[PopeDotNinja]

I suspect a push is a VC failure.

A friend of mine was CTO as a startup that raised like $100 million. They knew it was gonna flop after a while, and wanted to wind the company down and return 50% of the VC’s money. The VC told them to take extreme risk and/or drive the company into the ground before returning the cash. A 100% loss was expected, but a 50% loss was somehow an embarrassment.

[Natsu]

Pretty sure PG has talked about this and said something to the effect that all of their money is made on the extreme outliers rather than the ordinary failures or modest successes. Knowing that, it kinda makes sense that they'd rather see the startup push and try to go big rather than just going home.

[waterhouse]

Well, it depends on the numbers involved. If they estimated a 5% chance of getting $2 billion, then that would be a 2x expected return on a $50 million cost, which is entirely rational for investors with huge pockets. But if they estimated a 1% chance of getting $2 billion, then that's a 0.4x expected return (an expected loss of $30 million), which is irrational, unless the "embarrassment" is a significant factor for the VCs, and that would be interesting.

[Natsu]

Yes, that's a fair point--the numbers for the potential upside and downside matter a lot here. I was only trying to make the case that in some cases, the downside risk may not hold a candle to the potential upside.

I also think that they want to see founders who are willing to charge up those hills rather than to shirk away from challenges that seem to be too big for them. Sort of like burning your ships behind you in terms of morale--if it's go big or go home and you can't go home, there's only one choice left.