Slow Ventures PhD Program with Will Quist — indie Interview

What if we could know whether the business idea you can’t shake is worth pursuing?

What if we could ensure that we’re pairing the right ideas with the right capital sources to ensure the best possible outcomes?

Will Quist, from Slow Ventures, is on a mission to answer these question and more for founders with subject matter expertise and high opportunity cost.

To that end, he’s designed the Slow PhD, a program that embraces the idea that “Important companies and successful businesses can’t be hacked, forced, or faked.” Through a rigorous engagement process and step by step opportunity analysis, Will hopes to target more of the right people at the right opportunities with the right sources of capital behind them.

This conversation was an attempt to give a preview of the PhD program and explore ideas around its perimeter. Take aways from this one:

— There has been a decoupling of awesome products from awesome companies and awesome companies from awesome venture capital investments. Just because a product is great doesn’t mean it will make a great company or require venture capital. A lot is knowable early on about a company’s prospects.

— The abundance of venture capital in recent years may actually be a bug, not a feature, for founders. When capital was scarcer, getting funded was a stronger signal that an idea was worth a founder’s opportunity cost to pursue. Now, founders are sacrificing a lot of their valuable time without enough diligence.

— Venture capital should be used to fund experiments to test novel hypotheses about how the world works that could be wildly valuable if true. The experiments should generate clear true/false signals without requiring too much capital. This gives optionality to pursue bigger opportunities if the initial hypothesis is validated.

— If founders become better “investors” in their own companies by deeply understanding their business model, capital efficiency, and growth levers beyond just building great products, it could lead to more efficient allocation of capital and better venture outcomes overall. But truly great venture-scale companies may still be constrained more by the supply of innovative ideas than the supply of capital.

Will has been a friend for over a decade. I’ve watched him wrestle with these ideas in public and in private. I think this is the best distillation of those ideas and why they matter that he’s given so far. There’s loads of actionable advice and frameworks in this one.

I hope you enjoy listening in as much as we enjoyed having the conversation.

— Bryce