What Is The Future Of VC? Find Out At Disrupt SF

Many compare the process of picking a partner at a VC firm (or an angel) to back your idea to the act of getting married. You better be ready to be comfortable in the trenches with this person, because the startup journey is a roller coaster. Amidst the debate over value-added services vs. classic VC, what it really comes down to is picking the right partner to help you go down one of the most challenging paths of your life. At the end of the day, outsourcing services such as recruiting and marketing can help, but founders need to have an experienced and successful operator by their side who has been through the challenges of finding product-market fit, raising funding in tough climates, dealing with layoffs and much more. The VCs who will be sitting on the investor panel at Disrupt SF next week — Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), John Lilly (Greylock Partners), Bryan Schreier (Sequoia Capital), and Mike Volpi (Index Ventures) — have not only been in the trenches themselves, but have been helping some of the Valley’s new generation of successful founders, including Drew Houston, Kevin Systrom and others travel down their respective paths of entrepreneurship. Lee, who has helped lead investments in One Kings Lane, Rent The Runway and Trendyol, joined Kleiner Perkins in 1999 after founding a company and working in several operating roles at The Gap, Odwalla and others. She most recently founded her own seed-stage firm Cowboy Ventures. Lilly, who has led Greylock’s investments in Instagram, Dropbox, MessageMe, and Tumblr, was previously CEO of Mozilla, and also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007. Schreier has led Sequoia’s investments in Dropbox, and Hearsay among others, and prior to joining the firm, was the Senior Director of International Online Sales and Operations at Google, launching Google’s Europe headquarters and leading sales in China. Volpi serves on the boards of Path, Sonos, Lookout, Hortonworks, Soundcloud, Big Switch Networks, and Zuora, among others. Is there a resurgence of consumer after some of the fallout with the Series A Crunch? Are value-added services worth it? Are VC returns going to bounce back? Is there a diversity problem in the VC ecosystem? We’re going to be tackling these issues and more.