The curse (and benefit) of the Epic culture

 Working at a place for 8 years -- through your 20s -- really shapes how you view the world, how you interact with people. I think about this more and more the further I get away from my time at Epic (I left in Jan 2023). There's some quirks I've noticed about myself as I venture into the outside world, double-edged swords. A few of the things I've been thinking about are below.

Speaking with certainty

We're trained to speak with our hospital customers with certainty and knowledge; better for someone to trust that everything you're saying is accurate, even if it means half your answers are "I'll get back to you." In healthcare, this works amazingly well -- it's a cornerstone of building long-lasting trust. Works less well in the real world / the investing world, where you can't possibly know everything and are rewarded for having an opinion.

Replaceability

Part of the Epic culture -- for better or for worse -- is that everyone is replaceable. My cynical take: the genesis culture of this is that turnover is/was high, so you need to ensure that if someone leaves, you can replace them. This works well when you have to travel to a customer site or go on vacation -- you can have real back-ups to replace you. A lot of energy thus goes into ensuring that other people can easily know what you're working on, into educating others on niche areas of the software, on building redundancy. In some investment firms (and in some governance structures), this replaceability -- a focus on process, on sharing -- is not a focus. 

Deference

At Epic, we supported the hospital IT's team who supported end users (doctors, pharmacists, etc.) Thus, as Epic staff, my goal was always to make the end users trust the hospital IT team -- and ideally, never know that I existed (unless I came onsite). I would go out of my way to ensure that the hospital IT team looked like the heroes instead of me -- good for them, good for me. Same with newer team members: the quicker customers trusted the newbie, the quicker I could roll off; feeding the newbie answers was a win-win strategy. However good this may be for the org, the "leading from behind" strategy is not visible enough, especially when switching careers. It's a hard skill to unlearn.

"Build it yourself" mentality

Epic famously does not acquire; any tool you wanted, you had to build yourself. I feel the same way now -- I'd rather build a tool that works just how I want it than try to find a pre-existing software that does 80% and locks me in. A blessing and a curse.

VC Notes (Part 3)

"In investing, you're rewarded for having a point of view." 

Heard this recently, and it's a mindset that's been hard for me (and other STEM majors?) to adopt. In my prior roles, I was rewarded for being knowledgeable, not saying wrong things, and couching my uncertainty. In investing, the best speak with knowledge and conviction, but it seems the next best thing is to speak with conviction but not necessarily knowledge. To sound impressive -- or to have a view, even if ill-informed -- can take you further. Investors don't like to hear "I haven't done my research on that topic"; it seems they'd sometimes rather force you to glom onto a position. Obviously, there's a lot more nuance than that, but I'm slowly learning how to thread the needle of speaking like an investor. 

Gut investing

I wrote about this a little previously, but it also feels like there's some flavor of machismo in some corners of venture where people "trust their gut" and increasingly "learn to trust it more." I've heard it at least a few times, and I think it's something that uniquely exists in venture as something that people are proud of? You never hear a fundamental equities investor talk about their gut as the sole driver of decisions. Anyways, I hear it a lot, I agree with "gut" as a data point, but I think it behooves everyone to tease apart what "gut" means (founder charisma? founder anti-charisma? etc.)

What it takes to build a novel software (e.g. computer science research) is drastically different than what it takes to distribute a novel software

Perhaps it's embarrassing it's taken this long to fully comprehend, but the cool stuff that computer scientists are doing seldom translates to a successful software company, especially in age of AI. Cool algorithms or cool technology usually don't sell; "dumb" software with great distribution are what matter. Most of the MAG7 today are fundamentally "dumb" software with great distribution (save Google perhaps). I've become increasingly cynical about the software technology itself being any sort of differentiator; it's the people and sales channels that make a tech product pop.

Same goes deep tech, say in climate. Great lab work (i.e. science research) needs to be coupled with even better engineering to have any chance of survival. Sometimes it's not the best core science, but the one that can scale up better that wins. 

Syndicate vs. the more modern sole lead

Historically, VC investors looked for syndicates of other investors to share risk. The largest VC firms now don't need -- or want! -- syndicates; there's too much money that needs to be deployed. Instead, it feels like it's sometimes better to elbow others out of rounds. Almost has a PE flavor to it. 

Authentic differentiation

This is probably more through the lens of an allocator, looking at VC funds. (We recently had a day where we saw a few of our portfolio VC managers.) The VC funds that resonate the most are the ones where the point of differentiation feels authentic -- ties back to the person's past career, past predilections, or a difference in the way the GP thinks that manifests itself as strategy. Hard to describe without naming names, but something I think about more and more as I build my "brand."