Short excerpt from a YouTube conversation (April 7, 2024) in which Speaker B asks Jason M. Lemkin about how founders choose venture investors based on shared "realization of the problem" and about Jason's remark to "bet on what you know" when transitioning from CEO to VC. The clip focuses on founder–investor alignment (feeling the problem, passion) and seeks clarification of Jason’s advice.
One of the main reasons I think I've seen founders pick their venture investor is the alignment of realization of problem. You feel the problem of search and they see that in you. They feel your passion. And you said before about betting on what you know when you go from CEO to vc.
Yeah.
What did you mean by this, Jason?
Yeah, it's the same advice I give to lots of OP operators. Look, I came out of a, you know I came out of a second generation SaaS company now called Adobe Sign and I had, you know we, we hit a million a month when we sold to Adobe. 12 million a year growing 100% and I just, but, but we had a tiny team and I had so many headaches and my biggest headaches were, you know, we talked about our search servers going down. We used, we used a cool in browser thing that didn't scale. Then we switched to Lucene which is basically elastic today but it was an early deployment and we didn't have the right engineers to make Lucene skills.
