<story><title>Reid Hoffman&apos;s $30M bet: Send partners, not cash, to startups</title><url>https://angel.co/today/stories/reid-hoffman-s-30m-bet-send-partners-not-cash-to-startups-10235</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>My experience with investor-provided talent has been very poor.&lt;p&gt;Historically, the problem is that VCs tend to send &amp;quot;subject matter expert&amp;quot; type consultants who give advice. Startups need someone to do the work more than they need someone to give the advice. The VC-provided talent usually generated more work than they solved with questionable returns for the company.&lt;p&gt;Unless Reid Hoffman has cracked the code of sending the right people to get work done, I&amp;#x27;m suspicious.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skrebbel</author><text>FWIW, I had the exact same experience, and I lost faith in the &amp;quot;operational VC&amp;quot; model. Hiring the right people is hard for everybody, and the chance that a VC can spin up an &amp;quot;agency&amp;quot; style department that somehow has the best people is really small.&lt;p&gt;The entire model attracts the kind of &amp;quot;consultants who give advice&amp;quot; you describe. After all, people who want to get their hands dirty, i.e. people who are a good fit with startups, are overwhelmingly going to want to work directly for said startups.&lt;p&gt;We also had this super weird mismatch with perceived value. The operational VC &amp;quot;billed&amp;quot; agency-style, so by the hour, at (to us) outrageous hourly rates. It was like 6x what we&amp;#x27;d pay a salaried employee doing the same work. We didn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;feel&amp;quot; it as bad because it cost us equity, not money. But we&amp;#x27;d have never hired that agency for that money, if it was cash. The moment we realized that this was the case, we stopped the collaboration. It was a costly distraction and nothing more.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m curious if Hoffman found a way around this, but I don&amp;#x27;t see it in this article.</text></comment>
<story><title>Reid Hoffman&apos;s $30M bet: Send partners, not cash, to startups</title><url>https://angel.co/today/stories/reid-hoffman-s-30m-bet-send-partners-not-cash-to-startups-10235</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>My experience with investor-provided talent has been very poor.&lt;p&gt;Historically, the problem is that VCs tend to send &amp;quot;subject matter expert&amp;quot; type consultants who give advice. Startups need someone to do the work more than they need someone to give the advice. The VC-provided talent usually generated more work than they solved with questionable returns for the company.&lt;p&gt;Unless Reid Hoffman has cracked the code of sending the right people to get work done, I&amp;#x27;m suspicious.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mike_d</author><text>&amp;gt; ...consultants who give advice. Startups need someone to do the work more than they need someone to give the advice.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been on the other side of this with a few startups, and the right answer is almost never to come in and drop a bunch of code as much as founders would like an extra set of hands.&lt;p&gt;A good SME can come in and have a solid whiteboard session with a team to shave off the first two iterations of development. I&amp;#x27;ve done this before from a security perspective where just making the developers aware of the sharp edges and being available to answer questions was a massive force multiplier.</text></comment>