Eric Vishria
speaker
163 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Eric Vishria’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Foundational models are the fastest depreciating asset in human history. I don't believe NVIDIA is going to be the only game in town on infrastructure. We have a major, major shift in AI, which could be bigger than any of these other shifts maybe combined. It's simultaneously the most exciting and most disorienting time in my 25 years in technology.
There's a lot of uncertainty, but we've been more active than we've been since 2010 and 2011.
When I reflect on Rockmelt, which is a startup I founded and was CEO of, my reflection is that we fell short, like far short of my hopes and dreams for the company, like my expectations for the company and my hopes and what I thought we could accomplish. We fell really, really far short of it. You know, and I think there's a few ways to think about it.
One of the reflections, and it's been really useful now as a venture capitalist, is good teams with an interesting idea, it's not necessarily enough. The real lesson from it for me is like, Hey, you can put it together a great team. And I think we did. You can have an interesting or provocative idea. We were rethinking the browser and this is circa 2010. So I think we had some of the right ideas.
We had some of the right execution even and a great team, but distribution for a browser, brutal. But the big takeaway, the big lesson from that actually, I think is just that, you are really hard. And I think it makes you really empathetic. It makes me really empathetic as a venture capitalist now. When I meet entrepreneurs and you kind of understand like, well, you know what?
This stuff is really hard and there's a whole bunch of stuff you can do and there's a whole bunch of stuff you can't.
Yeah. I think the question is whether it's deterministic or not. Like it, It's just like, is all of that knowable? Like we're all taking calculated, whether you're an entrepreneur or you're an investor, you're taking a calculated risk, right? Of certain probabilities. And so I just, I don't think it's deterministic.
If you kind of like perfectly evaluate the team, the timing, the product and everything at the beginning, you can actually determine with certainty whether it's going to work or not. And that's just like, that's part of it because there's too many things that change along the way. As those things change, the probability of potential outcomes changes a lot.
And so like, I think that's the part of it that that's why startups are hard and fun.
Oh, a million. I do a million things differently. Like I, and I say this to the CEOs I work with now is, Some of the big mistakes that I made were definitely not thinking about distribution enough. That's always a big thing. There were a couple times or two people specifically that I think about where what they wanted in comp and what I was willing to give were separate.
They were just off and they were so far out of market in terms of what their ask was. At least for one of them, I would have just... broken all the rules and thrown it out and hired them. Those are two examples. But I think those things, you know, you can get into real trouble if you kind of keep doing something like that. It's always a balance.
I'm not looking for an answer or a right answer. What I'm really looking for and trying to figure out is, has the person thought about deeply and is constantly learning or constantly applying and adding new mental models to their framework to figure out what the right path is and they're navigating it.
It isn't like, hey, I'm a boat captain and I'm looking and like, this is where we're going to go. You start going and then conditions change and you get more information and you have to kind of constantly change. And so what you're actually trying to evaluate isn't, they're not going to have all the answers and that's okay.
You can have theories and hypotheses and then evaluate and change as time goes on and you get more information. I think that's really what you're looking for versus this is how it's going to work. And that could be bad in its own way.
They're better investors.
Well, also not necessarily better board members, not necessarily better advisors, not necessarily a better bunch of things, but definitely better investors.
Practice and reps matter. And so if you take somebody who's 15 years into their career, as an example, and they were an operator at that time, they may have seen three to five companies that they worked on and know them really deeply and know the ins and outs of them. If you're a career investor, over 15 years, you'll have seen 30 or 35 companies and hundreds and hundreds, thousands of pitches.
And then of those pitches, you'll be thinking about, well, I saw this one and this is what it looked like then. And 15 years from now, or 10 years later, or five years later, you've run this very long-term business. a longitudinal experiment and you have data and mental models around that. And so I think that that's really helpful.
It can actually hold people back too, but I think that's really helpful for investors. And so that's why I think the career investors tend to be really better investors. Why are they not the best board members? They haven't actually done these things at depth. They haven't done them themselves. They often lack empathy and understanding.
I think they often think that things are more deterministic than I think they actually are. Like all of those things, I think actually really can get in the way. And I was talking to my partners yesterday about it kind of. We were talking about a board member and he was at a different firm who is on a couple of boards with us.
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