Member-only story
“One Thing You Wish People Better Understood About Venture Capital” — Part II, featuring Victor Echevarria, Chris Neumann, Micah Rosenbloom, Alexa von Tobel and Roseanne Wincek.
I asked some investor friends to share, as the title suggests, one thing they wished people better understood about venture capital. There were no ground rules other than to specify that ‘people’ could be founders, politicians, LPs, etc and that it would be default attributed but anonymous if they desired. Reporting out in batches of five. Here’s Part II:
While the venture and tech community is incredibly collaborative, VC is an inherently lonely role. To succeed, you have to be comfortable taking big swings and doing so often means going out on a limb and holding your conviction when no one else is there with you. Plus, it takes extreme patience to learn if that conviction was warranted, because the path to a company being a venture-level success is anything but linear.
We often tell our founders that in the earliest stages of a company, you’re living day to day. As the company scales, the role of the founder can shift to thinking in months, and then years. But as a VC, you truly have to think in decades. So amidst the loneliness and the waiting, that’s why the team you surround yourself with as an investor is essential. I feel incredibly lucky at Inspired that we have the psychological safety to encourage those standout opinions and are comfortable sitting in the discomfort for long periods of time. [Alexa von Tobel, Inspired Capital]
[Hunter: I find that venture partnerships play a big role in amplifying or mitigating the feelings that Alexa describes. Dysfunction, mistrust, and unhealthy internal competition can all prevent a VC from bring their best selves ongoing to an investment. And quite often, this spills out of the individual and becomes a negative for the startup as well.]
It’s a sales job! From the outside, VC looks like a glamorous gig — you get to prognosticate about technology all day and write million-dollar checks. The reality is you need to be constantly working a funnel, building and strengthening relationships, nurturing deals until they close, etc.
