What I’ve learned after meeting with 150 Venture Capital Investors in just 100 days!

Since we started crystal.io in June 2016 we attended different media events. We got featured at Lions Innovation in Cannes and TechCrunch Disrupt, got mentioned among the Web Summit Top 11 AI startups and StartupGrind Global Top 50 startups.

This huge visibility meant hundreds of VCs started contacting us directly, during the events or by sending cold emails.

I could say the experience from meeting with the majority of them has been tremendously negative so far, as I discovered most don’t have a fluid and transparent due diligence flow.

Almost all Juniors and Seniors start by saying how cool and beautiful your startup is, they are eager to learn more in order to evaluate an investment opportunity. But after our first meeting, here is what I’ve got:

1. When they want to meet you and say they’re interested they just are making their own agenda.
2. They say they invest in early stage but in almost every case you will learn that is not true.
3. In the beginning they pretend to care about your vision, but you discover that’s not always the case.
4. They challenge you not because of your idea, but because they want to be right in any case.
5. From the way they approach your idea, it seems their goal is to monetize the sooner they can without a long-term vision, even if the startup needs longer to show its true potential.
6. They will always talk about multimillion dollar funds even if they don’t have money in the bank.
7. Analysts don’t have the experience to evaluate the business idea and managing partners don’t have the time to do it, so they lose plenty of opportunities.
8. CrunchBase and PitchBook data need to be well validated, as VCs co-invest in most cases and it’s difficult to know how much money they put on a deal.
9. They want you to give them the full picture, but they don’t listen while you do.
10. There are a ton of improvised “investors” who will waste your time.
11. VCs are like big corporations, expect long processes and bureaucracy.
12. In most cases you will end up with nothing.
13. Ok, I will stop here 😅

Hey don’t get me wrong, I am not saying all VCs are useless, but I believe most of them should have a better evaluation flow as they end up with missing opportunities in the first place and make people like myself waste a lot of useful time.

In the end, at crystal.io we were lucky enough to raise the same amount of money we needed thanks to business angels without risking to compromise our vision and mission, but I wanted to share this with you.

Has anybody else had to face the same issues? Please share your experience.