[burnte]

1. Good and great companies actively seek out funding, especially at early stages. Lots of good and great ones slowly build and get contacted, too.

2. There certainly are good metrics, otherwise the basic tenets of business that have evolved over the past 5,000 years would exist. There may not be metrics that say if a certain product/service will be a smash hit or not, but it did not take a crystal ball to see that Pets.com was incredibly unsustainable, or that Groupon (and Blue Apron was too easy to replicate and thus overvalued, or that Juicero was an absolutely asinine idea destined for failure (massively overengineered squeezer that wasn't even necessary for their overpriced juice bags).

3. People game every VC system. Remember Pixelon? Theranos was WIDELY derided in medical and medical research circles from the get go. No way a 19 year old drop out came up with such a massive breakthrough in blood tests, she didn't even have the time to learn the medical basics. Faraday has looked sketchy from the outset as well.

4. This statement I wholly agree with, and it happens to back up my disagreement with #2.

[sharemywin]

Groupon should have figured out how to be self service for merchants. maybe combined with an ebates. maybe even pushed into a influencer marketing.

Amazon would have probably gone the way of pets had it not found AWS.

[burnte]

I disagree about Amazon. They took the Walmart tactic and moved it digital before Walmart did, that's how they grew. Become a logistics expert, and expand horizontally.