Ramtin Naimi

Sometimes the special thing is they got into the school of their dreams.

So did everybody else that went to that school.

So like something that's truly different, I'm looking for.

Resilience is key.

That's a little harder to discern, especially with the age of founders that I back.

Not everybody's had a situation where they've had to deal with hardship to develop that resilience.

But some of the founders in our portfolio that have done pivot after pivot after pivot have survived for years.

And then

ultimately started a company that had nothing to do with their first company, ended up being very, very successful.

Now, I'm not saying that every founder should stick with every single company over a certain period of time.

There's founders who should absolutely stop working on a company and either return cash or find a soft landing or something and move on.

But there are other founders who will just do these non-local pivots.

I think the local pivot is what kills companies.

And

An example of this, we invested in a company called Paparazzi.

We had seeded them when it was TTYL and then TTYL pivoted five or six times until it turned into Paparazzi and then Paparazzi launched.

I think it was the first consumer social application ever to debut at number one on the app store.

And by the end of that day, they had three term sheets from three tier one VC firms and they signed a term sheet with Benchmark.

Within six weeks, it became very obvious that there was no retention.

The growth was there, but the retention wasn't there.