20VC: Sahil Lavingia on Rolling Funds and Their Impact on The Future of Venture, How To Evaluate Market, Team and Product, The Value of Party Rounds & The Pros and Cons of Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed

We're never going to see hundreds of billions of dollars in rolling funds in my opinion, but what you're going to see is all of these companies that might have failed that were able to raise a $100k here or $250k there from these new emerging fund managers that have these different networks, that have these different LP bases, that are going to lead to much more interesting, different, diverse companies getting started and continuing to get to that next stage.

I think Reid's [Hoffman] quote was accurate maybe 10 years ago... But the truth is, the bar for where your product needs to be today is so much higher. And yes, you should be embarrassed because I think the best founders will perpetually be embarrassed—Patrick and John [Collison] from Stripe are probably still embarrassed—but you have to have an insanely high level of product quality. You just do.

All of these small touches that show that you really really care about the product experience and the lowering the friction that really matters in my opinion. And so when I noticed that it's hard for me to commit because no one's going to fix that for them. I'm not gonna be able to be that person that's over their shoulder being like, hey fix this fix this fix this fix this there's like a thousand small small things.

It blows me away how many times I sign up for a product, and it doesn't do what I thought it would do. It doesn't do what the founder said it was going to do. It's not as beautiful as what's in the deck, etc.

People don't really give a shit about you, and I think that's great. I think most people care about a few people—their family, their friends, some other folks in their life, but truthfully, you just can't care about everybody. You can't love everybody. You can love people kind of like how Jesus loved everybody, but you can't really sacrifice parts of yourself for other people, like a parent would for their children.