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Comment by smountcastle | Hacker News Reader

"At the end of Demo Day what the startups usually have is a bunch of potential leads. Our default advice is to do a breadth first search, weighted by expected value. ... There are a few investors for whom it should be zero, and we can tell startups about those too."

Interesting. If you know beforehand that those investors' expected value is 0, why invite them?

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It would be too much of a deliberate affront to refuse to let them even attend. And not all the leads startups have are from the audience at DDay. Since there are so many investors here, they often get introed to investors before DDay through some other connection.

Also, zero is probably an overstatement. It would have been better to say epsilon. Because most of these investors I would take money from if the alternative would be to shut down the company.

A gentle request; I think it'd be better to call it DemoDay or something other than abbreviating it to DDay. (I know you mean no disrespect, it's an easy shorthand...)

How often do those situations happen (ie- take money from a low quality individual or close the doors)? Startup sucess rattes are very low as a whole, so it seems as if there may be a culture of "vulture" investors in SV to prey on entrepreneurs who just need cash. It'd be good to know the warning signs.

Maybe once per cycle. There doesn't seem to be a culture of bad investors; they're all bad in their own ways.

Reminds me of the opening to Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

> Interesting. If you know beforehand that those investors' expected value is 0, why invite them?

Just a speculation: Different investors may also have different values to different companies.

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