How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
This surprised me, because I'm an extreme penny pincher, so it was odd to see people move large sums of money in a "where's the money at" mentality rather than (perhaps my poor-man's mentality?) "what is the best value I can get?" process.
Although Tim Draper was my lead, so he got the best value in the deal. ;) And I'm happy for it, because he's been remarkable to work with - very supporting, encouraging, and edifying.
That said, there are some VCs that stopped accepting cold pitches because they initially researched and tracked leads from many channels, and eventually found that cold pitches had near-zero ROI.
I know this dead horse has been beat plenty, but I'm still curious: what, to you personally, denotes an ideal cold email soliciting an initial chat?
[1] http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Heilmeier_Questions....
The email should have a good subject and opening 1-2 sentences which piques her interest enough to keep reading. If you start by clearly and succinctly saying who you are, what you're doing (without any jargon or buzzwords), and why it's a fit for her firm, there's a good chance she'll continue reading a page long email.
I have two (related) criteria for good cold emails:
1) The sender should do a little bit of research on me/my fund (Susa Ventures). Susa is a seed stage fund, and our website lists some of the things we look for. For example: "We invest in founders and companies that are building competitive moats using data, network effects and/or economies of scale." A cold email that makes it clear why we might be a good fit -- e.g. because a company is building a unique dataset -- is much more likely to get attention than something generic that was clearly bcc'ed to dozens or hundreds of investors.
2) Building on the previous note, some effort to personalize the email goes a long way. I feel uncomfortable not replying to emails -- after all, I don't like it when people don't reply to my emails -- but replies do take time and I'm pretty busy. The rule of thumb I've settled on is that if it's clear that the sender didn't spend 5 minutes to write a targeted email, then I don't feel bad not spending 5 minutes to reply. If someone clearly put in effort, I'll try to reply even if it's not a fit for my fund.
Edit: Also, the email should give a decent sense of what a company does. It should not be too vague (e.g. this is not compelling: "I'm working on some amazing tech. Could you meet me on Thurs at 1pm or 3pm for coffee?") nor should it be too long (i.e. don't send rambling emails that are 3 or 5 or 10 pages long)
Here's the thing: we (founders) optimistically believe in our potential. Often we think we are further along than we really are. Multiply this times the widespread inability to communicate clearly and indeed, I can see why the ROI of cold-emails is miniscule.
On the flip-side, I believe VC's greatest limitation to scale is its reliance on warm-intros and who-you-know dealings. 'Uber for capital' will come along and turn the whole industry (...and banking?) on its head, by making capital accessible no matter who you know or don't know - perhaps a protocol on the blockchain?
VCs (unless you are Sequoia) can get really stressed about good deal flow in sourcing. The 100:1 pitch:invest ratio is telling, and there is a lot of time wasted talking to startups where the current VC partner is not the right person to be evaluating the company. I would guess a good fraction of those 99 end up getting investments, but by a VC better suited to evaluate them.
This is connected to decision making. The paper lists management as the most important factor, which I would agree with, but mostly because the VCs are domain specialists. By the time decision making gets intense, they already know (usually) how they feel about the business model. That doesn't mean it isn't as important, it is just a lot harder to judge talent.
Fear and greed. Is there a mob of VCs after them? Lets chase.
Are they chasing us? Lets run away.