Setting aside this one egregious investor case, hear me out. There’s a strange dynamic in the VC-founder relationship which never sat well with me.

Most VCs treat their LPs as customers, but not their founders. Why is that?

it’s because the relationship is not a typical customer relationship. Take the founder-lawyer relationship for example. Founder pays, they provide a great service and are customer oriented.

The VC firm thinks they get paid by LPs and they give money to founders.

BUT ultimately the bigger check comes back from the founder many years later. So we do get paid by founders, but because of the weird indirect way, it screws up the customer/service provider dynamic.

On top of that you add board and governance and it gets even more complicated.

Take for example the lust for control. Less than 1% of the time, shit happens. Punishing 99% of founders because of a few bad apples is crazy.

We’ve been experimenting with this. We give away voting rights and many things that are control oriented. Why? Because it makes the founders relax and trust us with all the stuff they don’t tell other investors. And if hear it sooner, maybe there’s a chance to solve it faster.

being the founder’s first phone call for good/bad/ugly things is way more important than all the fine print in the legal docs