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What do you do when you realize you invested in a stupid team?

• pg 18y ago
  I don't think it's happened yet. Between the application form and a 10 minute conversation, we can usually tell roughly how smart people are. And being super smart is not that critical anyway. Determination is more important. The real problem is when a team turns out not to have enough determination to see a startup through. Startups are hard; most people wouldn't be determined enough. When a group we've funded seems demoralized, we try to encourage them. It takes a few iterations to tell whether a group is just suffering from a temporary setback, or whether they intrinsically lack energy. If by Demo Day they've gotten nowhere, we start to think it may be the latter. But we're naturally optimistic. Usually groups give up before we give up on them.