20VC: Why Market Is More Important Than Team, The 4 Key Roles of A Board Member & Why Founders Get Market Sizing So Wrong with Rory O'Driscoll, Founding Partner @ Scale Venture Partners

Rory O’Driscoll is a founding member and Partner at Scale Venture Partners. An active investor for the past 20 years, Rory is focused on early-in-revenue software companies benefiting from the move to Software as a Service and the wider transition of enterprise computing to the cloud. Rory currently sits on the boards of Axcient, Bill.com, Box, Chef Software, DataSift, DocuSign, DroneDeploy, Forter, Katch, OneLogin, Pantheon, WalkMe and Wrike.  Prior investments include ExactTarget (ET; Acq: SFDC), Omniture (OMTR; Acq: ADBE), ScanSafe (Acq: Cisco), Frontbridge (Acq: MSFT), Placeware (Acq: MSFT) among others. Rory has been recognized by the Forbes Midas List and AlwaysOn Power Players in Venture Capital for his investments.

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In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Rory made his way into the world of venture and came to be a Partner @ Scale.

2.) How does Rory address market size? Does he utilise the bottom up or top dpwn approach? What is his strategy?

3.) Why are markets more important to Rory than management? What do each element have a different role in achieving?

4.) How does Rory look to navigate board conflict? When conflict does arise, how does Rory look to resolve a CEO who does not listen?

5.) What are the 4 fundamental roles of a board member? Why is competence underrated? What should founders and CEOs look for in prospective board members?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Rory’s Fave Blog: Term Sheet

Rory’s Fave Book: SuperForecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction

Rory’s Most Recent Investment: DroneDeploy

As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rory on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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