Founder vs. VC: The Unfiltered Truth From Both Sides
Founder vs. VC: The Unfiltered Truth From Both Sides
EP 79 of The Logan Bartlett Show: Untold stories from tech's inner circle
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth Joy Zalman and Jerry Neumann (co-authors of Founder vs. Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital from Startup to IPO) debating the state of venture capital. Liz is a 2x founder who’s raised over $100 million (including a Series A from Doug Leone at Sequoia) and Jerry has over 25 years of experience as a VC with successful investments in companies like Datadog ($32B) and The Trade Desk ($42B).
We talk about topics from fundraising, board meetings, the actual role of VCs, and much more.
Click here to view the episode transcript | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
✉️ Episode Memo
Founder POV
Liz emphasizes that board meetings as they exist today are pointless. Startup founders often stress through wasted weeks prepping a deck for a board meeting, and she believes board members often fail to bring much to the table besides complaints.
Liz finds more value in calling her investors and asking for advice on particularly thorny issues, leveraging the investor’s experience that comes from pattern-matching solutions within countless other companies.
Despite this, advice from board members is often unwelcome. “Not a single investor that ever sat on my board agreed to log into my product with me and see what it did. Why should I, as a founder, take anything that they're saying seriously when they don't care, they don't seem to care about the product or the company enough to even look at it?”
Investor POV
Jerry insists that there be monthly board meetings even when investing in the earliest stage. He believes it’s important for investors to know what’s happening with the financials, sales pipeline, and general progress. Yet he’s in agreement with Liz that excessive presentation deck preparation is a waste of time at these stages.
Jerry also argues that it’s not the VC’s job to offer operating advice. “Sometimes founders will ask me to, look, can you do this very specific operational thing? Maybe I can, technically, but that's not my job, right? You don't want that to be my job. You want to have somebody in the company to do that.”
⭐ Highlight: Are board meetings pointless or necessary?
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