Remote Investing

The Present and Future of Funding

Prime Movers Lab has operated as a remote investing firm from day one. As many other firms are now learning how to handle this situation, I would like to share our learnings from the past few years (and the decade before leading remote companies). Just to note, 10 years ago I was deeply opposed to the concept of remote work, but the actual experience has in practice been far superior to in-person company building or investing. I think many people fear that it won’t be possible to build a deep connection over video or that due diligence will be too difficult to conduct without an on-site visit, but we (and hopefully many others now) have learned that these are myths largely based on uncertainty about the remote investing process. Below are ways to address and overcome the obstacles to investing remotely and leverage the massive benefits.

In General

1. Treat video-chats like in-person meetings (i.e. be present with the person and don’t look at other things on your computer or phone).
2. Use the gallery view to see all participants and hide your own view so you can stay focused on noticing every person’s body language and facial expressions rather than your own or just the speaker’s.
3. Avoid screen-sharing of slides as much as possible and instead send the slides in advance for other participants to have open next to the video chat so that listeners can still focus on the people presenting.
4. Take time to discuss the personal, not just the professional, and build rapport by exploring shared perspective and experience.
5. Set up your workspace to be optimized for video chat with good speakers and microphone and a clear background behind where you sit (or preferably stand) rather than using a virtual background which can be jarring.

For Investors

1. Take advantage of this opportunity to speak with more members of the team you are evaluating. Video chat makes it easier to get more people together at the same time from a team, particularly when most teams today involve multiple locations or at least meaningful travel usually.
2. Do a virtual office tour (if they have an office and that’s important to you) where one person takes you on an office walk using a phone or computer camera while another is still on video chat face to face narrating.
3. Get more done because you don’t have to travel to many different target investments: you can look deeply at potential opportunities across the country or world back-to-back rapidly.
4. Use tools like Slack, Drive, and Affinity to in near real-time share feedback across the team (e.g. we complete a Google form after every entrepreneur screen that automatically posts to Slack for the whole team to see and we have a lot of other similar automated knowledge distribution workflows so that we are all better informed than even being next to each other in an office).
5. Complete even more reference checks to round out your diligence and leverage the extra time you have due to not traveling.

For Entrepreneurs

1. Explicitly ask investors if they are investing without in-person meetings (and how many investments they have made like that) so you can plan your fundraising process and each investor’s role in it accordingly.
2. Talk to more investors because you don’t have to travel to see them! This will result in finding the best fit for your team and company.
3. Include more of your cofounders and executives on video chats later in the process than you might if there were more cost of travel to doing so.
4. Proactively explain the systems you use to make remote work an advantage rather than a disadvantage in building your company.
5. Ask investors how they support companies remotely and what the working relationship is like post-investment without as many in-person meetings.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and computing

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