“One Thing You Wish People Better Understood About Venture Capital” — Part III, featuring Maya Bakhai, Paris Heymann, Nakul Mandan, Eric Tarczynski, and ANONYMOUS.

Hunter Walk
5 min readSep 11, 2024

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 III:

AI Generated Image

The term “VC” is a convenient, encompassing term, but it is an ambiguous categorization. For better or worse, “VC” is a disorganized, unruly, messy set of people and firms whose emergent behavior about important things does not converge. When folks want to vent/disparage VC they should feel free to use the ambiguous category. When people want to better understand it to raise capital from folks who can help, they are best served accepting the annoying bespoke/boutique nature of it and handling it accordingly. [Anonymous/Large Multistage VC]

[Hunter: I don’t believe this was specifically what they were referring to but I’ve noticed VCs hate when the press says/implies “all VCs” and press hates it when VCs say/imply “all reporters” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ]

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Hunter Walk

You’ll find me @homebrew , Seed Stage Venture Fund w @satyap . Previously made products at YouTube, Google & SecondLife. Married to @cbarlerin .