The only point I want to add:

- the article explicitly mentions it is advice for EARLY STAGE startups (see "No one knows the value of an early stage startup")

Yes, if the startup is already Series D, the traction numbers are there, I'd see why you would want to ask lots of quantitative questions to get a yes/no decision.

But for an EARLY STAGE startup--would digging in with factual questions really change your decision? At that point everything is just projections and guesswork. The signals are more qualitative than quantitative.

Put another way--as an investor, when was the last time you met an Early Stage startup, came out of the meeting with a "default not invest", emailed them a follow up FACTual question, and the FACTual answer they replied back to you, turned you from a "default no" into a "yes"?

- an Early Stage, pre-traction startup gave a pitch to you at a meeting

- you came out feeling "default not invest" (i.e. if nothing new happens you won't invest)

- you later emailed them a Factual question

- they replied with an elaborate Graph/Pie/Chart with lots of numbers to clarify some detail, that the founders decided were not important enough to be in the original pitch

- that Graph/Pie/Chart turned you from "no" to "yes"

when was the last time that happend?

Our first fund wrote $200k-$300k checks and made 40+ investments. Those checks were small parts of seed rounds, and we only led about 10% of the time.

The current fund writes ~$750k checks and has done 20+ investments, and we've led (or co-led) about 50% of the time.

> (1) What's a meeting to you? Keep in mind that your Principals and / or Associates conducting meetings and diligence should not qualify as meetings.

They count for my fund :). Generally we do 2 smaller meetings (maybe associate the first time and partner the second time, maybe partner the first time and partner+associate the second time, etc), then a full partnership meeting.

The rough theme of these meetings are Get to know each other (1st meeting), Dig in more deeply (2nd meeting), and Crowdsourced Q&A (3rd meeting).

> If it's not with a GP it's not really a fundraising meeting and no founder should reasonably consider it such.

It's part of our process. If you don't do well with the first meeting -- regardless of whether it's with a partner, associate, or both -- the process ends. If you do well, again regardless of whom it's with, we'll ask to do a 2nd meeting where we can go deeper.

> How many of these investments had a term sheet after only one meeting?

Of the term sheets we've offered, all took at least a couple of meetings. When we participate on someone else's term sheet, we committed once during the first meeting, and I don't think we've ever committed after the first meeting but w/o a second meeting.

> On top of that, is the a correlation between leading an investment round and a fewer number of meetings with a founding team before investing?

Not for us. If anything, the correlation for us is that we tend to do more diligence/meetings when we lead. When we lead, we know other investors will ask us to share diligence, and the founder will send some investors to us so that we can tell them why we're excited, so we want to have even more conviction than usual. We can get that extra conviction through a little more diligence.

> Also, out of the investments that took "2-4 meetings", did the founders ever roadblock you from investing (i.e. it's a meeting but the founder "isn't fundraising"?)

We don't do a great job of outbound tbh, so usually we meet founders because they are already fundraising or about to start. If someone says they're not fundraising, we've rarely preempted, but for companies we really like, we will continue to communicate regularly with the founders until they decide they want to raise. (And we realize they might decide they don't want to raise at all).

> If I were to give advice to new founders (and I do get asked occasionally, but I'm literally nowhere close to a celebrity fundraiser and still a fledgling entrepreneur) it's, "I still don't understand fundraising. Just be yourself and build something you're passionate about, have confidence, be persistent, be kind, and the right people will come along. You'll probably trick yourself into thinking you understand something about the process, but realistically, fundraising is just about people and relationships, and shit is messy. Be humble and thankful, and try not to waste too much time discussing fundraising strategy with investors on Hacker News."

I think this is great advice :)

(FWIW all of these answers are on behalf of my fund, and other funds might be different. But I generally don't see established seed funds committing after a single meeting.)