Managing Partner, @Initialized. Earliest investor in @coinbase @instacart @flexport & 100+ more—$36B in startup market cap so far. Forbes Midas List 2019 #21 
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Subtle real advantage nobody talks about: if founders can access deeper pools of capital early/quickly, they can get bigger faster without spawning lots of competitors. If your startup is real, pitching Sand Hill is sometimes like giving away copies of your treasure map
This advice is seldom given because most of the time and for most founders, you are still better off talking about your idea as much as possible to better understand where the dead ends are in the idea maze. Can’t do that in isolation.
Asking investors what is hot is usually less useful than asking what has worked, and what didn’t work and why? That’s how you can skip ahead and avoid death. “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.” —Munger
when has this ever worked in practice?
Groupon / Living Social was a particularly extreme example of this. If nobody knew how fast Groupon was growing it might have skipped a few rounds of dilution
were you thinking of palantir when you said it?
Oh that one nobody wanted to fund and there were no copycats spawned haha
Please send me deals that nobody wants to fund.
I should add - and there are no copycats.
none here! we outlived them all :)
That is privilege.. founders that say 'I raised $100k from family & friends' as if doing that is easy or VCs that say 'I started a fund as a group of friends gave me $1m each' Its Definitely a real advantage when for most, raising from friends and family is NOT an option at all
"Execution is everything" is a pithy quote VCs preach as gospel to the detriment of founders
It’s generally true, just not always true
Post Series A (less helpful these days) it gets a little fuzzy. Sometimes execution is hiring the right person to scale and that involves access and capital
examples?
Groupon had 5000 clones in China alone. Kaifu Lee’s book “AI Superpowers..” talks about how that group buying coupon war created a generation of market-savvy entrepreneurs (compared to mission-driven ones in Silicon Valley)https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-groupon-effect-in-china/ …
True. Flip side: there were only 23 VC deals in the entire state of New Mexico in 2018. Sometimes, the only way a startup has a chance is if there is access to any pool of capital.
Curious how practical it is for founders from other states to fly to Bay Area for fundraising?
People do it all the time
In our seed round in 2015, about 1/3 was from investors in our state. Most was from elsewhere.
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