Hankes: Rigid Metric Pattern-Matching Causes Major Venture Capital Mistakes
Vince Hankes · Vince Hankes: Why We Put $300M into OpenAI; Sam Altman's Pitch; Lessons from Josh Kushner | E1009 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · May 3, 2023 · at 47:30
Vince Hankes, Partner at Thrive Capital, explains how venture investors ruin potential deals by forcing startups into standard metric templates instead of understanding their qualitative differentiation.
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“You can't walk in biased about what you're looking for out of the metrics of a company or what the product should result in in metrics. You should walk in and try to have a very open mind and say, do these metrics explain the qualitative of the business that I'm so excited about and reinforce why it's special. And if you think those things are true, I think then you should lean into it a lot more and try to really get to the guts of, could it be a great investment? But ultimately when you get too, and I see this a lot with investors, when you get too pattern matchy on why companies should be the way they are, I think it leads to a lot of mistakes.”
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