How soon after making an investment can investors tell whether it will be good or bad?
5 recorded positions from 4 people, first said Apr 3, 2024. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Warts surface within three to six months revealing investment quality
David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024
You typically learn whether an investment is good within three to six months, when the warts hidden during diligence surface
Assumptions made at the deal turn out incorrect, or the business changes fast — as happened with COVID winners whose businesses stopped behaving the same way post-COVID
45:49 20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs"
Harry Stebbings · Oct 14, 2024 · hedged
You can tell within the first three months whether a company is not good.
Scope: framed as a personal feeling
10:02 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
Also on the record
Kevin Hartz · Jul 22, 2024
Patience is the most important ingredient in a venture outcome — time itself solves problems and gets companies into orbit, even ones investors have told to return the money
He has seen time and again companies wander in the woods for a long time, be forgotten or written off, and still work out
35:31 Patience and time eventually turn around written off companies
Harry Stebbings · Apr 3, 2024 · hedged
You can tell whether a company is good within the first month of working there
38:51 Company quality is apparent within the first month of working there
David Frankel · Oct 14, 2024
Early judgments about a company are often wrong: enterprise SaaS gives slow feedback because of long sales cycles, consumer gives fast feedback, and the overriding lesson is patience.
He was convinced Olo was a total loss and that the founder was duping investors each round, and it took a very long time to come good.
10:13 Feedback speed differs by business model enterprise slow consumer fast so patience is key
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 5 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.