Founders

Someone asked me recently "do VCs care more about product or team?"

1. They care about making money
2. Three variables: market, team and product

But if you hold market as the constant (that's a big if), then team tends to be a stronger signal at the early stage, product at the later stage. Ideally you have both.

"Strong" and "weak" are multi-dimensional and hard to precisely define. Not deterministic.

@pmarca has an excellent blog post on this:

Someone asked me recently "do VCs care more about product or team?"

1. They care about making money
2. Three variables: market, team and product

But if you hold market as the constant (that's a big if), then team tends to be a stronger signal at the early stage, product at the later stage. Ideally you have both.

"Strong" and "weak" are multi-dimensional and hard to precisely define. Not deterministic.

@pmarca has an excellent blog post on this: https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html

Chasing Curiosity. People, Nature, Machines. Hakuna Matata, "Its a problem-free philosophy.”

Yea, this is probably the biggest thing I’ve heard and also experienced.

Emotional rollercoaster is trite, but very real. Managing your psychology is a way bigger part of the job.

What’s a misconception you had about startups when you started your own, that you now see differently?

Devotional polytheist living a monastic lifestyle centered on curiosity, simplicity, and joy.  Exploring the intersection of technology and spirituality.

That's pretty much what "gut instinct" is.  Honed pattern recognition that doesn't need conscious processing because you've seen the pattern enough times.

How much of it is the honed gut instinct of someone whose made risks over and over again?

helping /bracky, playing /bracket reading /greatbooks

Disagree with, not really. I've never done the job the full-time, so hard to know what the right mindset is.

Teams: bias for action, pareto optimal balance of taste / quality and velocity, strong early hires.

Any common ways investors seem to be evaluating teams that you disagree with?

Anything you've learned to look for in team that is especially useful?

techarchive

2007 blog post from pmarca on the question:

"What's most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?"

Key takeaway is that the need for a good market is #1 priority. If the market is good, then you can get by with a baseline team and a simple, viable product.

Cracked team & polished product won't matter if the market you picked isn't getting any attention.

but what really caught my attention in this post was the second point - in extremely rare cases, products are SO GOOD that they create markets.

From my understanding, most products that fall under the second question will be core platform & hardware tools such as AWS, iPhone, Ethereum, GPT, etc. 

These products spring up a variety of niche new markets that the next set of founders try to identify and capture. App store, defi, and AI wrappers become the next design space created for founders that fall in the first category.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070701074943/http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html

just came across this last week, such a good post.

specifically thought the VMWare example as an outlier where it created a new market was interesting.

just came across this last week, such a good post.

specifically thought the VMWare example as an outlier where it created a new market was interesting.
https://warpcast.com/yb/0xded3722a

As a company that underpins the majority of NFT files, the market is definitely not a constant lol

So if the market is a constant it practically determines the strength of the team.

can also throw in a nod to the "team's vision" alongside the team itself. After the initial product success, the rest comes down to how strong their brainstorming game is

This is what my instructor taught me during marketing lecture.

If you have a good team you can always keep evolving your products or create new ones.

It's always about the money, after that comes down to experience and the individual/team they are investing in

looks pretty straightforward i know, but what qualifies as a strong team?