This is too real. The difference between "failing" or "succeeding" is determined by the smallest actions. Cold emailing 10 more people, pitching 1 more investor after 50 rejections, or driving an additional $5K in sales. Repost this video 👇

Today's founders sometimes need different types of support and expertise than I did as a first-time CEO (back in 2005!), but certain things are always going to be the same. The biggest thing that's still true? The value of having the right person, with the right expertise, in the room with you at the right time.

The secret ingredient for successful early stage investment? Intuition. When you're the first person to invest in a new company, you don't have a track record to look at or much data to examine – instead, you have to make those early decisions based on intuition. Intuition, though, isn't a magic trick. Like anything else, it's a skill you need to hone and develop. Contrary to popular belief, you can quantify intuition AND build a performance culture around it. At @sevensevensix, each time we invest in a portco after a pitch, we ask everybody who was in the pitch meeting to grade the founders: → How did this person communicate? → How resilient do they seem? → How coachable vs. stubborn is this founder? (there's a sweet spot) If we fund this company, Cerebro automatically sends everyone on the investment team a survey six months later asking them to grade the founders again — now that they've actually worked with them. Then, we show them the side-by-side of their original grades from the pitch and how they'd evaluate them today after working with them. This helps show us what we got right—but also, what we got WRONG. For example, maybe we thought a founder was going to be a great communicator because they delivered their pitch like a pro—but, six months later, they seem to be unable to get a dialogue going with their own co-founder. Oops. It's REALLY important to clock those discrepancies, though. To learn and keep learning from what we got right AND what we got wrong. It hones our intuition, building it like a muscle. This process keeps us fit as early stage investors. I was very lucky because I cut my teeth as a YC partner for years and saw thousands of pitches and made thousands of decisions (right and wrong) before ever starting my own fund. I've been successful because I got a LOT of reps. Now I'm building software to scale that to the entire team here at 776.