Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you
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Re: Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you
#2It's not what you know, but who you know.
Re: Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you
#3I'm impressed with Jason's posts. He seems to be methodically working through all the misconceptions of inexperienced founders. This is an important and subtle one. Investors assume that if they're hearing about you first from you, you can't be any good. If you were good, they'd already have heard about you, because you'd have found a way to get introduced to them by someone they trust.
Even if investors didn't start out with this bias, they'd soon learn it from experience.
Re: Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you
#4Argues its impossible to find the needle in the haystack, so VCs use other founders to sift the chaff.
But a VC was quoted that they funded zero cold contacts. That doesn't sound like its hard; it sounds they're incapable of evaluating cold contacts at all. I'm guessing they use contacts for their expertise, because VCs lack any.
Re: Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you
#5As someone on the East Coast, I feel this is the main reason everyone wants to immediately leave our town to go to the West. We have plenty of VC's around our area, but the network hasn't been built so only the very high up know anyone.
Re: Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you
#6It's not what you know, but who you know.
Its not who you know, but who they know.
Re: Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you
#7So is it the same meritocracy(1) of being accepted on a top university?
Re: Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you
#8As someone on the East Coast, I feel this is the main reason everyone wants to immediately leave our town to go to the West. We have plenty of VC's around our area, but the network hasn't been built so only the very high up know anyone.
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Re: Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you
#9another top tier VC once told me that out of the thousands of business pitches he receives in his office every year, his firm has never funded one that came in completely cold.
Referring to Chris Sacca (http://lowercasecapital.com/prospecting/) perhaps?
Re: Investors don’t want to meet you. They wanted to be introduced to you
#10If you’re working in any startup hub, you almost certainly have friends that are working on their own startups. Ask them to help you. The first question should be, “Am I ready to fundraise?”
I would actually phrase this another way, "Be honest with me: If I asked you to refer me to one of your investors, would you recommend me to him/her or is my startup not there yet?"