Everything Ted Wang said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Lean startup methodology fails when trying to compete against Amazon
“There's no lean startup methodology that's going to get you into competing with something like Amazon”
Founders bear total accountability for failure, even if following investor advice
“You know, ultimately for founders, if you do exactly what you're told to do by your investors and the company fails, you're a failure. If you don't do what they say and it's successful, you're a success. So ultimately the decision is in the hands of the founde…”
Government can be a force for good despite Silicon Valley libertarianism
“I believe the government can work for us. Being here in Silicon Valley, there's a very strong libertarian ideology, and there's a very strong notion that, oh, government's just this terrible thing, and it can never work, and it's always screwed up, and I worke…”
Startup risk cannot be mitigated or eliminated, only chosen
“So I think the biggest miscalculation people make about risk is that they think that there are ways to mitigate certain risks when actually it's just a matter of which risk you're going to choose to take.”
First-time founders cannot execute Jet.com's hyper-capital-intensive playbook
“I don't think that, you know, a first time founder is going to be able to pull something like that off”
Wang admits he was "dead wrong" thinking VC ownership targets were stupid
“When I was a lawyer watching other venture capitalists amass their portfolios, I really didn't understand, you know, why they were so focused on percentage ownership. And I sort of thought it was, it sounded pretty stupid to me, to be honest with you. And now …”
VCs add value primarily through alternative perspectives and portfolio benchmarking
“Yeah, well, look, I mean, I think first thing is understanding the limits of what you know, and so I think there are really kind of two core value adds that venture capitalists can have for When, as they give advice, you know, one is sort of, Hey, here's a dif…”
A founder's ability to learn is most highly correlated with startup success
“Yeah, well, look, I think if there's one factor that is most highly correlated with success of a Startup companies. It's the founder's ability to learn, and I just think it's the most critical thing, because ultimately, as they take on the company, as the comp…”
Wang estimates he has completed around 10,000 venture financing transactions
“Now, if we're talking about something like venture financing and, you know, I've probably done 10,000 of those, I may lean in a little bit more heavily, heavily on my advice and say, gee, you know, I hear what you're saying, but you really might want to listen…”
Improving predictive skill requires breaking problems down and shortening feedback loops
“What that book says is if you want to, the first answer is yes, some people are better at predicting the future, and the people who are tend to take these complex problems and break them down into subparts, and then the best way to improve your ability to pred…”
Wang evaluates venture deals using a 10-category spreadsheet scoring system
“You know, so I'm, what I'm trying to do is for companies that go into a longer process, I am recording all this data. So it's, when I say data, it's on a spreadsheet and it's 10 entries scaled on a scale of one to 10.”
Ted Wang
20VC 1