Playing in Traffic
True opportunities are the result of cumulative random intersections.
To understand how VCs successfully find promising investments, it’s illustrative to take a look at the sources of the five recent NextView ones which I championed within our firm:
Referral from Series A co-investor who liked a company but said it was “too early” — he mentioned it after catching up for virtual coffee
Referral from an angel investor who I ran into at an event (which took place just pre-covid)
Inbound cold email based on a blog post that I had written a while back based on our firm’s “everyday economy” positioning
Founders who saw me speak on a panel a year prior
Founder who I have been building a relationship for over five years knowing that he’ll eventually start a company in his domain expertise
One of these above is not like the other. The last one was very deliberate. And is part of a methodical approach that I personally, and we at NextView, use to track extremely talented people. This was a classic instance of a VC-Founder relationship building story that only happened because we have kept in touch with one another through the tech ecosystem for years.
At first glance, all of the other investments appear kind of random. No, they weren’t the result of a systematic approach. They kind of just happened. But it wasn’t by luck.
I had a mentor once tell me, “You can only get hit if you’re playing in traffic.” It stuck with me.
If you look outside right now, it’s spring — both literally and metaphorically, as we’re all emerging from the pandemic lockdown over the past year.
Soon it will be time and you’ll have the opportunity to go to that after-dinner drinks event, attend that conference, have a random quick coffee meeting, or even speak at a networking session. Do it. The challenge with any loose-purpose networking activity is that it’s never quite clear what attending that specific will yield. Any one of them is completely fungible… and skippable. That’s why that senior partner in the corner office eschews these kinds of things, or reluctantly attends only a select few.
But attending (or deciding not to) seemingly random networking activities is cumulative. Especially early in your career, it’s beneficial to force serendipity and to build upon it. You never know who you’ll meet for the first time at a startup-tech gathering, or who you’ll run into again who you haven't seen in a long while. Maybe it’s an executive whose friend just joined a new company, an angel investor who just invested in one, or a co-investor whose firm is pursuing a theme that coincidentally, you are too.
As an alternative, it can sometimes be too easy to be heads down researching and exploring a narrow market roadmap. Or staying inside the (metaphorical) office just employing whatever sourcing playbook your firm has set up or maybe even you’ve devised.
True opportunities are by definition opportunistic, exploiting chances offered by immediate circumstances without regarding a broader plan. The best way to make these opportunities happen isn’t by doing the same structured thing over and over again — it’s by playing in traffic. Getting into activities where there are a number of people intersecting with the chance for inadvertent positive connections is high.
So get out there and play in traffic… You just might get hit!