Being Swift, Nice & Straight.

A motto for dealflow and portfolio management. #carealot
At Kima Ventures, we see, connect and talk with a lot of entrepreneurs every single week. A lot ! On top of that, we need to manage our ongoing dealflow and current portfolio. One must never forget that we are in a people business. We must and we do care a lot about people. Our reputation matters as much as our returns (both are linked on the long run) and that’s why we are currently developing our operations and scaling our product in order to optimise and maximise our overall process and relationships with founders.
When I published that post, I knew that I would have to cope with it sometimes in my career. And here I am…
Governance is not an issue at Kima. We live under the “Great power comes with great responsibilities” motto. We are discussing our dealflow all together and each of the partners can decide to move forward or not. Xavier has the final word.
Therefore you lose less opportunities which are not in the consensus like Twitter, Blablacar, Capitaine Train or Zenly…
As for the rest… Discipline, Proactivity, Software and Support: We are working on it, individually and collectively.
Our software is already pretty good and we’re taking it up to the next level to support a larger, better managed dealflow and portfolio, as well as a collective intelligence & network.
Support is one of the biggest lie and illusion of the entire VC industry… However I believe that if great organisations like YCombinator or TheFamily have been able to tackle this subject with talent, there is no reason why we couldn’t build a solid base that works really well for all our companies ! VC Funds like Firstround.com have been doing a great job for instance…
Regarding Discipline and Proactivity, there are only two outputs at the end of the day: either things pile up and bring you down, or things run smoothly and you get shit done.
here are few hints for you to get to know me:
I turn Facebook & Twitter off to focus most of the day, I don’t take more than 2 lunches per week outside of the office, I wake up between 6 and 6.30am, I save readings for later, My average meetings/calls last 30 minutes or less, I don’t dig into subjects that I don’t / won’t understand enough to get interested, I don’t focus on geographies that I don’t understand either, when I communicate, things are straight and simple. I look for nice, singular and ambitious founders, building simple yet incredible things, with an insane learning & execution curve. I reject early when I doubt too much to focus on things that I want and can dig further.
I tend to be as honest as I can to the entrepreneurs I talk/write to. Sometimes it can be harsh, but it’s always benevolent. I get pretty angry at people pushing the boundaries…
Please excuse brevity and straight answers in my emails
Pick efficiency as your email pattern :)