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VCs aren’t your friends

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Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#5
In so many ways raising funding is just like applying for a job. Here's what I can do, give me money.

The only difference is that the VC pays you your salary (and all your other expenses) in advance. And let's you keep some of the upside. By contrast an employer pays you a salary, and your (work) expenses as you go.

The VC "implies" by their funding how long your contract is. The employee goes "forever".

So all the things that apply to job-hunting apply to VC funding (Amplified). And make no mistake, the VC becomes your boss.

Once you understand it in these terms you can best evaluate if VC funding is for you.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#6

>A VC receives 10 to 50 decks per week. Out of those, 10% are hot: think OpenAI. >1-5 OpenAIs per week Yeah, ok man, quality blog post incoming.

I didn’t read this as “10% will become 100B businesses”,

I read this as “10% are hot”—probably the author meant “like a team out of OAI” but maybe they meant “like recent rounds of OAI have been”.

In any case this post read as sophisticated, reasonable, and helpful, to me.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#7
post #5

In so many ways raising funding is just like applying for a job. Here's what I can do, give me money. The only difference is that the VC pays you your salary (and all your other expenses) in advance. And let's you keep some of the upside. By contrast an employer pays you a salary, and your (work) expenses as you go. The VC "implies" by their funding how long your contract is. The employee goes "forever". So all the t…

> the VC becomes your boss

Only if you give them board control.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#8

>A VC receives 10 to 50 decks per week. Out of those, 10% are hot: think OpenAI. >1-5 OpenAIs per week Yeah, ok man, quality blog post incoming.

Those numbers are hilarious. I can see an associate getting that many decks a week, then culling them down to 1 to 3 for the next guy up the chain. But there will be 3 to 12 associates.

Then the number of deals is also hilarious. These people don't have unlimited money, even in the good old days, you'd be lucky to be doing a deal a week out of the pool the associates approved.

So basically there are a hundred times as many decks as what the OP thinks there are for each deal. And the successful ones aren't open AI, the majority of the time a successful exit is getting sold for $10m to the incumbents in the field.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#10
I heard from Reid Hoffman himself that he approached 99 VCs before he got funded.

He had two meetings in one day. The first he was asked whether it’s B2B or B2C. He said B2C and was told they only fund B2B. Then next one he said B2B but they said they only fund B2C.

Meanwhile, some startups are funded by VCs piling on, and then go bankrupt quickly.

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