Nabeel Hyatt
speaker
205 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Nabeel Hyatt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The industry today is run basically by principals, associates, and junior GPs. A principal is not actually waiting for an exit. They just want a promotion, man. We are in the industrialization of startups playbook land where everybody's trying to churn out some piece of ridiculous arbitrage every week in order to get through the end of their incubator and raise their seed round.
There is absolutely a belief that too much capital can mess up a company.
It's showbiz, man. You're doing your job. I get it. Dude, it is great to have you here.
Well, I think it's happening already, whether we like it or not, right? I think we can't really preach that a founder is supposed to adapt to a market and understand that the market is there. There's a thing called founder market fit. And there's also, frankly, a thing called VC market fit. And this market for AI is wildly different. I don't think anyone would argue it's not wildly different.
And then the question is, in what way is it different? And we had a B2B SaaS amazing, wonderful bull run in 2021 and a little bit afterwards. And I think we got really good at like, Greg Treverton uses this phrase of puzzles versus mysteries, which is just like, puzzles are this thing that you can like, you know, use that raw horsepower to solve.
And mysteries are, you know, you have to go on the journey. There's like fog of war and you cannot work it out ahead of time. In many ways, like the B2B SaaS, blow up of that era was all about like the industrialization of venture capital.
It was all about figuring out all of the puzzles needed to hire 100 associates to do all of the work to figure out exactly the right SAS metrics and then grind it all out. And no one has any idea what a model is even going to do in a week. So I don't know how that isn't a mystery. And so I think you have to build a firm with that set of talent.
Yeah. And something will happen again in three months. You know that.
The show? 10 years. Yeah. So I've been a VC for a little bit over 10 years. So we're in the same generation in the sense of trying to think about unpacking this puzzle. I was a founder beforehand. I would say the early stages of venture capital, the real early stages of venture capital, if we think about the beginning of Sequoia and so on, that was all mysteries, man. That wasn't puzzles.
And so I think the truth is, it may sound incredibly old school, but it's going back to the way things were really done before. It is an artisanal business. There's a reason it's an artisanal business. And that's because. But do you actually think so?
Yeah, it is. I am not saying that if you built an awesome strategy to dominate the world and therefore you're probably regarded as like a tier one brand or whatever you were four years ago, you're probably dead without completely changing. And that was exactly the right strategy for that era. You go tick down the box. We were kind of like in late stage capitalism for startups.
Everything was red ocean. And so it was all about optimization and speed and like minor arbitrages. We are now in a world where you need rampant creativity inside of an org. All of it is in the nuances. And so you need to build a firm that can kind of like grok to that.
No, you know this cycle because the cycle in VC evolution is like horribly, horribly slow because it also loops back to LPs. They don't get to act on their own, right? They don't get to just like make a decision tomorrow. They have to go back and raise another fund against a new mandate, which probably requires like, I don't know, maybe you turn over half the team, three.
LPs want stability at a time when there's rapid change, so it's the wrong market fit. You have to ask, who's the person making that decision at that firm? So if they were sitting on all the wonderful, amazing B2B SaaS markups from four years ago, and so now they're the head honcho at that place, do you think they're really making this call?
I think you need to think like a founder. I think you need to be okay with a small team that makes subjective bets and think about the craft of what a founder needs today, which is that, honestly, what a founder needed four years ago was a lot of playbooks. You needed every single arbitrage-y, simple way to make everything move a little bit faster.
The conversations I have founders calling me about now, after a board meeting, before a board meeting, they are all unknowables. They are all trying to figure out, what is the new user experience that I should use when models go multimodal? And there are explorations that not necessarily I have the answer for. They're not coming to me for answers. It's a sounding board, right?
And they need a sounding board of board members that are actually using their products and actually have a curiosity to use the rest of AI products and get more native instead of just watching Twitter and looking at markups.
Can I push back a little bit or step up one level from even that? I think why did these simple heuristics of revenue, you can pick one, you have to hit 10 million. You can pick another set of metrics or dashboards that turn green so that you can get your partnership to agree to let you go do the thing you really want to go do. How did those things evolve?
Because that's not how partnerships were 20 years ago. So why did that happen? That happened because you added people to the partnership. You have to look at the core of the org and then work downstream from that. What happens is if you take a room which used to have seven partners and that room becomes 25 partners or 30 partners or 500 partners at a certain set of firms, like what really happens?
And I think the industry today is run basically by principals, associates, and junior GPs. That incentive system is what we're all swimming in, which did not exist 20 years ago. Why does that matter? Because what does a principal want? Well, a principal is not actually waiting for an exit. They just want a promotion, man. Like they just want to move up the ladder.
Showing 1–20 of 205 · page 1 of 11
Next →