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The Full Ratchet

Investor Stories 421: Rewriting the Playbook (Walsh, Schroepfer, Saxena)

5 min episode · 2 min read
·

Episode

5 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Productivity, Investing, Startups

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Conviction discipline: Resist chasing hot trends during market cycles by maintaining long-term thesis and patience, as overhyped investments often crash while contrarian bets prove correct over time.
  • Founder prioritization: The biggest investment regrets come from not backing exceptional founders due to concerns about secondary factors like market size or missing team capabilities rather than betting on talent.
  • Continuous innovation model: Products require constant feature development with competitors copying advances within months, making sustainable competitive advantage a series of small innovation bursts rather than one-time moat building.

What It Covers

Three venture investors share how their investment philosophies evolved: staying conviction-focused through hype cycles, prioritizing founder quality, and embracing continuous product innovation over finite project thinking.

Key Questions Answered

  • Conviction discipline: Resist chasing hot trends during market cycles by maintaining long-term thesis and patience, as overhyped investments often crash while contrarian bets prove correct over time.
  • Founder prioritization: The biggest investment regrets come from not backing exceptional founders due to concerns about secondary factors like market size or missing team capabilities rather than betting on talent.
  • Continuous innovation model: Products require constant feature development with competitors copying advances within months, making sustainable competitive advantage a series of small innovation bursts rather than one-time moat building.

Notable Moment

A former entrepreneur reveals the sustainable competitive advantage concept taught in business schools proves false in practice, as products never reach a done state requiring perpetual innovation instead.

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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 describe the biggest change to their investment philosophy over the course of their career. Here's the special segment called rewriting the playbook. Today's special segment, we have Shamine Walsh of DAMN Ventures. Shamine, how has your philosophy or approach to investing changed over the course of your career? I think it solidified my belief that you need to stay true to yourself and your beliefs, and time will tell or else you'll go crazy. Because I feel like I've seen so many cycles where things got really hot and then you wonder, oh, did I miss this? Did I miss that? And then time comes rolling around, and some of them folks may have had the benefit of exiting out of, and then others kind of time showed that it was overhyped and it crashed and burned. And and you really have to you really have to be patient and thick skinned in this game and have a long term view and not get caught up in what folks are saying in the moment. You really have to sit back and let the ride play its way out. On today's special segment, we have Mike Schreepfer of GigaScale. Schreep, how has your philosophy or approach to investing changed over the course of your career? Yeah. Well, I'm I'm, you know, I'm relatively new. You know, I've been investing for four or five years. So I'm sort of on the on the the dangerous part of the knowledge curve where I think I know what I'm doing, you know, as opposed to having no clue. You know, I I think that the, you know, the basics are the same. Like, it's not that hard to to base the basics of, like, alright. We're looking for a big market with a great team and an interesting approach. Like, you know, you could have learned that on day one. That's not hard. What's hard is to actually figure out how to tune the specific knobs of what does that mean exactly. So it's like, okay. Well, this entrepreneur is really great, but we're a little worried about the market, or this market's great, but we're a little worried about this team. Like, how how do …

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