We welcomed two more awesome speakers to the VC class recently. Julie Whitehead and Jaydev Karande bring very different perspectives to the table, both of which are important for young founders and VCs to hear.
Jaydev is a classic visionary founder who started building companies at a young age, before he had any real track record or network, and shared wise advice for those just getting started (as founders or investors):
1. Know your superpower and how that translates into your signature result (what people will hire/believe in you to accomplish).
2. The better you understand the power of pattern recognition as a fundamental mental model, the better at decision making you'll become.
3. It is possible, indeed often necessary, to borrow credibility from others when you're starting out (be it a co-founder, investor, early customer, advisor, etc).
4. If you want to be a great founder (or sales person), start by becoming a great "pain detective" (understanding the challenges/problems others are facing and getting creative about how to help).
Julie is an experienced CFO from both the startup and VC side of the table and has become an expert at managing VC firm operations (think all the necessary behind the scenes details that keep GPs in compliance and effectively executing on what their Limited Partner Agreement says they will do). Some key takeaways from her this morning:
1. If finance and operations is not among the superpowers of the GP team, you had better find a partner or key hire to help manage the chaos of a fund.
2. Most parts of venture are relatively simple to understand, but often very complex to actually execute against. For example, the idea that you need to understand the value of all of your portfolio companies, as a venture investor, is pretty intuitive/straight-forward, but actually performing an unbiased valuation of a bunch of startups, at different stages, that are mostly losing money, is quite complex.
3. An interesting observation I had while listening to Julie speak this morning is that VC firms are basically just a complex multi-sided marketplace. VC's have to find, vet, and close investors as LPs in the fund (and then manage those relationships well), while also finding, vetting, investing in, and managing (trying to add value) startups to invest that LP money in.
As always, I learned as much as my students while listening in!