The First VC Meeting (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The First VC Meeting (2009)

bothsidesofthetable.com

53 pointsgtabx19 comments

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Since there's no link at the of Part 5 to part 6:

Part 6 : https://bothsidesofthetable.com/sorry-guys-it-s-the-size-of-...

Part 6cont : https://bothsidesofthetable.com/pitfalls-in-market-sizing-pa...

Part 7? : https://bothsidesofthetable.com/pitching-a-vc-dealing-with-c...

... and then the numbering / search functionality seems to hit a dead-end. Pointers welcome...

I appreciate that Mark Suster is upfront in saying he's only interested in the correct pedigree. Even the "wrong" pedigree is a recognisable pedigree.

The rest of us don't exist.

(Edit: a better phrasing might be "the rest of us are not found in his taxonomy, possibly because it would muddle the discussion")

Which, given his position, is understandable. VCs can lean on brutally inefficient filters, since they get so many opportunities to recover from lossy rejections. And on the flipside, they can't afford to drown in lossy acceptances. C'est la vie.

Mark Suster is upfront in saying he's only interested in the correct pedigree

It doesn't seem to be true. Especially considering this is a long series of posts covering the pedigree first but then also the pitch, presentation, demo, and so on.

Having gone through them, yes, the full series greatly attenuates the effect.

But I still think there was an effect to be attenuated.

If you don't have the pedigree, go get it. Become that Stanford masters student, or go work at Google or Facebook for a few years. Then when dingbat investors like Suster ask for pedigree, just namedrop Google.

Of course, keep in mind that Suster himself doesn't have the right pedigree (he studied econ at UCSD and got an MBA from Chicago). Then again, maybe that's why he has a shitty portfolio (Upfront is certainly no Sequoia).

> If you don't have the pedigree, go get it.

I am fortunate to be in a position where I can.

But on the whole, it is probably cheaper (in time, money and stress) to find different investors than to go to Stanford.

sure it's not all-ivy harvard college + wharton but ucsd + booth will get you many VC meetings from the top tier names, based on my personal experience trying to raise funds for a previous startup.

i think the fact that mark suster has successfully raised and sold multiple times w/ the pedigree crowd ... sort of confirms that, doesn't it?

ucsd is fairly pedestrian, but chicago booth is ranked by usnwr the #2 business school in the nation, after harvard and tied with stanford... if you don't consider that a good pedigree i'm not really sure what to say.

> I appreciate that Mark Suster is upfront in saying he's only interested in the correct pedigree.

I didn't read it in such black & white terms. More like: If your team is uniquely qualified to solve the problem you're working on, you should lead with that.

At the very least, spend some time refining a story about why whatever background you have actually is the perfect pedigree for what you're working on.

I'm human. I read things through a lens partly composed of gall.

In an early draft of my comment I thought about emphasising that it's a showdown between two strawpeople, which leaves most of the rest of us guessing where we fit.

Kinda an obvious post; the name dropping of schools is a bit obnoxious in my opinion esp since the current highest valued private company is run by a UCLA dropout - something Suster would obviously have loved to invest in after the fact. I find the exceptionally smart "startup" people are very knowledgable about their competition and their companies relation to them and can project out to the future.

As somebody whose bio checks all the boxes Suster mentions, but without any particular drive or ambition, it seems like I could do cracking business renting myself out to real entrepreneurs as a face for these pitch meetings...

You hear people talking about colleges as nothing but signalling mechanisms, but holy shit, this article's ridiculous.

From Part 5 (Doing a demo):

> The stories should roll off your tongue since you’ve done it hundreds of times...

If I were a VC (not that it is likely to ever happen), and if your stories rolled off your tongue, it would set off some alarm bells ringing for me. If the stories roll so smoothly, just how many times have you told them before (apparently, without success)?

> Maybe you’re not a tech-head but you’ve hired a 23 year old from Harvard with a 1,600 SAT who’s your CTO (another real world example I heard just this week!)

Is it normal to mention SAT scores in an investor meeting?

No. At least, I've never heard of it happening, and I'm pretty sure the investors I've met would think it was silly.

Many years ago, my ex-boss was in an informal pitch meeting with a very prominent tech lady (who is/was a limited partner at a major SV VC fund as well as an angel investor) and he mentioned that he had signed up an experienced Harvard MBA as the CFO and her reaction was along the line of 'Well, so what?'.

This is 7 years old.

Surely it is about this VCs personal preferences, but has the dynamic markedly changed in that time?

My favorite high-tech product marketing book was written in the 1980s...

> My favorite high-tech product marketing book was written in the 1980s...

What book are you referring to?

https://www.amazon.com/Marketing-High-Technology-William-Dav...

Now, granted, this is about technology products as opposed to consumer facing apps: think Intel vs. Motorola CPUs back in the day or the various TI-vs-everyone DSP tangles. It's still very applicable to any number of technologies in robotics, energy and even things like MRIs.

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