7. Competition

Hey there,

Welcome to where I write about my journey from a stable Big Tech Software Engineering job to the wild and volatile world of Venture Capital.

You won’t find a group of more competitive people than VCs. It makes sense, VC is driven by power laws: winners eat while losers die. In the immortal words of Ricky Bobby: “If you ain’t first, you’re last!”

Working and succeeding in a VC are driven by the same laws: only so many people can be trusted to invest LP money, become partners, and reap that extra Carry. To even get more Carry, someone else in the fund has to give up some of their own.

At BigTechCo, it was an unspoken dirty secret that everyone only cared about work that would improve their next performance cycle / promotion. Promo driven development is even a meme in the Silicon Valley.

At The Firm, competition was overt. Hustle-porn and identities that are fully optimized for work are the norm:

• People would sleep in the office and boast about it: “My roommates haven’t seen me in a week”

• Working on the weekends was a badge of honor: “I wish I had time for a hike this weekend, but I’m working on finding a Director of Strategic Regional Retention and Revenue Growth for our Crypto for Centralized Banks Co.”

• VCs will do anything to “win a deal”: I met someone who actually tattooed a logo on themselves to convince a founder to let them lead their series A.

• We’d purposefully schedule interviews late at night to ensure candidates were “dedicated enough” to be part of our team.

• Sacrificing everything for work was idolized: “Elon told him to come back 2 days into his pat leave, isn’t that so badass?”

• I sat in a car in terror as a teammate blew through a stop sign to get to a founder meeting before anyone else on. You wouldn’t even believe what it’s like playing ping pong with this person…

If this all sounds a little insane to you, that’s because it is.

I had no idea how I was going to compete and “win” in this environment. I found myself questioning if I even wanted to. It took a few painful weeks before I realized that I frankly didn’t want to compete in the same way that my teammates were. It just didn’t make sense for me.

As an outsider, I had a severe disadvantages compared to my “peers”:

• No background in Private Equity, Investment Banking, or VC.

• No MBA and the built in connections that come with one (my network is pretty big tech engineer focused).

• I’m an introvert, so schmoozing or bragging are not at all enjoyable for me.

• I didn’t even have a twitter/X or whatever it’s called today.

• I actually had a life that I enjoyed outside of work.

• I had zero interest in doing 🍄s at Burning Man.

But what game were we actually playing?

A successful VC does these things extremely well:

1. Deal Flow: Finding potential startups / founders / marketing / networking.

2. Investing Capital: Thorough diligence, establishing valuations, convincing founders, and deploying resources.

3. Support: One of the key levers a VC has in improving the chances of success of one of their portfolio companies.

4. Managing Investments: Selling equity, negotiating M/A, serving on boards, helping with IPOs.

5. For newer, less established VCs: Courting LPs (The most important but least talked about)

Admitting that I couldn’t and didn’t want to play by my coworkers' rules was oddly liberating. My pride kept me from quitting outright, and I wasn’t ready to crawl back to BigTechCo with my tail between my legs. Instead, I decided:

Stay tuned for my next post where I discuss how I redefined my role to thrive without selling my soul.

Signing off and signing zero checks,

SWEdonym

PS: Love hearing from subscribers, send me an email with your thoughts or add a comment below on what you love, hate, or want more of.