3 Years of VC Experience

Yesterday I completed 3 years of working in VC (at Antler). It has truly been a fantastic 3 years and I have grown so much as an individual that I can not thank the team enough for this!

I have tried to capture a few key things about my experience in this article

Despite spending 3 years on 15,000+ founder profiles and pitch decks and after learning so much about various industries, its so humbling to realise that I hardly know 0.01% about them. Its a deep ocean of knowledge and I have only consumed a bucket of water from it. With that in mind, I’m super excited for the next set of years and consume a few more buckets from this ocean.

What did I realize about VC over these 3 years:

• We should be grateful to work in Venture Capital: VC is one of the best places in this world to work at, especially in the early-stage investing firms - that’s where you get to meet TRULY EXCEPTIONAL founders and get to see them in their raw form, with just an idea and nothing more beyond it in 99% of the cases. You can help a company that is going to change and impact billions of lives if it is a generational company. The fact that you had a small tiny contribution in making it a reality is just phenomenal. Please be grateful as much as possible!
• Be more empathetic towards founders: The founder journey is EXTREMELY HARD. They have to face so many rejections and struggles every single day. It has extreme working hours, high pressure, and high-stakes decisions. It's a journey full of fights, self-doubts, highs and lows. There are 1000s of challenges every day with product, hiring, sales, marketing, fundraising, finance, legal, security, etc. and founders just have to be at it! Firefighting with these battles every day with a smile. You win some, you lose some, but you DON’T GIVE UP! In this business of CAPITALISM, building that empathy towards founders is really the need.
• Don’t judge too early: It is very easy to say NO or reject an opportunity. Criticizing and finding faults in a business or a founder is something that most people can do. But what’s really hard is making a strong; logic and data-backed decision of saying YES to a company and thumping the table with your conviction and sticking to it. Give more chances to the founders to prove. People can improve and businesses can pivot. Tell them what’s really missing and give them a clean fair second shot of pitching if they have made enough progress. Don’t decide too quickly that this business or founder can’t build a large outcome. You will be surprised at what wonders people can do in a very short span of time if given another chance. Globally, one of Antler’s most successful company was rejected at IC several times before we actually committed to it!
• SPEED is God: In this business of Venture Capital, what will create success for you as an investor is believing that speed is your god. You meet a solid founder and you give them a Yes or No at a relatively better speed and people will respect you. (It might sound like a contradiction to the previous point and that’s where you need to strike a balance!) but great founders value speed >>> everything else. They will raise money fast, experiment fast, succeed or fail also very fast, and then pivot fast (if failed) and then raise again and again with success. As an Investor, it is your duty to both your customers (LPs and founders) to deliver value to them faster. Someone once said to me that MONEY LOVES SPEED and it has stuck with me forever since then like glue. As a fund, if you can make decisions and wire money faster than most other funds, it's such a strong value prop for the founder to work with you! At Antler, we are trying to work on this goal very seriously by keeping simpler terms and one of the most founder-friendly term sheet.
• Don’t try to pattern-match things from the past: as humans, we love to match patterns in our brains. Investing is arbitrary, you can’t fit it into 10 parameters and take a decision. As much as we love to fit things in a box, truly generational companies are meant to break patterns and not fit in. If you’re thinking of backing a company that is merely an incremental of what already exists, with an obvious insight and no clear why now, it will most likely not create a big outcome. The things that will really become big will never have a 100% consensus within your team (because they don’t fit in an old pattern). Some people will absolutely believe in the founder/business while some will think its completely pointless. So when taking an investment decision, use some level of assessment framework but don’t boil the ocean, at the end of the day, no investment will meet all criteria of your pattern.
• Network can change everything: The people you connect with in this industry is powerful beyond imagination. You build relations not only with founders but with operators, angel investors, other VCs, lawyers, CAs and so many more people who can help you become a better VC in many ways. Engaging and keeping this network warm is hard but what's harder is to remember them at the right time and be able to leverage them. What has worked for me - a personal CRM where I'm able to keep track.
• The list is endless honestly but one last thing I want to share: Capital is just a commodity. As a Venture Capital firm, money can’t be your sole differentiator unless you have an unlimited supply of money from your LPs. You have to really understand what differentiates you from other investors and double down on that strength. I have spoken to 100s of founders who value Antler for their wide portfolio, global access, ability to back across years, and our exceptional commitment to add value to our founders, even before they raise money from us. What we are aiming to work on as Antler is slowly changing this game and being founder first at each and every step of their interaction with us. By launching the Residency and Before Day Zero, we are already going 1 step before pre-seed investing and getting founders earliest to work with us. But post-investment, our aim in the future is to unlock doors across capital, customers and partnerships to a completely different level and I am super excited to build this within Antler for our customers (Founders). In every interaction, if you want to stand out as an Investor, ask yourself: how can you add more value to your customer?

Learnings about myself:

• VC takes some time to grow on you. When I decided to move from Consulting to VC 3 years ago. I found it extremely hard to fit in and consume an ocean of knowledge at such rapid pace. I used to stay up till 4-5 AM in the night and wake up at 9 AM to read, learn and research about businesses. Back when I started, we had a 2 member investment team beyond the Partners, and managing the volume of diligences was challenging yet rewarding. For the first 6 months, I felt I had made a wrong decision and I am definitely not cut out for this role with 20 times of context switching during the day. But with time I was able to set processes and manage time much more effectively. Am I an expert now? Nowhere close to it, but am I much more confident and comfortable that I will be able to do it - Yes!
• I love meeting and learning from founders. it gives me immense joy to see a 100x smarter person explaining their life story, their successes and failures, their business and all their key insights in a small 1 hour discussion. I have done 200+ diligences in these 3 years and 28 Investments and each diligence has taught me so much about a space and people
• I hate the forced networking and socializing settings. I have tried to be at 100s of events and meetups, doing small talks with people I barely know and I just can’t do it beyond a few minutes. I like meeting people separately, going deeper on a 1:1 level, and getting to know them better. One of the best ways for me to meet people has been playing poker with them!

Would I want to startup ever in life? - I think so, yet to gain a lot more experience and marry myself to an idea that I’m deeply passionate about.

Until then, I’m here on the other side of the table ( he much easier side!) to support fellow founders in any way possible!