About 7 or 8 years ago I worked at a startup which got money from Softbank / Masayoshi Son. Our founder and our CTO went to meet him in LA IIRC to pitch.
They came back telling us he was basically asleep during the pitch meeting which was scheduled for only 10 minutes anyway.
Our business/product really had no chance of succeeding at this point and most knew it. We got some money from Softbank anyway - forgot how much. Our management was basically laughing about how easy it was to get funding from Softbank.
I jumped ship a year later or so and that was good timing.
This is one of my arguments that startups are mostly about luck - because smart people who are highly incentivised to pick wimmers, with all the data they need to pick winners, all the people and compute they need to pick winners, can't pick winners.
mrandish|3 months ago
illuminator83|3 months ago
They came back telling us he was basically asleep during the pitch meeting which was scheduled for only 10 minutes anyway.
Our business/product really had no chance of succeeding at this point and most knew it. We got some money from Softbank anyway - forgot how much. Our management was basically laughing about how easy it was to get funding from Softbank.
I jumped ship a year later or so and that was good timing.
EFreethought|3 months ago
And if that is the VC model, then are the VCs smarter than everybody else?
marcus_holmes|3 months ago
toomuchtodo|3 months ago
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/charlie-mung...
chii|3 months ago
but you don't make the same type of deduction for lottery winners - surely a good lottery number picker should get a second win sooner or later!