May The 4th Be With You!
/Reposting this Partner PoV, authored by Scott Lenet in 2016, in celebration of today’s Star Wars holiday ;)
Darth Venture
What VCs can learn from the management style of the Sith
At my prior firm, 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.
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.