Daniel Gross and Brett Berson on Breaking Down Common Startup Tropes

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hey everybody, it's Erik Torenberg, co-founder, partner of Village Global, a network-driven venture firm. And this is Venture Stories, a podcast covering topics related to tech and business with world-leading experts.
Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Village Global Venture Stories. I'm here today with two repeat guests, fan favorites, I must say. Brett Berson of First Round and Daniel Gross of Pioneer. Brett, Daniel, welcome back to the podcast.

**Brett Berson** (0:35)
Delighted to be here.

**Daniel Gross** (0:36)
Thank you very much for having us.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:38)
So we're here to talk about a number of things. A couple of them are startup tropes, tropes related to company building that we have nuance or non-obvious opinions about. Brett, that was a topic we were talking about. One that I'm curious to start off with is picking startup ideas.
It's a trope in Silicon Valley that it's execution that matters, not ideas, and give away your ideas. They're free or they're worthless. How do you think about picking ideas at First Round, or how do you advise people who are looking to do their next thing during the idea, their generative process?

**Brett Berson** (1:08)
I think it's, I'm right now very curious about the sort of absolute earliest stages of company creation and what are opportunities for sort of more mechanization. And I think in talking with a bunch of people and sort of observing, I think one of the things that's been super interesting in the last 10 years has been the amount of information about company building that's kind of been open sourced or sort of shared broadly.
It's easy to forget, but like the sheer volume of like videos and podcasts, like the work that you do, writing, sharing ideas through conferences, executives leaving from one company and going to another, like the amount of information flow is astonishing. And at the same time, I feel like the absolute earliest stages of company creation, kind of the kernel of the idea and fleshing that out into something, whenever you wanna call it, feels like the most underexplored part of this lifecycle. And you have lean startup, and that would be like an example of kind of knowledge dissemination. But outside of that, which is all 10 to 15 years old, it feels like everyone thinks it's kind of the dark arts.
And that maybe you solve your own problem as kind of like best practice and then kind of see where it goes. And I think that's starting to change, and some of it is I think is more institutions at the early stage kind of have a larger sort of perspective. They're able to kind of disseminate. But broadly speaking, and I'm curious what both of you think, like the amount of actual detailed information about what are the properties of good ideas is astonishingly small relative to like running a product team, for example, in terms of best practice material. So like I find that kind of curious. And I tend to think that the two kind of modalities of company construction or idea generation can either happen top down or bottoms up.
And I think in sort of Silicon Valley, kind of more top down company creation is really considered quite negative. And this kind of hunting for your thing or whatever is sort of cast quite negatively. And I think that that shouldn't necessarily be the case. I think actually both modalities of company creation can be phenomenally successful, but I think it's less in vogue to sort of say, I'm gonna be pretty methodical about starting a company. Don't start a company until you can't go to sleep with these ideas that you have. And I'm not convinced that that's the case. But I think in general, you kind of have this sort of top down or bottoms up. Top down would be, I'm interested in climate. And so I'm gonna spend the next few years figuring out and zeroing in and landing on something that I think you could sort of stamp out a company around. Bottoms up is, I'm working at Google and I realized that this tool that we built, we could take out and sort of build an enterprise business around. Or I was trying to find a place to sleep and I didn't like the hotel options that I go and build X, Y or Z.
And I think that what all of these either bottoms up or top down ideas have in common is that in retrospect, there's a very clear chess game that is played to get to sort of whatever this long term thing that's quite interesting is. And either that, I think that chess game is intentional or unintentional, but it sort of always sort of plays out in sort of those multi moves. And I think in general, the thing that I've observed is when you talk to a lot of people, they tend to focus on long term ideas.