Things like "team" and "gut check" are especially useful answers for that, because a) it lets VCs sound like intuitive geniuses who can't easily be replaced, and b) the I-know-it-when-I-see-it nature of those lets VCs smuggle in all sorts of irrational biases. As one well-known investor said, "There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: 'How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!'" Points for honesty, but you can bet that wasn't the official reason they invested.
1) diversify their investments amongst many areas in tech (or maybe some non tech things, not stereotyping all VCS but for this example I'll say diversity of problems being solved using technology/software etc) and thus see commonalities of problems amongst teams in their experience despite whatever the specific niche industry is. I think it is pretty important to agree the cofounders are important. Specifically I've heard from CEOs of startups I use to work for they are really good at hunting out "weaknesses" in the bonds between cofounders.
Basically, they don't want a good idea to fall apart because two cofoudners fundamentally don't see eye to eye, which will make it hard for any decisions they make (whether good or bad) to come to fruition and indicates future struggles with the company, in addition to weak leadership/unified approach when hiring new people, who might be disoriented at understanding the direction the company is going in.
2) Focus on particular niches (a startup who focus specifically on funding AI startups, for example) often they will even fund competitors knowing that if one of them dies, they are almost gauranteed to reep benefits from the remaining on in the niche field. This also means they keep a close track on the variations between two or more companies approach in a specific industry and why one failed and the other didn't.
Someone from Marc Andreessen's team recently published a blog post going into great depth about 5 factors amongst ten or so AI teams that indicated their levels of success in the field, and most of the tilting factors are not what I would say is common knowledge amongst AI startups.
They may have their biases, but they also have unique experience in understanding or seeing repeated dynamics in what could make a relationship (between cofounders) fail (like seeing that one bad relationship where the couple can't see it but it is so obvious to you because youve either now been through it or seen it happen before, imagine this for VCs looking at cofounders over and over again for ten years...) and otherwise have lost lots of money over failed business ideas, so I would say they are incentivized to be as objective as possible with themselves, even if just selfishly for the benefit of their own bank account.
At the end of the day, they have money. Assume they are selfish and want to not lose money, so they probably have some rationale on which they give out money in hopes for a return on investment. That being said, I've seen way too many tech bros with bad blockchain ideas get way too much money which usually goes straight to their heads before they lose it all, and I assume the V.C.s have a really good strike price and know exactly when to liquidate.
For others, it was my general understanding VCs lose money on most investments, hoping that a few end up going really big and canceling out the losses on the rest, but I don't really know anything about VC stuff. I'm not sadomasochistic enough to try to start a company, I just try to work on my skills and people are willing to pay me to invest in myself because I tend to discover interesting things while I tinker about and also keep things from failing often in a raging dumpster fire but I don't know if thats a good way to market my skills.
It's a relatively small percentage of jobs that require people to be good at manipulating the opinions of others. As you say, marketing is an exception to that, but their business is manipulation, so that's not surprising.
I have friends in healthcare as well, and I don't hear things are much better too, in regards to the business ethics of the healthcare system.
My overarching point is that anything that involves finance is likely to be corrupt, and VCs are just one segment of them, but there are a lot of more corrupt financial entities with way less transparency and as a result, way less criticism.
It's not really a fair comparison to match factory work, cutting hair, and being a cashier to being a hero of honesty in relation to finance related jobs. Take cashiers for example, their job is to accurately ring up listed prices decided by a much more complex decision making system, leaving very little decisions for them to mess up at that point, and anything they do unhonestly, is likely to be relatively black and white in comparison to the unethical lobbying behaviors multi billion dollar corporations that bankrupt farmers that farm the seeds they make to monopolize food markets, that the cashiers are ringing up.
Yes, VCs are able to lose alot of money and not really be accountable for it, but so are many other industries related to finance...
Not sure why you are so convinced VCs are the one evil entity in the thousands of permutations of finance, but if I had to call out evil entities in finance it would be the credit market, corrupt government, wallstreet investors, but atleast somewhere at some point VCs gave value to some entity you can track other than transiently through a stock from an algorithm to maximise their profits, but I get it, you hate VCs.
The point is that people micro-tweak their behavior based on simple reward mechanism. Most can’t explain how they got there.
Top VCs are no different. They remind me chicken sexers (is that even a word?), who have differentiate gender by looking at their bottoms and quickly able to tell without ever being able to explain how they know [1].
With this long dribble I want to encourage founders to develop their own intuition. Create a pitch that makes sense to you and then tweak based on feedback.
[0] https://www.tacticaltennis.com/tennis-mythbusters-wrist-snap...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-intuition-of-...
Only problem is that VCs normally don't give any!
But yes, most VCs will never bother follow-up.
We analyzed the results of our first 500 reviews and calculated the correlations between high marks in categories like team, problem area and business economics with the number of requested intros from our reviewing VCs.
In other words the individual factors were graded, and the VC chose whether or not to meet. They are correlating the ranking of the components with the likelihood of asking for a meeting. They are not relying on the VC explanation of why they asked to meet.
I am curious who graded the proposals and how consistent that was. It would also be nice to see what good vs bad looks like in each category.
† https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h24JGbmweNpWZfBkM/markets-ar...
If you’ve ever heard publishers talk about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slush_pile submissions they receive, it’s much the same: they have clear and stable and “knowable” expectations, but authors break them, because most authors are new authors submitting their very first manuscript, having never gone through this process before, never received feedback before, and so never had any data with which to polish their approach before.
(The other main reason that VCs and publishers both receive so many pitches they don’t feel fit them, is that the markets they operate in are heavily slanted in their favour, and so they don’t put much work into making their requirements known. They often don’t put their expectations on their websites or anything. This can be circumvented on the supply-side, though, by just asking around to find out from other submitters what a given buyer is looking for. Some enterprising souls have even done the “lazy” supply-side’s work for it, and compiled indices of the requirements for the buyers in the market.)
We're actively recruiting now and it's amazing the amount of hostility we receive sometime when someone is rejected.
There's a HIGH false negative rate on our end. Meaning, we're going to screw up and walk away from candidates that are amazing - but we're unable to realize it in time.
Yet, people will still react negatively.
If I was a VC I would probably quickly learn to just keep my mouth shut.
They may have your company in mind to work with another company they know/own down the line, or the other way around and with that, see which one works well and breakup the other. That they won't outline at the start and yet would be a reason of interest in buying.