David Sacks (@DavidSacks) is a former member of the PayPal Mafia and the founding partner of Craft Ventures. He is one of the legendary operators and investors of Silicon Valley, and he has become more of a public voice through being a host on the All-In podcast.
Distilling all of his shared wisdom down to 25 lessons was a challenge, and realistically we could have shared 100 more.
Here are some of our favorite takeaways from studying David and his career.
VC Tech Stack: 88 tools used by tier one VCs
Investment Memo Template: our boilerplate template for memos
Venture Media List: 132 people and places to learn the game
ChatGPT Prompts: prompts to give VCs more leverage
Diligence Question Bank: 84 questions to ask founders
"You have to be comfortable with ambiguity. If you're the type who likes to very carefully weigh 99% of the data before you make a decision, you're not cut out to run a start-up."
"Growth solves many problems at startups; unit economics is not one of them."
"Trying to re-engineer the unit economics or culture of a business that is already operating at massive scale is brutally hard. Searching for the scalable model when you’re already at scale is a contradiction in terms."
"The low end of the market is usually the most under-served part."
"Investors increasingly scrutinize burn and margins during downturns."
"Psychologically speaking, you’re better off burning the boats, so to speak, and saying that failure is not an option, it’s not acceptable, and we will do whatever we have to do to survive and persevere."
"When you start to glorify doing things that don’t scale, you end up with a startup that doesn’t scale, which is kind of the opposite of the whole point."
"The category leader wins the easy sales — the order taking — while also-rans must sell hard to win every deal."
"Ironically, the better the startup is doing, the more chaos there is."
“No one cares about your features. You have to talk about the larger problem that you're solving and how the world will be different if what you're doing works. Explain the change that you're bringing about in the world and why that's important.”
“Everyone is running around with their hair on fire but they’re afraid that their innovation gets copied. If you’re not moving fast enough, you’re on a bit of hamster wheel. If you’re not moving fast enough, you’re running in place.”
We started our careers in venture. After about a week, we had a realization.
We had no idea what we were doing.
Turns out, we weren’t alone.
Junior VCs don’t get training. You’re forced to figure it out on your own.
Learning the rules, tools, and players takes FOREVER to learn. That’s why we made the ultimate VC resource library to speed up the learning curve.
