The Exchanges

Q Well, you've done incredibly well in, in the years you've been in venture, and I saw on your angel list profile, one of your recommendations from, I think it was a portfolio, uh, CEO of yours said, if Rob were a football scout, he would work for Barcelona. Leading me to ask, what do you think makes a good VC, and what sets one good VC apart from the rest?

A Um, so it's a lovely quote. I'm not sure it's true. Um, what is it that makes a good VC? I think the ability to That's a lot of things. Um, so in terms of finding interesting deals, I think the ability to keep challenging your assumptions. I think it's easy to get a VC to talk about pattern recognition and you have a bunch of sort of simple shortcuts in your brain on what a good entrepreneur should look like and what a good business should look like. Um, and that's the easy way to do VC. I think what marks out a really good VC is someone who keeps challenging themselves and keeps saying, actually, yes, Five years ago, it used to be the case that You enterprise products, um, had to be something you could sell for at least a thousand dollars a month. Otherwise you couldn't sell them economically. Uh, and then Zendesk comes along and completely rips that apart. Someone who can understand that and sort of speak to Zendesk and get that, I think is a unusual characteristic.

AI assessment note: “what marks out a really good VC is someone who keeps challenging themselves”

Q And what do you, would you say is The biggest problem or challenge that's facing you now in your role as principal at Balderson?

A Well, I think the VC market in general is becoming much more competitive, and I think that's, that's true in Europe to a lesser extent than the US, but it is true, um, and so you need to evolve the role, I think, Three years ago, five years ago, um, the majority of the role was about taking deal flow and deciding which ones we wanted to invest in, um, and you'd sort of, a company would come to you, you'd spoken to a few times before, and they'd say, yeah, we're now doing our fundraise, uh, I'm going to talk to you and three other people, and probably one of those firms would say, make a serious offer, maybe two. Uh, and what you're now seeing is good companies are getting chased by VCs. Um, they're getting funded before they were thinking about doing a funding round. They're getting funded on less sort of traction, less data, um, than would have been the case a few years ago. Uh, and so, yeah, it's, it's much more of a kind of, uh, a need to track down, um, the really interesting companies and be willing to, uh, invest earlier than you would have done. Three, five years ago.

AI assessment note: “the VC market in general is becoming much more competitive”

Q Well, you've done incredibly well in, in the years you've been in venture, and I saw on your angel list profile, one of your recommendations from, I think it was a portfolio, uh, CEO of yours said, if Rob were a football scout, he would work for Barcelona. Leading me to ask, what do you think makes a good VC, and what sets one good VC apart from the rest?

A Um, so it's a lovely quote. I'm not sure it's true. Um, what is it that makes a good VC? I think the ability to That's a lot of things. Um, so in terms of finding interesting deals, I think the ability to keep challenging your assumptions. I think it's easy to get a VC to talk about pattern recognition and you have a bunch of sort of simple shortcuts in your brain on what a good entrepreneur should look like and what a good business should look like. Um, and that's the easy way to do VC. I think what marks out a really good VC is someone who keeps challenging themselves and keeps saying, actually, yes, Five years ago, it used to be the case that You enterprise products, um, had to be something you could sell for at least a thousand dollars a month. Otherwise you couldn't sell them economically. Uh, and then Zendesk comes along and completely rips that apart. Someone who can understand that and sort of speak to Zendesk and get that, I think is a unusual characteristic.

AI assessment note: “what marks out a really good VC is someone who keeps challenging themselves”

Q And what do you, would you say is The biggest problem or challenge that's facing you now in your role as principal at Balderson?

A Well, I think the VC market in general is becoming much more competitive, and I think that's, that's true in Europe to a lesser extent than the US, but it is true, um, and so you need to evolve the role, I think, Three years ago, five years ago, um, the majority of the role was about taking deal flow and deciding which ones we wanted to invest in, um, and you'd sort of, a company would come to you, you'd spoken to a few times before, and they'd say, yeah, we're now doing our fundraise, uh, I'm going to talk to you and three other people, and probably one of those firms would say, make a serious offer, maybe two. Uh, and what you're now seeing is good companies are getting chased by VCs. Um, they're getting funded before they were thinking about doing a funding round. They're getting funded on less sort of traction, less data, um, than would have been the case a few years ago. Uh, and so, yeah, it's, it's much more of a kind of, uh, a need to track down, um, the really interesting companies and be willing to, uh, invest earlier than you would have done. Three, five years ago.

AI assessment note: “I think the VC market in general is becoming much more competitive”