The worst investments for me have one common theme:
The founder was a bit of a B.S. artist.
It’s a fine line between being a salesperson, and being the #1 evangelist and advocate … and being a B.S. artist
I remember one time a founder told me how Salesforce did a certain process internally. That sounded wrong to me, I was 99% sure. I checked and it turned out it wasn’t remotely accurate. The founder had just made it up.
I still invested. The company initially was a rocketship. It went from $1m to $10m ARR in 6 quarters! It was … Almost a Great Product. An almost, like the Salesforce story.
But it couldn’t deliver what the founders said it could. And churn lurked, and then exploded. The product didn’t really do what the customers expected, either. Not in the end.
Today, it’s barely growing.
Too much “Almost Truth” -> Not Being Enough In The Real World.
A little reality distortion field is probably necessary to build something big. It’s so hard. But too much? It hasn’t worked out for me.
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
