Call Your Customers Or Call Your Shot
Thiel vs Graham, mushrooms vs ayahuasca, prediction markets, Abhijoy & Katie’s nuptials
There’s a meme going around on the deep philosphical divide between Paul Graham and Peter Thiel.
Basically do you develop ideas based on repeatable frameworks and market feedback or on religious conviction and deep belief? These aren’t really in conflict, it’s a question of audience.
Graham (“call your customers”) is offering a playbook to turn anyone into a great founder whereas Thiel (“call your shot”) is offering a framework for great founders to act.
Once you have insight and vision, call your shot. But how do you take a talented young engineer (the YC archetype) and grant them clarity and insight? They have to inorganically acquire it by listening and talking to the market, basically pivoting and shipping around until they can get an external response instead of internal, long term insight.
Customer calls and velocity are inefficient without a shot call but shot calls will probably miss without the breadth, depth, and experience to have real vision.
I Wrote
Seed investing should be like microdosing mushrooms. This is obviously silly but also I think obviously right. When super early founders raise too much too soon, it’s like oneshotting themselves on ayahuasca: they’re just not ready to fight the nth dimensional demon and will end up with a broken brain and soiled pants.
I Read
What is venture capital now anyway? The Great Bifurcation has made it into the paper of record but we’ve been talking about it a long time now.
The Death and Life of Prediction Markets at Google—Asterisk. This is a history of internal predictions markets at Google which were attempted twice as a way to do forecasting. Didn’t work but a promising idea nonetheless. It came up because one of my port cos is doing this as a fun experiment. I hope the results are write!
Want to break into VC in 2025? MBAs and consulting backgrounds are out. Technical skills, especially AI, are in. I spoke to Melia Russell at Business Insider about hiring investors. Unsurprisingly I/we had a pretty different take:
Firms have long hired from certain networks based on the investment theme du jour. During the fintech boom, Stripe was the hot ticket, and investors rushed to hire from the fintech giant.
Today, firms are chasing after ex-Palantir and OpenAI employees to fill out their ranks — some of them are restaffing after years of hiring slowdowns or job cuts, though such moves remain rare in the venture industry — and to add expertise and networks in their fields of interest.
Being technical as an associate is a plus but not a requirement, though. "Being credible with founders because you worked at OpenAI is great," Rechtman said, "but doesn't necessarily mean much for your ability to pick stocks well."
My second appearance with the Technology Brothers, this time on the PE x VC Supercycle.
Programming Note
I’m in India for a wedding for a couple weeks. I deserve a huge pat on the back for getting this out, light though it may be. Expect another light one next week. Huge congratulations to my dear friends Abhijoy and Katie. Legends.
Will the bride and groom read to the end of 99D during their wedding weekend? Only time will tell.