Venture Capitalists at Work: How VCs Identify and Build Billion-Dollar Successes

What are three things that you wished as an investor that every entrepreneur knew? Wagner: Focus is essential. Recruiting is the main job, and listening is one of the core skills. And I don’t mean listening to venture capitalists. I mean listening to the market. Shah: What are the most common blind spots you see in the entrepreneurs? Wagner: The mo

What gives you an early sign that a company is getting off track? Lee: Adoption and engagement. That is what matters. If people start talking about the product less or they are using the product less over time, those are two big signs that there is a problem. Really great products continue to show linear growth in both adoption and engagement.

Another reason momentum is really valuable is that it helps cement a culture of performance and effective action. Start-up teams have an initial amount of bonding energy. That bonding energy dissipates every time there is a disappointment. You have a limited amount of time to hold together a team to accomplish something. Every time you have a micro

Think about how an idea from a twenty-eight-year-old kid in Chicago [Andrew Mason] turned into a multi-billion-dollar business. That was not possible five or ten years ago. Opportunities like this are a possibility because the markets are so big. If you believe in the product, you believe in the use case, and you have the right team—you should ride

Shah: What is a key to attracting and retaining great talent to build an A team? Dalton: It really boils down to appealing to the most basic human emotions. You want people to have pride in what they do and you want people to create some intrinsic value as a result.

I believe that recruiting is just something that you need to do relentlessly. And how well you balance your ego ultimately shows up with your approach towards recruiting. I am a believer in taking risks with hiring, adding additional DNA to a system.

As I mentioned, they have a holistic picture of a whole company in their mind. As the company expands, their holistic picture expands itself. This ability to holistically think out a company from the product to the customer to whatever. It does not mean they are great engineers or necessarily great sales guys or great financial guys, but they can h

If you want to start a company, you really have to go to people who will talk to you. Entrepreneurs have to go out to get objective feedback on their ideas.

What you see in these very successful companies fairly early is a higher repeatable sales model. You also see them zooming into first place.