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
And every single company in which I invested, I believed, could be a standalone public company.
I don't invest in a company that I don't think has the capacity of a standalone private, you know, independent company because the best outcomes are a result of your capacity to do that.
Right.
And so and yet of those 50.
uh four have gone public and and been standalone businesses uh i have a fifth i think is a lot is the likely fifth so you know one in ten of those companies has done the thing that is that i hoped was true of the other nine and ten and so yeah there's a whole lot of oh my gosh i was wrong or that worked in a way i didn't think it was going to or the environment changed uh but
But as long as you're backing astonishing people who you think are doing the right thing and one time out of 10 it works, then the business model is a success and you get to continue to do it.
If you've done this thing the way I think is the right way, then you have real and meaningful relationships with the founders, the CEOs, the people who are building these businesses.
And they are putting their entire lives into these things.
And so for those things to fail...
is catastrophic and has a real human toll.
And so there's no amount of time where I will feel better about that.
People I care about experiencing something terrible, I will always feel terrible about that.
Having said that,
Understanding the model, you can understand that that's the model, that one in 10 has to be successful.
But if you're a new venture investor and you have yet to have that one and you start seeing these companies fail and you don't know if you'll have the one, it is an astonishing amount of stress.
And, you know, the expression goes in venture, lemons ripen early, which means the companies that aren't going to work are going to not work sooner than the companies that were.
In my career, it took 11 years before Splunk went public.
I had been the first investor in Splunk, three amazing entrepreneurs and a good idea.
In year 11, it went public and my firm made hundreds of millions of dollars and, you know, and I made the Midas list.
And but in year seven, I was like, wow, I wonder if I'm terrible at this.
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