India is turning into a startups hub with the amount of fund flowing in from US/Japan/China and other countries. Some of the startups got an early exit making VCs & founders rich. Anyways, this post is not about funding scene in India. It is all about these investors and VC’s who are glorifying portfolios in twitter timelines.
The Problem with this
- Thumping new funding round for portfolio is no guarantee for portfolio turning into Unicorn.
- Your tweets put other founders in portfolio under some kind of pressure who are in raising boat and as a result instead of building business all they think about is raising round.
- You turn into a RT/Tweeting exercise portfolio instead of sharing your wisdom with the followers who are looking up to you for useful suggestions and advices.
- Some of these same founders whom you have been glorifying get egotistical and even start playing hardball with you as you are no more a majority stakeholder in it. So you basically gave an ego boost to them. We keep hearing such stories on regular basis.
- VCs job is to mentor, teach and inspire. It’s not making portfolio fund announcements or press releases. Do you similarly tweet when one of the founders leave your portfolio company or one of your company dies?
My Suggestion
- Keep a separate twitter feed which is meant for catering portfolio related announcements.
- Ask all your followers to visit that feed for all kinds of PR, funding, merger, announcement deals for your portfolio.
- We are looking forward to learn from you and your timeline. You are supposed to inspire us, share your thoughts, not portfolio announcements.