VC Decision Making: Growth Expectations, Biases & Fast Deals – E551

"You're going to make a decision. You're going to meet about a thousand—maybe five thousand—companies in a year, then decide to invest in ten of them. Think about it. You're basically meeting everybody for half an hour or one hour, and you have to make decisions fast. The reason VCs make so many decisions is that the best founders move very quickly—they’re aggressive in how they approach business. And you need to be in a rush. You need to work fast to get the deal. I'll give you an example—today, I had a call at 8 a.m., and by 7 p.m., we made a decision. We finalized it by 8 p.m.—12 hours. We sent a WhatsApp in that time, but it wasn’t enough. Now we have to fight for allocation. And I remember waiting, thinking, ‘Shit, this is too slow.’ Even I felt it was too slow. But the other way to look at it is that we could have been overloaded or just overconfident, right?"

"There was this team that met through Antler, and it turned out that their co-founder was not who he claimed to be—he had a criminal record. Imagine that—the two co-founders met this guy, didn’t know his background, and now, even though their company is doing pretty well, they had no idea that one of them was a criminal. As a VC, if I knew you had a criminal record, I’d be like, ‘No way, man, I’m not putting money into this company.’ But I’m not just looking at the negatives—I’m also evaluating the strengths. Do you understand the market? Do you care about what you’re building? Are you going to work hard and learn quickly? Founder quality is absolutely key."

"Doing a startup is an Olympic sport. It’s not a university sport, not an academic bell curve course, and definitely not a pass-fail system. One person gets a gold medal, one gets silver, one gets bronze—and the rest of the world walks away with nothing in that event. So, do you have the right market fit? Can you fundraise? Do you have charisma, presentation skills, and that X factor—the thing that makes people look at you and think, ‘There’s something special about this person’? And of course, we talk about a 10x product. Is what you’re building 10x better than the competition or the status quo?"

Jeremy Au talked about how venture capitalists assess startups based on their ability to scale rapidly, led by strong founders with a clear strategy and market fit. However, their decisions are shaped by heuristics, biases, and time constraints. The best founders move fast, refine their pitches, and demonstrate exponential growth potential. He also discussed how VCs evaluate startups, the common pitfalls in fundraising, and why speed and conviction matter.