Founders/Ex Founders on Grapevine, what can VCs get better at?
What can be improved? Not people specific, but what you feel is wrong about us consistently across most conversations you've had?
Talking product sense with Ridhi
9 min AI interview5 questions
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Taking the easy way out using T1 education as a filter. What was the last school dropout / T3 college grad you know got funded? Doesn't impact me but its a query thats common in the ecosystem.
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The Indian VCs are too risk averse & push founders into chasing the “formulaic” industries instead of trying risky new arenas. Most VCs lack imagination and want to hitch on market-space that already has some investments. It really sucks for founders trying to build products in untested waters.
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Theory flow from VCs to Operators on execution. Be extremely discerning when VCs dish out operational gyaan.
- So the filtering happens because there's too many people building things. T1 profiles in the past has become norm (no doubt it's bad). That said, I think there have been learnings from SaaS where most founders were not fitting into that bucket, so people have started to learn to optimise for kind of roles, or just proof of execution at early stage.
I think it will get better over time
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It is very pattern matching based, true. Only few partners have seen multiple companies do well over the course of their investment journeys, those people are better able to come up with newer things
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Hahahaha, this should never ever happen. Theses can be dished out, because we do a lot of research. We also meet with too many companies in the same space, so some insights from that. But never operational stuff, sorry somebody did that to you
@WittyFeed Thanks for responding. Wasn't expecting it 😊 Thank you for your insights.
Hire more ex-founders. It helps get a good view of how things work operationally. Stop chasing the "hot" spaces. A vc needs to create the future, not follow the trends happening outside India.
On ex-founders, absolutely on point! I think even operators helps. We do lack empathy on how tough it is to build, have felt this myself.
On chasing 'hot' spaces, I feel the good ones know, but yes most others jump on bandwagons.
- Founders should hopefully be more open to direct feedback. Don't BS and give flimsy arguments / boilerplate 'positive' messages when rejecting, say the truth. And for sure don't ghost.
- If you are taking a meeting, please be prepared at your end as well. The least you can do is skim through the material shared in advance. It is frustrating when the answer is the 'I have gone through but it would be great to go through it from the start'. There are enough employees we interact with and know when someone hasn't read the material. A simple no is better. The VCs I have massive respect for and would love to talk to any day are the ones who are respecting my time as well and not just filling some Excel files.
- I think this is by far the one I agree with the most. I’ve also seen that sensible founders will almost always listen patiently and reply logically, even when the feedback is negative. I am starting to see VPs++ now starting to realise how important being honest is.
With Analysts and Associates, it’s still tough, especially those within a year of experience.
- Hmmm. Again, this is about seeming nice to founders, but actually this only diminishes your image in front of them. They eventually see lesser value in you.
Appreciate these answers a lot @FlakyCamp75
I think Vinod Khosla has some really good opinions on above topics, I’ll consciously remember the above the next time I’m in these situations
From the founder's POV:
nowadays Vc's are harder to approach. You guys should ease up the process of connecting with founders.
And people with connections benefit most even though the thing they are building is trash (literally). I have seen such instances where someone closely related to vc gets funded or helps others get funded and takes a stake in exchange for this service.
Just my opinion. : )