Loved diving deeper with @stacyspikes oh his incredible journey building @MoviePass, being fired and then buying it back. The ultimate founder story.

Let's talk about something VCs rarely talk about publicly: our failures. The reality of venture capital is that most investments won't return the capital we put into them. Yet if you follow VCs online, you'd think every company is going from $0 to $100M in revenue or becoming a unicorn overnight. There are three types of investment failures, making less than you invested. 1. Shutdowns. This is the most common. Companies run out of runway, struggle to find product-market fit, attempt several pivots, and eventually decide to shut down. Often, this process takes much longer than it should. As investors, we sometimes recognize the likely outcome before founders do, which is understandable given how much founders have personally invested in their companies. 2. Acquisition below a 1x return. These are often acqui-hires or smaller acquisitions designed to find a home for the team and give founders a chance to move forward. Occasionally, these deals can turn into meaningful returns if the acquiring company's stock appreciates significantly. But most of the time, they represent an investment that didn't work out financially. 3. Fraud. This is the most frustrating and damaging category because it's fundamentally different from the first two. I've personally experienced two situations involving founder misconduct over the past decade. It's always shocking with diligence, references and multiple investors this can still happen. I thought it was always a lack of diligence when it happened and then I realized some people are just good at being bad. What concerns me most is how little the industry talks about these situations. I've seen founders involved in serious issues go on to raise money again, sometimes without new investors ever contacting previous investors. There are legal and confidentiality considerations, but the lack of information sharing creates opportunities for the same problems to repeat. Periods like now with an abundance of capital and intense competition can often encourage bad behavior. The reality is that most of our investments won't produce the outcomes we originally hoped for. That's the nature of taking risk in venture capital. Even the best investors get plenty wrong, and a high success rate isn't necessarily the goal if it means avoiding the risks required to generate exceptional returns. Yet our industry overwhelmingly celebrates the winners while staying quiet about everything else. We encourage founders to embrace failure, learn quickly, and be transparent about what isn't working. Shouldn't we hold ourselves to the same standard? If we're going to celebrate the wins publicly, we should be willing to discuss the losses too.