Thanks for your note and sending ?investor? our way, we really appreciate it and always enjoy meeting with YC followers. Keep 'em coming!
We loved ?investor? and are impressed by both his pedigree and the portfolio he has assembled thus far. It's exciting to see investors seeking "real-world" opportunities in important areas, which aligns well with our long-tail world view.
However it's currently a little early for us to get sidetracked here. We'd like to see ?investor? show a few more exits and demonstrate a more complete core understanding of our market. We've offered to introduce him to a few value-add founders within our network, who we think could really help him work through and grasp some of the technological issues fundamental to achieving a product/market fit in our industry. We plan on keeping in close touch and will be iterating back once he's at a more appropriate point to deserve equity from those who have worked so hard.
On a separate note, I feel like we could be doing more to help YC groupies. We're amazed at what people want to throw money at and we'd love to grab a coffee and talk more about how we could help investors better understand the opportunities we've poured so much of our hearts and souls into.
I couldn't help but chuckle at this as Harj even included the concept of "grabbing coffee", which is discussed in "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" [1]:
"Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectively free if you're on the manager's schedule. They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to 'grab coffee,' for example.
Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager's schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day's work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them."
Not to veer too far off-topic, but these "speculative meetings" are often (but not always) well worth the schedule disruption, even if it ripples out across several extra "productive" hours. Perhaps for Paul Graham, who has all the VCs in the world scrambling to fund his picks, it's not so important, but for the little people like you and I, the value of a good network is immense.
Business is primarily a social thing. It always has been, and is no different today. This is why inferior products can make tons of money.
Seconded. While inefficient, they are often more valuable than spending that time heads down coding a feature that's not going to bring in any extra revenue or users.
Thanks for linking this. I just sent it to a few Project Managers friends. Along with:
"I find myself reading this while waiting for a build to QA. This is the time I have to write code. When the meetings are done. Meetings are important, but this is worthy of a read if you can schedule it in. Also, I'd be happy to discuss this over coffee."
I might be misreading this, but it seems like PG is humiliating one of his partners in public.
EDIT: Yep, I was misreading this. It wasn't so clear that it was an inside joke. I guess the joke's on me and the stereotypical non-partner VC, ha ha?
From Wikipedia:
Harjeet Taggar (born June 8, 1985), is a British businessperson and partner at the seed-stage investment firm, Y Combinator. He was formerly funded by Y Combinator and sold his company Auctomatic to Canadian company Live Current Media at age 22.
In 2010 he was named as the first new partner at Y Combinator since its founding in 2005, aged 25. In 2011 he was named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
This is mail from Harjeet written as if it's from a VC to a YC partner like himself. Since Harj is not a VC and is part of YC, he wouldn't write Paul a mail like that. It's satire.
If it's an inside joke, then it's probably a good idea to explain it as such instead of downvoting the parent (not everybody on this site is an insider).
I wonder what that's about, if anything. The last time I really encountered inside jokes was in high school. It always seemed like some way to establish a dividing line between cool and uncool people.
It's meant for everyone, from the cool people who got it right away at the A table where Paul and Harj sit (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371321 ), right on down to the D table where people like me and you sit. You can't have popular without unpopular.
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."
We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.
... and the people at the E table are the hellbanned ones like losethos / SparrowOS, who incidentally might just get up and leave if someone at the A table told them nobody was allowed to talk to them.
Increasing your connection with someone else through an inside joke cuts off anyone who both hears it and isn't in on the joke. That's why the last time georgeorwell encountered inside jokes was in high school: someone else made the joke, he didn't get it, but everyone else did.
Of course georgeorwell has almost assuredly heard inside jokes since. The difference was that he got it and it didn't occur to him that other people wouldn't.
At least this one is funny. pg is really overestimating the HN brand and the obviousness of the joke if he really thinks that t-shirt was a "pretty bold assertion of brand power" (which is the point ju6ernaut was making when he asked, "would someone who frequents HN recognize it if they did not already know its affiliation" (emphasis mine)).
I've been here a long time and that shirt wouldn't make me look twice (if I hadn't happened to have seen it on HN that day). That's not a very good inside joke.
It wasn't clear to me that "YC partner" meant somebody working at YC, rather than a VC firm that had a formal relationship with YC. The satire went completely over my head on first reading.
"On a separate note, I feel like we could be doing more to help YC companies. We're in awe of what you've built over there at the Y and we'd love to grab a coffee and talk more about how we could be helpful to both the companies and you."
I think they get messages like this all the time, which is why they think it is funny. So, satire for this specific example, but suggests an increasing level of annoyance from the Y partners when they actually get these messages.
VCs, management consultants, business gurus... all the same rubbish.
After working in Big 4 management consulting jobs for almost six years, I'm constantly surprised that phrases like "value-add" and "validate a couple of the core assumptions" still have the power to bring me out in a cold sweat.
But what is it going to take to end this nonsense? We know we're talking rubbish. Most of us hate these stock business-speak phrases, yet still most of us choose to hide behind them. Clients are partly to blame, but an industry that tries to differentiate itself by the bizarreness of its terminology (thereby fabricating "exclusivity")is more to blame.
When are we going to wake up and realise that speaking in plain, simple, understandable English does not make us look stupid and simple. Quite the opposite.
Your irony detector needs adjustment. As pg wrote in his introduction to this letter,
"I sent the YC partners an email saying I was growing increasingly impressed with one of the startups in the current batch and asking what they thought of them, and Harj Taggar replied with this brilliant piece of VC boilerplate."
The joke is on the people who think that Taggar was expressing what he thinks, rather than what he has heard too many venture capitalists say when they aren't willing to say what they think.
Nothing in GPs post is dependent on the thing being serious. This kind of language is unfortunately real (cringe), regardless of this particular piece of business poetry.
I've always enjoyed that one, especially this part:
"One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field."
It's hilarious, even though I have since decided I don't agree with "curing" the not un- formation.
FWIW, my position is that the difference between strict opposite and negation in English means that there is often a subtlety of meaning accurately expressed with a "not un-". It's essentially the English language equivalent of needing ways to express less than, greater than, less than or equal to, and greater than or equal to. I know Orwell was criticising people who misuse it, but he beats his fists a bit too hard for my liking in that essay. Related, I get annoyed when people aggressively attack "I don't disagree" with "then just say I AGREE!". The phrase "I don't disagree" is useful to convey "I might agree, I don't know whether I agree, I don't have an opinion, I agree with some of it and disagree with small details, any or all of these or more, but I'm certainly not disagreeing with you outright at this moment". In a lot of arguments these opinions fail spectacularly, since for the most part a combination of aggression, loudness, and a veneer of logical reasoning tends to win out over uncertainty and an attempt to consider all cases.
When are we going to wake up and realise that speaking in plain, simple, understandable English does not make us look stupid and simple.
In my experience, this kind of speak is not about sounding sophisticated, it's usually about saying nothing while coming across as sophisticated. I see this from business folks all the time; you rarely see it from technical people, but when you do, it's very annoying.
I've been playing around with the theory lately that the buzzwords and nonsense are an elaborate ritual not only to hide personal ignorance, but the fact that there is no known reliable way to solve most of the major issues surrounding the management of firms at all - yet, most peoples' careers revolve around pretending that the opposite is true.
My only issue with this email is that he used the subject "we" when mentioning grabbing a coffee. The current accepted standard of phrasing in business circles eliminates the subject and would read "would love to grab a coffee".
Is that really an accepted standard? I have to go out on a limb here and ask if that's even a proper sentence? Who/what is the subject? It certainly helps to know who you would be having coffee with.
The subject is an implied first person. (i.e., "I" or "we.")
I see this kind of omission as a way for cowards to avoid explicitly standing behind their request, both to diminish their own disappointment if the recipient says no or ignores them and to mitigate the chance that the recipient perceives their note as 'needy.'
Nailed it. It's a way to extend an invitation with minimal vulnerability.
I wouldn't agree that it's necessarily "for cowards," probably because I tend to employ similar strategies.
When I recognize it in communication from someone else, I understand where that person is coming from and consider the message delivered. It's kind of a fun game, striking that balance between nonchalance and making your intentions clear.
I was wondering about this construct several times in the past.
AFAIK English is not a pro-drop language, which means that the construct should be ungrammatical.
My impression was that it was introduced to American English be immigrants with pro-drop native languages (Italians? Slavs?) Am I completely off track?
Right, technically English doesn't let you drop pronouns. On the other hand there is a pretty long tradition of dropping first person pronouns in writing. You see it in informal correspondence and journals from before electronic media were omnipresent. Stuff like, "Went to the store today. Got stuck in a snow bank and had to call a tow truck."
I don't think it comes from immigrants that speak other languages, so much as economizing long passages of text that's all in the first person. The "I" at the beginning of every sentence just gets dropped.
It depends on whether you think "ungrammatical" means "not approved of by prescriptivists", or you mean "not used and/or not understood by fluent speakers".
Given that you know the word "pro-drop", I assume you know this, and I'm not sure if I should bother continuing in this vein. Maybe you're asking for a descriptive grammaticality judgement from fluent English speakers?
I agree that from a prescriptivist perspective, this is improper formal writing.
From a descriptivist perspective, I try to avoid biz guys, but I suspect the GP post nailed it, with respect to common usage in the appropriate sociolect (the same sociolect that has "proof points", "value-add", "circling back", etc). Although maybe not for the last sentence of an email that already had that much circumlocution.
Ungrammaticality changes over time. For a new grad emailing her boss, douchy pro-dropping in English is ungrammatical. Eventually, it sinks in as an acquired taste, and becomes grammatical.
"Pro-drop" languages usually incorporate the person in the verb. So "grab" in "we grab" is different than "I grab". In Greek, it's "πίνουμε" vs "πίνω". You omit the subject because you lose no information. In fact, it's redundant to include it, so you only do it if you want to emphasize it.
I think we (American English speakers) tend to drop pronouns in informal writing more than in speech. At least, thinking about how I'd say things, I might elide the pronoun almoooost to the point of dropping it, but it still "feels" like it's there, even if it didn't come out very much.
But "was thinking the other day, why don't we..." sounds fine to me in an email. wouldn't say it out loud, though...
the more spanish i speak the more i want to drop english words, and the more confortable i am moving the subject of the adjective to the end of the sentence.
Interesting. I always thought this form of writing was to cut down on the number of words in an email, so that the reader can more easily skim for the overall message, while also reducing formality and increasing familiarity. I've even recently tried to start emulating this style for those reasons.
If you said text messaging then I would agree. That's the first thing that came to mind because traditionally everyone wants to save characters when texting resulting in ur, b, etc.
Actually, with texting, I find it harder to shorten words into misspellings like ur or b, because I end up fighting against my phone's autocorrect. Sure, once you use it a few times, your phone will learn to stop autocorrecting, but why bother? I don't understand why people still use "ur" when "your" is just as easy to type these days. SMS length isn't really an issue anymore either, with most smartphones automatically concatenating longer messages for the recipient.
That is true, with smartphones this has changed (or should have go away). The issue isn't really about concatenating--I had nokia phones with just a keypad that did that years ago--it's the fact that often you can keep a message short and only use 1 message with the shorter "words". This won't make a difference if you have an unlimited text plan but it still matters for some people.
It's not grammatical English, but nor are a variety of other constructs that we see as normal, such as "ain't no," or even "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun (this one matters only to sticklers). Convenience need not obey the rules. Would love to expand further if you are interested.
I... I hope I'm not ruining it by asking if this is a test to see how the HN comments respond to subtlety?
<strike>I suppose that's part of the joke, though like some good jokes it makes me sad. We get upset that VC's respond with boilerplate and knee-jerk, but then we do the same thing.</strike>
Update: egh, looks like we're not doing too badly.
Even if it sounds impersonal and lazy, this is just called being polite, most people still prefer an answer of this kind to "lol no, sorry, you suck". And that's why we do it aswell. Perhaps we should work more on make it seem less impersonal, but the message is clear and loud in any case.
I got the distinct pleasure of describing my big physics idea to Murray Gell-Mann, who is both a Nobel laureate and expert in (one half) of the specific topic I was interested in. He told me very bluntly he thought it was hopeless, and I consider it a sign of respect that he didn't feel the need to sugarcoat it.
There's politeness--with which I've only seen Gell-Mann flirt--but then there's the sticky-sweet bullshit the OP was parodying.
(He's wrong though, and I'm still working on it :)
Dude I would take a cut to have someone as a vc who said "lol no, sorry, you suck." I mean jesus christ these are the last people we want patting our egos.
Not me, I like people being polite with me. Which doesn't mean these messages couldn't be more informal and direct. But "you suck" is not impersonal, is rude.
I have my ego pretty much under control, exagerated compliments won't do any damage here.
I prefer when people are realistic. Polite and impolite are immaterial.
VC boilerplate is etiquette, which means formalized behavior designed to reduce conflict, but also at the expense of communication. It's not really about politeness, so much as being noncommital both ways.
In the time I've spent as an entrepreneur, I learned that I actually much prefer the "Your idea sucks and here's why" approach than the polite and encouraging response, mainly because if they try to keep things positive, you're likely to continue to spend time trying to get to a point where they WILL invest, which turns out to be never, because they're not interested. It's a sure fire way to waste a boat load of your time.
The problem with universally sugar-coated answers is that, unless you're psychic, it's impossible to know for sure where you stand and what to improve, and you're left to randomly walking through the self-improvement space until you get lucky or run out of resources.
Brillant, and there is a common denominator across all this kind of communications: there is no real information, so after some practice it's easy to spot it's just bullshit.
Btw this style is not just common to VCs, but also to clueless management.
Here's what I gleamed from the message:
1. Taggar doesn't want to invest in the company.
2. He wants Graham to keep referring other companies to him.
3. He may want to invest in the company in the future.
4. He introduced the founder to some of his acquaintances (see 2).
I tend to agree. On one level, you could say it's a satire and even a mockery to VCs in general (which I found hilarious when I found out who Tagger was).
However, in real life I think this would be a polite response. It might read like bullshit but it's quite fair to see he's trying to make these points. Everything else not in the email (e.g. why does the VC not want to invest) would be speculation.
What I don't get is what's so subversive/ironic about any of this. What part of this seemingly-polite note can't be, or shouldn't be, taken at face value? He doesn't think the investment is a good fit right now but agrees that the company is worth keeping an eye on, and is appreciative that YC took the time to think of him.
Not a business for introverts or borderline aspies like myself, I guess...
Yes but, what is the value added by the people they want to get involved? Why is too early to invest? Just because there are not already a zillion of users and they are not able to evaluate? Why later it could be interesting?
Basically there is just boilerplate to say "no thanks" but no real information. Just a general feeling that they are not able to really evaluate.
Email is prone to misunderstanding so you have to be verbose. If I would have gotten a "no thanks" that would have left me guessing "Why?". Possible reasons which are ruled out by this message: 1) I don't trust YC anymore; 2) The guy you referred to me was a jerk; 3) I'm out of the VC business; etc.
I don't know the guy, but... consider the power dynamic. PG sends him a sales pitch and the guy pushes back. What's he supposed to do, fall all over himself and say "where do I sign"?
No, he says, "yeah, maybe".
Wouldn't you do the same if someone came to your door looking to sell you something?
> Wouldn't you do the same if someone came to your door looking to sell you something?
My usual reaction is "what else d'ya got?"--until they run out of "else"s.
This way, the situation is reframed as them not having anything I like, rather than me not being willing to accept what they have--and it's then much easier to just politely end the conversation.
Let's look at what a VC is trying to accomplish here.
- They don't want to invest for reason {X}. Could be as trivial as someone not liking the founder or they could genuinely think they don't know whether the company will do well.
- They don't want to tell the founders what they really think. Mostly because they want to hold open the option in case they are proven wrong as often happens. As much as founders say they like honest replies, I've seen so many founders say "VC X said he doesn't want to invest in us because he disagrees with us on {reason}- I'm going to prove that moron so wrong".
- They want to help out the founder with a couple of intros so that the founder doesn't feel like he got nothing from them in return.
The boilerplate/corporate B.S language? Terrible and everyone could easily do better. But there's no easy to tell someone you don't believe in something they're putting their heart and soul into.
YC has the nicest rejection mails of all of VC-land and I've still seen YC-rejects get really angry and make it their life's work to prove pg wrong.
Are you sure these YC-rejects are building their companies just to prove pg wrong? They are probably just pursuing their dream, which is what led them to apply to YC to begin with. If they succeed, proving YC wrong is just a nice side-effect for them (see: http://lightsailenergy.com/ and others).
Actually, having something that matters to you held back by someone's rejection is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to make a person angry. In most situations it will lead to the rejectee pushing harder for what they want to do - likely a winning strategy in simpler situations.
I often wonder of VCs actually have a secret website where they go on it, select from a half dozen drop boxes of platitudes they want to include, and then out spits a message along these lines. Over the years my inbox has gathered enough of them that I could probably extract most of the patterns.
Have you considered you're doing it wrong? If you asked out 100 girls and they all blew you off, it would be time for some introspection. VCs are just ugly girls with more money.
Someone had made something like that for internship reports, when I was in college. Very handy, when you needed a bonus paragraph here and there on "How this experience made me a better person".
Also generalizable. Email pattern-mining software, anybody? It would classify patterns within social groups as defined by LinkedIn and Facebook social network topography.
Vu, try this: "Hi. What are other companies in your batch we should invest in?" <- seriously, first question. I think our conversation ended shortly thereafter.
For those in various sub-threads arguing that this is simply polite, what's wrong with the following email?
-------------
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your note and sending ⟨startup⟩ our way, we really appreciate it and always enjoy meeting with YC founders. Keep 'em coming!
I see a lot of promise there, but it's not enough for us yet. We've offered to introduce ⟨founder⟩ to a few useful contacts.
As always, we value Y Combinator, and we appreciate this and future opportunities to invest, and to help YC companies. Our calendar is always open for coffee or whatever.
--jholman
-------------
It's half the length. But it's still polite, appreciative, etc.
I guess it depends on what the sender thinks of the recipient, with respect to narcissism and self-importance, and what kind of sucking up is predicted to be effective. When I read plausible sucking-up, I feel gratified. When I read implausible sucking-up, I feel manipulated.
I like this. I live in a country where exaggerated politeness is deeply ingrained, and redundant over-explanation common. I've been here long enough that it's rubbed off on me to where the original spoof message didn't really ring any alarm bells. Your rewrite is natural English without the BS. The only change I would make if I wrote it myself would be taking out "or whatever". I blame the fashion for that word to be used on its own disrespectfully - my brain often reads it as the British "wha'ever", or the US "whatEVVVVAAAARRRR".
This is really funny, because it is not far off from the "boilerplate" responses YC sends out to rejected YC applicants.
>We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your late application for
funding. Please don't take it personally. The chances of a late
application being accepted are much lower than for an application
submitted by the deadline.
If you want to apply again for the summer 2013 cycle, the application
form will probably be online within a few weeks.
Unfortunately we can't give you individual feedback about your
application. This page explains why:
Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know
we make lots of mistakes. We have good statistical evidence that
we fail to interview a significant number of startups that we'd
accept if we did.
We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain
that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups.
If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us
about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.
Remove "We should grab coffee" to "apply again" and "We'll be Circling Back" to "if We rejected you and you become successful, email us about it". In the case of the VC if I raise funding from another VC and you rejected me do you think I would let them "circle back around"?; or in the case of YC you think if my start-up becomes a billion dollar success I am really going to waste my time explaining to YC in an email where they went wrong rejecting me?
Thanks for your post and sending ⟨link⟩ our way, we really appreciate it and always enjoy reading about We'll Be Circling Back. Keep 'em coming!
We loved We'll Be Circling Back and are impressed by both it's background and the statement it makes. It's exciting to see entrepreneurs tackling "real-world" problems in important areas, which aligns well with our hacker interests.
However it's currently a little early for us to make a comment here. We'd like to see We'll Be Circling Back show a few more proof points and validate a couple of the core assumptions underlying the post. We've offered to introduce it to a few hackers, within our network, who we think could really analyze it and shape some of the strategic issues it'll face in the coming months. We plan on keeping in close touch and will be circling back once it's at a more appropriate stage for commenting.
On a separate note, I feel like we could be doing more to help Hacker News posters. We're in awe of what you've built over there at the Hacker News posting and we'd love to grab a coffee and talk more about how we could be helpful to both the posts and you.
I was totally confused reading through this the first time - it made me roll my eyes at least 5 times. Then I realized it was satirical and my faith in PG was once again restored.
This reminds me of the fearsome chapter in Launch Pad where Paul Graham is telling the founders of Science Exchange that VCs use any excuse when they dont like you as a reason not to fund in their case circumvention in this case "strategic issues and proof points". Which leads into another Paul Graham quote "Listen to the answer ,dont listen to the reason"
Also the investor couldnt have been more obvious with the fact that the real reason he emailed Paul was that he wants to get his claws in YC on a deeper level " keep em coming" "on a seperate note we feel we could be doing more to help YC companies" on a seperate note? really? Paul is a veteran at the VC game so trying to bait and switch him with all the "we loved him and where impressed but" nonsense is crazy to me. But its one of his partners so it might be just a simulation of the dozens of emails he gets like this on a daily basis
It’s been wonderful talking to you. We are pretty amazed by your team’s ___ chops and xxx.
We talked about the opportunity briefly during our meeting and would like to see a more fuller team and strategy around the product before getting into a deeper relationship.
Congrats on an incredible product and let me know if we would be any help to you along the way.
So it's obviously satire, and I'm a huge PG/YC supporter, although consider this: PG (through the voice of another YC faithful) is in a way attacking the "dullard VC", lampooning them for being formulaic and unimaginative.
But, in a sense he too is using subtlety to obfuscate the real message and the reader is left to fill in the blanks. It's probably meant in good humor, but usually there is a little truth and sore feelings behind these sort of jests.
Now maybe the VC's are arrogant or whatever, although this does seem like tit-for-tat in my book.
I'll go out on a limb here and say I don't think YC-style is going to "take over" and obliterate the traditional VC model, nor do I believe traditional VC's should dismiss YC-style investing as chump-change or unimportant.
There are a zillion things I do not understand about startups.
But one thing I know: never use investors. You're better off trading the next Facebook for an 8-figure startup and just not putting yourself through any of it.
You know, I don't actually find this offensive, and it ranks fairly low on the comedic value scale for me.
He is essentially saying "I'm not interested right now, but I might be in the future. I don't want to tell you why. I respect you and wish to be polite and leave the door open to future discussion"
Sure, the message is padded out and business bullshitty/flowery (depending on your POV), but it doesn't give me the willies..
Reminds me of that parody of a VC guy telling siri to "clear out my inbox with wishy-washy responses to everything": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WZA0TATcEI. This is what he means by wishy-washy reponses. :)
Yes, it was a brilliant parody, send up, etc. of standard venture partner communications, especially when they are loquacious but really saying "No".
The main point is, they are keeping hidden what they are really thinking. Right: They like the project and the founder, the connection with "real world" problems, etc. All total BS. They want more "proof points" -- mostly BS.
What they don't want to do is what the founder had to do -- deeply evaluate the promise of the project now.
What they really want to see they didn't mention but is in one word, significant and rapidly growing 'traction'.
What's going on? The venture partner is working for his limited partners, and they think much like traditional private equity investors or just commercial bankers. So, the limited partners really want their venture partners to make financial investments only in measurable financial assets. The limited partners would greatly prefer there to be audited financial statements, but in a pinch they will let their venture partners settle for a surrogate measure, 'traction', from, say, Comscore or some such.
If a venture partner is especially curious, then they may want to try the app or Web site. Why? Mostly to keep up their "deep domain knowledge" but otherwise to evaluate how millions of users might like the app or Web site. If such an evaluation looks good beyond belief, then they might make a seed investment.
That's just how the venture capital business works.
Is this narrow focus on 'traction' and essentially ignoring everything else working? At least on average, over the past 10 years or so, apparently not. Or as in a recent post at AVC.COM, on average, the venture capital ROI figures have been significantly less good than an index fund.
The fundamental gap is 'planning': Can we plan a project, execute essentially the plan, and with high batting average get the intended results of the plan or at least significantly high ROI? That's the fundamental challenge. And mostly in venture capital, the answer is "No". That is, the industry does not take such planning seriously.
Is all such planning so hopeless? No: Quite broadly in our economy and technology, we can plan and then execute the plan with reasonably high batting average. Even for projects that appear to be highly technical, original, and 'innovative', there can be some good early evidence of the good or bad prospects of the project. Project selection is important, and there are means of selecting good projects with reasonably good batting averages, averages much higher than in venture capital.
But back to the limited partners: They still want to think like private equity people or just commercial bankers. They just do. And, instead of changing, they will pick venture firms more carefully or just invest less in the 'venture capital asset class'.
But just now for the most interesting part of venture capital investing, 'information technology' based mostly on just software, the venture capital 'business model' is under attack: The reason is the recent and astounding ratios of price and performance for computer hardware and communications bandwidth and also the powerful infrastructure software available at least initially essentially for free. So, for a startup based on software, computing, and the Internet, the path to the coveted 'traction' is just one or a few guys living cheaply and typing quickly. Then, with such low 'burn rate', once they get the traction, and especially if their traction is growing very rapidly, they stand to be nicely profitable already or soon and, thus, no longer in great need of equity investment and likely reluctant to sign the usual term sheet and subordinate themselves to a Board controlled by venture partners. So far this threat to venture capital has not a lot of examples and maybe no examples of really big wins, e.g., another Facebook, but the threat is coming like an 80,000 pound 18 wheel truck at 80 MPH just 50 feet away.
So funny. The hilarious thing is some VCs actually talk like that in person too! Even when they are really just trying to say "Hey, computer guy, stand in line at the A&TT store for 125 bucks and hour and get me that new iPhone for me."
How do other founders deal with non-committal VC nonsense? I feel like only taking targeted meetings where social capital gets spent on introductions to avoid this takes too much serendipity out of the equation.
After looking through the comments I'm surprised there's no speculation on the promising startup that PG reached out to the YC partners about. Any ideas?
I like getting boilerplate responses from people, it's basically a message to me: You are worth nothing to me and if I can make a profit by throwing you under the bus, I will make no hesitation to do so, and you shouldn't expect me to.
It's actually a refreshing whiff of the jungle. Kill, or be killed.
To: Paul Graham
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your note and sending ?investor? our way, we really appreciate it and always enjoy meeting with YC followers. Keep 'em coming!
We loved ?investor? and are impressed by both his pedigree and the portfolio he has assembled thus far. It's exciting to see investors seeking "real-world" opportunities in important areas, which aligns well with our long-tail world view.
However it's currently a little early for us to get sidetracked here. We'd like to see ?investor? show a few more exits and demonstrate a more complete core understanding of our market. We've offered to introduce him to a few value-add founders within our network, who we think could really help him work through and grasp some of the technological issues fundamental to achieving a product/market fit in our industry. We plan on keeping in close touch and will be iterating back once he's at a more appropriate point to deserve equity from those who have worked so hard.
On a separate note, I feel like we could be doing more to help YC groupies. We're amazed at what people want to throw money at and we'd love to grab a coffee and talk more about how we could help investors better understand the opportunities we've poured so much of our hearts and souls into.
Best,
edw519