Andy Rachleff explains his product philosophy of “slugging percentage, not batting average” When Benchmark co-founder Andy Rachleff left venture capital to co-found Wealthfront, he brought one key idea with him. “Very few of the skills one learns in venture capital are appropriate to running a company,” Andy explains. “But the one thing that I brought with me was the belief in slugging percentage, not batting average… Almost every job in the world is evaluated on the percentage of time you’re correct. That’s irrelevant in venture capital… If you take very little risk, you can succeed most of the time, but with very little risk comes very little return.” When he taught at Stanford GSB, Andy would ask his students: “What do you call a venture capitalist who’s never lost money? Unemployed because I don’t want them as a partner because they’re unlikely to have any big wins. They have to take chances because it’s about the magnitude of the win, not the percentage of the time you succeed.” At Wealthfront, he wrote a product philosophy memo to instill this same idea in the company: “I want us to fail most of the time. We’re going to take a lot of shots on goal. We’re going to try a lot of products. Most of them are going to fail. And we want the ones that succeed to succeed big.” Video source: @twistartups @Jason (2019)

Watch the full @twistartups interview with Andy Rachleff here: