This person is great at climbing the ladder in modern-day Russia. Let’s say you were considering investing in someone in modern-day Russia and you were quite impressed with them. This is a real problem in societies that are not fundamentally healthy. They’ll continue down that path instead of ending up disillusioned and leaving the gang altogether. The more talented that person is, the more they’ll succeed and rise to a top gang position. If a talented person is embedded in the wrong hierarchy, like a gang, that’s not going to end well. I look at which audiences a person is trying to impress and which hierarchies they’re embedded in. They’re often sincere, but they're still kind of b.s. What is the most important thing you look for in the people you fund? If I were just out to maximize profit, I’m not sure I’d be very good at it. I think my greatest strength is in evaluating idea-based projects. We had a number of them at Emergent Ventures, but I would’ve done much more with that if I knew what I knew now about the industry. Some of my other missed opportunities were around people in the public policy arena who were writing about crypto very early in the game. I’ve missed out on people who were brilliant but not credentialed - I undervalued a whole bunch of them. The most important thing for me is to stay open and aware of my own preconceptions, and willing to fight back against them, because I”m trying to support people who are working in a lot of different areas. We were able to get her money in two or three days after what was basically a ten minute video call.Īnd then on the other end of the spectrum, I’ll get a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old who has a lot of promise but doesn’t have that background or experience, and we might fund them too. The notion that she would have to jump through hoops to get money just seemed obviously wrong to me. She was famous to begin with and already had some money, but I thought what she was doing was important and needed to be done right then, not two months later. At one end, we made a significant grant to Emily Oster for her data-driven studies of COVID-19 and when K-12 schools should reopen. I certainly hope those make a profit, but they’re also just idea-based projects. We have over one hundred and seventy ventures that we’ve funded at Emergent Ventures, and only twenty of those are for-profits. Tyler: What we do is very different from venture capital. What’s your approach for identifying and funding entrepreneurial talent?
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