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That's a nice overview but IMO it fails to take into account how the founders (oftentimes inadvertently) influence how helpful/harmful a VC is. The most common

That's a nice overview but IMO it fails to take into account how the founders (oftentimes inadvertently) influence how helpful/harmful a VC is. The most common (negative) example of this I've seen is when founders sell the VC on the solution, not the problem they're solving. Everything starts out fine (you have a VC who is really excited to help you build and sell product X, even if they don't really care about problem Y). But then you realise that actually, the market wants you to pivot slightly to product Z to solve the same problem Y. And that's when the VC pivots from being helpful to harmful. There are probably multiple other examples of how founders can influence the value-add of their VCs, but that's the big one that springs to my mind. And I bet it accounts for 90% of the 'harmful' instances.

dopamean 8y ago
> The most common (negative) example of this I've seen is when founders sell the VC on the solution, not the problem they're solving. There are so many aspects of my work life that this applies to. Sometimes product managers will suggestion a solution to a problem instead of presenting the problem. Often times their solution needs work and unless caught early a lot of time gets spent going down the wrong path. Another time this happens with the whole "xy problem." Where I or a team member have problem X, we come up with solution Y but have trouble implementing it. Then we ask for help with solution Y without knowing that maybe it's not the best solution and what we really should have asked for help with is problem X. I think we could all do better by thinking more about what problems we're trying to solve rather than being married to our potential solutions to those problems.