Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results

Past performance does not guarantee future results for startups, venture capitalists, accelerator programs, the media, individual founders, or any other part of the startup ecosystem.

On the mission to see into the future, there is a tendency to over value the information and lessons of the past. With 20/20 hindsight it seems obvious that things would turn out the way they have. Cell phones? Computers? “If I had been alive back in the 1950s I so would have called that,” you say. Television? Telephone? Automobiles? “Obviously I would have been first in line to get mine!”

But would you have? Really? Massive changes in how we build things, operate our companies and think about technology have often taken place gradually, and met plenty of resistance along the way. Even visionaries miss great things all the time, just look at the Bessemer Venture Partners anti-portfolio, read Dustin Curtis’ “What a Stupid Idea” reflecting on early looks at Pinterest and Vine, or the long list of VCs who didn’t invest in Facebook early on but then made a late stage play to add the Facebook logo in their portfolio.

Echoes From the Past

Limited partners (LPs) complain that their venture capital investments haven’t had returns that were as good as in the 90s. Venture capitalists complain that companies founded today aren’t as innovative as they used to be or that valuations are higher than they used to be. And the press? Writers who have never been anything remotely close to entrepreneurs will continue to bitch about everything.

“Company ABC would never do that” – says who, Company ABC is like 4 years old? “I’m not a sales guy” – you’re a 22 year old computer science graduate, you’re not really anything yet! “Startups who tried that in the 90s totally bombed” – yeah well it is 2013 now, might be time for another go. “I wish we could invest, but founders who fit our profile have computer science degrees” – your profile is 20 years old, the Internet has gotten a lot more programmable since you were in school.

Fighting for the Future

Listening to these complaints and excuses for not doing something (e.g. changing strategy, trying sales, trying a model that previously failed, investing despite lack of founder credentials) is like hearing parents complain that the kids’ music is too loud, and rock was so much better in their day. And the worst part is that they try to dress all this up as some version of “pattern matching”, which is the one of those terms you can throw out to make people nod and stop arguing with you. One of these days I’d like to jump up from the boardroom table and shout, “screw your pattern matching, I saw the results and I don’t believe you!” just to see what happens.

Boardroom fantasies aside, people who are really great at pattern matching don’t get distracted by inessential details like what founders are wearing on 2nd street this week, what kind of parties they throw, the alma mater of the software engineering team, what Dave McClure said at a conference, or even whether the company is raising at a $5M or $12M pre-money valuation out of Y Combinator this batch. These are things that might matter for a moment in time, but quickly fade into the past. What matters most is trying to understand how a combination of past knowledge combined with present action will ultimately generate a favorable result.

Fight for the future, or get out of the way.

P.S. I’m not claiming I am some great visionary, but I’ve been placing some bets so we’ll see in 10 years or so.