MENA Venture Capital is ripe for a ground up rewrite

1/ >90% of VCs have little to no background in the technologies that they’re attempting to invest in. Instead they outsource basic DD to TMT consulting shops who talk a good game but themselves outsource to “experts”

2/ Far too many GPs have never operated a business, instead having had access to family money, or the stamp of a government run incubator, resulting in the blissfully ignorant spewing of unsolicited advice and a penchant for writing cheques with other people’s money

3/ The value add of most VCs begins and ends at the point at which you’re able to convince them to sign the definitive docs to close your next round. Consider yourself blessed if you haven’t been paraded in front of potential GPs at your VC’s annual investor day

4/ Please could you send me everything on this 47 point list is a sadly common strategy to build out a competitive dataset that no one save for the intern will ever look at again. Also a crude form of founder punishment to measure one’s pre-term sheet hoop jumping abilities

5/ When the going gets tough, they’re the first to get going. Cofounder conflict? Government insurrection? Bridge round falling apart? Buy me out is the cry *or* let me embed myself so deep in your cap table that even investors with free Zoom accounts will stop taking your calls

6/ Unsolicited advice is second nature. The analyst armed with an MBA and a deck is convinced that throwing 37 engineers at route optimisation AI will get deliveries back on track, whilst you know that your Ops Manager’s hesitant Pashto has created a driver leadership vacuum

7/ What happens when two or more MENA VCs meet? A conference stage spontaneously sprouts around them. Pretending to grok VC has taken precedence to actually building early and meaningful relationships with founders

8/ A lack of conviction and focus has lead to the inability to explicitly decline and move on. Instead conversations and email threads fizzle into oblivion until pre-Series A FOMO kicks in, resulting in a beg-plead-let-me-know-how-i-can-be-helpful