Floodgate Insights

“We invest in people.” 

This phrase is the VC industry’s most common refrain - yet it often masks a simple truth: most VCs are investing in resumes. They seek out the senior engineer from Stripe, the researcher from OpenAI, or the ML engineer from DeepMind. It’s less about the individual and more about the institutional validation they bring.

The potential of an inflection must be converted into a pattern-breaking product that changes how people think, feel, and act in the future.

The insight is what connects the two; without it, the inflections that surround you will not be harnessed effectively to create a breakthrough.

Startups like Twitter, Twitch, and many others achieved extraordinary success while often seeming to disregard the usual "best practices." In contrast, many other startups I thought were highly promising often failed, even when they seemed to do everything right.

I became fixated on knowing why. Years of hard questioning drove me to a truth that surprised me. Underneath a breakthrough startup idea were powerful forces at work—forces more crucial to success than the idea itself.

Roughly a decade ago, I needed to make an important choice:

Retire from seed investing because I was a lucky fool?

Or dive deeper than ever to learn about what was really going on?