Ignite VC: Eric Woo on The Hidden Signals Behind Top-Performing Emerging Managers | Ep224

Episode notes

What most LPs miss, and why venture is quietly changing shape Here’s a strange truth about venture capital: it’s an industry obsessed with pattern recognition, yet remarkably bad at measuring its own patterns. We have spreadsheets for startups. Metrics for growth. Frameworks for product-market fit. But when it comes to evaluating the people allocating the capital, especially emerging managers, we mostly rely on vibes, pedigree, and coffee chats. That worked when the industry was small. It breaks the moment it scales. Eric Woo has spent most of his career living inside that contradiction. He’s evaluated hundreds of emerging managers as an LP, helped institutionalize syndicates at AngelList, and now, as the co-founder and CEO of Revere, he’s building infrastructure to make venture underwriting a little less mystical. This post distills the core ideas from our conversation for anyone who didn’t listen to the episode, or wants the signal without the audio. Venture underwriting is still mostly vibes Let’s start with the uncomfortable part. Despite all the talk of rigor, most LP decisions about emerging managers still come down to: * Do I trust this person?