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.

It’s easy for a VC to just stick within your own networks and filter bubbles—and hard to scale being “open” without opening the floodgates. I sought out ways to be open for limited, manageable segments of time, because I found it valuable and inspiring.

A couple of years ago, I had the idea that I wasn’t alone in thinking this way—that if you could make it easy to for VCs to meet a bunch of folks in a finite amount of time, they’d be open to the idea knowing that some of these founders might be early in the progress. I asked a bunch of investors I knew to sign up a widely distributed Open Office Hours—across firms and across places, wherever investors wanted to meet. We had 70 investors sign up!

We should always do this—having incumbents encourage and welcome healthy competition of ideas, as long as everyone supports the winner in the end. This happened with Biden and Bernie Sanders—with Biden ultimately letting Sanders push him to the left on some issues as the new White House set policy after graciously hearing him out in the debates.

There’s no reason why we can’t have real debates and real choices, and then once someone is chosen, support them in the general election.

I know a lot of really smart, interesting people. That’s why I find myself telling a lot of people that I’d love it if they shared their thoughts more often in public. I don’t much care whether they do it in writing, or a newsletter, a podcast or on LinkedIn—but I feel like I every time I interact with them, I learn something or I’m inspired to think about things in a different way.

Yet, the response I get most often is, “But there’s already so much content out there!”

I’ve never quite related to that way of thinking—mostly because I don’t actually find most online content to be that good. Remember, you don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the slowest camper—and in the world of online thought leadership, there are a lot of slow campers.

Say what you will about VCs, but we’re a mostly predictable bunch. You know what our incentives are and we care enough about our reputation within the ecosystem to not do anything too terrible—usually.

Still, there are a lot of downsides to taking venture money—the push to grow at all costs, our desire to be all up in your business, literally, and sometimes, we’re kind of obnoxious.

That’s why when you come upon someone outside the traditional ecosystem, there might be a lot of compelling reasons to take their money

To not be “transactional” and not think about specific goals like this is to be inconsiderate—which is not to mean “rude” but to quite literally lack consideration. You just didn’t think of me and what I might need or whether helping you is a way I might want to spend my time.

Or, you’re pretending not to know what you want or hiding it, in order to prevent me from having the opportunity to make that judgment myself as to whether or not this is going to be a fit. Sorry, but that’s not more polite or more human. It’s deceptive.

Two weeks ago, I opened X/Twitter and got pushed an ad for an anti-trans movie produced by PragerU and that was my final straw with this cesspool.

I immediately requested my Twitter archive of over 63,000 tweets over 16 and a half years. Not surprisingly, it took nearly two weeks for me to receive a link to it given how understaffed the company is.

Once I got it, I deleted my account.

I’m gone from Twitter for as long as Elon Musk continues to own it.

I find level setting to be one of the most difficult things to do around any task or skill. Just how good is good? What are the best people accomplishing? How do you measure it?

It comes up a lot with my coaching clients who aspire to be top VCs and are trying to figure out how to self-assess and goal set.

I figured the best way to go about answering would be to ask the best of the best. Over the last couple of weeks, I asked everyone who has been on the Forbes Midas List over the last three years what their activity and accomplishment actually looks like in the functional areas of the job.

Besides being “busy doing great deals and distributing cash to your LPs”, what are they’re actually doing to make that happen?