Comment by nickelcitymario | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickelcitymario | Hacker News Reader

nickelcitymario

When I think of "studio", I think of a movie studio. Each product would be the equivalent of a film.

The studio brings together the necessary talent and sets them loose on a well-defined project (with a deadline, a scope, and a budget).

The best studios, under this model, know that the most important thing for their success is finding the right top talent. (In films, that would be your writer, director, and starring cast. In tech, the typical hacker+designer+marketer trio of project leads would probably be the closest equivalent.)

When viewed in this light, I think the studio approach makes an awful lot of sense. It's similar to VCs and incubators, yet different in a crucial way.

A studio looks primarily for talent, and trusts that when they have the right people, the right ideas and execution will follow.

The VC model, as best as I can tell as a distant observer, is focused first on identifying the winning ideas, and then securing the right team as a secondary item.

Both approaches care about both the idea and the talent. It's an order of priority thing. Are you banking on your ability to spot winning ideas or winning talent? Studios spot talent and then evaluate ideas. VCs spot ideas and then evaluate the talent.

>The VC model, as best as I can tell as a distant observer, is focused first on identifying the winning ideas, and then securing the right team as a secondary item.

I see the exact opposite.

I keep hearing that (early stage) VCs care about the team a lot more than the idea. The idea is necessary as a way of knowing that the team can come up with a concrete idea but not more than that. Later stage VCs focus on other things but those aren't close to a film studio.

But do you know of any examples of VCs investing in a team before knowing what the product will be? Maybe those examples exist and I'm ignorant of them.

By contrast, movie studios keep lots of people on staff or on rotating contracts, often with no idea of what the film will be. They hire people on the assumption that those people will figure out the idea.

Early stage (preseed and seed) investor here. I think the easier way to conceive of this is that if I have conviction around the team but not necessarily the product, I will likely invest. The inverse is almost never true for me.

I have invested in founders where I thought their initial conception of the product wasn’t likely to find PMF but I believed that the team had good instincts and the necessary skills to iterate to a different product.

If you didn’t believe the idea could find PMF why did you believe in the teams instincts?

Same reason an NBA team will draft someone who isn't ready be a starter averaging a double double. If I believe the team is elite and that the potential is there, there's potential for such an asymmetric outcome that it's a worthwhile bet.

I don't know the NBA that well but in NHL you would draft someone with high stats in the minor leagues, knowing they will develop (physically and mentally) into someone who can achieve the same stats at a higher level. The game is the same but the parameters are larger. It takes time to work out at the gym, make quicker decisions, cleanup some weakness. There are many other factors like how their strengths will play into the teams structure, etc.

Is this the model you would apply? What are the parameters that are key to founders beneath the idea itself?

I think Color Labs was close. While I'm sure they shared a plan with VCs I remember a lot or surprise that they had raised so much cash pre-launch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs

Yes this is exactly what early stage and seed investors are doing. They know the idea will still live, but they trust the team to figure out what to do.

I know several people on both sides of this equation.

That's a good argument. I find it striking for example how much better youtube music looks compared to spotify, given that spotify started so much earlier. But google can afford to hire the best designers in the world.

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