What is Founder Success?
When someone finds out I lead Founder Success at Felicis, an early-stage venture capital firm, their next comment is often, “Wow! I’ve never heard that before. What is Founder Success?”
At a high level, it’s simple. Any VC firm has two key drivers: performance and reputation. In other words: generating returns and ensuring entrepreneurs want to work with you. The two reinforce each other. I focus on making sure that Felicis is known for the things we want to be known for and that our reputation helps us partner with exceptional founders.
The Felicis mission is success with empathy. We don’t just want to generate exceptional returns for our LPs; we want to do so with empathy for the people building the companies we invest in. It’s easy to strive for one of these, but it’s much harder to optimize for both. One of my favorite questions to ponder is how to incentivize focusing not just on what we want to accomplish, but on how we get there. Defensible, enduring brands emerge from that intersection.
Founders are our customers (not all VC firms believe and operationalize this). Founder Success is analogous to Customer Success, a function found in many operating companies that’s responsible for ensuring customers are happy net promoters. We operate similarly: we measure NPS, track support data and help iterate the Felicis “product” based on founder feedback.
Founder Success is also a nod to our belief that making a company successful is very different than making the people building that company successful. There are many ways to make money, and the perils of “growth at all costs” have been well-documented. We want to support founders as people, which is why I created our 1% founder development pledge.
The CEO of Gainsight tweeted a formula for Customer Success that inspired my guiding framework: Founder Success = Founder Experience + Founder Outcomes.
On the surface, the outcomes part seems easy to accomplish. Many VC firms take the “supermarket” approach, offering various specialists (recruiters, marketers, salespeople) to portfolio companies in attempt to ✨add value✨. They measure themselves by the number of candidates sent, introductions made, press mentions scored etc. Often, this is actually just output. We strive for meaningful, specific and memorable outcomes, which we deliver via scalable, repeatable programs and high-touch custom efforts.
Experience comprises all interactions a founder has with our firm. We want trust to be the foundation of this experience. I love the trust battery concept. It’s a powerful metaphor for any relationship: every positive interaction builds trust, negative interactions deplete it. The stored energy powers the relationship. This mental model guides how we approach our relationships with founders.
Exceeding expectations supercharges the success formula. Founder Success strives to understand each founder’s unique expectations and figure out how to at least meet, but ideally, exceed them. This is easier said than done. It requires asking thoughtful questions, giving and receiving difficult feedback, and maintaining a tight communication loop internally and with founders. Expectations change over time, and so how we operate does, too.
What do I actually do day-to-day?
Spend a lot of time with founders and startup leaders: pre-investment, gathering context on problems & sharing status updates, collecting feedback after major milestones like fundraises, and more.
Manage and support my team, ensuring that we’re allocating our time and resources towards key drivers of experience and outcomes.
Dive into sensitive or difficult portfolio requests.
Serve as the “voice of the founder” in our partnership and investment discussions.
Develop new initiatives in service of our mission.
As far as I know, Founder Success does not exist at other VC firms (though Alison Pickens, former COO of Gainsight and an angel investor, also subscribes to this approach!). How I got here is a story for another day.
I’ve never met someone who has exactly the same scope and charter as I do. While this has occasionally made the role feel lonely and the path ahead unclear, it’s overwhelmingly been a positive for me personally and for Felicis overall.
It’s afforded me broad exposure to every aspect of our business and the chance to creatively drive impact using this context. It’s also allowed me to feed my curiosity about psychology, high performance, personal growth and more through the lens of investing and observing founders at work.