VCs lack operational leverage and must aggressively filter their time
Merci Victoria Grace · 20VC: Lightspeed Partner, Merci Victoria Grace on The Future of Collaboration Tools, Bundling vs Unbundling, Synchronous vs Asynchronous & What It Means To Productise The S*** Out of Venture · Jun 8, 2020 · at 6:35
Merci Victoria Grace, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and former Head of Product at Slack, reflects on the lack of operational leverage when moving from tech leadership to venture capital.
0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 15.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In most of my working experience, I've been a leader and a manager and someone who had not just the leverage of a team around her, but also the leverage of the software that we were building, and so in venture, you have to be incredibly choosy with how you spend your time and what you look at.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Merci Victoria Grace
Venture capital needs more female and diverse check-writers
“Venture-backed companies are this outsized engine of wealth creation and societal change relative, right, to the dollars at work. Venture funding changed my life, and it changes the lives of founders and employees. And venture-backed companies have the scale a…”
Silicon Valley actively rewards certain types of startup failure
“Silicon Valley really rewards some types of failure.”
Venture funding must rely less on exclusive operator networks
“I hope that venture funding becomes less of a closed circle, and actually that these networks become less important, and that access to this life-changing financial tool is democratized for many more people who didn't have the incredible luck That Jana and I h…”
Collaboration startups fail by targeting managers instead of end users
“I think the next thing that I see is selling into managers instead of individual contributors. At the end of the day, it can be counterintuitive to approach it this way, but the end user is your customer, even if they're not the person who's taking out their c…”