To win the best pre-seed deals, investors should engage high-potential talent during their 'founder curious' phase, long before a formal fundraise. The real competition is guiding them toward conviction on their own timeline, not battling other VCs for a term sheet later.

Echoing the Hippocratic Oath, a venture investor's primary job with a high-performing company is to stay out of the way and not disrupt its momentum. While providing resources for talent, capital, and strategy is valuable, it's secondary to the core principle of not interfering with a team that is already executing successfully.

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.

A common mistake in venture capital is investing too early based on founder pedigree or gut feel, which is akin to 'shooting in the dark'. A more disciplined private equity approach waits for companies to establish repeatable, business-driven key performance metrics before committing capital, reducing portfolio variance.

A core investment framework is to distinguish between 'pull' companies, where the market organically and virally demands the product, and 'push' companies that have to force their solution onto the market. The former indicates stronger product-market fit and a higher potential for efficient, scalable growth.

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.

When evaluating revolutionary ideas, traditional Total Addressable Market (TAM) analysis is useless. VCs should instead bet on founders with a "world-bending vision" capable of inducing a new market, not just capturing an existing one. Have the humility to admit you can't predict market size and instead back the visionary founder.

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.