Lessons from a Titan

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[00:03:21] - [First question] - What Don Valentine’s heart was like

[00:06:30] - The most productive and unproductive parts of Don’s toughness

[00:09:01] - Being the opposite of insufferable and how it was different when he was younger

[00:10:55] - Why it’s so important to understand someone’s core motivations

[00:14:18] - Questions or topics he returns to when getting to know people

[00:15:31] - How much time he believes it can take to really get to know someone

[00:16:44] - The most formative experiences he had prior to becoming an investor that impacted his investing the most

[00:20:37] - What venture looks like to him today relative to his prior career

[00:23:51] - His style of approaching emerging technology markets like AI as an investor

[00:26:37] - Whether or not he’d go into venture today if he was in his late 20s

[00:28:30] - Commonalities between the very best at going to market effectively

[00:31:11] - The key components of great product positioning

[00:32:10] - Helping companies circumnavigate mediocre positioning

[00:33:25] - Generating demand and leads and doing it well

[00:37:15] - How interacting with companies early on has changed over the ears

[00:41:12] - Whether or not new entrants into venture should build firms with enterprise value

[00:46:14] - Sussing out the killer gene in somebody

[00:47:25] - What high school was like for him when he first came to the US

[00:49:04] - How successful people can instill the lessons learned from hardship into their children

[00:50:45] - The most common failure modes he’s seen for investors

[00:52:30] - Whether or not competitive advantage can be architected ahead of time when building a company

[00:53:52] - Whether or not his view on competitive advantage has changed

[00:55:21] - The early 2000s clawback at Sequoia and what navigating that period was like

[00:59:06] - What he’s learned about picking the right LPs and partnering with them

[01:00:40] - The most interesting question an LP has ever asked him

[01:02:18] - Making sure that performance is on everyone’s minds all the time

[01:04:04] - What the components of a fantastic investment memo are

[01:05:00] - Which dinner companions he’d pick to educate a newly successful founder

[01:05:29] - What first popped out at him as black magic when he started investing

[01:07:59] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him