These are all still pretty fast No's in my experience.
The worst No's are the ones where they ask to do Due Diligence and then never open the dropbox folder. Or if you are on your fifth meeting and they just keep trying to pump you for competitive information.
So how do you know when you get a Yes?
When you get a wire or a check. That's the only way.
Even a signed note or Equity docs don't mean anything until that money clears.
The best No's I've had were from Bessemer and a16z years ago. Almost immediate and right to the point that they wouldn't invest, with specific reasoning/metrics behind them. A++ would get told no again.
> Or if you are on your fifth meeting and they just keep trying to pump you for competitive information.
15 years ago after the funding I'd arranged to start a company fell through after about a year of travelling to raise it...we finally went to a VC. He insisted that he could not sign an NDA because of the precarious position it put him in hearing so many of these pitches. At that point we figured, this was basically our last option anyway so we gave him the pitch.
He really liked it and wanted a local company to build it that we weren't comfortable with, so we parted ways.
5 years later I found out he had the company build it about as well as he could from memory of our pitch. It had plenty of flaws but it was a company that ended up selling for several million. As far as I can tell, it was re-sold and the company had a complete shift of focus afterwards.
Meanwhile, in NY 2 years after my meeting with the VC an enterprising group of people who were not affiliated with that VC at all pursued and built a business out of one of the core features of my original platform. As it turned out, that feature stood as a business on it's own. I'd included it in the overall system because as an integrated feature, it facilitated a lot of efficiency gains.
My platform was a comprehensive information system for public schools designed to make it easier for teacher's to focus on their students, reduce their workload and make it easier for them to communicate directly with parents. As a part of that system, there was to be a market place for teachers to sell and exchange lesson plans. This was back in 2003 and now smaller companies have popped up doing various parts of what our original plan was for.
In NYC, Teachers Pay Teachers has made a business out of that aspect and for what it's worth, I'm really happy that they have been successful.
The whole experience was really eye opening and I've been extremely reluctant to pursue funding for any of my business ideas because of it. I wish that wasn't the case.
It's a risky game. We've had a major accelerator application, proceeded to an interview, they requested our business plan which we promptly sent to them. Then they went silent and stopped taking our calls or answering emails. We moved on, only to discover that their alumni for this batch included a similar company that was shameless enough even to use complete sentences out of our business plan. I avoid everything that's linked to that accelerator or people from it since then.
We have similar stories... A possible investor (a supplier for our product) went through a Due Diligence with us to learn more about our process etc. Couple of weeks later our founder got the no plus a note that they would not sell their product to us anymore, since they were planning on persuing service similar to ours within their own company.
A couple months later our founder has another possible investor and we go through a Due Diligence again. This time we were already wary from our first DD (plus the investor had a bit of a reputation of being a scammer in the past) and lo and behold their IT guy wants to have full access to our software packages / pipeline, source code and databases, so they "can assess the quality". (...) I didn't end up giving them any of our source code, which they were fine with after a while. This whole spiel went on for another month where they "focused" more on other processes. Eventually they went quiet and their CTO asked me privately if I wanted to jump ship to join them, because they need someone with my expertise...
Does this happen often or did we just have some bad luck? Also has anyone ever been asked to provide the source code to their product? (that seemed kind of outrageous to me)
the agreements we did have included that we don't disclose their names. I did not see the exact wording and don't know if they extend beyond the due diligence, so to be on the save side I'd rather zip it.
Plus I think a write-up of guide lines or red flags that one should watch out for during a DD or when talking to a VC might help more than just name calling. What worked the last time: Google their names and go past page 1 (Most seem to know how to alter their search results)
> the agreements we did have included that we don't disclose their names.
That's just one sided. They can steal your ideas (because they didn't signed the relevant NDA), and you can't even name the bastards if they do?
I have zero experience in this stuff, but it looks like in this situation, one should either refuse to sign this sort of non-disparagement clause, or have them sign the relevant NDA.
I think the whole story is not as simple. First of all, it happened in China, the country with vastly different cultural mentality. "36 stratagems" are fully alive and kicking here. People in businesses here lie, cheat and deceive because it's considered to be market acumen and cleverness. The fund behind the accelerator made a right decision in the cultural context: to improve the position of their own "family" using every available material. Bad faith? What bad faith? I bet they won't even understand what they did wrong when confronted. So I generally avoid any contact with Chinese funds unless absolutely necessary.
We've had our own little revenge though. The competitor is funded well but has a very weak technical team. We used numerous holes in their systems to obtain critical data about their business. Shall we use it or not is another moral question, but it gave us great insights and let us adjust our strategy without spending our own or VC's money and time on getting to know it.
I wish they would. This is like being in a group of friends and you're talking about potential romantic partners and one keeps vaguely alluding to a negative experience with someone but not actually being helpful.
you should publicly shame the VC. it should be a necessity. if you're worried about the backlash at least go anonymous and publish on something like pastebin.
I find TPT interesting and - as a teacher - have a strong interest in platforms that could help debalkanize curriculum and support materials; however, it's always seemed to me that the marketplace model (while a successful business) must limit both the amount of teacher engagement as well as the type of teachers/materials present on the platform due to the incentives involved. Because of that, it's never seemed systemically useful.
Did the platform you built attempt to create a shared curriculum libraries? If so, was the focus on the school, district or national scale?
Happy to take a response via email so as not to derail the thread (see profile).
It did. At that time this was a system that would be deployed within each school on its local network for a lot of other functionality. The pitch around lesson plan management was sharing and exchange internally within the school while also allowing teachers to sell in the marketplace network of other people on the system. The schools themselves would be able to build a library of quality lesson plans that they could use to continuously try to improve each aspect of the classes they taught by experimenting with more effective ways of teaching each lesson within each class.
That's awesome. Did this system go into production? If so, were you able to monitor how (or if) teachers used the shared curriculum to iteratively improve curriculum? Did the platform manage discrete files or were lesson content/relevant media/assessments/etc. associated with each other in a network of some kind?
It's a topic of personal interest. I believe teachers are far too isolated in their lesson planning/curriculum creation which leads to significant redundancies in labor, glacial curriculum improvement, and contributes to the difficulty serving the needs of my individual students.
Came here to write the same thing. This needs about 5-10 more "No" variants that all include the words "yes, we're excited to move forward with you, and...".
I'm not sure we ever got a VC to give us one of these waffling "no"'s without apply serious pressure.
Free option? Vanity? You get to know the books, the team, etc. And if before you ("VC") haven't been figured out the startup gets traction, you can find money to get in (maybe).
I think you hit it with the free option. They are syndicating their investment as soon as they have some sort of agreement and they probably have some contigencies that allow them to get out for any reason in the event they can't find investors.
Something was going through their head. For comparison, how many people who are poor enter terms to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of property without having any mortgage or ability to pay or any expectation other than "wheeeeee - that was fun."
I'd wager approximately zero. There is more to the above story. As described, these VC's wasted tons of their own time. How did they even have offices?
There are ways to acquire assets without putting any money down yourself, so definitely possible, though not very easy.
An example: say you acquire a company worth $10m and have no money in the bank. You could pay 50% of it in stock ("you'll be part of an amazing growth story, and the $5m stock you get today will be worth $50m in 5 to 10 years") and then go borrow $5m from a bank (or go through an equity investor) to fund the other 50% of the acquisition price. But often you'll need a binding LoI to get a loan.
Doesn't always work, but if you're someone who is well connected then it's quite doable. I've seen it done.
>Almost immediate and right to the point that they wouldn't invest with specific reasoning/metrics behind them.
Was going to comment on the article itself: You shouldn't walk away from a VC without this in hand. Kind of a general sales concept - never take "no" without a good reason.
A related sales concept is forcing people to say no, even if you don't get a reason for it. This is why some very effective sales folks will follow up essentially forever until they get a definitive answer. It looks like crazy behavior if your mental model is "I brushed him off twice, clearly that is a constructive no, why can't he take the hint", but the rep's mental model is "I close deals all the time after the 18th unanswered followup. If I haven't gotten a no yet, there is insufficient evidence to exclude the possibility that e.g. they're just busy."
I've lied to pesky sales reps and telemarketers and told them that I've been diagnosed with terminal cancer and have six months to live. That ends the conversation pretty quickly and they never call back.
I've had this exact thing happen to me (while talking to customers). Recently had the person answer after the third or fourth follow up and needed more time as they haven't gotten to getting all the sign offs.
That being said, I'm not a telemarketer, I work with high end Integrations and before you get a proposal we've had a few conversations. If the answer is no, I'm respectful of that and I want to know what we can do better next time.
I'll keep following up until I've gotten an answer.
> The best No's I've had were from Bessemer and a16z years ago. Almost immediate and right to the point that they wouldn't invest with specific reasoning/metrics behind them.
Don't you mean "without specific reasoning/metrics behind them"?
I don't think so, I think it says he was really pleased with the rejection (and that could have been because it came with actionable feedback, like reasons and metrics.)
totally agree on that (yes is when the check clears) I was helping a startup getting VC and basically the check never came. Granted that they wernt' very happy with the progress and that was pretty transparent, but they never actually said it would impact anything. I think the founder could have handled it better but I can understand taht it's sometimes hard to tell what a hard-requirement is from a stretch-goal.
Oh wow, I didn't know that. I thought a check was a permission to withdraw rather than a guarantee of available money, kind of like a paper form of an ACH withdraw (which is why I thought we had cashier's checks and such).
I did some searching now and it seems that intent to deceive/defraud is required at least in some states. Common sense would say you wouldn't get any company shares or other things until your check clears, so if it bounces, is it actually fraud? Or just being a jerk?
Due to the way the US legal systems work, it is unlikely you'll be arrested for uttering if you bounce a $50k check as an accredited investor but far more likely it will happen if you bounce a $50 check as a welfare recipient. There are a number of gates which will prevent the first incident from becoming a criminal case -- the police will laugh at it, the DA will decline to prosecute, the 'victims' will not choose to set fire to their professional reputations by demanding a prosecution, etc etc. Police won't laugh at the second one -- sorry, business owner, we know that people defraud you all the time and that sucks. The DA has an expedited program to defer some of these cases and prosecute repeat offenders. The victim has someone whose literal job it is to move the case forward and convictions per year may be a KPI for them. (That someone is probably not a lawyer, this being not worth the time of a lawyer on a private payroll, but rather "loss prevention specialist" or similar. "Yes sir, we do intend to prosecute. Yes sir, I would be happy to get you that documentation. Yes sir, I can be at that meeting. Thank you sir, we appreciate you looking out for us.")
> but far more likely it will happen if you bounce a $50 check as a welfare recipient.
That's quite an extreme mischaracterization.
It is VERY unlikely that you are going to be arrested for bouncing a single $50 check.
Generally the people who get arrested for bouncing a check have something extra on top of it. They immediately sold the purchase (so it can't be reversed). They have bounced many checks up to this point (you mentioned repeat offenders). etc.
There is genuine injustice in being poor. That "bounced check charge" disproportionately hits the poor. And banks were going out of their way to reorder transactions to make things bounce. Parking fines, usage fees, etc. all are meant to tax the poor.
However, even multiple bounced checks are unlikely to result in prosecution without something to add to the pile.
As I've gotten older and... "more successful", I have been able to see this divide myself, experience it on my own. The "bounced check charge" (NSF charge) almost exclusively hits poor people than it does people with money. Because when I was poor and walking miles to work at 0500 in the winter, and I bounced a check (which did happen more than rarely), the NSF fee was charged and the bank would never gift me with any forgiveness, even though I did call and try to explain the situation every time. It was never an intentional bounce, but when you're scraping by, it's very, very easy to bounce a check on accident. This was in the 90s and early 2000s before checks cleared immediately. But as I got older, and started programming for a living, and my social mobility kicked in and I crossed the divide... I never, ever, ever have the NSF fee stick for overdrafts. Never. It almost never happens now because it's typical for banks to tie a backup to your checking account for overdrafts (e.g. savings) so it's been a while since this has happened to me. But when it did, I'd call the bank, explain that it was a mistake on my part, and the banker would look up my account and immediately take it off and then apologize to me. Life is totally different on this side of the river. It is astonishing.
Incidentally, some time ago, I used Bank of America. I had about $300 in my checking account. I made about $300 in purchases for the month, like groceries and gas and this kind of thing. Then, something happened with the car, and I had to take it in to the shop. They could fix it for $250. I knew I didn't have it, but I decided I was willing to pay the overdraft fee (of $35) in order to get my car fixed, since... I needed a working car. Anyway, I made the charge on my card. Then, the next day, when all those charges posted, Bank of America rearranged the order of my posts so that the $250 charge went on the account first, and then charged me about ten $35 overdraft fees. They rearranged the post order so the largest transactions went first. Anyway, scumbag banks aside, they were actually sued for this in a class action, but through some "miracle" for the bank (a shredder), they "lost" all of their records for that year, including my $350 in overdraft fees that they charged me. So I wasn't able to get my money back even years later. Class actions are total ripoffs.
I think all cases of writing a check you know isn't covered is fraud. The cases when you thought it would be covered but you were mistaken are difficult to judge, need to prove what you knew when.
The worst No's are the ones where they ask to do Due Diligence and then never open the dropbox folder. Or if you are on your fifth meeting and they just keep trying to pump you for competitive information.
So how do you know when you get a Yes?
When you get a wire or a check. That's the only way.
Even a signed note or Equity docs don't mean anything until that money clears.
The best No's I've had were from Bessemer and a16z years ago. Almost immediate and right to the point that they wouldn't invest, with specific reasoning/metrics behind them. A++ would get told no again.