Exploring decision-making biases in VC & entrepreneurship.
Austin, TX
Joined February 2018
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Aram Attar retweeted
It is an uncomfortable truth that 70% of pre-seed funded startups never raise another dollar.
Seneca: we are dying every day, little by little.
So is your company. Quietly. On a Tuesday. While you polish the deck.
Memento mori isn’t morbid. It’s runway math.
Aram Attar retweeted
Stop trying to be good at everything.
When I considered moving from CEO to full-time investor, I had a question: What should I invest in?
I reviewed 250 investments and split luck from edge. That’s why I only do B2B software. My insights, network, and experience as a CEO are most helpful to B2B founders.
Find your superpower.
Hire people who found theirs.
Aram Attar retweeted
BREAKING: Zuckerberg just described the near-future of computing, and it has nothing to do with screens.
His call: within 5 years, every person on Earth has a personal AI that knows their life, understands their goals, and does the work for them.
Not a chatbot. Not a search box.
An agent that is deeply, intimately embedded in how you live.
When the person building the social layer for 3 billion people says this is where we're going, it's not a prediction.
It's a roadmap.
Is the personal AI agent the most valuable product anyone can build right now?
Aram Attar retweeted
A VC on X just published his own rejection letters — ~100 passes in 60 days, each one specific: what number in the deck killed it, what he'd need to see to reconsider. That's rarer than a yes.
Most "no"s you get are a form-fill silence. If a fund can't tell you why they passed, they didn't actually evaluate you — they pattern-matched and moved on.
When you're picking who to spend outreach time on, ask up front: "if it's a no, will I know why?" Funds that say yes to that question are worth 3x the ones that ghost.
InvestorMatch shows you fit-score reasoning on every match — not just "we're not the right fit right now." A no with a reason is a lead for your next investor, not a dead end.
Aram Attar retweeted
The best VCs I’ve met do not trust intuition. They use it as a starting point.
I talked to @TheVCFactory about how he evaluates emerging managers.
And one line really stayed with me:
In early-stage VC, intuition is only step one.
The strongest investors don’t stop there.
They pause.
They collect information carefully.
And then they make the call with a promotion mindset - not trying to avoid loss, but trying to win.
That distinction matters.
Because in venture, the feedback loop is slow.
You don’t get the clean signals you get in poker or chess.
You can be right for the wrong reasons.
You can be wrong and still look smart.
So Aram’s point was simple:
don’t worship track record
don’t mistake brand for skill
don’t skip the hard part of decision-making
What matters more is how a GP thinks.
How they build the firm.
How they test their thesis.
How they react to uncertainty.
And whether they are really trying to win - or just trying not to lose.
That’s a much better lens than most LPs use.
Worth thinking about.
Aram Attar retweeted
The best predictor of success for tech companies, at every stage from during the YC batch to public company with billions in revenue, is the rate of shipping new stuff.
Aram Attar retweeted
I passed on Netflix.
I passed on LinkedIn.
Got outbid on Facebook.
Sat next to Sergey and Larry on a plane, brought Google to my partners, and heard, "Draper, you've gotten us into six search engines. Why do we need another one?"
People ask me about my failures all the time.
I sat down with Nicole Petallides on Market Overtime last week and we covered all of it:
→ Why 7 of the 10 biggest companies in the world turn over every 20 years (and why that turnover is speeding up)
→ Robot "brains" that learn how to pour water without spilling it, the same way an LLM learns language
→ The shift in healthcare from chemical whack-a-mole to bio cures
→ Why every family should hold six months of Bitcoin, and why a treasurer or central bank without it is being irresponsible
→ The best advice I've ever heard anyone give an entrepreneur
→ And of course… my favorite failures of my career
Thank you Nicole and the Market Overtime team for having me.
schwabnetwork.com/video/tim-…
Aram Attar retweeted
I’m backed by Vinod. Every founder who raises from Vinod knows the deal.
Could he try to fire you from your own company if he thinks that’s what the company needs?
Yes. That’s not a secret. We even joke about it.
But making this entire drama about “firing founders” misses the point.
The point is that Vinod will always make the call he believes is right for the company, no matter how uncomfortable it is.
And there are 2 sides to that coin.
If he thinks you’re in the way, he’ll move you.
If he believes the company should win and you’re the person to make it win, he’ll move mountains for it. He’ll pull strings, take the hard fights, and push harder than almost any investor would.
The ruthlessness that makes him dangerous is the ruthlessness that makes him exceptional.
That’s the deal with him. Vinod is not founder-first, he’s company-first. And if that makes your uncomfortable, you should probably pitch someone else.
Aram Attar retweeted
Two of our worst VC stories:
1. A Sequoia partner passed on Cloudflare because he didn’t think a woman could lead a security infrastructure company. Seriously. 🙄
2. I got introduced to @pmarca. Meeting got scheduled for a Monday, which should have been a clue. I thought it was just a casual meeting. He thought it was a pitch and brought the whole @a16z partnership team. Hilarity ensued. 🤪 At one point one of them said: “You don’t seem very prepared.” Which was true because I wasn’t. I framed the rejection letter they sent.
I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A.
12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going.
I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital.
You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious.
It's a dance.
And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious.
If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird.
No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there.
It is weird.
Aram Attar retweeted
Occasional setbacks are a part of trying ambitious stuff. Kudos to @JeffBezos for trying. I’m sure he will succeed next time. Try and fail but don’t fail to try
Breaking News: A rocket built by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned space company, blew up on the launchpad during a test in Florida. The failure is a setback for several missions. nyti.ms/4ffp4QT
Aram Attar retweeted
How LPs view GP activity on social media:
- 98% say social media profiles of firm personnel are important when deciding to invest.
- 85% of LPs want to see personal statements about geopolitical or societal issues.
- 85% have decided not to allocate to a GP because of their social media content.
These survey responses raise questions about LP competence and fiduciary duty.
Allocation decisions should not be influenced by politics. Not just because it's a dumb idea, but also because it's known to be a drag on performance.
The case might be made that it's about "values alignment", but that should be understood through the GP's work, where those values are relevant.
It's unfortunately common for allocators (on both sides) to resort to comforting personal biases when making low-confidence qualitative judgements.
For example, research shows that VCs are also more likely to invest in founders with shared political views, and the result is higher failure rates and fewer exits.
It's one thing to use personal social media to DD key facts or check for malpractice, but using that content to guide investments is garbage in, garbage out.
tl;dr - The world would be a better place if allocators would just read a bit of Kahneman.
(In VCs defence, at least they are smart enough to not broadcast that bias.)
Aram Attar retweeted
Every startup should run cash like a Formula One car. Full speed on the straight. Brake as late and hard as possible into the curve.
The danger does not come from a high burn rate - but from not being able to change it rapidly when things change.
A recent conversation with our portfolio founder on risk and burn management, and the metrics that actually matter:
khoslaventures.com/posts/ven…
Aram Attar retweeted
we competed fiercely with benchmark for decades. still do. deep respect for the firm. i don’t always agree with @bgurley’s public positions and, candidly, neither do some of his partners, but this is too good not to shamelessly echo. his narrative is timeless and searing. @peterfenton @benchmark @sequoia @ericvishria
"So You Want to be a VC"
Im enjoying this week in Boston visiting students promoting my new book - Runnin Down a Dream. Not surprisingly, many ask me about trying to break into venture capital. I wrote a letter answering this question 15 years ago. I would send it out when people inquired. I'm making it public for the first time - with zero modifications.
1) I think it holds up well
2) make sure and read my new book also
3) I probably can't help with followups (as suggested in the letter)
Hope you find it useful. Good luck!
Aram Attar retweeted
The longer a bull market continues, the more skeptics are sidelined in investment committee.
If every deal you say no to gets marked up by another firm, you look wrong in the short term. Institutionally people start to say “we should have done all of these deals” and the skeptics get quieter and quieter.
This is the reality at most VC firms today.
Aram Attar retweeted
"We look for people that are students of history, that have studied the markets and all prior attempts."
David Haber on what great founders do before building a company:
"If you're going to spend the next 10 years of your life building a company, why wouldn't you spend time studying every prior attempt?"
"It always gives me much more discomfort when somebody is saying, 'All those people are idiots. We're the smarter team.'"
"I think having respect for prior attempts, and in some cases even having spoken to the former entrepreneurs in that category."
"And then having a very clear articulation of what you're going to do differently or why now is different."
@dhaber on The High Flyers Podcast with @vidags10
Aram Attar retweeted
Going to be hard to explain to future generations that there was a time, before Claude Code, when people with an idea would sometimes spend years looking for a “technical co-founder”