Anu Hariharan: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's a how-can-I-help moment. Yeah. What we look for is, how fast does the founder move? What is how fast do they move mean? How fast do they ship? How fast do they iterate? Is it single biggest indicator and correlation to how successful they're going to be and how soon? You won't be right about members' many decisions early on, but at least, are you learning from them fast? And are you making changes? That's one we measure. Second of the growth stage is how well are you hiring. If you're sloppy in hiring, it always hits a wall. One of the things we look for is how well are they hiring engineers, how well are they hiring execs. Will they be able to convince an incredible exec to come join them? That's second. Third is clarity of thought. Clarity of thought in the growth stage for us is, can they write out two pages what makes this a $5 billion or a $10 billion company really well? If you're doing those three things, you're going to be on top of your metrics, your product-market fit, your attention. There will be rough edges. I think because of YC, we've had the benefit of watching everyone from day one. We know how Tony scaled. We know deeply well how Josh had Gusto scale. We know a lot of those founders. We then know, okay, these were rough edges, these are okay. These other founders had and this is how you and I know. We've told a lot of these stories on Acquired. If you're a growth investor looking at these companies new, you're like, I know this is all going great, but you know those companies don't always all go great. Tony had some serious near death moments. Airbnb was not up into the right journey the whole time.…

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