Why Should a Founder Meet With You?
I’ve been coaching a lot of non-partner VC professionals and their number one challenge (besides taking obligatory meetings that their GP throws over the fence at the last minute—GPs, why do you do this? Stop wasting your team’s time and a founder’s time. Just pass when you think it’s a pass.) is trying to figure out how to get in front of the best founders with a title like Senior Associate or, potentially worse, Investor, which everyone assumes means Senior Associate.
Don’t get me wrong. There are very smart, likable, and helpful people in these junior roles—but compared to a partner, if you’re on the Associate level, you have no juice when it comes to getting a deal done. As a Principal, you have some juice. As a Principal at First Round, I got nine deal approvals in two years—but it was a lot more work for me than it would have been for one of the partners.
Even if your firm does allow you to lead or you were instrumental in a deal getting over the line last year, it’s actually better to act in such a way that everyone’s assumption is that you can’t lead. This way, you can challenge yourself to come up with another reason for a top founder to meet with you than as a conduit for capital.
Imagine this:
You conduct a survey of 250 Series B and beyond CROs and VPs of Sales for B2B SaaS companies to understand everything about what drives sales success and what profiles of candidates turned out to be the most successful hires.
Even if I were a repeat founder with a previously large exit, wouldn’t I want to reach out to you to hear everything you learned above and beyond the tidbits you’ve been dripping out on social?
What if I ran a community of GTM experts and hosted a podcast about the best practices and success stories of new companies that punched above their weight on the marketing side? What successful founder wouldn’t reach out to me to brainstorm strategies and potential first hires?
Whether you’re running hackathons and you maintain deep connections in the technical community or you’re known for the ins and outs of marketplace liquidity dynamics, being the person to talk to about something clearly valuable to top founders should be table stakes for both non-partners and for anyone trying to break into venture.
If you’re trying to break into venture, the top recruit is expected to hit the ground running—to already have deal flow because they’re regularly talking to top performers. What good is hiring someone whose only conversations with rising stars happen because they just joined a fund? That fund already has a network and they’re looking to add you for incremental access, not just additional processing bandwidth.
There are tons of different lanes you can carve out for yourself, but whatever you do, I would make sure it’s something that a) isn’t too niche and b) is likely to continue to be a need for top founders though multiple cycles.
