What’s a VC’s most important and hardest part of the job?

Gustavo and I recently talked about what venture capitalists do. In this article we look at each activity and try to and position it on a “most important/hardest matrix”.

The X axis defines the most important activities venture capitalist have to do. In the previous post, Gustavo and I discussed the main generic activities that investors do and broke them down into smaller parts.Today we will insert generic activity and sub activity on the X-axis to classify them by importance. As, one is always caught up in to do list and may sometime lack ranking activities based on what is most important and what is crucial for the business.
The Y axis defines difficulty. In other words, we are measuring what’s hardest to get done.

One may wonder why we are placing activities on such a match matrix. Controversy has erupted over what Venture Capitalists’ job description :

some dedicate much effort at helping portfolio startup founders operate the business on a day-to-day basis ;
others show up at board meetings to offer insights;
a third group relinquishes board presence and advises entrepreneurs only when called on. World-renowned leader turned Business Angel turned VC, Fabrice Grinda is a proponent of the latter approach.

In the video, Gustavo and I look at each activity and place it on the matrix and we explain their location.