The Venture Advantage Revealed
This post is a bit of a commercial and I have no intention of apologizing for it. In fact, I’m incredibly proud of it.
Many venture capital funds will tell prospective entrepreneurs, “If you take funding from us, you won’t just have one person working on your behalf, you’ll have our entire team pushing for you and opening doors for you every day.” As you might expect some firms are truer to this mantra than others. For founders choosing their funding partners, this is one of the most important areas on which to perform diligence. Ask other companies in a VC’s portfolio how often they interact with multiple members of a VC firm. The answer will reveal an enormous amount about the health and culture of the partnership. As a founder, you want a VC that acts as one team of many people, not many people acting as many individual teams.
Since joining First Round Capital, I’ve always been amazed at how well the group functioned as one team. It took me a while to figure out who was “on point” for some of the portfolio companies because all of the team members were working for all of our portfolio companies. This past Wednesday at week at our annual CEO Summit in San Francisco, I was treated to some great reminders of this culture. As Steve Jobs was saying across town, “It was really amazing.”
When I arrived at the Summit a little before 7am, a few members of the First Round team were already going through the last minute checks before kicking off the day. I asked what I could help with and went to work. One by one, as each and every member of First Round arrived, they did the same thing – our awesome backoffice team, our Principals and our Partners. No questions, no complaints, no being above the work. Everyone was moving chairs, sliding tables and doing page checks in binders. It was a small moment but one of my favorite of the day. It says a lot about our culture. Like the companies in which we invest, we’re a start-up too. There’s no room for ego if you want to get things done.
We had some terrific speakers throughout the day, but the most engaging sessions were the eight breakout sessions which were often led by the attendees.The topics ranged from “Building a Great Culture” to “Running a Platform Business” to “Knowing When to Pivot.” These discussions were where the conversations were really happening. Being a Founder or CEO can be the loneliest jobs, so as gratifying as it was to see our portfolio Founders and CEOs leaning on and learning from one another, I think they were even more fired up. The conversations they started will continue far beyond the day. And for First Round portfolio companies, this is one of the greatest competitive advantages we can offer.
So if you’re raising capital, do your due diligence. Ask about your potential VC’s culture. If you ask about First Round, you’ll find that you won’t just work with a single partner. You will benefit from the hardwork and advice of our entire team – the best backoffice in the business, eight investment professionals, and access and insights from the ass kicking founders and leaders of our nearly 80 portfolio companies.
