Venture is a weird job
The good and bad of VC, don't quit your day job, and 5 tarpit ideas worth building
We’re hiring (http://Slow.co/jobs) right now so i’m finding myself explaining the job of a VC a lot. So here’s the skinny on this very weird “profession” - good, bad, and other.
You spend most/all your time talking to smart, passionate people about the thing they’re smartest, most passionate about in the whole world. If that’s not energizing I just can’t help you.
Yes but it’s a lonely endeavor. Venture is not a team sport. Even if you dig your team (the people at your firm) you’re responsible all on your own.
It’s not that hard of a job to do (raising money can be hard). Any VC who says otherwise (posting their packed cal of weekend meetings, etc.) is either A) full of shit or B) doing a lot of pointless work that doesn’t mean anything. Founders work 10x harder.
Yes but statistically, it’s an extremely hard job and everyone sucks at it. For really ambitious hard-working people, it’s even harder that “just grind” has diminishing returns.
You’re switching contexts every day and working really fast to invest, learn, etc. It’s not stuffy or slow.
Yes but the feedback cycles are maddeningly long and you’re in the dark the whole time.
You’re working with/being involved in lots of cool companies at once. You get to see so much from a front row seat.
Yes but your impact is super mediated/indirect. You don’t do anything to make those companies work or not work and you ultimately don’t matter as much to them as they do to you.
It's a sexy, high status job that people will ask you about at parties.
When people do talk to you about your work, they'll mostly know of it from some of the most dishonest, dumbest, loudest people in business and will judge you similarly.
Pretty much the only way to actually be happy as a professional venture capital investor is if you love the game itself. You have to create joy directly from investing and want to work on that as its own skill with little crossover value. If it’s a proxy for something else (building startups) or a hedge against indecision (fingers in many pies) you will probably get bored, discouraged, etc.
Abundance
This week I met with Derek, the founder of the Inclusive Abundance Initiative - a really cool new group that’s more DC focused than Abundance NY. There is clearly a moment forming around this idea and an opportunity to make a lot of change locally and federally (yes, even if it means working with the admin) in the next couple years. The basic idea that we need to solve our problems by building and fixing - more energy, more transit, more housing, better government - is catching on. Let’s go save New York and then save America.
It seems like the NY City Council is going to approve the City of Yes plan to spur more housing starts which, silly name aside, is great news. This is basic stuff: relieve some parking mandates, allow ADUs, protect tenants in flood-prone areas, etc. and will add ≈80k units to the city over the next decade. A good start worth celebrating but obviously a tiny drop in the bucket of what we need to do on private development, public housing, affordable housing, and transit. So we should take the win and keep going in the work to make NY affordable and livable for anyone who wants to live here (and who wouldn’t).
If you want to get looped in on what I’m doing, let me know and I’ll add you to my list of people who want to enact the Abundance Agenda and save New York... What exactly I’ll do with that list I don’t yet know... But stay tuned.
I Wrote
Five “tarpit ideas” that are worth trying anyway. There’s a bunch of ideas that have failed 100 times but are probably worth trying the 101st - if you can study history and find an edge. Obviously these are all really hard and probably never work:
Ag tech
Duolingo for mental health
AI travel agents
local, offline marketplaces (events, dating, etc.)
Content discovery
Venture, on the other hand, is a super weird job.
Don’t quit your day job isn’t an insult. It’s actually just really good advice that you should take seriously. Having an income means operating with less financial/time pressure and lets you maintain optionality until it’s time to make a binary call. At some point perpetually buying options and letting them expire unexercised is a losing strategy (not financial advice).
But starting a company is not a diversified bet in a portfolio; it’s a concentrated trade that you can’t quickly unwind.
I Read
NIMBYs and Bad Faith Procedure Almost Killed the New York City Subway - Daniel Golliher. What’s old is new. Conservative pessimism has always been a blocker on New York’s greatness and aspirations. It lost then and we need to consign it to history now.
Governmental Efficiency: What Can It Possibly Mean? - The Good Science Project. A pretty good faith assessment of why DOGE is pointed in the wrong direction and what we should be doing instead. For anyone who wants to see government actually work.