I know exactly what you mean. Most predictions are cast into the wind and only the ones that are correct are recognized later. Nate Silver talks about this in his book "The Signal and The Noise"; I highly recommend it.
>> the key assumption that's baked into that statement is that everyone universally recognizes the 'best deals'. Of course that's not certain. The wisdom of the crowd may be better than VCs at recognizing the 'best deals'. I can easily imagine 'best deals' that the crowd identifies that VCs wouldn't fund.
Wholeheartedly agree with your statement - but keep in mind that VCs typically get access to way more information than what's available through a crowdfunding site.
My guess is this is because most VCs cannot really discern trends, predict the future, etc - even though that is what they claim to do. ( The best ones can, to some extent )
So I would guess, based on this data, that crowdfunding equity will perform just as well as average VC or better, net of fees
The best VCs just have good deal flow. IE, the wildly successful startups go to them first. I don't think the VCs with great returns are better at guessing.
All fair points. Especially the notion of api-company w developer investors. Investors naturally become evangelists for the company and that could prove to be amazing. Hasn't played out yet, but I believe it can be powerful.
I think Zenefits is an awesome company as well. With regards to allocating a slice to the crowd, I don't know how often that will happen. At least for me personally, if I commit to invest, I typically want to invest as much as possible (trying to learn from Buffett). That would likely mean that if I was investing in a round I would prefer that no slice is allocated to non-value add investors. Could certainly debate whether or not the "crowd" is a value-add investor.
I loved the quote though, just had to use it. I scanned all of the comments from the original post and the "Maserati" one was my hands-down favorite. :)
I scanned all of the comments from the original post and the "Maserati" one was my hands-down favorite.
Cool, glad you found it useful. The reactions were fairly mixed, and I think a lot of people in the original post took it a bit too literally. It's all good though.
No problem :) I think you're catching enough flak for your over-50 comments below, so I didn't mention that one ;)
BTW, shallow thought wasn't meant as a derogative. It's what we monkeys do best, after all. It'll result in a different profile of swings, hits, & misses than other approaches, that's all.
(also, the irony that the new yorker article also suggests how we're really good at seeing the faults in others thought processes but not in our own is hi-larious)
There is a sense of sustained confidence, of inevitability, of capability, that investors must look for in their founders. A person like this is bound to have a history of success, large and small. They can't help it. And none of these qualities are correlated to personality type or financial status. Such people are simply incessant creators. They cannot stop creating. You might try to stop them creating, and they would still find a way to thwart you and create anyway.
My sense is that most wannabe entrepreneurs do not have these qualities. And without these qualities, it will be difficult to succeed even with a world-class idea, or with all the money in the world, or even with great intelligence and capability.
The helpful words from you, then, would be the ones that change the would-be entrepreneur into an incessant creator.
Let us assume that such words exist, and that the supplicant (and I use that word advisedly) implements them. I reckon it would take a year (or possibly less) to demonstrate that a sustained change has occurred, thanks to those words.
The question arises, of course: do such words exist, and if so, what are they?
Note that if you discover these words, then they will be worth, literally, many billions of dollars.
Personally, I'd go more Zen. We are talking about inspiring deep, abiding, personal change after all.
More often than not we get in our own way. This is not something that you can consciously change, even if you are aware of it. There are several kinds of beliefs, and some of them are ingrained deep-down inside of you. We often make the mistake of thinking that our minds are like machines, which can be constructed in different ways - but minds are more like life - growing, changing, in lots of ways.
So the words must be seeds. It is easy to describe the outcome that you want, but very hard to construct a seed that will get the person there. So difficult, in fact, that it may not exist, or if it does it may take years to grow.
Learn to meditate. Learn to accept reality for what it is, learn to stop fighting reality. Learn to accept yourself and love and laugh and work with a vigor that you've only barely tapped.
"radical transparency" is a powerful concept. Weird and uncomfortable at first - but I generally like it. In case anyone want's to see their 100+ page internal company manifesto, it's right here:
It seems to me there's a lot of interesting psychology elements to this, but it's also a simple reflection of relatively constant growth rates. If population of cities grow 3% every year, they will spend a lot more years in the 1 millions than the 9 millions, etc
