In Venture Capital, it is astonishingly “easy” to find reasons to say no. When you decline 99% of what crosses your desk, rejecting becomes a reflex. Yet the irony is that we are in the business of pursuing outliers, companies that initially look strange, imperfect, or outright improbable.

To reach a true “yes,” a team must do the work: research deeply, gather diverse perspectives, and remain flexible enough to learn, unlearn, and occasionally admit they were wrong.

Emotional discipline matters as much as intellectual rigour. The best opportunities nearly always arrive wrapped in contradictions. Google, eBay, Facebook, Oracle, each had glaring flaws early on, but they also possessed such overpowering strengths that the flaws became irrelevant.

This is precisely why many of the most enduring venture firms resist over-optimising for agreement.

Solving for outliers

At Icebreaker, General Partner Lasse Lehtinen describes their philosophy as explicitly designed to protect the non-obvious: “We solve for outliers by prioritising individual conviction over investment committee (IC) consensus. We empower our partners to take the shot. While we rigorously challenge each other’s assumptions, we do not require a unanimous thumbs up to proceed. In the venture landscape, the most transformative ideas are often the most polarising. If we operated by consensus, we would inadvertently filter out the non-obvious, counterintuitive opportunities that lead to the greatest returns. Our best investment so far is a living proof of that.”

Teaching Conviction

At First Momentum Ventures, Founding Partner Sebastian Böhmer frames conviction as something that cannot simply be taught top-down:

“It is very hard to teach conviction directly. As soon as you try to do that, you risk building a clone of your own beliefs and thinking. In venture this is not what you want. You need strong shared values in a team, but at the same time people need to think differently to bring different perspectives to the table.”

“What we try to do instead,” he says is “to create an environment where people can build their own convictions over time. This mainly happens through exposure and repetition. Talking to hundreds of founders, seeing different approaches to similar problems, and continuously discussing and challenging ideas creates pattern recognition that cannot be taught in theory. Conviction in venture is not certainty. It is the ability to form a strong opinion under uncertainty while knowing that you can still be wrong.”

A very important part of this process is challenging. Junior team members are encouraged to defend their thinking, but also to understand where their arguments do not hold up and where they need to rethink their position. Over time they learn where they can stand their ground and where they should think twice. Seeing experienced investors change their minds is also important, because it shows that strong conviction and intellectual flexibility belong together.

This process takes time. Young investors need to close the loop. Benchmarking hundreds of founders cannot be done in a few months, but it is necessary to avoid turning early conviction into unearned and uninformed confidence. The goal is not to make people confident, but to help them build their own informed judgment.

Managing Conviction: A Delicate Art

For conviction to work, it must be supported and challenged in equal measure. Deal champions need the freedom to explore their thesis, but also the accountability that comes from structured questioning. Avoiding politics is essential; venture falls apart the moment dealmaking becomes transactional.

The most successful investment cultures treat conviction as a team effort — not a lone-wolf narrative. Due diligence should be used to deepen understanding, not eliminate ideas. The real advantage comes from building conviction early, long before the wider market decides something is obvious.

At Sondo, this balance also shows up in how quickly decisions are made. General Partner Kjetil Holmefjord explains:

“From our experience the best companies are not obvious early on. For that reason, we prioritise conviction over consensus – meaning that we only need one ‘strong yes’ to reach a positive investment decision. We both weigh in on a potential opportunity, but we don’t need both of us to love it, shortening the time it takes to get to a ‘yes’.”

Speed matters. So does clarity of ownership. By lowering the bar for agreement while raising the bar for individual responsibility, firms preserve momentum without sacrificing thoughtful debate.

Maintaining Conviction When Ambiguity Is the Only Constant

At Icebreaker, Lehtinen explains that their philosophy starts with people, not predictions. “In highly ambiguous markets, we don’t look for certainty in the what – we look for clarity in the who,” he says.

He explains that their core thesis is built around deep domain expertise. “Founders who’ve lived inside an industry often develop a unique foresight into how that sector will shift,” Lehtinen explains. “When someone shows us a compelling vision for a real problem – and the ability to execute against it, we’re willing to back them, even if the opportunity isn’t obvious yet.”

Since 2017, Icebreaker has applied this approach more than 130 times. Lehtinen is candid about the outcome: “Not every vision will materialise – and that’s fine. Failure is an acceptable byproduct of early-stage risk, as long as the winners are significant.”

Case in point: Hoxhunt

Nearly a decade ago, Hoxhunt’s founders argued that the “human element” would become the most critical vulnerability in enterprise security, a perspective far from market consensus at the time. “We trusted their domain insight,” Lehtinen says.

Icebreaker backed the vision early. Today, Hoxhunt is a fast-growing global leader in a category it helped define, a reminder that conviction, when grounded in deep expertise, often arrives well before agreement.

Hybrid Approaches: When Conviction Meets Collective Wisdom

Most venture firms eventually migrate towards a hybrid model. At the earliest stages, conviction takes the lead because data is scarce and imagination is abundant. As companies progress into Series A and beyond, consensus plays a greater role as financial metrics, customer signals, and market behaviour become clearer.

The best partnerships treat conversation as the bridge between these worlds – preserving individual insight while benefiting from collective evaluation.

VC = Impact: The True Purpose of Conviction

At its core, venture capital is an impact engine. The best firms flatten hierarchies, amplify ideas over titles, and design environments where intelligent risk-taking is rewarded. They turn opportunities into investments long before others recognise their potential.

Venture reshapes the future precisely because it refuses to accept the present as fixed.

Conviction beats consensus not because it guarantees accuracy, but because it gives innovation and societal progress the oxygen it needs to breathe. If you’d like to know more about why I believe that consensus helps us to avoid making mistakes, but conviction is what creates outlier returns, read my previous article.