Why We Don’t Believe in "VC Value Add Services" or Platform Teams
And how we actually help our companies instead
In contrast to lots of/most other VCs, we @Slow are explicit about not doing “value add” services like recruiting, marketing, sales, engineering, etc. We don’t play pretend as part time executives at all our companies at once or assume we can parachute in and start “supporting” by diktat.
Here’s why we don’t believe in “value added” services or platform teams:
It selects for worse founders. Founders who not just want but need high-touch support on day-to-day decisions/operations will skew less experienced, less resilient, and lower conviction. The best founders will be open to feedback selectively but don’t need your help.
It hurts your reputation by overselling and underdelivering. Once you get into the practice of hyping up how helpful you are, you necessarily wind up overpromising and disappointing founders. Even with the best intentions, it’s just not possible to DO all that much as a part time contributor. It’s a bait and switch!
It makes you run a worse business less aligned with founders. The only way to support a big “platform” team is to either 1) charge your companies money for those services which doesn’t feel very nice or 2) grow so large that you can foot the bill yourself with all your management fees, which means becoming so big as to wind up out of alignment with your founders (SL has written a lot about this).
Instead, we focus on helping our companies in 3 ways:
WE GIVE YOU MONEY. This is ~obviously~ the most important thing any VC will ever do for any founder. Anyone who says otherwise is either selling you something (and overpromising) or misunderstands their role.
We help you raise more money. We want to be your bridge to the capital markets and help you take advantage of opportunities, not get taken advantage of.
We help you become a better investor. Ultimately every choice (making a hire, launching a product, doing a marketing campaign) is an investment decision. We can’t tell you what to do but together we can work from first principles and try to figure out the rubric to get to the right answer.
In short, we can help you think about problems, opportunities, investments as advisors and sparring partners. We can provide resources and connections. We can be a sounding board. But we can’t do the work or make the choices for you.
Other people might tell you differently but we’ll always tell you the truth.
Founders who can operate as independent owners, we salute you.
True