Instead of building a platform team of specialists, Eclipse operates like a small special forces unit. A lean team of senior partners, all ex-operators, handles everything from thesis creation to scaling companies. This ensures founders get direct support from proven builders, not junior staff.

Contrary to conventional wisdom about delegation, the best management style for a small business founder is to be "all over fucking everything all the time." This means maintaining granular involvement in every aspect of the company—from client happiness to legal spending—to relentlessly drive daily improvements and maintain operational control.

VCs at the highest level don't just write checks; they fundamentally reset a founder's aspirations. By placing a startup in the lineage of giants like Google and Oracle, they shift the goal from building a big business to creating a generational company.

Venture capital returns materialize over a decade, making short-term outputs like markups unreliable 'mirages.' Sequoia instead measures partners on tangible inputs. They are reviewed semi-annually on the quality of their decision-making process (e.g., investment memos) and their adherence to core team values, not on premature financial metrics.

Large, contrarian investments feel like career risk to partners in a traditional VC firm, leading to bureaucracy and diluted conviction. Founder-led firms with small, centralized decision-making teams can operate with more decisiveness, enabling them to make the bold, potentially firm-defining bets that consensus-driven partnerships would avoid.

Unlike operating companies that seek consistency, VC firms hunt for outliers. This requires a 'stewardship' model that empowers outlier talent with autonomy. A traditional, top-down CEO model that enforces uniformity would stifle the very contrarian thinking necessary for venture success. The job is to enable, not manage.

Lior Susan highlights the biggest mental hurdle for former operators becoming VCs: internalizing the power law. Operators are builders wired to fix problems and believe they can turn any situation around. In VC, success is driven by a few massive outliers, requiring focus on winners, not on fixing every company.

The transition from a C-suite operator managing thousands to an investor is jarring. New VCs must adapt from leading large teams to being individual contributors who write their own memos and do their own sourcing. This "scaling down" ability, not just prior success, predicts their success as an investor.

Exor's governance model focuses on finding the right leaders and then giving them space to execute. They review plans and organizational structures but avoid micromanagement, viewing their role as a supportive yet challenging partner to the CEOs of their portfolio companies.