Ankur Ahuja, COO at Veronica Capital, walks through what venture capital actually looks like behind closed doors. It's less glamorous than the hype suggests: mostly diligence, spreadsheets, long hours, and coordinating between stakeholders. COOs and analysts spend their days vetting deals, managing investor relations, and writing investment memos.
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Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And today we are going to talk about two of the most mysterious letters in SAS v C Venture Capital. What's so interesting about this topic and why I'm so excited is in the SaaS industry we all work for venture capital backed companies and yet so often as reps, managers, leaders, VPs, even CROs, we have very little insight into how actually VCs operate. Look at companies, make money, raise money, spend money and all of those things. And that is why I'm so excited to have Ankar Ahuja with me today. He's the Chief Operating Officer at Veronica Capital and he's going to dive into this with us today and really kind of pull back the veil on how VCs work and also what you should probably look at too to identify good opportunities. So we are ready to do this. Ankur My man, welcome to the show.
Excited to be here.
So I'm going to open up with a question here. Maybe you know, this is coming or not, but like, is VC as sexy as people make it out to be? Because everyone's like, oh, I want to work at venture capital, I want to become part of a firm. You're in it. Is it as sexy as people think it is?
You know, now, having done this for seven months and having been a two time founder previous to this, I will tell you that is not as sexy as people make it sound. It's a lot of work. It's interesting in that you get paid to learn. So our fund happens to be sector agnostic, so we invest across a variety of sectors. So I could be looking at an EV company one day or a SaaS based company the next day. So from that perspective, it is really great. You get to learn a whole lot. But it's a lot of work, it's a lot of long hours, it's a lot of spreadsheets. And it is not as sexy as everyone makes it sound. TechCrunch makes it sound pretty sexy when they, when they get these big, you know, $200 million Series A raised by XYZ Fund. And that's very sexy. But the things that go on behind the scenes are not so sexy. So sorry to your listeners who are going to be a little disappointed with that.
I think I thought that was going to be the answer and they need to hear it because it is. It's like you see numbers and multiples and people think it's like just all glamour and not the grind. And so let's go another layer deeper there.
Right.
Like, what does the workload entail for someone in your position? I think most people don't even understand, like, okay, working, but on what? Right. So like what goes into kind of that day to day, week to week type process for you?
Sure. So because I'm the COO of the fund, my job, I'm kind of connected everywhere, so I help with diligencing potential investments. I'm also kind of the center of our office. So anything that any of the partners or any of the other staff needs and also anything that the LPs might need, the people that actually invest into our fund. So I'm working with kind of all the different stakeholders in the fund. And that's exciting because my day, my day to day is like two days are never the same. And that's the type of work that I like. I can't be a slave to my desk. I like to be up and around and doing different things. So from that perspective, it's really great. If you are an analyst at a VC fund, like some of the members of our team are, you are basically diligencing investments. And that could mean you're looking up different markets, market sizes, companies, the founders themselves, what they've done in the past and what other companies in the space might be doing. And that's all kind of to help produce what's known as like an investment memo, which is something that we all kind of do. It's a very standard kind of memo that we produce based on each investment that we make. And that's something that we all sit down as a team and review before we make a new investment.
Love that. And so we're actually going to take a step back there. You named a lot of terms that I actually want to break down for everybody.
Sure, sure.
So like the term and then their primary responsibility. Right. So you had partners, LPs, stakeholders, analysts. Right. You're the chief operating officer. So could you break down real quick, people listening, like kind of the general anatomy of a VC and what those primary roles are and what they do?
Sure. So a VC fund and its simplicity has a few different moving parts. You have the fund itself, and the fund is made up of LPs. LPs are known as limited partners. Those are basically the people that staked your fund. Right. So when you fundraise to raise capital to deploy, you're raising it from LPs and those LPs.
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