From Founder Failure to Building a €100M+ European VC Fund with Apostolos Apostolakis, Managing Partner @ VentureFriends
Apostolos Apostolakis delivers a raw account of scaling a startup to €100M+ revenue before watching it collapse into bankruptcy, then channeling those hard-won lessons into building VentureFriends, a leading European VC fund. His central thesis challenges conventional VC wisdom: the best founders don't actually need their investors' help, and recognizing this counterintuitive truth is key to superior fund performance.
Key takeaways
- •Startup failure creates complete social isolation and psychological devastation that founders rarely discuss publicly.
- •The strongest founders operate independently and don't require VC guidance, making them paradoxically the best investments.
- •VCs should become stricter about team assessment over time, prioritizing founder quality over compelling business models.
- •Even exceptional founders will eventually need concentrated support at unpredictable inflection points in their journey.
- •Personal experience with startup failure makes investors significantly better at identifying resilient founding teams.
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Best moment
From celebrated startup success to complete social isolation and shame
continue? Did you manage to keep any any balance in your life? Did you have a partner, a friend, social life? That's a great question, and I I I can emphatically say no.
My life literally stopped. For the next three, four years, I wasn't able to socialize. I was feeling this shame because we were very notable, a very visible success story. And suddenly, we were being shown as an example of failure. So it was quite difficult, and, personally, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't enjoy social interactions. I couldn't have personal life because I wasn't ready psychologically
“So I think this is the biggest learning, and you can see that between fund one, fund two, and fund three.”
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