How BackedVC built Europe's most powerful founder community (and how you can too), with Andre de Haes

The venture capital industry faces a fundamental paradox: VCs constantly seek differentiation in portfolio companies while often lacking meaningful differentiation themselves. As Andre de Haes, Founder & CEO of BackedVC explained at SuperVenture, "It's the outrageous hypocrisy of venture, which is in the same way that most VCs don't have a board and yet spend all their time lording about board governance, most VCs look for edge in companies and have no edge themselves." A must-watch for anyone looking to cut through the noise in venture capital and build sustainable competitive advantage.

Andre's key takeaways:

Creating true differentiation in venture
To build genuine edge in venture capital, funds must "play the game by a different set of rules." For BackedVC, this means creating a powerful community through events:

• "Our vision at Backed is to build the Davos of the next generation"
• After 10 years, they've developed Europe's largest event offering among venture funds
• Most top European unicorn founders have attended Backed events
• All major funds participate in their annual events

This community-building approach creates a powerful flywheel effect: founders choose BackedVC knowing they'll gain access to top-tier follow-on investors like Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.

Measuring and identifying edge
How can you identify true edge in venture? Andre suggests three key questions:

• Is there a clear reason why founders consistently choose you? BackedVC measures this through win rate, they've won 90 of 92 term sheets issued since inception (97%).
• Can the fund truly uniquely deliver something? "Unless you can really say you are better than everybody else in the world at that... then that's not edge."
• Is the differentiation authentic and sustainable? For BackedVC, events feel natural because Andre started his first events business at age 19 while at Oxford.

Key venture learnings
After years in venture capital, Andre shares three critical insights:

• Build leverage into your team and systems
  • Venture is structurally challenging with too many stakeholders (90+ portfolio companies, 60+ LPs)
  • Create systems that automate responses to common requests
  • Delegate effectively to specialized team members
    
    
• Embrace true contrarian thinking "Our best deals have all been the ones where we were truly contrarian"
  • Invest with intellectual conviction in non-obvious opportunities
  • Be early in emerging fields (like computational biology and optics)
  • "Be prepared to look stupid and be prepared to invest on the frontier"
  • Focus on fundamentals Learn from investment legends like Munger, Buffett, and Thorndike Prioritize capital efficiency and strong business fundamentals "The best businesses just need really, really strong business fundamentals... they don't need hype"