Everyone Is Asking Someone Else for Money | Gonzo Capital

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On Capital, Status, and the Humility of the Ask<br>There is a particular expression founders get when they realize you are a venture capitalist. A certain twinkle in the eye. A spark of life. You can see the calculation unfold, the gears turning and grinding away, as they look for a calculated plan of attack.<br>The eyes quickly sharpen and then dilate. Whatever conversation was just happening has abruptly come to a halt. Somewhere a microscopic pitch deck on a lightly smashed smartphone screen is being prepped just for your enjoyment. Until a bigger, more important fish swims by, that is.<br>And so it begins… Sometimes gently. More often than not, with all the subtlety of a brick being thrown through the window of a moving vehicle.<br>Sometimes they ask what I invest in, wait for the answer, then pitch me something completely unrelated that they have rehearsed countless times anyway.<br>Sometimes I am eating, aggressively chowing down on finger foods that I’m somehow never able to truly enjoy. Other times I am already engaged in conversation with someone else, while the ravenous turkey buzzards circle me as if I were a rapidly decaying corpse in an otherwise barren desert. Oftentimes I am clearly attempting to leave, scanning the room for some sort of divine, deus ex machina escape plan. These distinctions have not always proved decisive.<br>In my peculiar line of work, I’ve been pitched in hallways, conference rooms, hotel lobbies, private dinners, loud parties, quiet corners, crowded elevators, parking lots, public transportation, even romantic date nights with my poor, understanding wife. You name it. Even during conversations that had absolutely nothing to do with venture capital until the other person discovered what I did for a living.<br>Well, it’s part of the job; I suppose I did sign up for all this.<br>More accurately, it is part of going anywhere while possessing a LinkedIn profile that contains the words “venture capital.”<br>Startup founders obviously need money to help them achieve their dream of building that longshot company from scratch. Investors are supposed to have capital to allocate, watchfully on the lookout for people to allocate it to.<br>Conferences gather both groups inside large buildings, provide them with lanyards, ply them with alcohol, feed them tasty food they can never quite find time to eat, and bless them with almost nowhere comfortable to sit, all while acting surprised when everybody begins hunting one another.<br>Apparently this is networking. I imagine it as the worst episode of Planet Earth, David Attenborough calmly narrating as founders and investors circle the canapé table, each pretending not to stalk the other.<br>Some founders are brilliant at this little song and dance.<br>They introduce themselves like normal human beings. They ask questions. They listen to the answers. They seamlessly slip in a mention of what they are building so organically you don’t even realize you’re being asked for anything.<br>More often than not, they flounder and flop. Some spectacularly.<br>They appear to have robotically memorized a sequence of generic buzzwords in a particular order and will suffer some sort of catastrophic internal failure if interrupted before reaching the final slide.<br>Others speak for several minutes without pausing, making eye contact, breathing, or even showing any visible interest in whether the person is still standing in front of them or showing any signs of life at all for that matter.<br>I have also heard downright disastrous, confusing, puzzling, bizarre pitches. That too comes with the territory!<br>Pitches that seemed to become less coherent with every additional attempt to clear things up or answer easy questions.<br>Pitches where the founder insisted there was no competition, which is usually either very good news or extremely bad news. It’s nearly always the latter of the two.<br>Pitches built around a market so enormous that the company would only need to capture 0.000001 percent of humanity, including several remote tribes and possibly the research team living in Antarctica, to produce a respectable return for their investors.<br>You know the ones. (Well, I guess that depends on who is actually reading this. Say hello in the comments!)<br>Perhaps you’ve given a pitch like this before. Or received one! Maybe even both…Want to know the truly scary bit?<br>The pitch does not always end when the conversation does either. It could somehow find a way to follow you around after the event is long over.<br>There is the email sent ten minutes after the nonconsensual meeting. The second email harking back to the first dreaded email. The LinkedIn message checking whether the emails have been arriving. The casual status update that is not really relevant or an update so much as another attempt to restart a conversation that both parties may remember very differently.<br>A polite rejection can be treated as feedback. That feedback can also be treated...