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Comment by lpolovets | Hacker News Reader

This is an experiment I've been wanting to run for a while. If anyone has questions or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

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Sounds like a great idea and wish you the best of luck. I'd love to hear your thoughts after the sessions. The restriction on "no pitches" makes sense in that context since it's a pay-it-forward/advice style forum.

How do you think a similar experiment could be conducted that tries to solve one of the main problems a founder has with raising capital: getting a warm intro? Advice on a pitch is only helpful if there's someone to listen to the pitch! Something like office hours as "open auditions" for pitches?

It varies investor to investor. For reaching investors who only take warm intros, it's hard for me to help. There are other investors, like me, who reply to cold emails when they're personalized/well-targeted. Founders don't need any kind of audition to talk to the second investor group... they just need to send a relevant email (i.e. not "Dear Sir or Madam, here's a form letter about my company that I'm bcc'ing to 50 investors..")

Will you post some results/thoughts to let us know how it went? Nothing specific about the conversations, obviously, just some general conclusions.

Sure! Part of my goal for running this 3 weeks in a row is so that I can iterate on the process a little bit. E.g. is 25 minutes a good time, or is 15 or 45 better? I also want to see what the most popular topics are. I'll write a summary post in January.

I'll keep an eye out :)

Leo more a question about your investment thesis. I can understand the focus on B2B startups with a real competive advantage, but why limit to minor traction? Minor traction is unlikely to provide much insight as to scalability and passing on this requirement would allow you to invest on much better terms.

Three reasons:

1) I think there's actually a significant difference between "we think customers will really want what we're building" and "a few companies like our product enough to pay $20k/year for it." (If you a found a few customers like that, you can usually find many more.)

2) The practical reason is that often (but not always), when my partners and I see an interesting pre-launch or pre-traction company, we think "this looks promising, we just wish there was a little bit of traction to validate that this is solving a real problem in a meaningful way." So waiting for a little bit of traction before engaging saves time for us and for founders.

3) Investors can get a lot of insight from talking with one or two live customers before making a decision.

Thanks for the reply. 1 and 3 should be solvable by talking to potential customers in the market, while I guess 2 is a pragmatic choice based on time.

I do a bit of angel investing and I have found far more value talking to non-customers in the target market than to actual customers. My experience is many startups end up creating a product too focused on the specific needs of their current customers at the expense of future customers. I prefer to invest in a startup that has built a product that I think has general appeal in the market and zero customers than one that has a few customers and a product that has lost some of its general appeal. These startups are also way cheaper which covers a lot of mistakes by me.

The only downside is you have to vet more companies, but this approach has got me access to some rather good startups that I would not have had a chance once they had traction.

I agree with you: there's a lot of value in talking to non-customers, too. Sometimes that's easy because we know a lot of potential customers for a startup, and sometimes it's hard because a startup is operating in a fairly obscure field.

If you have trouble finding potential customers then the startup will too. I have asked the startup to help me find these people and if they can't help me then this is a massive warning sign for me.

I have been thinking of doing office hours as well. Are you thinking of using software to help scheduling?

I'm using Calendly for now and it seems sufficient. FWIW, the blog post has had ~2500 views so far (thanks HN!) and about 45 people emailed me. 45 isn't a small number, but probably small enough for using something like Calendly. Happy to help/share learnings/collaborate if you want to do office hours as well (I'm leo@susaventures.com)

I think this is a great idea. Hope it works out for you and is mutually beneficial

Hope it goes well and provides benefit for everyone involved.

The tone here feels a little sanctimonious, like:

  Chocolate bon bons for everyone because "yay, me!"

Sometimes I think it's useful for people who have enough affluence to surround themselves exclusively with positive people to hear a little constructive criticism.

I've met tons of bosses who have spent so much time being autocratic bosses, that they suffer from "emperor's new clothes" syndrome, because only yes-men survive in their social circle.

An exchange of 20 minutes per 5 minutes doesn't feel exceptionally useful, considering how much time people spend in bars and cafes.

The term "office hours" rings of high priests in ivory towers. An invitation opened to lesser beings that informs them of their own lowly status will probably fetch obsequious RSVP's, but maybe that's the idea.

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