Sarah Drinkwater

Roelof Botha brought up this same topic in a recent Invest Like The Best episode in an even more poignant way: "Imagine the venture business in a decade, and Sequoia is gone. We presided over the decline of Sequoia, this team, the people here in this room, it was us. What happened? What did we not do?"

First, most venture capital firms use antiquated business models that prevent them from being able to move quickly, reach scale, and establish strong competitive moats. Most venture firms are built on a partnership model, like law firms.

1. young funds invest particularly early2. emerging VC focuses on trends at early stage3. new fund managers have different work experience

Forget what they say—instead look at who they marry.

This is a sure-fire technique, and it tells you important things about people you can’t learn any other way. A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public.

This choice tells you about their own

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Asking friends what would kill their firms, I heard; Performance. Succession planning. Politics. There was plenty of overlap in their answers. What stuck out to me the most was how a lot of these fears closely aligned with the revolutions already going on in venture that I've been writing about. The productization and improvement in a venture funds... See more

Dunbar actually doesn’t say that we devote “grooming time” to the whole social group of 150. Rather he says that the 150 is made up from welding together much smaller “primary networks”: coalitions, friendship groups. Intensive grooming (language, for humans) is reserved for close friends. Our intimate group is very small, averaging just five.