Wagner: Balancing guardrails and autonomy accelerates VC investor learning
Peter Wagner · Peter Wagner: 27 Years of Investing Lessons of Picking Founders, Price Discipline & Reserve | E1123 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 6, 2024 · at 12:55
Peter Wagner is Founding Partner at Wing VC and former Managing Partner at Accel. He reflects on how venture firms effectively train junior investors.
0:00 / 0:26exact quote · 26.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And then you give that person both enough rope to hang themselves so that they're, you know, feeling tremendous accountability. You know, what will be called the sleepless night factor. But also guardrails that protect them from making, you know, really egregious you know, blunders, right? And so this combination of guardrails and enough rope to hang yourself is sort of the magic of it, and it accelerates learning tremendously”
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 Peter Wagner
Wagner: SoftBank and mega-funds pollute good startup opportunities with excess capital
“There's certainly lots of otherwise good opportunities that have been polluted or dragged down by, you know, whatever soft bank showing up, and, you know, or any other number of people that, that we can name”
Peter Wagner: VCs Funding Capital-Intensive Sectors Are Repeating Bubble Mistakes
“Yes. And you know, and you can get away with it sometimes, just like I got away with it, with that early deal. If you can find, you know, other people's money on advantageous terms to sort of fund you through you know, the valley of death there you know, like,…”
Wagner: Excessive fund scale gets in the way of VC excellence
“The adventure is a scale game. Like, I think it actually kind of runs quite the opposite, that excessive scale, you know, gets in the way of excellence. So, you know, you can be too small too, you know, don't get me wrong, and scale, scale has its benefits, bu…”
Wagner: VC partners are rarely punished for consensus mistakes
“There's this kind of safety in the herd thing, and I, a belief within, you know, firms and partners, and not incorrect, that if they're making the same mistake that everyone else in the industry is making, they probably won't be punished for it, because, you k…”