“One Thing You Wish People Better Understood About Venture Capital” — Part V, featuring Ethan Kurzweil, Lily Lyman, Ashley Mayer, and Leshika Samarasinghe.
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 V:
VC is a profession! That sounds obvious but the perception continues to be pervasive that the job can be done as a side hustle without full-time focus and years of learning the trade. It takes time (as in decades, not years) to learn the art of opportunity identification and hone one’s individual style for engaging founders. Also, because the feedback loop is very long, the advice we give founders — to move fast and iterate — is hard to put into practice as a venture investor. This leads to the second non-obvious thing about the profession: one has to have long-term faith in our ideas and approach to the market way in advance of real success. The interim measures that get celebrated (winning deals, having one’s deals marked up quickly) are more often than not uncorrelated with ultimate success and the best measures of early progress are…
