Charlie Songhurst

Because my guess is they didn't receive formal instruction on it.

Their VCs and advisors weren't that helpful on it.

It may be either by chance or by skill, they just intuited their way through it.

Then when you get beyond that sort of series B and beyond, I think it's institution building.

And one of the interesting problems is the sort of people that become entrepreneurs are often full of energy and sort of flexibility, almost a sort of combination of street smart and book smart.

But there's a point where they've hit product market fit, where actually what they're doing is repeating a process at scale.

And to repeat a process at scale, you need to build an institution.

And often that sort of is almost arithmetic to their personality.

If you're going to take in revenue from 42 countries, you really need a well-developed finance department.

Once you get to a certain size, you will always be in court cases because of being sued by ex-employees.

You'll have patent infringement suits.

You'll be debt collecting customers that didn't pay.

Like the shift to sort of building an institution with institutional norms and institutional values and institutional culture and all the boring stuff of building a strong finance department, strong legal department, strong HR department, that again is a big filter.

And so those are sort of filters by stages.

What's interesting is some of those you can do when you meet someone in pre-seed.

One interesting thing is I sort of close my eyes and think, can I imagine this person in a public company conference call?

Remembering the Microsoft earning schools.

And I'm thinking, can I imagine them sitting as a sort of CEO next to their CFO talking with all the sort of Wall Street equity analysts on the buy side on the phone and just be incredible enough and deep enough and mature enough to pull that off?

I think the irony is it is absolutely something that can and should be coached, but often isn't.

So often the people that get it intuitively are the people that survive.