I don't know, your answer very wrong to me. What do you even know about math. Did you even win the Putnam, if not then please don't be bolder than the parent poster.
That joke ceased to be funny about 8.5 years ago.
Investor Day
51–60 of 92 posts
Re: Investor Day
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am an investor and my experience is, if you have done enough homework about the startup you want to meet, twenty minutes shall be long enough to clarify a few key things so you can make an informed decision.
I personally like asking a lot of questions, so I'd still prefer >20 minutes. I 100% agree with you though that preparation can save a lot of meeting time. One catch with YC companies in my experience is that they rarely have detailed pitch decks or significant web presences, so there's often not that much to research before a meeting.
Did you check out The Macro - http://themacro.com/ ? Yes the info disclosed by YC for each startup is still limited but better than nothing in the before.
Re: Investor Day
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally like asking a lot of questions, so I'd still prefer >20 minutes. I 100% agree with you though that preparation can save a lot of meeting time. One catch with YC companies in my experience is that they rarely have detailed pitch decks or significant web presences, so there's often not that much to research before a meeting.
Did you check out The Macro - http://themacro.com/ ? Yes the info disclosed by YC for each startup is still limited but better than nothing in the before.
Definitely helpful, but AFAIK only about a dozen startups from the 100+ startup batch have been covered so far (https://www.google.com/#q=%22meet+the+batch+s16%22+inurl:the...). I can imagine the coverage will double or triple by demo day, but I'm skeptical that all startups will be covered. Btw, I love the /data subsection of your website!
Re: Investor Day
#54As an investor, I think this will accomplish a few things: 1) A lot of scheduling friction will disappear. The week just after demo day is usually crazy because hundreds of founders and investors are all trying to schedule meetings with each other, and there are inevitable race conditions that lead to a lot of rescheduling and wasted time. (E.g. I email three founders with 5 possible time slots, and they all reply an…
I am an investor and my experience is, if you have done enough homework about the startup you want to meet, twenty minutes shall be long enough to clarify a few key things so you can make an informed decision.
This is probably sufficient for many angel investors, a few seed investors, and very few series A investors. No matter how much homework you've done on a company you can't responsibly deploy $5M after 20 minutes of diligence on the team.
Re: Investor Day
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investors are not weighted by their fund's size - they are ranked by the founders individually. Founders would be able to apply your stated preference for meeting with larger funds or with known high frequency investors, if they were so inclined.
Without knowing how one ranks, though, it's substantially harder to prioritize. This doesn't hurt the big funds so much as it does the small ones. If I were an eCommerce or Logistics company, for example, there are a subset of niche funds which would be great strategic investors; but knowing they're only going to invest in one or two ventures would leave me disinclined to prioritize them when high-frequency investors…
We do have a lot of context on investors that can help founders when choosing who to meet with. In addition, we're going to let investors specify a reason why they want to meet with each company (optionally). This should give less well known investors who are highly suited to particular companies a chance to get noticed.
Re: Investor Day
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am an investor and my experience is, if you have done enough homework about the startup you want to meet, twenty minutes shall be long enough to clarify a few key things so you can make an informed decision.
I personally like asking a lot of questions, so I'd still prefer >20 minutes. I 100% agree with you though that preparation can save a lot of meeting time. One catch with YC companies in my experience is that they rarely have detailed pitch decks or significant web presences, so there's often not that much to research before a meeting.
How long would you want?
Re: Investor Day
#57Reminds me a lot of Waterloo's co-op matching system, Jobmine.
Which is an absolutely awful system, for a multitude of reasons.
One of the biggest faults that looks like it might be replicated here (the article does not specify) is that once employers (VCs) rank students (startups), the students can't see the numerical ranking they were given.
For example, if I'm a student who was ranked by several companies, I cannot see the numerical ranking they gave me. This introduces a significant bias against students for no apparent reason; employers do not lose out if we can see how they ranked us.
This is one of the reasons that UWaterloo as a school is hugely overrated (although the students are generally as good as they are hyped up to be).
Re: Investor Day
#58As an investor, I think this will accomplish a few things: 1) A lot of scheduling friction will disappear. The week just after demo day is usually crazy because hundreds of founders and investors are all trying to schedule meetings with each other, and there are inevitable race conditions that lead to a lot of rescheduling and wasted time. (E.g. I email three founders with 5 possible time slots, and they all reply an…
20 minutes is a good amount of time to determine if you like the Founders or not, but I agree that you probably want to do more digging. Would love to see YC post a "post mortem" about how all of this went.
Re: Investor Day
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally like asking a lot of questions, so I'd still prefer >20 minutes. I 100% agree with you though that preparation can save a lot of meeting time. One catch with YC companies in my experience is that they rarely have detailed pitch decks or significant web presences, so there's often not that much to research before a meeting.
How long would you want?
I typically do 1-hour meetings and that works pretty well. 45 min would be okay. I haven't tried 20 min before, but that feels a little short. To apply the over-applied analogy that fundraising is like dating, 20 minutes would be enough time to tell if a date is terrible, but I'm not sure if it's enough time to distinguish between a B date and an A date.
Two ideas related to Investor Day that I'd be interested in:
- let investors ask for one or two consecutive 20-minute slots. Founders can just allocate one slot to someone asking for two, but asking for two slots would be a good signal of investor interest and/or investing style.
- don't automate scheduling, but instead host all founders at a single location for a few days, and make it easy for investors to book slots on founders' calendars once those founders opt-in to meeting up. Maybe this could use something like https://calendly.com/
Re: Investor Day
#60> ...if Investing/General Partner is not present, the slot will be cancelled. These seems to be an attempt to reinforce FOMO to force key people to attend demo day. Resorting to these tactics implies a pretty big perceived power imbalance... Eg. is this a reaction to senior partners sending their underlings because of DDay burnout? If so, this could backfire. The senior partners might just not show up (still), and fo…
Why the downvotes? Seems like a well-reasoned hypothesis and contributes to the overall discussion. Has HN become that critical of different opinions that downvotes are used to punish dissent rather than using upvotes to indicate agreement?
Sometimes downvotes mean people just disagree not that the comment was malformed.