Jonny Boyarsky

Hot Take Season is back!
 
 One of the biggest problems of the VC world is the incentive and practice to tout your wins and hide your losses.
 
 So many "Tier 1" VCs will swear up and down about early stage investments they made and the conviction that they have and then founders and others start to believe that they're geniuses.
 
 "We knew Uber was going to be huge, read our investment memo on it" --> please shut up and show me the 50 investment memos you wrote that year that you didn't get your money back.
 
 You likely had the same conviction on those 50 other deals that went belly up within a few years and you got no return
 
 Every time a VC talks about a 100x return there are usually 20-100 that end up being worthless.
 
 They have the same conviction at the earliest stages about their winners as they do their losers, which means that their conviction is misguided and essentially meaningless.
 
 The problem is that the conviction leads to founders and LPs thinking that investors are omniscient mini gods. Founders and LPs will listen to their advice on building and take it as gospel even though many investors haven't built anything in years!
 
 And before people respond with power law nonsense, I'm not arguing that they can't be good investors even when they're wrong most of the time, I'm just arguing they shouldn't tout certainty and conviction when their accuracy is abysmally low.
 
 The problem isn't that they tout their wins, it's they give advice as though they aren't wrong most of the time.
 
 #founders #vcs #hottake