What do you do after an investor says yes? | Hacker News Reader

What do you do after an investor says yes?

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90 pointsashrust16 comments

One of the best parts of this, illustrated by the use of red squares, is that "sit and do nothing" isn't part of fundraising.

Common YC advice for fundraising is "optimize for speed" (with valuation, amount, brand names, etc, coming second). Don't get trapped in long diligence cycles, waiting for a lead, or other road blocks.

Yes. I've convinced myself so many times that fixing a bug or shipping a new feature was more important than closing the round.

Outside YC, chasing a 'yes' actively to turn it into a completed investment is even more important. Optimize for speed is closely related to optimize for outcome.

One minor addition to the chart - if investor asks for a longer timeframe, respect that - and chase other investors!

But a longer a timeframe where? I think waiting on signing docs after agreeing to them is far from ideal, same goes for waiting on wiring the money, unless agreed in advance.

Relatedly: write one of these for your sales process (certainly for enterprise sales, but very useful for low-touch/medium-touch as well). It will save your sanity.

Good call, adding to the list.

I second that - you always know what to do next...

In my mind until you can answer 'Yes" to the question of "Have they signed?", then they haven't said yes.

They haven't said 'yes' until they've wired the money.

The gap between 'yes' and money in the bank, is why so many people have trouble with this, imo.

A note to anybody having problems loading the flowchart image: some combination of HTTPS Everywhere and other privacy-related extensions causes the image to fail to load with an Amazon S3 or CloudFront-like error from Edgecast CDN.

The broken image URL: https://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/8019B6/data.tumblr.com/d92e8...

The correct image URL: http://40.media.tumblr.com/d92e89be88474faafb5122dc60a6e450/... (https also works)

Interesting that there's no step in the flowchart for an investor to exit the flow after a verbal yes. A 100% close rate may be normal for a YC company but in my experience it's not typical. You want to get a "No" as fast as possible, which I've seen happen at every stage of the pipeline, including after signed docs (although rarely).

I agree, we've never closed 100% of yeses. However, dragging it out with one of those investors, assuming they refuse to say no is worse for them imo as it creates a clear paper trail of bad behavior which hurts their reputation.

This is true, investor and for that matter 'executive' lock-in is significantly more substantial than an individual contributor, and so (rightly so) is the investment to return. It's an interesting paradox. Reputation matters.

how'd they make this flowchart? Its great

take their money and buy a ferrari

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