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In general I agree with you, but I would say that alot of VCs either 1) diversify their investments amongst many areas in tech (or maybe some non tech things,
by racecondition 6y ago
In general I agree with you, but I would say that alot of VCs either
1) diversify their investments amongst many areas in tech (or maybe some non tech things, not stereotyping all VCS but for this example I'll say diversity of problems being solved using technology/software etc) and thus see commonalities of problems amongst teams in their experience despite whatever the specific niche industry is. I think it is pretty important to agree the cofounders are important. Specifically I've heard from CEOs of startups I use to work for they are really good at hunting out "weaknesses" in the bonds between cofounders.
Basically, they don't want a good idea to fall apart because two cofoudners fundamentally don't see eye to eye, which will make it hard for any decisions they make (whether good or bad) to come to fruition and indicates future struggles with the company, in addition to weak leadership/unified approach when hiring new people, who might be disoriented at understanding the direction the company is going in.
2) Focus on particular niches (a startup who focus specifically on funding AI startups, for example) often they will even fund competitors knowing that if one of them dies, they are almost gauranteed to reep benefits from the remaining on in the niche field. This also means they keep a close track on the variations between two or more companies approach in a specific industry and why one failed and the other didn't.
Someone from Marc Andreessen's team recently published a blog post going into great depth about 5 factors amongst ten or so AI teams that indicated their levels of success in the field, and most of the tilting factors are not what I would say is common knowledge amongst AI startups.
They may have their biases, but they also have unique experience in understanding or seeing repeated dynamics in what could make a relationship (between cofounders) fail (like seeing that one bad relationship where the couple can't see it but it is so obvious to you because youve either now been through it or seen it happen before, imagine this for VCs looking at cofounders over and over again for ten years...) and otherwise have lost lots of money over failed business ideas, so I would say they are incentivized to be as objective as possible with themselves, even if just selfishly for the benefit of their own bank account.
- dclusin 6y agoReally surprising your username wasn't taken!
- racecondition 6y agolol I know me too I just made it up to type that comment and it was the first thing that popped into my mind.
- wpietri 6y agoIf your point is, "Some VCs can be good at their jobs," I definitely agree. My point is more that all VCs have a strong incentive to appear to be good at their jobs, especially in ways that sound impressive and are hard to verify.
- racecondition 6y agoI think you could say that about anyone.
- wpietri 6y agoI really couldn't. E.g., I've hired a number of programmers who are terrible at self-promotion. And even many of the ones who are good at it talk about specific, verifiable, repeatable skills.
- racecondition 6y agoyeh I guess nerds are an exception to the rule, but honestly relative to all of the industries out there outside of engineering alot of business, marketing, etc etc is fluff. VCs are in business and finance. At the end of the day, they have money. Assume they are selfish and want to not lose money, so they probably have some rationale on which they give out money in hopes for a return on investment. That being said, I've seen way too many tech bros with bad blockchain ideas get way too much money which usually goes straight to their heads before they lose it all, and I assume the V.C.s have a really good strike price and know exactly when to liquidate. For others, it was my general understanding VCs lose money on most investments, hoping that a few end up going really big and canceling out the losses on the rest, but I don't really know anything about VC stuff. I'm not sadomasochistic enough to try to start a company, I just try to work on my skills and people are willing to pay me to invest in myself because I tend to discover interesting things while I tinker about and also keep things from failing often in a raging dumpster fire but I don't know if thats a good way to market my skills.
- wpietri 6y ago
- spekcular 6y agoCould you please give a link to the blog post? I'd be interested in reading it.