Remember when venture capital firms were more secretive than the NSA? I certainly do. That's when NDA's were signed in blood, and VCs were loathe to talk about anything other than how much and when a prospective fund investor would be wiring in a check, and would only make references to the industries they were focused on, nothing more.
New rules (duh!). As noted by Nicole Perloth in her NY Times column today : for all of you under-employed PR wizards, great news: the VC world is 'ramping up.' and hiring those who can tweet, blog, and word-smith--just like the start-ups those VCs invest in.
Self-promotion via aggressive, this generation public relation strategies is not only in vogue, its become an integral component to an industry that competes like gladiators for the opportunity to invest in deals as well as for fee-paying/profit-sharing institutional investors who are ever-more pernickety when it comes to allocating assets to 'alternative asset' managers.
A telling part of the article profiles the mindset of Andreeessen Horowitz (Marc Andreesen made his bones and mini-billion as a result of co-founding Netscape); each year 15 deals account for 97 percent of all venture capital profits. This means VC's need laser-like precision to identify and get a piece of a very small fraction of the deals that actually end up making money for investors. And to do that, VC's need to be "out there" with magnetizing messages that start-up companies can gravitate to.
No comments:
Post a Comment