The mechanics of venture capital
A guide for scientists
Venture capital (VC) is an integral part of the quantum tech ecosystem, so I thought it would be fun to do a bit of a dive into the mechanics of VC. I used to think of VCs as this mysterious group of people, who existed to give you money, if only you managed to impress them somehow. My guess is that other academics, who haven’t actively looked into what VCs do, might feel a similar way.
As scientists, we're actually already used to mysterious groups of people who give us money. But I think the difference is that if you're an academic, surrounded by other academics, you can get quite far just by absorbing, through osmosis, best practices for grant writing.
The VC world is different to the world of government grants, and if you're a scientist considering entrepreneurship, you won't have years to spend in a like-minded community to internalize how to do things. You’ll need to get out there into the world, talk to people, and learn from them. A basic grasp of the mechanics of VC will give you a framework to make sense of what you’ll learn in those conversations (it might also make interpreting the quantum technology news easier!).
This basic framework is what we'll be looking at here.
