Tit-For-Tat Office Hours with a Seed-Stage VC | Hacker News Reader

Tit-For-Tat Office Hours with a Seed-Stage VC

codingvc.com

43 pointslpolovets31 comments

Glad to see Leo doing this, his fund was an investor in my company so I've gotten to experience a few rounds of Leo office hours, although we didn't call them that at the time. He was very helpful and smart in my experience.

On another note the usage of Tit-For-Tat seems a bit weird in this context since I think it's generally reserved for retaliatory exchanges rather then beneficial ones.

Hey Joe! Oops, my bad on the word choice. I read a book on social altruism a while ago which talked about tit-for-tat in the context of game theory (i.e. why people do nice things for strangers). I didn't realize the term has a mostly negative context.

I think the parent comment is mistaken. I've always heard this used as referring to exchanges of roughly equivalent things- whereas, "an eye for an eye" leans negative, "tit for tat" is neither negative or positive. To me it simply suggests the idea of a balanced exchange.

EDIT: The dictionary, and the historical roots of the term, seem to agree with the parent though. Maybe I'm just an optimist and never noticed the underlying connotation of violence.

If I remeber correctly, tit-for-tat in the game theory is referring to a proportional response to an uncooperative action.

For example, you take an action is 10% unfavorable to me. In response, I take an action that is 10% unfavorable to you. So next turn you take the most favorable action for you+me, and so I take the most favorable action for me+you. I guess a proportional response signals wanting a mutually beneficial, rational approach.

This is an experiment I've been wanting to run for a while. If anyone has questions or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

I think this is a great idea. Hope it works out for you and is mutually beneficial

Will you post some results/thoughts to let us know how it went? Nothing specific about the conversations, obviously, just some general conclusions.

Sure! Part of my goal for running this 3 weeks in a row is so that I can iterate on the process a little bit. E.g. is 25 minutes a good time, or is 15 or 45 better? I also want to see what the most popular topics are. I'll write a summary post in January.

I'll keep an eye out :)

The tone here feels a little sanctimonious, like:

  Chocolate bon bons for everyone because "yay, me!"

Sometimes I think it's useful for people who have enough affluence to surround themselves exclusively with positive people to hear a little constructive criticism.

I've met tons of bosses who have spent so much time being autocratic bosses, that they suffer from "emperor's new clothes" syndrome, because only yes-men survive in their social circle.

An exchange of 20 minutes per 5 minutes doesn't feel exceptionally useful, considering how much time people spend in bars and cafes.

The term "office hours" rings of high priests in ivory towers. An invitation opened to lesser beings that informs them of their own lowly status will probably fetch obsequious RSVP's, but maybe that's the idea.

Sounds like a great idea and wish you the best of luck. I'd love to hear your thoughts after the sessions. The restriction on "no pitches" makes sense in that context since it's a pay-it-forward/advice style forum.

How do you think a similar experiment could be conducted that tries to solve one of the main problems a founder has with raising capital: getting a warm intro? Advice on a pitch is only helpful if there's someone to listen to the pitch! Something like office hours as "open auditions" for pitches?

It varies investor to investor. For reaching investors who only take warm intros, it's hard for me to help. There are other investors, like me, who reply to cold emails when they're personalized/well-targeted. Founders don't need any kind of audition to talk to the second investor group... they just need to send a relevant email (i.e. not "Dear Sir or Madam, here's a form letter about my company that I'm bcc'ing to 50 investors..")

Leo more a question about your investment thesis. I can understand the focus on B2B startups with a real competive advantage, but why limit to minor traction? Minor traction is unlikely to provide much insight as to scalability and passing on this requirement would allow you to invest on much better terms.

Three reasons:

1) I think there's actually a significant difference between "we think customers will really want what we're building" and "a few companies like our product enough to pay $20k/year for it." (If you a found a few customers like that, you can usually find many more.)

2) The practical reason is that often (but not always), when my partners and I see an interesting pre-launch or pre-traction company, we think "this looks promising, we just wish there was a little bit of traction to validate that this is solving a real problem in a meaningful way." So waiting for a little bit of traction before engaging saves time for us and for founders.

3) Investors can get a lot of insight from talking with one or two live customers before making a decision.

Thanks for the reply. 1 and 3 should be solvable by talking to potential customers in the market, while I guess 2 is a pragmatic choice based on time.

I do a bit of angel investing and I have found far more value talking to non-customers in the target market than to actual customers. My experience is many startups end up creating a product too focused on the specific needs of their current customers at the expense of future customers. I prefer to invest in a startup that has built a product that I think has general appeal in the market and zero customers than one that has a few customers and a product that has lost some of its general appeal. These startups are also way cheaper which covers a lot of mistakes by me.

The only downside is you have to vet more companies, but this approach has got me access to some rather good startups that I would not have had a chance once they had traction.

I agree with you: there's a lot of value in talking to non-customers, too. Sometimes that's easy because we know a lot of potential customers for a startup, and sometimes it's hard because a startup is operating in a fairly obscure field.

If you have trouble finding potential customers then the startup will too. I have asked the startup to help me find these people and if they can't help me then this is a massive warning sign for me.

Hope it goes well and provides benefit for everyone involved.

I have been thinking of doing office hours as well. Are you thinking of using software to help scheduling?

I'm using Calendly for now and it seems sufficient. FWIW, the blog post has had ~2500 views so far (thanks HN!) and about 45 people emailed me. 45 isn't a small number, but probably small enough for using something like Calendly. Happy to help/share learnings/collaborate if you want to do office hours as well (I'm leo@susaventures.com)

Had a chance to have a 1:1 with Leo a few years back. We chatted mostly about technical topics around building analytics platforms in-house with limited resources. He offered really good advice and was extremely generous with his time. Even if you just need a sounding board, I recommend that you take him up on this offer.

I've enjoyed your writing and so yeah, I'll do this.

However I do have one question. Why Caltech? Going to Caltech for computer science seems like becoming a Navy SEAL in order to work as an aerobics instructor. I suppose you could do that but it does seems like overkill.

I originally decided to go to Caltech because I loved math and science and thought I wanted to be a math major. I ended up "pivoting" to CS pretty quickly. I never had any plans of entering venture capital -- it just happened by circumstance.

I have been thinking about doing office hours for a while. The proper hacker spirit would be to do it at like 10pm at Happy Donuts in Palo Alto.

Really cool to see Leo doing this. If he ever moves to an online version of this, I'll be the first to sign up. Huge fan of his blog.

> * Founders assume VCs don't work during the holidays, so they don't try setting up pitch meetings. As a result, VCs don't have any work to do and end up going on vacation. =\

This is interesting. I wonder if founders who ignore this assumption would have better success raising money. At the very least, they'll have more attention from the VC during their meetings.

It's probably a wash. For the VCs that aren't on vacation, you likely have a higher chance of getting a meeting since their schedules are emptier. But the decision-making bar generally won't move up or down much regardless of how much free time investors have.

>> "If this experiment is successful, I'm open to online office hours in the future."

Agree that in person is better for a number of reasons, but is there any reason not to allow the slots to be filled by online/voice meeting if you can't fill the slots with in person meetings?

My two reasons: 1) I don't have an office near where I live, so I plan to have the meetings at a local cafe (not ideal for online/phone meetings). 2) If this works well I'm totally open to online in the future.

Hey Leo, is this best suited for 1 on 1 or a team (say 2) of cofounders?

1:1 or 1:2 would both be fine. I think this format is best suited for one startup at a time though -- I suspect 20 minutes should be enough to have an interesting conversation about 1-2 things, but probably not 1-2 things about each of 2 different companies.

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