Study: How can VCs be truly helpful to portfolio startups?

For months, I have been researching how global VCs are building communities around their portfolio startups and helping them build products, scale, and raise their next rounds.

I’ve talked to 15 startup founders from the F1V portfolio and 11 VC platform managers from across the world, including Britain, Portugal, Poland, Germany, and the US. And here’s what I found out.

Slack, Google Groups, messenger chats

One of the first things most VC funds usually do when onboarding a new portfolio startup is add its team to a Slack, Google Groups, or messenger chat with other teams. Such chats, however, are not super active, because startuppers don’t generally know what they should write there.

To ramp up engagement, some VCs divide chats with their portfolio into topics and hire people to moderate the discussion in them.

A manager from one VC firm told me her company asked the head of the legal department to moderate a chat for the startups’ lawyers. The advice he provides is direct, valuable, and — what’s more important — hits its target audience.

It’s generally better to create such sub-chats — separate for startups from one industry or one country, or even for companies that are B2B and B2C.

One heavyweight VC firm segments its chats this way: 1) for pre-seed startups, it has a separate chat only for CEOs, as they do pretty much everything at a startup’s early stage; 2) for later-stage startups, the VC has chats separately for CEOs, CMOs, and CTOs.

Creating a board of advisors

Many VC funds extend their aid by expanding the network of advisors, who can mentor founders, fill the knowledge gap about the industry, and even help with due diligence.

I found that few founders express proactive interest in finding advisors. Reason: Not many know how helpful it could be and agree only when a VC personally recommends reliable people. Only few founders have their own full-time advisors. 

Creating a board of advisors is a common practice for many top-notch VCs. They develop a network of advisors to help with hiring, sales, marketing, fundraising, etc.

A standard algorithm for VCs to find advisors:

1. A VC defines which industry the fund invests in most frequently.

2. Its managers talk to portfolio startups from this industry and ask what kind of help they need.

3. A VC builds a network of relevant people.

Most of the founders perceive VC funds as their main advisors. Founders value board meetings with top management or personal advice from our general partner.

Events: webinars, summits, meetups

Startup founders expect VCs to organize offline and online events: meet-ups, roundtables, and webinars. These events have different purposes, though.

Networking. Meet-ups and summits give founders a platform to meet each other. This, in turn, helps further communication in the community: the more people know each other, the more they engage in discussions in VC chats.

Founders are unanimous: Live communication is super valuable for them, and many expect to meet offline at least once a year. All the VCs I talked to said they regularly organize offline meetings for startuppers to get to know each other. 

Discussion. Roundtables, workshops, or Zoom conferences “force” founders and VCs to find solutions to startups’ pains.

For events like this, similar to handling messenger chats, VCs should divide entrepreneurs into interest groups so that they can discuss pressing issues in their particular field. It can be an event for CTOs or founders of fintech companies. Someone from a startup’s team could moderate the discussion.

It’s better to keep discussion and networking events off the record for people to feel at ease.

Learning. A webinar is a “one-way” event when a VC (or someone invited as an expert) shares expertise in one particular field. Potential topics for webinars: fundraising, building a leadership team, how to build a remote team, marketing or product analysis.

Among invited experts, there can be vendors who provide services for startups — for example, someone from Hubspot, Zendesk, and AWS.

However, only about 50% of founders tune into webinars. Reasons: Lack of time or interest in a topic. So it’s better to collect feedback from startups before coming up with a webinar.

Learning portals, newsletters

Many VCs launch learning portals, a hub where all the digital learning content and resources are stored centrally (for example, in Notion). 

The problem with these platforms is that founders rarely read them. One of the reasons is the lack of clarity on use cases. To remedy that, VCs should ensure they have an onboarding process for new startups and then regularly inform founders about new content in a portal. 

An onboarding process can start with a call, during which the investment team and platform managers ask founders about their pressing challenges and show document templates, blog posts, or case studies that can address them.

Later, VCs could use newsletters or talk personally to let startup teams know about the new info on the portal and how it can be used.

To keep up-to-date, VCs should regularly collect feedback from startups. Collecting their requests will increase the chance of providing more value for the portfolio.