Why startups should think of VCs as customers

Startups today are operating under a dangerous illusion. While founders obsess over product-market fit, user feedback, and customer satisfaction, they’re often blind to an equally crucial truth: venture capitalists aren’t just capital providers — they’re also an odd type of customer whose needs must be understood and served — for the benefit of the startups’ continued growth and success. This isn’t a popular view in an ecosystem that worships at the altar of user-centricity, but it’s a reality that separates truly disruptive companies from those that merely show promise. Before you balk at this theory, let’s see why together.

The uncomfortable truth: VCs as customers, not capital

The traditional startup playbook suggests building purely for users, achieving product-market fit, and then approaching VCs when growth capital is needed. This sequential thinking, while intuitive, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of company building in today’s market. Venture capitalists aren’t passive capital providers waiting to fuel your growth, they can be sophisticated market participants whose needs, preferences, and success metrics could influence your company’s DNA from inception.

Understand how different this mindset is from the current founder orthodoxy. We celebrate stories of founders who ignore investor advice, who bootstrap until they’re undeniable, who build purely for users. While these tales are inspiring (Mailchimp, Basecamp, Atlassian, Zoho), they often mask a more complex reality: most truly disruptive companies aren’t just built for users — they’re built for the sophisticated requirements of both users and venture capitalists simultaneously.

When Stripe decided to focus exclusively on developers, it wasn’t just a product decision. It was a deliberate choice that aligned with VC preferences for developer-led adoption in enterprise software. When Uber aggressively expanded into new markets despite massive losses, it wasn’t just about growth . It was about creating the kind of network effects and market dominance that VCs knew would lead to long-term value creation.

The capital imperative: where traditional bootstrap thinking falls short

This dual-client reality stems from a simple but often overlooked truth: the very nature of disruption nowadays requires speed and scale that only significant capital can provide. While bootstrapping can create profitable businesses, it rarely leads to the kind of enterprises that reshape industries (7% of unicorns are bootstrapped today) purely because internet has brought and intensified international competition to every single industry.

The capital imperative isn’t just about growth. It’s about the fundamental nature of disruption in modern markets. Whether it’s building payment infrastructure, revolutionizing transportation, or creating new computing platforms, these endeavors require massive capital not as an accelerant, but as a core ingredient. Without it, even the most brilliant innovations remain local successes rather than global transformations.

Similar to Uber mentioned earlier, take the example of Airbnb. The core concept of home-sharing could have been built as a bootstrapped business in a single city. However, the company’s true disruption came from its ability to create a global network effect, standardize the experience across markets, and build trust systems at scale. This required not just billions in capital, but building the company in a way that aligned with VC understanding of marketplace dynamics from the very beginning.

VCs as market oracles and strategic accelerants

Venture capitalists should bring more than money, they bring pattern recognition developed through seeing thousands of startups and their outcomes. Not all of them do but the ones you want supporting you must. When top VCs consistently emphasize certain metrics or strategies, it’s not arbitrary, it’s because they’ve seen countless companies succeed or fail based on these factors.

The best VCs function as market oracles, with their investment criteria serving as sophisticated predictive models for business success. When Sequoia Capital backed Apple in 1978, it wasn’t just providing capital, it was validating a new vision for personal computing. When Andreessen Horowitz heavily invested in crypto and web3 startups, it wasn’t just deploying funds, it was signaling a fundamental belief in the decentralization of the internet.

Beyond capital and vision, VCs must serve as strategic accelerants through their network effects. When Benchmark invested in Uber, it wasn’t just the $13.5M Series A that mattered. It was their role in helping recruit key hires like CTO Thuan Pham and several board members, connections that proved crucial for international expansion. Similarly, when Sequoia led DoorDash’s $535M Series D, they didn’t just provide capital, they brought crucial insights from their investments in Asian delivery giants like Meituan (which preceded Sequoia’s investment in DoorDash by four years). That’s what you should expect from VCs.

I'm not saying you should solely build for VCs. Rather, you should use VCs as feedback loop to understand where the market is going. 50% of a company’s sucess will always be time to market, so if you really don’t buy into this theory of VCs as customers, then you better be cash resilient and expect to weather some drought before the potential flood of success.

The final word

The future of company building lies in recognizing that VCs aren’t just capital providers. They’re strategic partners whose needs and insights could shape company strategy from day one. This isn’t about compromising your vision — it’s about building companies that are designed to maximize impact through the powerful combination of user value and venture scale. In an era where speed to market and network effects often determine winners, the ability to align both user needs and VC feedback isn’t just an advantage . It’s increasingly the price of admission for building truly transformative companies.

OVNI Capital specializes in bridging the gap between European deep tech innovation and U.S. market leadership. We partner with visionary entrepreneurs to build global category leaders by bringing their breakthrough technologies to the U.S. from day one. Our investment strategy is rooted in systematic co-investments with leading U.S. and European funds and leveraging our extensive network of LPs in North America.

At OVNI Capital, we don’t just fund companies; we empower them to transcend borders and redefine industries.