David Hornik
speaker
392 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 25 Feb
David Hornik’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I will only back people who are unflinchingly ethical.
And in fact, part of my process... How do you define that?
There are definable truths.
And if you are willing to, you know, if you are willing to stretch the truth, you are not unflinchingly ethical.
Choosing how much and how hard you're going to push is not an ethics question, it's a culture question.
And I do think that's an extraordinarily important question.
I backed a phenomenal entrepreneur, and in his first startup, one of the tenets of his company was work-life balance.
And then I backed his second company.
And when he built a second company, he said, under no circumstance is that going to be my tenant.
Now, he remained an extraordinarily good human, a very devoted family man.
But he realized that an emphasis on work life balance suggested that the startup world was not an unimaginably rigorous thing that one had to engage with all of one's energy.
I don't think he became any less ethical when he said work-life balance is not the thing we're focusing on.
Selling something you think you can deliver, although you're not certain, is one question.
Selling something you know you can't deliver or you know you don't have is another question.
And I would not back someone who is selling something that they know they can't deliver.
That is dishonesty.
Man, it's crazy.
I literally gave a talk this week about all the ways in which I've failed.
You know, and I said, you know,
So venture capital is about disappointment because the reality is that I've invested in, let's call it, 50 companies over the last 25 years.
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