Nobody in business is your friend. Friendship isn't about money and money isn't about friendship.
VCs aren’t your friends
11–20 of 383 posts
Re: VCs aren’t your friends
#12Re: VCs aren’t your friends
#13Every blog post about VC should have a disclaimer with the interest rate at the time of writing.
What do you mean?
You can't compare VC behaviour when interest rates are low to when they're high, because when they're low they're handing out money to anyone with a pulse, and when they're high they're checking if pitches say March instead of May.
Re: VCs aren’t your friends
#14In 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.
If someone gives you money, they become your boss
Re: VCs aren’t your friends
#15In 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.
… Or if you expect to ever raise money again.
Re: VCs aren’t your friends
#16[deleted]
Re: VCs aren’t your friends
#17The is all "investing theater", in which stuff other than the business and product is what the VC uses to make a decision.
Re: VCs aren’t your friends
#18The problem with the “signal” is that it’s based on pretty much nothing. It is just as valid or nuts as any other ad hoc random tea leaves & chicken bones “signal” someone decides to come up with a dubious justification for. Whether the deck said March, April, or May changed absolutely nothing about the underlying business and thus also nothing about the actual investment opportunity.
Maybe they made the deck two months ago and spent the last two months prosecuting pipeline and closing deals? Maybe they didn’t have a great investor network, so it took them a month or two to even be talking to the right investors (which more often than not is actually what’s important, and only superficially any given pitch or deck)? Maybe the VC in question was their first choice once they learned they existed and what their thesis is?
It’s absolutely true that VCs aren’t your friends. They’re middlemen for distributing other people’s money who pick winners at such a low success rate that one could be forgiven for wondering if random lottery might do just as well.
In terms of actual performance and criteria, they’re more like clergy. There are various performative religious traditions and ceremonies that have to be serviced and abided if one is to have any hope of them bestowing their blessings.
Re: VCs aren’t your friends
#19>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.
It's orders of magnitude off. The guy is just LARPing poorly, even lacking common sense.
One single OpenAI-tier deal every two years, consistently, would put you into Legendary VC territory.
Re: VCs aren’t your friends
#20Most business founders don’t need VC money and are worse off for taking VC money.
I find the mindset “my pitch deck was 2 months old so I didn’t get funding” very out of touch of business realities. It is far more likely that that type of business doesn’t need VC funding. Your SaaS can probably be built with your daytime developer salary. No VC ever says “wow, what a great investment opportunity, one of the best, but the slides were old”. You don’t even need the slides, or the rehearsed elevator pitch. Just build a business that’s worth VC money (solid, profitable, and ready to scale up) if you absolutely insist on it.