If not confessions, at least some lessons learned. What did I learn from my years founding and running a venture capital business?
Be – or get – completely comfortable saying ‘no’ – again and again and again. Very good is very rare. It’s true of public markets; it’s many times truer for startups and growth firms. To find one investable startup, we looked at hundreds of decks and researched many of the companies and carried out due diligence on firms in which we didn’t invest.
Embrace loneliness — think for yourself. You have to be ok being the only person who sees – or doesn’t see – something. The VC ecosystem is full of completely unnecessary conferences, newsletters and podcasts, 99% of which are no help in selecting or scaling a business.
Be resilient. With a venture portfolio, the failures happen before the successes come good. Even with the firms that succeed, it’s very rarely a smooth path and things can go very wrong very quickly. For the investor this means that resilience and conviction aren’t nice to have, they are essential if you aren’t going to lose your mind.
Commit – your convictions should be just that; be bold. In venture capital I felt one could add value not only in the selection of investments but, crucially, by making bold decisions with capital allocation. Our largest capital commitments were many times larger than the smallest.