""The longer I've been doing this, the more the problem and the urgency of that problem come back to me as one of the most important things... the default answer is always team, and that's certainly a huge part of our decision. But I'm always evaluating the team in the light of, is this a big important problem to solve? Is there a good reason to build a company here?"

"I'm a pre-seed investor, the failure rate is high, and so we expect fifty percent of our companies to not make it, or at least return less than one X capital. In any other context, that's like an absolute bloodbath... even if you have the handful of breakout successes that make the fund, there's a lot of times where it still doesn't feel like things are going well."

"There's a lot of techniques that you'll see founders use to try to manufacture FOMO... 'we're closing on two million and the first million gets this cap and the second million's gonna get this higher cap.' That's not a real thing. Nobody wants to pay more than other people closing around the same time. If you tell me I'm raising two million and I've got three million of interest and I need to do allocations by this week, then that tells me I better make a decision. So the way you create FOMO is creating more interest in the round than there is room... if you manufacture that, you start to lose credibility."

"The same way a founder qualifies their sales leads to figure out who they should spend more time with, you should qualify your VCs. Have you invested in this sector? Have you invested in this stage? Do your check sizes line up with the kind of round we're trying to raise?... After two or three calls, you should be able to ask a VC, what do you have left in your process? What are the things you're still trying to get comfortable with? If you don't get a straight answer, the VC is probably still figuring it out, and they don't really know what they need to hear to get to a yes. So you might want to move on, or push them to come back with an answer."

"The founders who are more successful tend to work with their investors on, what is the dashboard of things we want to look at to run this business? Let's agree on a set of things that are important and how we're going to measure progress, and let's talk about those once a quarter. My investor update is not inventing some report I don't care about as a founder but my investors bug me for... your investor update should just be a screenshot of your dashboard on how you're running your business, what's important, what's going well, what's not."