Brian O’Malley

And so I'm a big believer that incentives drive outcomes.

That will be a recurring theme.

If you listen to me over time,

And you just got to think different people within these organizations based on their seniority, based on how their success is measured.

They're going to have very different behaviors along the way.

If you had a magic wand, you could create the perfect incentives in a large firm that played into the benefit of both everybody in the firm as well as LPs.

How would you do that?

How would you align everyone's incentives?

The first thing that I would do is really to agree on what our objectives here, right?

Like some firms are really much more focused on let's just get into the best logos we can.

If you think about an Andreessen playbook, they'd care about what are the 25 companies any given year that really matter.

If that's their North Star, then you want to make sure your incentives are lined up to get into those type of companies.

At Accel, we cared a lot more about which individual founders were we backing and were they special individuals that were going to be able to drive these outlier outcomes.

And so that might be more of a name to count approach where you're really thinking about, did we ultimately see the deals that were the most important ones?

And did we win our fair share of those?

Whereas battery was much more straightforward.

We were very much DPI driven at the end of the day.

So when you think about how you got promoted after you've been there for a while and after you've made a fair amount of investments, it was really driven by your numbers and your returns.

So I think step one is deciding as a firm, what is your North Star and what are you ultimately trying to solve for?

And then make sure that people all up and down the food chain have that sort of focus.