August Capital partner David Hornik gives his candid assessment of Peter Thiel's 20 Under 20 fellowship program when asked during a quickfire round.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
David Hornik: Google is best positioned to become the first $1T company
“I think that I think that Google is in the best position to do it today.”
Opinion
Hornik: Legal training is a terrible asset for venture capitalists
“Well, largely venture, sorry, lawyers are trained to be to be very conservative, right? They're, the training is to sit, to find all of the problems that one might run into, and to try and you know, worry about those things, and not say to yourself, what are t…”
Insight
Hornik: Big tech giants are slowly morphing into the same company
“I think that if you look at what Amazon is doing, what Google is doing, what Facebook is doing, they all are slowly but surely, and in many ways Apple, they're all slowly but surely morphing into the same company.”
Insight
Hornik: Starting a startup is unreasonable and extraordinarily unlikely to succeed
“Now, the reality is that, of course, it's completely unreasonable to start a startup. They're extraordinarily hard. It's extraordinarily unlikely they succeed.”
Disclosure
Hornik: August Capital investments Ebates, Zulily, and Splunk were multi-billion-dollar exits
“Valuable investments that, that we have made in, you know, the Ebates or Zulily or Splunk were all multi-billion dollar outcomes.”
Insight
Hornik: Venture funds require billion-dollar addressable markets because startups capture small fractions
“You really need to have markets that that, that span billion dollars of available opportunity, because in all likelihood, you're going to get small fractions of those markets, and it's incumbent upon you to then you know, eek, eek out your hundreds of millions…”