In a business, you would measure success by saying, “Well, can you consistently win?”
Some VC firms will create the bravado of consistently winning. Let’s look at the last 15 years. We’ve had Google, Facebook, and Uber. What’s interesting about that is that there has been no consistency of winning. Sequoia and Kleiner were in Google. Accel and Greylock were in Facebook. Benchmark is in Uber.
To me what it says, is that the reason there’s such a divergence, and no consistency and repeatability, is that the investor class and entrepreneurial class continually gets out of whack. The more and more it gets out of whack, the more and more these outcomes become more randomly distributed.
As a smart business person, I think the challenge is to close the gap.
I think it’s ridiculous to want the entrepreneurial class to look more like the investor class. It should be the exact opposite. We just set about understanding that quantitatively, and then you can solve it.
Most people in the investor class don’t want to solve it. They look like a very old, dated representation of what success looked like.
It’s a lot of ego-driven bravado.