Navigating VC Operations — How it started at Anamcara…

Working in Venture Capital can feel like a minefield at times and sometimes a walk in the park, but one thing’s for certain (and one thing that I can define VC Operations by), it is — DYNAMIC.

For a bit of boring old background — I have a technology and a project management background, and worked at a consulting firm in London, while qualifying as a Chartered Accountant. Six years and two countries later, just as I was starting to explore the world of private equity, along came the disruptive world of venture capital, and a brilliant chance to work with Anamcara Capital in Fund Operations.

I was ecstatic and nervous — these were unchartered waters, but still seemed familiar — something that I had not done exactly before, but had experienced most of the “on-paper requirements” in my professional life.

As I started learning the ropes at Anamcara in the first few weeks — I found a sense of clarity and and how to structure my work in the initial few months (cue the project manager in me!).

Some things I did, which helped me at the start were:

• It was important to set priorities at the outset— how can I align the work I am doing with the firm’s strategy! It was crucial to understand what it is we were trying to achieve, who we are trying to impact, who do we want to partner with — essentially, who are our stakeholders. From hereon, defining — our key stakeholders or “inner circle”, secondary stakeholders or “necessary to engage” and tertiary stakeholders or “nice to haves”. This helped in the next step — how are we managing these stakeholders and what can we do for them or vice versa.
• All stakeholders are invaluable at different stages and in different parts of the business. For our existing “inner circle”— LPs, GP, Venture Partners, Portfolio Companies and Mentors, we set protocols for regular communication and engagement; and for our “potential-inner circle”, we set about ensuring that we are delivering value, and they see us as invaluable partners. Technology came to the rescue here and we have been using Affinity for deal tracking, portfolio tracking, identifying potential LPs, having regular touchpoints with our portco founders, LPs, mentors, on-thesis start-ups etc.
• A business is only as strong as its people; and it was important to connect with all our secondary and tertiary stakeholders on a regular basis as well. The way I see it, secondary stakeholders (our service providers) are the backbone of a VC firm — administrators, lawyers, compliance, regulators, company secretaries, accountants, auditors etc. In the first few weeks, I connected with all our service providers, understood the services they were providing us, where the gaps were, in what other ways could they help the business, were we being fairly charged for the services being provided... This gave a good sense of understanding of the whole ecosystem behind a successful VC firm, and I started to reflect on tangible things we could do to improve our processes — operationally and financially.

The next few steps (or rather lateral steps) were to —

• familiarizing with core documents — PPM, LPA, Subscription Agreement — understanding the various clauses, regulations, the allowances for the fund and the fund manager — which was a great segue into understanding and budgeting for expenses between the two.
• devising and/or revising the policies and procedures for the firm — including, policies for onboarding, valuations, accounting, cash, AML and compliance, corporate governance, risk management etc. This helped in setting firmed-up procedures for a new VC firm, ones which we could rely on as the business scaled-up.
• defining, fleshing out the repetitive tasks and making templates /processes — so we could focus on value-add tasks — creating email templates for onboarding steps, templates for payments approval, month-end reconciliations, budget vs actuals etc. We use Asana for organizing tasks, managing and tracking time-sensitive projects, creating workflows, meeting deadlines etc., which helps put things in perspective.
• ensuring that the finances are in order (budget, cash-flow projections, payments, month-end processes, accounting, quarterly management reports). Being a start-up VC firm, budgeting and cash-flow forms the back-bone of all our operational and strategic discussions — when to do a capital call, how long will this cash last, what are the expected and unforeseen expenses, which months will see an expense spike, do we need to renegotiate contracts, hiring personnel, and most importantly — liquid cash for making investments.

There are still very-many learnings which I may not have covered above and many which I know I will have on this journey with Anamcara; but it’s an exciting and dynamic road ahead, and I cannot wait to see where this year takes us.

About Anamcara Capital

Anamcara is a pre-seed/seed stage venture fund investing in B2B companies focused on building technologies that serve and enable SMBs.

Our distinctive approach is crafted around a curated network of industry leaders, investors and SMB owners. This is the Anamcara flywheel of value. Deep industry expertise and access.

Find out more about how we venture beyond at www.anamcaracapital.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Medium or Twitter.