Some VC Insights

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This recent episode, 20VC Roundtable: Is the Venture Model Broken? was one of the best I’ve heard in close to ten years of listening.

I found myself jotting down a few notes. Listen to the whole thing, but here are some of the highlights:

  • VCs tend to jump to the “next big thing” (Crypto, AI, etc.) because that’s how you get markups on your investments. But, by definition, the “next big thing” isn’t contrarian and, in theory, wouldn’t be where the outsized returns are. There is an interesting conflict for VCs between showing a good markup and getting actual returns.

  • In venture, patience is an arbitrage.

  • The true outlier investments, in theory, are the cheap investments. That’s because they’re truly contrarian, and nobody wants to invest in them.

  • Pre-product-market-fit, stay as lean as possible. If you get ahead of the market, the team will have built things that aren’t perfectly aligned to the market, and they’ll develop opinions about what the market needs based on what you have and what’s been built. Slow that down and make sure the market is pulling and you’re not pushing.

  • When you have product-market fit, your next customer should be marginally more attractive than the last one. e.g., you shouldn’t have to be straining your offering to get more customers. At some point, everyone should want it.

  • Often, a company’s go-to-market is better than its product-market fit, and you can fool yourself into thinking you’ve found it.