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The Full Ratchet

Investor Stories 417: Best LP Question (Delk, Hilaly, Dash)

7 min episode · 2 min read
·

Episode

7 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Productivity, Relationships, Investing

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Mission vs metrics question: Ryan Delk was asked if Primer could hit all growth targets but still fail by his standards, revealing his focus on student outcomes over scale through regulatory capture or political connections.
  • Expectations over tactics: Arif Hilali values founders who ask about vision and expectations rather than requesting lists of customer introductions or recruits, since long-term support matters more than transactional help at relationship end.
  • Conviction testing: Samesh Dash learned from Travis Kalanick that the painful question is simply asking if you truly believe the numbers, cutting through valuation rationalizations to expose fundamental conviction in the founder's ability.

What It Covers

Three venture investors share the most revealing questions they've received from LPs and founders, exposing what truly matters beyond standard due diligence metrics.

Key Questions Answered

  • Mission vs metrics question: Ryan Delk was asked if Primer could hit all growth targets but still fail by his standards, revealing his focus on student outcomes over scale through regulatory capture or political connections.
  • Expectations over tactics: Arif Hilali values founders who ask about vision and expectations rather than requesting lists of customer introductions or recruits, since long-term support matters more than transactional help at relationship end.
  • Conviction testing: Samesh Dash learned from Travis Kalanick that the painful question is simply asking if you truly believe the numbers, cutting through valuation rationalizations to expose fundamental conviction in the founder's ability.

Notable Moment

Travis Kalanick confronted an investor who passed on Uber, then returned six months later to prove he exceeded his original projections, demonstrating founder conviction through execution.

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Episode Transcript

This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Welcome back to TFR. On today's special segment, we ask guests to share the best question they've ever been asked by an allocator. Here's the segment called best LP question. On On today's special segment, we have Ryan Delk of Primer. What is the best question a VC has asked you? It's a good one. Someone recently asked me, let's assume that Primer is there any path to where Primer achieves all the goals that you're talking about from growth, you know, student enrollment, number of primers that are nationwide, but still fails in your mind? And if so, what would that what would that look like? And I thought that was a a that was a good question. One, because I think helped them get inside my brain and how I think, but then two, it helped disambiguate a little bit between the, you know, all the all the goals that are kind of useful to talk about when you think about scaling an organization versus the the motivations that are behind that. And so for some people, those are those are one and the same. For us, we're we're probably, you know, this this quite a bit more altruistic and motivated about this very specific type of future we wanna create, certainly more than, you know, some random SaaS company. And so I thought that was quite a good question. Love it. And what was the answer? There's plenty of organizations in education that have scaled very, very large through regulatory capture or the right lobbyist or, you know, knowing the right people to take to the Lakers game to with in courtside seats to get the contract or whatever. But the the efficacy they they they're not really making an impact on students. And if we even if we were able to I don't think this is possible because of the way that that the market we operate in works, but in a in some some world where, you know, we were able to scale to serve millions and millions of students. But when I looked at the, you know, the efficacy data and the outcome data and we were, you know, barely better than fiftieth percentile, I would not consider that a success. And I would I would I would …

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