Playing the survivorship bias game is always fun, but the devil is always in the details: 1. USV's investment was made in 2011. In 2014, we're at a point in th

Playing the survivorship bias game is always fun, but the devil is always in the details: 1. USV's investment was made in 2011. In 2014, we're at a point in the cycle where investors are even more focused on growth. 2. According to DDG itself[1], the inflection points in DuckDuckGo's growth correspond to key privacy-related and distribution events. There's nothing in DDG's growth to suggest that USV's investment itself sparked growth. 3. DDG's founder is a successful serial entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs with a track record can more easily raise money, even for bad ideas (see: Color). 4. USV's investment rationale ("we invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it") is fundamentally based on the potential size of DDG's market (search), which is one of the largest. In other words, it was a small bet (USV only invested $3 million) on there being an emerging opportunity to compete with Google. I repeat: if you are "growing slowly", especially in today's market, you are going to have a very difficult time raising capital from Silicon Valley investors. Period. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who believe they're the exception to the rule, and you see a lot of companies trying to game growth metrics because they know how important growth is to fundraising, but the vast majority of the post-launch startups that don't have a growth story to tell are getting "no" far more often than they're getting "yes." [1] https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html