David Sze: Venture investment decisions require a three-step heart-head-heart process
David Sze · 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function · Apr 19, 2021 · at 26:31
David Sze, General Partner at Greylock, outlines his personal framework for making venture investment decisions when balancing quantitative data with founder conviction.
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“I tend to start with the heart, which is, I have to, like, sort of fall in love with the idea, or fall in love with the founder, or some combination of that, and what it could be. Then you go to the head, and you do all your work, and you crunch all the numbers, and you find all the data you can. But at the end of the day, if you've done a lot of work as an analyst in your history, or done a lot of the analysis, you know, at some point, you can make the numbers say whatever you want. If you twist that Excel spreadsheet, or you play with that Google Doc. So you have to go back to the heart again, After you've done those two steps, and unify it all, and make the call. That, for me, is my process. It's sort of heart, head, heart, back again to make the call.”
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