FreeTabby76

Student

Experience with VCs

If you have been through the process of raising funding from VCs, whats been your best and worst experiences?

19mo ago

Brisktalk

Amazon19mo

Every VC is different.

Some grill you on thesis level, if they go deeper then they’ll kind of want to do market and founder level check (with or without consent). Every VC has thesis on certain sectors and they try to invest on basis of that thesis. Although some funds are sector agnostic.
Some of them just pass you on team level or idea level.
Micro VCs usually take bet on the team, they might invest pre-prod or pre-rev, but stay away from those term sheet, they’re bad.

In terms of good experience:

if you pitch enough number of times, you become really articulate and your story becomes better
sometimes you gather insights which you might have completely missed

Bad experience:

sometimes they go cold, just like recruiter
let’s circle back later, keep on sharing updates usually means no, don’t waste time chasing them
some vcs are sinkhole, they waste time by questioning everything and asking document on research they need to do (again stay away from them)

MetalMan20

Stealth19mo

Good Experiences:

Closed a few good ones after only a single conversation on the vision. They understood the need well having been operators themselves and immediately decided to back us up.
Met a few VCs who while wouldn't invest, but spent time to give us the right feedback and connect us to folks who had aligned thesis on our sector.
Most conversations also gave us insights, when we blatantly asked for the research they had done. Helped us get free research material to help us enhance our proposition (you won't get this everytime, only if the VC is open to sharing and if they've done some deeper research in your sector)

Bad Experiences:

Got ghosted multiple times by a few notable names without any heads up or reason.
Some of them were senior folks but with little to no operator experience. Couldn't even grasp the domain we were on ( and ended up asking irrelevant questions only to tell us later that they have someone else in their portfolio co-basically they did competitive research for their portfolio cos)
Most VCs even if they like your idea will wait for someone else to lead the round ( i believe to save time on DD and other nuances) and then try to creep into the round with them. Makes it harder when everyone is playing catch up and you end up with nothing.
There are still some biases around very similar to recruitment. So without a warm intro from either a partner or a successful founder from their portfolio, it could get hard to even get their time or interest.
Few of them have predatory terms, so better to talk with people in the ecosystem to avoid the pitfall. It helped us stay away from some not so helpful folks completely.

Gambler1

Crypto19mo

Depends on VC I’m friendly dm me if you have a good startup

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UrbanLoss35Stealth21mo

VC with 5+ yrs of exp - AMA

Go for it :)

Or get it on the stores.

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