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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

Nah. I know a VC that passed on Apple because Steve was 20 min late to their meeting.

Jobs also had to be convinced to not smell like a hobo before a meeting because he did not believe in showers (his fruit diet was pure!).

If he did make it to an important investor meeting, he'd sit there massaging his naked dirty feet.

Like it or not - the business world requires some level of shallow ritual you have to buy into.

Honestly, I would have too, if I were in that VC's place. Hindsight is everything obviously but at that moment, if a founder were to arrive to an important meeting 20 minutes late without good reason, either the meeting was of little importance to the founder, or the lack of punctuality speaks volumes of his dedication to his company and his potential partners. Dave McClure once told me that he passed on Travis Kalanick for similar reasons.

If lack of punctuality being used as a signal causes these VCs to drop Steve Jobs or Travis Kalanick I think it's safe to say it doesn't speak volumes.

Otherwise you're optimizing for criteria other than "selecting whether to invest in Apple or Uber."

>Otherwise you're optimizing for criteria other than "selecting whether to invest in Apple or Uber.

They arent single-mindedly optimizing to invest in the next apple or uber at all cost! They are balancing it against the need to screen out no-name bums that look and sound the same.

All I'm saying is that a "screen out the bums" heuristic is also a "screen out some of the wealthiest companies to ever exist" heuristic then it's probably not rooted in anything other than vibes.

It is a huge amount of vibes. There is no scientific way to know the future and predict rare events. The whole VC business model isnt about having good predictions. It is about being a few percent more accurate than random chance.

If you can win a coin flip 51% of the time instead of 50, you have a viable business model.

Perfection isnt the goal.

You're only considering the false negatives while forgetting about the true negatives. VCs don't have infinite funds at their disposal; a heuristic like "being late to a meeting leads to a rejection" can be beneficial even if the false-negative-rate is non-zero.

That's not necessarily evidence of how he treated all VCs rather than one VC one time. (Though I'm inclined to guess it's more accurate than the idea you replied to.)

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