Are Venture Capitalists deforming capitalism?
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Earlier this week, The New Yorker wrote a scathing piece on the VC industry with the above title (link in comments), looking at VCs through the WeWork debacle. If you were a cynic, you could write it off as cherry-picked writing in the “tech Vs media” battle that’s plaguing the Valley.

But it does highlight some issues with VC pretty well. Yet it isn’t saying anything new. The problems in VC are quite apparent — concentration of big capital with fewer funds, a power shift towards maverick founders, VCs becoming less confrontational to be seen as founder friendly, lack of principled & authoritative boards, a growth-only gospel, and an undying hope that continuous scale will trump everything else.

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Are you really fit to be a founder?
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Firstly, a Happy Dhanteras! Today it makes sense to talk about the “money” side of entrepreneurship. Many people have the needed skills, experience & passion to be great founders. Yet they’re unfit to be one. Why?

It’s to do with “founder financial viability”. While there’s an appreciation by most founders for a need to bootstrap & work without market salary for some time, usually they grossly underestimate this duration to be a few months till first round of funding arrives.

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News: Rezolve.ai announces $0.5M fundraise
News: Rezolve.ai announces $0.5M fundraise
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Rezolve.ai (Actionable Science), one of our portfolio SaaS firms, announced a $0.5M fundraise yesterday.

We backed Saurabh, Manish & Udaya, stalwarts in the enterprise technology space, over 2.5 years ago at Globevestor when global SaaS out of India wasn’t a big theme. This team had that solid mix of domain expertise, sales experience & tech chops for us to instantly get excited about the problem they were attacking.

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Is your belief in meritocracy the reason for your failure?
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As a pre-seed/seed stage startup investor, the most frequent gripe I hear from Indian founders is that they had a better product, competent team & better numbers, yet the investors funded their competitors. This makes them confused & dejected, and they lose faith in VCs & angels. A fair number of founders have remarked to me that “VCs are dumb”.

My honest answer to this is that the competition is simply selling a “better story”. But the founders are never satisfied with this response. And I believe the problem stems from a belief in pure meritocracy.

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