The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth

“In the VC world, the errors of omission are much more damaging than errors of commission.”

Here’s the lesson: set your organization goals thoughtfully. If the organization celebrates and pays bonuses only for successfully achieved targets, don’t be surprised by endless sandbagging and employees setting low-risk, easily achievable targets in the first place.

This is why home runs matter for VCs and strikeouts don’t.

VCs don’t want to buy the first house or the first car.

So how do VCs hit the home runs? VCs do this by making relatively small bets and acknowledging up front that most of them will fail.

venture capitalists are causally responsible for the launch of one-fifth of the 300 largest US public companies in existence today. Moreover, they estimate that three-quarters of the largest US VC-backed companies would not have existed or achieved their current scale without VC support.

They de-risk risks; they don’t avoid them.

“In the VC business model,” the founder of Floodgate VC firm Mike Maples tells us, “you have to think of risk not as chance of failure, but as a chance of an upside success.”

Playing it too safe is one of the major flaws we observe.