I knew this guy when I was working at American Express (we’ll call him Jack) who was always upbeat and smiling and positive and always had nice things to say about everyone.
And despite being the nicest guy, I found him annoying – like crazy annoying. And on top of that, I didn’t trust him. He was just too sugary sweet all the time for it to be real. Maybe it’s just the NYC skeptic in me? I don’t know.
Anywho, I thought of Jack when a friend who gets our newsletter asked me “Why are you guys critical of VCs even though they’re one of your customers?”
The simple answer is cuz we don’t want to be annoying like Jack.
Pandering and being a cheerleader doesn’t do anyone any good. We’d feel icky doing it and you’d get pretty f’n sick of us if every newsletter said Greylock, Union Square and Accel are awesome VCs.
Ultimately, we take great data we collect and turn it into insights.
And for every critical analysis we’ve done like VCs are not great predictors of tech success or Seed VCs are the next casualty of the Series A crunch or saying Fred Wilson is wrong, we also highlight the top firms in VCs largest exits or tell you who has the best Seed VCs by follow-on rates or even occasionally bow down to the VC ballers at Sequoia Capital (more below on that as well)
So we call it like we see it.
We know there are many great VC firms, but we also know that many are just not that good. Lake Wobegon this is not – a town “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”.