“Luckily You Didn’t Give Us Enough Capital”

Yes, this is a direct quote, and it came from one of my portfolio CEOs who I was speaking with this morning.

The topic was product strategy, and a debate the CEO had been having within the company. Some camps wanted to have a longer dev cycle to build out a fully formed, fully functional version of the entertainment experience they are pursuing.  Others preferred a much more iterative “lean starup” approach whereby they built everything in small bite-sizes and then tested.

The CEO, who in retrospect appreciates the virtue of the “build, test, iterate” approach as opposed to the “big bang” approach, made the comment to me that, since his lameass investors had provided the company with so little capital, they had no choice but to go small and iterate rapidly.

It is a rare day when an entrepreneur actually confesses that his VC actually was right about something, so, even if we were only right by accident, I am going to enjoy this one.

~ by vcmike on June 5, 2009.