Thread by @dinozuco

Listened to the @investlikebest podcast today with @roelofbotha from @sequoia. What an insightful chat - I found the clarity of Roelof’s thinking and simplicity of answers especially good.

Here are the 12 key points I pulled out around #VentureCapital and #business. A THREAD 👇

1. “Our principle customer is the founder, and our secondary customer are the LPs”

2. “Interest rates are so low globally. There is $16 trillion in developing countries that is earning a negative nominal yield (not even real) right now. It is literally better off to keep money under your mattress”

3. “Oftentimes, you should view fund raising as a recruiting decision, not a fund raising decision. Who is this person you are going to let on your board?”

4. “One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed over the last 15 years is the scale of ambition of founders”

5. “Sometimes there are people in your business who help you get from year 1 to 3, but they’re not the people to get you from year 3 to year 5”

6. “Every meeting is both buying and selling. Just like every good interview.”

7. “I think about value creation before value capture. It’s very rare that a company delivers an enormous amount of value and fails to build a great business”

8. “There are about 25m people on the planet who write software for a living. It is a staggeringly small number of people on whom we depend to build all these wonderful products which we use today”

9. “Companies in my mind face 1 to 2 crucible moment decisions in a year. And the challenge they have is to identify that it is in fact a crucible moment, and then you have to get the decision right”

10.“The most important element in the DNA of a great investor is curiosity.”

11.“I think one of the most interesting trends in the world at the moment is genetic engineering. The concept that biology can become more programmable”

12. “Most of the time I have made poor decisions is because my time horizon of thinking was too short. People underestimate the ability for really successful businesses to compound sustainability”