Winston Weinberg

The area where kingmaking or like people think kingmaking matters is customers, where they basically say, hey, this has like branded trust.

And so that that is good.

I think there is like a little bit of legitimacy there.

But it's not like only the top three VCs give you that brand, right?

A vast majority of VCs give you that brand.

And what's actually interesting for us is like someone like EQT actually gives you that more than Silicon Valley because their private equity and a lot more lawyers know who that is, et cetera.

So I don't really believe in those two.

The third one might be the one area that is helpful, and that's just recruiting.

Humans are very bad at judging how good other humans are.

We're really bad at it.

Like, we're really bad at it.

And I can tell you a very clear reason for why we're bad at it.

We still pay so much attention to someone's resume.

We care so much where they went to school.

And this happens so much in technology.

It happens a lot in tech.

The only other area where I know it happens an incredible amount is legal.

Legal and tech are probably two of the main ones where prestige matters, where you went to school matters, how your grades were, who you worked under, things like that, right?

It does help you in a sense of if you get one of those brands, people assume that there's maybe a higher chance of the company being successful.

The reality is that might be the wrong person to hire in the first place because the people that think or go to a company because of the investors usually don't care that much about the mission of the company.