A short message - one year in VC
Reflections from 1 year of being a ROTI chaser, Project Manager & 'Insights' guy (with no offense meant to anyone)
For the record: ROTI means Return On Time Invested.
“I want to be a VC so that I can brainstorm & help founders” — says the Pre-AI overpaid midwit with his IIT/IIM degree and 2 year Power Point monkey stint at an MBB firm. This product of human civilization has never sold a thing in his life — but has been sold all sorts of fanciful fuckery.
The ‘modern’ VC firm hires Analysts as “pre-AI labor backfills” while their AI systems get up to speed. This is, btw, something I tell candidates to their face during interviews.
VC is going in the direction of the HFT era — every tenured VC fund manager is deploying capital to build proprietary signals, which in an AI world become cheaper & therefore more commoditized.
VC is no longer a ‘high margin boutique’, it is a ‘low margin commodity play’ but which has a strong ‘bi-modal outcome distribution’. The best VC funds generate jaw dropping IRRs, the worst are as good as Charity (or, as I would say: “unilateral wealth transfer from middle class Western pensioners to not yet middle class Indians”)
Nothing I’ve written above would surprise another VC investor. But this is 2025…
In 2024, when I got the offer from Z47 to join Aakash & Divyanshi at DeVC, I wasn’t sure what to expect from being “on the other side” — I had made a few Angel investments, heard a ton of podcasts on how VC firms operate and I’d seen the full spectrum of VCs (good/bad/terrible) as a founder.
I told myself: “I had some incredible investors in my founder journey, I hope to be as good as them one day — they were decisive, had clarity & were patient” the 3 things a founder can ask from an investor.
Imagine being told 9 months into your job: “Your new job description is to fire your pre-AI self by building an AI system.” — literally what Avnish dropped on me (becoming Post-AI)
What has changed in the past one year? 💡
The key & only change in the past one year is that I’ve made the transition from founder/operator to investor:
You become an investor when you have a clear mental model for:
Your hunting ground — I’ve found mine. It is on certain small pockets of the Internet.
Your sourcing mechanism — I’ve figured out how to sift through my content-led inbound channel in a structured way.
Your framework to process a company — I’ve learnt this from our team, run the ‘process’ a dozen times now, it has become muscle memory.
Your founder archetype to work with — I’ve always had mine, doubling down on this. Mine isn’t the “know it all” delulu artist — it is the irrational optimist who “will figure it all (somehow) but will take help”
Your reason to be an investor — The last one year hasn’t felt like work, it has been fun! But that isn’t a good reason — I don’t know what business I would start & I know I’m generally unhireable / insufferable to work with. Hence, an investor.
What was as per expectations? 😊
Project Management is at the core of the investing job — not founder calls, project management. The best VC firms have the tightest process around their CRM. Most investors are project managers (so am I).
This is a ROTI business — Return On Time Invested (courtesy Jitesh from Leo Capital). There are always 100s of things to get done — you will piss a lot of people off but you have to chase ROTI.
Highly misunderstood profession — “you’re an investor, we can catch-up for coffee, that is anyways your job”. No my dear, I can’t even poo in my own office in peace because of the workload.
I owe the reader a piece on common misconceptions about VC — I’ll leave it for another time.
What was not as per expectations? 🤔
The amount of work done to make an investment — perhaps DeVC & Z47 are the exception. We have a copious amount of notes on a company (founder history, conversation transcripts, reference checks, customer calls etc). The bar for ‘acceptable’ work doesn’t change with cheque size, it is always high!
VC is an Arms Race — firms are deploying an arsenal of expensive techniques (social listening, structured mining, network events etc) to be the first to meet a prospective founder. It won’t be long until our industry issues pre-birth Term Sheets to pre-pregnancy ladies.
Some of the conversations I’ve heard have made me change my perspective on several people. I’m glad I heard them, but also wish I hadn’t. That’s all for this one.
What has gone well?👍
“I’m lovin it” — When I’m at work, I lose track of time. It doesn’t feel like work. Every day is a new learning opportunity.
DeVC OS — We’ve built an Agentic system from the ground up to manage our deal lifecycle, automate tasks & unlock team bandwidth. Our OS is complete, our AI Analyst today does 25% of the work which a human Analyst can do.
Pushed out of the comfort zone — DeVC (like Z47) has a high performance culture. I don’t think I’ve worked this hard in many years. But I also don’t think I’ve learnt so much in years.
What has NOT gone well? 👎
On multiple occasions, I’ve had to drop the ball on investing to prioritize operations (e.g. our content flywheel, events cadence and Tech/OS build out)… Ideally, this shouldn’t have happened but life gets in the way.
On some occasions, I’ve not been decisive enough to make a call or push our team — more in Anti-Portfolio.
On select occasions, I’ve incorrectly prioritized opportunities, resulting in misses — more in Anti-Portfolio.
The Portfolio💪
DeVC has a great concept of Collective wins & losses. While internally we attribute ‘points’ for sourcing, winning & supporting — we collectively own the portfolio. A team member might be the ‘POC’ — but we are all responsible.
We’ve made 40+ investments since I joined, the 3 which I could be credited with (if we operated differently) are:
Stealth (D2C | Regional snack foods brand | Angel round)
Stealth (B2B | Construction Chemicals | Pre-Seed round)
Unannounced (SaaS/AI | Voice AI Infrastructure | Seed+ round)
Not a lot of investments this year, I agree. But my focus was on building the Operating System to manage the portfolio, streamlining the investment process & a few more things.
The Anti-Portfolio 😅
For me, an Anti-Portfolio company is a high bar — it is a company which I have evaluated closely, wanted to invest in but not been able to invest:
Swish (D2C | Quick Food Delivery | Seed round) — I was early but dropped the ball due to our firm-wide offsite (never again)
Alienkind (D2C | QSR | Seed round) — I was too late
Stealth (FinServ | B2B2C Wealth | Seed round) — Process goof-up from my end
I’ve spent half of this first year in VC intentionally not investing — to free up time to build the OS. Hence, I expect this list to be longer next year.
Next year?
For Year 2, I have 3 simple goals to accomplish:
Investing: 5 fresh investments, at least one follow-on investment & hopefully one large cheque investment (fresh or follow-on).
DeVC OS: Our AI Analyst should be able to do 75% of the work which a human Analyst does.
Team: Our headcount is growing. Process, ramping up & onboarding will be something I will prioritize.
Closing thoughts
I don’t think I’ve had this much fun — investing, building & doing whatever else it takes. Big shoutout to the DeVC team — Aakash, Divyanshi & Mohit — who have to tolerate 100s of Notion, WhatsApp & email pings everyday from me.
It has been a great pleasure building DeVC as part of the Z47 platform — I’ve enjoyed all my interactions with Avnish, Vikram, Rajat & other Z47 team members (I can’t say the same for them).
Until next year for a work update👋
Congratulations Rahul. I write a weekly newsletter on VC, startups and everything in between. would love to hear your feedback :)