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Comment by lpolovets | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

Roughly speaking, our investing process is: 1 hour one-on-one meeting, then 1 hour full partner meeting, then decision.

The way I think about the math: Current scenario: 25 1-hour one-on-one meetings -> 10 full-partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.

Worst case for Investor day: 25 20-minute meetings -> still don't have enough info -> 25 1-hour one-on-one meetings -> 10 full partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.

Good case for Investor day: 25 20-minute meetings -> 10 companies don't seem like a fit -> 15 1-hour one-on-one meetings -> 10 full partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.

Best case for Investor day: 25 20-minute meetings -> I get all the info I need -> 10 full partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.

These four cases represent 25, ~33, ~23, and ~8 hours of one-on-one meeting time, respectively.

lpolovets - shouldn't the follow up one-on-one meetings be only 40 minutes?

That's a good point. I guess they could be!

40-min meetings might be a little awkward because usually the first 5-10 minutes of a meeting are social / chit-chat, so it might feel a little weird to immediately start a 2nd meeting exactly where you left off on the first meeting. Also, most of the time a 40-min meeting still takes up a full 1-hr time-slot since most people schedule meetings on the hour.

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