The three things it takes to get into the investing business are dealflow, judgment, and capital.

In venture, you live or die by your deal flow. If you’re not seeing the best deals, you’re already playing catch-up.

Deal flow is everything. If you’re in a second-tier firm, you never get a chance at that great company.

I believe deal flow is destiny. If you have incredible deal flow, then the companies you select and your criteria becomes more discerning.

Early-stage VCs need deal flow, which means you need to be more aligned with founders. Crappy terms for the founders means you aren’t going to get deal flow. Getting good deals is insanely competitive.

If you’re a nobody who starts out, any deal flow that gets to you, by definition, has been picked over by all the qualified people.

You can’t be a great investor if you don’t see any deals. Being a friendly collaborator with other investors is one of the best ways to see more investment opportunities – you essentially multiply the surface area of what you see.

We believed it would take years to get great deal flow. So instead of fighting for hot Series A rounds, we made 80 seed investments to ensure we’d see the best companies early.

The best deals come through personal networks. Many of our top investments were referred by friends or former colleagues.

You have to see a lot to do some. If you didn’t see it, you never had that opportunity — you need to improve your dealflow. Ultimately, you’re going to miss out. That’s just life.

I have a database and software that processes 20,000 applications every year. We’ll probably double that. By the end, we’ll have the same deal flow as Y Combinator… We have an army of researchers and analysts sorting through this deal flow.

“We try to meet companies as early as possible – we track them as ‘lines’ over time. By the time we’re face-to-face, we’re further along in deciding than founders realize, because we’ve followed their progress.

In our first year we missed Instagram – we’d seeded a similar photo app and couldn’t do another. That taught us the opportunity cost of a crowded pipeline. Sometimes your second choice turns out to be the 312x return you missed.

Deal sourcing is a time-consuming and inefficient process, requiring a thorough review of deals at varying stages of progress.