Do investors and operating executives face fundamentally different standards for how often they can be wrong?

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Venture capital is a job where you feel great writing every check and the data later tells you you were wrong about roughly 80% of them

33:07 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Harry Stebbings · May 31, 2024

Venture capital is uniquely tolerant of failure — you can be the best in the world if 10% of your outcomes are great even when 90% are terrible

No other profession, like a chef, could survive that hit rate

33:16 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Andrew Feldman · Mar 24, 2025

Venture capitalists are wrong nine times out of ten and everybody forgets as long as they're really right once

55:04 20VC: AI Chip Wars: How Cerebras Plans to Topple NVIDIA's Dominance | Why We Have Not Reached Scaling Laws in AI | What Happens to the Cost of Inference | How We Underestimate China and Shouldn't Sell To Them with Andrew Feldman

Andrew Feldman · Mar 24, 2025

Being a CEO demands a different error profile than investing — you have to be mostly right most of the time, even though high decision volume guarantees many mistakes

A CEO makes a very large number of decisions, so mistakes are unavoidable, but the job requires a high base rate of correctness rather than rare outliers

55:13 Ceos must maintain a high hit rate unlike investors