Help Us Help You.

Have an idea to share with us? Too many good ideas never get heard because of ugly pitches just shotgunned without context or cohesion. At the same time, we could spend all day reading through pretty and shiny business plans that, despite their eloquence and pomp, don't amount to squat. Having seen thousands of appeals, we came up with a few thoughts that will help us help you.

Email rocks. Phones are very yesterday and voicemail is so broken. Until someone can make it easy for us to extract a number from a voicemail, file the message away for later, label it, quickly find it again, search through it, forward it, reply asynchronously, etc etc, we are going to stick to email.

Thesis statements. Lead with what it is you want. Please, put it in the first sentence or two. Just tell us how we can work together. You can expand on it later, but please don't make us go too far. It helps us both cut to the chase.

What problem are you solving? Many times we've had conversations with folks who can't answer that question. We're obsessive about solving problems that enhance end-user experiences and are suckers for companies that have dramatic impact on end users. So, please tell us what about their experience is broken now, and how you are going to fix it.

The URL is the pitch. We haven't funded a mere business plan since our founding three years ago. Instead, we work with teams that already have live sites. The world has changed and there is rarely an excuse for not having something up and running. Ideas are cheap and execution is the cat's pajamas. If you don't have a site, at least send a deck or an exec summary with some wireframes. Meandering paragraphs describing a notion won't cut it.

Lead with product and engineering. We like to dive into the nuts and bolts of what is currently broken, how we will fix it together, and what that collaboration will look like, all with specificity. A deep technical understanding on both sides is a precursor to doing any business. So, thanks in advance for bringing your geeks into the loop from day one.

Meetings aren't always necessary. Often, entrepreneurs are in a rush to meet in person. We went along with this for a long time and soon saw our schedules descend into gridlock and we ended up generally unhealthy and unhappy and still not actually getting much done. Truth is, meetings are usually inefficient. Let's start with email. Maybe next we can do a brief call after we've tried your stuff and we have something to chat about. We've confidently done business without ever having been in the same room as a few of our founders and partners.

NDAs don't help. As investors and advisors, we just can't sign them. Asking us to do so will likely grind things to a halt. Share what you feel comfortable sharing and please know how seriously we take our reputation in the startup and finance worlds.

Bottom line is that we want to work with kickass teams building memorable products of which we can all be proud. Is that you? Hopefully keeping all of the above in mind, we will get more done together. Thanks. Now, send your pitch here and let's get to it.