Without founders, VCs don’t exist and without founders, you’ll never make partner either. The founders you choose to work with and those who choose to work with you are by far and away the best proxy for whether you have what it takes to be a valuable addition to your fund’s partnership. This is on both a quantitative and qualitative level — they’re equally important due to the long feedback loops in VC. You can control the inputs below; you can’t control the output that is your track record and reputation.

Shout out to the incredible founders who’ve entrusted me with their businesses and journeys to date, I have learned so much from all of you and am pumped for the journey we still have ahead: Victor, Peter, Ugo, Max, Dan, Ciarán, Raffi, Issah, Mark.

Lesson 3a: invest time to really know your founders

VCs wax lyrical about investing in “people”, but how many can genuinely say they’re truly close to the founders they’ve invested in? If you’re not close to them as people, how can you understand their motivations, their fears, and the context of their decision-making?

You don’t need to be best friends, but you should be an excellent active listener and you should know what’s keeping your founders up at night as clearly as what’s keeping them excited.

One day, the virtuous circle will hopefully reward the depth of your relationship — in the short term a glowing founder reference for a new investment, in the long term investing in that same founder’s second business.

One of my portfolio companies had a moment where the founders thought they might need to sell. They weren’t convinced the risk/reward for building out a new category without a proven exit landscape was there for them and they didn’t want to “throw away” years of hard work by ending up in no-man’s land (you’ve raised too much VC capital for a small exit, but you can’t grow large enough to IPO or be a major acquisition target). We did a lot of desktop work, but what really counted was being close enough as a team to be able to talk through the human emotions and motivations and figure out the right answer together. In the end, we did figure it out and I believe that process gave us the faith we now have in our ability to become that category-defining company in the space.

Lesson 3b: scale yourself

The VC-founder relationship is one of the least scalable parts of the job on both sides. It’s the personal, personalised touch that counts. However, you can still enable a supercharged version of that valuable time.

Every investor is always too busy, too stressed, and has too much going on at once so give yourself the support structure to focus on what really matters with your founders at the right time.

There is a lot of often-overlooked groundwork behind being a board member and mentor. I’ve built libraries of templates and examples for everything from financial models and metrics dashboards to pre-mortems, investor updates, board decks and pitch decks. I have a Notion timeline with pages ordered by time periods relative to fundraises (e.g. 1–3 months since pre-seed, 6 months to Series A) and by function (e.g. Hiring, Finance, Sales, Fundraising) to remind me what to keep top of mind and when.

Lesson 3c: take the chance out of fundraising

Your portfolio companies should never fail to raise because of a sub-par process. Of course, a number will fail because they haven’t proven product-market-fit (PMF), hit milestones, etc or because of unforeseen market conditions. However, your responsibility is to mitigate as many of these upfront as you can to put your founders’ destiny in their own hands to the greatest extent possible.

There have been many posts written on how to nail a fundraising process (First Round, Creandum), but here are my clearest learnings. As an investor I will guide my founders through all of these as well as support directly on almost all of them too:

1. Materials prep. Cut no corners when putting together your deck, FAQs, financial model and data room (commercial + legal). Done right, you shouldn’t have almost any additional work to do when asked for info by investors.

2. Warm up halo customer references. Make sure your top 3 halo customers are primed and ready to speak to your prospective lead investor(s). This is often the final, crucial gate in a VC’s process.

3. Practice pitch. Either you or ideally a colleague who’s less close to the business should do one or two practice pitches plus direct feedback before going out to market.

4. Investor masterlist. You should have a comprehensive investor list with these fields at a minimum: Fund, Individual investor, Wave, Introducer. Wave is important because your investor list should be 50–100 funds long, but you can’t speak to them all at once and ideally won’t need to. You should start with a few funds you think you have the least fit to further refine the pitch. You then hit the first two waves, give each a week, check the state of the funnel to “deep dive/diligence/etc” (5-10 funds here at any one time) and then move onto intros from the next wave as necessary.

5. Intro emails. You should have a template ready that you can customise for as many investors as you can — maximising speed and quality. You should send this easy-to-use template to all Introducers on the masterlist so there’s no gap in the waves.

6. Weekly check-ins. Sometimes this is a 5-minute conversation sometimes a 30-minute one, but you need to stay close to the founders and the process to understand how to adjust the pitch, when to activate the next wave of intros and to make sure your founders aren’t getting burned out or disheartened by the inevitable no’s.

7. Backchanneling. This is an important part of any process at the business end. You or your colleagues should have the network to be close to the funds that are at advanced stages with your company and it’s your job to present a balanced view of the thesis and anti-thesis to ensure the key risks and opportunities are noticed and understood.

8. Decision-making. If you’ve followed all the founder lessons above, you’ll probably be the first person your founders call for advice on which investor to go with. You’ll also be close enough to the business to be able to give informed advice. Ditto with negotiations from there, both on price and legals.

Lesson 3d: learn how to manage startup failure

Everyone knows that VC is a power law game, but very few actually process what that means in practice: most of your portfolio companies will “fail” (either go bust, or fail to exit as a venture outcome or fail to exit full stop). As an investor, you need to learn how to manage failure for your founders and for your fund.

For your founders, you need to be close enough to know when things aren’t going well and have enough time to do everything you can to turn things around (from bridge financing to product pivot to team changes). Once there’s nothing more to be done and depending on whether the company can continue trading profitably or has a looming cash-out date, you should figure out a new sustainable strategy for the company, leadership and team, or find a path to exit to at least protect the founders and team. Empathy and hard work are what you can give your founders at this crossroads.

For your fund, you need to secure the best financial outcome possible. Depending on why the company is failing, you should do everything you can to find an appropriate exit path or enable the company to reach a sustainable profitable state. Once you’ve figured out the future beyond the crossroads, extricating yourself from close management is a tricky but necessary part of the process to allow you to refocus your time and energy where you might find your fund’s fund returner.