Why Top VCs Decide in 48 Hours

Some VCs take forever to decide while others can move with lightning speed. What separates them? In this clip from my conversation with Matt Turk, partner at FirstMark Capital, he talks about the preparation that he puts in that allows him to make decisions with lightning speed. You want to speak with investors who are as prepared as Matt.

Actually fascinated by, you know, that, that curve, right? I start backing the best founders and I come back to backing the best founders. You're a tier 1 fund competing with other tier 1s who all have access to the shiniest founders, and you're an early stage investor, which means those rounds happen relatively quickly. How do you form conviction kind of so rapidly?

So, you know, going back to some of the clichés of venture capital, but again, there's a reason why they clichés. So prepared mind is something that, you know, people may have heard about, which is this idea that, you know, you do work upfront and That can be industry work, that can be general company category work. It can be founder work where you've sort of fine-tuned your own model, if you think of your mind as an AI, based on founder data. But you show up in those conversations with an opinion. And when it so happens that the founders match that opinion, then you know pretty quickly. And then yes, you have to act fast in a context of maximum ambiguity. The world where for the best companies, companies show up in your office, have $2 or $3 million in ARR and are willing to answer all your questions and are not talking to any VCs and tell you, you have all the time in the world to make your decision. That is long gone. And maybe it existed at some point, I don't know, in the '80s in Silicon Valley, maybe even then it was not the case. But in our world, that's just not the case. But again, you do this job long enough, you build, you sort of know very quickly in a conversation whether that's something that you're going to be excited about. And again, prepared mind, like you've done the work and you know that whatever they're doing is interesting because you've done the reps and you know that this specific thing, that's where the world is going because it so happens you spoke to a bunch of Fortune 500 CIOs that explain that it's a problem that they have, whatever heuristic, but you've done that and then you meet people that have that clarity of thought where they explain in very precise terms why what they're doing is important, why it's almost inevitable that whatever little part of the world is going to evolve the way they describe it and why they're the right people to do it. And when that happens, and it doesn't happen that often, it's very special. As an experienced VC, you sort of, you You sort of know pretty quickly.

That really resonates. The reason why I left Shopify actually was to join a venture capital fund. Went to the dark side for a bit.

Yeah, that I'm aware of.

And one of my observations was that the best investments were based on a crisp, simple insight. It was crisp and easy to articulate. It was just unfortunately not obvious at the time of investment. Hence the venture aspect, but like the entrepreneur's ability to just synthesize everything, have unique knowledge, have alpha to use an investment term, but then just convey, they have such mastery over the topic that they can just tell you crisply, like you can walk into a partner meeting and you just recite it verbatim. Like, and so complexity of the entrepreneur struggles to convey what they know that for me was like a negative investment signal.

No, that's, that's, uh, that's, that's exactly that.

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