The Next Chapter for the VC Platform Global Community
During my tenure leading Underscore VC’s Community and Platform, one of the greatest highlights was being part of the VC Platform Global Community. My first experience with this community was our first “annual summit” in August 2016. I was 2 months into my role and had no idea what I was doing in this new and ambiguous world of “platform”.
I finally felt a sigh of relief as I met incredible people who pioneered the concept of building a platform to support the growth of their firm’s portfolio companies. The community was unbelievably generous with their time and expertise to help as I navigated my way around my new role. At that point the community was small; maybe 40 people, primarily representing firms in NYC and SF.
Today that community is an incredibly diverse group of 300+ people from Paris to Tel Aviv, Sydney to Chicago, Boston to San Francisco and growing daily. The group’s members collectively support some of the more important and valuable companies in the world with their firms collectively managing over $100 billion of capital.
For the last two years, I’ve had the privilege of spending my nights and weekends helping to grow this community alongside some incredible friends including Maria, Lindsay, Marianne, Andrew, Keji, Stephanie, Bethany, Jordan, Ryan, Mike and many more.
As a peer-led community that operates through a meritocratic leadership model, we had no idea what this community would have turned into. When it was originally championed by some of the earliest platform leads including Dan, Brittany, Meltem, Kim, Chaz, Adrian, Danya, Katie, and so many more, I doubt that they had any expectation for this group to grow to something more than just another email listserve.
In just the last year, we’ve been able to make it much more than that. This year’s summit was a full-day gathering bringing together nearly 200 of the smartest leaders in the industry.
We launched a lot of new initiatives over the last two years to scale the community and add value such as the annual industry-wide platform compensation survey.
Today we’re excited to share the newest additions to the VC Platform Global Community website. Specifically, we have launched the first-ever jobs board for VC firms to list platform-related roles at their firms.
Additionally, we have launched a new curated content repository for all the best VC platform-specific articles and blogs (an idea kicked off by Joel). Finally, we’ve relaunched the public member directory where anyone can search and meet the top platform leaders in the industry.
And potentially of most excitement, we now have an official brand and logo (Thanks to Marianne) for the community as well as a twitter handle (follow us!).
I know that this is just the beginning for this community. As I “retire” from the community and transition fully into my new role at True Search, I’m excited to see what some of the newest peer-nominated community leaders will do to further support and improve this amazing community. I hope you get a chance to meet the newest co-chairs of this community: Carolina, Chris, Devin, Devon, Laurel, Lauren and Stephanie; they’re all really incredible humans.
Are you a VC Platform leader who should be part of this growing community? Apply to join here (it only take 2 minutes!)
