Jessica Livingston: evaluation

Transcript context

…Amazing. So if we were to zoom out, in early stage investing, the main thing you need to get right and evaluate as the founder, the social radar skill that you've had from childhood is such an incredible advantage in doing this well, and you could basically say YC is what it is because of this unfair advantage that you all had in the early days. I'm guessing many people listening to this are like, "We need a Jessica on our team. We need to build this skill ourselves. We need to figure out how to integrate social radar into our process." I know you're going to hate this question, but just, do you have any advice for people that want to try to build the skill, get better at this, notice some of these things? I really think that our advantage was that my three co-founders were deeply technical people. And I think a lot of investors back then weren't, didn't have that background. And I think that that background really helped YC choose good founders. So I don't want to make it sound like it was that big of a deal, but advice? Advice for how to hone... I mean, I think just try to pay attention to subtle cues. If you really feel like, gosh, I'm so clueless about these things, try to just tell yourself, "Okay, I'm going in to evaluate these founders, evaluate this investment opportunity. I know I'm bad at these kind of judgments. I'm going to remember, do they seem like they get along?" Because there are no trick questions. I don't have any trick questions that you could ask, or it's just paying attention. Have a conversation. Do they understand their product well? Are they defensive? Maybe have your own little checklist that you think about. You don't have to have it written down, but you think about, and then afterward, you spend some time thinking, were they defensive? When I asked them why this is better than the competitor, how did that go? Or ask them, maybe do have some questions, if you don't know how long they've known each other, ask them that question. "How did you two meet? Have you ever worked together before? How's it going?" Just be a little bit more conscious about asking these types of questions to reveal some key information for your investment decision. That was an awesome summary of a lot of the stuff we talked about. If anyone ever doubts that you are very good at this, Paul tweeted this quiz, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes quiz, that I took, it's incredibly hard. You basically see a bunch of eyes and you're supposed to judge their emotion, and it's really hard. And you got 36 out of 36, which blows my mind.…

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