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Published · transcript-backed

David Rosenthal: commitment

15 Dec 2025 Acquired 10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

“We will never lose money for our investors ever. We will do everything we can possibly do to make this fund in the black.”

— David Rosenthal

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
David Rosenthal
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
commitment
Recorded
15 Dec 2025
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…I got us a little off track. Your lesson number three was Berkshire Hathaway and don't be afraid to have a too hard pile. My frame for all of this story was Sequoia. This story is very different than Sequoia, but we interviewed Doug Leone, who was one of the two stewards of Sequoia. He told us that after the dot-com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the dot-com bubble fund, every other venture firm out there after the bubble popped, we're taking Mulligan funds. They went to their LPs and they said, there's nothing we can do on this one. We're going to be more disciplined next time. We said, absolutely not. We will never lose money for our investors ever. We will do everything we can possibly do to make this fund in the black. He said the best line anyone's ever said on Acquired. He said, we looked at each other and you could burn cigarettes on our arms, and we wouldn't flinch. They spent the next five years. They didn't raise another fund. They just went to work with the portfolio. I think they stopped taking fees for a while until they were back.…

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