Is venture investing fundamentally an art, or does it have teachable technical/scientific components like interviewing and coaching?
4 recorded positions from 3 people, first said Feb 11, 2020. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Art with teachable technical components like interviewing and coaching
Wesley Chan · Aug 22, 2022
Mastery in both piano and venture capital comes from separating the mechanics (which anyone can do) from the art, and finding one differentiated edge that compounds
Anyone can issue a term sheet or find a great company; the difference between average and outlier returns is the mastered, slightly-different interpretation that others notice
39:32 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
Phin Barnes · Oct 2, 2023
Venture investing is an art rather than a science, but its technical components — interviewing founders and coaching — are documented crafts that can be deliberately practiced and improved
Venture investing starts with an interview with a founder, and interviewing is well documented across podcasting, journalism and law enforcement; coaching is similarly documented
8:11 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP
Also on the record
Jude Gomila · Feb 11, 2020
Investing is both art and science, and a very large part of it will always remain art because not everything can be verbalized into science
The art part is hard to specify or verbalize but is still truth
41:19 Investing is mostly and permanently art since most of it cannot be verbalized
Jude Gomila · Feb 11, 2020
More data and analytics in venture increases the skill required rather than removing it, even if the art component declines
More data means more complexity and more opportunity to be analytical — like a modern F1 car with many controls versus a 1920s race car, both are skillful in different ways
42:05 More data and analytics increases required investor skill rather than replacing it
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 4 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.