@Marcelino Pantoja - I'm glad I caught up with this one. A really great piece.

Building multi-billion dollar organizations goes a long way in garnering influence.

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"In today’s ecosystem, however, companies are increasingly able to have as much, if not higher, narrative leverage than VC firms. The top companies—and especially their founders—are more known than their VCs. At the extreme end, Patrick Collison has much more ability to attract investment, customers, and hires than any of the VCs on his cap table. Every year there’s an increasing number of founders at each stage who have higher brand leverage than what VCs can bring to the table. This is both due to the growing primacy of founders as well as the relative stagnation venture has had beyond brand network effects."

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"Too often we focus on how much money a company can raise. But money is rarely an ends. Instead, it’s a resource to spend to functionally derisk the company. Historically, capital was the scarcest resource. Venture capital as an industry was built and structured around capital scarcity as the most important blocker on company success.

But increasingly it isn’t scarce anymore. And it certainly isn’t the main blocker for many of the top companies. Talk to top tech companies today and raising capital is ironically one of the easier aspects of building and derisking the company. Hiring and retaining a talented team is far harder. Acquiring and retaining customers is harder. Understanding and getting the team coordinated on what to build is harder. Oh, and did I mention that hiring and retaining a talented team is far harder?

This is the CEO’s job: to raise and allocate the capital needed, but also to build a team capable of building the product needed and getting distribution. All while understanding what the company needs to build and helping the team understand and orient around it."

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