Saying something more critical has some downsides and upsides.<p>Downsides:<p>* You could burn a bridge if you are not careful. It is a small world after all in certain domains.<p>* Open yourself back to criticism, person starts defending themselves, worse they go on twitter about it.<p>* You help them too much so now they compete better with someone you invested with. Telling someone they screwed up would be giving them an edge. Sometimes investors might not want that. It is better to provide dismissive or false feedback ("you guys are awesome, it is me not you, I just don't have time, keep working hard on this"). Basically give them false feedback so they don't realize how badly they are fucking up.<p>* It creates a negative social vibe. Some people are just averse to negative public display of emotions. It rattles their nerves too much, regardless of how it starts or who causes it.<p>Upsides:<p>* You get to feel better (this is the most important but people forget). You are a teacher giving feedback to an inexperienced person. It makes you feel good and smart. This is an egotistical reason to do it.<p>* You like the person so you want to help them. Maybe you hope they accept the feedback, fix the issues and you come back to you. Note this involves believing in them to start with. This is an altruistic reason.<p>In general the downsides are more risky than the upsides. So people will choose not to give negative feedback.
>Some VCs said, “We like you, but we need to do some more due diligence on the space.” Then they asked us for a bunch of hard-to-get stuff – market research, traction metrics, and better proof of growth. But even when we got them this information they still didn’t say yes.<p>That one is the classic "weak leader" no. I had this happen to me while I was still in college. Where I went everyone had specific rules for each class, where the seniors had the most leniency, but were still not given real freedoms.<p>As part of a negotiations class, myself and three others had to create a topic and then negotiate a deal with someone. I chose to negotiate more freedoms for the seniors with one of our top officials. We did a ton of background research on why and how and implications etc... We gave our pitch, answered lots of "tough" questions and afterwards asked "So are you willing to make the change?"<p>The response was a fantastic display of political wriggling but ended up with basically this response: "I think this is great you guys, but here is what I need you to do so we can make this happen. I need a legal review from 4 different legal disciplines, then I need to see a study of expected outcome effectiveness for your proposal, then you will need to do a poll of the student body to see if they would accept it. Only then, will we be able to make a truly INFORMED decision."<p>I saw the NO from a mile off that day, so I said thank you, got my A in the class (Despite not getting to any BATNA) and went on with my life having seen what a disguised NO really looks like. I am confident even if I had done all that work the answer would have still been no, I just would have put hundreds of hours into getting a firmer no.
How true. Also, most people, in my experience, are unable or unwilling to accept frank feedback. They will get their feelings hurt, argue, get angry, or just block out what you're saying. (At least this is true in my experience in the US - perhaps some other countries have a more direct culture, e.g. Germany/Israel/Russia?)<p>So if you can project your ability to calmly receive frank feedback, others may be more likely to tell you what they really think.
Just about everything in this post seems to assume that investors are the center of the entrepreneur's world when it comes to feedback and validation. That's a real problem because if you have domain expertise (which you should), there's a very good chance that you will know more about your market than 9 out of 10 investors you meet.<p>Once you recognize that most investors will be capable of offering little in the way of meaningful (read: specific) feedback, it isn't hard to identify the source of the most valuable feedback: target customers.<p>The good news: more often than not, it's fairly easy to locate potential customers who will be eager to look at what you have and give you an ear-full of honest, informed feedback at no cost. Some might even go on to become your first customers, but even if none do, I can guarantee you that you won't walk away from 52 meetings with potential customers wanting for real feedback.
What I'd like to know is how to get 52 meetings.<p>* Can you get 52 VC meetings in the valley, cold? Is that possible without being part of an accelerator, or knowing influential people?<p>* If your personal network doesn't flower into a bunch of meetings, then where do you get more?<p>* Is it events and meetups, cold emails, making noise online, some combination of these?
Even outside of the VCs, it's true that startups generally don't get to hear negative feedback on their idea from <i>anyone</i>. On the whole, people are really nice. No one wants to say "I don't think that'll work because X" as, in other other sphere, it's just a really horrible thing to say to someone. Startups actually need to hear that stuff though. It's not horrible to tell a startup you think there's a barrier to their success; it's <i>damn</i> useful information.<p>It's a shame too, because I'm sure there's a lot of startups that could have used some honesty from the people around them early on to modify and pivot and consequently not fail.
loved the piece, just one part kind of got me:<p><i>You simply need to become more formidable.</i><p>I think VCs may be good at judging confidence, but a wide array of stereotypes and predispositions come to mind when picking whether someone with no track record will make it. I really don't get the feeling that VCs in general are good at picking the formidable founders, and in the end, really just place bets on the guys who someone else already bet on. I think YC does a great job of picking founders who have the potential to be formidable and allowing them to raise after the program.
I recently moved to the VC side from software engineering. I was sure that the biggest value that I'd have for startups would be my engineering experience, but what founders seem to appreciate most is direct feedback. Even when saying 'no', I try to add some useful bullet points about what my fund's concerns are, what we'd like to see in order to invest in a latter round, any oddities that I noticed on the website or mobile app, etc. Founders seem to really like that -- especially product feedback.
This is also true in romance and friendships. It's a fairly severe faux pas to actually tell someone why you rejected them - very, very few people take this sort of honesty well.
Recently read "The Mom Test" which had some good advice about how to avoid the positive feedback that people only give you because they want to spare your ego or whatever. Not exactly applicable to this post, but still some pretty relevant ideas in there which I've made good use of.
Jason is absolutely crushing it with these posts. I wouldn't be surprised if he's made partner at YC; either imminently on a part-time basis, or otherwise once he's exited 42floors.
So what are the real check points:<p>* Track record?<p>* Strong verbal presentation? (Confidence, ex-football lineman, what?)<p>* Connections?<p>* What else??<p>* Something else?