What Do I Look for in a Pitch?

Founders will often ask me, “Do you want to go through our deck?”
 
It’s not about the slide deck. We have made the decision to invest in entrepreneurs without slides, whose ambition, passion, depth of understanding of an opportunity and compelling vision come through crystal-clear in conversation.
 
But…that’s a high bar for communication. Most of the time, putting a business plan on paper helps you structure a … [ Read more ]

Sarah Guo

It’s worth thinking about whether you are a category creator or disruptor. If you are creating a category, focus on market risk — do users really feel the pain and want this? Is there budget out there? If you are trying to take over a category, then what are the dynamics, the changes in technology or environment, the 10x better that will allow you to … [ Read more ]

Sarah Guo

Great entrepreneurs can change and expand markets, even consumer attitudes. Total focus on solving a problem for a customer you understand helps you dominate a “small market,” and dominance of a tactical, small market gives an agile and ambitious team a wedge to grow from. Many great companies start from a tactical feature in a space full of problems. Initially, they must fight to maintain … [ Read more ]

Sarah Guo

A company is a great story told again and again, to recruits, investors, media, customers, and partners, until it’s real.

Sarah Guo

Some entrepreneurs validate customer need through years of having lived the problem. Others go native with users — survey and interview them, show mocks and prototypes, do demand testing by “selling” or advertising a product they haven’t built yet, even get customers to partner and co-develop with them. There’s no replacement for shipping a product and getting adoption, engagement and revenue data. But that is … [ Read more ]

Marc Andreessen

Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.

When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else. I’m not suggesting … [ Read more ]

Marc Andreessen

You can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, and not infrequently — but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. Market matters most.

Andy Rachleff

When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

Marc Andreessen

The caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the CEO, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them. You look at a startup and ask, will this team be able to optimally execute against their opportunity? I focus on effectiveness as opposed to experience, since the history of the tech industry is full … [ Read more ]

On Product/Market Fit for Startups

Marc Andreessen writes about the only thing that matters for a new startup – product/market fit.

The #1 Mistake Entrepreneurs Make

I’ve started 4 companies and have invested in 25 more. And I can say, with supreme confidence, that I have made or seen almost every mistake possible. None of these are fun to live through, I assure you. But they are not nearly as fatal to a young company as the #1 mistake entrepreneurs make – FOCUSING ON THE WRONG THINGS. Successful entrepreneurs focus exclusively … [ Read more ]