David Weisburd

I don't want to age you, but what is one piece of advice you would have given a younger Nick when you just started at McKinsey that would have either helped accelerate the rest of your career or helped you avoid costly mistakes?

Do you feel that more 25 years into your venture career?

Do you feel that more like you've internalized this power law?

Power law is one of those things that it's this unlearnable lesson that until you experience it yourself, it's like, yeah, power law.

Great.

Great.

I'm going to focus on two, three acts and yeah, I'm going to get my power law, but it's so powerful that it's, it's hard to actually internalize until you've experienced it.

How would you explain that?

It's idiosyncratic.

You don't actually know until you're deep in them.

To play devil's advocate, obviously these startups, Facebook, Google, SpaceX, these are just completely idiosyncratic, completely nonlinear companies.

But there must be pattern matching when it comes to the founders.

Is that also completely different for each generation or is the founder archetype and something in the founders subject to pattern matching over your career?

A lot of the top investors I know have told me, both private and publicly, that they will invest in a top founder with what they consider to be the wrong business and the wrong business model.

Do you subscribe to that?

I completely agree with that.

Why does that work?

Play that out.

There's still what makes somebody so special that Venrock wants to put resources behind him or her, maybe not even with an idea.

I know you're not a therapist or psychologist, but is trauma either a necessary component or an amplifier of founder success?