<story><title>VCs aren’t your friends</title><url>https://www.openvc.app/blog/vcs-arent-your-friends</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>michaelt</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; the recipient was not their first choice (ouch, you can hear the ego taking a glancing hit)&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It baffles me that a person successful enough to get put in charge of an investment fund can have such incredibly thin skin.&lt;p&gt;How would you even function in the real world if you were so easily offended?</text></item><item><author>fsloth</author><text>In the tweet the wrong date was not a red flag due to lack of detail as such, but because it signaled:&lt;p&gt;a) they had been raising for a while now&lt;p&gt;b) the recipient was not their first choice (ouch, you can hear the ego taking a glancing hit)&lt;p&gt;So ”the market” did not consider the startup investable, and they did not think about their sales pitch strategically enough … this VC would have liked to be sold to, not just a source of funds.&lt;p&gt;The implied peer signaling is the key thing here IMO.</text></item><item><author>keiferski</author><text>The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It&amp;#x27;s more about whether you&amp;#x27;re smart &lt;i&gt;enough&lt;/i&gt; and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutional structure of school and work.&lt;p&gt;For companies that are at the point of raising venture capital, this might be what is actually needed. But it certainly seems like it filters out a lot of the more idiosyncratic, brilliant types that aren&amp;#x27;t concerned with (from their perspective, irrelevant) details, like the date on a pitch deck. It seems like a good way to get institutional operators, not rare but not-quite-conformist innovators. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Nikola Tesla passing these VC&amp;#x2F;Ivy League kinds of tests.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>balls187</author><text>Not to defend the VC in this case, but thin skin assumes that the VC did not take the meeting because they were offended by not being picked first. VCs and Investors are more often than not lemmings with strong FOMO bias, and perceiving no other VC is interested is enough of a signal to not waste time.&lt;p&gt;From my own experience having met with VC&amp;#x27;s and investors is that most are inundated with pitches, and the old addage of &amp;#x27;Take every meeting you can&amp;#x27; has been replaced with &amp;#x27;Say No by default.&amp;#x27; There is no exact science, and so there are proxy signals they use in their heuristic.&lt;p&gt;It reminds me of the scene in money ball where the scouts are complaining about a baseball player who does not date an attractive women, so therefore they should not sign him because he doesn&amp;#x27;t have confidence. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=6naO8n6HsqE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=6naO8n6HsqE&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>VCs aren’t your friends</title><url>https://www.openvc.app/blog/vcs-arent-your-friends</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>michaelt</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; the recipient was not their first choice (ouch, you can hear the ego taking a glancing hit)&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It baffles me that a person successful enough to get put in charge of an investment fund can have such incredibly thin skin.&lt;p&gt;How would you even function in the real world if you were so easily offended?</text></item><item><author>fsloth</author><text>In the tweet the wrong date was not a red flag due to lack of detail as such, but because it signaled:&lt;p&gt;a) they had been raising for a while now&lt;p&gt;b) the recipient was not their first choice (ouch, you can hear the ego taking a glancing hit)&lt;p&gt;So ”the market” did not consider the startup investable, and they did not think about their sales pitch strategically enough … this VC would have liked to be sold to, not just a source of funds.&lt;p&gt;The implied peer signaling is the key thing here IMO.</text></item><item><author>keiferski</author><text>The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It&amp;#x27;s more about whether you&amp;#x27;re smart &lt;i&gt;enough&lt;/i&gt; and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutional structure of school and work.&lt;p&gt;For companies that are at the point of raising venture capital, this might be what is actually needed. But it certainly seems like it filters out a lot of the more idiosyncratic, brilliant types that aren&amp;#x27;t concerned with (from their perspective, irrelevant) details, like the date on a pitch deck. It seems like a good way to get institutional operators, not rare but not-quite-conformist innovators. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Nikola Tesla passing these VC&amp;#x2F;Ivy League kinds of tests.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>csomar</author><text>&amp;gt; It baffles me that a person successful enough to get put in charge of an investment fund&lt;p&gt;Not necessarily ROI successful, though certainly successful in making connections to get the job. It seems, however, from their website that some of their capital made it into big companies. It&amp;#x27;s not clear whether they disclose the previous funds performances.</text></comment>