Why a Reactive Venture Capital Strategy Fails Family Offices
In this short video, TFOA founder Marc Sharpe explains why a reactive venture capital strategy quietly burns through a family office’s time and talent — and how flipping to a proactive, criteria-first model leads to better deals and a protected investment team.
It’s a companion to TFOA’s whitepaper on family office venture capital investing.
Transcript
If your venture capital strategy is reactive, you’re losing. Here’s what happens. A deal comes in from a friend or someone in your network. The investment team allocates resources. An analyst spends weeks modeling J-curves into something that approximates reality. By the time everyone agrees it’s not a good fit, you’ve burned precious hours on a deal that never had a chance. Multiply that by every email that lands in the inbox. That’s a venture program built on noise.
The fix is to flip the model. Define your criteria first. What stage? What sectors do you actually understand? What check size? What exit profile? Then go find deals that match.
A proactive process protects your team. It also gets you to better deals, because the discipline of saying “we only look at X” creates room to actually evaluate X well. Reactive teams chase. Proactive teams choose.
