People who live much more mundane and low-visibility lives than Fred also have too many demands on their time and can't do everything they want to or feel like they should.

Seems like this is nearly everyone, in fact.

A VC's workload falls into several primary categories, which map back to groupings that are probably more familiar to those of us on the entrepreneur or employee side of the table: working with portfolio companies (Operations), prospecting for new firms (Marketing), screening new firms to decide if they want to invest (Purchasing), and raising capital for their next fund (Sales).

If you get good at this or even just high visibility, you can get deluged with new firms wanting your investment. Fred is good at building his brand and marketing himself/his firm, and now has the classic problem that we as entrepreneurs all want: too many customer prospects; even when winnowed down to the good ones, it's too many GOOD customer prospects - because a lot of people with good companies like Fred/USV and because Fred is largely actually doing well by his portfolio companies.

So what do you do when you have a high touch and/or service business and want to grow? If you have more leads than sales people to close them, generally you hire a good sales director, train some qualified folks on the idiosyncrasies of your business, and staff up your sales team to match. Some level of this is probably the right answer here, but unlike a conventional firm, USV can't do this on a large scale.

That sounds odd, doesn't it. But venture funds are limited in size. They have commitments from external investors to provide a certain amount of $. If they start garnering phenomenal interest and everyone wants investment from USV, Fred and others have to go raise a new fund. This is the gating factor on how much VCs can invest, how much they can afford to have a huge staff to assist in sourcing, screening, and closing companies. If you have a ton of capital to put to work, you have huge management fees and can afford more of a staff (as well as more $ in your own pocket).

So interestingly, Fred spends a while trying to jawbone down the price he pays for his share of companies. This is in one metric a good idea for him because he effectively gets a discount as to what the company is actually worth, but is causing a big chunk of the problem he faces. He's only got a certain number of dollars to spread around, and the more places he wants to invest in, the more his time is spent discovering and exploring those firms - let alone actually helping out with them. A busy VC is not an asset to the entrepreneur over and above the $ invested, whereas if he has time to focus on the startup firms that can be much more valuable. Ironically, success in VC generally makes you no longer "smart money" as you are just a distracted guy with a checkbook trying to juggle a dozen different board seats at once.

Fred would probably be better off getting a larger investment pool, putting larger chunks of money to work, adding the right team members to help scale USV, and focusing on making the portfolio companies more successful. His counterpoint is probably that investing smaller amounts and knocking down the valuation of the companies so that those smaller amounts buy bigger pieces of the firm gives the investors in the VC fund better returns. But it would be refreshing to see VCs focus more on adding value to and growing their portfolio companies, and realizing that more capital and more personal involvement are in fact a reasonable way to do that. Might even produce more value for everyone involved - fund investors, entrepreneurs, and VCs - as well as taking some heat off Fred to answer his email firehose personally.