What It's Really Like To Pitch Lerer Ventures (opens in new tab)

My broad conclusion is that the VCs are without any doubt the biggest idiots in the room. They are nothing like the students I respected in mathematics and physics or in computing. One could count on two hands all the venture partners with significant technical backgrounds (in information technology). There is hardly a single VC in the country I would hire as COO, Chief Scientist, CTO, Chief Software Architect, software manager, software developer, server farm administrator, network administrator, new product designer, help desk staffer, etc.

Some VCs respond to 'cold, over the transom' e-mail messages, and some do not.

The VCs have a HUGE problem: They very much DO need 'home run hits' but have essentially nothing for good criteria for selecting such. Indeed, net, their view appears to be to go for 'base hits' with some 'face validity' according to some currently popular 'herd criteria', draw their 2%, and just let 'another Google' happen when and if it does.

If they get only 10% of their 'hits' from 'cold, over the transom' e-mail, then the reason might be not that the e-mail contacts are unpromising but just that the VCs have trouble (1) handling their e-mail (most do) and (2) actually evaluating a project based on just text in an e-mail message (most do).

In Silicon Valley the VCs have a special approach: They spend so much time in 'gossip' that they all learn about the same 'hot deals' at the same time, just from gossip.

Alas, the gossip is a very poor way to select home runs.

Here's part of the problem in selecting 'home runs': Look at the home runs, Apple, Twitter, GroupOn, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Dell, Oracle, HP, Sun, Microsoft, Intel, etc. and now, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to find the 'pattern' in that list. The list is short, and the list covers so many decades that the circumstances have changed a LOT over the decades. So, each decade, before the circumstances have changed, really have only one to a few such home runs. So, simplistic patterns don't work.

But there is something that does work. It has a GREAT batting average, FAR better than the VCs. It's worked GREAT for 70 years now. It still works. It gave us little things like the Internet, GPS, Silicon Valley, radar, atomic power, microwave ovens, microslectronics, and much more. Right: What actually works is the project evaluation process of the US DoD. And that is done nearly ALL on paper, with essentially always some quite technical material.

That process, nearly all on paper, is how I evaluated and executed projects in some of the world's best industrial research, some leading edge projects in business, various projects for the US DoD, my Ph.D. dissertation in engineering, and more. It WORKS. In comparison, the VCs are blind men throwing darts in the dark.

Some of the best VCs actually do realize that their 'networks' do not "overlap" with those of the most promising entrepreneurs. In particular, the 'network' of Lerer Ventures looks like it totally sucks for promising successes. Indeed, the very most promising sources of good deals for Lerer Ventures would be from 'cold, over the transom' contacts from people it does NOT know. If Lerer Ventures knows and likes an entrepreneur and immediately likes their project, then they should NOT invest! That is, unless they want to start another Huffington Post!