Our Partnership with GV: What It Means for Founders — Nov 2025
Portfolio Support Beyond Capital: How We Show Up for Founders
By Oliver Marsh · October 14, 2025 · 13 min read
Venture capital is a service business. The product is capital — but capital is the least differentiated part of the offering. What separates great venture partners from average ones is everything that happens after the wire hits the bank account.
This is a piece about how the Latica Ventures team thinks about portfolio support: what we believe in, what we actually do, and how we measure whether we are adding genuine value to the founders we back.
The Philosophy: Presence Over Polish
Many venture firms produce glossy portfolio support programs — talent networks, marketing workshops, legal resources, CFO services. These are valuable. We have them too. But in our experience, the most meaningful support we provide has nothing to do with programs. It comes from showing up.
Showing up means: when a founder calls at 9pm because they just lost their CTO, we answer. When a portfolio company is two months from running out of runway, we work the problem with them — not just send them a list of bridge investors. When a founder is making a bad hire decision because they are desperate, we say so, clearly and kindly, before it is too late.
We have built our entire team structure around this philosophy. Each portfolio company is assigned to a single named Latica partner. That partner attends every board meeting, is available for monthly check-ins, and holds themselves personally accountable for the success of the relationship. There is no handoff. There are no hand-waves.
Talent: Our Highest-Impact Support Area
Across hundreds of conversations with founders, talent is consistently cited as the single biggest constraint on growth. Finding great engineers, great salespeople, great finance leaders — and making the right offer before a competitor does — is the operational challenge that determines whether a seed-stage company reaches Series A or dies trying.
Our talent support works at three levels:
Direct Introductions
Every Latica partner has spent fifteen or more years building a professional network. When a portfolio company needs a specific hire, our first move is to search our own networks for people who might be right — or who might know someone who is right. We make warm introductions. We write emails. We make calls. We track the outcome.
The Latica Talent Network
We maintain a curated database of 800+ operators who have indicated they are open to exploring opportunities at Latica portfolio companies. These are not recruiters trolling for fees — they are executives and senior individual contributors who have worked with our team members, co-invested with us, or been referred by portfolio founders. Access to this database is available to all portfolio companies on request.
Recruiting Process Support
Many seed-stage founders have never hired more than three or four people. They have not yet developed the intuitions and processes for high-volume, high-quality hiring. Our team has run these processes many times, and we offer hands-on support: interview scorecard design, offer letter structuring, equity benchmarking, and post-offer negotiation coaching.
Fundraising: Navigating the Series A
The transition from seed to Series A is one of the most stressful and consequential moments in a startup's life. It is also one of the areas where the right support matters most — because the consequences of a poorly run Series A process are measured in years of company trajectory, not months.
We begin working with portfolio companies on Series A preparation typically 12–18 months before the round. This is not because we are impatient — it is because the best Series A processes are built on 18 months of consistent milestone achievement and investor relationship-building, not a four-week sprint.
Our specific support includes:
- Helping founders identify and prioritize target Series A investors based on their thesis, portfolio, and track record of founder relationships
- Making warm introductions to Series A investors, including our co-investment partners at GV (Google Ventures)
- Facilitating narrative workshopping — helping founders translate raw traction data into a compelling investment story
- Running mock partner meetings and Q&A sessions with senior Latica partners playing the role of critical investors
- Providing honest assessment of whether the company is ready to raise — and, when it is not, helping define the milestones needed to get there
Strategic Support: When to Call
Portfolio companies can and should use their Latica partner as a sounding board for major strategic decisions. We expect to be consulted on:
- Key hires at the VP level and above
- Pivots to product or go-to-market strategy
- Pricing changes and packaging decisions
- Partnership agreements and commercial relationships with large companies
- Acquisition interest and competitive responses
We do not expect to be consulted on every decision — that would be both micromanagement and a poor use of everyone's time. But we have found that the companies where we have the best outcomes are those where founders use us proactively, rather than bringing us in post-mortem to explain why something went wrong.
Community Programming
Beyond individual company support, we run three recurring programs for the Latica portfolio community:
Monthly Founder Roundtables
A small-group conversation (6–10 founders) on a theme selected by the group. Topics have included: compensation benchmarking, managing remote teams across time zones, negotiating enterprise contracts, and handling press inquiries. These are peer-to-peer conversations, not Latica lectures.
Quarterly Expert Office Hours
We bring in domain experts — former CTOs, CMOs, CFOs, and general counsels — for three-hour open office-hours sessions available to all portfolio companies. Founders can book 30-minute slots to work through specific problems with deeply experienced practitioners.
Annual LP Summit
Each year, we host a gathering of portfolio founders and selected Latica LPs. The goal is twofold: to give founders visibility with sophisticated investors who may participate in future rounds, and to give LPs genuine insight into the companies they have indirectly backed. This is an increasingly rare event format in venture — most LPs interact with portfolio companies only through quarterly reports — and we think it creates real value for both sides.
When Things Go Wrong
Not every company succeeds. Some of our portfolio companies will not make it. How we behave in those situations is, in many ways, the most important test of whether we are the kind of firm we aspire to be.
We commit to being honest early — not waiting until a company is on the edge of insolvency to have the hard conversation about whether the business model is working. We commit to helping founders land well when a company winds down — making introductions, writing recommendations, and helping them think through what they want to build next. And we commit to learning from every outcome, both the successes and the failures, and sharing those learnings transparently with our portfolio community.
How We Measure Our Support
We send a quarterly NPS survey to all portfolio founders, asking them to rate the quality of support across six specific areas: talent, fundraising, strategy, network, community programming, and overall partner relationship. We share the results internally and use them to continuously improve. We believe this kind of feedback mechanism is rare in venture — and that the absence of it is one reason so many firms persistently disappoint founders without knowing it.
Oliver Marsh
Managing Partner, Latica Ventures. Leads overall fund strategy and is personally invested in the success of every portfolio company. Writes about venture best practices and founder development.