The due diligence question I got asked most when I started was whether or not I could continue to source good deals outside of First Round Capital, where I had worked as a Principal before starting my fund. I spent a lot of time telling investors how much I didn't need that brand because it was helpful to my fundraising pitch. I wasn’t being negative—I was trumpeting my ability to be independent.

I certainly wasn't going to say, "Oh, yeah, that's going to be hard--First Round is a great brand and has a tremendous network of resources that would make me a better investor. I'm going to need to work twice as hard to piece that together independently."

How successful would that fundraising have gone?

I have no idea, because that’s not what I did.

If I had that mindset, I would certainly have become a better investor and I can see that now.

Articulation of a focus area accomplishes a few critical things for an investor:

• Inbound content marketing for deal flow—because you want your brand to get you on a founder’s list of smart people to talk to, especially if you don’t think the brand of your firm and your position within that firm will guarantee you all the best deals.

• A focus and filter for networking—because otherwise, you’ll find that you could wind up in a meeting with anyone for any reason because any connection could theoretically lead to a future deal.

• It signals expertise—because the best founders like talking to someone they don’t have to explain remedial things to, let alone someone who at least has an interest in what they’re doing.

The question is what to focus on.

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.