3 ms·
>- If you get a meeting, don't take that as a good sign, we still take a lot of meetings. They don't explicitly spell this out, but this is because being a VC
by sbierwagen 4y ago
>- If you get a meeting, don't take that as a good sign, we still take a lot of meetings.
They don't explicitly spell this out, but this is because being a VC is still a job. Even if they're not actually making any deals, management doesn't want to see everyone sitting at a desk scrolling twitter for 8 hours, so instead they do pointless meetings.
Matt Levine had a fun Great Recession story which I cannot find right now, which is that during 2008 in the M&A department at Goldman Sachs everyone still came to work, even though obviously merger and acquisition activity was way down. They would spend every day doing calls and making pitchbooks, all of which went nowhere. Goldman didn't close a deal for a full year. A floor full of people could have just collected a salary and stayed home for 12 months and it would have had an identical outcome.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CallMeJim 4y agoWhen the first deals started closing again, who would have won the deals? The company that stayed home for 12 months? or the company that continued working for 12 months? Imagine swimming hard against a strong current. You get nowhere (or maybe even go backwards slightly!), but when the current changes you make a lot of progress. If you don't swim at all, you go backwards. When the current changes, you may get to where you were at the start.
- sbierwagen 4y agoThat would be a dynamite answer to give during a job interview for a position in the Goldman Sachs M&A department in 2009.
- Gunnerhead 4y agoI would love to read that article if you end up finding it.