You're Not the Same Fund Manager You Were When You Started

A lot changes in terms of where you were when you started your fundraising journey and where you are today.

When I started fundraising for Precursor, I went to one of the more successful seed-stage VCs I knew then and asked him for advice about starting a new fund. In a fit of honesty, that person told me that they had a hard time remembering what it was like when they started because so much had changed since then. My initial reaction was a combination of surprise and disappointment - why couldn’t this person put himself back where I found myself in the moment of my ask and give me the advice I needed? Yes, I realize that is a very egocentric point of view, but that’s how I felt and I don’t want to pretend that I didn’t feel that way. Deep down, part of me felt that person just didn’t want to help me; with the benefit of time in the seat, I realized that person was being honest, and I just didn’t want to hear what they were saying.

Time and experience change most people. Outside of my work at Precursor, one of the most satisfying and educational experiences I have had is my work at Screendoor. I meet tons of smart, talented venture capital fund managers who want to build next-generation venture funds based on their networks, access to great founders, and views on the future of technology. Many of them ask me for advice or perspective, and I find myself wanting to give the same advice I was given when I asked the same questions.

I’m roughly ten years into building Precursor Ventures, and I am not the same person I was when I started the fund. My life circumstances have changed, I’ve changed, and I’ve learned a lot about the business of running a venture capital fund. Being in the market as a venture capitalist teaches you a lot about how things work in this business. Every long-tenured manager I know has a handful of things that he or she thought would be important that don't matter and a handful of smaller things that end up being important but feel trivial at the moment. Whenever a new VC manager asks me for advice, I pause and ask myself if my experience is useful and still relevant. One of my mentors always reminds me that in life, you are almost always an example or a warning, and you don’t always know which one you are at the moment. So what does change look like? I have a few ideas:

• Sometimes, the strategy changes - I started Precursor Ventures ten years ago. Back then, there were very few pre-seed venture capital firms. Most LPs I met didn’t understand pre-seed and didn’t believe pre-seed was a category worthy of investment. Being a pre-seed focused fund was a differentiator ten years ago in a way that it isn’t today. It would be hard to start Precursor today with the same thesis as the world is different.
  

• Sometimes, your life circumstances change - I have a family now and didn’t have the same family setup when I first had the idea for Precursor. For some people, being married and having children creates focus and incentives to work hard and create something that will make your family’s life better, and for others, having a family means there are things you used to do professionally that are now off the table given your commitments and constraints. I say this without judgment, but most people are not in the same place in life and life circumstances where they were when they decided to launch their first fund.
  

• Sometimes, the market and external environment change. When I started Precursor, the seed funds that did most of our follow-on rounds were small, and the multi-stage funds that invested in the Series A rounds of our portfolio companies were also fairly modest. If you fast-forward to today, the largest venture capital funds are larger than ever, as are the seed funds. The world of early-stage investing has changed a lot since I started, and I suspect it will continue to change over the next few years.

I share all of these thoughts to encourage fund managers to not feel bound by what the world looked like, either personally or professionally, when you started your fund and to continue to think about what makes sense for you and your fund based on how the world works today.