Year 3 as a VC
A quick review of what I have done in the past year
Three main things that changed my role drastically from last year: changes to M25 investment model, three new team members additions (two full time and one part-time), and the COVID-19 pandemic.
My responsibilities have shifted quite a bit from focusing the majority of my time on due diligence and internal projects to relationship building and working with portfolio companies. While I was doing many of these activities in previous years, they are now the main priority in addition to everything else I was doing. Before jumping into the changes, a quick visit to last year’s goals and what happened to them.
Previous Year Goals:
- Find diverse mentors
AllRaise and Women in VC have been tremendously helpful in connecting with investors across the nation. Also, thank you to Bethany George and Jacob Levy from VentureNext, who is running a mentorship program for Midwest VCs.
- Build more active founder and investor relationships that are not surface level
Dinner parties pre-COVID and no agenda catchups were helpful to connect with folks outside of work driven conversations.
- Be able to reach out to industry experts when necessary
This is still in progress and will be focusing more on it for this year. Being at a generalist fund investing in serval sectors is intellectually challenging and takes more time to get a grasp. You get to learn every day.
- Learn more about financial economics of an investment
I was able to dive into the economics of investment during M25’s latest fundraise and work closely with new investment term sheet negotiations, given new changes to the fund.
M25 Investment Model
Two main changes to the investment model are that we are writing bigger checks and can lead some investments. With these changes, our investment process and pace have evolved too. More specifically, building founder relationships to win term sheets and negotiate with them. While I was involved directly, I was able to witness them and gain more experience.
New Team Members
Over the past year, three new team members joined the team. It was awesome to see the organization grow and share more responsibilities. I was able to transition off some of my responsibilities and start to focus on some new ones. This was helpful to grow and learn more over the past year.
COVID-19
We have had COVID-19 on our minds for the past four months, and it has changed how we work. There are pros and cons of it, but overall it has made me more productive. We are communicating better, working on various projects, talking to more investors/founders, etc., I also want to acknowledge how fortunate we are and thanking everyone who is spending their time to take care of us.
My Current Time
Every year during April, I keep track of how I spend my time to reflect and compare how it has changed from the previous year. This year’s data is skewed given working from home, but it’s still interesting to see.
- Meetings (↑): Increased drastically given the COVID environment and the amount of time spent on Zoom due to working closely with investments as they come close to a close and networking with others individually. This includes intro calls, team meetings to discuss details, catchup calls with investors, founders, and webinars.
- Emails (↓): I actively spent less time checking my emails throughout the day by having focused time to get through emails. I do glance at emails once in a while if anything is urgent. I have recently started to get away from Apple mail app to browser only emails when I am on a desktop. This is to make better usage of different stars and be more proactive about the emails that I am waiting for a response.
- Standup/Catchup(new category): As a team, we have regular check-ins to make sure we are all communicating. This category includes team meetings and weekly 1:1s with specific team members. My favorite part of team meetings is coming up with a new order of when each person goes. We are getting very creative by using the timeframe of when we ate something to an activity that we have done in the past. For example, when was the last time we ate cookie dough to how much time did we spend watching TV during the weekend.
- Coding (new category): I enjoy optimizing our processes and making things easier to do frequent activities. I have worked on creating an M25 specific new tab extension and various scripts that connect to our CRM.
- Research (↓): Some of my responsibilities to research companies for due diligence or detailed analysis have been passed on to a team member with some help from me when needed.
- Projects (↓): This category is for ad hoc activities that involve analyzing data, looking into why something is not working, working on the brand, etc.,
- Reading (new category): I have been spending more time reading about how the pandemic is affecting our industry and looking into trends. A bit of this was done through a newsletter in emails before but decided to separate the category for this year. I am also spending my time reading when I want to take a break from other activities.
- Social Media (↓): The love-hate relationship for social media continues. I am struggling to find my voice but trying out a bunch of things to balance out lurking, commenting, and being intentional about tweets.
- Coursera (new category): M25 team and a couple of portfolio companies decided to do the Coursera course on happiness together. Every week, we meet and discuss that week’s topic.
- Analysis (↓): This is the time that I spend on scorecards for the companies that we are talking to and are moving along our investment process.
- Lunch (↑): You need to eat and take that break. I am usually working on something else while eating, and that’s why the percentage is so low.
- DD Prep (↓): Prepping internal docs when we are making the final decision to invest in companies.
Overall, I still enjoy the work that I am doing, but there are even more things that I need to work on. M25 partners and I have discussed what it means to have more responsibility and one day to become a partner.
M25 team is implementing OKRs across the organization, and once we finalize those, I will update this article with my personal goals for next year.
About Abhinaya Konduru
Abhinaya is an Associate at M25, where she helps make new investments and works with portfolio companies.
About M25
M25 is one of the most active venture capital firms focused solely on early-stage tech investments in the Midwest. Since the firm’s inception in 2015, M25 has invested in over 95 early-stage tech startups in over 20 cities across 11 states in the Midwest. M25’s objective, analytical model, and collaborative, the forward-thinking approach creates a large portfolio spanning several industries across the entire region, allowing them to establish M25 as a key node in the Midwest startup ecosystem.
