Sublime

The success of each fund entirely rests on the top one to three companies in the fund. There’s often even a large gap between the returns from the No. 1 company and those from the runner-up. Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures, uses a heuristic of thirds: “one deal returns the fund, another 3 to 4 deals return it again, and the rest

talent sets the floor, but character sets the ceiling.

This is critical, because every single organization in this research insists that a candidate’s attitude is equally if not more important than her skills and experience.

This was the second statistically significant difference I observed in my data comparing the billion-dollar and random group. The founders of billion-dollar companies were more likely to either work for themselves or to work at a tier-one company.