The VC Job
I'm in France visiting some friends for a long weekend.
We got talking about each other's jobs, and we needed to do some explaining to each other as they're all very different: my wife works in the music industry, our friends work in aviation (her) and facilities management (him), and I work in VC.
I love explaining VC to new people because they ask such brilliant questions. Often, they seem simple and obvious but they actually get to the core tension of the uncertainty of venture capital. "How do you know what a good founder looks like?", "Won't ChatGPT just do that?", "Why would I need that [fill in the blank product/service/app we're excited about]?"...
It's easy to get caught up in small echo chambers, particularly in the tech world. And that's particularly dangerous for consumer founders and investors when the rest of the world - the people who ultimately need to be your users/customers if you're planning to build a mass market consumer business - couldn't care less about 99% of the stuff you're interested in.
It's always a judgement call on how far into the future you ought to live, and how much you need to meet people where they are. The problem is that technology and behavioural shifts can take forever, and then happen overnight (cf ChatGPT adoption speed).
Like many of the questions I was being asked tonight, I'm not sure I've yet nailed the answer...