Agile Coaches Make the Best Venture Capitalists - #44

I Would Know.

Assumptions and Definitions:

• Agile Experience - You’ve been working in Agile/Scrum for 7-10+ years

• Agile Coach - You’ve been working in agile as a coach or consultant for 5-7+ years

• Multiple Projects - You’ve helped teams build 5+ products or services

• Multiple Markets - You’ve worked in more than just 3 industries (IT, healthcare, govt, entertainment, sports, etc)

The key here is [exposure] and [variety]. If you’re in the consulting world and you’ve been able to help many different clients and companies build products and services over the years, I’d strongly suggest you consider looking into venture capital, private equity, or investing in businesses.

The old Agile for All Team

Why?

I’m into my 20th year of agile this year. It’s amazing to look back and realize my life was fundamentally changed in 2004 when I first learned about agile. Scrum added the framework necessary to fully live a life of agile/scrum to it’s fullest. In my years of conference-going, meetup-attending, social-gatherings, etc etc… I’ve had hundreds of conversations with many different types of people in business, however, one particular persona sticks out as the best experienced-based candidate for venture investing: Agile coaches.

Let’s Start with the Normal

Below is a list of the usual suspects in venture investing:

• MBA or Business Graduate - Went into business management, maybe dipped toe into banking or finance, did that for a handful of years, learned enough to be ‘sophisticated’ with the upper tiers of management operations, found opportunity to get into PE or VC. NORMAL.

• Banking or Finance Career - Not too dissimilar from the business graduate. NORMAL.

• Successful business person over many years, lifestyle business, scaled enough to create war-chest of funds, met a friend who suggested he go invest. NORMAL.

• Successful entrepreneur with exit, rolling exit winnings into venture fund, usually syndicated or F&F (family and friends) to start. RARE.

These Don’t Make for Good Investors

• The MBA grad has learned to talk the talk. They don’t actually know how to build a business, or run one… or even actually spent time in one.

• The banking career sees business as inputs and outputs. They lack the deep-in-the-trenches understanding of business building. Numbers don’t make businesses, people do.

• The successful business man understands one niche really well. They are limited in their breadth and depth. However, they can be a ninja when it comes to investing in their industry.

• The successful operator to exit to VC fund doesn’t make them a good investor. It just means they didn’t give up over 10 years working 16+ hour days. There are plenty of reasons why first funds by an entrepreneur don’t do well.

Agile Coach Venture Capitalist #ACVC?

There is one persona of individual whom I’ve had decades of experiences with: It’s the agile coach. From my hundreds of conversations with experienced, skillful, and sophisticated agile coaches with a flurry of varied experiences and successes… these individuals actually harness the truest depth of experiences required to make informed investments in companies!

Hear me out:

• An agile coach works in the trenches. They know the lifecycle of product and service development.

• An agile coach has experienced the financial constraints, politics, and bureaucracy inherent in any scaled organization.

• An agile coach understands teams, the dynamic of teams, and the best collaborative environments to help teams succeed.

• An agile coach is a jack-of-all trades. They understand the software, tools, techniques, and frameworks that make sense to use when building complex software.

• An agile coach is a deep well of multi-faceted knowledge. Great coaches I know pull in systems thinking, value streams, team dynamics, and many other great frameworks and models to help organizations optimize and thrive.

• An agile coach is a communicator. This is their primary mechanism of encouraging, digging in, asking questions, socializing, and facilitating problem solving. An agile coach knows how to find root cause issues.

• An agile coach has touched all levels of management. From the executives to the in-the-trenches individuals. A seasoned agile coach knows how to be all-things-to-all-men for the greater good of the system. Access and engagement are their hallmarks.

• An agile coach understands the technicals behind the work that is done. They need not be an expert, but they understand the total system at play. Seeing the whole of the problem is their superpower.

• An agile coach is a lifelong learner. Diligence on an investment? Agile coaches know how to dig. They know how to spot good and bad patterns. They’ve “been here before.”

I cannot tell you how many times in the more [recent years] that I’ve sat down with a experienced agile coach and wondered: “Why aren’t you maximizing your returns by helping startups crush it (and get equity)?” or “Why aren’t you investing your war chest into companies you know you can help guide to profitability?”

It’s what I’ve been doing for 8 years!

I’m fully alive when I’m helping others.

I find my place in life to be unique:

• I’m an agile coach. It’s my lifeblood.

• I’ve built companies to exit and I’ve built venture funds.

I have an unfair and outsized advantage over every other single venture fund in existence:

• I can train and coach any team, startup, and business to better product delivery and ROI using Agile and Scrum. What VC fund do you know of that trains, equips, and coaches their investments to success???

• As a multi-business builder in multiple industries, I’m well equipped to help.

• I know product development, marketing, and media.

• I love helping people succeed.

I feel like I need to trumpet this idea to the larger world. #ACVC anyone? There are thousands of agile coaches around the world that fall into this bucket. It’s still a small group… but wow… the mental power!

Frankly, I believe that a venture fund built only with agile coaches would be one of the most successful venture firms of all time. Hows $1B+ AUM sound?

Sounds juicy…

Should we begin?

Or… for the rest of you who aren’t agile coaches… what do (you) need to begin?

All the best,
ps

[Send this to your agile friends… maybe they need to know]

Listen to this post here.