Why Does a Venture Committee Miss the Best Deals?

Oren Zeev says this business is not symmetrical, and a missed investment is much worse than a bad one. A deal you should not have done costs the money you put in. A deal you should have done, and did not, can cost 100 times or 200 times that in gains that never arrive. Partners, even smart ones and even without internal politics, do not push you into a deal you would have skipped. They push back on deals you already want. If they are right nine times out of ten, one blocked deal that would have returned 100 times still wipes out the nine bad deals they stopped.

A committee is not necessarily the better decider. It moves toward consensus. One person can follow a gut feeling and do something a little out of context, and it is easier to be contrarian when there is nobody to persuade. He spent his first 12 years in venture on the partnership route. He does not think more people, even great ones, would have left him better off. Alone, he controls his schedule and skips the meetings that exist to run an organization.