Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Fred Destin Deliberately Engineers Conflict With Founders Before Investing

Fred Destin · 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired? · Jan 18, 2016 · at 22:07

Fred Destin, General Partner at Accel, explains his pre-investment process for testing founder behavior under pressure and in disagreement.

0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.1s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So I will engineer disagreement, just so we see, like, what are we like in conflict, right? Because you never know about people until they go and get stuff.”

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 Fred Destin

Opinion
Destin Says European Angels Are Overly Risk-Averse and Hate Write-Offs
“Angels are sometimes the worst offenders, because angels are very afraid of losing their money in many cases, especially on the European side. Angels just hate writing shit off.”
Fred Destin Jan 18, 2016 ▶ 19:42 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired?
Opinion
Destin Criticizes VCs for Operating Under a Control Mindset
“VCs are very often assholes because they're in a logic of control. Their viewpoint of the world is like, Hey, you work for me. You have to deliver results. Which is, of course, completely wrong, because the reality is we're only trying to enable a project call…”
Fred Destin Jan 18, 2016 ▶ 20:02 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Destin: Benchmark Gets Discounted Deal Pricing Due to Brand Prestige
“In fact, I bet you benchmark gets discounted pricing on most of what it does because they're benchmarked.”
Fred Destin Jan 15, 2019 ▶ 24:09 20VC: Stride's Fred Destin on The Acceptable vs Non-Acceptable Risks When Investing, How Startup Founders Can Improve The Quality of Their Decision-Making and Must Play for Batting Average & Why Plans Do Not Matter and No Board Member Should Bash An Entre
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Destin: Smart Workflow Automation Will Eliminate 60% to 80% of White-Collar Jobs
“We can take out 60 to 80% of white-collar jobs through smart workflow automation before we're even touching decisioning engines like AI.”
Fred Destin Jan 15, 2019 ▶ 31:33 20VC: Stride's Fred Destin on The Acceptable vs Non-Acceptable Risks When Investing, How Startup Founders Can Improve The Quality of Their Decision-Making and Must Play for Batting Average & Why Plans Do Not Matter and No Board Member Should Bash An Entre
Opinion
Destin: VCs claiming 'business as usual' in crisis are unhelpful to founders
“It's, I believe, extremely unhelpful for founders to go out there with a message that says, we are open for business as usual, because nothing about this is usual.”
Fred Destin Apr 8, 2020 ▶ 3:13 20VC: Are VCs Still "Open For Business", How VCs Attitude To Risk Has Changed & The 2 Most Valuable Assets To Founders Today with Fred Destin, Founding Partner @ Stride VC
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Destin: Deliveroo has almost no customer overlap with Just Eat or Delivery Hero
“We have almost no overlap with Just Eat or Delivery Hero.”
Fred Destin Jan 18, 2016 ▶ 7:38 20VC: Fred Destin @ Accel on Why Startups Fail & Founders Get Fired?
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.