How Venture Capitalists Can Provide Value Beyond Investing

How can VCs differentiate themselves by adding value beyond their investments? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. 

Answer by Kunal Lunawat, Investor and Operator, Managing Partner at Agya Ventures, on Quora: 

The hallmark of a good venture fund rests in its commitment to assist its portfolio companies to grow and to enable its CEOs navigate ambiguity, inherent to an early-stage company. A few simple ways VCs are rounding up their time and resources to help their portfolio companies grow are listed below:

1. Help with business development: Venture funds, especially ones focused on a particular sector, have deep-rooted ties with industry and can leverage those relationships to expedite the sales cycle of their portfolio companies. It is not uncommon for partners at venture funds to call on their network and base of limited partners to assist portfolio company CEOs with sales and business development.
2. Hiring: As investors plugged into the technology ecosystem, good venture funds have a rolodex of former founders, senior engineers from big tech, and generalists looking for the next meaningful opportunity. As effective hiring continues to be one of the biggest drivers of an early-stage company’s success, funds strive to work with their portfolio companies in bringing the right talent on board.
3. Strategy: Leveraging their access to data points through their portfolio and beyond, partners at venture funds assist portfolio company CEOs in triangulating the right KPIs and benchmarking them with industry standards. This often helps CEOs cut out the noise, double down on what matters and get a sense of where the early-stage market is at while gunning for the moonshots.
4. Showing up: The startup journey is a marathon, sprinkled with varying intensities of sprints. Through all of this, good venture funds are committed to showing up for their portfolio company CEOs – to provide feedback, act as a sounding board, and be plain supportive, especially when things don’t pan out the way they were intended to.

This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.