An investor explains his mentor Roger Hurwitz's rule: product, market, and management matter equally, but strong management execution often wins even with a mediocre product. The firm bets on founders who can scale.
It's a great question. God, it's hard to boil it down to one, but one that resonates with me is there's a partner here, Roger Hurwitz, who's kind of been one of my mentors, and he always says there's 5 things that matter in investment: product, market, management, management, management. And we are backing management teams just as much as we're backing markets and the actual product, if not more, which is why they're 3 of the 5. And I've seen scenarios where the best product doesn't always win because it's the management execution that wins. So we're trying to back really good founders who can carry a business, who we feel like can build a really large business. And I think that is probably more important than do they have the best product in the market.
