DT David Tisch On The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

“I don't think anybody knows anything about markets at the early stage. Markets evolve. … If you name a company at early stage, I can tell you why it's going to fail. Any company. … So you explaining why something isn't going to work is incredibly obvious and incredibly irrelevant. The magic of our business is squinting and seeing why something is going to work.”

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · Startups & Venture · October 2026

Context

Tisch was describing his firm's decision process, where anyone who hasn't met the founders isn't allowed to be negative about a deal. Stebbings asked what happens if a partner knows something about the market; Tisch says arguments for failure are easy and not useful at seed stage.

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Transcript

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch Around 59:41 into the episode

David Tisch

If you aren't the person that has spent time with the founders, you aren't allowed to be negative about it.

Harry Stebbings

But what if you know something about the market that you feel the?

David Tisch

…evolve. If you know something about the founders, but we probably diligence that before we're taking meetings and leaning into something. Like if there are like ethical issues, if there's reputational issues with a founder, I think that is an important thing to share. We don't allow grenades at early stage. You're not allowed to throw a grenade on someone else's deal. Our job is to get to yes. If you name a company at early stage, I can tell you why it's going to fail. Any company. Here are the five risk conditions and here's why it's going to fail. It's the easiest thing to do. If you've done this for like a year, you can guess why a company is going to fail. Your memos that every firm writes are very obvious why it's not going to work. That's not the job. And by the way, on a probability basis, it's not going to work because 70, 90, whatever the number is, percent of…

Harry Stebbings

Totally get that and understand that. I always love that Google will just build it or the OpenAI or IT. Whatever it is. But

David Tisch

like you can't hire. You don't know how to hire. You're not going to get like, it's not big enough. All these things. They're just not factors for the win. Why is it going to work?

Harry Stebbings

You said that 17 to 90% don't work. Keith Robois said before that's dramatically overestimated. And in fact, if you're investing in great people, your loss rate, in other words, it actually really not working being a zero or close to a zero is much lower than people think.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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