Tourists
Throngs of tourists from all over the world crowd the banks of Lake Louise, Alberta, on a sunny summer morning, August 2023.
Mountain Guides and their Clients are never Tourists. When you travel together to a new place to climb or ski, your job as a Guide is to ensure your Client has the trip of a lifetime. If you’re a Client, you’re there to have fun, focus on the objective, learn some new skills, do your best, and be a good partner.
Tourists go to places to see things and experience the local culture. Being there is its own point for Tourists. While local cultures are a part of guiding, it comes with the objective. Meeting the locals, eating their food, and drinking their wine is great fun for Guides and Clients, but it’s not the point. Guides and their Clients are there to get to the top.
In summer, everywhere I like to go in Canada is filled with Tourists. They’re easy to avoid – just get going early in the morning for your climb or fly a helicopter to the remote hut. But it’s still a shock when you get back to the parking lot after a day of climbing at Lake Louise and see busloads of Tourists all standing in the same place, taking the same photos every day.
It's exactly the same thing in the venture capital business. When a new technology market catches fire with investors, experienced VCs have already been there for a while navigating the risks and investing with the best teams. Then busloads of less experienced investors show up, hoping to catch the wave and pile mountains of fresh capital into these hot startups.
We call these investors Tourists.
In every new technology market, a couple of deals will turn into great public companies and dominate their space over the next decade. Everyone makes money but you can usually count these enduring names on one hand. A few more will get bought or go public at high prices and the VCs will get a good result playing musical chairs. The vast majority of deals will have their moment in the sun and then crash, leaving Tourists holding their worthless stock, wondering what they did wrong, and blaming the VCs for this bad outcome. Then the Tourists go home and the whole thing starts over again.
At Boulder Ventures, we’re Guides and Venture Capitalists.
Our Serial Entrepreneurs are our Clients.
We’re never Tourists.
The author and his old friend and fellow Mountain Guide, Erich Unterberger, avoid the tourists while enjoying a hanging belay together on another remote wall in the Selkirk Range near Mt. Moloch, British Columbia, August 2023.