Promise Ends at Series A with David Hornik

Hey folks - Firas here.

This week’s PMF Playbook comes from my episode with David Hornik, founding partner at Lobby Capital and one of those rare venture investors who’s seen enough cycles to tell you what’s actually durable.

David has backed companies that became categories - Splunk, GitLab, Fastly, Ebates - but what made this conversation valuable wasn’t a list of wins. It was the operating system behind them: the belief that venture isn’t a transaction business, it’s a relationship business and that the best investors (and founders) win by caring deeply about the problem, not just the upside.

If you’re building, raising, or hiring in 2026, this one is a masterclass.

Let me walk you through what stood out.

David said something that should permanently reframe how founders think about fundraising:

A lot of people believe venture is about finding and doing deals.
They’re wrong.

In his view, venture is fundamentally a relationship game because companies are built by people, destroyed by people, and accelerated by people.

You can have a great product and still lose if the team is dysfunctional.
You can have a mediocre business and watch it become massive if the people are exceptional.

That’s also why “AI, tech, tech, tech” isn’t the full story. The tech matters, of course, but the human dynamics matter more. Especially when things get hard (which they always do).

And I loved the blunt truth embedded in his line: “There’s no great business on the planet that bad people haven’t ruined.”

It sounds obvious - until you’ve seen it happen.

When I asked David what value a VC brings besides money, he didn’t reach for the usual “network” cliché.

He called it what it is: selling.

A great VC becomes your “cheerleader in chief” - not in a fluffy way, but in the most practical way:

When you’re trying to hire someone extraordinary - someone who has options - credibility matters. And a strong investor lends that credibility.

“David meets 1,000 companies a year and funds one. We were the one.”

That sentence sells.

It sells to candidates.
It sells to customers.
It sells to future investors.

But the piece that felt even more true - especially for founders - is what he said next: the best investors also become the place where you can tell the truth.

Because being a CEO is lonely.

You can’t always dump fear, doubt, or uncertainty onto your team - everyone reports to you.
So a good investor becomes part psychologist, part operator, part board partner - someone who can help you keep the business from eating you alive.

That’s not talked about enough. But it’s real.

David has an unusual background: he was a lawyer before becoming a VC, and he’s dyslexic.

It’s a combination that sounds contradictory - until you hear him explain it.

Law trains you to think in rules, implications, risks, and tradeoffs.
Not just “what’s written,” but what happens if you don’t comply.

Dyslexia, on the other hand, forces a different skill: you rarely have perfect information, so you learn to extrapolate and make decisions with incomplete data.

And that’s basically venture.

You’re never investing with certainty. You’re investing with fragments.
So the ability to reason clearly and decide without full visibility becomes a competitive advantage.

It also connects to something founders forget: detail matters - but interpretation matters more. Great decision-making isn’t just about knowing the facts. It’s about understanding what the facts imply.

This was one of those “write it down” moments.

David told me a story about Travis Kalanick raising Uber’s Series A, and he shared a dirty secret most founders don’t internalize early enough:

Until a term sheet exists, the investor has leverage.
The moment a term sheet exists, the founder has leverage.

Because a VC spends a year looking at hundreds or thousands of deals to write one term sheet.
Once they’ve written it, they want it to happen.

That’s why the best founders slow down right when they feel pressure to speed up.
They create space. They compare. They negotiate from strength.

And the parallel to recruiting hit me immediately: the leverage shifts the moment intent becomes clear and closing becomes a two-way sale.

David gave the cleanest framing I’ve heard in a while:

Seed rounds are mostly promise.
Series A requires proof.

At Seed, someone might fund you because you’re sharp, the story is compelling, and the market feels big.

At Series A, you need to demonstrate that the thing you believed is true:

●     The problem is real

●     The customer cares

●     The solution actually solves it

●     And ideally: people will pay for it

No shortcuts. No cheat codes.

This is the heart of PMF. It’s not storytelling. It’s validation.

And it’s why so many “high potential” startups stall: they confuse early excitement with durable demand.

This part matters because it cuts against the current founder narrative.

When I asked David whether he indexes on founder-market fit, he said it’s overblown.

Yes, sometimes the fit is obvious like a doctor fixing information flow in hospitals.

But he’s also backed founders who had no “obvious” right to win - young founders, outsiders, people who simply saw something broken and worked relentlessly to understand the customer and solve it.

What he does look for is more interesting:

He wants people who genuinely care about the problem - not people chasing what they think will make money.

And he wants founders who don’t pretend they have all the answers.

If you give confident answers to unanswerable questions, it’s a red flag.
The best founders have strong convictions where they should and real curiosity where they don’t yet know.

That’s a very different filter than “ex-Google” or “10 years in industry.”

David’s take on AI companies was nuanced and honest.

Yes - teams are getting traction faster with fewer people.
Yes - products can be built quicker than ever.

But he’s worried about what comes next: defensibility.

In a world where everyone has similar tooling, the question isn’t “can you build it?”
It’s “can you defend it?”

Historically, the slope up is often the slope down.
Momentum attracts competitors. Speed invites clones. Differentiation gets thinner.

So AI will create a small number of massive winners - but it will also create an even larger graveyard of fast starters who couldn’t sustain a moat.

That’s the uncomfortable truth behind this era of “four engineers to $50m ARR.”

David’s breakdown on fundraising for VC funds was also surprisingly applicable to founders.

LPs care about two things:

Because you can’t do great deals unless you see them.
And there are only a small number of transformative deals in any given year.

That mindset maps perfectly to founders and operators too:

You’re only as good as the next distribution edge.
The next customer insight.
The next hiring unlock.
The next relationship that changes the trajectory.

David ended by recommending Give and Take and The Biggest Bluff, and the theme was consistent with everything else he said:

People who give - who build relationships without keeping score - end up with the strongest networks, the best deal flow, and the highest-trust partnerships.

Not because it’s moral.
Because it compounds.

And that, to me, is the quiet meta-lesson of the whole episode:

In a world obsessed with speed, leverage, and tactics - relationships are still the highest ROI asset.

If you want one line to take from this edition, it’s this:

You can’t sell Series A on promise. You have to prove the truth.

Everything else - the fundraising dynamics, the investor-founder fit, the recruiting parallels, even AI’s acceleration - hangs off that.

And if you’re building right now, that’s the job.

Until next time,

Firas Sozan
Your Cloud, Data & AI Search & Venture Partner

Find me on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/
Personal website: https://firassozan.com/
Company website: https://www.harrisonclarke.com/
Venture capital fund: https://harrisonclarkeventures.com/
‘Inside the Silicon Mind’ podcast: https://insidethesiliconmind.com/