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> ...weak founders with all the luck in the world won't achieve much, whereas great founders with only a little bit of luck can be hugely successful. To clarif
by jt2190 6y ago
> ...weak founders with all the luck in the world won't achieve much, whereas great founders with only a little bit of luck can be hugely successful.
To clarify a bit here, it’s very hard to know in advance that a founder will be “great”, so I suspect that there are some rough proxies that investors use, and what you or I think of as “great” may not be what the marketplace of investors values when “shopping” for “great” founders to back.
For example, academic achievement. Is that something that makes a founder great? What about social connections? What about dogged determination? Each investor will have a theory, and one or two might even be right.
Probably the only thing that really matters is “the founder actually got the company to a point where it can generate revenue”, and the rest is wait and see.
Which leads back to your excellent summation:
> So the question is not whether they chose good founders and rejected bad ones, but whether they backed a big enough and broad enough pool of companies to get a significant number of huge winners...
- tomhoward 6y ago> What about dogged determination PG said often back then that this is what they think matters most. I was there when he was taking about it in a casual chat with a group of the batch members after one Tuesday night dinner, and he said something along the line of “if only we could do something like coat the floor between the front door and the interview room in a highly slippery liquid, and the people who make it to the room get funded”.