Is a laughing emoji not the most efficient way to convey that you're joking or think something is funny?
The cool thing about emojis is that not only they can represent whole concepts in one character, but a lot of them are almost universal across languages and cultures. Pretty much anyone in the world understands an emoji of a laughing face.
I think parent should have used 'formal', as there are still different writing styles. Formal, business, intimate, friend, etc.
Many do find emoticons inappropriate in some formats...
I agree that emojis which express emotion not conveyed in text are useful. ;-)
You are selling a product to a single customer (or small group of them). That product is an investor story that can sell for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars if you tell it ably enough, so it's worth putting in the time in to tell it well.
If necessary, you can even write a little toy website, and entice people to sign up for it, in the service of that story. If you can get yourself to believe in the story, you will be all the more persuasive in convincing that key customer.
But never forget that your primary focus is that customer—your investor. Learn their interests, learn to speak their language (perhaps by reading posts like the parent), learn how to flatter their sense of self until they feel like a genius visionary for finding you.
Startup investing is a luxury lifestyle product for the very rich. The art of selling that product well is pretending that the transaction is something different than what it is.
Your suggestions are interesting, but I'd rather focus on the real customer, and have the numbers speak for themselves, rather than simply perfecting the art of raising money.
I've founded startups in the past, raised money, and also invested both as angel investor and as a founding member of a micro-VC fund (and currently operating partner at a large VC fund, but not too relevant here).
In my personal experience, building a strong company most often trumps a founder's ability to play smoke and mirrors in front of an investor.
The founders that over index on what they think an investor wants to hear almost without lose me within the first minute. I’m not buying your 5yr projections. It’s not believable that you’re literally the only other company in the top corner of a competitive quadrant. Try and pitch me about the tax efficiency of my potential investment and we’re done. Sometimes a founder forces a deep dive and what typically surfaces is they have a pretty superficial understanding on most of this stuff and we end up a multitude of holes or inconsistencies in what got pitched. It’s not their fault, they’ve only learnt enough of this stuff for the sake of fundraising because that’s what someone somewhere told them they had to do. A meeting that ends with the overwhelming sense you didn’t know your stuff isn’t going to end with an investment.
Contrast that to the founders I’ve invested in. One I contacted originally because I was building a competitive product. A few referrals from people I know with “they could use a little help, would you mind having a chat and giving them some advice?”. More than one of those I thought was not a particularly viable idea and planned to help the founder map a path to working that out themselves as quickly as possible. Instead I walked away from all of those conversations feeling like a knee nothing. That I’d just been gifted a brain dump from one of the most insightful people I’d come across. And that they’d introduced me to a whole exciting new area of potential I’d been completely oblivious to only an hour earlier.
I definitely want to hear a different story to what you’d represent to a customer. I think people would be more successful if they gave me the version they’d give their first dozen employees and not the one they think investors want to hear.
Building a strong company also requires a different set of skills and much more work. Not everybody has those skills, or would want to develop them if their goals can be achieved by hacking the system.
Looking at cases like Theranos and WeWork, there's definitely something wrong with the game itself. The fake it-till-you-make-it culture is a little too prevalent to dismiss.
In a nutshell, 'Round A' is now a form of scaling money. Early, but essentially: you need to build a product that the market really loves, before you get any substantial money.
It would seem that VC is really de-risked themselves, obviously to their advantage. This is somewhat the natural equilibrium in a world where it's easy to start some kind of companies with little effort.
However, there are always going to be a lot of initiatives that require some capital to make it work. This is of course, very dangerous territory for VC to play in (i.e. before Product-Market-Fit) but then, they do have 'Venture' in their titles.
It's to the point wherein we could start to consider Round B and later firms merely a slightly different form of Private Equity.
Is anything really that important going to be 'productised' for $500K-1M i.e. on seed money?
And really, it's interesting in that, if a company does actually have good product market fit ... traditional VC terms might seem a little expensive.
Having massive customer traction and 'blow up growth' is a valid form of customer interest, what matters is the post-blow up economices.
Uber, WeWork etc. will all make money for investors in the long run.
The concern is that there is zero real R&D or product development spending.
Well.. 10 years ago there was no “seed” rounds. Airbnb raised a $600k series A right before demo day in ‘09. That round got rebranded as a seed round later.
In a clear majority of cases, a startup closing its doors after two years is not considered a failure by the VC fund. The startup successfully spent the money the VC firm was contractually obligated to invest, may have employed the VC's choices of officers for a significant period (providing them income and experience), maybe purchased a great deal of tech from suppliers the VC officers are themselves invested in, and may have left valuable assets that could be snapped up at auction.
The biggest problem a VC firm has is the five billion dollars of others' money they have to "place" in only 30/60/90 days. What happens after placement is much less their problem. They know most of their placements will be duds, but they and the actual investors knew that up front. Once the money is "placed", though, much of it can be siphoned off for the benefit of the VCs' cronies or one or other non-dud. Maybe, after collapse, a non-dud or non-startup can buy up assets of a dud for pennies on the dollar, and extract something usable, like patents or equipment. Sure, the investor lost that money, but somebody got it, and somebody ended up with what the money bought. Just not, often, the founders.
None of this is good for most people who do a startup, unless they happen to be chosen as a non-dud. The chosen duds are valuable for money laundering, which few startup principals really meant to sign up to be. Although some did.
