intro, that counts as double qualified. Then meet. Shows founder is aggressive and knows how to penetrate and get sh*t done. The last 4 are often great. > 33% of time but without double qualification, a warm intro is often worse that a cold email. At least a cold email you can ignore or meet and then politely say no, and that’s it. As a founder I got every single company I intro’d to VCs funded. 100%. The key was making the case both for the company and the match, logically. Why this would be an amazing Unicorn, why the founders would kill it and why it was a match for their target investments. Easy-peasy. 39. How do VCs vet businesses? From my experience as an entrepreneur, having pitched 150+ VC firms, I can categorically say: The more vetting VCs do, the lower the odds they’ll do the deal. The ones that really know the space, what they are doing, can pretty much do all the diligence they need to in a day or a week. The ones that don’t need to call 1,000 customers, talk to every single employee, discuss cell E32 in your financial model, argue over whether you’ll hit next month’s plan and why last month’s was 0.23% lower than plan and so on. Those ones almost never close and the term sheets they eventually give you, if they do give you one are the worst (and often most tortured) ones. (So far as a VC now I’ve done 4 deals. Took 1 day each to the initial decision then a week or so of confirmatory diligence to confirm what I believed and had already heard to be true was true.) SAASTR.COM 35