Kashyap: Venture capitalists judge founders too quickly in one-hour meetings
Nagraj Kashyap · 20VC: Why Young VCs Must Have Cheque Writing Ability & Why Corporate VC Is The Best Training Ground For New VCs with Nagraj Kashyap @ Microsoft Ventures · Apr 12, 2017 · at 19:50
Nagraj Kashyap, head of Microsoft Ventures, discusses why VCs should strive to understand a founder's context and journey rather than rushing to judgment.
0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 15.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I feel that myself, you know, VCs and myself included, we pass judgment too quickly. We meet a company. We really don't know what journey they went through before they got To presenting us across the table, but you know, they basically get an hour and we pass judgment on whether that's good or bad.”
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 Nagraj Kashyap
Kashyap: Corporate VC is a better training ground than traditional VC
“And I think that's why I think corporate VC is a great training ground. You cannot necessarily do the things I'm talking about in a normal financial VC environment, but in the corporate VC environment, you can do these things”
Kashyap: Smart non-VCs can be trained into successful venture capitalists
“Basically, what I learned was you can absolutely take young professionals who are smart, who are just pure smart, who have never done VC, and you can train them.”
Kashyap: Corporate VCs foster greater diversity than traditional VC firms
“Historically, it's been very, very hard to see how there's sort of just a fundamental lack of diversity in the way it is, and I sort of trace it back to a little bit of the inflexibility with the VC model, and the financial VC model, and why I think corporate …”
Kashyap: Developing young VCs requires letting them write small checks early
“The lessons I've learned which have worked well is, you hire what you think are the best, smartest people, you give them responsibility very early on, and you give them responsibility by letting them essentially write small checks, make small investments”
Kashyap: Letting junior VCs make small mistakes prevents bigger errors later
“If a newly minted VC wants to write a small check, and you think that's a mistake, many times you'll say, why don't you go ahead and do it? And what happens is, If it turns out it didn't work out, they will never again do it again.”