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Interesting that completely missing from this conversation is: -- Their website design -- Their code (Rails? Jquery?) -- Their hosting / scalability / "cloud"

Interesting that completely missing from this conversation is: -- Their website design -- Their code (Rails? Jquery?) -- Their hosting / scalability / "cloud" strategy -- Source control methods, dev environment, tools -- APIs, "ecosystem", social media, "viral rate" etc. -- And more... Basically, all the things that most of us here spend most of our time discussing. Instead: 1) Idea / Team 2) Execute 3) Talk to people with money 4) Go to #2

jorkos 16y ago
This is a great point....market potential seems to be top of mind more than anything else.....which reminds me of how Sequoia invests....clearly they got the larger vision (and presumably had more data points as they invested later)
freshfey 16y ago
not sure whether this is in 1) but the fact that they actually talked to their customers in NYC etc. is a huge point as well.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ig1 16y ago
Why would anyone talk about that stuff when pitching to a VC? Sure the operational factors are important (and that's why they get discussed here), but they're secondary to size of the market and the nature of the solution when it comes to how big the investment opportunity is.
webwright 16y ago
MARKET. http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-startups-part-4-the-only http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-star... That's all Fred is looking at in that phase-- because even an awesome team won't build a venture-sized business in a tiny or low-growth market. At our Demo Day, there was two teams that had a veritable investor feeding frenzy around them-- and they were both attacking markets that were either huge/rich or markets that were growing like gangbusters (and they had the good sense to talk as much about the market opportunity as they did about their product).
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  To be fair, anyone who makes it through YC and gets pg's recommendation should be pretty competent.
zaidf 16y ago
Because "we" talk about it so much "we" are able to kill it and make it a non-issue so investors can focus on more imp issues.

jorkos 16y ago

This is a great point....market potential seems to be top of mind more than anything else.....which reminds me of how Sequoia invests....clearly they got the larger vision (and presumably had more data points as they invested later)

freshfey 16y ago

not sure whether this is in 1) but the fact that they actually talked to their customers in NYC etc. is a huge point as well.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ig1 16y ago

Why would anyone talk about that stuff when pitching to a VC? Sure the operational factors are important (and that's why they get discussed here), but they're secondary to size of the market and the nature of the solution when it comes to how big the investment opportunity is.

webwright 16y ago

MARKET. http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-startups-part-4-the-only http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-star... That's all Fred is looking at in that phase-- because even an awesome team won't build a venture-sized business in a tiny or low-growth market. At our Demo Day, there was two teams that had a veritable investor feeding frenzy around them-- and they were both attacking markets that were either huge/rich or markets that were growing like gangbusters (and they had the good sense to talk as much about the market opportunity as they did about their product).

JoachimSchipper 16y ago
To be fair, anyone who makes it through YC and gets pg's recommendation should be pretty competent.

zaidf 16y ago

Because "we" talk about it so much "we" are able to kill it and make it a non-issue so investors can focus on more imp issues.