Do early-stage and growth-stage investing skills transfer to the same investor?

Sarah Guo · Apr 28, 2023 · hedged

Early-stage investing is more different from growth investing than it appears, so growth firms that moved into early stage with a blanket approach — like Tiger — may not fare well

A blanket-based approach doesn't transfer to early stage

Scope: "I don't know if that's gonna turn out super well"

34:38 20VC: In AI Who Wins? Startups or Incumbents? What Happens to Wealth Inequality? Why Will $10BN+ Companies Only Have 10 People | Why Defensibility in Startups is BS & Speed is Everything? Why Large Groups Worsen Decision-Making with Sarah Guo

Imran Khan · Aug 26, 2024

Public market investors going deep into early-stage private investing (Series A/B/C) is a mistake

Everyone has a core strength and skills don't transfer across asset classes; private investing requires access, judgment and conviction, and public investors lack the time for deal access so they end up hiring others to manage the book

57:36 20VC: Why the IPO Market is not Closed | Why Revenue Multiples are BS and Founders Need to Change | Advice From Jack Ma, Jamie Dimon and Evan Spiegel | Lessons from Taking Snap & Alibaba Public with Imran Khan

Nabeel Hyatt · Apr 4, 2025

Early-stage and growth investing are different sports and should be run by separate teams

Growth can be more hierarchical, use principals and associates, do deep diligence, look at numbers and call 25 customers; at early stage there often aren't 25 customers, so it's a different muscle — and doing one job simply at the highest level is hard enough without playing two sports

Scope: says it's not that he couldn't do growth, but that he shouldn't try to do both

21:44 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital

Philipp Freise · Jun 30, 2025

The DNA of KKR and other later-stage firms does not extend to what growth funds or Insight do, and will never extend to venture, because it is a fundamentally different skill set

Growth requires a separate team; the skill sets do not transfer

20:45 20VC: Inside KKR's Monster $8BN European Fund | The $500M Turkey Gamble That Went Wrong | Do Andreessen & General Catalyst Scare KKR? | Will AI Kill the PE Model? | Can The PE Model Survive without IPOs and Where is the Liquidity with Philip Freise

Philipp Freise · Jun 30, 2025

Venture firms moving into private equity's territory are not a threat to KKR, because the industry is large enough for everyone and venture is an entirely different skill set

He has done venture investing himself and knows it requires a different skill set from what KKR does

57:02 20VC: Inside KKR's Monster $8BN European Fund | The $500M Turkey Gamble That Went Wrong | Do Andreessen & General Catalyst Scare KKR? | Will AI Kill the PE Model? | Can The PE Model Survive without IPOs and Where is the Liquidity with Philip Freise

Logan Bartlett · Aug 29, 2022 · hedged

Exposure to many investing styles under one umbrella (early stage, late stage, growth equity, growth buyout, lower mid-market LBO) makes you a better evaluator of investment opportunities because there are many different ways to make money

Battery looked at so many different kinds of deals that internalizing the mash-up of styles taught him how to evaluate any investment opportunity on its merits

Scope: framed as what he personally internalized at Battery

5:23 20VC: Is Now Really the Best Time to Be Investing? WTF is Happening at Growth Stage Investing? Why VCs Have Gotten Lazy Over the Last 2 Years? Investing Lessons from Hitting with Braze and Missing with Snowflake with Logan Bartlett, Managing Director @ Re

Saam Motamedi · Jul 15, 2024

Elad Gill is the outside investor he most respects, because he is rare in being able to operate effectively across all stages in one person.

Gill can initiate new companies, lead Series A's and do growth rounds — a single thinker extending across stages.

56:47 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock

Harry Stebbings · Jun 30, 2025

Thrive is the firm that manages to cross growth and early stage investing exceptionally well

Scope: framed as an exception to the rule that skill sets don't transfer

21:06 20VC: Inside KKR's Monster $8BN European Fund | The $500M Turkey Gamble That Went Wrong | Do Andreessen & General Catalyst Scare KKR? | Will AI Kill the PE Model? | Can The PE Model Survive without IPOs and Where is the Liquidity with Philip Freise

Everett Randle · Nov 10, 2025

The best investors today transcend stage rather than identifying as growth or early-stage specialists.

Investors like Pat Grady simply find incredible founders with immense upside and partner with them, and many nominal growth investors are now doing earlier-stage deals.

Scope: Ev says he does not yet have the track record to claim he is an amazing investor

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Harry Stebbings · Feb 23, 2026

Josh Kushner at Thrive has proved that the LP belief that early-stage and growth investing skills don't transfer is wrong

38:19 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

Harry Stebbings · Oct 21, 2024

Not every investor has the plasticity to move between investment stages within a firm — it is really hard to do

46:54 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws

Mamoon Hamid · Oct 21, 2024

It is generally hard to have the neuroplasticity to switch between early-stage infrastructure investing and pre-IPO consumer investing day to day, so only a few partners should do the select/growth work

They keep one shared pipeline and investment meeting but don't want to burden everyone with bringing that neuroplasticity every day

Scope: all partners still do venture investing; only a few do select

47:09 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws

Lucas Swisher · Feb 23, 2026

It is possible but very hard for one investor to be excellent at both early-stage and growth-stage investing

The frameworks and inputs differ by scale — reading a balance sheet matters for a pre-IPO company while having seen thousands of founders is what you have to go on at seed — and you face different competitors in each segment

Scope: some funds have done it exceptionally well

38:33 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

Harry Stebbings · Aug 5, 2024

Sustaining selection quality is far harder at seed and Series A than at Series B or C, which makes Pat Grady's move earlier stage impressive

Waiting for the right pitch is a very different discipline when there is much less company data at the earliest stages

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Taavet Hinrikus · Apr 28, 2025

Mid-stage SaaS and consumer investing is mechanical spreadsheet work — stacking cohort curves, netting CAC against LTV, then paying a very high price to win — and is uninteresting compared with early-stage founder judgment

At mid-stage the analysis is arithmetic on existing metrics; at early stage you have to read the founder's motivation and unfair advantage

Scope: 'spreadsheet monkeys' applies to mid-stage, not early stage

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Taavet Hinrikus · Apr 28, 2025

There is more unpredictability now, but predictable growth-trajectory companies that need capital still exist and can still be underwritten spreadsheet-style — resembling older-style public market investing

Those companies still look similar and still need someone to fund them; there's nothing wrong with that

8:35 Predictable growth companies still exist and warrant spreadsheet style underwriting

Pat Grady · Jul 8, 2024

In growth investing you cannot distinguish yourself by underwriting the standard five-year financial model; the key question is what happens after the model ends — whether the founder has grown faster than the company and is attacking new markets with act two and act three.

Every growth investor has the same inputs — the numbers, customer calls, time with the team — and builds the same decelerating-growth model, so the model itself carries no edge; the founder variable decides whether the company keeps compounding or grinds to a halt and gets sold to private equity.

16:52 Growth investing edge comes from judging founders post model act two and three not the financial model

Nabeel Hyatt · Apr 4, 2025

Internalizing what public markets currently think will lead early-stage investors to make the wrong calls, because nobody knows what public markets will value in AI in seven years

The argument that late-stage/public-market mindset improves early-stage judgment was a pitch suited to 2021; the relevant exit window is seven to ten years away and macro-focused investors are just hoping the cycle turns in their favor then

23:22 Public market mindset misleads early stage judgment given long exit horizon

Shardul Shah · Sep 16, 2024

Investing across stages requires little mental plasticity because the evaluation starting point — the founders — is the same at every stage

If team evaluation is the constant, the data differences between stages don't change the core judgment

10:25 Founder evaluation is the constant across stages so skills transfer easily