On losing a deal you wanted
We passed on a company 18 months ago that just raised a Series B at 10x the valuation. The lesson isn't what you think.
There’s a company we passed on 18 months ago. B2B SaaS, Central European team, solving a real problem. We passed because the market looked too small and the founder seemed more operator than visionary.
They just raised a Series B at a valuation ten times what we could have gotten in at.
Here’s the thing: the lesson isn’t “you should have invested.” The lesson is that the framework you use to evaluate deals is always wrong at the edges. The question is whether it’s wrong in a random way or a systematic way.
Systematic misses are fixable. Random ones aren’t.
I’ve been going back through our pass notes to find the pattern. I think we underweighted founder resilience relative to early market size. Working on calibrating that.