I'd say Jobs would have blown them away. He was a businessman and an obsessive who knew when to focus on the design versus the product versus the money. If investors in his era wanted a perfect pitch deck, his pitch deck would have been perfect.
Tesla might have been more likely to focus on having the tech working at the expense of everything else.
Honestly, I would have too, if I were in that VC's place. Hindsight is everything obviously but at that moment, if a founder were to arrive to an important meeting 20 minutes late without good reason, either the meeting was of little importance to the founder, or the lack of punctuality speaks volumes of his dedication to his company and his potential partners. Dave McClure once told me that he passed on Travis Kalanick for similar reasons.
If lack of punctuality being used as a signal causes these VCs to drop Steve Jobs or Travis Kalanick I think it's safe to say it doesn't speak volumes.
Otherwise you're optimizing for criteria other than "selecting whether to invest in Apple or Uber."
You're only considering the false negatives while forgetting about the true negatives. VCs don't have infinite funds at their disposal; a heuristic like "being late to a meeting leads to a rejection" can be beneficial even if the false-negative-rate is non-zero.
>Otherwise you're optimizing for criteria other than "selecting whether to invest in Apple or Uber.
They arent single-mindedly optimizing to invest in the next apple or uber at all cost! They are balancing it against the need to screen out no-name bums that look and sound the same.
All I'm saying is that a "screen out the bums" heuristic is also a "screen out some of the wealthiest companies to ever exist" heuristic then it's probably not rooted in anything other than vibes.
It is a huge amount of vibes. There is no scientific way to know the future and predict rare events. The whole VC business model isnt about having good predictions. It is about being a few percent more accurate than random chance.
If you can win a coin flip 51% of the time instead of 50, you have a viable business model.
That's not necessarily evidence of how he treated all VCs rather than one VC one time. (Though I'm inclined to guess it's more accurate than the idea you replied to.)
Jobs definitely didn't present himself that way, at the beginning at least:
To build the company, Jobs adroitly tapped the network of support services that has made Silicon Valley such a fertile place for fledgling businesses. Says he: “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing, but we were very careful observers and learned quickly.” Jobs pestered Regis McKenna, the area’s premier public relations specialist, to take on Apple as a client. After refusing twice, McKenna finally agreed. For advice on how to raise money, Jobs consulted both McKenna and Nolan Bushnell, his former boss at Atari. They suggested that he call Don Valentine, an investor who frequently puts money into new firms. When Valentine came around to inspect the new computer, he found Jobs wearing cutoff jeans and sandals while sporting shoulder-length hair and a Ho Chi Minh beard. Valentine later asked McKenna: “Why did you send me this renegade from the human race?”
OTOH people who prefer the conventional are not likely to recognize the most promising outliers for what they are, it can go right over their head as if there was no difference from those having below-average potential.
Tesla might have been more likely to focus on having the tech working at the expense of everything else.