Founders Fund Partner Zebulgar: Treating VC as an Interest is Better than Full-Time
Founders Fund partner Zebulgar suggests that viewing venture capital as an "interest" rather than a full-time career can significantly enhance investment performance. He points out that each year, the number of companies with truly decisive impact is very small, and full-time VCs can easily become self-numbed among a vast number of projects, misjudging ordinary projects as top opportunities.
This viewpoint emphasizes the importance of selectivity over high-frequency investing, aligning with data from the venture capital industry: top funds typically invest in a limited number of projects annually, with returns highly concentrated in a few successful cases.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
This suggestion's core lies in the contradiction of "opportunity scarcity" and "judgment bias." Top investment opportunities are indeed rare, and full-time roles can lead to an "activity trap"—to maintain investment pace, standards are lowered, creating a cycle of "busy but ineffective," while an interest-driven approach more easily maintains high standards.
Mechanically, this represents a typical "focus trade-off." Full-time VCs face performance pressure, FOMO effects, and team expectations, leading decisions to shift from "deep judgment" to "surface matching." An interest-driven approach reduces external distractions, aligning more closely with "zero-sum filtering": acting only when extremely high-quality opportunities arise, while spending the rest of the time accumulating insights.
This also reflects the venture capital industry's "power law return" structure: 99% of returns come from 1% of projects. The true advantage of excellent investors lies in "missing the majority," rather than "participating in the majority," which is completely contrary to traditional professional logic and more akin to the "inspiration-driven" model of artists or scientists.
In the long run, this "interest model" is essentially an evolutionary strategy to cope with information overload and judgment fatigue. In an environment with highly asymmetric opportunities, maintaining cognitive clarity is a more decisive advantage than high-frequency actions.