41–50 of 383 posts
Every blog post about VC should have a disclaimer with the interest rate at the time of writing.
They aren't interested in your measly 5%
Every blog post about VC should have a disclaimer with the interest rate at the time of writing.
Why should VCs care about interest rates? They're looking for 30000% returns from 1/100 of their investments while the rest go to 0. They aren't interested in your measly 5%
I had a short experience with the music industry and the whole enterprise + VC sounds the same dynamic between artists and record labels back in the day, where was not enough to play in local bars and have a steady presence there, but everyone wanna to be Metallica or Anthrax.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're brilliant and idiosyncratic and delivering something truly compelling, then vcs are more than happy to look past these things. God knows how many very eccentric founders have received funding
It is impossible for something in very early stages, that needs money to be "truly compelling". For VCs a compelling product means great traction but to get great traction you need initial funding so it's always a catch 22.
That's the minimum bar without traction however. A regular genius isn't that impressive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah pretty much So much that playing videogames during a VC meeting can swing them the "right way" if you fit the structure enough
In case anyone doesn't know this reference: https://www.businessinsider.com/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-league...
Most business founders don’t need VC money and are worse off for taking VC money. I find the mindset “my pitch deck was 2 months old so I didn’t get funding” very out of touch of business realities. It is far more likely that that type of business doesn’t need VC funding. Your SaaS can probably be built with your daytime developer salary. No VC ever says “wow, what a great investment opportunity, one of the best, but…
Profitability is optional.
I love this blog post about why Jason Lemkin’s post about passing on a pitch because the pitch deck said March instead of May is a good and normal post. Without this informative content we would not know that Jason Lemkin‘s post was not at all off putting or ridiculous, and we are rightfully brought up to speed on how cool it was, in fact.
Also, "caused an outrage" apparently means "barely got any traction". I guess "VC was wrong and nobody really gave a shit" doesn't have the same ring to it.
This is a good point. When something looks like Jason Lemkin posting something ridiculous on social media, it is actually an opportunity for us to learn of both his fame and the normalcy of his opinions, as well as to be reminded of the high portion of VCs that are good human beings.
For folks that are working on a product right now, given the incentive structures behind venture capital, are there genuine reasons to pursue that kind of money? Let me rephrase: How many folks out there are searching for for some kind of niche business with enough to cover expenses and had some profit in a small scale? I had a short experience with the music industry and the whole enterprise + VC sounds the same dyn…
It's either: only allow companies that are already big to do new things, which they often aren't geared for in various ways, or have a mechanism to allow capital into new businesses from outside, that comes with certain expectations. You're free to decline both the capital and the expectations, of course, because this is a free agreement made between two parties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn’t read this as “10% will become 100B businesses”, I read this as “10% are hot”—probably the author meant “like a team out of OAI” but maybe they meant “like recent rounds of OAI have been”. In any case this post read as sophisticated, reasonable, and helpful, to me.
It's orders of magnitude off. The guy is just LARPing poorly, even lacking common sense. One single OpenAI-tier deal every two years, consistently, would put you into Legendary VC territory.
- Volume: Former founders who hit the jackpot are investing in a bunch of startups every week. There are hundreds of unicorns etc out there, and thousands of Series A's every year. That's a bunch of competitive deals being signed every day!
- Quality: Early silicon valley startups can easily look like openai's early days. With hundreds of unicorns out there, their execs eventually leaving and recruiting smart folks for their next thing happens almost every day. Pitches that are "We're solving X" are a dime a dozen. Likewise, they're each flawed in different ways -- in OpenAI's case, an easy negative phrasing is: no real business plan, positioned mostly as a non-profit R&D lab that'd do open source for Elon Musk to get google IP more easily. Likewise, having Stripe's CTO was one of those cool unicorn exec things, but for 0->1 business, maybe not so obvious, and Sam Altman's only 0->1 gig was running a small failed social mobile social network. It's easy to phrase in positive vs negative lights. Now imagine getting 5 of those on your desk every week, and you only pick 0-3 a year, hoping each win pays for all the duds, and then some...