Joe Kraus isn’t just a Google Ventures partner. He’s also a poker player, and I think he knows that both pursuits involve a certain amount of gambling, regardless of how much skill you think you have.
“In poker, if my analysis doesn’t agree with my gut, I’ll usually go with my gut,” he tells me in his corner office in the Google Ventures building in Mountain View.
“As an angel investor, I made a bunch of one-meeting investments based on feeling. In the venture world, that doesn’t work. … You have a gut read in your first meeting, then you do all of this analysis, and it either confirms your gut or not.”
