Dominik Andrzejczuk is an Associate at Morado Venture Partners – Silicon Valley based seed fund investing mostly at B2B and SaaS companies. He meets about 50-100 startups every month and listens to their pitch. Since Dominik’s role is to further recommend (or not recommend) startups to the fund’s parters, I’m asking him several (not necessarily most comfortable) questions to help us understand the investor’s point of view while meeting with a startup.
What do investors pay attention to most during a pitch meeting? What do they like and what they don’t like? How do they measure “quality of a founder”? What were the funny situations? Do they really mean they want to hear back from founders when they say “no” to them? In how many startups does Morado Ventures invest per month? What’s their attitude towards “married founders”? What’s the first thing founders should do when arriving to Silicon Valley?
Watch the interview to find out!
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Here are some highlights from the interview:
💰 “VC’s don’t look at reasons to invest, they look at reasons not to invest in a company.”
💰 “It’s no picnic to be an entrepreneur. It sounds very glamorous on the outside, but it’s very dark, lonely, gloomy job sometimes when things get tough.”
💰 “There were couple of situations where the entrepreneur walked out of a meeting. For example, there was a gentleman of Boston… and I don’t think they were used to how Silicon Valley VCs operate. Sometimes they are not ready to reveal all of their secrets. They asked to sign an NDA but that’s not how we operate.”
💰 “Honesty is always the best policy. There’s nothing harder than to keep a secret, because that’s a very heavy burden to bare.”
💰 “[In pitch presentations] put some thought into the little things, because those things count. (…)Look at how you can be more entertaining to grab my attention, since it’s been a long day.”
💰 “Before I go out and pitch it to my partnership, I need to make sure I know what I’m talking about. The last thing I want to do is go and say ‘Hey, this is a great company’ and they say ‘Don’t you know, that so and so got acquired last year…?’”
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