Things I Learned from Chris Dixon about Startups (2015)

It's ultimately content marketing for a16z. If Chris Dixon wrote this same article—e.g. "Here are all of the best things I've said"—then it would come off as arrogant or ickily self-promotional. But having someone else write it allows the author to praise the ideas without the same stigma.

I don't know whether it was intentional or not, but it's interesting how well the content comes across when the base idea ("writing about smart things our partner was right about") is the type of marketing companies/VCs _want_ to actually say but social norms prevent.

The article itself is an example of the advice within the article. A "good idea that people think is a bad idea."

I don’t know if it’s possible but I would love to see all these concepts proven by data.

My real issue is how to weed out the legitimate feedback from the bad. No one has ever told me how to identify the difference. It's typically, "yay" means you've done well and "nay" also means you're doing well. When really, either of those responses could be a false positive - but which?

Which unicorns were started by people with deep domain knowledge? Struggling to think of any, but that may be a lack of imagination.

If you're not a domain expert everything you come up with will collapse under efficiency arguments. Such as "if this made sense someone would have done it".

Much of expertise is knowing what experts themselves think. That's why you can answer the question of why it isn't already there.

I have a question though. If you need to be a domain expert, how can there be so much focus on young founders? Is that a different category of investment, people who happen to have a lead into an emerging industry like social networks?

Like does anyone read this stuff?

“[The] business of seed investing, and frankly, early-stage entrepreneurship, is so much about getting good information. And almost all of that information, unfortunately, is not published.”

OK cool, thanks. By the way also that's also true of all investing, in anything, ever throughout history. By definition good investment information is unique information, that's the nature of competitive markets.

“Ideas …matter, just not in the narrow sense in which startup ideas are popularly defined. Good startup ideas are well developed, multi-year plans that contemplate many possible paths according to how the world changes.”

Ideas matter. More thoughtful, well developed ideas matter more. Who knew? Another thing that matters is warm clothing, it's really handy.

“What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.”

In ten years everybody will be spending time with their family, apparently.

This era of technology, it seems to be the core theme is about moving beyond bits to atoms.

Thank god, the whole sub-etha thing has been getting pretty tired.

And so on. This article is almost completely devoid of actual analysis or observation, it reads like a fugue on someone's stream of consciousness ramblings

That someone could see the future of smartphones when a mobile phone was a box of 100 pounds in the trunk of a car is a bit much. There WAS a possibility just by (1) talking to the electronic radio engineers about spectrum, bandwidth, propagation, and power, (2) learning about encryption, and (3) talking to the experts in microprocessor lithography and where that field was going. E.g., quite early on, IBM had their eye on line widths small enough to need X-ray wavelengths as a light source and built a cyclotron as an X-ray source.

The OP missed the possibly crucial role of original advanced technology, e.g., from applied math, that is difficult to understand, duplicate, or equal. Reasons for the OP to miss this possibility is that (1) they have seen little or no such on Sand Hill Road and (2) are unable to evaluate such technology themselves and unwilling to direct such evaluations by others. That the US DoD, DoE, NSF, NASA, NIH, etc. are willing to evaluate such technology early on and have done so with fantastically good effects is just ignored by Sand Hill Road. My guess is that the main cause is concerns by the institutional investor limited partners.

The part about building a demo to prove that the team can build serious software is not good: From all the months I contacted Sand Hill Road, apparently it doesn't much matter WHAT software a team has written in the past or what abilities the team has demonstrated, Sand Hill Road won't invest based on software yet to be written.

Writing such as the OP long misled me: I guessed that such considerations would be part of a VCs investment decisions. But after experience, I concluded, NO: Instead IMHO it appears that that the investment decisions are based on (1) traction significant and growing rapidly, (2) in a large market, (3) with little or no current competition, (4) with a team with not much obviously wrong with it, and (5) the team desperate for a check. The rest in the OP might tempt an entrepreneur to send a pitch deck but won't have anything to do with the VC writing a check.

We don't know this actually. What we know is the things that the 'smart' (whatever that is!) people who have succeeded did on the weekends. We not only don't know what the things they did that never went anywhere were or others who are less notable are spending their time on.

I hate these types of sugary statements that everyone flocks to.