[lpolovets]

I personally like asking a lot of questions, so I'd still prefer >20 minutes. I 100% agree with you though that preparation can save a lot of meeting time. One catch with YC companies in my experience is that they rarely have detailed pitch decks or significant web presences, so there's often not that much to research before a meeting.

[zillionize]

Did you check out The Macro - http://themacro.com/ ? Yes the info disclosed by YC for each startup is still limited but better than nothing in the before.

[lpolovets]

Definitely helpful, but AFAIK only about a dozen startups from the 100+ startup batch have been covered so far (https://www.google.com/#q=%22meet+the+batch+s16%22+inurl:the...). I can imagine the coverage will double or triple by demo day, but I'm skeptical that all startups will be covered. Btw, I love the /data subsection of your website!

[snowmaker]

How long would you want?

[lpolovets]

I typically do 1-hour meetings and that works pretty well. 45 min would be okay. I haven't tried 20 min before, but that feels a little short. To apply the over-applied analogy that fundraising is like dating, 20 minutes would be enough time to tell if a date is terrible, but I'm not sure if it's enough time to distinguish between a B date and an A date.

Two ideas related to Investor Day that I'd be interested in:

- let investors ask for one or two consecutive 20-minute slots. Founders can just allocate one slot to someone asking for two, but asking for two slots would be a good signal of investor interest and/or investing style.

- don't automate scheduling, but instead host all founders at a single location for a few days, and make it easy for investors to book slots on founders' calendars once those founders opt-in to meeting up. Maybe this could use something like https://calendly.com/

[zacharycohn]

Love the "open to experiments!" attitude. I think you nailed it here - 20 minutes is enough to rule someone out.

If our original scenario is:

Scenario 0: 25 1-hour meetings over the course of a few days. Investments = 25-n

You seemed to be suggesting in an earlier comment you might end up with:

Scenario 1: 25 20-minute meetings followed by 25 1-hour meetings. Investments = 25-n

I think you'll actually end up with:

Scenario 2: 25 20-minute meetings, eliminate x companies, (25-x) 1-hour meetings. Investments = (25-x)-n.

Saves you and the founders some unnecessary hour long meetings.

[lpolovets]

Roughly speaking, our investing process is: 1 hour one-on-one meeting, then 1 hour full partner meeting, then decision.

The way I think about the math: Current scenario: 25 1-hour one-on-one meetings -> 10 full-partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.

Worst case for Investor day: 25 20-minute meetings -> still don't have enough info -> 25 1-hour one-on-one meetings -> 10 full partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.

Good case for Investor day: 25 20-minute meetings -> 10 companies don't seem like a fit -> 15 1-hour one-on-one meetings -> 10 full partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.

Best case for Investor day: 25 20-minute meetings -> I get all the info I need -> 10 full partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.

These four cases represent 25, ~33, ~23, and ~8 hours of one-on-one meeting time, respectively.

[rhc2104]

lpolovets - shouldn't the follow up one-on-one meetings be only 40 minutes?

[lpolovets]

That's a good point. I guess they could be!

40-min meetings might be a little awkward because usually the first 5-10 minutes of a meeting are social / chit-chat, so it might feel a little weird to immediately start a 2nd meeting exactly where you left off on the first meeting. Also, most of the time a 40-min meeting still takes up a full 1-hr time-slot since most people schedule meetings on the hour.