Dave Munichiello

Key Quotes

On being open/vulnerable about challenges faced:

• "Sometimes when entrepreneurs come in and pitch us, they can appear bulletproof. They can say, 'I'm the smartest person in this space. I've never made a mistake. And we're gonna be huge and you're about to miss out on this big opportunity.' It feels egotistical — it feels out of touch. And as somebody who's seen all of the challenges of startup world, and all of the risks and that every day is either a huge high or a huge low, it just doesn't feel real,"
• It's a bad sign if a founder walks out of the room and Munichiello feels like he doesn't have a sense of who they are.

Looks at investing as testing a hypothesis posed by a business:

• "The reason we're investing isn't some arbitrage where we think we can make a lot of money based on something we know that nobody else knows. The reason we're investing is because we're also curious about those tests and we want to see what the results of those tests are. Sometimes we invest in a company and those tests all come back negative and our hypotheses were wrong. But really good entrepreneurs are able to see that ahead of time and have that conversation in a vulnerable way,"

On what Slack Founder/CEO Stewart Butterfield did right in his pitch to GV, reframing investors’ discussion on profitability:

• "Stewart is a fantastic CEO and he refocused the conversation to the metrics he cares about as a CEO. He said, 'Look at how fast our user adoption is growing. Look at how much time our users spend on the Slack platform and look at this wall of love that I have. Look at how many people are so passionate about this thing.Yes, we are charging this small group of people and they are willing to pay a tremendous amount. But look at all these other people who are willing to pay as well and we think we can monetize that in the future. But let's continue to create something that people will love."

Career