> The greatest trick VCs ever pulled was convincing founders, “you’re just like us.”
I don't follow how that's a trick VC's played. Founders really are investing in companies. In one of the most extreme cases, see Adam Neumann going around talking crazy for years making all kinds of big bets that all blew up spectacularly, and after this all erupted as a scandal that tanked the company he was given a cool 1.7 billion dollars to walk away.
If there's any trick being pulled, it's that each founder gets several times more equity than the size of the entire option pool (i.e. than all the employees they will ever hire put together), and are able to do things like take millions of dollars in cash off the table when they raise new rounds of funding.
In successful companies the founders really are much more on the financial than production side.
When a founder becomes a VC, his interests in the company he invests in are different than the founders interests. That difference in interest should be obvious but since they portray themselves as founders first, which they were before, instead as VC, which they are now, it confuses that distinction. Agree that it was written a bit too strongly as an attack since I don’t think VCs are malicious when they do that (most at least).
If you don’t believe that, then see other comments that describe how founders in almost all other places other than Bay Area (Boston, NYC) prefer bootstrapping you VC.
Though one way I’m not convinced by the article, in my view what keeps the tension low and manageable in the Bay Area is the amount of money and small number of major firms, which makes treating founders well a key long term strategy, otherwise they’d get less deals (supply vs demand) rather than the power law distributions of this “phase” of tech firms. This long term strategy hasn’t evolved in Boston, NYC, Atlanta, etc, so VCs don’t play up their former founder roles, and the tension between VC and startup is easier to see.
Anyway, it’s not a bad thing, I would question the deal making abilities of founders who don’t see it, and just recognizing these tensions and finding win-win ways to resolve them is a woefully unrecognized part of growing a business.
I don't follow how that's a trick VC's played. Founders really are investing in companies. In one of the most extreme cases, see Adam Neumann going around talking crazy for years making all kinds of big bets that all blew up spectacularly, and after this all erupted as a scandal that tanked the company he was given a cool 1.7 billion dollars to walk away.
If there's any trick being pulled, it's that each founder gets several times more equity than the size of the entire option pool (i.e. than all the employees they will ever hire put together), and are able to do things like take millions of dollars in cash off the table when they raise new rounds of funding.
In successful companies the founders really are much more on the financial than production side.