“One Thing You Wish People Better Understood About Venture Capital” — Part IV, featuring Diana Kimball Berlin, Jake Gibson, Jesse Middleton, Adam Nelson and Nikhil Basu Trivedi.
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 IV:
Here’s something I only realized about VC once I joined Matrix: more or less everything we do as investors is implicitly an invitation to reach out. To trace the line of thought to its source: I can only invest in a founder I meet, and I can only meet a founder I know about, so I spend a lot of my time reaching out to founders and probable future founders-but that still only scratches the surface. So whenever I have a spare minute, I try to post something to the world wide web that might possibly entice an unknown founder or future founder to track down my email address and send me a note. It’s a lossy approach, but it’s also the only way I know to cast a wide enough net.
In my previous life as a PM at startups, I squinted at the vast volume of VC internet activity from a…
