Rob Go

We believe strongly that when making investment decisions, it’s important to score opportunities quantitatively but make decisions based on conviction. This idea here is that in order to capture the immense value you create by creating jaw dropping value, you need to have a business model that has strong increasing returns to scale. This also includes economies of data scale where your ability to deliver on your value proposition gets stronger and stronger the more data you accumulate and incorporate into your service. This might mean a free viral product that we believe can quickly get scale and grease the wheels for a paid enterprise service, similar to what we see in our portfolio company Code Climate or our former portfolio

The leverage they get from a non-partner handling operational stuff or due diligence isn’t terribly great, and almost certainly isn’t the same as helping to find the next great investment. But because of how long this takes, it pays to invest time even with funds that don’t immediately seem like great prospects, as long as you think that they are on the rise and likely to expand their team over the next year or two. Beyond that, I actually wouldn’t sweat some other things too much early in your career (stage, sectors, team size, etc) * * If you are unable to get into VC now but want to later, I think a good path is to work at a winning, high growth company and make a great impact.

I’m not really a media investor, but I think 2016 was a year where we have seen a shift in media production and consumption, and I think that will continue into 2017. Amazon has huge plans for this in the years to come, but I think 2017 will be a seminal year for voice. VC’s have huge amounts of capital now to deploy against new companies, and I think that the companies that were able to retrench this year will find their adjustments will pay off. I think 2017 will be a very good and exciting year.