Investor Funnels for Series As

Re:Investor Funnels for Series As by contingencies on Thursday May 30, 2019 @02:31AM (#20048895)

This is sort of embarrassing for YC, so it's admirable they're sharing their surprise. Reads kind of like Breaking: people actually doing something know more about its practicalities than supposed subject matter experts. Points for honesty. I wonder if there's a VC model that could apply solutions to this category of issues from other domains (eg. traditional German trade schools) against the traditional founder/PE/VC structures to avoid such scenarios in future?

Also, the entire tier of coffee meetings don't really happen in Asia, we tend to do either meals or in-house presentations in my experience.

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Re:Investor Funnels for Series As by JumpCrisscross on Thursday May 30, 2019 @04:26AM (#20049353)

> This is sort of embarrassing for YC

Why?

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Re:Investor Funnels for Series As by rtpg on Thursday May 30, 2019 @04:45AM (#20049436)

Well they're shocked by the 30 number, despite having had investments in like 624 billion companies so far. You think they would have at least heard about something to this effect from their relationships with YC companies? Especially given the whole "YC is about the network"

How good is the network if it doesn't even give you the basic knowledge for a thing you are extremely likely to have to go through (Series A), right after YC itself?

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Re:Investor Funnels for Series As by JumpCrisscross on Thursday May 30, 2019 @04:55AM (#20049493)

> they're shocked by the 30 number, despite having had investments in like 624 billion companies so far

Handholding start-ups through their Series As isn't YC's core competence. If one could schedule two and a half meetings a day, on average, individual partner pitches could be had in 3 weeks. Give it 1 week for a partnership meeting and 1 week for a term sheet and you're talking zero to term sheet inside a month and a half. That's good. Unusually good.

YC's network serves to speed up the rate at which those 30 meetings get scheduled. Not change the fundamental dynamics of company-investor fit.

In any case, we have no baseline. It may be the case that 3% of YC coffee dates result in a term sheet while 0.3% of non-YC meetings do the same.

> You think they would have at least heard about something to this effect from their relationships with YC companies?

There is a lot of information buried in relationships that never surfaces because nobody is incentivized to ask. No CEO worth her salt will start waxing lyrical about all their failed coffee meetings when a term sheet on the table needs to be closed. And after the capital is raised, there are more pertinent questions for both sides.

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