Building Your VC Community

This is part two of the VC Community Series. Check here for Part I.

Quick background, I’m the General Manager at Union Square Ventures, where I run our 6+ year community, the USV Network. The VC Community function has increased in popularity, and is also a core part of many other organizations like Accelerators, Incubators and Professional Organizations. This series is focused on sharing best practices for starting, building and growing a community in these organizations.

Building the right community for your organization

The landscape of VC communities is varied, especially when you include accelerators, incubators and other groups that have similar dynamics of peer professionals learning together. Deciding the scope of how to serve your community is a key product decision.

Specifically, what is the goal of your organization? What is your relationship with portfolio companies? And what is the timeline of those services? These are pieces of your community product that should be decided early on.

To help get you started, here are a few examples of the different relationship expectations, timelines and goals for different types of organizations. You can use this framework, whether you’re a VC, accelerator, incubator, or a professional network.

Institutional VCs

• Goal: Help each company grow and evolve until a successful exit.
• Relationship: Involved from investment to exit (IPO, acquisition, shut down)
• Timeline: 2–10+ years
• Example organizations: USV, Spark Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint, etc.

Note: For Institutional VC firms, whether you invest early stage or in later stages, a company would join the core community right after the investment and stay through the exit of the company.

Incubator, Seed VC or Angel

• Goal: Help the company get to the next level of investment or profitability.
• Relationship: Involved from investment to next investment (or shut down)
• Timeline: 1–3+ years
• Example organizations: 500 Startups, Angellist Syndicates, Betaworks

Notes: An Incubator, Seed VC or Angel investor may structure their involvement or investment with a company so that they pull back once the company makes it to the next investment stage.

Accelerators

• Goal: Help companies build quickly and successfully present at Demo Day.
• Relationship: Acceptance into the accelerator to a month after Demo Day
• Timeline: 3–6 months
• Example organizations: Techstars & YC

Notes: An accelerator is designed to provide a high concentration of support in a short period of time. They will likely focus all community efforts in a few months with a small buffer after demo day.

Professional Network Groups

• Goal: Help individuals grow and network over time.
• Relationship: Ongoing with membership.
• Timeline: 1–10+ years
• Example organizations: Elevate Network, YPO & EO.

Notes: For professional network groups, the purpose is to learn and grow in your career. Typically members join a group and stay until they change careers or decide to leave the group. There is less of a firm “conclusion” date.

You may agree with these constraints for your organization, or decide to change the relationship to be shorter or longer to fit with your firm’s expertise. My advice would be to start small before committing to too many things.

How will you define the scope of your network?

How long are your members “in network” or “part of the community”? This helps to figure out who you are serving and for how long.

Look closely at the start and end dates of the formal relationship commitment you’re making. In venture capital, the companies you invest in are part of a larger ecosystem of entrepreneurs, and beyond that, a part of the larger industry. Where do you draw the line in where your community starts and ends?

At USV, we speak with a lot of companies before we invest in them, I wasn’t sure if those companies should they be part of the community or not. Equally, we have companies that exit, are we going to continue to serve them as part of our community after they leave? These questions can be answered on a case-by-case but I found that prioritizing the core of my community, I knew how to better spend my time.

There is no right or wrong way to serve the community, the choice is unique to each firm. Here’s how a few examples of how different communities have defined the boundaries of their networks.

What defines your community?

Members only

At USV, we focus 95% of our resources on companies already part of the portfolio. We do continue to include ‘alumni’ companies in our community events, but we are more passive than active. We don’t focus the USV Network on including pre-investment companies. We engage with those companies as a firm, but we do not include them in the scope of the USV Network.

Potential and existing members

Founders Fund runs an annual event called F50. They invite portfolio companies and other curated guests from their community. Not everyone has to be a potential investment, but they actively engage and work with their pipeline in addition to their members.

Members and alumni

YC offers a platform to allow continued networking for their accelerator alumni. Their program is a few months long, but access to the network is on-going. They connect with potential companies through HackerNews but the majority of their community efforts are for those connected into YC.

Lifecycle

FFVC ensures they are connecting with entrepreneurs at every step of the lifecycle. They plan social events that include members of the general tech community, high potential investments, their investments and past investments. They engage a wide group of people to add benefit to their founders and the firm.

Each organization will be different, so figure out where you are interested in focusing your efforts. There is value in all of these approaches, the only differences is how you allocate time and resources to support the breath and depth of how you define your community.

Organization Outline Recap:

You should now have a better understanding of your operating constraints. Create your community outline that answers these questions:

- The thesis and culture of your organization.

- The next steps your community members are trying to reach.

- The timeline you are defining to engage your community.

- The boundaries of community members you’re focusing your support.

Now that you’ve defined the characteristics of your organization, we’ll use these in the next blog post to define and address the needs of your customers: the organizations you’re serving.

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