Founders Are Being Taught to Treat VCs Like ATMs.
But That Will Leave You Without A Real Partner When Things Get Hard.
I used to think “partner” was the strangest word in venture.
When I was a founder, the people on the other side of the table were, from my vantage point, pretty simple. They gave you money. They showed up to board meetings. They asked questions that sometimes felt like they were written by someone who hadn’t read your deck. And then, years later, when you finally crossed some finish line, they collected their returns. That was the deal. That was the relationship. So why on earth would you call that person a partner?
My first theory: it was just internal. They were partners with each other — the people inside the firm who split carry and shared a kitchen. Not partners with us. Just partners among themselves. That made more sense.
Then I crossed the table.
And now, after years on this side — after sitting through hundreds of founder conversations, after watching some companies crater and others catch fire — I finally understand what the title actually means. Or at least, what it’s supposed to mean. When it’s done right, you’re called a partner because you actually are one. Your job is to help. To protect. To show up when it’s hard, not just when it’s convenient. The word isn’t decorative. It’s aspirational. It’s a code.
But here’s what I keep seeing lately, and it’s bothering me more than I expected.
There’s a growing chorus — founders, accelerators, Twitter/X threads, forum posts — actively coaching founders to architect their companies and fundraises in a way that makes partnership structurally impossible. The pitch usually sounds like independence. It sounds like leverage. Some even call it “Founder mode”: Don’t give investors too much ownership. Keep them small. Keep them off the board. Keep them at a distance. Take the money and build. Super voting shares only. You don’t owe them anything. Don’t ever let them in.
I get the instinct. There are bad investors. There are investors who confuse activity with value, who pattern-match instead of think, who optimize for the narrative of helping rather than the work of it. I’ve seen them. I won’t pretend they don’t exist. And I’ll even grant that most investors — myself included — probably overestimate how much we can actually help. That’s a fair critique and worth sitting with.
But here’s what founders in that camp consistently underestimate: how pivotal good investors are when things get tough, and how dangerous it is to keep them fragmented, uninformed and at a distance.
Not just because fragmentation makes them unhelpful. But because structurally, absent investors are only called upon to make critical decisions at the most decisive — and often most vulnerable — moments in a company’s journey.
When you’ve distributed your cap table across a dozen investors each holding 0.5%, you haven’t created freedom — you’ve created a void. No one has enough ownership to really give a damn. No one has enough stake to pick up the phone at 11pm when something breaks. No one has enough skin in the game to roll up their sleeves and treat your problem like it’s their problem. Practically speaking, the math just doesn’t work. The value of deep engagement doesn’t scale down to a rounding error on someone’s portfolio spreadsheet.
What you get instead is a cap table full of people who technically call themselves investors but are functionally spectators. That’s not partnership. That’s cap-table free-riding with better branding.
And then there’s the other version — the relational one. Where the posture toward investors is adversarial by design. Where the philosophy is: you give me capital, I’ll give you the privilege of watching me build, and we’ll exercise mutual indifference until exit. I’ve watched founders build companies this way. Some of them succeed despite it. Most don’t.
Because here’s the thing no one wants to say out loud: even the best founder cannot make this journey alone.
The sheer number of people required to build something real. You need dollars. You need customers. You need employees who are brilliant and weird in exactly the right ways. You need introductions to people who don’t have a reason to take your call yet. You need someone who has seen this specific mistake before and can tell you, at 2pm on a Tuesday, whether it’s survivable. You need, in other words, partners. Actual ones.
Here’s the part that’s easy to miss when things are going well: this doesn’t matter yet.
When the metrics are up and to the right, when the fundraise closes oversubscribed, when the press is good and the product is humming — none of this relationship stuff feels urgent. You get the sensation of making progress without having to do the hard, important work of actually building trust. The absence of partnership is invisible in the good times. You can go months without a real conversation with your investors and it won’t show up anywhere that matters. No one will call you out or give you feedback. So founders tell themselves the relationship is fine, or that it doesn’t matter, or that they’ll deal with it later.
But every company that makes it usually endures multiple winters. A bank blows up. A key customer churns during a fundraise. A regulatory shift rewrites your unit economics overnight. A co-founder leaves at the worst possible moment. These things happen. They happen to good companies, good founders, good ideas. And when they do, the call comes — and what happens next depends almost entirely on the relationships you built before anyone needed anything.
I’ve been in those partner meeting. The one where I have to stand up and advocate for why we should write another check — another $5M, $10M, $20M — into a company that is clearly going through something hard. And I can tell you: it is a very different conversation depending on what kind of relationship exists. If the founder has been communicative, honest, present — if we’ve built a real partnership over years of small moments — that’s a story I can tell. I can make that case. I want to make that case. But if the updates stopped coming two years ago, if emails went dark when things got complicated, if the whole relationship was transactional from the jump — it’s nearly impossible to get people to make that gamble. Not because they don’t want to help. Because they don’t know who they’d be helping.
Trust is built in the boring middle, not the dramatic ends.
Which means right now — when capital is available, when terms are founder-friendly, when it feels like the market will always be this accommodating — is exactly the time to be thoughtful. Not later. Now is when you choose your partners carefully. Now is when you invest in those relationships, when the stakes feel low enough to be honest, when there’s room to build something real before you need it. Because winter always comes. And when it does, you want someone who’s willing to give you a coat — someone with actual incentive, actual ownership, actual skin in the game. Someone who shows up not because they have to, but because you’re partners.
Founders who internalize this — who understand that the relationship with their investors is a resource, not a tax — materially increase their chances of success. That’s not sentiment. It’s just how the game works. The best outcomes I’ve seen have almost always involved someone on the cap table who cared enough to do something other than wait and see what happens.
This is also, not coincidentally, the kind of founders I strive to work with. Not because the adversarial ones aren’t interesting or capable. But because I’ve found that the ones who know how to build partnerships — real ones, not transactional ones — tend to be better at building the rest of the business too. They know that value flows in both directions. They know that the relationship is part of the asset.
There are founders who want capital with no strings attached — who want money without partnership, checks without accountability, investors who disappear after wiring — and there are plenty of people willing to play that role. But let’s call it what it is. Those are not partners, regardless of what their title says.
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