#012 Accel: Five Questions

https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts116/v4/89/fe/56/89fe5608-b9b0-412d-764e-f0cd98680109/mza_16898780489908905596.jpg/600x600bb.jpg

All Things VC

Justin Pryor

25 episodes

4 days ago

Every week, I devote several hours of research scouring through books, podcast transcripts, YouTube transcripts, archaic S-1s, many frustrating paywalls, and more just to provide you, the curious-minded listener, with an incredibly in depth podcast that investigates, for example, in my first ever episode, “Why Sequoia invested in Apple, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Whatsapp, how they won the deals, what Sequoia’s general investment thesis is, how you as a founder can position yourself to get funding from Sequoia, and discuss some regrettable passes they have in their anti-portfolio."

Technology

RSS

All content for All Things VC is the property of Justin Pryor and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Technology

https://d3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net/staging/podcast_uploaded_nologo/39838666/39838666-1701296706486-6b5f1be289baf.jpg

#012 Accel: Five Questions

All Things VC

39 minutes 24 seconds

1 year ago

#012 Accel: Five Questions

In this episode, I reviewed some notes that didn’t make it into last week’s Accel podcast on why they invested in Facebook, Scale AI, and Flipkart and why they passed on Cisco, Skype, and Flickr. If you want to learn more about Accel, I suggest starting there.

I used those notes to generate five questions I’d ask founders if I were a partner at Accel.

While I don’t know whether they actually ask these questions, I have many direct quotes from current and former partners about what they look for in founders and questions they ask founders when determining whether to invest in a company. Therefore, I can extrapolate some reasonable questions.

I think this will be a helpful thought exercise for founders who intend to raise to think about your answers to some of these questions as I believe they are questions an investor would ask whether Accel or not, so it’s good to think about.

For investors, it’s good to think about the questions you like to ask founders and why and read some of these quotes from Accel partners, who are certainly some of the best investors in the world, so it’s worth reading this information and maybe adding some of these questions to your list if you think they’re effective.

Chapters:

1. What's Working Now and What Are the Challenges? 2:00

2. How Do You Know This is a Problem? 8:29

3. What is Your Team Like? 15:27

4. What's Your Competition Like? 25:57

More All Things VC:

To read this podcast in an abbreviated format, check out the substack: All Things VC. It has the same content as the podcast, just a little more direct with less improv.

To read more about Initialized Capital and many other companies they invested in that we didn’t discuss, more on their general investment theses, what makes a good VC, what they look for in founders, and general advice for founders, head to allthingsvc.blog to read more.

You can also follow me on X at Justin_Pryor_ for more information I post throughout the week based on what I discussed in this episode. Likewise, you can find All Things VC on YouTube to see clips of these episodes separated by each major topic I discuss.