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Investor Day

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Investor Day

#61

Post by [deleted] »

DelaneyM wrote: post #43
Finbarr wrote: post #38

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: Investor Day

#62

Post by zacharycohn »

lpolovets wrote: post #59
snowmaker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: -…

Love the "open to experiments!" attitude. I think you nailed it here - 20 minutes is enough to rule someone out.

If our original scenario is:

Scenario 0: 25 1-hour meetings over the course of a few days. Investments = 25-n

You seemed to be suggesting in an earlier comment you might end up with:

Scenario 1: 25 20-minute meetings followed by 25 1-hour meetings. Investments = 25-n

I think you'll actually end up with:

Scenario 2: 25 20-minute meetings, eliminate x companies, (25-x) 1-hour meetings. Investments = (25-x)-n.

Saves you and the founders some unnecessary hour long meetings.

Re: Investor Day

#64

Post by tyre »

lpolovets wrote: post #46
timdorr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll still be able to be methodical afterwards via direct communication over emails/calls to the startups, just as you used to before. Unless this Tinder-style app removes all the contact info you'd normally receive, you should be able to take it slow if you want.

I agree that I can still be methodical after Investor Day. I'm just saying that before, if I was interested in 25 companies after demo day, then I'd do 25 1-hour meetings spread over a few days. With Investor Day -- and without a chance to do much prep/research before each short meeting -- I'm not sure if I'm going to have 25 20-minute meetings and then still have 25 1-hour meetings to follow up, or if it's more like…

In what percentage of 1-hour meetings do you eliminate the company within the first 20 minutes?

As a CEO, I've eliminated at least 25% investors in that time period. Given that most meetings start with the company pitch, my guess is 20 minutes would be enough to winnow down the list of hour meetings.

Re: Investor Day

#65

Post by emmett »

udba wrote: post #57
canistr wrote: post #19

Reminds 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 sig…

Why is sharing the rating with students so critical? I can see why people would be curious, but I'm not sure why it matters so much?

Re: Investor Day

#66

Post by afarrell »

lpolovets wrote: post #31

As 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…

> there are inevitable race conditions

I've found https://calendly.com/ super useful for eliminating race conditions in scheduling, especially across time zones.

Re: Investor Day

#67

Post by argonaut »

ryanSrich wrote: post #29
pc86 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't get a single investor to give you 20 minutes after Demo Day you've got much bigger problems.

A few years ago sure, but 2016 has been pretty brutal for seed and series A. I imagine a small percentage of great companies will lose out as a result of a cold funding climate.

Seed is roughly the same as it's always been. Even if a lot of VC firms are retrenching, there are still tons of angel investors and seed funds out there casting wide nets.

Series A, definitely.

Re: Investor Day

#68

Post by gist »

beambot wrote: post #32
beambot wrote: post #26

> ...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?

I actually UPVOTED when I saw "implies a pretty big perceived power imbalance". It's possible that the downvotes took that as a negative where I was in agreement.

Downvotes (for whatever reason) mean that more people vote down than vote up (duh). As a result they can change simply because of the people that are reading a particular comment stream. Same comment on a different post could have entirely different results vote wise (at least when it's an intelligent comment as yours was).

Re: Investor Day

#69

Post by DelaneyM »

Finbarr wrote: post #55
DelaneyM wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> we're going to let investors specify a reason why they want to meet with each company (optionally).

Even better! You guys have really thought this through. :)

Re: Investor Day

#70

Post by sytse »

This is great, it would have saved us (GitLab) a lot of driving around. It is one of those idea's that are very obvious in hindsight but for sure I didn't think of it.
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