Scott Maxwell of OpenView Partners had an awesome post up this morning titled The Truth About VC Value-Add. Go read it – I’ll still be here when you get back.
You may recognize Scott’s name – I wrote about him in my post When VCs Don’t Bullshit You.
The next person on the list of supporters is Scott Maxwell at OpenView Venture Partners. Scott and I were both on the Microsoft VC Advisory Board that Dan’l Lewin organized and ran. While we had never invested together, I felt like Scott was a kindred spirit. We both spoke truth to Microsoft execs, even though they mostly ignored us. I remember a meeting with the Microsoft Mobile 6.0 team as they were pitching us their vision for Microsoft Mobile 6.5. Both Scott and I, on iPhone 1’s or 2’s at the time, told them they were completely and totally fucked. They ignored us. A year or two later they had less than 3% market share on mobile. We had a blast together and as we went out to raise our Foundry 2007 fund, Scott made several introductions which resulted in two wonderful, long term LP relationships.
That’s how a friendship develops, at least in my world. You do stuff together, learn from each other, and then do things for each other. Simple.
Scott’s post is a great history lesson about the evolution of “value-added VC” behavior, especially around organization building by VC firms to “add more value” to their portfolio companies.
Before I dig in, I need to express two biases. First, whenever someone says “I’m a (adjective) (noun)” I immediately think they are full of shit. When someone says “I’m a great tennis player”, I immediately wonder why they needed to tell me they are great and it makes me suspicious. “I’m a deep thinker” makes me wonder the last time the person opened a book. “I’m a value-added VC” makes me think “Isn’t that price of admission?”
Second, I went through the scale up of the organizational VC firm in the late 1990s at Mobius Venture Capital. When we started Mobius, we were four founders and two EAs. At one point we were a 70 person organization, with 10 partners, 20 associates, two business development people, three recruiters, a marketing person, two incubators (anyone remember Hotbank?), a staff to run the Hotbanks, a big back office for accounting, EIRs, and some others folks.
It was a disaster. Now, you can argue that we were terrible at it. Or that we completely fucked it up. Or that our basic premises about what we were doing was wrong. Or that how we managed it was ineffective. Or that it would have worked great if only the Internet bubble hadn’t collapsed. Or probably 83 other arguments.
Regardless, it created a very deeply held belief that I share with my partners at Foundry Group that we wanted to run a VC firm that had none of this. We didn’t want associates. We didn’t want to grow. We didn’t want to build an organization. Instead, we wanted to be extremely close to the entrepreneurs and do all the work ourselves. It just occurred to me that we are bare metal VCs. That kind of fits with the word Foundry in our name.
So, my fundamental biases are (a) I don’t like the phrase “value-added investor” and (b) I have no interest in building a VC firm that looks like one that is configured the way many of the current larger VC firms are organizing themselves.
However, while it’s a bias, I have no opinion on whether it’s a better or worse approach. It’s a different approach. And that’s totally cool – there are lots of different ways to do things successfully. And there are lots of different ways to fuck things up.
In my opinion, Scott is one of the guys that is doing this effectively. I’m an investor in Scott’s funds and a very happy one. Scott’s also been thinking about this and working on it for over 15 years, now at two different firms, so he has a lot of run time with what works and what doesn’t. Many folks that are trying to incorporate “value-add infrastructure” into their firms would be wise to read his post carefully.
Now, if you are paying attention to my biases, you’d logically ask “So why did you co-found Techstars and why are you and your Foundry Group partners so involved?” Remember that it’s a different approach. We deeply believe that the way companies are created and funded, especially at the seed stage, is radically changing on a permanent basis. Techstars, at the very beginning, was based on this premise. It’s scaling magnificently around this premise and the iteration loop on learning is incredibly tight. And, while we are very close to it, Techstars is not “our firm” so we can help with our opinions, lessons we’ve learned, and belief system without having to run it.
Remember, there are lots of different ways to do something. However, there’s a huge difference between “doing something” and “doing something successfully.” The distinction is always worth paying attention to.