Earning Every Win: Grit, Innovation, and Knowing When to Venture | Lisa Calhoun, Ep 25

On whether founders should pursue venture capital

“Venture is the hardest, most difficult, most vulture-like money you will ever take.”

“Coding per se is absolutely no longer the constrained resource that it was even this time last year. That really frees the product visionaries out there that are technical enough to understand AI to build.”

On the 2024 venture capital shakeout

“Last year, a good 40% of smaller funds closed their doors and shuttered. The first ten or twelve made a few headlines and then it became so normal. When venture closes stores, it doesn't look like other businesses where you can't reach them. They have prior funds that they have to operate out of. The firm has a skeleton in place to manage existing investments. In a way, the outside world sees that brand still exists, but actually it doesn't. Zombie funds.”

On learning sales resilience as a teenager doing door-to-door commercial printing sales

“I realized it's just part of life. And it doesn't feel good. It never does. But it's not personal rejection. It's that your product doesn't meet their needs.”

“What we prefer to see is rather than hire two or three junior developers, which are also human beings that have to be managed with a lot of care, attention, feeding, personal development, hire Devon and have multiple instances of basic AI coding running.”