The Wisdom Wall
10 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“If we start, all we're doing, we're investing more money in late stages. We're lowering our returns. That's all we're doing because our commitment is fixed. It's not like we're going to be more committed. So we're, you could say we're getting more cash on cash for, yeah, but we're lowering our returns.”
“Our customer isn't, it's not the founder. We say it is, but it's really the purpose of the founder, and it turns out that purpose, if that's the customer, One of us may be deviating from that, and we can keep each other accountable, and that happens internally.”
“we have faith that every year, some number above zero companies will be founded that are going to be worth more than ten billion dollars, and then about every two or three years, a company's going to be found out it's going to be worth more than a hundred billion, and it seems to be independent of the cycle.”
“One benchmark, no pun intended, I guess, one measure of quality for the firm will be how good our failures are. Webvan was a really good failure.”
“It turns out that a bad idea well executed is a problem because then you give it more money. Or a good idea, poorly executed, well, that hurts because you think, oh, I mean, we can think of companies like Friendster and think, oh, but the bad idea of poorly executed is kind of an apex.”
“The founding two or three employees set the culture. And it doesn't change unless there's some catastrophic event where it has to get reborn, but good luck with Elon at Twitter. You know, that culture was set in motion, and its root system goes so deep.”
“One of the things I found is when there's secondary selling, it does tend to clarify people's interest in price. It's one thing if you're just selling this, you know, equity on the cap table, but when you're selling your own shares, you start to get really focused on the, you know, we're not running an auction, but it…”
“firms are full of strategies that aren't coupled to reality. And if you look at a venture firm, eventually it's just a collection of habits.”
“the problem with the table is that you either have a rectangular structure, which carries power structure embedded in it, Um, or you have a circular table which atomizes the group.”
“When I don't have enough time to take that next marginal meeting, I shouldn't be practicing.”