5harathFounding Growth Lead, Willow Voice

Venture is a service industry - Adam Draper, Boost VC

25 Jul 2023 · 1 min

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1:18

In this brief conversation, Speaker A argues that venture capital should be viewed as a service industry focused on supporting founders rather than critiquing them. He emphasizes that building a startup is an extremely lonely and difficult endeavor, and that VCs who empathize with this struggle can better serve entrepreneurs by highlighting what they are doing right and offering practical financial options. Speaker B echoes the sentiment, framing venture capital as fundamentally about helping startups, the true "heroes" of the ecosystem.

Yeah, dude, venture is a service industry. There's no way around this. And I think if you listen to even the greatest, all of the best VCs over the history of 70 years of real venture capital, there's other venture capital all over the world.
Just like startup venture capital.
But like what we believe is venture capital, everyone just, they talk about it and they know that the startups are the hero, Right? Like the startup is the one who's literally a sorcerer or sorceress willing something into existence. I think that the average human doesn't understand how difficult that is, like how incredibly excruciatingly lonely that process is. And I think venture capitalists, if you empathize with that struggle, You become better at your job because your job doesn't become about criticizing what they're doing wrong. It becomes about supporting what they're doing right. And I think that that's all that everyone needs in this. It's, hey, what's the best option we have on hand right now with the cash in the bank?