Funders. Got Heart?

For my funder friends:

What do you think comes to mind when you think about how founders perceive investor personalities?

For many it's an adversarial relationship instead of a great partnership.

The energy can be all wrong.

We can come across as mythical beasts.

Aloof and inaccessible.

Only reinforcing capital confusion around raising.

We come about as cold and calculating.

Does this help us find the right founders to invest in? No.

Does this assist founders in finding the right investor partner? No.

Does this make the broken fundraising journey that is also very slow match the speed of innovation? No.

What level of responsibility do we share as investors for this perception?

Something I have noticed that I respect from some of the greatest investors:

They are open, transparent and tell stories of the many mistakes they have made.

This makes them accessible and humanizes them.

Fred Wilson has been doing this for years on his VC blog.

His track record speaks for itself.

Twitter. Lending Club. Carta. Etsy. Coinbase. Zynga. Meetup.

However, how awesome is it that he still speaks and shares plainly?

He still talks like a man figuring it out as he goes.

He shares the setbacks and hard won learnings.

I tell founders to run if their investor acts like it's all been roses.

Great funders get in the trenches, we get our hands dirty.

We win when our founders win.

So how do founders feel our hearts if we don't show them?

Founders forget that we are people just like them. That many of us were once founders just like them.

Great founders being backed and supported by the best funders out there.

Truly something to be celebrated.

If you think about it, these could be some of the greatest partnerships of all time.

The raw innovation, endless curiosity, intellectual, and entrepreneurial capital being fused with dollar and relationship network capital.

All to create "machines" that can move mountains, travel the miles and change the world.

Is there anything more beautiful?...

To someone who's obsessed with creating founders that go on to become funders themselves: No there is not :P

#fundraising #funders #investors #venturecapital #founderfunders