For VCs, Your Thesis Is Your Portfolio Page, Everything Else is Just Hopes and Dreams
“We invest in rebellious outliers.” “We invest in the Future of Work.” “We invest in frontier technologies.” “We invest in diverse founders.” “We invest with social good in mind.”
I hear, read, see examples every day of investors espousing differentiated theses with regards to why they exist. Why a founder should take their dollars. And why a LP should give them theirs. Sometimes there’s substance behind these statements; others are rickety content marketing or breathless trend hopping. Fortunately there’s a source of eventual truth! Your portfolio page. Your portfolio page is your thesis. It’s where you’ve committed dollars, not just Medium posts. It’s who has actually taken your checks, not the deals you wish you were in.
One challenge for seed investors especially is that your portfolio page is a lagging indicator of your interests. Startups often don’t announce their initial funding for quarters or years, which leads to the “oh I didn’t know you guys invested in that area” challenge for early funds like ours.
So we network, we write blog posts, we research, we tweet. And hope to continue adding amazing companies to our portfolio page. Because the portfolio page is real.
As a former strategy consultant who worked across dozens of industries and now an entrepreneur I find venture both fascinating and mystifying. The industry writ large has created a gamblers mentality that optimizes for deal flow over insight. It leads to grandiose theses and diligence conversations that almost always center on "why shouldn't we invest in you?" as opposed to "How could we help you be successful?" This in turn leads towards a huge bias towards simple ideas and this strange notion that if you can't fully get your idea across in 10 seconds don't bother because VCs have no attention span. Fortunately, there are venture professionals who view their jobs quite differently, where expertise trumps quantity -- their portfolios and words tend to operate far more in parallel
Wild Card - draw me for a winning hand | Creative Problem Solver in Many Roles | Manual Software QA | Project Management | Business Analysis | Auditing | Accounting |
6yI see too many VC's act like this. Sustainable business plan? Yawn. Profits? Who cares. Business experience of founders? Doesn't matter. Located in Silicon Valley? Here's the check.