I have to share this post by Paul Graham.. it really is something every startup investor and person who is raising money should read.
I’ve done several types of work over the years but I don’t know another as counterintuitive as startup investing.
The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas.
The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn’t really grasp till it happened to us. The total value of the companies we’ve funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it.
