Understanding Investors
Some thoughts on investors collected from my experience and conversations with other founders.
On the positive side, most investors:
- Are very smart people and are connected to other smart people.
- Really want to see you succeed, wether or not they invested in you.
- Ask interesting questions when looking at your data.
- Have difficult schedules and travel a lot. That is hard work.
- Will give you plenty space to experiment.
- Are personally relatable and have cool interests.
- Understand the need to rest and family time.
On the negative side, beware that a majority of investors:
- Are very busy and spread too thin. They will forget what you tell them from meeting to meeting (sometimes within the meeting) and repeat questions a lot.
- Are insecure. Investing is hard, signaling is strong, and most suffer a lot from “me too” dynamics.
- Are deal driven. Frequently, investors don’t really understand or voice opinions on important tech trends. They want to get deals done.
A minority of outstanding investors:
- Always give more than they ask. They are active ambassadors, users, product team members, etc.
- Have unique, god-view insights into your product and users.
- Have great taste.
- Are opinionated and useful when benchmarking your business, qualitatively and quantitatively (like metrics). They’ll tell you what doesn’t need fixing, and what does.
To be continued!