VC associates can be vital to firms and founders—when they’re empowered to be
If you pay attention to VC Twitter (or X, as it’s now called), you may have witnessed a heated debate recently: Should startup founders talk to VC associates—those lowly greenhorns in a venture firm’s hierarchy—or are those meetings pointless wastes of time?
The discussion was lively, as founders like Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock wrote: “For the record, I’ve been pitching associates for well over a decade. Here’s the number of times i’ve found it helpful: ZERO.” Box CEO Aaron Levie meanwhile defended the value (and honor) of associates: “Every partner we pitched passed, but one associate fought to push the deal through, saving us.” In the post, Levie tagged Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid, revealing that he was that heroic associate. Hamid, Marc Andreessen, Jack Altman would all eventually chime in on the debate.
You know that scene in a teen drama after a cafeteria food fight, where someone sits back and says, “Wait, who started it?” In this case, that person may very well be serial entrepreneur Darren Marble, who originally tweeted: “Talking with a VC Associate will almost never convert into actual funding. Just stating the facts.”
When I find Marble, he takes pains to be clear that he’s not hating on VC associates at all, but rather that it’s just not an optimally efficient use of a founder’s time to meet with a junior person.
“I think it’s generally a mistake for founders that are wanting to raise capital, especially from venture, to spend the bulk of their time talking to lower-level people that are just not decision-makers,” Marble told Term Sheet.
Brad Kam, Unstoppable Domains cofounder, agrees: “The associate is never the decision-maker. You don’t be mean, or refuse to speak to them of course, but fundamentally that’s not how you get a deal done.”
And yet, while it’s true that partners write the checks, and the most senior partners often have the most power to get a deal done, many of the folks Term Sheet spoke to pointed out that associates can be something of a secret weapon for a shrewd founder raising capital.
Founders and associates are both in the building phase of their careers, notes IVP general partner Somesh Dash. That creates a mutual understanding that can fuel a powerful relationship. “Founders have to make their companies work, right? There’s no fallback,” Dash said. And for associates trying to break into the VC business, there’s only one path to success: “In school, you can get an A through F but here you’re either an investor in the startup or you’re not—it's binary.”
Alex Chung, who's an associate at Chai Ventures, agrees: “Associates and founders, especially first-time founders, have this shared desire to prove themselves.”
Associates can also serve as a sort of backchannel, providing a founder with valuable information about a VC firm’s investment process. “There's politics within every firm and usually you need buy-in from multiple people—maybe the partner championing your deal is really excited but, like, there's a lot of hesitation from the partnership about other things,” said Steph Mui, founder and CEO at PIN (and a former NEA associate). Associates can be “great allies,” Mui said, offering a valuable window into those inner workings.
Understanding these subtleties can be a big help to founders running through the harrowing fundraising gauntlet. Ultimately though, founders have to ruthlessly optimize their time and that means being discerning when it comes to associates. Are associates a vital part of the dealmaking process? If they are, great, and if not, that’s what doesn’t optimize founders’ time and can lead to the dreaded “long no,” said Rob Biederman, managing partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners.
No one is just their resume of course, and resumes have a funny way of underselling or overselling a person. Just because someone’s an on-paper-perfect GP doesn’t mean they’ll be an able (or willing) advocate. And just because someone’s an associate doesn’t mean they can’t be a vital, long-term partner for a fundraising founder.
Does that settle the Twitter debate? Probably not. As IVP’s Dash notes though, if nothing else, the debate about associates “is probably a good reminder to treat every interaction respectfully.”
Because you never know who someone’s going to be someday.
Elsewhere…Gecko, a Pittsburgh-based robotics company, recently secured $100 million in Series C funding to expand its defense technology operations. Fortune covered the company’s founding story, from its beginning as a senior project at a small Pennsylvania college. —Rachyl Jones
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
