Claude Monet spent 20 years painting the same perspective in his garden and the paintings only improved with time. Recent data from Sydecar suggest that great venture capitalists operate the same way.

Sydecar analyzed fundraising timelines from thousands of SPVs on its platform and found that managers increase speed with each deal they close. The commitment compounds. But experience is just one of the variables that determines how long an SPV takes to raise, and some of the others might surprise you.

Download Sydecar's latest data report to see what the data says about what drives SPV fundraising speed.

As I have shared in many of my previous writings before, the Benedictine monks have been an incredibly influential group of people in my live. I have now studied them for the last 7 years and I continue to find more and more conviction in applying learnings from their early monastic movement to our culture today.

St. Benedict (I promise I don’t like him just because of his name) founded the western monastic movement in the 6th century. He was formed in a time of the Western Roman Empire, as the culture and the people’s faith was at it’s weakest point.

In this time, Benedict left Rome and moved out into the desert to pursue his faith with the passion, purity, and commitment he felt called to. It was a radical move against the Zeitgeist he was surrounded by.

As time went on, other people were attracted by his way of life and the encounters he had with God. So they started following him.

Through this movement, St. Benedict formed what we now call the “Rule of Life”. A commitment to live life a certain way. Under those commitment were frameworks like “ora et labora” - “pray and work”, that Benedict formalized.

Now, this is a newsletter to Venture Capitalists, so let’s bring this into a space where this matters to us.

Benedict also formed a framework called the Benedictine Stabilitas. The Benedictine vow of stabilitas is a foundational, lifelong commitment to a specific monastery, its community, and its way of life. In doing so, a monk cultivates a strong, rooted connection to that specific place and its people. It’s a reminder that growth does not always come from external change, but from interior transformation.

This is a concept I lectured on in our Fund Circle cohort recently. But why?

Because I believe that the Emerging Manager’s commitment to their fund is ideally a lifelong commitment to a specific strategy, cause, founders, and Limited Partners.

Or as David Zhou said on Embracing Emergence last year:

I believe if you dedicate yourself with excellence and the highest level of commitment towards what you were meant to do as an investor, this dedication will exponentially compound over time.

And Claude Monet shows us how this works for us in Venture Capital.

The Stabilitas of Monet really took shape in his garden where he dedicated the last 20 years of his life to painting this perspective over and over again.

Monet is famous for this painting and his various other paintings of water lilies. He sat in his garden for 20 years. 20 years.

And as you watch his painting evolve, you will start to notice that his focus becomes more and more narrow. It moves from capturing the pond with the bridge and horizon, to sometimes only painting a single water lily.

And that is one of the fruits any great investor needs to show: an increased capability and capacity to notice details more quickly and in greater accuracy. The longer you sit in the garden you invest in, the better you get at noticing all the little things that are making the garden what it is.

You start noticing things about founders. Words they use, habits some share in common. You learn what really creates trust with LPs. You learn that some want a personalized quarterly update. You learn what books to send to the right people. You learn when to call.

All these things make you great. It’s what we call mastery.

But you need commitment into the same direction for a long time. And you can’t be mediocre at it. It has to be excellent. In Venture, LPs will rather invest in a one-hit wonder vs. a GP who is decent but for a long time. Be great. But be great for a long time.

Someone who was similarly single minded and passionate about one particular thing was the english author Tolkien. Tolkien was fascinated with language.

By his own admission, Tolkien’s obsession with language began very early in his life. His mother introduced him to Latin, French, and German. Later, he studied ancient Greek, and then Old English, Norse, Gothic, Welsh, and Finnish. His job after World Ware One consisted of writing definitions for the Oxford English Dictionary.

He had also nursed a passion for the invention of imaginary languages since childhood.

His commitment to linguistics is easily discernable in Tolkien’s writings, like The Lord Of The Rings. From the Hobbits, to the names of places, to the language of the Elves, Tolkien created a world of linguistic consistency in his trilogy.

It is through his continuous dedication for his passion that he managed to write one of the greatest english novels of all time.

His linguistic consistency is what allows us as readers to enter the world he created and breathe the same air as the heroes of the fellowship of the ring. The places, the people, how they speak, it all invites to join their world.

So why do we as investors do not do this more? Don’t we have our own ecosystem that we are living in and are passionate beyond measurement? Don’t we look at the same problem as Claude Monet for years on end and are obsessed with funding their solutions?

Shouldn’t we be able to communicate our world to other people in a way, where we inspire them to breathe the same air as we do for a short while?

Come up with words, speak a certain way about your firm, describe problems in a way where you create linguistic consistency. Spark our imaginations. Let us join your way of perceiving the world.

Some investors do a great job at that. They form a language around their firm and everything they do. Daniel Kimerling from Deciens, Erica Wenger, or firms like a16z, are great examples of how this can be done.

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