Mercedes Bent
speaker
417 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard Sep 2025
Mercedes Bent’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So I do think there's a question of why would you as a seed manager compete for these things?
I think most people have gotten very lazy on what
constitutes a good founder in a world of more and more options, which the asset class has exploded, the number of founders has exploded, you tend to rely even more so on signals rather than on actual kind of substance.
For example...
Like Ivy League degrees are signal versus substance.
They tend to correlate and they tend to mean something good.
But just because someone had that on their resume doesn't mean that they necessarily are good.
It's a lot harder to spend the time to figure out who's really good.
And that's the problem that I think we're running into now.
Yeah, we call it gifted TVPI and earned TVPI.
There's the folks that everyone's going to agree with.
And look, obviously, like Martin Cassato had that tweet that went viral and also caused a lot of conversation on VC Twitter.
I think it's a lot safer for your VC career to be consensus.
And...
If you don't have as much experience in venture, you should always – well, not always.
You should certainly do a good amount of your deals to be consensus early on to make sure that you have something there.
I did a lot of non-consensus.
When I joined Lightspeed, I opened our Latin America region, and that was –
very much so not popular, but I was able to find diamonds in the rough.
I was able to find companies that I met pre-revenue that are now doing hundreds of millions in revenue and worth billions.
Showing 241–260 of 417 · page 13 of 21
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