

Email Pain - cwan
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/12/email-pain.html

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wccrawford
I like how he doesn't have time to answer his email, but he has time to write
a pointless blog post about not having time to answer his email.

~~~
wyclif
It's a matter of taking responsibility for your priorities. It's just so much
easier to not do that and cry, "waaah, I can't answer all my email." He needs
an assistant.

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praptak
I don't get this concern:

 _"I've thought about getting an email assistant. But I am worried that
putting more capacity into the system will simply create more volume that will
eventually overwhelm the increased capacity."_

Ok, building more roads might entice more people to switch to cars. But not
every system has this positive feedback loop. Good secretaries have their ways
of discouraging unnecessary communication.

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GBKS
Sounds more like a communication problem rather than an email problem.

Startup idea: Email request box. An email account that logs everything that
comes in. The sender can check the status of their request and where they are
in the queue. You can simply "deny", "block", "answer later", send a pre-
formatted answer or "reply".

~~~
ShabbyDoo
Like help desk tickets :) The issue I see is that such a system makes visible
to all "the elephant in the room" that Fred Wilson is more important and more
powerful than most of the people sending him email. This is ok -- I accept
this and would like some visibility into the queue [Note that I've never
contacted him, so this is hypothetical]. However, he risks the public hoopla
which would come with his proclamation of the obvious. There seem to be a
bunch of unwritten social rules which preclude this sort of thing. Perhaps
this system could be portrayed publicly as his "secretary"? There certainly is
a long and accepted social tradition of the powerful putting a layer of
indirection between themselves and their public.

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neworbit
People who live much more mundane and low-visibility lives than Fred also have
too many demands on their time and can't do everything they want to or feel
like they should.

Seems like this is nearly everyone, in fact.

A VC's workload falls into several primary categories, which map back to
groupings that are probably more familiar to those of us on the entrepreneur
or employee side of the table: working with portfolio companies (Operations),
prospecting for new firms (Marketing), screening new firms to decide if they
want to invest (Purchasing), and raising capital for their next fund (Sales).

If you get good at this or even just high visibility, you can get deluged with
new firms wanting your investment. Fred is good at building his brand and
marketing himself/his firm, and now has the classic problem that we as
entrepreneurs all want: too many customer prospects; even when winnowed down
to the good ones, it's too many GOOD customer prospects - because a lot of
people with good companies like Fred/USV and because Fred is largely actually
doing well by his portfolio companies.

So what do you do when you have a high touch and/or service business and want
to grow? If you have more leads than sales people to close them, generally you
hire a good sales director, train some qualified folks on the idiosyncrasies
of your business, and staff up your sales team to match. Some level of this is
probably the right answer here, but unlike a conventional firm, USV can't do
this on a large scale.

That sounds odd, doesn't it. But venture funds are limited in size. They have
commitments from external investors to provide a certain amount of $. If they
start garnering phenomenal interest and everyone wants investment from USV,
Fred and others have to go raise a new fund. This is the gating factor on how
much VCs can invest, how much they can afford to have a huge staff to assist
in sourcing, screening, and closing companies. If you have a ton of capital to
put to work, you have huge management fees and can afford more of a staff (as
well as more $ in your own pocket).

So interestingly, Fred spends a while trying to jawbone down the price he pays
for his share of companies. This is in one metric a good idea for him because
he effectively gets a discount as to what the company is actually worth, but
is causing a big chunk of the problem he faces. He's only got a certain number
of dollars to spread around, and the more places he wants to invest in, the
more his time is spent discovering and exploring those firms - let alone
actually helping out with them. A busy VC is not an asset to the entrepreneur
over and above the $ invested, whereas if he has time to focus on the startup
firms that can be much more valuable. Ironically, success in VC generally
makes you no longer "smart money" as you are just a distracted guy with a
checkbook trying to juggle a dozen different board seats at once.

Fred would probably be better off getting a larger investment pool, putting
larger chunks of money to work, adding the right team members to help scale
USV, and focusing on making the portfolio companies more successful. His
counterpoint is probably that investing smaller amounts and knocking down the
valuation of the companies so that those smaller amounts buy bigger pieces of
the firm gives the investors in the VC fund better returns. But it would be
refreshing to see VCs focus more on adding value to and growing their
portfolio companies, and realizing that more capital and more personal
involvement are in fact a reasonable way to do that. Might even produce more
value for everyone involved - fund investors, entrepreneurs, and VCs - as well
as taking some heat off Fred to answer his email firehose personally.

