The VC Field Guide

2Who = Team

The team is one of the first things VCs focus on and it's critical for a startup's success. Many VCs have been CEOs themselves and VCs just love their CEOs they love them. They embrace the golden rule: treat others as one wants to be treated. They know exactly how to work with CEOs, they know what makes a CEO great and they'll quickly assess a team and CEO and say things like, “This is a scenario where I see this CEO will shine. This person is an ‘A Player.’” What about the successful investors who've never been CEOs?

I find it helpful, when assessing a team, to start with pattern matching based on my experience with things I've seen in the past. “Pattern matching” is a common phrase in VC conversations and what it means is taking prior experiences that are similar and applying those to a current situation—it's a shortcut, a way to distill lots of information into something recognizable to you. And that prior experience doesn't have to be a 1‐to‐1 correspondence to the situation because there is a lot you can learn about a team from personal experience—yours and theirs. And because everyone is unique, everyone will have different patterns that emerge for them.

You might find a pattern from a high school coach you had, or a musical director; you might have a pattern based on a teacher or a neighbor or your first job selling ice cream at the local carnival. It could be anything, but it's a pattern that emerges for you based on what you're seeing from a startup team. ...