Member-only story
“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 distance and assumed it was a mix of self-expression and broad “brand-building.” What I can say now from personal experience is that all the frenetic posting is actually getting at something much more specific: it’s us angling for a “same here!” or “I was thinking more about what you posted…” or “funny you should mention that, we just started building” note from out of the blue-especially from people who are too conscientious to “impose” without a timely premise. (By the way, it’s never an imposition when you reach out; keeping an open inbox and an open mind is a lot of the job in VC.) So the next time you see one of us post, just know that we’re waiting for you. [Diana Kimball Berlin/Matrix]
[Hunter: So I agree with Diana — of course it’s prospecting, and for most investors, it’s genuine interest and curiosity driving their efforts in this area (besides the fact it’s essentially our job). BUT I’m also a believer that most founders shouldn’t waste time with…
