What I Learned Coaching VCs for the Last Year and What’s Next
About a year ago, I asked why more VCs aren’t using coaches.
Given the uncertain career paths for VCs, the unique dynamics around partner promotion within and across firms, and lack of clear direction on how to best spend your time on a day to day basis, it felt like investors would benefit from talking to someone who could provide some guidance.
After all, it’s something they recommend founders do.
What followed was a stampede of newly minted associates, ambitious principals aiming for partnership positions, emerging GPs navigating their firms through fundraising, and even a few experienced partners looking to optimize their time in order to compete with up and comers.
I honestly wasn’t prepared to handle the interest—and it didn’t stop. Every week, new VCs inquired about coaching even though I had barely put it out there. I wasn’t intending on making coaching my main activity, but I found it incredibly rewarding.
I coached investors to promotions, first board seats, internal personnel decisions and even a long overdue resignation.
Here are a few key things I’ve learned:
While VCs work with entrepreneurs, they often need reminders to be entrepreneurial themselves—to strive to take on new projects that create community (and exclusive deal flow), teach them something new, or help them stand out.
VC firms often have weird internal dynamics that conflict with your career goals.
It’s far too easy to be busy as a VC and far too hard to feel efficient with your time.
I don’t think anyone in VC spends as much time as they’d like to being proactive about thesis and research vs reactive to current deals.
Firms collectively spend far too much time on deals they pass on.
One other theme came up over and over again. On almost every call, I found myself pushing my clients to think about ways not only to get better, but ways to make their efforts maximally impactful—standing out from the pack.
For example, one investor was “tracking” an enterprise company that he was interested in, but worried that he was going lose the opportunity to invest if the company got noticed by a fund with a bigger brand name.
I asked him what his tracking—the check up e-mails and coffees to get information from the company—had done for the company. I challenged him to think about the ways that would put his value add ahead of every other potential competitor.
How many customers had he introduced the company to?
How many hiring intros had he made for their key open positions?
Why couldn’t he start treating the company as if he was already an investor trying to create value in the company? Certainly that would improve his chances of having them say they only wanted to work with his firm.
In fact, why wasn’t he just putting a term sheet on the table now? Make it easy for them to say yes.
I’d often refer to this as figuring out what the “eleven out of ten” was for any given situation. It wasn’t until recently that I realized the reference was lost on most of my younger clients.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the 1984 masterpiece mockumentary movie “This is Spinal Tap”, I give you comedy gold—where lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel of the fictitious band Spinal Tap explains some custom equipment that gives him the ability to kick things up a notch:
“The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...”
“Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?”
“Exactly.”
“Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?”
“Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?”
“I don't know.”
“Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?”
“Put it up to eleven.”
“Eleven. Exactly. One louder.”
“Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?”
[pause]
“These go to eleven.”
That’s why, as a Gen Xer, when I decided to professionalize my coaching practice and give it a brand, it felt appropriate to use this as the inspiration.
Introducing VCto11 Investor Coaching:
Creating a brand for my coaching efforts is a commitment to myself and to my clients that I’ll be working on this for the longer term, with all the dedication to continuous improvement that making a career out of something versus just taking a temporary job entails. That includes using a software platform to help my clients manage their goals and getting started on a coaching certification.
If you’re interested in exploring coaching as a venture capital investor, I’d love to talk with you about how I can put my 20+ years of experience to work for your benefit.
