Friends and enemies
Pick good friends and foes and make sure everyone knows where they stand
Late post… Last week was a week of friends and enemies. I spent much of the week in SF hosting a small conference (friends) and helping a portfolio company think through a sticky situation (enemies).
As Sam likes to say, you need to pick good friends and foes and make sure everyone knows where they stand.
Mini Conference
On Wednesday I hosted Slow Fall, the west coast version of our (now 2X!) annual mini conference for young partners, principals, and emerging managers. We bring together a group of ≈100 people entering the prime of their careers to talk openly about all the stuff we’re always debating privately: raising capital, building a firm, building a career in this moment, etc.
I am a huge believer in this network of peers and colleagues as the best, most value-aligned collaborators for me to work with. There’s a really great spirit of openness in the room and among this group of investors. I’m very luck to be able to invest with and in this group.
We had a phenomenal group of speakers come share their POV:
Emerging managers: Kristin Shen (Chemistry), Nikhil Basu Trivedi (Footwork), Abhijoy Mitra (CIV)
Young partners: Leigh Marie Braswell (Kleiner Perkins) Rak Garg (BCV), Yaz El-Baba (Emergence)
LPs: Miles Dieffenbach (CMU), Chris Duovos (Ahoy), Jake Kupperman (Level Ventures)
And a fireside chat with Brian Singerman (Founders Fund)
We did this event with Cooley and JPM who have been exceptionally supportive in helping us pull it off.
The event itself was/is off the record so I’ll only summarize some takeaways that struck me.
There was a lot of back and forth about team composition and what you get from your partners. If you work for or with someone else you’re paying a tax. Make very sure you know what you’re paying for across seeing, picking, winning (or something else) that justifies it. In the best partnerships, everyone can clearly articulate what they give and get and is happy with the trade, regardless of whether or not they’re equal partners.
The LP conversation was very wide ranging but I think the most salient tactical advice was to understand whether your LPs are principals (acting of their own accord) or agents (carrying out the will and whims of others). It’s not as easy as merely saying FoFs and consultants are one and endowments and HNWIs are the other but it matters for who can take novel risks.
Singerman really pushed people to be both more upside focused (kill your career preservation instincts) and maniacal about doing only what you’re best at and in the way you’re best at doing it. I need to do more thinking about what I’m not good at but rather could be the best at (at some point). At times during our ≈1 hour long chat it felt like Yoni’s career coaching session on stage.
Overall we kept things loose and conversational and I love getting to hear unvarnished takes from folks who I admire as peers, partners, and mentors.
This is now the 6th time in 4 years we’ve done this event (4x in NY, 2x in SF) and we plan to keep doing it one per year on each coast.
This is a network/community of friends and the only way to be in the room is to be in the room :)
It’s good to keep your friends close
And keep your enemies on their toes
VCs are too nice and conflict averse. So there’s insufficient consequences for bad behavior.
Everyone is too worried about closing off opportunities to “work together soon.” Instead, you should worry less about optionality for partnership in the future and more about integrity in the present.
“If you don’t have any enemies in life you have never stood up for anything” - Winston Churchill
No one wants to be confrontational because every possible network node and connection could bring them a deal or help them make money. But as a result there are insufficient self-correcting measures in the market in the name of a positive sum, iterative game where everyone is friends and no one has to lose. The bad actors take advantage of that.
There are people I will never ever work with again and will actively work to undermine because of how they’ve behaved. I don’t care if I make money with them. It’s not personal, it’s just business, and they’ve shown themselves to be people not to do business with.
It’s important to keep an enemies list and black ball VCs who mistreat founders/act in bad faith by:
reneging on their word or making promises they don’t/won’t/can’t keep
deliberately and wantonly wasting their time
going on competitive fishing trips/RFIs
Being a good person only compounds over time if there are consequences for being bad. Otherwise everyone is nice but not kind or good.
This is another way the optionality mind virus manifests it self. Leave all doors open and it’ll only cost you your integrity. Founders need partners who will commit to them in a blood pact and that means being unafraid of making enemies.
There is of course a difference between being “nice” and “kind” and “good.” They are not always mutually compatible.
Sometimes founders need a pitbull, not another friendly face to gladhand and cheerlead.
Help me help you (hiring)
Speaking of helping friends, I ran/am running a VC hiring survey among my network/friends/peers. I now have a list of 20+ VC funds’ and what their hiring needs are (level/seniority, focus area, geography, etc.). You can submit open roles there.
I’m sitting on pocket listings for ≈30 jobs
I’m not going to expose the full list. For the sake of trust and anonymity, it’ll only be double opt-in intros with people I know (on both sides).
Wish I could have been a fly on the wall in that room! I'm sure it's great to host the off the record version occasionally as well though. Great read as always Yoni!