[lrvick]

I once had a VC ask to meet my founders and I for his morning breakfast at a run down diner in texas. So we fly out from Florida pitch deck in hand, and meet him at his booth.

We pull out the deck, he says "Do not need that. How many paying customers do you have?"

Given we were at MVP stage and were running a public sentiment analysis driven social media search engine using our published academic AI work (15 years ago) we said "None yet. The capital to build the paid portion of our product, which is popular, is why we are here."

As he eats his eggs he goes "Come back when you have a hundred or more paying customers" and sent us packing .

Not even a 5 minute interaction with people he asked to fly out to pitch him, and were not even allowed to pitch.

I expect rejection by default at an early stage, but that one was particularly mean.

It will forever remain my go to example of a meeting that could have been an email.

One excited investor we did find for another project ended up being the now famous con man "Michael Prozer" who got on who wants to marry a millionaire using forged bank records and proceeded to get actual capital based on this lie until he was arrested for fraud.

My opinion of VCs is still... recovering. The bar is in hell.

[sharts]

Why is that mean? It seems prudent for any investor to invest based on real metrics.

What’s probably dumb is that none of those questions/concerns were brought up ahead of time (by either side).

[Marciplan]

well they could’ve pre-ement that

[simmschi]

So, how long did it take you to go 100 customers after this pitch?

[lrvick]

In the end my co-founders and investors wanted to sell to a single specific political party exclusively. I chose not to participate as it did not align with my goals, and started a small IT company instead. The original project was dead within a couple months of me leaving given no one else had any idea what ssh was.

[throw1234567891]

Was ssh essential to the product?

[lrvick]

Being capable of sshing to servers to maintain things sure was.

[keiferski]

At what point does this kind of groveling behavior actually become a negative signal, though?

If you’re willing to fly halfway across the country just to talk to a VC in a diner, it signals a lot of desperation IMO.

I haven’t had a ton of interactions with VCs; however, I have read innumerable books about the VC world, and a recurring theme is that VCs are competitive and don’t like being left out of a deal / losing a deal to another VC.

By willing to fly so far away for nothing, it signals that no other VC is interested.

[iJohnDoe]

You're not really wrong. However, it was a power play by the VC and to make themselves feel important. Hopefully they grew up a bit since then.

No matter how you look at it, if the only question was, "Do you have 100 customers?" then they could have sent and read that e-mail over breakfast.

[lrvick]

Yeah, first "real" startup and we were absolutely desperate for some seed cash. Mistakes were made.

These days I have significantly higher self respect, always have multiple income and funding sources, and a lot more protective of my time.

[keiferski]

For sure, hugely rude move by the VC. But unfortunately I’d just expect that from them.