Charles Hudson argues venture firms should treat their decision-making process as a product, since a portfolio is just the sum of its decisions. He favors small, intuition-driven checks for early-stage investments over more rigid approaches, and contrasts his method with peers like Josh and Jack.
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The one thing I will think is that I've heard Josh talk about this at length is most firms don't think about their decision making process as a product. And if you thought about your decision making process is a product, you would spend a lot more time and care thinking about, well, how do we actually make decisions? And I'd argue in venture, decision making is the product. Your portfolio is the sum total of the things that you saw, the things that you chose to invest in. And I think what he outlined, I don't think that will work for me. Like it's a little bit more rigor and we don't have as many decision makers at the firm. But I think a lot about on our end, what is our product. And I think I'm happiest with our decision making processes. Individuals following their own intuition and rewrite small enough checks to early stage companies if there isn't a lot of metadata to analyze. But I think it was Jack who said if most VCs looked at the way that their own firms are run and he had portfolio companies that were run that way, he'd be horrified.