The time has come. For the past three months, you have witnessed my journey from baby VC to VC fableist to VC historian. I’ve worn many hats, completed many a task to help get this newsletter up and running, and I would like to take this final article as an opportunity for self-evaluation. Did I fulfill the objectives for this role?

To figure this out, let’s break down Joe’s initial LinkedIn posting:

Ok, I’m off to a good start. I began the series with my own story, because it was all that I knew how to write about going into this internship. For my first piece, the tone can be best described as wide-eyed. I voraciously read my surroundings, hoping to communicate all that I absorbed without overwhelming my hypothetical reader. I did the same for the next three weeks, as I wrote about the distinction between assertiveness and intrusion and the peculiar process of thesis refinement (how else could we determine what’s out of scope?). By the fourth week my mind wandered, as it often does. The spiral began with week four’s Billy Slides, a cautionary tale based loosely on a true story. Unable to suppress my flair for the dramatic, I attempted to bring a piece of office gossip to a mythical status.

Ready to move on from the temporary indulgence the day after publication, I sat in the office for inspiration. As I eavesdropped, I kept hearing peculiar words, words I had read in articles, and I bugged fellow interns for definitions. As they explained unicorns and moats and angels, nine-year-old me raised her hand: “Are we not living in a fairy tale?” Yes, we are. 

“Stories,” it turns out, is an exceptionally broad term. And Joe said I had full autonomy, did he not? So I looked out of the “out of scope” scope. 

As Joe likes to say, it was low-hanging fruit. Parts one, two, and three of my “Scaling Ventureland” series serve as an indulgent attempt to place the sorts of themes I’ve witnessed around the office into a metaphor-ridden vacuum. They were lots of fun to write, even though there may have been a plot hole or two.

To ground myself a bit, and to cement my newfound status as a VC expert, I wrote my most recent piece about the history of VC. Because I can’t help myself, it’s rife with speculation and exaggeration, but some hypothetical person might potentially find it semi-educational. Who knows.

What I do know is that I told stories. So, check!

I came into this with the limited understanding that VC is casual, dynamic, and young. Independently I put myself through the occasional New York Times Podcast episode, and my TikTok feed is chock-full of political and cultural current events. So I started with a general sense of what’s happening in the world – just not the VC world, per-se.

I was sure to do some TikTok due diligence on the industry when I was offered the position, but I learned the most on the job. 

My most obvious resource was producing “Marked as Read,” our weekly news roundup email. Exposure to a wide, wide variety of VC and tech news has helped me become the tech wizard I am today. 

I also gleaned lots of insight editing Daring’s other written material, including its formal materials (gasp!). As it turns out, I am quite the grammar freak, and as I helped Daring Ventures refine its messaging, I had the opportunity to learn what matters while also shaping it in my own small way, on comma at a time. 

Perhaps our VC party games TikTok series did it best, at the very least showing our office environment and general vibe. What we lacked in consistent virality, we more than made up for in delight and authenticity. 

I was!

For a fly on the wall, I sure buzzed a lot. However, while my fellow interns might describe me as a “D1 distractor,” I was able to absorb a great deal throughout my internship. Like a fly, my eyes are made up of thousands of those little hexagon things. The few moments I wasn’t talking, I was typing ferociously to populate my “Notes Day-to-Day” Word doc.

But, alas, it is time for me to fly away before Joe and Maddi find their AI-powered B2B SaaS fly swatter (far less unnecessary friction than a rolled-up newspaper). 

I knew the day would come when the title of my series would become insincere. But the title was never really about my articles – it was about Daring Ventures. So as I bid my summer home adieu, and as the team plunges into the far busier autumn months, I conclude my series with an ellipsis, in recognition of all the Daring developments I will witness from more distant walls. 

To be continued…