Quantifying the VC life (and my inbox)

A well meaning but unfiltered entrepreneur recently told me: “To us, VCs act like assholes!” (that’s a nice opening line) “…but what many of us don’t realize is how time constrained you are.”

The comment has been sitting with me for some weeks, so I figured I would try to use some proper data to validate his comment on the VC lifestyle and hopefully provide some ideas for entrepreneurs on how to rise above the noise. This post is not meant to be a sob story about my day to day, but rather an attempt to share a glimpse into the reality of life on “the dark side.”

There used to be a saying at Facebook that “data wins arguments” so I went and found a handy tool called Gmail Meter to help me quantify my Inbox.

Lets start with the summary: In January, 2015 I received a total of 4,338 emails from 686 different people (in December, 2014 it was 3,915 emails).

Most of those emails were from external parties outside of White Star:

And not surprisingly, if you look at the word cloud, most of them were sharing a business plan or deck, asking for a meeting and for investment:

A vast majority of the emails from external parties had an attachment which was likely a presentation or business plan. External parties vary from entrepreneurs themselves, “bankers” (read John’s post on the subject), and contacts in the ecosystem (Angels, other VCs, entrepreneurs introducing entrepreneurs).

And while there is a running joke at home about my iPhone being an appendage, I do value and want to be respectful of those who reach out and therefore try to respond to as many emails as I can (and sorry if your emails was one of the few that slipped through the net).

So, yes, a lot of my time is spent filtering inbound messages, trying to look through pitch decks and responding to emails. The challenge, though, is that the inbox is secondary to the other part of my day which centers in having meetings with existing portfolio companies, potential new investments and other members of the extended White Star network (ex: our own investors).

To look at that side of my day, I used a service called TicTrac to help quantify my calendar.

When not reading and answering emails, I have an average of 8 “meetings” per day (the dips are the weekends). Most of those are 1 hour meetings with entrepreneurs to hear their stories (the actual average according to TicTrac is 72 minutes). But some are 3 to 4 hour Board meetings or deep-dives with portfolio companies and the rest is internal (Partnership calls, deal reviews, etc).

So what should all of this mean for you the entrepreneur? Well, most likely that if you send a blind email to a VC from the email on their website you will be waddling in a very large pool of other such emails and that you need to rise above the noise. How can you do that?

• Seek a warm intro: Use LinkedIn, Facebook or other tools to see how we might be connected. An email from a person I know is much more likely to get more attention. That person will also be able to tell you what our relationship is and whether they feel comfortable doing the intro.
• Think about TL;DR: Assume I am reading your email on my phone and use the first 2 lines to get my attention. Share some metrics on your momentum, remind me who your angels might be, nudge me on how a recent blog post or tweet of mine led you to believe I might be interested in what you’re building.
• What’s the objective?: A lot of the emails we receive are asking for “a coffee chat to share our story and get your feedback.” That’s not true. What you really want from me is to get excited about your ambition and your team and to convince myself and my partners that we should invest in your company. The end goal is not the meeting, the end goal is the investment. I’ll tell the story sometime down the road of a warm intro email in which I was already emotionally engaged with the entrepreneur before even ever hearing the pitch. Get me to lean forward !

So my well intentioned and unfiltered friend was right (well…not about the asshole part I hope): from the perspective of the entrepreneur VCs are always running around with too many things in their head, don’t respond to emails and seem to never commit to an investment. As I said in a previous post, we say YES 1 in 100 times, so be mindful of the noise you’re competing with in my inbox (and calendar) to get us jointly down the path to yes.

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