It took Bob less than three years living in the Bay Area to establish himself as a leading VC (an impressive feat even by Silicon Valley’s standards). The iconic speech he gave at MIT became known as the Subliminal VC speech, a true ode to entrepreneurship.
Bob’s story was the stuff of legends: In a mere couple of months, he managed to launch a $500M fund (called Subliminal Ventures) while scaling x23 to unicorn status (quadrupling its burn rate in the process) and taking a prominent role in the coveted VC space as a thought leader and a lead investor.
But success often leads to controversy and there was now a growing rumor in town that Bob had become greedier and meaner, going as far as multiplying his startup’s burn rate tenfold in an attempt to achieve massive scale. For some, he simply became a better Silicon Valley VC by mastering the art of blitzscaling. But for others (including his Boston and New York-based friends), his new attitude was a sign of pure betrayal of everything he stood for and of the contrarian values he upheld in his iconic speech at MIT.
From the outside, Bob didn’t seem to mind all the polarizing noise his success was generating (after all, he wasn’t the first VC to profit from the tech bubble). But deep inside, the young investor was starting to struggle.