Count your symbols 🟡 🔺 ❎ 🔷 . If you’re a VC, get your CFO to help. If you made it as far as secondary school, a calculator will do.
You are SoftBank.
Never mind that you’re playing with the money of MBS, the Saudi crown prince, whose favourite hobbies include sushi night with journalists (the journalists being on, and at, the table): what gets you going is thinking big.
For you, BP is like MBS: it’s oil, first and foremost.
Your investment thesis is beautiful companies and beautiful founders who speak well, present well, are super cool, and ask for a lot of money.
Because as a VC based in Asia, you know your bank charges a fortune for every transfer, so if there are fewer than 9 figures, why bother.
You are Kima.
Independent, you’ve got the keys to the house, since uncle Xavier Niel, who bankrolls you, has better things to do than manage the dosh day to day, what with his hush-hush trips to the US with an MEP, his stand-up show and his book.
Young go-getter, you’d have tied your tie round your head at the “afterwork”, as Paris calls office drinks, if you’d worked in the 80s. But it’s too late. And back then, the word didn’t exist.
Your investment thesis is simple: be a startup that’s cool, French and still alive.
Because your thing is meeting as many people as possible so you can say, like the bee in Jean-Paul Goude’s French TV ad, “I was there”. You score more times in a quarter than Rocco did in a year in his heyday, because what matters is quantity.
Spread and prey baby.
You are Benchmark.
You’re so old you lived through the dotcom bubble, and its bursting. That’s actually what made your name. Back then, AOL, eBay, MySQL and Metacafe left you rolling in cash, which mostly meant you could hang on to Uber through nearly ten years of losses.
But let’s be honest, the last time anyone saw you lead a round that impressed somebody, Evan Spiegel was still wetting the bed. (Then again, he got you a x250, so fair enough.)
Most founders assume you’ve come about the CFO job when you turn up at their office to hear them out, but you don’t mind. It keeps you “down with the kids”, as the young people say. Well, as they said back when you were already no longer young.
You are Y Combinator.
You came within a whisker of being some random container at Station F, the giant Paris startup campus, with a garish logo slapped on it. But on top of believing that a good startup must always have fresh fruit as well as the table football, you have a certain feel for trends. And you speak (vaguely) English.
From late 2020, you were already investing in crypto companies, and by the time ChatGPT came out, you’d already wolfed down at least 50 AI pitch decks. Incidentally, you turned down Mistral AI, saying it would never work in a European market.
For you, a good founder must have crashed at least 2 companies already, come out of a good university (but not too good either) and, above all, be under 30, which helps you feel young.
That said, you really need to drop the Stan Smiths and the hoodie. You’re not Mark Zuckerberg. You’re just his age.
You are Bpifrance.
Truth is, as France’s public investment bank, you don’t really know what you’re doing there, but somebody handed you a pile of dosh, so you tour the country to waste invest it, between dire events nobody wants to go to and grants handed out without the slightest logic.
You forgot long ago that what you were mainly asked to do was fund the local economy, and you much prefer scooping up the worst decks to come out of Village by CA, the Crédit Agricole bank’s incubators, and out of local incubators set up in village halls nobody rented any more, run by the area’s three local startuppers (after their latest bankruptcy).
A polytheistic insect farm? An app connecting hairdressers with scissor sellers? A social network to find the hottest M&A specialists in your area? An algorithm An AI that analyses your till receipt to suggest the best recipes? The worse it is, the more it catches your eye.
No two ways about it, you are the Warren Buffett of every bird in these woods. A visionary, your talent is matched only (and even then) by your intelligence, placed in the service of revolutionary innovation. Pragmatic and serious, you subscribe to Zero Bullshit, donate regularly and have even booked several calls at €300 per half hour. For no reason, just because you love doing good.
My name is Benjamin Charles, and I advise companies in finance, real estate and web3 on branding, positioning and content creation.
👉 Contact me, or reply to this post: benj@mincharl.es
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