« On Pinning Plans to Restroom Walls | Main | On Interminable Meetings »
Latest Stories
- Creating a Bell Labs for Quants
- Sneak Peek at Weekend Reading
- Quote du Jour: Vonnegut
- Traveling, Jobs Report
- Geithner Gives Best Explanation in Senate Hearing Today
May 5, 2005
What VCs Want is Not What They Say
What is most aggravating about "what VCs want" talks and articles is how little useful information there is. If people in any other context kept writing the same article, or giving the same speech, over and over again someone would eventually stand up and say "No mas". It is a species of bizarre credit to them that VCs can get away with saying so little so often about such an important issue.
Case in point: This HBS piece summarizes what three VCs at top-drawer firms are looking for, but what we really learn is that they are all looking for the same thing -- and it is the same thing that they claim they've always wanted: team, technology, market size, and edge.
Cmon guys, say something new and/or useful. Unless you think entrepreneurs don't listen, at least have the decency to explain what you want in a different way. Because no-one other than the most hidebound over-analytical (and under-performing) VC actually thinks this way. They may think they do, but that says more about our collective well-documented inability to articulate mental processes than it does about how VCs actually make decisions.
More useful, for example, is something like this:
- Why now?
- Why you?
- What's different?
Sphere It
| 
Digg it
| 
Bookmark it
| 
Stumble it
"If people in any other context kept writing the same article, or giving the same speech, over and over again someone would eventually stand up and say "No mas"."
Ah, but how do you explain wedding magazines?
Ah, an excellent point! And the more I think about it, the more parallels I find between venture capital speeches and wedding magazines. They all have to do with triumph of hope over experience, not to mention the deeply misguided notion that someone else somewhere else knows better than you do.
Exactly right.
When I was a VC, and did VC panels, I used to joke that I could just use slides from any other panelist at random. It was GRUELLING to sit through VCs delivering identical calorie-free, self-congratulatory, utterly empty presentations. They insulted the audience, and wasted their time.
Congrats for saying what needed to be said.
Of course, all that sterile nonsense is what gets you to the clean 30 second answers to the basic bullet-point two-word questions.