“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…
