Opinion certainty 4/5 debate potential 4/5

Sam Altman's advice to wait for YC is selfish and poor

Dave McClure · 20VC: 500 Startups' Dave McClure on Whether Unicorns Are Necessary For Venture Returns & Why Ownership Is Not The Math To Think About When Investing · Aug 15, 2016 · at 17:11

Dave McClure, co-founder of 500 Startups, responds to advice from Y Combinator president Sam Altman regarding accelerator alumni and whether entrepreneurs should join non-YC programs.

0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 17.0s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think that's kind of laughable and actually probably really poor advice for entrepreneurs. Usually I think Sam and YC in general is an amazing program, and they offer lots of benefits and advice. In this particular case, I think they were being a little bit more selfishly directed about their advice to entrepreneurs.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Dave McClure

Insight
Venture math should focus on probability distributions, not ownership percentages
“But the point that I was making with Michael is that ownership really isn't the math that we use to kind of think about how we invest. We really think more in terms of number of investments and the likely probability distribution of finding large outcomes. And…”
Dave McClure Aug 15, 2016 ▶ 8:56 20VC: 500 Startups' Dave McClure on Whether Unicorns Are Necessary For Venture Returns & Why Ownership Is Not The Math To Think About When Investing
Insight
Predictably hitting unicorns requires investing in 200 to 500 startups
“If we find, you know, unicorn only two percent of the time, or heaven forbid, one percent of the time, our portfolio size needs to be a minimum of 50 to a hundred to really have a shot at that, and I would argue, actually, we are aiming for more than one unico…”
Dave McClure Aug 15, 2016 ▶ 7:47 20VC: 500 Startups' Dave McClure on Whether Unicorns Are Necessary For Venture Returns & Why Ownership Is Not The Math To Think About When Investing
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Early rounds for Lyft, Credit Karma, and Twilio were uncompetitive
“When we invested in Lyft out of FB Fund, I guess it was called Zimride at the time, and when we invested in Credit Karma and Twilio they were not really that competitive rounds, even though, you know, the founders were compelling most of the time.”
Dave McClure Aug 15, 2016 ▶ 5:33 20VC: 500 Startups' Dave McClure on Whether Unicorns Are Necessary For Venture Returns & Why Ownership Is Not The Math To Think About When Investing
Insight
Overemphasis on venture signaling indicates underlying company performance issues
“My perspective on this is typically that if the founder or other investors are more worried about my investment decision than the baseline performance of the company, there's already likely some kind of problem there.”
Dave McClure Aug 15, 2016 ▶ 13:53 20VC: 500 Startups' Dave McClure on Whether Unicorns Are Necessary For Venture Returns & Why Ownership Is Not The Math To Think About When Investing
Disclosure
500 Startups has invested in over 100 Y Combinator companies
“We've been investors through our seed investment program in a bunch of YC companies, over a hundred. I think we're actually one of the top three or four investors in YC companies over the years.”
Dave McClure Aug 15, 2016 ▶ 17:32 20VC: 500 Startups' Dave McClure on Whether Unicorns Are Necessary For Venture Returns & Why Ownership Is Not The Math To Think About When Investing
Disclosure
McClure passed on investing in Uber multiple times, starting at seed
“Clearly Uber was the deal that I totally fucked up. Travis gave me the opportunity to invest in June of... The reality is I didn't invest multiple times, not just in the seed realm, so it's probably my mistake multiple times over.”
Dave McClure Aug 15, 2016 ▶ 23:30 20VC: 500 Startups' Dave McClure on Whether Unicorns Are Necessary For Venture Returns & Why Ownership Is Not The Math To Think About When Investing
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.