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John Smothers (Ambassador Program Lead @ Acrew Capital) on venture becoming a hospitality business

  • Community activated: build businesses on top of these online communities where different groups are gathering.
  • Diversity in an LP base allows for different perspectives. This can provide a lot of unseen benefits over the lifecycle of a fund.
  • There is a huge amount of upside in taking the road less travelled. This reminded me a lot of Naval’s quote: “Play average games, expect average results.”
  • Established VCs rely on pattern matching, which assumes that the future will look like the past. This overlooks a lot of founders that don’t fit a certain criteria.
  • People tend to make purchasing decisions from communities they feel comfortable from.
  • Venture is a hospitality business. How you make somebody feel when you provide a service to them is a foreign concept to VCs, but the best ones will have to adapt to this mindset change in a world of more available capital.
  • At the Series A, you are investing in an imperfect but available data set. At the seed, you are investing in people.
  • If you want to be a seed investor, you have to be a great identifier in talent.