Partner at local VC messages all LinkedIn connections, asking ‘How can I be helpful?’
Approximately 3,000 LinkedIn users received a message over the weekend from Dave Smith, a partner at DSeeEm Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. The message was a single line — ‘How can I be helpful?’
John Parker, a software engineer at Twitter and a recipient of the LinkedIn message, says he met Smith at a housewarming party in San Francisco, where Smith immediately requested the party attendees’ LinkedIn profiles.
“Yeah, he spent at least 5 seconds with every person at the party. Always asking people how he could help. When a couple of friends and I were cleaning up, he hid in the bathroom and left without saying goodbye,” Parker recalls.
Susan Li, founder of a D2C startup based Palo Alto, is another recipient of the LinkedIn message. “I don’t know who this is,” Li says, “How the hell am I supposed to know how he can be helpful, if I don’t even know him?”
Li replied to the LinkedIn message asking for DSeeEm’s financial involvement in her company’s upcoming series E fundraise, to which Smith replied, “I’m afraid it’s too early for us. Please let me know how I can be helpful.”
Insider sources reveal that DSeeEm keeps an internal spreadsheet of all startups in the Bay Area, divided into two columns: ‘Helped’ and ‘Not yet helped’. Among startups in the ‘Not yet helped’ column, notable companies include Uber and Pinterest, which both recently went public.
Upon request for comment, Smith wrote, “We are sad we could not be helpful to Uber and Pinterest when they first appeared on DSeeEm’s radar. Because of this, they did not reach out to DSeeEm for their later rounds of fundraising. It is now company policy to offer every startup our helpfulness, because you never know when a deal, that you have passed on, will become valuable in the future. By the way, let me know how I can be helpful.”
