“Darth Ventures” and the efficacy of Sith management techniques
/By Scott Lenet
Everyone loves to joke how venture capital is the “Dark Side,” and most of the VCs I know are good-natured about simply accepting the comparison. It’s probably better than “vulture capital,” which was how we were ridiculed when I first started in the business in the early 90s.
At my prior fund, my DFJ Frontier co-founder David Cremin coined the term “Darth Venture” in the early 2000s in one of his all-too-frequent clever moments, so I suppose we bear some responsibility for propagating the rhetoric that VCs are like the Sith, the champions of the Dark Side. (Click here to read David's original article)
While I personally identify with (young) Obi-Wan Kenobi, sometimes you just need to lean into the dominant discourse in your industry and accept how others view you. With that mindset, I thought it would be interesting to explore whether there is anything constructive that venture capitalists can glean from the Dark Side.