Why Most People Are Grinfuckers - The Flipside Of Brad Felds Post Today

Brad Feld has an awesome post today up on his site

Check it out here.

It feeds off another great post by Mark Suster, which you can find here.

So here's the retort to these: most people are grinfuckers and however noble the cause, you're probably not going to change that.

Let's take a hypothetical example

Parent: " Isn't my daughter the cutest thing in the world? So precocious isn't she?"

Now you have two options here

1.Smiling, you say: "She certainly is." And then you move as far away as possible as quickly as possible

2. Or staring straight into the other parents eyes you calmly say: "Actually your kid is a monster - some form of sub demon belched forth from hell. I've seen blocks smarter than her and her behavior makes you question how she's survived to this point" And then you run.

Truth is, most people don't take criticism well - particularly when they are emotionally vested in the area you are providing constructive criticism.

And if you are a VC - it can be doubly hard.

Because in that position, you are going to say no most of the time - and some of those times you are going to be dead wrong.

Truth is, in a competitive world, you are sometimes competing for the right to invest - very few investors can choose any deal they want. So how you deliver bad news is sometimes as important in building your reputation as how you act in the deals you are doing.

We recently turned down a company that we had done a reasonable amount of work on. When I communicated with the founder, I laid out 5 points that led us to pass - and hopefully those five points were taken as constructive criticism that will make that company stronger.

And guess what? We might be wrong about those five points. Or we might be right about them and the company changes and succeeds and we get another shot at investing. At that point, will the founder think, wow those guys were spot on and I'm glad they turned me down and criticised those five things? or will he simply think, those guys rejected me - the hell with them!

More often than not - it is the latter rather than the former

People generally want to shy away from negative reactions. That's just human behavior writ large.

I'm with Brad whole heartedly. I'd far rather hear honest constructive criticism from someone who has an interest in making me better at whatever I am doing - than a smile and a handshake and in the back of their mind their thinking - yeah that DeMott guy is an ass.

George R.R. Martin puts it very well in Game of Thrones when Tyrion the Imp says:

“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.”

And that's why grinfucking isn't about to stop.

Teamwork - You Never Know

Last night I went to see my beloved NY Rangers hockey club at the newly refurbished Madison Square Garden (Hint for all you New Yorkers out there - get to the Garden, they've done a wonderful job reinventing the place)

While the team came away with an L - getting shut out 1-0 - the game did get me thinking about teamwork.

VC's are always evaluating teams, not just the founder or founders abilities, but we are also making a judgement as to whether or not we feel that the founders are going to be able to field and motivate a great team around them. Very few men (or women) are an island. It does take a village (or a small office cramped with tech gear and red bull) to build a company.

The easy route is to invest where there has been previous success - founders who have built teams around them in the past.

Look at Zynga for instance. Mark Pincus certainly had built companies before, and I suspect that if you went back and asked Fred Wilson or Brad Feld why they backed Mark at Zynga, a lot of the reasoning would be around knowing Mark, and knowing he could pull a great team together around him.

There are lots more examples: Mike McCue at Flipboard, Chris Dixon when he put together Hunch, our partner Doug Camplejohn at his current company Fliptop (where Raptor is an investor), or Linkedin when Reid Hoffman started it.

The harder route is to invest in unproven builders - and yet some of the largest wins have come from exactly these people. Steve Jobs never had a company before Apple, nor did Bill Gates before Microsoft or Mark Zuckerberg before Facebook. I was lucky enough to be involved with Tim Westergren at Pandora - another start-up neophyte.

Most Rangers fans would have written off a large part of this season - yet here we are almost to Christmas - and the Rangers have the fewest losses of any club in the league. Most people can't name the stars on the team - but as a unit they are playing well together and getting the job done effectively.

I recently had dinner in Palo Alto with a team of 6 guys who all worked in one small room. What struck me the most was the level of camraderie among them, built through long hours of work in tight quarters, and their ability to joke and get along with each other. They were a tight unit and I believe they will do great things - even though there is no track record to point to.

Truth is, you never know which team is going to gel to get you to the promised land. There are signs along the way (hard work, great inter personal skills, ability to lead or inspire etc...), but none scream - this is the team: invest here.