
Founder-Investor Fit - yarapavan
https://nbt.substack.com/p/founder-investor-fit
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vincentmarle
> Founder-investor fit, which happens when the desires of founders match the
> products of investors, is one important factor.

This is a bit delusional to be frank, because of the power imbalance. Reality
of raising VC money is more like Tinder: most founders frantically swipe right
on every investor in the hopes of getting a match, while an investor swipes
right on anyone they want and get a decent hit rate. From time to time
investors gotta chase after the hottest thing (aka Clubhouse); and then all
Phd-level hypotheses, investment focus, and fancy blog/tweet theories get
thrown out the window.

If you have 5 investors throwing term sheets at you, then yeah, you might want
to look into them a bit more deeply to figure out what they can offer beyond
the check. But if not, just keep swiping.

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toohotatopic
With low interest rates, and an ever increasing complexity of the state of the
art, won't this balance tip to the other side soon?

There is more money than can be invested, and since economies don't grow fast
enough, even more will be printed. On the other hand, founders don't grow on
trees. So if you have a good idea and a good team, why should it be difficult
to rise money?

~~~
convolvatron
except that we're already in a position of pretty low expectations. your
'good' might make sense relative to all the other poorly conceived and
executed startups, but still might be a worse investment than treasury bills

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b20000
interesting to see the author admits VCs are generally superficial and only
invest if they like you as a person. in reality to be succesful in business
you need to be able to work with people you don’t like, if they are really
good and the right choice for your business. maybe that is the reason a lot of
VC investments go nowhere.

~~~
zippy5
It's the ”nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft” optics driven decision
making. Essentially, VCs decisions on average don't work out, so they check
the optics to protect their downside. So long as the decision looks
superficially correct, they protect their reputation with both investors and
founders even when things go south (which probabilistically they do).

Does it cause them to pass on some great companies and miss the outliers? Yes.

Do they regret it? Probably not.

~~~
b20000
The question if it's really down to probability that only 1 out of 10
investments works out. I'd say there is a big factor in there that they simply
make poor business decisions, like doing whatever your friends are doing, and
betting money on people you would like to go play golf with instead of people
that maybe make you uncomfortable but are much smarter than you are as a VC,
and know a lot more about the problem domain than you do.

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bottled_poe
Some interesting ideas, but not a lot of evidence is presented to justify the
position taken by the author.

