Nick Beim

And to appreciate them, you have to really spend a lot of time understanding how they grow, where their competitive advantage is, what's distinctive about them, where their defensibility is.

And it's so driven by the people, like the person typically, or the people that are founders have to understand what they're doing in such depth, understand the problem better than anybody else has thought about it.

And if you see all that, those are often the best kind of investments to make.

But when you make them, it takes a lot of courage of your convictions to say, I very much appreciate that people disagree with me.

I think this could be huge.

I'm obviously going to be judged on my performance.

I love venture firms that allow people to do that.

Venrock has that kind of structure.

And those have been some of our biggest wins.

It's very much subject to pattern matching.

And on top of the founder archetypes, there are deep relationship networks that we find lots of insight in that might tell us this founder is extraordinary.

I love calls where someone says, Nick, this is one of the most extraordinary people I've ever met.

You're going to think he's kind of weird.

You're going to think he might not understand all these things.

Hear him out.

I will invest in whatever he does.

And he's going to change the world.

I don't quite know how, and he's going to make a bunch of mistakes along the way, but he needs a great partner.

And please take the time to talk to him.

I will drop everything I have going on if a really calibrated person introduces me in that way.