The most successful venture investors share two key traits: they originate investments from a first-principles or contrarian standpoint, and they possess the conviction to concentrate significant capital into their winning portfolio companies as they emerge.

Given private equity's finite 5-7 year investment hold period, the 80/20 principle is an essential framework. It forces leadership to ruthlessly prioritize by identifying and doubling down on the 20% of customers, markets, leads, or team members that drive 80% of the results.

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.

Successful concentration isn't just about doubling down on winners. It's equally about avoiding the dispersion of capital and attention. This means resisting the industry bias to automatically do a pro-rata investment in a company just because another VC offered a higher valuation.

Contrary to the instinct to sell a big winner, top fund managers often hold onto their best-performing companies. The initial 10x return is a strong signal of a best-in-class product, team, and market, indicating potential for continued exponential growth rather than a peak.

New VCs often rush to make deals to prove themselves, but this leads to a portfolio of mediocre companies. These investments consume a disproportionate amount of time and energy, leaving no bandwidth to pursue the truly exceptional, career-making opportunities that may appear later.

The most effective investors deliberately carve out unstructured time for deep thinking and reading. This discipline contrasts with the common early-stage VC tendency to equate a packed calendar with productivity. True investment alpha is generated from unique insights, not just from the volume of meetings taken.

Achieving a top-decile graduation rate requires stacking multiple, distinct filters. Start with an algorithmic screen on founders to beat the market. Add a filter for co-investing with top VCs to improve further. The final layer is your own qualitative judgment to reach the target performance.

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.