[HN Gopher] Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested i...
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Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
Author : ceonyc
Score : 198 points
Date : 2020-05-04 12:29 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.feedback.vc)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.feedback.vc)
| mgamache wrote:
| I am not sure what value this post is besides a sales pitch for
| the poster. Don't mean to be overly critical, but really the
| number one factor is always customers. Do you have any? Also, How
| do you get more (cost of acquiring customers)? Market size? I
| suppose that's in the "underlying economics" section, but that's
| such a common question it should be addressed. VCs are looking
| for 100x return. Can you meet in person (or Zoom these days) and
| present yourself well? etc...
| onion2k wrote:
| _Don 't mean to be overly critical, but really the number one
| factor is always customers. Do you have any?_
|
| This is 100% true and 10,000% annoying. Effectively it blocks
| anyone who has an idea for an idea for a business that needs
| seed capital from competing unless they're already wealthy
| (directly or able to raise funds from within their own network
| of friends and family). 15 years ago seed capital was exactly
| that - money that was available to fund a startup based on
| little more than an idea and a persuasive team. It was
| _massively_ high risk but that was kind of the point. The taste
| for risk that VCs once had is gone. Today what people call seed
| rounds are really Series A. You need to have already done the
| high risk proof of concept work and actually have something on
| the market before VCs will take your call.
|
| That's entirely up to VCs of course. If they want to do that
| they can. And no doubt they'll still make a lot of money. But
| society as a whole is faced with dull ideas thought up by
| middle class kids who want "innovative" ways to pay someone to
| do their chores because of it, and that pisses me off a lot.
|
| End Rant.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Isn't this down to the rise of angel investors, though? I
| feel like that concept has exploded in the last decade, and
| established VC's have moved "up market" in response to it--
| hence their first look is now more like a Series A than a
| seed.
|
| Has available seed capital declined overall or is it just
| coming from different places now?
| [deleted]
| GuiA wrote:
| Well, that's what happens when everything "standardizes"
| after the initial wave of disruption.
|
| 15 years ago, there weren't any "programming bootcamps" or
| "entrepreneurship workshops" or "become a UX ninja in 7 days
| crash course" to the extent that there is today, Harvard MBAs
| didn't give much of a crap about working in tech, computer
| science students were there for the nerdy stuff, not because
| they wanted to be the next Zuckerberg.
|
| There just isn't much risk left in tech. The path is that now
| you start a weird crypto startup (which aren't even that
| weird anymore because there's dozens of them) while you're
| comfy at Stanford, you hope to get a fat check before you
| graduate, and if not you go work to Google. Or you quit
| Google, start your company, get some investment because you
| were at Google after all, and hopefully a few years later
| your startup gets bought by Google.
|
| Tech startups just aren't weird and new and unknown anymore,
| as far as the money people are concerned. Does it fit their
| idea of what a company on its way to a billion dollar
| valuation looks like? If yes write a check, if not tell them
| thank you and let the next team in.
| mgamache wrote:
| This is correct. Big capital ideas can only be funded by
| wealthy people who have the ideas. Wealthy people by
| definition, have an interest in perpetuating the system that
| made them wealthy.
| toohotatopic wrote:
| >This is 100% true and 10,000% annoying. Effectively it
| blocks anyone who has an idea for an idea for a business that
| needs seed capital from competing unless they're already
| wealthy
|
| There's your startup. Get some money and invest it in all
| those teams that need initial funding.
|
| You may also want to establish an online forum for young
| entrepreneurs and engineers to hang out and discuss news and
| ideas so that they know about you and approach you once they
| need the funding.
| nwsm wrote:
| > But society as a whole is faced with dull ideas thought up
| by middle class kids who want "innovative" ways to pay
| someone to do their chores because of it, and that pisses me
| off a lot.
|
| If true:
|
| 1) VCs will stop making money, or there is an endless money
| stream available to boring startups as long as the barrier to
| entry is kept up.
|
| 2) We will see stagnation in many industries but particularly
| tech, which will only make it easier for actual innovation to
| shine.
|
| The endless money stream bit could be true, but if we accept
| that it negates 2), we should just give up anyway (or shift
| all focus to politics until it's solved).
| wpietri wrote:
| I don't disagree, but 15 years ago it was much more expensive
| to do a startup. This was before AWS and Rails was just
| getting started, so just getting something up and visible was
| a major technological effort. Now I can spend a day writing
| some Terraform code and have an infinitely scalable, load-
| balanced cluster up and running. A day later and I can have a
| decent-looking basic CRUD app on the cluster.
|
| Then I can spin a lot of the other work off to pay-as-you-go
| SaaS tools. Payments, sales support, CRM, support, marketing,
| analytics, feature flags, landing pages, A/B testing: all of
| these are things I don't have to build any more. And now
| thanks to the rise of things like Slack, Zoom, and Trello,
| remote and/or part-time work is much more tenable, meaning we
| don't need an office and full-time commitment to get going.
|
| So yes, VCs are going to take minimum risk for maximum
| return. But they always have. What's different now is that
| you don't need to convince some rando that you need $250k in
| seed money just to find out if your idea might work. If it
| does, you'll at least be in a better negotiating position.
| And maybe you won't need to seek investment at all.
| est31 wrote:
| > This was before AWS and Rails was just getting started,
| so just getting something up and visible was a major
| technological effort.
|
| Before rails there was LAMP. That's what Facebook used.
| Java servlets existed as well. And rented clouds existed
| before AWS as well. Despite the hype for them on pages like
| this, neither AWS nor Rails were really big disrupting
| inventions. The market for both existed before them, and
| will exist after they've fallen out of favour.
|
| Where innovation happened is in the scaling domain.
| Terraform, kubernetes, etc, as well as in the SaaS tools
| you mentioned. But most of those things aren't needed for
| earliest stage startups. You don't need to be super
| scalable from day one. You can just run everything from one
| very powerful box for a while.
|
| Of course this all depends on what your application is. If
| your product is a cloud based tool to post process movies,
| it will be a different setting from a CRUD app to plan
| events.
| wpietri wrote:
| In some sense, nothing has been really disruptive since
| the web browser. But that doesn't matter because what I'm
| talking about is reduced cost, reduced accidental
| complexity, reduced systemic latency.
|
| Having lived through it, it's just loads easier to get
| something up and going these days. I ended up back in
| some Java code again recently, and servlets are a) a
| pain, and b) a general-purpose abstraction. They're
| adequate for a lot of things, but not particularly great
| at anything. Whereas these days people have had 15 years
| to come up with special-purpose code to accelerate all
| sorts of common activities. My point wasn't that AWS and
| Rails were the only good things that happened in 15
| years. It's that those, which now seem old and boring,
| were near beginning of a whole wave of innovation aimed
| at making it easy to have a consumer-grade user
| experience up and running.
| onion2k wrote:
| The problem is that if your idea _isn 't_ a CRUD app then
| finding funding to pay for the expenses is effectively
| impossible outside of raising from friends and family. VC
| funds (and _especially_ public money that VCs control)
| should be invested in genuine innovation, not yet-another-
| Uber-for-meal-kits.
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree that would be nice if it were true. But that's
| manifestly not the business VCs are in. Their behavior is
| a pretty predictable outcome of our society's current
| ideology around capital.
|
| That could change, of course. The pandemic is making it
| clear how threadbare that ideology is, so perhaps we'll
| return to valuing things beyond a high rate of
| shareholder return.
| mgamache wrote:
| Sure executing some ideas are cheaper and infrastructure
| can be purchased cheaply. But this covers a subset of all
| startups. For example: Let's say you wanted to do a med-
| tech startup. You'll have to work for at least two years
| without pay to get a non-medical device product launched.
| wpietri wrote:
| Undoubtedly. And I'd bet that in those areas you can
| still find seed money before you get customers. My point
| wasn't, "All startups are easy now!"
|
| It was that investors aren't going to pay for anything
| they don't have to. If there's a sufficient stream of
| web/mobile based startups coming to them who already have
| some proof, they're going to be much less likely to fund
| people who don't have that proof yet.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| Excerpt:
|
| The Problem & Market Segment - Moderate to Strong Predictor
|
| "This would have been a stronger predictor had it not been for a
| few outliers at the top. Aside from a few companies who got a
| high number of intros despite scoring relatively low here, this
| was overall a very good predictor of who get intros. Picking the
| right problem to work on seemed more important than having the
| right solution by more than 2x.
|
| So what was the most important factor?
|
| Which area, if a VC only knew one thing about your company, was
| the most predictive of enticing a VC to want to meet?
|
| Some founders might be disappointed, because its that age old
| question that they love to hate...
|
| _"How does it make money??"
|
| Yes, the underlying economics of the business was the strongest
| predictor of whether a VC wanted an intro over any other aspect
| of the company. Founders who could clearly articulate an economic
| opportunity fared really well with investor interest._"
|
| Hmm, reminds me of some song lyrics...
|
| "Come on, come on, listen to the money talk..."
|
| -AC/DC "Money Talks"
|
| Observation: Just as Scientists talk science, and Lawyers talk
| law, Venture Capitalists speak "Venture Capitalese", aka "Money",
| aka, "How much money could I the VC make with this?
|
| That, and _give me compelling proof of what you 're saying in
| under a minute..._"
|
| Ideas, on the other hand, even great ones (to a VC point of
| view!) are the proverbial "dime a dozen" (or less even! An idea
| and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee... Or, an idea and
| five dollars will get you a cup of coffee if you go to
| Starbucks...<g>)
| lasky wrote:
| stop worrying about VC's. trust me, it's a rabbit hole of pain
| and perpetual disempowerment.
|
| better to focus on figuring out what perspective you're currently
| missing to how you can better help your customers THRIVE.
| wyck wrote:
| Analyzing common sense seems to be getting more popular.
| arxpoetica wrote:
| That site needs the base font to be bumped up by 400% or more.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Love it - there's a startup in analyzing startup chances.
| streetcat1 wrote:
| To iterate is human, to recurse, divine.
| bosswipe wrote:
| How do they measure team quality? Is it just number of elite
| school and FAANG alumni?
| racecondition wrote:
| I would imagine they know the difference between a team full of
| "ideas" people who answer the question of "how will you solve
| this problem" by saying "easy, we don't need to code, were
| "business people" we will higher an offshore team in India for
| cents on the dollar to code this for us overnight."
|
| Where software development is just an example of one of the
| skills you would need
|
| Vs.
|
| "We prototyped this ourselves based on our experience coding
| with best in class teams for scalability, performance and
| optimizing cost savings for scaling (lets say web platform?)
| web platform, and we have a working MVP with some customers
| onboarded and seem to be growing faster than we can handle due
| to demand, and even though we are all pretty good at running
| this platform ourselves, we know some key people we want to
| hire to take over the scaling our existing backend devops teams
| so we can focus on the UX/UI and feature development to respond
| to specific asks from our current customers because we know
| these will keep them on board with us vs our current
| competitors."
|
| In general, they are looking for people who are realistically
| engaged with the resources it needs to implement the solution
| to the problem where many people have the attitude of "I have
| the idea, I will hire minions to do it for me, I just need
| $5million from you to do that so I can hand out tshirts and
| take credit for their work at conferences while my minions do
| the work, duh".
|
| You may think this does not happen. It happens quite alot....
| graycat wrote:
| After contacting many VCs and getting only meager responses, I
| concluded much the same things as in the OP.
|
| The VC Web sites were deceptive: They claimed interest in new,
| advanced, powerful, for big markets, secret sauce, barriers to
| entry, high margins, etc.
|
| Nope. Much as in the OP, the main thing they want is just current
| revenue, or at least proxies such as monthly unique users,
| significant and growing very rapidly.
|
| So, I switched projects to one I can do as a sole, solo founder
| funded with just my checkbook.
|
| Let's get a view of something VCs do not like but their Web sites
| implied they would like:
|
| To the users, my project is just a Web site. The project is a new
| search engine for Internet content. The main _business idea_ ,
| drawing in part from some old work at Battelle, is that quite
| generally keywords are good for only about 1/3rd of content
| search. My project is for the other 2/3rds. Keys in the work are
| some new data and new ways to process that data. The new ways are
| from narrow, advanced pure math and some original applied math I
| derived (users will not be aware of anything mathematical) --
| this use of math is the _intellectual property, trade secret,
| secret sauce, technological advantage and barrier to entry_ ,
| etc.
|
| Status: Code for the project as envisioned, not just a _minimum
| viable product_ , is ready for significant production, say, if
| enough users like the site, a one person company with revenue of
| $10 million a year, nearly all pre-tax earnings.
|
| Team? Just me, and that's enough for now. Qualifications? Plenty
| in computing from IBM's Watson lab and much more. For the math, I
| hold a Ph.D. in applied math from a world class research
| university -- one advisor had other students build on my research
| and was later President at CMU.
|
| Status: Code (.NET and SQL Server) for the project as envisioned,
| not just a _minimum viable product_ , is ready for significant
| production, say, a one person company with revenue of $10 million
| a year, nearly all pre-tax earnings.
|
| Lesson: My project is of zero interest to any well known VC. They
| don't care about any such project. Period.
|
| Before going live, I need to add data -- doing that.
|
| Got delayed by some outside interruptions, e.g., moved.
|
| Early on, but not really now, the work could have been helped by
| some VC funding. Now, if the project gets even $1 million a year
| in revenue, then I will not want or need VCs.
|
| So, net, with VCs, when I would have wanted them, they didn't
| want me; if I get to where they want me, then I won't want them.
|
| There is some advice about VCs: Wait, that is, be successful
| enough, for them to call you. If that time comes, I will just
| check my old files and tell them the dates when I did contact
| them and they were not interested.
|
| I want to make two broad points:
|
| First, the economic shutdown for the COVID-19 pandemic has
| revealed that "50% of the US economy" (whatever the details on
| that are) is "small business". Next, as I have looked around at
| the families doing well, e.g., money enough for a 50' yacht, to
| pay full costs at Harvard, they are nearly all from running a
| family owned business and never got even 10 cents from a VC.
| Okay, start and run such a business where computing, the
| Internet, maybe some _secret sauce_ (now these three can be just
| dirt cheap, less than some people spend in restaurants for a
| year) help but without VC funding.
|
| Point: To do well in the US, don't really need VCs; e.g., nearly
| all the US families doing well are running family owned
| businesses, all across the US and not just along the east and
| west coasts, without any VC funding.
|
| Second, there should be some big opportunities in applying what
| is in the research libraries in math, science, and engineering
| and/or doing and then applying more such research.
|
| This fact has been well known for ~70 years by the US Department
| of Defense, CIA, NSA, Department of Energy, NSF, NIH, CDC, NASA,
| ONR, etc., well known and heavily exploited with huge benefits
| for US national security, health, and economic prosperity. E.g.,
| we got GPS from a project of the USAF. For some decades, there
| were similar contributions from Bell Labs -- information theory
| (e.g., upper bounds on data rates), error correcting codes, the
| transistor, tiny solid state lasers lighting long haul optical
| fibers, etc.
|
| Typically these projects are submitted and approved just on
| paper. The batting average is high: E.g., Keyhole (like Hubble
| but before Hubble and aimed at the ground instead of the stars),
| LIGO, the A-bomb, the H-bomb, the SR-71, navigation satellites
| (first from the US Navy and later from the USAF), nuclear fission
| power, the SSBNs, TCP/IP, NSF Net (now the Internet), DNA
| sequencing (the key to detection of SARS-COV-2 and now maybe to a
| fast vaccine), ..., all worked just as planned, essentially the
| first time, on or close enough to on time and on budget. Batting
| average! ROI!
|
| Gee, if the USAF charged a penny for each use of GPS they would
| have how much money?
|
| If Bell Labs got a penny for each transistor they would have how
| much money?
|
| Point: The VCs just will not evaluate and fund projects presented
| just on paper and, thus, are missing out on such developments.
|
| Final Point: VCs make some money and do at times help some
| projects, but their methods of working are quite narrow, and in
| the US the paths for making money are in principle and at times
| in practice much wider. There is a lot of opportunity doing
| projects the VCs won't fund.
| owens99 wrote:
| Great work by Charlie on this.
|
| As Charlie is an NYC VC, I assume most investors on this are from
| NYC and there may be an Easy Coast bias in the data here. It's a
| stereotype of East Coast VCs to overly focus on monetization
| compared to West Coast.
| rognjen wrote:
| Beware of survivorship bias.
| onebot wrote:
| I would say that absolute best predictor of getting a meeting is
| strong introductions. I hate to say this, but you'll have an
| easier time with a strong network.
|
| A trusted introduction can even overcome a bad deck in some
| cases. But there should be no reason to have a bad deck now-a-
| days as there is ample reference and knowledge share.
|
| First-time founders: Please don't pay for access. Services like
| this, in my opinion, are dubious at best. Work on building a
| network, blogging, open source, meeting other founders, going to
| VC events, tapping your alumni network, etc.
| viklove wrote:
| Best advice is just to be born wealthy so you can use your
| parents "connections," and then go to a top-tier business
| school to make more "connections." The startup scene is so
| boring because there's no diversity of thought when everyone
| comes from the same basic background.
| danenania wrote:
| In tech, my experience is that founders with a business
| school background are a fairly small minority. The most
| common ways to bootstrap connections are getting into an
| accelerator or working at a VC-backed startup.
| pge wrote:
| I wouldn't trust these data, not because there is anything wrong
| with the analysis but because the inputs are inaccurate. What VCs
| say was the reason they were interested is not necessarily what
| made them interested. It may be what they tell themselves or tell
| you, but I think the decision criteria are rarely that objective
| or explicit. Decisions are made, then back justified with a
| plausible explanation.
| derefr wrote:
| Sure, but at the same time, the relationship between founders
| and VCs isn't actually adversarial. VCs _want_ founders to know
| how to pitch them. VCs are not "anti-inductive"+ -- they're not
| shifting their requirements to become stranger and more complex
| every time they're understood. Their needs are fairly stable.
| The main reason that _most_ pitches don't succeed, is that most
| founders are first-time founders, and therefore don't have
| experience at pitching, and therefore make newbie mistakes.
|
| + https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h24JGbmweNpWZfBkM/markets-
| ar...
|
| If you've ever heard publishers talk about the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slush_pile submissions they
| receive, it's much the same: they have clear and stable and
| "knowable" expectations, but authors break them, because most
| authors are new authors submitting their very first manuscript,
| having never gone through this process before, never received
| feedback before, and so never had any data with which to polish
| their approach before.
|
| (The _other_ main reason that VCs and publishers both receive
| so many pitches they don't feel fit them, is that the markets
| they operate in are heavily slanted in their favour, and so
| they don't put much _work_ into making their requirements
| _known_. They often don't put their expectations on their
| websites or anything. This can be circumvented on the supply-
| side, though, by just asking around to find out from other
| submitters what a given buyer is looking for. Some enterprising
| souls have even done the "lazy" supply-side's work for it, and
| compiled indices of the requirements for the buyers in the
| market.)
| wmeredith wrote:
| I came here to say this. User-reported data is unreliable at
| best.
| wpietri wrote:
| 100% agreed. Most VC funds are necessarily good at very
| specific skill: convincing people who control lots of money
| that the VC is smarter and better than their competitors. The
| easiest way to sell that is to truly believe it, and then
| perform that belief convincingly. That's not something one
| switches on and off, so their answers here are likely to be
| skewed in the direction of things that make them look valuable.
|
| Things like "team" and "gut check" are especially useful
| answers for that, because a) it lets VCs sound like intuitive
| geniuses who can't easily be replaced, and b) the I-know-it-
| when-I-see-it nature of those lets VCs smuggle in all sorts of
| irrational biases. As one well-known investor said, "There was
| a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: 'How could
| he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!'" Points for honesty, but
| you can bet that wasn't the official reason they invested.
| racecondition wrote:
| In general I agree with you, but I would say that alot of VCs
| either
|
| 1) diversify their investments amongst many areas in tech (or
| maybe some non tech things, not stereotyping all VCS but for
| this example I'll say diversity of problems being solved
| using technology/software etc) and thus see commonalities of
| problems amongst teams in their experience despite whatever
| the specific niche industry is. I think it is pretty
| important to agree the cofounders are important. Specifically
| I've heard from CEOs of startups I use to work for they are
| really good at hunting out "weaknesses" in the bonds between
| cofounders.
|
| Basically, they don't want a good idea to fall apart because
| two cofoudners fundamentally don't see eye to eye, which will
| make it hard for any decisions they make (whether good or
| bad) to come to fruition and indicates future struggles with
| the company, in addition to weak leadership/unified approach
| when hiring new people, who might be disoriented at
| understanding the direction the company is going in.
|
| 2) Focus on particular niches (a startup who focus
| specifically on funding AI startups, for example) often they
| will even fund competitors knowing that if one of them dies,
| they are almost gauranteed to reep benefits from the
| remaining on in the niche field. This also means they keep a
| close track on the variations between two or more companies
| approach in a specific industry and why one failed and the
| other didn't.
|
| Someone from Marc Andreessen's team recently published a blog
| post going into great depth about 5 factors amongst ten or so
| AI teams that indicated their levels of success in the field,
| and most of the tilting factors are not what I would say is
| common knowledge amongst AI startups.
|
| They may have their biases, but they also have unique
| experience in understanding or seeing repeated dynamics in
| what could make a relationship (between cofounders) fail
| (like seeing that one bad relationship where the couple can't
| see it but it is so obvious to you because youve either now
| been through it or seen it happen before, imagine this for
| VCs looking at cofounders over and over again for ten
| years...) and otherwise have lost lots of money over failed
| business ideas, so I would say they are incentivized to be as
| objective as possible with themselves, even if just selfishly
| for the benefit of their own bank account.
| wpietri wrote:
| If your point is, "Some VCs can be good at their jobs," I
| definitely agree. My point is more that all VCs have a
| strong incentive to _appear_ to be good at their jobs,
| especially in ways that sound impressive and are hard to
| verify.
| dclusin wrote:
| Really surprising your username wasn't taken!
| tlb wrote:
| "Looks like Zuck" meme debunked at
| http://paulgraham.com/tricked.html
| wpietri wrote:
| That's disappointing. I knew it was a joke, of course. But
| I took it as an acknowledgement that he, like all of us,
| has irrational biases that we discover over time. I'm sorry
| to see that it was much less than that.
| Zenst wrote:
| The fact they attended the meeting already shows they are
| interested. What maintained that interest to the end is as you
| say a many forked answer and what they tell you and what they
| are actually thinking will be different.
|
| They may have your company in mind to work with another company
| they know/own down the line, or the other way around and with
| that, see which one works well and breakup the other. That they
| won't outline at the start and yet would be a reason of
| interest in buying.
| btilly wrote:
| The following passage addresses your concern.
|
| _We analyzed the results of our first 500 reviews and
| calculated the correlations between high marks in categories
| like team, problem area and business economics with the number
| of requested intros from our reviewing VCs._
|
| In other words the individual factors were graded, and the VC
| chose whether or not to meet. They are correlating the ranking
| of the components with the likelihood of asking for a meeting.
| They are not relying on the VC explanation of why they asked to
| meet.
|
| I am curious who graded the proposals and how consistent that
| was. It would also be nice to see what good vs bad looks like
| in each category.
| brlewis wrote:
| Yes, that's an important distinction. At the same time, if
| VCs graded individual factors, those grades could themselves
| be rationalizations. For example, they want to meet a
| founder, and give high marks to the categories they _think_
| should be important, not the factor that actually influenced
| them.
| ceonyc wrote:
| They actually weren't "grading" per say. They were
| answering questions like "Have you seen anything else like
| this?" and rating teams with multiple choice answers like
| "This is one of the best teams I've seen." So, they _kind
| of_ know how a company did, but it 's not like they were
| looking at their own scores at the end.
| doh wrote:
| It reminds me the "wrist snap" practice in tennis. I don't
| remember the exact details, but it started because a successful
| tennis player said that's what he does. Shortly after,
| thousands of trainers were teaching the method breaking wrist
| of naive students. It took high speed camera to confirm that no
| players use it [0].
|
| The point is that people micro-tweak their behavior based on
| simple reward mechanism. Most can't explain how they got there.
|
| Top VCs are no different. They remind me chicken sexers (is
| that even a word?), who have differentiate gender by looking at
| their bottoms and quickly able to tell without ever being able
| to explain how they know [1].
|
| With this long dribble I want to encourage founders to develop
| their own intuition. Create a pitch that makes sense to you and
| then tweak based on feedback.
|
| [0] https://www.tacticaltennis.com/tennis-mythbusters-wrist-
| snap...
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-intuition-
| of-...
| ceonyc wrote:
| Tweak based on feedback is exactly right!
|
| Only problem is that VCs normally don't give any!
| doh wrote:
| What I look for is behavior rather than verbal feedback. I
| know where I have hit spots in the presentation. If they
| don't react, then they are not as strong as I thought. If
| they react negatively, I know I didn't explain them well.
|
| But yes, most VCs will never bother follow-up.
| tlb wrote:
| Yes. It's like, if you analyzed reasons for romantic breakups,
| you might conclude many were "It's not you, it's me". Which is
| not "the reason" in the strict sense of a single condition
| that, if you constructed a counterfactual scenario where it
| wasn't true, the breakup wouldn't have happened.
| burtonator wrote:
| When interviewing people and giving feedback there's a non-
| trivial percentage of people that react with hostility to even
| the most constructive criticism.
|
| We're actively recruiting now and it's amazing the amount of
| hostility we receive sometime when someone is rejected.
|
| There's a HIGH false negative rate on our end. Meaning, we're
| going to screw up and walk away from candidates that are
| amazing - but we're unable to realize it in time.
|
| Yet, people will still react negatively.
|
| If I was a VC I would probably quickly learn to just keep my
| mouth shut.
| code4tee wrote:
| It's often been said that VCs invest in people not products and
| there's certainly some truth to that.
|
| That said, having a realistic plan on how your idea turns into a
| sustainable business is certainly key too. That's even more
| important with the economy we're heading into where startups that
| are not financially stable are not long for this earth.
| quezzle wrote:
| I thought VCs were interested in companies with superstar teams
| with a killer idea, an established and lucrative monetization
| mechanism, an established defendable innovative product, in a
| global market with hockey stock growth and for some reason still
| willing to sign ridiculously unfavorable investment terms with no
| downside or risk for the VC at a very low price, but at a very
| high price to the next round of investors to drive up ponzi
| scheme valuations. Oh and a CEO/founder who at first they love
| but later can be shoved out by the board. Or have I been watching
| too much Silicon Valley?
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > Or have I been watching too much Silicon Valley?
|
| Too much, or not enough.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Interesting. Investors are interested in making money on their
| money.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Is "team" a measure of how good the team is in general, or how
| well-suited they are to the area they've chosen to build a
| startup in?
| dclusin wrote:
| Everyone always says team without elaborating on what that
| means. It seems to me it's generally a shorthand for how many
| of your founders/employees went to Harvard, Stanford, Yale,
| etc. You can't say pedigree these days because that doesn't fit
| with the current Bay Area politics.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| What are the demographics of the VCs whose responses are
| summarized here? Were they from a wide array of cultures and
| histories? Were they primarily rich white men?
|
| Ethics in AI would ask us to consider the unconscious bias
| introduced into the algorithm's outcomes. The same interest
| applies to human-generated outcomes. Either way, the input is a
| group of humans making subjective decisions, and since
| unconscious bias survives summarization, it should be accounted
| for.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| There should not be a single factor, sometimes the team make up
| becomes the multiplier factor. Say Jony Ives joins a team solving
| a not so good problem.
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