture in real-time:

Hire Everyone: A16Z
Do Every Deal: Tiger
Raise Every LP Dollar: Insight

A $500M SaaS company growing 70% YoY just unveiled their S1 and basically no tweets about it. What a time to be alive when that isn’t the biggest talk of the town.

A consortium of VCs should buy the SF Westfield mall so we can all move in there. Each of us gets a retail store, the mega funds can take the Nordstrom’s and macys, & we put Souvla+Blue Bottle in the food court. Emerging managers can get retail carts. @nvca what say you?

Nothing like the announcement of twins to abruptly end a man’s lavish spending habits

You can tell the pandemic is mostly over in SF because we’re back to debating about parking spots

Can we at least all agree that @levie & @bchesky make a pretty cute couple

I prefer the entrepreneur to be at their highest comfort level, so if that’s Teams, I’ll deal with the discomfort on my end

Onward & upward @scalevp techcrunch.com/2022/09/28/sca…

Clearly I’m doing something wrong since I don’t know a handful of people that can actually retire in their mid 40s, or maybe all my friends just had kids

This is probably an awkward time to share that I got into college as an athlete.

VCs out competing each other on who’s not on vacation is so VC. I’ll be in vacation for two weeks in August and hope I’m not disturbed. Cause, you know, I don’t feel guilty about prioritizing my family sometimes. Just as founders should.

Fleetmatics marks the 9th *public* #SaaS acquisition of the year. With so few IPOs, the public universe is getting smaller & smaller.

11x500=5.5M
5.5x.45=3M post tax

4k rent/mo x 11yrs = 528k
8k spend/mo x 11yrs = 1.1M

Where did the other 1.5M go? Or did you outright buy your place instead of 20% down?

SF is hard but I must be missing something? This is very generous spend.

For those of us that have been in SaaS for a while there’s this gut wrenching feeling we should have bought everything five years ago. Everything.