Josh Kopelman — The Past, Present, and Future of Seed Investing (Invest Like the Best EP.170)

Josh Kopelman on Cartographers vs. Navigators — school hands you a roadmap, starting a company doesn’t, and he screens founders for evidence they charted their own course (designing a major rather than picking one). Plus the hardest early call: platforms are almost impossible to evaluate before their third-party applications exist. The question he’d ask any company: what is the Google search you’d want to appear at the top of?

Notes

• School gives you a roadmap but starting a company doesn’t; no one tells you what to read or when to read it
• Cartographers vs. Navigators – the ability to chart your own course
• Evaluating founders looking for examples of when they created their own path for example creating around major versus just picking a major
• Platforms – really difficult to evaluate early on, salesforce as an example, iPhone as another example. Where all of the original applications were developed in the house. A platform has to have a really big vision for the parent company to develop applications on top of it and then you can paint a picture of other companies coming in an event building on top of it
• Question for a company: what is the Google search that you would want to appear at the top of? Marketing
• Howard, one of the cofounders a first round – “I’ve made a lot of money investing in things early and lost lotta money investing in things too early.” #Timing