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Comment by acgourley | Hacker News Reader

I don't like how he points at the negative 10 year VC return numbers as implied proof his strategy is superior. On the other hand I don't know why I'm arguing against someones alter ego.

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I didn't get that takeaway. He said if you're losing money, you have no standing to criticize someone else's investment strategy. He seemed perfectly willing to take criticism from Sequoia & Friends who adopt a different strategy from his own, but with the important distinction THAT THEY ARE MAKING MONEY.

I think he's acknowledging that there is still risk in his strategy, but that's it's not as risky as critics like to say.

That's overly charitable of you. Why would he bring up the last 10 years of VC returns unless his argument was, "look how bad traditional investor schools of thought are, anything else that kinda seems to make sense must be as good or better". But that doesn't follow.

The past 10 years returns of VC's investment strategy says nothing about his strategies relative performance.

i didn't say "anything else must be as good or better".

what i meant was that blind trust in traditional VC strategy doesn't make any sense, since on average they suck.

my strategy is still new (<12 months old), so there's no historical performance to compare, outside my investing at Founders Fund (which looks pretty good so far) and my own angel investing (which also looks pretty good).

sorry i can't share #'s here on those, but as a personal investor i was in early on Mint, SlideShare, Simply Hired, & Mashery. as a professional investor at Founders Fund i was in early on Twilio, CrowdFlower, CreditKarma, Bitly, and several others which are doing pretty well.

still, it's too early to say whether i'm any good or not.

my point was simply that arguing status quo doesn't make sense when status quo is sucking pretty hard.

Look, I like your investment strategy and want to see how it plays out.

That said, your post does imply that the weak returns of the VCs last decade lend your approach merit when you point out their weak returns and then say:

"to be more specific: if we look at the #'s, on average it's more likely that high-volume, spray & pray investing -- which i will going forward refer to as "a quantitative investment strategy" -- is likely to be successful than a "focused, low-volume" investing strategy."

(Of course I assume you measure success by expected value, not the chance of being in the black after a small number of investments)

yeah, guess i'm intentionally taking on the "spray & pray" haters, but to me more specific -- i'm combining that strategy with other filters, domain-specific expertise, selective follow-on investment. the combination of all of these is more like an index fund for initial selection, then active management and time-weighted averaging of future funds into the winners.

little bit complex to describe, adn we're still developing it so even i'm not final on which parts add most value.

but we are trying some new shit. some of it hopefully works ;)

One has to believe that with the variety of startups coming out that seed-level spray and pray, coupled with selective follow-on will likely get you in on big things.

Worst case, you have an existing relationship with a large number of startups, a percentage of which will undoubtedly go on to bigger things or exits -- the trick is of course in how big that percentage is.

This is evidenced somewhat by the increasingly large number of teams getting accepted by YC.

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