The Business of Venture Capital. Mahendra Ramsinghani

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      Source: Bob Mankoff/Cartooncollections

      High Level of Churn

      Once you get in, staying in the business of venture capital is easy only as long as you can generate superior returns. Successful practitioners continuously need to adapt themselves to economic cycles. Besides performance, the business is rife with partnership challenges, greed, and politics. Often, people leave and firms fall apart.

      Performance of Partner

The one and only measure of the business is financial returns. Returns are a function of capital invested and time. Time is your enemy. As the clock keeps ticking, the measure of performance — internal rate of return (IRR), which is a function of time — keeps dropping. Worse, in bad markets and recessionary times, the ability to exit an investment slows down, not to mention the potential value of the return. But investors really don't care for any excuses. When asked what keeps him up at night, Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital said, “Suffice it to say that you're only as good as your next investment.”³

      Performance of Funds

In a world of one-hit wonders, consistency matters. Top-tier venture capitalists who generate returns get to raise their next funds quickly and charge higher profits — as much as 30 percent, as opposed to the standard 20 percent. Marc Andreessen once said, “I don't believe there is such a thing as a VC industry. There are about 40 firms that really do well as investors and over 600 firms that will break your heart as an investor. A handful of firms generate all the returns and a lot of firms want to generate those returns.”⁴

      The Business of Home Runs

      Only a small number of startups are meant to be successful. The same goes for venture firms. I expect most VCs to fail. The entire business is about finding exceptional, awesome companies. If you find one of them every five years, nothing else matters.

—Mike Maples, Floodgate Fund⁵

      Market Forces

      At times, changes in market trends can hurt highly specialized firms. Not too long ago, clean-tech investments were at an all-time high. As the waves receded, the green practitioners had to tweak their resumes. Some repositioned themselves as generalists. Others went back into the technology sector and sought “clean web” opportunities. Often, when technology/software investments are on the upswing, life science sectors take a beating. Technology sectors have a shorter path to exit, while the time horizon of life sciences investments is longer, often mired with technological, regulatory, and financial risks.

      No Payday

      Of the 8,000 practitioners in the business in the United States, very few have seen any financial profits, or as they say, a “carry check.” In other words, most practitioners have survived on salaries coming from management fees. This is yet another cause of heartburn for VCs who feel frustrated that their bets have not paid off fast enough, and for limited partners (LPs), who think incentives are misaligned when VCs get paid fees for poor performance. One investor with over nine years of experience says, “We need to own up to the fact that there may never be a big payday.”

      Ego, Greed, and Intellectual Dishonesty

Any LP will regale you with stories of bad VC behavior. But at its very core, what irritates these investors is how VCs play around with numbers to bloat their performance. It's an age-old tactic: slice and dice the data to make sure your performance looks good and then find the next sucker who can invest in the fund. VCs, with their inflated egos, hubris, and biases, rarely do a mea culpa. No VC in their right mind will say, “We lost your money and we learned a few lessons.” Often, VCs find someone to blame for poor performance. Several limited partners described this behavior as disingenuous. A fund of funds (FoF) summarized it as the Lake Wobegon⁶ effect, where in a VC land, all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children [and all the venture capitalists] are above average.

VC CAREER AS A CALLING

      The VC business is subject to pressures from multiple ends: the supply of capital, the availability of investment opportunities, liquidity time frames, and regulatory dynamics. Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson, managing director of Sapphire Ventures Fund-of-Funds, says, “Often, you don't know if it's you or its luck. Having humility is essential.”

      In any career where those two imposters of fame and fortune prevail, you can be assured of petty politics, backstabbing, and opportunistic behavior. Ego, greed, and hubris have often turned practitioners into primal beings — ask any founder and they will share plenty of VC horror stories.

      Being Reasonably Nice Can Be a Competitive Advantage

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