Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…You had to make a judgment about other people's judgment. How did you do that? Back when I was an analyst in the early 70s, I followed Xerox. One of the portfolio managers said to me, who's the best Wall Street analyst on Xerox cell site? I said, well, the one who agrees with me most is so and so. Isn't that our definition of who's the smartest? No, but the truth is, we look for smart people. We look for what Nancy, my wife, calls smart eyes—exceptional people who get things a little better than others who understand what's important and what's not, who can go beyond the readily available quantitative information. It's very simple. With oil, the cure for low oil prices is low oil prices. Some people get that intuitively, some people don't understand it.You have to get the people who get it intuitively. I think, also very importantly, we look for team players. We look for people who can work and exchange ideas and can do well with ideas from their peers, from their lessers, from their superiors, managers, subordinates, and throw it all together. We don't want the lone wolf, we don't want the you-eat-what-you-kill kind of person. We don't pay people on the basis of their one year's quantitative performance as an individual, and we don't want people to work that way. I definitely can attest to having nearly as much experience in recruiting. We've added a whole three people to our team now. I do think that the vast majority of venture investment decision making is about understanding founders and having a sense for founders. Again, after talking about all this business analysis stuff, we firmly believe that the vast, vast majority of the investment consideration is backing the right people. What you're doing, I think, every day, every week is evaluating people, so you have to do that in the same way. I think, first of all, when you hear a venture pitch, so many of them that we all hear are like, the person gets on and it's like, here's where I went to school, here's where I worked, and then I worked here, and now I'm doing this, and let me tell you what I'm doing. I sort of say, no, no, let's stop, I want to spend a lot of time understanding you. I think the real way to suss out judgment is by going through the person's story and background and understanding why they made decisions, because you can fake your way through prospective things. When I, and I'm sure you guys were recruiting out of school, there was the vault guide for finance interviews. You memorize every single answer about how you would do this, how you would do that, and whatever. In CS, there was a book called Programming Interviews Exposed written by three ex Microsoft guys, and it was truly the way to whiz through any of these.…

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