- The Dunning-Kruger effect applies in venture roles. You initially overestimate your abilities then come to reality and underrepresent your abilities.
- The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know much.
- What is the optimized point of the founder-investor relationship?
- The business of venture is what is in the job description. The game is the relationship between you and the broader ecosystem.
- Can you build trust with all sides of the venture world?
- Winning deals is in the unofficial job description.
- “Can you make the call?” In order to get conviction, you have to get reps.
- Judgement is what matters most, and it is far harder to approach than the business side of VC.
- Prioritizing process matters over the outcome. So much luck goes into early-stage investing; all you can do is stick to and refine your process.
- You deal with so little info at the earliest stages that you’re willing to do deals without full conviction.
- More capital = higher valuations = higher levels of growth needed to hit benchmark returns
- Mega funds are getting bigger. The way to allocate resources as you scale as a company is to specialize roles within the company.
- More specialization = more FOMO = more auction-like dynamics
- Venture is closer to journalism than traditional finance. You make bets based on narrative, not numbers.
- Paper gains of funds look far better than they did in the past. As TVPI goes up (paper gains), you wonder how capital will be paid back to LPs.
- Software ate the world; it also ate the enterprise. As this happened, the buyer appetite got a lot bigger.
- The internet allows there to be a direct relationship between the creator and the consumer. In dev tools because of this, the best product usually wins due to better feedback cycles.