The Wisdom Wall

“And I think that to the extent these new products get introduced to the industry, it's gonna be because they see an unfair advantage, ah, in their ability to deliver on that because they have this unique insight into, like, what these companies really need and how to serve them.”

“none of this matters if you don't have a compelling brand that I believe can only be forged at the earliest stages.”

“Because if you marry wrong, it's tragic, but you can get a divorce, right? You can make a change. Once you pick a general contractor, and I know this from personal experience, having remodeled the house with my wife a couple years ago, you are stuck with that person. And this is more similar to what it's like working…”

“Don't not take investor meetings because you're not raising. And the reason for that is because you can do it in a contained way that allows you to understand what these people are about and who they are and do you vibe with them or not? And I think the problem with these, like, shotgun processes where, you know, the…”

“That said, um, it's not clear to me that, that construct needs to exist at seed and pre-seed in a way that, uh, necessarily, like, makes the company better off. And so typically what I see is that there are cases where, like, the founder wants to form a board, they want the investor involved at seed, and that's fine.…”

“the big mistake that, uh, some investors make, especially earlier in their career, because thesis driven work is, is a little bit easier to do, uh, than say developing relationships with people, which takes a lot longer. Is they tend to go and find the best company that fits their thesis or is on their market map, and…”

“the moment I lose the desire to go on Hacker News or go on Reddit or go on X and just figure out what's going on in the world and what people I don't know that I should get to know, that's the moment that I should probably hang up my cleats and move on because I just don't think you, you want it bad enough to be great…”

“The, the, the limiting factor is really who do you choose to do that work with, right? You cannot do it with 20 different companies at once. And so there is this element of taste and picking that goes into that that I think you actually have to take very, very seriously.”

“figuring out who that person would be, would be minimum a six month process. The fundraising process thereafter would take Nine to 12 months.”

“as personal a relationship as I have with each founder I work with, I have to remind myself that I was representing Kleiner Perkins on the board of all these companies that I served on, and I think with that, now that I've moved over to Lightspeed, there's this obvious, obvious question as to, like, who should do that…”

“you can think of carry similar to the way a startup employee vests equity, right? So they, they're, they're given an equity grant. That equity grant vests over some time period over multiple years. You can think of venture carry as similar. And so the reason for that, of course, is that when there is a transition like…”