Venture is a search for blue dots

Peter WalkerHead of Insights @ OpenRouter | Data Storyteller

"Turned down a founder with $1.5M ARR this year and $5M ARR next year. Today, brutal as it is, that isn't good enough to raise a Series A." Always provocative from Harry and this one drew enough criticism that he actually deleted it. Honestly I'm not sure why he did. In the simple graphic below, you're trying to find blue dots (the startups that will return your fund by themselves). You're competing with the other funds to do so. There are very few blue dot startups. You run across red dots slightly more often (startups that are really exciting but then don't pan out). In fact, the red and blue dot startups may look identical when you meet them OR the blue dots actually look worse than the red ones in revenue, team, etc. …