My VC pitch horror story:
I posed as an Uber driver and picked this angel investor up outside a restaurant he was eating at, he didn’t check the car and I had been following him all day
During the drive I made a video call with the rest of my team using our platform, being sure to show how high quality the video and audio was despite being on phone with multiple people
He was interested for a second before he caught on to the fact that he had been kidnapped and I was not his Uber, at which point he tried to bail out the door or make me stop driving
I begged him to consider investing and explained we had been turned down by every other VC firm in town and we were out of money
He actually gave me really good advice about DAU numbers and goals we needed to hit, and didn’t report me to the police so it actually ended up okay all things considered
(He did not invest)
I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A.
12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30 minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going.
I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital.
You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious.
It's a dance.
And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious.
If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird.
No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there.
It is weird.