The Team is Everything

You've invested in a lot of companies, one of your biggest wins is Facebook. Have you ever done a count of how many companies do you think you've invested in over the years?

Well, OK, so me personally. So Facebook, I was part of that team. I wasn't on the board. Right. But so I would say if we just started with the ones that I personally lead, it's probably around 40 or 50. That's probably about right. But then if you expanded into like my firm, whether that was Accel, Aspect, or Acrew where I was a partner or managing partner and we collectively decided to invest in a company like in Facebook. And in that case, obviously, Jim, prior to the board seat there, that would expand into it would probably be 5 to 10x that so in the hundreds.

So you've either led or been involved in investing in hundreds of companies. What do you look for in deciding whether to invest in a company?

So this is the part where market is important. So I tend to take a very thematic approach to investing. So identifying sort of markets like cybersecurity or like within consumer vertical search and then go and look at a lot of the companies. So the market piece is sort of a priori a little bit, and that's maybe two thirds of the investment. Sometimes it's just like great entrepreneur comes in. It wasn't something I thought about before, but I was like, wow, that's awesome. I'm going to make this investment. And of course, you need to make sure that the product, the technology or the idea of it is differentiated. But at the end of the day, as the first institutional venture capital check, which is what the series A is, I'm investing in people. And this is why I said before to me teams, it's all about the teams. And I do mean the teams, not just you know, it's not just the solo founder. I mean, I think if you look at most of the great stories, right. Some of them is very well known, like with Google, Larry and Sergei. But, you know, if you go back, yes, Bill Gates, but also most great huge companies in Silicon Valley that have received venture backing have had at the time of raising the series A, at least there's more, even if it's just usually there's more than one founder, but even if it's not just one founder, by that point, the founder has recruited some more people to join them in their in their mission, in their vision. And I think that is at the core.