In terms of assessing a company’s chance of success, and this is my personal opinion, the things that matter most for the early investor are the founder and the go-tomarket strategy. Getting over-worried about whether
a segment is too big or too small is the wrong thing early on. The question is: Can the early, small, entry market become that much bigger? And if you have a great founder who understands how to get a product into the hands of customers in a certain space, worrying about everything else, at the early stage, is too much worry. So I try to focus on what I think is most important. I like technical founders who understand their first set of customers. That’s where value gets created. Another huge risk early on is whether the founders know each other and like each other. One of the problems in young teams is the founders really don’t know each other. And then you have what we call founder drama, where there is huge conflict between the founders learning to work together. That is one of the most debilitating things to start-up companies on the planet. Another reason companies fail, apart from founder drama, has been incredibly smart founders who could not find customers. So figuring out, “Is your founder able to sell? Do they understand where their first customer is going to come from? How does it work?” Engineering, particularly, produces a lot of introverts. So do you have someone who is willing to spend time with customers and who will learn how the sales process works? And if I find a technical founder who can sell, that’s where you have to basically back up the Brinks truck. My regret in Zoom was, I knew that Eric was one of those type of founders. I mean, literally I’m writing the guy a check. I should’ve written it for double.
My advice to young lawyers: Be strategic about where you want to go. Every year sit down
and say, “Is being at this law firm getting me closer to where I want to go or not? How can I use being here to get the skills I need for whatever’s next?” You always need to understand what your long term career goal is and then figure out the tactics to get there. Maintain your network of people. Listen as much as you talk. And always ask open-ended questions about people’s career strategy. I was always strategic. I was always trying to say, “What do I want to do? And then how do I end up there?” At the law firm I looked around and said, “OK, if I’m going to be a general counsel, how do I act? How do I learn from this? What do I need to take from this law firm to do that?” When I was at Cisco, I said, “If I’m going to be a VC at some point, who would I fund? Who would I hire? Who would I not fund? Who wouldn’t I touch?” And I was always kind of thinking forward, always. One thing I know for sure is you’re going to have an incredible network coming out of Duke because the people I went to law school with are just incredible. d
F
Frances Fulk Rufty ’45
rances Fulk Rufty wasn’t just the only woman in the Duke Law Class of 1945. For a time she was the Class of 1945. “One day I went to school and it was filled with boys and the next day I was the only one there,” said Rufty, recalling the effect of America’s entry into World War II early in her first year. “So I had the class — legal research — in the professor’s office for the semester.” Rufty, 95, never set out to become a double-Duke alumna, she explained during an animated interview at her Las Vegas home. She had her heart set on attending the College of William & Mary at age 15 after finishing 11th grade — the highest grade in her Spencer, N.C. school — but wasn’t able to secure one of its slots for out-ofstate students. She was late in applying to the Women’s College at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, but was assured that slots would open up when crop failures forced students from farming families to withdraw. “Well, that year every crop in the
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