Dave Morin

Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Offline Ventures · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorfounderexecutivehost@davemorin ↗LinkedIn ↗davemorin.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

An early Facebook employee who co-created the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect, Morin subsequently co-founded and served as CEO of the mobile social network Path. He went on to co-found Slow Ventures and later founded Offline Ventures, an early-stage venture studio and fund.

11statements → 2claims → 0claims resolved → 3.73/5average certainty → 2.09/5average debate potential → 4.1/5argument clarity · the sources → 24said about them ↓

2 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 2 opinions · 4 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Dave argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.1 / 5 directness 4.2 · coherence 4.3 · precision 4.1 · compression 3.2

redirected or did not address 1 of 12 assessed questions (8%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

231 words/min while actually speaking · 26.7 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,815 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 0/10

pushed back at the host 1/10

setup questions received 85%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 12:25“How does that then affect Your investment decision making process when you go from scaling up from like 25 K checks to now with a sixty five million fund. And how does the addition…” ▶ 16:37“How much of a role does ownership Stake and valuation then play when it comes to investment decision making?” ▶ 9:15“I guess what was behind the decision to formalize the structure and get institutional LPs on board, and how did that change your investment thought process?”

What they said11 What others said24 Episodes1

Everything Dave Morin said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Morin: Slow Ventures Targets 2% to 5% Ownership Over Traditional 20%

“At the size of funds that, that we are at today you know, we think we can create performance at the two to five percent level of ownership. Do that across many companies rather than needing to just be at the 20, 30% your traditional fund might target along wit…”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 17:07 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

Opinion

Morin: Entrepreneurial Drive Is Innate and Instantly Identifiable

“If you're an entrepreneur. It's just innate. Like, it's really clear to me. Like, I can tell that you're a purebred entrepreneur from, like, across the ocean and having never talked to you on the phone. Like, it's just, like, super clear. You know, when you ha…”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 6:30 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

Opinion

Morin: Silicon Valley Culture Is Workaholic and Transactional

“I think in Silicon Valley, we have a workaholic culture is really sort of transactional.”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 8:23 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Morin: Biotech and Software Intersection Starts 30-Year Shift Like PCs

“I really think that we're on, we're at the beginning of a thirty-year journey that's similar to the personal computer that is going to Be based on genomics, technology, and software.”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 24:53 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

Insight

Morin: Venture Partnerships Are Like Marriages Requiring Collective Decision-Making

“I think of it as building out a marriage more than anything, you know, it requires really honest and open communication and, An eye towards the collective rather than, you know, a single person benevolent dictatorship.”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 14:13 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

Disclosure

Morin: Slow Ventures Averages $250K to $1M Checks and Avoids Board Seats

“You'll see that we today, you know, average between 250 K to one million dollars going into most companies. However, we don't take board seats unless it's something that we're extremely passionate about.”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 16:49 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Morin: VC Funds Must Adopt Traditional Strategies as Fund Sizes Grow

“I think that over time, as funds get larger, have to play the more traditional game, but right now, this is working pretty well for us.”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 17:46 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

Insight

Morin: Traditional Media Must Connect Niche Communities Peer-to-Peer

“Most of those media companies have been talking in a one-to-many kind of way with their community, rather than trying to generate and take their community and connect it to itself and enable people to contribute and Meet each other, connect to each other”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 19:10 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

Insight

Morin: Having Children Is a Fundamental Operating System Upgrade

“I think having kids is an operating system upgrade. You know, it's one of those things that's impossible to describe. Once you go through it, you can't go back. I love the saying that once you have toast, you can't turn it back into bread again. It really is a…”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 23:01 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

Disclosure

Morin Founded Slow Ventures in 2009 While Still at Facebook

“I started Slow in late 2009, actually while I was still at Facebook.”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 3:15 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

Disclosure

Morin: The First Two Slow Ventures Funds Were $1M Each

“The first two slow funds were only a million US dollars, you know, enabled a lot of 25 K, 50 K, a hundred K kind of investing”

Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 5:01 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures

The other half of the tape: Dave Morin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 23 times in 11 episodes on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 13 Wayne Chang 1 Scott Belsky 1 Sam Lessin 1 Matt Mazzeo 1

Statements about Dave Morin, by other people (1)

Assertion Supported

Path Attempted a Close-Friend Network by Placing Caps on Friend Counts

“There was a social network called Path, which had been started a few years earlier by Dave Morin, who had explicitly set out to try to build a use case for close friends. He did it by trying to cap the number of friends you could have.”

Jeremy Liew Feb 24, 2021 ▶ 23:10 20VC: The Snapchat Memo: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on The 4 Key Elements To Consider When Evaluating A Consumer Social Product, What is Good/Great/World Class For Retention, Usage and Downloads in Consumer Social Today & The Core Insight Development of Eva