Matthew Mandel

As I was reading Mallaby’s The Power Law, I was tickled to learn that Paul Graham gave his iconic “How to Start a Startup” lecture in Emerson Hall at Harvard. Although the lecture was for the Harvard Computer Society, it was delivered in the philosophy building. And Graham himself was a philosophy major in college (though he doesn’t hold academic philosophy in very high regard).

In my post announcing that I was joining USV, I wrote about one similarity between philosophy and venture capital: both look something like ordinary reasoning rendered persistent. Neither philosophers nor venture capitalists get their edge from substantive knowledge about a field. Some VCs might have deep industry expertise, but most end up investing in a variety of industries and the more time they spend investing vs operating, the more their domain knowledge depreciates. Instead, philosophers and VCs contribute by asking the questions any ordinary person could ask but by doing so more persistently than others might. Both philosophy and VC require forming an opinion about a very high dimensional problem with minimal opportunity for empirical feedback (and both can look kind of fake as a result). And so Hegel’s dictum applies equally well to both: the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.