The VC Field Guide

1The Venture Capital Investment Framework

STARTUP INVESTING

The relationship between an entrepreneur and their venture capitalist (VC) is a lot like the relationship between a player and a coach. The VC/coach typically has a broader perspective because they meet lots of companies, sit on a lot of boards, and learn from multiple entrepreneurs'/players' experiences while studying the market and analyzing the gaps. At the end of the day, the entrepreneur decides what the company will do, motivates the team, and executes it on the field. With that in mind, venture is a unique ecosystem where people have to work together. No one party holds all the cards and no one party can dictate the terms, so all parties have to make their own decisions on who they want to work with. If a startup is going to be successful, if it's going to be profitable, scale, and endure, then VCs, entrepreneurs, startup employees, and startup customers have to be aligned––which is a lot easier said than done. With this Venture Capital Investment Framework (VCIF), I hope to help innovators in the startup industry: VCs, the entrepreneurs and founders creating companies, the startup talent, and startup customers who work in or with the companies, and folks aspiring to be any of the above in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

In my experience, startup investing is still an imprecise art. Venture capitalists tend to either highly productize their process––we are talking complex spreadsheets or software programs quantifying ...