The evolution of VC community — insights from the 3rd global VC Platform Summit

I joined Reinventure three years ago (this week!) to build out our portfolio platform and community strategy.

Three years ago, VC community was a nascent role with only a handful of funds globally (and none locally) that I could look to for inspiration with dedicated resources focused on supporting founders and companies through events, expert networks and other portfolio-wide support services. Little did I know that around this time, about 20 of my US and European peers were gathering on the other side of the world for the first time to share learning and brainstorm strategies and ideas together.

Fast-forwarding to today, I now have at least four (and counting! Oh haiii Joel Connolly, Imogen Baxter, Emily AirTree Ventures, Rose Powell… :)) peers across Australian venture funds focused on different aspects of startup and portfolio community engagement and support. And last month I represented Reinventure (and Australia) alongside 97 funds globally at the 3rd VC Platform Summit in New York City. It’s fair to say the role of VC Community lead has hit the mainstream!

Below are some key insights I took from a day of benchmarking and sharing knowledge with my fellow VC community leads.

Platform leads wear many hats

Like a lot of community roles, VC platform has become a bit of a catch-all to cover the majority of non-investment related activity in venture capital (although even here the lines re blurring). This image captures the full spectrum of activity that my platform peers are engaging in, though it’s clear that each person or platform team is mostly focusing their efforts on two or three of these areas.

The top five priority platform activities, according to a survey done by the group, are community and expert network development, event planning, content creation and marketing, business development and internal operations.

Across the board, talent support is also an increasing focus, with many funds bringing talent resources in-house to support the portfolio with key hires, talent pool development, recruitment best practices and more. To this extent, I am excited to announce that we recently brought on Nell Hardie to join our team as Reinventure’s Head of Talent to do just that!

Community should play a role pre-investment

Typically, most VC platform leads focus on the value they can add post-investment, through the activities mentioned above. These roles are also more commonly found in firms with less than $250M under management, so the value-added services focus on supporting earlier stage founders (Seed to Series B) through the initial phases of building their business.

With the actual capital being invested becoming table stakes (even in a market like Australia, which is still has a relatively nascent VC industry), the differentiating factor is starting to rest on the support and other value-adds provided post-investment. With this in mind, there is a case for making a fund’s platform activities known to potential founders earlier in the investment process. However, perhaps more importantly, the benefit of highlighting the platform offering as soon as possible is that it can help to create even greater alignment between founders and investors from a values perspective, as well as orient them to what they can make use of straight away once the deal closes.

For Reinventure, we have started to use the pre-investment process as a way to better understand how we can support and work with founders by conducting a work preferences questionnaire called the Harrison Assessment. This helps us identify (and debrief with founders on) strengths and areas for development early in the process, which guides the rest of our portfolio platform strategy, and accelerates a high degree of trust in the relationship.

No platform strategy is unique…

We are relatively early in our VC Platform journey here in Australia, so the space has been a fairly green field for developing initiatives with not too much risk of overlap or fatigue amongst portfolio companies. In larger markets like the US or Europe, where they have the challenge of portfolio companies with three or more VC platforms to engage with, it’s clear that most ideas have been tried and tested somewhere.

You can’t pick a platform strategy that’s unique, but you can pick a platform strategy that your firm can uniquely execute — Maria Palma, RRE Ventures

My greatest takeaway from the time I spent with my platform colleagues in NYC comes from an insight from one of the founders of the VC Platform Summit, Maria (Brewer) Palma from RRE Ventures. Her observation over the last three or so years is that you can’t pick a platform strategy that’s unique, only a platform strategy that your firm can uniquely execute. It is in this spirit that the community of Heads of VC Platform meets and so generously shares insights and best practices with each other, rather than seeing themselves as in competition. Each platform lead has identified the particular strengths of their fund, and doubled down on where they think they can add unique value to their ventures, both complementing each other in market and providing true differentiation.

With our deep roots in fintech, and relationship with Westpac, our unique strength and focus has been building the local fintech startup ecosystem from its infancy. From our role in the incubation of Stone & Chalk, the country’s largest fintech coworking community, to the launch of FinTech Australia, we have prioritised community activities that will boost the whole ecosystem because we believe a rising tide floats all boats. We also believe the strengthening of the whole venture capital ecosystem here (and the rise of other community roles) can be nothing but a good thing for our startups, in fintech and beyond.

For other great summaries of the 3rd Annual VC Platform Summit, check out:

10 Lessons from the VC Platform Summit by Kate Hyslop, Notion VC

Powering VC Platform: 3 Reflections from the 2018 VC Platform Summit by Stephanie Manning, Natalie Sportelli and Amanda Mulay, Lerer Hippeau