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#3 is insane, if for no other reason than the VC is signaling that he’s likely going to try and do the same thing to you some day… even if you were totally willing to screw over your team, why would you ever get involved with that VC given you’ll then have to watch your back until the end of time?
All I ever hear are horror stories. Can someone tell me a good story about VC that isn't Facebook or something?
Casey Aylward from Accel has been mentioned in all void0 company posts. So she must have been very useful for the founder. (I don't have any insider information about void0, I've met her a few times and she is amazing) https://voidzero.dev/posts/voidzero-cloudflare#acknowledgeme...
I could write a book with the horror stories I have of VC and LP behavior, and some of the wild stuff I’ve either been asked to do, verified others were asked to do or say it’s just totally unhinged. I don’t know if Angel investing groups are really still around like they were in there 2010s but the variance in the types of insanity and weirdness for those groups is really unmatched.
Tell us one or two, then!
I was invited and drove 3 hours. They then put you in a giant dining room with all the country club members eating dinner, with your own table by yourself. They tell you to order whatever you want, and wait there, and when the group is ready you'll be summoned to dance.
Anyway, whenever they are ready which was like an hour and a half, they call you in and you have to be ready.
While they loudly eat dessert you are supposed to walk around this 20' long table pitching them whatever you're doing and then you have to take questions from them, while still walking around a table. No presentation place, no place to sit, no real way to talk with everyone, you're always talking over someone's head.
Then they say thank you and on the way out you get a bill for whatever you ate.
That was one of the "nice" ones. There's tons of bullshit networks like TiE, Keiretsu forum, YoungPresidentsOrganization shit like that are all social clubs for wannabe oligarchs.
I think every Chinese backed firm on sand hill road at the time was a front for Chinese billionaires money laundering, I'm sure I have the giant spreadsheet of funds I talked to from 2016 that later turned out to be almost exactly that like Rothenberg Ventures.
The bad ones are LP's sexually assaulting people and being told to ignore it or that it's no big deal (I didn't ignore it and people got fired). Or when LPs push CEOs to fire more people than they need to, or to raise money through some shady vehicle to get it off the books. Not to mention seeing too many people that later were in the Panama/Epstein files.
Literally horrific
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Greg Isenberg's viral tweet about VC that fell asleep during a pitch kicked off a bunch of other tweets about weird VC experiences this week: https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/2061794787825479818 Some QTs: https://x.com/dunkhippo33/status/2062768969560510486 https://x.com/typesfast/status/2062791307094048937 https://x.com/awxjack/status/2062605286683336757 https://x.com/travisk/status/2062224472426365045 https://x.co…
Oh thanks! I'll add these to the toptext.
I could write a book with the horror stories I have of VC and LP behavior, and some of the wild stuff I’ve either been asked to do, verified others were asked to do or say it’s just totally unhinged. I don’t know if Angel investing groups are really still around like they were in there 2010s but the variance in the types of insanity and weirdness for those groups is really unmatched.
>some of the wild stuff I’ve either been asked to do Oh man, I'm really sorry you had to go through that :'(.
All I ever hear are horror stories. Can someone tell me a good story about VC that isn't Facebook or something?
My prospective co-founders and I were pitching to a VC firm that was, on paper, a really good fit for what we were trying to do. The partner we were pitching to was, 15 years ago, briefly my manager's manager -- some work relationship there, she remembered me and I her, but we didn't work super closely together and it had been a very long time. She had moved on at that company to more big-shot things and ultimately b…
After reading some of these stories, I don't see how you can't come away thinking that psychopathy is a trait that goes hand in hand with being a successful VC. The story about Vinod Khosla speaks for itself, but after reading #2 I clicked on Marc Andreesen's twitter profile, which currently says this: > You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser. That loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me. T…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell us one or two, then!
The (fun?) one that stands out the most were the Pittsburgh Angels (2013 probably) and they literally have a long round table that they dine at in a closed off room in this country club. They take like one or two pitches a month and tell you that they generally do 300-500k checks. I was invited and drove 3 hours. They then put you in a giant dining room with all the country club members eating dinner, with your own t…