How much should decision-makers rely on intuition versus explicit analysis?

Kulveer Taggar · May 31, 2019 · hedged

Deciding whether an idea is working is part science, part data and part intuition — there is no precise rule for how much testing time is enough

His own process mixed roughly six weeks of conversion experiments, weeks of qualitative user and industry conversations, and a forced pilot test, totalling four or five months to validate

Scope: "I don't really have a precise answer"

17:43 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

Product management is both art and science: data frameworks can surface which problems and areas to focus on, but deciding how to tackle them remains a strategic judgment call the founder must make.

Understanding what matters strategically for the business, users and other stakeholders is not something the data hands you.

16:14 20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric

Linda Lian · Apr 1, 2021

Rationality and intuition are symbiotic rather than opposed: intuition already incorporates the hard data plus years of accumulated subconscious inputs.

Hard data goes directly to the head, but intuition sums that logical reasoning with a multitude of subconscious channels aggregated over a lifetime, and is the most basic human survival mechanism.

25:24 20VC: How To Deliver Feedback with Compassion and Clarity, WTF Are Values Really and How To Instill Them & Raising $50M+ From Index and Greylock but Remaining in Stealth for 12 Months with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO @ CommonRoom

Christa Quarles · Jul 29, 2021

Whether to persist with an initiative is an iterative judgment driven by the strength of your hypothesis and point of view as much as by data — belief in the end-state product and customer experience is often what propels founders through

She trusts data above all ('in all else bring data') from her Playdom years, but has seen entrepreneurs succeed by adding and adding on conviction about what the product must become

Scope: she is a big believer in data; both data and conviction matter

16:13 20VC: A Masterclass in Leadership and Scaling Companies: The Decisions only the CEO Can Make, The Secret To Talent Acquisition and Retention and How To Find The Unscalable Things that are Fundamental To Scale with Christa Quarles, CEO @ Corel Corporation

Mike Hudack · Sep 13, 2024

Product is more art than science but has to be managed through data: you must make room for unprovable intuitions, and also measure whether they were right in order to hone intuition over time

Some effects can only be known after shipping and may take months to show up, but measurement is the only way to correct and sharpen intuition

Scope: larger organizations truly struggle to make room for this

19:24 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack

Shardul Shah · Sep 16, 2024

Investment decision making is composed of intuition and an analytical framework, and venture is a craft you continually refine

His own intuition and conviction have grown and evolved over his career even though intuition is hard to put into words

11:25 20VC: Index's Shardul Shah on Why Market Size is a Trap | Biggest Lessons on Pricing from Leading Rounds in Wiz & Datadog | Why Benchmarks & Averages in VC are BS | How Index Makes Decisions and Why Growth & Early are the Same Investing Style

Lucas Swisher · Feb 23, 2026

Data is a prerequisite for an investment decision, not the answer — metrics are guideposts but you can miss the bigger trend if you live in the numbers.

He cites a Coatue IC on Databricks where Thomas told him that a quarter without net-new-ARR acceleration didn't mean the trend wasn't happening.

Scope: data must still be very good

47:16 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher

Vince Hankes · May 3, 2023

A financial model should be one tool among many in an investment decision rather than thrown out or treated as decisive; the real question is what weight to give it

You need many tools to make a decision; the model is a tool to help, not the decision itself

34:38 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive

Martin Mignot · Aug 11, 2025

Detailed outcome scenario planning isn't worth the cycles; sensitivity analysis on the few levers that matter plus judgment on the founder and the talent they attract matters far more than number crunching

Only a few levers really determine where a business goes, and founder dynamics and hiring quality are the dominant variables

50:32 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures

Everett Randle · Nov 10, 2025

Mary Meeker, despite her quantitative reputation, is the most qualitative investor he has worked with — she uses numbers to visualize what a company becomes over eight to ten years

she reads a model like the matrix, translating projections into a concrete picture of real-world adoption, e.g. seeing 20% of households ordering DoorDash monthly rather than an abstract growth rate

5:43 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid

Everett Randle · Nov 10, 2025

Financial models are only useful as a yardstick for testing conviction — laying out what the market is underwriting to and asking whether your intuition says the company will smoke those projections; beyond that they are not useful.

Every successful investment looks absurd when modeled — you'd be laughed at for modeling Figma's actual growth — so models can't forecast the outcomes that matter, but they can reveal when everyone is underestimating a company.

Scope: the 'everyone will underestimate this' signal happens very rarely

52:20 20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid

David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

Your gut is the most sophisticated machine learning model ever created and should be leveraged rather than discounted as a whim

It has been trained over tens of thousands of years with enormous training data, with generations of people refining the code before you inherited it

Scope: contrasted with the common derogatory framing of 'trusting your gut'

15:34 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Jason Citron · Nov 25, 2024

'Trust your gut' is weak advice on its own; the real skill is learning which categories of decision your intuition is reliable on and discounting yourself in the others.

You don't inherently know where your gut is right and wrong; that pattern is learned over years.

25:37 20VC: Discord's Jason Citron on Why Everything We are Taught About Hiring & Management is BS | Do Richer Founders & Gamer Founders Make Better Founders? | Never Before Told Moments Behind Scaling to 200M Users

Martin Mignot · Aug 11, 2025 · hedged

The best investments are the ones that are an immediate yes within the first five minutes, and he would have performed better had he acted on that instinct every time instead of overthinking

Most of his investments that worked were an instant yes on meeting the founder, as with Personio

64:23 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures

Jerry Murdock · Feb 28, 2026

Intuition is almost never wrong; the real error is mistaking wishful thinking for intuition

Reviewing his own wrong calls, the failure was always in misidentifying what was intuition

36:15 20VC: Why Cursor is Dead | An AI Tsunami is Coming & You Need to Prepare | Systems of Record Become Valueless Databases with Agents | Is This The End of Tech Private Equity with Jerry Murdock, Co-Founder of Insight Partners

Cyan Banister · Oct 19, 2020 · hedged

Having to make decisions purely to survive builds the habit of trusting your own convictions and deciding fast

Coming from the streets, survival depended on making decisions; you can't operate without conviction in that situation

Scope: some of those quick decisions turn out wrong and she recalibrates afterwards; others may read it as impulsive

10:55 20VC: Cyan Banister on Her Relationship To Money, Risk, Her Investment Decision-Making Process, Why We Will See A Reckoning in the Early Stage Market, Her Biggest Takeaways from HQ Trivia & The Future of Silicon Valley

Kevin Ryan · Apr 10, 2024 · hedged

Experienced investors should trust their gut more and be decisive — if a deal doesn't feel right, that's sufficient reason to pass.

The judgment built from seeing many things work and not work is what makes gut feel reliable.

Scope: applies once you have accumulated pattern experience

58:09 20VC: Are the Best CEOs the Best Fundraisers, Are the Best Founders Insiders or Outsiders to a Problem, Why Ownership Should Not Be a Focus in VC & The Biggest Lessons Scaling MongoDB to $26BN Market Cap with Kevin Ryan, Founder @ AlleyCorp

Aman Narang · Aug 21, 2024

He has changed his mind toward trusting his own instincts more

If you don't trust your instincts you can end up moving too slowly

Scope: framed as advice he received; in tension with leading with humility

52:38 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast

Danny Rimer · Jun 17, 2024

Investors should trust their first instinctive reaction to a founder and opportunity as the primary input, and keep first-principles analysis and signals as far from the decision as possible because that material mainly serves to rationalise a conclusion either way

The industry trains people to be analytical and to build theses on signals, but those signals end up rationalising rather than driving the decision; the honest information is in how the founder and opportunity first make you feel

Scope: framed as a recent change of mind he is still exploring; part of a broader spiritual/instinctual dimension he had held himself away from

63:04 20VC: Index's Danny Rimer on Investing Lessons from Hits like Figma, Discord and Etsy to Missing Snapchat, Airbnb, Facebook & Spotify | Why Valuation is a Trap and Market Sizing, Signalling and Sector/Geo-Specific Funds are all Noise

David Frankel · Oct 14, 2024

In investment decisions it is wrong to ignore the emotional, visceral response to a founder; at some point you have to run with the emotion rather than only the intellect.

He can talk himself out of any deal overnight by listing what will kill the company, yet the energising rapport with the founder is real information.

Scope: balanced against intellectual analysis, not replacing it

80:28 20VC: Investing Lessons from FC Seeding Uber, Airtable and Coupang | Why Pro Rata is the Original Sin in VC | Why Liquidity Has Died in 2024 | Why LPs are Pissed with VCs | The Hard Truth About Seed Fund Economics with David Frankel @ Founder Collective

Byron Deeter · Aug 25, 2025

He should arguably be more detail-oriented but does not intend to change — betting on team and gut over documents and deal terms is the right way to run his practice

Life is too short; he wants to do big things with great people and have fun, and accepts occasional errors of commission from falling in love with a team

Scope: acknowledges his partners would say he misses small details

73:31 20VC: Do Margins Matter in AI? | Is Defensibility Gone For Good? | Is Vertical SaaS Dead in a World of AI | What SaaS Rules Are BS and No Longer Apply in a World of AI | The Future of Venture: Why Chanel vs Walmart is BS with Byron Deeter

Pat Grady · Jul 8, 2024

Investors should trust their instincts and act on a point of view assembled from clues even when the data doesn't yet support it

Jim Goetz had picked up enough clues in 2007 to be right about the cloud long before the evidence backed him up

Scope: framed as 'trust your instincts' / 'dare to dream'

61:49 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady

Jason James · Aug 29, 2025

You should just do the common-sense things whether or not you have data to support them; chasing supporting data is often a distraction and a delay

At Thumbtack from 2016-2018 they spent enormous time debating native-first because they knew app usage correlated with retention but couldn't prove causality, when establishing causality takes a long time and the secular trend toward mobile was obvious enough to just bet on

Scope: applies even at late-stage companies; bets should rest on sensible long-term secular trends

11:58 20Product: Why Most CPOs are Bad | Why You Do Not Need PMs in a World of AI | Why the Design Stage is Dead and How to Use Vibe Coding to Replace It | The Three Roles All Founders End Up Firing on Repeat with Jason James @ Tezi

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

Growth is a game of intuition — spend is justified by learnings even when the campaign fails

You keep learning to find the right direction, then work on cadence to keep driving in that direction

38:54 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik

Paul Erlanger · Jun 27, 2026

Product building is driven by intuition, but growth and creator selection should be purely metrics-driven

Creators are judged on impressions and conversions; if CAC-to-LTV doesn't work, you churn them out

34:16 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo

Wesley Chan · Aug 22, 2022

Partnership decisions should be driven by data rather than competing opinions, because opinion-yelling rarely changes anyone's mind

Larry's rule — if you have the data you're right, if you don't I'm right and I'm often wrong, so bring the data — makes partner meetings productive

44:06 20VC: Why Market Always Wins Over the Founder & Why I Do Not Do Market Sizing | Why it is not the Best Time to be Investing but it is the Best Time to Have a Fund & The Type of Deals to do Today | Why The Best Founders Have 100 Year Plans with Wes Chan, C

Mike Hudack · Sep 13, 2024

The choice isn't between open discussion and dictatorial product vision — you avoid unproductive talk by grounding debates in quantitative, objective measures and goals, forcing advocates to state how much their idea will move the goal

Once someone has to name a number, the argument becomes grounded — people either back down or make a credible case you can stack rank

Scope: for a big company you may let a credible team own the number and go build it; requires intellectual humility because sometimes they're right and you're wrong

17:34 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack

Dan Siroker · May 15, 2024

His biggest pattern of failure at Optimizely was overriding his own gut in favor of smart hires' or board members' views, and the core lesson is that a CEO must be decisive and follow their intuition

The decisions that still haunt him all followed the shape 'my gut said A, someone else said B, we did B and it went badly'; because he couldn't verbalize his intuition he didn't feel entitled to defend it

Scope: there were also times he chose A and it went badly, but those don't stick with him

17:17 20VC: Fundraising Wisdom that is Total BS; Dilution, Meeting Associates, Taking the Highest Price, Always Be Raising | Why Second Time Founders Are More Investable & Why Not To Hire People Out of College with Dan Siroker, CEO @ Limitless

Jason Citron · Nov 25, 2024

He went through a period of over-trusting experienced hires — delegating not just the outcome but the approach to executives — and stopped listening to his own intuition, which caused a lot at the company to go sideways.

He delegated the approach as well as the outcome and overrode his own instincts as a result.

Scope: describes a specific past period, not the present

26:49 20VC: Discord's Jason Citron on Why Everything We are Taught About Hiring & Management is BS | Do Richer Founders & Gamer Founders Make Better Founders? | Never Before Told Moments Behind Scaling to 200M Users

David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

Over-reliance on graphs and metrics is a major founder mistake: data tells you what is true but not why, so it should inform areas of exploration rather than dictate the product roadmap — you have to go talk to users to learn the why.

Many different underlying causes can produce the same number, and they point to completely different product actions; talking to users gets you the real thing in the world rather than the effect of it.

26:22 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

King pushed data-driven decision-making too far by making data the sole decision maker, at the cost of user experience and product quality; data should be an input, not the decider

When launching games they sometimes spent more time looking at the numbers in meetings than at the game itself

Scope: King was the most data-driven organization he has ever worked in, which was also very powerful

4:46 20Growth: Revolut's Chief Growth Officer on The Growth Playbook Revolut Used to Scale to $2.2BN in Revenue | How Revolut Launch and Grow Products | Why the Best PMs Don't Need A/B Tests & Why CAC is a BS Metric with Antoine Le Nel

Vince Hankes · May 3, 2023

Investors should not walk in with a fixed view of what a company's metrics should look like; instead ask whether the metrics explain and reinforce the qualitative excitement about the business

Every company is unique even within a category, and getting too pattern-matchy about why companies should be a certain way causes many mistakes

39:40 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive

Mike Hudack · Sep 13, 2024

Data is very hard to interpret accurately and it is very easy to lie to yourself with it, so you must consider the full context around a metric

At Facebook, ~75% of users opened the 'dive bar' surface, which looked like a great place to ship into, but ~99% opened it by accident and immediately closed it; data can be cut any way you want

36:12 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack

TJ Parker · Jun 5, 2023

Launching PharmacyOnAmazon.com required non-data-driven, intuitive decisions, and scaling it afterwards was better handed to an Amazonian who knows how to turn the crank

Getting a product off the ground and scaling it are different skills; he doesn't have the scaling skill

53:48 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack

Paul Erlanger · Jun 27, 2026

Beyond a certain scale, product building shifts from a game of intuition to a data-driven numbers game, because data surfaces causes that intuition gets wrong

Robinhood assumed iPhone users deposited twice as much because they were richer, but data showed the Android loading screen was twice as slow and users churned; once fixed, deposits converged

Scope: fomo has not reached that scale yet

38:36 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo

Anish Acharya · Feb 9, 2026

The quality of being consistently right supersedes any explanation of why or how, including intellectual mental models of investing

He found it maddening as a young engineer, but on reflection the outcome-based standard is what actually holds up

40:17 Being consistently right outranks any explicit model

Jeff Seibert · Nov 22, 2023

The most valuable investor skill is deep intuition and conviction from reading a market at a very theoretical, high level

Peter Fenton committed to Digits' A round quickly by distilling the market into a crisp high-level thesis, which Jeff found the biggest lesson of working with him

19:48 Deep market intuition and conviction is the most valuable investor skill

Lucas Swisher · Feb 23, 2026

Being highly analytical — able to compress a complex company into a few lines in Excel and tell a story with the data — is a critical investing skill

Mary Meeker's ability to see stories and errors in numbers others miss, and to lean against the grain from data, is what made her exceptional

46:07 Analytical fluency with the numbers is the decisive skill

Pat Grady · Jul 8, 2024

A firm's data platform should determine whether to meet a company but should never pump out buy signals or make the final investment decision.

It is an internal efficiency tool, not a decision-maker

37:45 Data platforms should inform meeting triage not drive final investment decisions

David Meyer · Nov 1, 2023 · hedged

Over-rigor is waste in the system; detailed frameworks and models should be used to find holes in strategy rather than treated as proof of the right decision

The fallacy of misplaced concreteness means more detail makes people believe something is more correct, but humans are not mathematically definable and products are built for humans

26:29 Detailed frameworks should find holes in strategy not serve as proof of correctness

Mike Lazerow · Aug 2, 2021

You should trust your gut — the first reaction is typically the right one and later reactions are usually worse

Intuition built from experience is where the truth lies for most people

41:51 First gut reaction is typically right later reactions are worse

Chandra Narayanan · Mar 13, 2024

Intuition-led pattern recognition is exposed to bias and to the world changing around you, but it is still the best input you have when a decision must be made

Data is not failsafe either — data works under assumptions that can get ripped away

23:46 Intuition is exposed to bias but remains the best available input when a decision must be made

Chandra Narayanan · Mar 13, 2024

If you think in frameworks and formulas, you don't need much data to make good decisions

At Facebook they built formulas like revenue = users x time spent per user x ads per time spent; at Sequoia, with far less data than Facebook, they classified the portfolio into about eight company types with eight corresponding formulas and could reason from abstractions instead

57:49 Framework based thinking reduces the need for data in decisions

Jerry Murdock · Feb 28, 2026 · hedged

Good decisions require both logic and intuition, and autonomous agents will not have intuition any time soon, so humans remain necessary for decision-making

Without the intuition component you won't succeed; his own success he attributes to better intuition

35:01 Intuition is required agents supply only logic

Jude Gomila · Feb 11, 2020

Investors sit on a spectrum from purely feelings-driven with an unconscious algorithm to those with a written, specifiable process; the work is making the unconscious rules conscious and writable

Writing rules down lets you find the mechanics, derive principles, link them to an ethical framework and become consistent, then check afterwards whether the decision was right and modify the algorithm

15:42 Unconscious intuitive rules should be made explicit and refined into a written process

Harry Stebbings · Dec 7, 2022

Intuition is what takes you to the mountain and data is what takes you up it

26:48 Intuition sets the direction data executes the climb

Vince Hankes · May 3, 2023

Investors should strip emotion out of market volatility to focus on the core of a decision, while still leaving room to trust their gut

In good times people overextrapolate and in bad times they underextrapolate; things are never as good as they seemed and never as bad as they appeared, so a balanced approach lets you see what you are really solving for

10:01 Strip emotion from market swings but trust instinct in key moments

Gustav Söderström · Oct 12, 2022

All models are wrong by definition, and the real risk is dimensionality reduction — picking the wrong few dimensions of a multidimensional reality

A model's whole point is to simplify reality because reality has effectively infinite dimensions; if you leave out the dimension that matters, like disease spread, the model breaks

14:38 The real risk in any simplified model is omitting the dimension that actually matters

Gustav Söderström · Oct 12, 2022

Great leaders can introspect and articulate the reasoning behind their instincts, and doing so is far better than becoming the bottleneck for every product decision

At Spotify he makes few of the product decisions himself because the team spent so much time articulating how they think about the world, producing people as good or better than him at product instincts

62:20 Leaders should articulate the reasoning behind instincts to scale decisions without becoming the bottleneck

Harry Stebbings · Sep 13, 2024

Data interpretation is so context-dependent that two different teams given the same data will reach wildly different outcomes

37:10 Same data yields different conclusions depending on team interpretation

Mike Hudack · Sep 13, 2024

Customer service is where he has seen data abused the most

Metrics get defined to flatter the team — e.g. the story of Amazon claiming all calls were answered within a minute, where the analysis only included calls that were actually answered

37:18 Customer service metrics are especially prone to being gamed or misrepresented

Peter Singlehurst · Mar 19, 2025

Passing on Coinbase at first check was a mistake caused by over-modelling

He built an elaborate spreadsheet estimating the Bitcoin volume and liquidity needed for a 5x return and felt clever doing it, but the model was wildly off

56:57 Over reliance on elaborate spreadsheet modeling can mislead investment decisions

George Zachary · Oct 12, 2020

Conviction in early-stage investing should come from listening closely to the founder and gauging your own felt excitement, not from market-sizing reports or your own or your partners' vision of what the business should be

His hits came from feeling compelled by the person in front of him — as with Elon Musk in 1996, whose mapping idea others thought was dumb because physical maps existed

8:07 Conviction should come from founder excitement not market sizing reports

George Zachary · Oct 12, 2020

The venture investors who survived long-term are almost all human-first, data-second, and they look for the same trait in founders — human-centric people who use data to drive the business

Of roughly 50 people who entered venture in 1995-96, only about five were left years later, and nearly all of them are driven by the human side and use data to help make decisions

23:48 Human first data second investors survive long term and back similarly human centric founders

Zachary Bookman · Dec 6, 2024

Snap judgments are very valuable and leaders should trust their gut on big decisions, contrary to the common advice to be thoughtful and balanced

Your body usually is already telling you the answer, often very fast — when you meet someone or walk out of a meeting

51:25 Snap judgments on big decisions outperform forced deliberation

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Growth intuition is only trustworthy once it rests on a knowledge base: understanding the customer's context, the mathematics of your growth model, and your own company's capabilities

Without that base, the highest-paid opinion in the room just confidently asserts things that may be right or wrong — like ChatGPT stating scientifically false things with confidence

13:48 Intuition is trustworthy only when grounded in customer market and company knowledge

Jake Gibson · Jul 14, 2023

Using signals like Facebook share counts on a video as the input to an investment decision is not real data-driven investing and is crazy

He asked a data-driven VC what data they had on the robotic pizza company and the answer was the number of Facebook shares of a video about them

45:34 Citing vanity metrics as data driven investing is not genuine analysis

Hugo Barra · Nov 9, 2022

When entering a brand new product category you have to rely on intuition more than data, and then validate that intuition repeatedly until you're confident enough to build

In a new category the data doesn't exist yet, so the PM's job is to be the voice of the customer and run an intuition-to-validation loop

26:08 New product categories require intuition first then validation since data doesnt exist yet

Hugo Barra · Nov 9, 2022

He has come to rely on intuition more and more in building consumer products as he has gotten older

46:23 Experience and tenure deepens reliance on intuition in building consumer products