📖 This article is part 2 of a wider series on "Founder relationships 101 for MENA VCs", you can check out earlier instalments here.
There is a peculiar moment that exists in every venture deal, somewhere between the wire transfer clearing and the work of actually building the company beginning in earnest.
The press release is out, with its usual choreography of LinkedIn announcements and congratulatory comments from people who, in many cases, the founder has met exactly once, or not at all.
And the founder, who has spent the previous six months in something close to permanent performance mode for the benefit of a dozen prospective investors, is suddenly faced with a slightly disorienting reality, that the people whose money they took are now, in some structural sense, in their lives for the better part of a decade.
What happens in the next ninety days, in our reading of the conversations for this edition, sets the tone for almost everything that follows.
The post-investment phase is, of course, exactly where the bulk of the value-destruction referenced in the Khosla statistic actually occurs. But it's also, conversely, where the most useful investor work gets done, and the difference between those two outcomes is almost never a matter of value-add ambition.
It's a matter of the quieter, less glamorous, more operationally specific work of setting the relationship up to actually function over the next decade.
Governance, cadence, expectation-setting, and (most importantly, in our reading of the source material) looking after the founder behind the founder.
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The first 90 days: governance scaffolding
Of all the post-investment moves we discussed across our eight conversations, the one that came up most consistently as something founders genuinely needed but weren't reliably getting, was the basic institutional scaffolding work, data rooms, board structure, reporting cadence, legal hygiene, the unglamorous infrastructure that, properly laid down in the first ninety days, prevents an enormous amount of pain later on.
The most basic thing, I think, that an investor can provide is governance, especially at an early stage, putting it in place from the outset. The data room, the accounting, the financial management, managing a board as you fundraise, being properly prepared for all of that, having your legal structure in place. The last thing we want as a Palestinian fund is for a deal to fall apart over governance issues. We have more than enough other things a deal can fall apart over.
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