VC Expert Interview - Key Skills for VC
- 02:24
Uzma answers, what skills make a good venture capital investor?
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Yeah, venture to a large extent is about network and relationship building. And so I would say that the softer skills probably are where you would probably overindex and therefore your ability to build relationships and trust with founders, with co-investors is paramount. And so I would say that those are probably the top skills. So, you know, sort of building a really robust network, strong relationships and all of those, you know, can be fed into through your soft skills. Negotiation skills are again, huge. So that is super important because you'll be negotiating with the entrepreneurs, you'll be negotiating with your investment committee, you're negotiating in across a board meeting setting. So, that's very important. And equally sales because you are selling the entrepreneur, the firm that you're representing or the fund that you're representing, you're selling the entrepreneur yourself as an investor that they should take money from or an investor that potentially could go on their board. And so that sales piece is important. And internally, you're also selling because a lot of funds have a nice investment committee set up. And therefore when you are really excited about an investment opportunity, you have to take that back to the investment committee, which would be other team members and, and partners who you also have to bring up that sort of like line of conviction. And so it also requires really, really strong sales skills. I think ability to learn is also important because venture has long feedback cycles. It takes between seven to 10 years to see how your investments are doing, whether they've done well or whether they haven't done well. And there'll be, venture is very early stage and inherently very risky. And businesses can, can fail for a lot of reasons and then a lot of reasons. Therefore, your ability to understand why your investments did well or struggled and where the issues were is really great because that makes you then a great investor going forward. It refines your like cycle and standing, and that's what Venture more generally is, is an apprenticeship. People come from varying different backgrounds and learn about investing as they go on to invest and see how these companies are doing.