Dana Mead: A Day in the Life of a Venture Capitalist

So what do we do every day? Tina asked me this. We don't play a lot of golf. People think that. At least I don't. If you saw me play, I would prove it to you, really. We spend our time in three big buckets, and I've listed the buckets kind of in ascending order here, where we look at a lot of investments, we probably invest in one or two a year. As an individual venture capital partner, I will probably look at 2 to 300 ventures myself this year, actually. Either talk to someone on the phone or meet with someone in person. So we invest in a very small percent. I said 1 to 2%. It might be even a little bit lower than that. So we practice really hard every day to say no really, really nicely. And the reason why we do that is that person could two years later walk in with a Google or Genentech. And so we always do. And I do personally offer to help people and talk to people, and we do that on a regular basis. But once you have an established portfolio, like I do, where I'm on 12 boards, you don't have the time or bandwidth to look at too many ventures. So you have to be very efficient about your time. When I first started, when I didn't have any boards, I spend 70% of my time looking at new ventures. But most venture capitalists, once they're established, probably spend about 10 or 15% of their time looking at new ventures. The second thing you do is networking. For me, quite frankly, that's one of the most fun things I do. And I would consider what we're doing right now, networking. So I meet with people all the time. I'm fortunate enough. I get to mentor, actually, Mayfield fellow students. I saw one or two of the folks here tonight, and we do a lot of that meeting with other VCs. I call it the VC lunch, where you meet with VCs, and at the end of every lunch, you say, we ought to do something together. Right? That's how every lunch ends. And there's a lot of VCs. And throughout your career, if you talk to people who've done this for 30, 40 years, there's 10 to 15 VCs they work with out of that whole cohort of VCs. And the reason why, it's the people you're on boards with, the people you trust, the people you like, the people you want to work with over time. And so it's a small cohort of that. But we're not really in competition with each other, because as companies continue to grow they have a syndicate and they'll normally have 3, 4, 5 VC firms working with them so it's a very collaborative thing I don't really consider it having worked in operating roles where you actually hated your competitors it's not like that in venture capital at all and then the last thing we do which is a really fun thing especially for someone with my background is getting to work with the companies and there are four really big areas where we spend a lot of time recruiting and one theme that you'll hear from me is the people obviously are the most important in any business the quality of the people especially in small businesses that don't grow like this they grow like this and they have many near death experiences through their growth you need great people that are built the ability to deal with that change be agile and make changes Obviously we help raising money we work with strategy and then we one of the biggest things we do is just apply our network to whatever the challenges are that the company has.