Oxyfish

After a stint as a VC, some parts of being an entrepreneur seem easier. For example, it’s much easier to see things from the investor and the board perspective, because you’ve been in their seats. You know how to pitch to investors, and what information they need. You know what is relevant to the board and what is not, and generally how to handle a board meeting.

There are a few things you forget after being a VC for a while. Hiring and recruiting is harder than I remembered – not the sales part, but just finding people and interviewing them. Making tough decisions about how to spend your limited cash and other resources is harder than I remembered. There are a million and one details that you don’t have an executive assistant or a CFO to handle for you. Travel planning alone is a time sink.

I have to reach out a lot more proactively. I didn’t realize how easy it was to just answer the phone and email all day, but as a VC, a lot comes at you. When I was a VC, it took incredible discipline for me to put that aside and actually be proactive, and I wasn’t doing it very well. As a CEO, the phone doesn’t ring much, which means I reach out a lot more.

One other thing that is much easier as an entrepreneur is the focus. I find that my top few priorities are quite obvious, and I’m not really at loose ends about what is most important to be working on right now. Sometimes there are too many top priorities, and it’s almost paralyzing, but mostly I can just crank without too much reflection. As a VC, I found that much harder. While there were still a million things to do, deciding which ones were priorities was much harder for me. Of course, there were some obvious times when we were doing financings and such, but often I had many different potentially valuable things I could do, and no good way to decide between them. And the feedback cycle was so long that it was hard to even come up with good rules of thumb.

I travel a lot more now, visiting potential customers and partners, and my kids are having to adjust to having me gone more, which can be heartbreaking. I’ve been lucky to have dinner with my kids an awful lot the last few years, and that’s getting harder. But my family definitely senses my excitement and enthusiasm, which helps a lot.

By the way, I’m not the only one who has done this. Danial Faizullabhoy also did this relatively recently, you could ask him what it’s like. Other folks I know who made this transition are Darlene Mann and Perry Wu. There are also VCs who occasionally step into CEO roles for a while, like Alex Mendez at Storm Ventures.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 12:12 am and is filed under Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, Yieldex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.