23-year-old's Point of View on VC

Venture Capital, at its core, is one of the following:

• Venture Capital is about helping rich people get richer.

• Venture Capital is about helping people achieve their dreams.

• Venture Capital is about accelerating and driving innovation.

Or some combination of the 3.

As someone with little experience in venture capital, I thought it’d be fun to write this post to see if my thoughts change down the line. By no means is this an in-depth deep dive into venture, but instead a subjective and qualitative write-up on my thoughts and some things I’ve noticed meeting founders and investors in my early career.

Like many other spaces, venture is a space where people are hungry for status. The ability to say that they were an early investor in XYZ company, an industry giant now, seems to be what the chase is about. The cash return on carry is a side bonus.

Being a VC is interesting because once you’re offered the title, your status in the startup space shoots up. Some people look at you differently because you have a little bit more access to capital than they do.

The finance background VC all of a sudden has more status than the 3x founder. Because of this, early and mid-career professionals are migrating to the VC space. I mean, why not? It’s a respectable job in an exciting field that doesn't require hard technical skills and is intuition-based.

Being an outsider looking in, being a venture capitalist seems glamorous and respectable. Being within the venture space, people will deem you glamorous and respectable depending on how impactful you are and what you’ve achieved.

What makes an impactful and high-achieving VC? The people they have access to. VC is an industry based on warm intros. Hence, the lack of diversity within the space. However, you can’t just abolish warm-ups outright. How do you sift through all the noise to find the next unicorn without warm intros? But how do you create a diverse and equitable space in a warm-intro based field that is predominantly white males? Another thought, how important is diversity in VC? Is diversity tied to success in VC?

Successful VCs generally seem tied to people who can talk for a long time. People who can talk for a long time about some topic demonstrate an in-depth understanding of a subject (sometimes). There are certain niches that VCs can talk on and on about, and it is crazy the depth that some of these VCs can get into. But what distinguishes a successful VC and highlights their quality is their ability to listen.

The best VCs are the best listeners. VC is the ultimate listening job where you’re hearing different perspectives on different spaces. There are many VCs who are extremely smart and can talk in depth on a subject for hours, but the ones you want to work with are the ones who take the time to listen. They are the ones who notice they have been talking for the past 10 minutes straight, take the time to ask about you, AND actually listen.

However, listening is not a primary trait of the best VCs. Insanity is.

The most successful VCs are a little insane because the most successful people are a little insane. But this applies to any industry. The people who are a little more insanely obsessed with the industry are more likely to be the most successful. The 20-year-old exited startup founders are the equivalent of D1 high school recruits who are NBA-ready and have done nothing but play basketball their entire lives. This level of success is achieved because they want it more than anyone else + a little bit of luck.

The VC industry seems to be growing with more funds popping up daily across the world. We’ve seen big corporations + government entities adopt models similar to VC to drive innovation and not get left behind in a rapidly changing world. It is becoming an attractive asset class because of its potential for extraordinarily high returns and the status bump associated with the ROI. It seems to be an asset class here to stay because of its driving force in fueling innovation (and profits).

And that’s it. A 23-year-old's point of view on VC.