If your thought process going into an investor meeting was raising money, then you’re dead wrong. For every 100 startups VCs or angel investors meet with, an investor will invest in one startup. Just one. That’s it.
That’s why you need to get the most out of every meeting you have with investors.
I was meeting with the CEO of a startup the venture capital fund I was an EIR at was interested in investing in. The CEO began his pitch by saying, “Here’s a slide that might work.” Then the CEO fumbled through his slide deck to find the correct slide.
In that moment it was clear he was unprepared for our meeting. And he had lost the chance to get an investment from us.
My goodness, how can you not come prepared to an investment meeting? I’ll get back to this later.
So, you obviously don’t want to be unprepared when you meet an investor. And you don’t want to go into a first meeting assuming you’re going to get funded by this investor. That’s not realistic.
Here’s the mindset I have when I’m raising money:
“I know I’m going to raise my funding, but the odds that this investor will fund me are low.”
The reason I like this mindset is it reminds me that raising money is a numbers game. To make the numbers work, and improve your odds of getting an investment, you will likely have to meet with lots of investors because each investor has maybe a 1 in 100 chance of being the one that will invest in your startup.
This thought process leads to three important, what I’ll call, sub mindsets:
1. You always need to come prepared to every meeting because this investor might be the investor that funds your startup.
You never know when lightning will strike because you don’t know what the investor is looking to invest in before you meet with them. Indeed, in my own experience, I would have never guessed before the meeting that the investors that invested in us were going to be interested.
