Venture Capitalists Are Not The Startup Team’s Friend

A friendly investor greeting the startup team

To be successful in their job, by necessity, VCs are friendly and personable. So friendly that it is easy to be lulled into thinking you are forging a real friendship and that they can step outside their fiduciary selves and provide good unbiased advice to a startup founder who needs good unbiased advice a lot. But it is vital the startup founder keep in mind that the VC has a job to do and they are driven first and foremost by that job even in the advice they provide.

There are two experiences I have had that illuminate this. One was when asking a VC for professional career advice, and the other was when an investment I was CEO of no longer looked like an investment worth continuing. They intersected at the same company with the same investor.

I was a successful multi-time CTO who sought to build skills toward being CEO of an upcoming startup. To do that I needed to get sales and marketing experience as well as specific CEO skills such as raising money.