201–210 of 383 posts
The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It's more about whether you're smart enough and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutiona…
The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It's more about whether you're smart enough and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutiona…
VCs manage risk differently than bankers, but they still need some form of assurance that their investment will bear fruit. They are not as rigid as bankers but they are still in the same position of having to rely on proxy signals to predict the future.
They can catch more non-conformist value builders† but not every single one.
†For a VC, innovation is a means to building value, not an end to itself. Often the 2 are used interchangeably but only the finances matter in the end.
The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It's more about whether you're smart enough and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutiona…
I think “nepotism” might be more succinct?
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…
> Your SaaS can probably be built with your daytime developer salary Sure. But from experience it takes 3x as long. After a long day of coding it’s not fun to come home and do another 8 hours.
The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It's more about whether you're smart enough and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutiona…
> can't imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Nikola Tesla passing these VC/Ivy League kinds of tests. My "favorite" "test" is the one more for soft studies (think law or public policy) rather than STEM: for example UN internships typically have no compensation and they often require you to relocate to extremely expensive CoL areas, meaning there is an automatic filter built in where only children of very well-off paren…
Imo the easiest way to get a VC Analyst internship is to do EECS@Cal/MIT or CS@Stanford with a Business (or in Cal+Stanford's case Econ or MS&E) minor, do a SWE internship in Frosh summer, and be prominent in your university's entrepreneurship or hackathon scene.
That said, my question would be WHY would you want to do that as an undergrad? I'm firmly in the camp that you need to build domain experience in the industry you are investing in, and that takes a decade of SWE, PM, and Sales experience - and that is reflected by the career trajectory of most VCs I work with.
Edit: This is not a snipe at Top Programs and VC Analyst roles. They have value in incubating new founders (plenty of successful YC founders have been VC Analysts who leveraged their VC network to start a successful startup).
Most of the replies below are just salty.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole "hate VCs" thing is kind of silly in my opinion. VC wouldn't exist if founders didn't want and need capital and have no other way of getting it. Also, for every other "evil VC" story, there are other stories where founders are really happy with their VC board members, have a strong and positive relationship with their VC partners, and end up getting some kind of positive exit which wouldn't have happened at…
VC wouldn't exist if founders didn't want and need capital and have no other way of getting it. This is too reductive. A lot of founders have to raise because they're competing with other companies with VC funding, often dumping their product on the market at a loss to starve out bootstrapped competitors and lock in customers.
There are many valuable and amazing businesses where self-funding/bootstrapping doesn't work. Or businesses which start out as one thing, get VC money and experiment, try to find product/market fit over a year or two, and then hit it big and create something really valuable to the market.
I agree that many companies would be better bootstrapping and creating a sustainable, profitable businesses, but the truth is, the VC model and ecosystem does enable certain businesses to exist which wouldn't exist otherwise as people wouldn't work for that long for free or almost no income.
The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It's more about whether you're smart enough and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutiona…
I think “nepotism” might be more succinct?
So let’s add criminal corruption.
Don’t take my word for it, Carmack publicly expressed regret at not fighting it harder.
And on hacker news? I don’t really care if someone disagrees with Engine John.
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I'd say Jobs would have blown them away. He was a businessman and an obsessive who knew when to focus on the design versus the product versus the money. If investors in his era wanted a perfect pitch deck, his pitch deck would have been perfect. Tesla might have been more likely to focus on having the tech working at the expense of everything else.
Nah. I know a VC that passed on Apple because Steve was 20 min late to their meeting.
If he did make it to an important investor meeting, he'd sit there massaging his naked dirty feet.
Like it or not - the business world requires some level of shallow ritual you have to buy into.
The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It's more about whether you're smart enough and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutiona…
In my little experience, most of the deals I see closing with VCs are because they/we were already linked to VCs through strong trust networks or directly. I see more deals that are close just by phoning/messaging someone that following the typical startup funding round that is read on Internet. Not saying that most of the cases are not hard work from the startup team but saying that if I would have to raise funds I…
This is the most common piece of advice all VCs and Founders give. Even YC has called it out on multiple occasions
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I think “nepotism” might be more succinct?
Nepotism to me implies a kind of incompetence, in that people are selected purely for their relationship to the decision maker. I don’t think these people are generally incompetent at all, although certainly some exceptions exist. It’s more that the filtering mechanism eliminates anyone that doesn’t color in the lines exactly.