VCs don’t spend most of their time on new deals.
They spend most of their time on existing investments.
Imagine you are a VC on 9 boards of directors:
- Bored, er, Board meetings alone can take 20% or more of your time. Each board meeting takes a half day including travel, prep, etc. 9 boards x 8 meetings a year x 0.5 days = 36 business days right there. There’s a reason A16Z added “board partners”.
- Monday partner meetings can take 20% of your time right there. Most of Mondays are dedicated to portfolio review, and pitches from other companies that aren’t even yours. It takes a lot of discussion and time to run a partnership with > 2 or 3 partners. A lot of time.
- Fundraising can take a lot of time, although not all the time. But if you aren’t a Top Fund, you can spend a huge amount of your time raising the next fund.
- Dealing with your Dogs can take 10% of your time (and 20%+ of your energy and mental bandwidth) right there. The ones slowly going down the drain, doing drama-filled acqui-hires, that can’t pull off the next round, with quitting founders and failing CEOs — they take so, so, so much time. And so many high drama calls and meetings. And if you have a ton of money into a Dog, it can be a career-ending drama for a GP.
- Working with CEOs, recruiting for your existing investments, speaking, events, etc. can easily take another 20% of your time. Just doing VP interviews alone takes a lot of time if you do a lot of them.
Best case, that leaves 30-35% of your time to look at new investments. Best case.
