Venture investors face pressure to pick winners fast, but the best companies often take four years or more to show their real potential. Early signals matter less than patience.
It's easy as investors to get impatient and to want every company to work immediately right out of the box. I think about some of our top Companies in Fund 1. For many of them, it wasn't clear that they were going to really work in the first four years. They managed to stay alive. They finished to get some good things done, but it wasn't obvious that they were going to be successful. And so there's this tension between. You want to tell your investors, these are the companies you should care about. And if you're like four years in, you know, I'm having this kind of conversation with some of our LPs right now about our most recent fund, four years in. It's only now beginning to emerge a set of companies that are likely to be the ones that matter.
