Building a successful VC-backed company requires getting everything just right. Getting it right means hitting a bullseye where three factors intersect: Founder Competency, Market Reality, and Investor Approach.
When you hit that intersection, you have a big exit and sail away to your private island. When you miss, you either hire or negotiate, depending on how you miss.
Let’s start by defining the three factors.
Founder Competency
This can be either markets you understand, or innate skills. They will drive your ability to execute well in a one type of venture, and struggle in another. Highly technical founders can have a rocky road building sales-driven orgs, and vise versa. Founders that start in the SMB market might struggle with a pivot into, say, government contracts, even if they spot an open niche. Adapting is hard.
Investor Approach
Investors try to stick to a general approach across their portfolio. At the broadest level, most investors look for scalable tech that can create a big category and have a huge financial outcome. Ventures that live in the cracks simply don’t fit in most portfolios.
A level underneath, most investors have some other thesis, or collection of theses, that guide their investments. For example, the aging US population needs accessible tech. Or industries with information asymmetry are ripe for disruption.
Investors usually talk about their approach when raising funds. Deviation merits some explanation, so there’s friction to changing the approach to accommodate a single portfolio company.
Again, adapting is hard.
Market Reality
While Founder Competency and Investor Approach are visible from the outset, Market Reality isn’t totally clear until a venture has been in the market for a while. What we think is going to happen once we’re in market is usually wrong in number of ways. Our customers might be bigger or smaller than we expected. Our core use case might appear from out of the blue by some happy accident. We pivot and adapt, and hope that the pivots don’t take us too far out of our competencies, or our investors’ approaches.
Market Reality Doesn’t Align with Founder Competency: Hire Leadership
When startups find that their Market Reality doesn’t align with Founder Competency, it’s far from a death sentence. If the founders are sufficiently humble, they’ll find leadership that can fill in the gaps. Investors are usually very helpful in tapping their networks for talent.
Sometimes the transition goes well and sometimes it causes fissures. New leadership might change the tenor of the place in a way that demotivates the team. Or they might try to run a playbook that worked for them in the past that doesn’t factor the nuances of the new venture. Overall, misalignment between Market Reality and Founder Competency is sub-optimal, but workable.
Market Reality Doesn’t Align with Investor Approach: Negotiate
VCs rely on reputation for deal flow, so they are generally forgiving towards portfolio companies that are still finding their way. On the other hand, when it comes to re-investing, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their LPs to not “put good money after bad.”
If you find yourself with a decent business, that you are good at running, that doesn’t fit the approach of investors, you’re in a tough spot. You can’t expect your investors to reinvest in a business that doesn’t fit their model, and you can’t expect new investors to come in if your old investors are sending a cautionary signal.
Those lengthy docs you signed as part of your financing are designed (in part) to protect investors in this scenario. What happens next depends on those docs, and your investors’ willingness to make adjustments. The conversations that follow are awkward, humbling, and may not work out in a way that you like. But the next step is always an honest conversation.
One of the keys to making a VC-backed startup work is making sure all parties are aiming for the same bullseye. Also, understanding how you might miss, and the impact to your viability, should be an important factor in deciding whether you want to seek funding at all.